"Immer noch Philosophie?"

Marjorie Grene

pp. 93-100

in: Günter Dux, Thomas Luckmann (eds), Sachlichkeit, Wiesbaden, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1974

Abstract

Philosophy, non-philosophers complain, settles no problems. Thus social anthropology, for instance, might produce an adequate theory, say, of totemism or of magic, a theory which would both suggest directions for and explain the results of empirical research; but »philosophical anthropology« has no such »concrete« outcome. Similarly, brain research produces again and again definitive results which suggest further investigation, etc., while discussion of the »mind-body problem« seems to go on forever in the same vein, only with different vocabularies: instead of the reduction of mind to sensations or to corpuscles in motion we have its reduction to bevahior or to neurophysiology or to machinery, reductions which some philosophers embrace with enhusiasm and others resist. We circle, as Wittgenstein said, »round and round the same landscape«. And the question, what philosophy is, is one of the philosophical questions that itself keeps recurring, however many philosophers have thought it settled. Looking back at Plessner's philosophical writing, in the context as well of the history of philosophy, past and contemporary, one may ask once again: what is philosophy doing, and why does it do it in this unsettling, because unsettled, way?

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig