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Full Idea
The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back.
Gist of Idea
Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama
Source
Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro)
Book Ref
Williamson,Timothy: 'The Philosophy of Philosophy' [Blackwell 2007], p.8
A Reaction
This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins.
| 16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
| 9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
| 9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
| 9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
| 9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
| 9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
| 9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
| 9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
| 9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
| 9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
| 9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
| 9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
| 20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |