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What do philosophers talk about these days?
I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well:
What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.
EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.
What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.
EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.
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http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/current.dtl
does include review of a book called "Beyond Kuhn" though ;-)
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"Fending off sociologists" isn't what I have in mind. More like "jumping in and doing what the sociologists should be doing themselves." But my point would be that there isn't a specifically philosophical way of jumping in, and there wouldn't be a specifically philosophical way of jumping in and doing what psychologists and biologists ought to be doing either. But that doesn't mean a philosopher shouldn't jump in, especially if the philosopher is practiced at asking, "Well, what do you mean by that?"
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i'm pretty sure there's no actual answer to that question - sorry if i've still not grasped it quite right. but there are still distinct philosophical modes of discourse - there is still a strong analytical mode existent, which is largely characterised by familiarity of 'the state of things' wrt touchstones on the big ideas, like realism, meaning, intentionality, and so on. (i don't know how to characterise discourse outside the (broadly) analytic run of things.)