Grab Philosophy Without Intuitions Edited By Herman Cappelen Paperback

splash of cold water in the face of a lot of contemporary philosophy, Everyone knows that the term "intuition" and "intuitively", etc,

is thrown around without a very clear sense of what exactly it picks out, or what role it plays in philosophical theory, Cappelen hammers on that unclarity and does some "anthropology of philosophy", by looking at examples of famous arguments Burge's arthritis case, Thompson's trolley case, Perry's trail of sugar in the supermarket and observing how it's not clear how, if at all, they rely on intuitions.
This, more than anything else I've read recently, has made me reconsider how I should be going about my research, Read this alongside some other recent reflections on philosophical methodology, like Alexander's Experimental Philosophy and Baz's When Words Are Called For, and the basic assumption of those works, that intuition is central to philosophical theorizing, will look a lot less obvious.
Could have been SO good, . . but ended up being SO frustrating, Seems to me that Cappelen let his normative biases conceptual analysis is impossible so no one should do it the pretheoretic common ground is only accessible via empirical experience which should be investigated blind him to the descriptive fact that many people DO practice conceptual analysis and DO unreflectively rely on pretheoretic common ground without acknowledging its empirical investigatable roots.


His suggestion that metaphilosophers should examine specific cases of people philosophizing is right on, But his own examination is way off, He makes strange assumptions about justification such as that a justified claim cannot be puzzling or spark further investigation and blatantly misinterprets many of the cases most egregiously in that he mixes up reasons that justify with reasons that explain why.
Say I have a justified claim that a body is on the ground, I can still give the body an autopsy further investigation, If I find the murderer, that is an explanation why the body is on the ground because she killed him, not a justification of my original claim that a body is on the ground that claim was never in doubt.
In the same way, philosophers take up a judgment about a thought experiment and come up with a theory that explains why we make that judgment, The theory is not an argument meant to justify the judgment, As Cappelen himself admits in response to an anonymous reviewer with the same criticism, we can only read a theory as giving an argument for a judgment if alternatives to the judgment are salient options, and yet I see no evidence in many of his cases that they are.
Rather, the philosopher puts considerable effort into ensuring that the judgments are safely in the pretheoretic common ground, which would presumably save them from the trouble of considering any salient alternatives.


Finally he really ought to consider the argument that philosophers are interested in some judgments simply because they are the kind of judgments people make pretheoretically.
For example, some think that philosophers should investigate folk knowledge and folk morality, not some fancy philosophical version thereof, This position weakens Cappelen's insistence that no selfrespecting philosopher would ever use an unreflective pretheoretic judgment as evidence for a theory,

I hope that this work inspires similar investigations that continue his important project and deepen his normative critique without being so irresponsible and brash about it.
I was expecting a great book that would shake the foundations of analytic philosophy, The sequel to Williamson's PoP, I found overblown claims based on a pedantic and systematically uncharitable reading of philosophical passages, A pointless exercise in misleading nitpicking, Love the cover tho. Except where's the soul Where is the sociology What is the point Where is the connection This is why I hate analytic philosophy, as its formality leaves humanity hanging.
The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current metaphilosophical debates and it figures prominently in our selfunderstanding as analytic philosophers.
No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases.
This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about nonphilosophers' intuitions of any interest to us, Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don't work on metaphilosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them.

The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively or even a little bit on intuitions as evidence.
At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'vocabulary, While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled metaphilosophers: it has encouraged metaphilosophical pseudoproblems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

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