Well, I don't know if it could be quite like that, but one dominant approach to contemporary linguistic theory holds that questions like, "How do descriptions work in natural language?" are ultimately questions about the psychology of competent speakers. Assuming that (cognitive) psychology in some sense or other ultimately reduces to facts about the brain, it follows that the question how descriptions work in natural language is, in some sense, a question about the brain. But the nature of the relation between psychology and brain-facts is the difficult question here.

What I'd "make of the idea that philosophers are trying tounderstand the world through natural language, and not through enoughof an observational component, and method" is that this generalization is just plain false. Philosophers throughout history have drawn upon science, mathematics, literature, art, theology, and whatever else they can get their hands on in an attempt to deal with the questions that perplex them. Once philosophers have achieved enough of an understanding of a question to make it susceptible to serious scientific investigation, what happens is, well, that the question starts to receive serious scientific investigation, and at that point its no longer a question for philosophers but a question for some often new branch of empirical science. This has happened time and again throughout history. So philosophers often aren't in the business of answering questions but rather in the business of clarifying questions: clarifying them enough that empirical work can then be done. As...

There are really several questions here, and there isn't really any simple answer, since "analytic philosophy" isn't sufficiently unified for there to be any single approach. If there is such a thing as "analytic philosophy", then it is more a tradition than a school. Some analytic philosophers do approach philosophical questions with little regard for history. Not all do, and I guess I'd be something of an example. Some analytic philosophers have also regarded most, or even all, philosophical questions as the result of some kind of linguistic or conceptual confusion. And there was a time---half a century ago now---when that was the dominant approach. But times have changed, and there are now few analytic philosophers who would endorse it. What is widely believed is that making progess on philosophical problems often depends upon getting clear about the concepts involved, and experience has taught that close attention to the language used to express those concepts can be invaluable. But that's...

Yes to the first one, but no to the second one, and I think no to the second one even for science. What makes science, and philosophy, harder now, in a sense, is that they are both so highly specialized. Let me use an example from mathematical logic. Fifty years ago, you could pretty much become an expert in mathematical logic by reading and understanding one book, Stephen Kleene's Introduction to Meta-mathematics . I'm not, of course, saying that doing that on one's own was easy. The central results were not understood them as profoundly as they are today. Nonetheless, the contrast with today is clear. It's not so much that there's not much left to discover. It's that, to do any serious work, there is so much that has been discovered and so that one has to know.

I hate to be overly defensive but, frankly, for someone asking this kind of question, and making these kinds of accusations, the questioner displays quite astonishing ignorance. Rigor? Methodology? Math? I would have thought that twentieth century analytic philosophy was almost defined by its obsession with these things. Now that said, the next question---whether philosophy is a branch of literary criticism---rather suggests that the questioner has relatively little familiarity with analytic philosophy. Perhaps a good suggestion, then, would be that the questioner should read Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy . Or Carnap's Logical Syntax of the World . Or Quine's Word and Object (though read Carnap first). Or, perhaps best of all, Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic . And have a look at question 1416 . Besides which: The concern about the bent spoon is a concern about the nature of perceptual representation, a concern that is continuous with the concerns of visual...

I'll let Louise respond on her own behalf, as far as her own position is concerned. But, if I may address the second question, in a spirit with which I think she'd agree.... Yes, of course, date rape, and hazing, and binge drinking, and the like are all serious problems. But the question is why one should suppose that philosophy classes are the right place to address them. I think it's asking a lot of philosophy—not to mention of philosophy professors—to suppose that it—and we—are in some special position to instill wisdom in our students. Certainly, if you ask me what I'm trying to teach the average student in one of my undergraduate courses—the one who's not a major or, perhaps, is but is headed to law school or the business world or what have you—I'll say I want them to learn to read and listen well, and to think and express themselves clearly. And one would certainly hope that these skills might help people live their lives better. But, however clearly I can think (and I don't even manage...

Philosophy is a very diverse discipline. It's practiced in lots of ways, and with a focus on lots of different issues. Some philosophy is intensely mathematical; some has a strong focus on science; some is more humanistic; some is, perhaps, even spiritual. But I don't know that anyone would suppose philosophy had any sort of "spiritual persuasiveness" special to it. See question 1350 for additional remarks.

Metaphysics, as it was originally understood, was 'meta' to physics. That is, metaphysics was concerned with general questions about the nature of physics or, again, with foundational questions about physics. That's certainly the sense you get from Aristotle's Metaphysics , which I think is where the term originates, but also from Descartes and many of the other early modern philosophers. I don't know about the medieval Christians. But even they might fit this mold insofar as their loftier speculations are, ultimately, driven by concerns about the foundations of physical science.

I think this question is one of the most contentious in the field at the moment. Perhaps it has always been this way. For some of us, philosophy, as we practice it, has very little in common with the other disciplines traditionally included among the humanities. (I'm not entirely sure I know what the "humanities" are, to be honest.) Our colleagues in these disciplines are often exceedingly frustrated with us for this reason. They think we should be teaching Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Islamic philosophy, and we reply to them that we have no more obligation to do so than the physicists have to teach Aristotle and Newton. This is because, as we see it, philosophy is, like physics, centrally concerned with certain problems , and our task is to make some kind of progress on those problems. Of course, it complicates matters that philosophy's relationship to its history is very different from physics' relationship to its. This is in part because philosophy's problems are sometimes (not...

I'm not sure that any of us really pretend to have answers to the difficult questions of life. We claim to have thought about them, perhaps more deeply than your average prostitue or politician, and perhaps from a different perspective than your average priest (or minister, or what have you). I don't know that this makes what a philosopher has to say about, say, the ethics of abortion or gay marriage, the meaning of death, or the nature of human sexuality of more value than what someone else might have to say, but I hope very much that it does make it of some value. Part of what I myself would hope this website demonstrates is that it is possible to think hard, rationally, and clearly about difficult and profound issues. And, indeed, thinking about such issues does not have to be separate from whatever it is one might do with priests, politicians, and prostitutes. Thinking can, I would again hope, be integrated with other ways of approaching such questions.