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Full Idea
Analytical philosophy can rightly pride itself on having produced the greatest critical arsenal the world has ever known.
Gist of Idea
Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools
Source
Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.6)
Book Ref
Fraassen,Bas van: 'The Empirical Stance' [Yale 2002], p.18
A Reaction
This is, of course, in the context of a scathing attack on the desire to use analytical methods to do speculative metaphysics. I say that if these are the best tools, then we should push forward with them to see how far we can get.
| 12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
| 12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
| 12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
| 12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
| 12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
| 12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
| 13066 | An explanation is just descriptive information answering a particular question [Fraassen, by Salmon] |
| 6783 | To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but to believe it empirically adequate [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| 6784 | Why should the true explanation be one of the few we have actually thought of? [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| 14917 | To accept a scientific theory, we only need to believe that it is empirically adequate [Fraassen] |
| 14919 | Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen] |