Timothy Williamson. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Malden/Oxford (Blackwell Publishing), 2007, 332 pp.

The Philosophy of Philosophy is a book on how to do philosophy.

How to define and how to do philosophy is a topic as old as philosophy itself. As philosophy, especially nowadays, comes under attack of various claims of reductionism and charges of being superfluous philosophers devote considerable effort in defending the usefulness and distinctiveness of what they are doing. Philosophy is a many and not a one. There are several understandings of philosophy, and this has been a strength of philosophy as philosophy precedes any introduction of methodology and restriction on procedure and topic. Accordingly a philosophy of philosophy had to be monumental to come to terms with all branches of philosophy and the all the ways to do philosophy (analytic philosophy, various form of phenomenology, postmodernism, various neo-NN form of following an important position/philosopher of the tradition [like Neo-Kantianism, Hegelians …]).

In this respect Williamson’s book is one-sided and strongly focused. Although he mentions some other forms of philosophy in the introduction he only concerns himself with philosophy in the analytic tradition. And he is very outspoken about its superiority: ‘Analytic philosophy at its best uses logical rigor and semantic sophistication to achieve a sharpness of philosophical vision unobtainable by other means.’ (46) – ‘The rise of modern logic from Frege onwards has provided philosophers with conceptual instruments of unprecedented power and precision, enabling them to formulate hypotheses with more clarity and determine their consequences with more reliability than ever before.’(45, cf.279)

Up to some arrogance: ‘Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans:’(45, cf.289)

In fact Williamson argues from a very specific position within current analytic philosophy, and makes use of a couple of claims controversial within analytic philosophy (like theories of direct reference and de re modalities, having a rigid actuality operator, how to understand tacit knowledge and so forth). Williamson often refers to his own work and results (e.g. in the theory of vagueness), and accordingly sometimes (e.g. discussing vagueness or probabilistic reasoning) the discussion seem to be too engaged in setting out one theory on a topic than reflecting on ways to develop philosophical theories. So Philosophy of Philosophy could also be titled One Way to Do Analytic Philosophy. Williamson acknowledges that his book ‘makes no claim to comprehensiveness. … it explores some interrelated issues that strike me as interesting and not well understood’ (8).

Philosophy of Philosophy also makes in some chapters use of the formal devices of analytic philosophy. Although the formalisms are elementary they presuppose some background in modal logic and the theory of counterfactuals (as two formal appendices are provided as well).

The book, therefore, aims neither at the layman or the general philosopher, but is of oft interest to analytic philosophers who reflect on their way of doing analytic philosophy. It is especially worthwhile for those analytic philosophers who rather disagree with Williamson’s sub-branch of analytic philosophy, as the book invites them to compare their methodological self-understanding to Williamson’s and defend it in the light of his criticisms.

Williamson defends armchair reasoning. He claims that one may arrive at substantial insights by reflecting on the conditions and consequence of our judgments (often in present work called ‘our intuitions’, a phrase Williamson does not endorse at all, cf.215). The precondition to arrive at such insights in methodological thoroughness. We have to use our faculties (of modal knowledge, inter alia) and express the conceptual structures we find as clearly as possible.

One chapter therefore deals with knowledge of metaphysical modality, and one with thought experiments as a way to do philosophy. Williamson sees our ability to come to terms with modal knowledge as grounded in our ability to use counterfactuals and counterfactual reasoning: ‘our overall capacity for somewhat reliable thought about counterfactual possibilities’ (137). Therefore the book stresses the importance of formal systems of counterfactual reasoning, and sees the alethic modalities (‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’) as being reducible to our use of counterfactuals: ‘metaphysically modal thinking is logically equivalent to a special case of counterfactual thinking’ (158, cf.162). Thought experiments exploit this faculty as well: ‘Paradigm thought experiments in philosophy are simply valid arguments about counterfactual possibilities’ (207).

Defending arm chair reasoning Williamson does not consider philosophy as a mere reflection of language or meaning. He proposes – as one chapter title has it – to take philosophical questions at face value, i.e. to consider them as concerning their topic (say a theory of properties) directly and not being about our way of taking about that topic. Philosophers use methods of reasoning ‘required over a vast range of non-philosophical inquiry’ (3). They reflect often on language, but turning to language to reason about vagueness, say, does not make vagueness a mere linguistic issue. ‘Many non-philosophical questions that are not about thought or language cannot be resolved without inquiry into thought or language.’ (41), which does not make philosophy, according to Williamson, a discipline reflecting on language.

In this vain several chapters criticize analytic philosophy in as much as it claims to rest on a linguistic or conceptual turn of philosophy. In that tradition philosophy might be seen as conceptual analysis, where conceptual analysis is understood as following the structure of linguistic meaning. Williamson disagrees and claims ‘that the differences in subject matter between philosophy and the other sciences are also less deep than is often supposed’ (3). Scientific results, because of this, may be important to philosophy. ‘Our evidence in philosophy consists of a miscellaneous mass of knowledge, expressed in terms of all kind, some from ordinary language, some from the theoretical vocabulary of various disciplines. … Whatever we know is legitimate evidence’ (277). In this way philosophy is not set apart from any other science. Naturalism tries to exploit that. Nonetheless, according to Williamson, neither reductionism/naturalism nor the philosophy of mind have ‘come to play the organizing role in philosophy that philosophy of language once did’ (18). And even if some sentences which express philosophical results are analytic in the sense that substitution of synonyms turns them into logical truths (i.e. are ‘Frege analytic’): ‘it does not follow that we can gain cognitive access to them simply on the basis of our logical and linguistic competence’ (70). In fact completely competent speakers may deny some such truths (often for reasons of their philosophical background theories); there are no law-like ‘understanding-assent-links’ (85): ‘No given argument or statement is immune from rejection by a linguistically competent speaker’ (97). Philosophy so cannot appeal to the linguistically obvious or evident. And what some practice considers to be obvious or linguistically evident need not be so on close analysis. ‘What strikes us today as the best candidate for analytic or conceptual truth some innovative thinker may call into question tomorrow for intelligible reasons’ (126).

Williamson regards armchair reasoning (‘in which experience plays no strictly evidential role’, 169) as detached from empirical reasoning, because the beliefs acquired in the armchair have no direct link to experience, experience only (formerly once) played a role in acquiring some judgments, now the object of reflection. This theory of experience less than ‘evidential’ but more than ‘purely enabling’ (168, where ‘enabling’ means experience playing a role somehow like in acquiring a concept) might need further elaboration.

Williamson attacks several versions of understanding conceptual analysis (e.g. one which sees conceptual claims grounded in meaning, and thus being a priori and secure and another one which defines those claims as analytic the very understanding of which secures assent by competent speakers). He uses strong language again: ‘the conceptual turn and a fortiori the linguistic turn look like wrong turnings’ (21, cf. 53). These chapters are the most important for current analytic philosophers, even if they do not agree with Williamson’s diagnosis. One may ask oneself (as analytic philosopher) at which point one parts ways with Williamson and which of his presuppositions one therefore has to question. The common thread of these chapters is the question whether conceptual analysis delivers substantial insights or ‘just’ analytic statements (considered as mere trivia). ‘Many philosophically relevant truths are clearly not conceptual truths in any useful sense’ (49).

Williamson rightly stresses that serious analytic philosophy cannot forsake the claim that analysis provides substantial insight: ‘we should not assume that analytic truths are insubstantial in any further sense’ (52, cf.71), i.e. being obvious or trivial. Once this is granted one may even soften Williamson’s attack on conceptual analysis.

One could somewhat more clearly than Williamson differentiate between ‘analytic’ as a description of the procedure or a classification of the result of philosophy. Even if analytic sentences rest on definitional or conceptual structures definitions may be useful or not. Useful definitions capture facts corresponding to these definitions. A truth resting on such definitions, maybe expressed as analytic truth, may thus nevertheless be a substantial truth. This may be even more so in case of concepts long in use where we discover by reflection the structures they try to capture. Following this line of reasoning one may agree with Williamson: ‘nothing has been done to rule out the hypothesis that [the analytic truth] expresses a profound metaphysical necessity about the nature of the world’ (61, cf.63).

These chapters (about half of the book) are worthwhile reading – and maybe arguing against – for anyone reckoning him- or herself to be part of the analytic tradition. The Philosophy of Philosophy is far from comprehensive as philosophy goes, but it is superb in coming to grips with one’s methodological self-understanding as analytic philosopher.

Manuel Bremer, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany