Reddit reviews The Philosophy of Philosophy (The Blackwell / Brown Lectures in Philosophy, Vol. 2)

You might also check out The Philosophy of Philosophy which is meta-philosophy with an analytic slant. It's concerned not so much with empirical proof, but just what sort of standards can be said to apply to proofs (ie if a philosopher uses hypothetical examples to prove a point - so what? What does that mean? Has that proved anything, and if so, how?).

Aside from uncontested logical constructions like modus ponens, there are some commonly used heuristics, like inference to the best explanation, the principle of sufficient reason, appeal to intuition, ontological parsimony, Bayesian epistemology, Ockham's Razor (there are more). All of these may be questioned, and their applicability is dependent on context. Metaphilosophy, or the Philosophy of Philosophy, studies philosophical practice and its justifications.

This exists already, but not in the form you are imagining. Timothy Williamson has written a book titled just that. It is about the method of philosophy, among other things.

>Whenever we're talking about a thing, we're talking about our conceptions of that thing. It's all we have once the external world is filtered into our minds.

Alright, I don't really wanna get as deep into metaphysics and epistemology as you're taking us right now. I could start going "no the thought of a tree is not the same as a tree" and so on, but I'm just gonna say I don't agree with all this "rigid meaning" and "we can only talk about our concepts" stuff. The "conceptual analysis" model is way outdated IMO. But hey man where's your philosophy education from? I'm curious who's producing these hardcore conceptual analysis types.

Anyway just so I don't short-change you completely, here's a few things.

One, I know conceptual analysis probably is one of the things philosophers can do. But it just ain't the main thing. Philosophy is fundamentally about the big questions, life, the universe, and everything. Reducing it to just "How is this term to be defined?" is such a disservice to it, it ignores the big questions like how we can live good lives and what it all means, which don't have the same form at all. It's really an anti-philosophy view-- it's the view that philosophy's enemies often have, which enables them to say philosophy is "semantics" or mental masturbation.

Two, if you wanna know about the particular anti conceptual analysis view that I have (I called it realism), it's basically Timothy Williamson's in The Philosophy of Philosophy. That might be the most cited work in recent metaphilosophy, so it's not exactly a minor view, and I regularly see it crop up elsewhere. (You could probably just read the Amazon preview.)

And about "green is tasty": fair enough, there's a sense in which it's meaningless, and that's the one you intended, sure. It's still not like talking about being "fully human" though. This view you have where "human" is just a biological designation is itself a particular controversial philosophical view, so disagreeing with it is also philosophy. I would call it scientism but hey.