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The Philosophy of Philosophy
The expanded new edition of one of the most influential and controversial books about the nature of philosophy published in the past several decades The Philosophy of Philosophy presents an original, unified concept of philosophy as a non-natural science. In this provocative work, distinguished philosopher Timothy Williamson challenges widely-held assumptions and clarifies long-standing misconceptions about the methodology and nature of philosophical inquiry. The author rejects the standard narratives of contemporary philosophy developed from naturalism, the linguistic turn, postmodern irony, and other prominent trends of the twentieth century. Viewing the method of philosophy as evolving from non-philosophical pursuits, Williamson provides readers with fresh insight into the “self-image” of philosophy and offers new ways of understanding what philosophy is and how it actually works. Now in its second edition, this landmark volume comprises the original book and the author’s subsequent work. New topics include the recent history of analytic philosophy, assessments of experimental philosophy, theories of concepts and understanding, Wittgensteinian approaches, popular philosophy, naturalism, morally-loaded examples in philosophy, philosophical applications of scientific methods, and many more. This edition features the author’s latest thoughts on a variety of issues, autobiographical reflections, and replies to critics. The Philosophy of Philosophy, Second Edition remains essential reading for philosophers, scholars, graduate and advanced undergraduate students in philosophy, and other readers with a sustained interest in the method and rationale of the doing of philosophy.
686 pages, Paperback
First published November 28, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 30, 2016
This book would be more accurately titled 'A Philosophy of Some Philosophy'.
ALL THE NEGATIVE STUFF FIRST
Williamson announces in the preface that the book is a conception of philosophy and not a comprehensive account, but surely a conception of philosophy that has nothing to say about ethics, politics or in fact anything that we should do is disconcertingly impoverished.
Williamson would undoubtedly defend that the book is designed to be about the way we do philosophy not the things we should philosophise about. But surely the question of whether philosophy ought to have a practical import is one of the most pressing? I agree with Williamson that philosophising from the armchair has a place within philosophy, and I understand that he doesn't think that that is the only way that philosophy should be done, but it's not enough just to defend that. In a book titled The Philosophy of Philosophy I can't help but feel that there really ought to be more about what we can and should be doing as philosophers within a wider context.
To cut to the chase I think the problem with Williamson and so many analytic and formal philosophers is that they place describing the way things are over what we should do (there is in fact not even any discussion of metaethics or even normativity in the book). Whereas I think that describing the way things are is a very worthwhile pursuit, it's primarily in the service of deciding what we should do - personally, ethically, politically, scientifically - that it's important. Some might think that the two things are inseparable, but it's the primacy of describing the world that I think clouds Williamson's conception of philosophy and ironically leads him to describe the world incorrectly.
Williamson's most deeply held philosophical commitment - the primacy of knowledge - works as a good case study for this. I of course agree with Williamson that some of our beliefs are most likely true, and that they are justified, and that they are justified in a way that tracks the way the world is, but this is a belief of mine, I have no way of proving it. Williamson makes a lot of claims about our intuitive notions about knowledge and seems to think that we probably do have these relations to the world is enough, but one of the features of our shared view of what knowledge is I think he is missing is that when we claim to know something, we claim that from our position we have enough evidence to be sure that we can't turn out to be wrong. To say that we know something is a guarantee to it's truth. This is perfectly acceptable thing to do on a day-to-day level and something that I do myself, but strictly speaking it is false: we can never have enough evidence to guarantee there might not be a way in which we might turn out to be wrong. Williamson doesn't like this because it threatens to make his account of the world very messy, but what Williamson and so many philosophers seem to miss is that what is important is not so much the way things are, but the ways we are justified in acting - I may not know that a chair will support my weight but I have enough evidence to risk sitting on it, we may not know that legislating for euthanasia will alleviate more suffering than it will cause, but the best we can do is look at the evidence and risks, try to come to an understanding of what we are trying to achieve for who and act accordingly.
I was disappointed in Williamson's treatment of intuitions, not seeming to realise the depth of how varying the kinds of intuitions we can have are and what kind of sources they can have. I also don't like his and most other philosophers conception of language, in which they don't seem to have taken the time to actually look at the way that living languages behave. This is reflected in Williamson's account of vagueness and his account of reference. Language is a social tool for communication, what we think people intend to refer to is usually more important to us than what they do in fact refer to. On Williamson's account of reference there may well be cases in which no one - including the speaker - ever finds out what they are referring to. Such a mystical link has no bearing on the actual world and is next to useless.
It's a bit silly to get angry at a book for what it hasn't said, but just one final thing that I think is very important is the way which in so much philosophy, it is not clear as to whether philosophers are trying to describe the way things are, or whether they are trying to stipulate a tidier conceptual structure (my thought is that philosophers are often doing the latter when they think they're doing the former). I guess he touches on this by talking about epistemic import of our philosophical claims, but not clearly enough. Basically, what are we actually doing?
SOME OF THE POSITIVE THINGS
More of this please! Why the hell do philosophers cast opinions on absolutely everything apart from what it is that they're doing? It's so weird.
As much as Williamson's focus on Logic Epistemology and Semantics irritates me, at least he's bridging the gap between them and looking carefully at how they interrelate.
Another thing that is nice is that Williamson's undermining of the a priori occasionally leads him to actually look at the way things are in the world before bridging the gap to a more formal approach. Not being a logician I found his project of first understanding what counterfactuals are to humans, and then defining necessity and possibility in terms of them a very worthwhile project, and I found his account very plausible, it's just a shame he doesn't do the same with language and have a better look at the way it actually is.
ANOTHER THING
Williamson's approach to continental philosophy is funny. You can see he wants to appear enlightened - mentioning Rorty and Hegel, and stating that the analytic/continental divide has no methodological grounding - but in his more free-wheeling afterward at the end it's assumed that continental philosophers is something philosophers don't want to be. It's a thorny issue that makes me sad, it always feels like a family that's been divided to me, but at the same time I find it difficult not to take sides. I think about all the bad continental philosophers that make it hard to find the good ones, then I realise that the same goes for analytic philosophy. If only we could go back to the 17th century.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, although Williamson's parochialism is embarrassing it's an interesting book, and I think that Williamson is a very interesting philosopher. The way he writes is sometimes ridiculously turgid, and although he is often precise he is often not as methodical or clear as I think he likes to think, he sometimes misses important distinctions and most importantly sometimes just describes. things. wrong: describing things right is a hugely underrated thing in philosophy and something that very intelligent people or sometimes very bad at. Philosophers need to look, and be perceptive, as much as they need to analyse, and preferably before they analyse.
Perhaps an even better title than 'A Philosophy of Some Philosophy' would be 'Methods of Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics and Semantics'. Such a title is admittedly a lot less catchy, but if he is going to do a big rant at the end about how we need to be more accurate and not be tempted by the 'sexy bits', by his own lights he really ought to accept that title.
ALL THE NEGATIVE STUFF FIRST
Williamson announces in the preface that the book is a conception of philosophy and not a comprehensive account, but surely a conception of philosophy that has nothing to say about ethics, politics or in fact anything that we should do is disconcertingly impoverished.
Williamson would undoubtedly defend that the book is designed to be about the way we do philosophy not the things we should philosophise about. But surely the question of whether philosophy ought to have a practical import is one of the most pressing? I agree with Williamson that philosophising from the armchair has a place within philosophy, and I understand that he doesn't think that that is the only way that philosophy should be done, but it's not enough just to defend that. In a book titled The Philosophy of Philosophy I can't help but feel that there really ought to be more about what we can and should be doing as philosophers within a wider context.
To cut to the chase I think the problem with Williamson and so many analytic and formal philosophers is that they place describing the way things are over what we should do (there is in fact not even any discussion of metaethics or even normativity in the book). Whereas I think that describing the way things are is a very worthwhile pursuit, it's primarily in the service of deciding what we should do - personally, ethically, politically, scientifically - that it's important. Some might think that the two things are inseparable, but it's the primacy of describing the world that I think clouds Williamson's conception of philosophy and ironically leads him to describe the world incorrectly.
Williamson's most deeply held philosophical commitment - the primacy of knowledge - works as a good case study for this. I of course agree with Williamson that some of our beliefs are most likely true, and that they are justified, and that they are justified in a way that tracks the way the world is, but this is a belief of mine, I have no way of proving it. Williamson makes a lot of claims about our intuitive notions about knowledge and seems to think that we probably do have these relations to the world is enough, but one of the features of our shared view of what knowledge is I think he is missing is that when we claim to know something, we claim that from our position we have enough evidence to be sure that we can't turn out to be wrong. To say that we know something is a guarantee to it's truth. This is perfectly acceptable thing to do on a day-to-day level and something that I do myself, but strictly speaking it is false: we can never have enough evidence to guarantee there might not be a way in which we might turn out to be wrong. Williamson doesn't like this because it threatens to make his account of the world very messy, but what Williamson and so many philosophers seem to miss is that what is important is not so much the way things are, but the ways we are justified in acting - I may not know that a chair will support my weight but I have enough evidence to risk sitting on it, we may not know that legislating for euthanasia will alleviate more suffering than it will cause, but the best we can do is look at the evidence and risks, try to come to an understanding of what we are trying to achieve for who and act accordingly.
I was disappointed in Williamson's treatment of intuitions, not seeming to realise the depth of how varying the kinds of intuitions we can have are and what kind of sources they can have. I also don't like his and most other philosophers conception of language, in which they don't seem to have taken the time to actually look at the way that living languages behave. This is reflected in Williamson's account of vagueness and his account of reference. Language is a social tool for communication, what we think people intend to refer to is usually more important to us than what they do in fact refer to. On Williamson's account of reference there may well be cases in which no one - including the speaker - ever finds out what they are referring to. Such a mystical link has no bearing on the actual world and is next to useless.
It's a bit silly to get angry at a book for what it hasn't said, but just one final thing that I think is very important is the way which in so much philosophy, it is not clear as to whether philosophers are trying to describe the way things are, or whether they are trying to stipulate a tidier conceptual structure (my thought is that philosophers are often doing the latter when they think they're doing the former). I guess he touches on this by talking about epistemic import of our philosophical claims, but not clearly enough. Basically, what are we actually doing?
SOME OF THE POSITIVE THINGS
More of this please! Why the hell do philosophers cast opinions on absolutely everything apart from what it is that they're doing? It's so weird.
As much as Williamson's focus on Logic Epistemology and Semantics irritates me, at least he's bridging the gap between them and looking carefully at how they interrelate.
Another thing that is nice is that Williamson's undermining of the a priori occasionally leads him to actually look at the way things are in the world before bridging the gap to a more formal approach. Not being a logician I found his project of first understanding what counterfactuals are to humans, and then defining necessity and possibility in terms of them a very worthwhile project, and I found his account very plausible, it's just a shame he doesn't do the same with language and have a better look at the way it actually is.
ANOTHER THING
Williamson's approach to continental philosophy is funny. You can see he wants to appear enlightened - mentioning Rorty and Hegel, and stating that the analytic/continental divide has no methodological grounding - but in his more free-wheeling afterward at the end it's assumed that continental philosophers is something philosophers don't want to be. It's a thorny issue that makes me sad, it always feels like a family that's been divided to me, but at the same time I find it difficult not to take sides. I think about all the bad continental philosophers that make it hard to find the good ones, then I realise that the same goes for analytic philosophy. If only we could go back to the 17th century.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, although Williamson's parochialism is embarrassing it's an interesting book, and I think that Williamson is a very interesting philosopher. The way he writes is sometimes ridiculously turgid, and although he is often precise he is often not as methodical or clear as I think he likes to think, he sometimes misses important distinctions and most importantly sometimes just describes. things. wrong: describing things right is a hugely underrated thing in philosophy and something that very intelligent people or sometimes very bad at. Philosophers need to look, and be perceptive, as much as they need to analyse, and preferably before they analyse.
Perhaps an even better title than 'A Philosophy of Some Philosophy' would be 'Methods of Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics and Semantics'. Such a title is admittedly a lot less catchy, but if he is going to do a big rant at the end about how we need to be more accurate and not be tempted by the 'sexy bits', by his own lights he really ought to accept that title.
December 15, 2014
Timothy Williamson describes what is relevant (which methods) for philosophy. He takes well known principles, like the sentence of excluded middle into account as well, as he mention the significance of a common sence, when doing philosophy. In his view philosophy is like an armchair-technology like mathematics. And he requires to use mathematical methods in philosophy, where possible. Sometimes descriptions are too long and some compactness is missing.
April 10, 2026
What is philosophy? That is the question at the heart of the book. To some extent the answer turns out to be a much clearer account of what it isn’t, rather than what it is.
One of the author’s key insights is the (humble) recognition that philosophy is nothing special. He even avoids any special names, such as metaphilosophy, to describe philosophical reflection on philosophy.
He also thinks that philosophy doesn’t have a unique methodology or subject matter, which can justify philosophers in arcane mysterious ramblings of their own. Philosophy shares its central insights and methodologies with (all) other branches of human knowledge and thought. And so it cannot be hedged or separated into a unique corral of its own, whether it is philosophy’s enemies trying to do so, or even its advocates trying to stress its unique exceptionalism as a justification for their own positions or as a license to pursue their own interests.
There are various strands of philosophical methodology which the author is less sympathetic towards. One particular example is psychologising the data. That means instead of reflecting on ‘things’, reflection focuses upon the reflective process and analysis of the one reflecting. That is often far easier to do, especially with some of the more complex aspects of philosophy, but what is its point? What is it trying to achieve, and does it really tell us anything important about the issues that philosophers traditionally examine?
At least the logical positivists gave reasons for turning away from a reflection on metaphysical ‘things.’ They considered it meaningless. But what is the rationale for modern philosophy to turn to psychologising? Or is it just happening by default because it (reductively) produces an evidence base that people can actually agree to argue about?
One of the controversial aspects of philosophy over the years has been the idea that it is an ‘armchair’ science. It is something that can be done from a desk, rather than from any studying of any aspects of the world. The author is sympathetic towards that viewpoint, partially because all studies involve armchair aspects. Part of what has made philosophy standout is the extent to which it is an armchair enterprise, rather than the fact that it involves any such reflection.
Overall this book raises some interesting questions, but it raises them in complicated ways, which drill down into narrow aspects of the analytic philosophy workspace. Professional philosophers may find it an interesting book, but non-expert readers will find it difficult to engage meaningfully with some of the discussions, and perhaps difficult also to motivate interest through some of the very detailed analysis of very narrow issues.
One of the author’s key insights is the (humble) recognition that philosophy is nothing special. He even avoids any special names, such as metaphilosophy, to describe philosophical reflection on philosophy.
He also thinks that philosophy doesn’t have a unique methodology or subject matter, which can justify philosophers in arcane mysterious ramblings of their own. Philosophy shares its central insights and methodologies with (all) other branches of human knowledge and thought. And so it cannot be hedged or separated into a unique corral of its own, whether it is philosophy’s enemies trying to do so, or even its advocates trying to stress its unique exceptionalism as a justification for their own positions or as a license to pursue their own interests.
There are various strands of philosophical methodology which the author is less sympathetic towards. One particular example is psychologising the data. That means instead of reflecting on ‘things’, reflection focuses upon the reflective process and analysis of the one reflecting. That is often far easier to do, especially with some of the more complex aspects of philosophy, but what is its point? What is it trying to achieve, and does it really tell us anything important about the issues that philosophers traditionally examine?
At least the logical positivists gave reasons for turning away from a reflection on metaphysical ‘things.’ They considered it meaningless. But what is the rationale for modern philosophy to turn to psychologising? Or is it just happening by default because it (reductively) produces an evidence base that people can actually agree to argue about?
One of the controversial aspects of philosophy over the years has been the idea that it is an ‘armchair’ science. It is something that can be done from a desk, rather than from any studying of any aspects of the world. The author is sympathetic towards that viewpoint, partially because all studies involve armchair aspects. Part of what has made philosophy standout is the extent to which it is an armchair enterprise, rather than the fact that it involves any such reflection.
Overall this book raises some interesting questions, but it raises them in complicated ways, which drill down into narrow aspects of the analytic philosophy workspace. Professional philosophers may find it an interesting book, but non-expert readers will find it difficult to engage meaningfully with some of the discussions, and perhaps difficult also to motivate interest through some of the very detailed analysis of very narrow issues.
April 18, 2018
Only found value in the opening and closing chapters, which were a refreshing view on philosophy and its uses; middle chapters dragged on with the Mars example, which could have been summed up in a few paragraphs and didn't really serve to motivate Williamson's real argument (which was the last chapter), but after skimming through Vagueness, were helpful as context for the greater path of his work.
June 9, 2018
Exceptionally rigorous in defending a compelling view of philosophy as reasonably continuous with ordinary reasoning, scientific reasoning, and formal reasoning in both method and subject matter.
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March 14, 2009If you read the table of contents you'd think I was a complete asshole and you'd tell me to get a real job.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews