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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
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Empty Ideas - A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (Hardcover)
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Empty Ideas - A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (Hardcover)
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Peter Unger's provocative new book poses a serious challenge to
contemporary analytic philosophy, arguing that to its detriment it
focuses the predominance of its energy on "empty ideas. " In the
mid-twentieth century, philosophers generally agreed that, by
contrast with science, philosophy should offer no substantial
thoughts about the general nature of concrete reality. Leading
philosophers were concerned with little more than the semantics of
ordinary words. For example: Our word "perceives " differs from our
word "believes " in that the first word is used more strictly than
the second. While someone may be correct in saying "I believe
there's a table before me " whether or not there is a table before
her, she will be correct in saying "I perceive there's a table
before me " only if there is a table there. Though just a parochial
idea, whether or not it is correct does make a difference to how
things are with concrete reality. In Unger's terms, it is a
concretely substantial idea. Alongside each such parochial
substantial idea, there is an analytic or conceptual thought, as
with the thought that someone may believe there is a table before
her whether or not there is one, but she will perceive there is a
table before her only if there is a table there. Empty of import as
to how things are with concrete reality, those thoughts are what
Unger calls concretely empty ideas. It is widely assumed that,
since about 1970, things had changed thanks to the advent of such
thoughts as the content externalism championed by Hilary Putnam and
Donald Davidson, various essentialist thoughts offered by Saul
Kripke, and so on. Against that assumption, Unger argues that, with
hardly any exceptions aside from David Lewis's theory of a
plurality of concrete worlds, all of these recent offerings are
concretely empty ideas. Except when offering parochial ideas, Peter
Unger maintains that mainstream philosophy still offers hardly
anything beyond concretely empty ideas. "This incisive book lays
crucial challenges at the door of mainstream analytic philosophy,
for Unger argues persuasively that (contrary to its explicit
self-conception), a great deal of recent philosophy has been
concerned with merely conceptual issues-nothing 'concretely
substantial'. The book is sure to provoke controversy and healthy
debate about the role and value of philosophy." -Amie L. Thomasson,
Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow, University of Miami
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