Metaphilosophy - Metaphilosophical Writings

Metaphilosophical Writings

Plato raised questions concerning

• the nature of philosophy and its methods (most explicitly addressed in the Meno)
• the value and proper aims of philosophy (in the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, etc.)
• the proper relationship between philosophical criticism and everyday life (a pervasive theme explored most famously in the Republic)

Immanuel Kant's approach to philosophy, his 'criticism', is thoroughly selfconscious and reflexive. Writing Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science, he presented an example of a work that is seen today as indisputably metaphilosophical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about the nature of philosophical puzzles and philosophical understanding. He suggested philosophical errors arose from confusions about the nature of philosophical inquiry. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote that there is not a metaphilosophy.

C. D. Broad distinguished Critical from Speculative philosophy in his "The Subject-matter of Philosophy, and its Relations to the special Sciences," in Introduction to Scientific Thought, 1923. Curt Ducasse, in Philosophy as a Science, examines several views of the nature of philosophy, and concludes that philosophy has a distinct subject matter: appraisals. Ducasse's view has been among the first to be described as 'metaphilosophy'.

Henri Lefebvre in Metaphilosophie (1965) argued, from a marxian standpoint, in favor of an "ontological break", as a necessary methodological approach for critical social theory (whilst criticizing Louis Althusser's "epistemological break" with subjective marxism, which represented a fundamental theoretical tool for the school of marxist structuralism).