Analytic Philosophy for Beginners

The aim of this post is to describe for the general reader some of the main features of
contemporary analytic philosophy, with a focus on metaphysics. My hope is that, having
taken 20 minutes to read this, people without the background will be much better equipped
to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or even have a go at actual books and
articles.

My plan will be to look at the ‘credo’ of a particular recent school of philosophers. I do so

not because the views defended by that school are universally accepted by analytic
philosophers, but because the credo happens to use much of the terminology, and say
something about many of the debates, that you need to understand contemporary analytic
philosophy.

The original document, written by the philosopher Daniel Nolan in 1996, can be found
here. I thank him for letting me use it and for clearing something up for me, but want to
explicitly note that any errors remaining — and I’m almost certain there are some, although
I’m also pretty sure it’s mostly accurate — are my fault. Relatedly, in an article that
attempts to cover so much, simplifications have to be made: this is most definitely a first
word, and nothing should be taken as definitive statements of views. Rather, the hope is
that it’s a quick way to get a zoomed out lay of the land.

I haven’t included further reading: a good place to start is always the SEP (I consulted a
couple of articles while writing this), and if you want more ask in the comments.

The Canberra Plan Credo

The text of the credo is in italics, and my commentary in normal text. Key technical terms
are bolded.

() We believe in a mind-independent, metaphysically real world

A good start! You might wonder … why does this need to be said? But that there exists a
mind-independent world has, in one form or another, and to varying degrees, been denied.
You might know of famous figures from the history of philosophy who said this, like
Bishop Berkeley, for whom objects were ideas in the mind of God. And you might know of
famous contemporaries in ‘continental’ philosophy who seem to deny the existence of an
external world, like Jean Baudrillard who said, somewhat bafflingly, that LA no longer
exists (see the linked to post on postmodernism below for this, and I thank a reader for
pointing our I previously wrote ‘Lyotard’ when I meant ‘Baudrillard’).

Most analytic metaphysicians go in for metaphysical realism. But it’s useful to note that not
long ago, famous and renowned analytic philosophers defended anti-realism, and that’s
what makes the statement not redundant.
(It’s not the easiest to describe in a short paragraph the arguments for anti-realism that were
popular among analytic philosophers. Extremely roughly, one — associated with Michael
Dummett — had it that understanding a language is a question of being able to tell whether
its sentences were true or not. We understand ‘it’s raining’ because we have a way of
working out whether it’s true on a given occasion of use: look outside, check the forecast,
etc. But some sentences aren’t like that. We have no way of working out whether some
sentences from the past are true. No way of telling whether ‘Shakespeare ate eggs on his
ninth birthday’ is true. So, this line goes, such sentences (as well as their negations:
‘Shakespeare didn’t eat eggs on his ninth birthday’) are neither true nor false. But it’s
surely a feature of a realist viewpoint that there’s a fact of the matter about Shakespeare’s
birthday eating habits, and so this view of meaning is inconsistent with such a realist
viewpoint and supports anti-realism.)

The point is, that anti-realism was not unheard of among analytic philosophers in the 20the
century. It’s true, however, that it’s considerably less in vogue today. We are, for the most
part, realists (although not necessarily realistic, as you’ll see shortly).

() and the correspondence theory of truth.

According to the correspondence theory of truth, true sentences or statements correspond to

bits of reality. So, for example, it’s true that I ran this morning and so there is a bit of
reality that corresponds to the sentence ‘Matt ran this morning’. It’s false that I swam this
morning and so there is no bit of reality corresponding to ‘Matt swam this morning’. You
might wonder why this gets its own line. Isn’t this just another way of getting at the idea of
realism?

No. You can be a realist without liking a correspondence theory of truth, which for a long
time was viewed as too metaphysically loaded. To see that, think about the question: what
are the bits of reality like that make our sentences true?

It seems that, in our example, the bit must involve me. But it can’t just be me. Maybe the
bit consisting just of me could be what ‘Matt exists’ corresponds to, but surely the bit for
‘Matt ran this morning’ must involve, somehow, running. Then maybe we could say this:
the bit consists in the object, me, and the property of running, connected together.

But this is already to say quite a lot! After all, what are properties? If you were in a room
containing solely an orange on a table, and you were asked how many entities there were in
the room, you would say two — the orange and the table. You would not say (at least) four:
the orange, the table, the orangeness of the orange, the squareness of the table (the
roundness of the orange, the …).

It seems that we normal speakers and thinkers don’t recognise properties, and you if you
were particularly concerned with doing justice to ordinary speakers, you might want to
deny that properties really exist. And then it would be harder to defend the correspondence
theory.
Things stray further from common sense when you consider more complicated truths. If I
didn’t swim this morning, then ‘I didn’t swim’ is true. Then there’s a bit of reality it
corresponds to. But what bit is that? There’s a sense in which at least we can gesture at the
bit of reality corresponding to my running, but it doesn’t seem like any bit of reality
corresponds to my not swimming. That, after all, is the point!

To capture things like negative truths it seems we’re going to have to have some very weird
bits of reality, and that’s why, despite surface appearances, the correspondence theory of
truth is a substantial commitment and involves one in thinking about the nature of reality
quite a lot. The debate has moved on in the intervening years, and you’re likely also to hear
about truthmakers, and — the current hot topic du jour in metaphysics — grounding,
which are both ideas in the same ballpark.

() We believe in the reality of the past, and of the future,

and we are four-dimensionalists (or at least three-plus-one dimensionalists) about

spacetime.

So what do you think about the first sentence here? Common sense or not? Certainly it
seems like the future bit is less certain. After all, you might think, if it’s real, it’s out there,
and its nature is determined already, which wouldn’t be great for those of us who think we
have free will. If the future is real like the past, given the past is locked in and
unchangeable, then the future is also locked in and unchangeable.

Last night, for example, I intended to work this morning. It turns out that I am in fact
blogging. If the future exists, then the bit of reality consisting of me blogging already
existed as a (to speak loosely) future fact. But then it seems I don’t have control over what I
do in the future just as I don’t have control, now, over what happened in the past. I can’t
change the past because it’s already there, and on this view, it seems the same applies to the
future. Nevertheless, partly for reasons to do with contemporary scientific views about time
(such as the relativity of simultaneity of special relativity) and partly for other reasons,
many philosophers like the idea that the future exists on a par with the past.

I take the second sentence here to cash out in technical terms the first. In particular, as I
understand it, four-dimensionalism is the view that time is another dimension alongside
the spatial ones, on a par (or maybe not quite — per the parenthesis) with them (it also goes
by the name eternalism, and is here opposed primarily — but definitely not exclusively —
by presentism, which says that only the present exists). It goes along well with a view
about the nature of objects according to which they too are four-dimensional. On this view
(called perdurance theory), objects are extended through time somewhat like my body, for
example, is extended through space. Similarly, on this view, just as I have spatial parts
located at different locations in space, so I have temporal parts located at different locations
in time: there’s a part of me that’s running located at 9am this morning, for example.

() We believe in conceptual analysis, the a priori , and narrow content.

I think the best way to understand these three views is as being about the nature of concepts
or meanings. It’s reasonably common ground among philosophers to say that words and
expressions have meaning or express a concept, which meaning/concept are also the objects
of thought. These views then spell out some features of concepts. The first says that
concepts are complex, structured entities, which structure gives rise to a certain sort of
truth. The second tells us that the concept or meaning associated with some sentences is
epistemically special, and the third tells us about two different ways concepts can be related
to the world.

Conceptual analysis is understood differently by different people, but on one way of

thinking about it it’s a view according to which the objects of thought have a certain
structure which can be investigated and uncovered to yield knowledge. On this way of
thinking, the goal of analysis is to say what the component parts of the concept are and how
they hang together. A famous — and famously incorrect — analysis of the concept of
knowledge would have it that knowledge is justified true belief. We can think of it then as
composed of the concepts justification, truth, and belief. On this story, philosophy would be
at least in part an ‘armchair’ discipline — you sit around and inspect concepts and try to
find their structure, and in so doing learn new and non-obvious truths about the world.

Some concepts or meanings correspond to sentences — they are often called thoughts. The
notion of the a priori concerns thoughts. It says that some thoughts can be known to be
true independently of experience.

Most thoughts aren’t like that. The thought I’ve just thought that it’s raining, for example,
can’t be known to be true independently of experience. I need to look outside the window
to check. Such truths are called a posteriori.

Examples of a priori truths include the truth that all bachelors are unmarried, or that all
physical objects have a colour, or that 2+2=4. In each case, it seems, merely grasping the
thought lets us see that it’s true.

The idea of narrow content is best brought out by means of a — famous — example (from
Hilary Putnam). Water in our world is the chemical element H2O. Imagine a world in every
other respect like ours but in which the potable clear liquid that is in rivers and so in is the
chemical element XYZ. That it’s like our world in every respect means that it contains
people who speak English and call XYZ ‘water’ — indeed, it contains someone identical to
me except he is 90% XYZ. Imagine those people before the discovery of organic chemistry,
so they don’t know it’s XYZ, and imagine us at the same time (so we don’t know it’s H2O)
. I and my twin say ‘Water is delicious’. Do we mean the same thing?

Well, on the one hand exactly the same thoughts and images and come to mind; we
associate the same dictionary entry with the world, and we behave with regards to what we
call ‘water’ the same way. So it seems a good case can be made for saying yes, we mean
the same thing. On that view, meanings would be in a sense internal to the speaker: it
doesn’t matter what’s actually out there (which differs for me and my twin), but just instead
how we think of it, how we behave with regards to it, and so on. Narrow content is this
type of internal content or meaning that my twin and I share as a result of being duplicates.
This example shows two people can share narrow content even if the thing in the world
their thoughts are about are different.

But you might doubt this. Surely, you might think, meaning tracks how the world actually
is — our thoughts are about a particular chunk of reality, and if that chunk is different, our
thoughts are different. This is the view known as externalism about content, and it’s one of
the most influential views of the 20th century (if you take just one thing away from this
article, externalism would probably be most useful: related terms you might want to
research and know are descriptivism and Fregeanism and direct reference theory and
Millianism. Roughly, the firs two go with narrow content and the second two with wide
content.)

Externalism goes with what is called wide content, which is the sort of mental content that
is sensitive to environmental conditions and according to which concepts or meaning reach
out to the world and have their identity determined by it. My twin and I have different wide
contents for ‘water’. My wide content for ‘water’ is simply H2O itself, while my twin’s is
XYZ. It sounds a bit weird to say that a substance is a type of content, but that is indeed
what people say.

Narrow content, on the other hand, is that content that we share. A lot of ink is spilled as to
whether wide or narrow content is the important one — whether it best accounts for what
our words mean, or how belief spurs action — but one approach is just to say that they are
both important and to say that we have both narrow and wide content (indeed, as Nolan
notes in his comments, the tendency to favour a two-dimensional theory of meaning is a
notable feature of the Canberra planners. Two-dimensional semantics is the term,
although it’s not easy for the beginner).

() Ramsification over platitudes leads to the systematisation of theory, and thereby enables
identification of the best deservers for theoretical terms.

I think this is perhaps less crucial to know (admittedly, I say this mainly because I managed
to go about ten years in philosophy resolutely not bothering to learn what ‘Ramsification’
meant), so I’ll be somewhat quick. Say we have a theory of some bit of the world. It
consists of words standing for things that we make into sentences that are true or false.
Most of these words will be good, familiar words. Say we want to give a theory of human
beings. We’ll talk about stomachs and smiling and protein and feet. But we’ll also talk
about slightly more hard to deal with words, words for things that we can’t see, like pain or
joy or just consciousness.

Famously, these sorts of words lead to hard problems. What is, after all, pain or
consciousness? How do we fit pain into our theory of the world, alongside feet and
smiling? The Ramsification idea is that we take a bunch of things we uncontroversially
know about pain, for example that pain is caused by injury to the body by some stimulus
and pain causes people to say ‘ow’. We can know these things even if we’re confused by
what pain actually is in a deep metaphysical sense.
We can use these uncontroversial things to get some knowledge as to what pain is. The
basic idea is that we can replace the controversial term (‘pain’) in our list of obvious truths
about pain with gaps, like so:

__ is caused by injury and __ causes people to say ‘ow’

And we can then do what is called (existentially) binding the gaps, where we quantify over
the gappy sentence yielding (don’t worry about the unexplained jargon in this sentence too
much; I explain some of it in my philosophy of language piece linked below):

(*) There is some thing such that it is caused by injury and it causes people to say ‘ow’.

There’s something neat about this. We started with a theory that involved something weird
we didn’t understand. We then converted that theory to another theory, specified above,
that doesn’t involve mentioning anything weird — we generalized to get rid of the
weirdness. Now our theory is nice and respectable, containing only nice scientifically
understandable words and ideas about causation and injury and speech.

Now, if we assume our theory is true, then this sentence is uncontroversially true, and has
no weird unclear terms in it. But if it’s true, then there’s some thing that has those
properties — something that, to use some jargon, satisfies the existential quantification (the
‘there is some thing’ sentence).

We can then say that that’s what ‘pain’ stands for: it stands for whatever the object is that
makes (*) true. In that way, we can parlay our knowledge of uncontroversial truths and
unweird entities into a sort of knowledge about the weirder things, by saying that the
weirder thing is just whatever it is plays a certain role in our overall theory. This, more or
less, is Ramsification, and — as my example might have suggested — was used as a tool in
the philosophy of mind (and elsewhere) to help understand the hard to understand.

() We are materialists and functionalists about the mind.

Materialism — although it might mean slightly different things in different mouths — is

the idea that there is (perhaps at some deep down level, whatever that means) just one type
of thing in the world, physical things. About the mind in particular this means that the mind
is not, as other philosophical and religious traditions would have it, a separate type of entity
other than, say, the body associated with it. Materialism about the mind is thus a rejection
of dualism, according to which there are two types of things in the world, minds and
bodies. Functionalism is the idea is that mental states are defined by the role that they play
in a person’s behaviour. As we just say, pain, for example, can be thought of as that state,
whatever it is, that is caused by injury and causes ‘ows’, in general the functionalist idea is
that we don’t have to know how in particular a given state is realized — that is incidental
— we just have to know its causal patterns. A consequence of being a functionalist about
mental states is that we allow other creatures and even non-organic entities to have mental
states, provided there is something that plays the same causal role (injury detection and
warning) as pain does in us.
()We reject spooks and epiphenomena of all sorts.

Spooks are the non-physical things, the sort we might be worried about fitting into a
respectable scientific theory. Epiphenomena more particularly are things which have no
causal effect. On one view of the mind, consciousness would be an epiphenomena. In
general, fitting epiphenomena into a nice scientifically respectable theory is tricky, and the
Canberra planners want none of it.

()We are Humean about value, but not about causation.

Humeanism about value (this is the thing I’m least sure about in this essay, so reader
beware) is the idea that value isn’t something inherent in an object, but something that
depends on human actions, and in particular on human’s valuing it. We value good music
not because of some inherent, kind of weird, property of its being valuable, but because —
and kind of circularly sounding — we adopt certain attitudes to it, the attitude of valuing.
Valuing is a state of ours we bring to the object, not a state of the object that impinges on
us.

Hume’s famous theory of causation, which remained popular in one form or another in a
good chunk of the 20th century, has it that for a given event of type a to cause a given event
of type b is for it to generally be the case that b events follow a events. This has some
advantages: in a sense, it deflates something kind of weird seeming. When I eat something,
I feel sated. These are two different events, as different, you might think, as me eating and
it raining in Brazil. But they have this weird close connection: pretty much always,
whenever I eat, I feel sated. What is this weird close connection, that knits together to
events in a way to most events aren’t knitted? The Humean’s reassuring response is, pretty
much, ‘nothing’. It’s just a fact that some events always follow others, but that’s all there is
to it.

However, that’s not very satisfying, because it’s going to require some fancy footwork to
exclude bad cases. Whenever the sun rises, the sun (a bit later) sets. But the sun’s rising
doesn’t cause its setting. In the last bit of the twentieth century, when people became less
uncomfortable with confronting the weird bits of reality, a flurry of theorizing took place
about the metaphysics of causation according to which it was some real metaphysically
robust thing, and today that would be the general consensus (although the details, as ever,
are much debated).

()We believe in the reality of properties and relations

(though we are agnostic about whether they are universals, tropes or special sets).

Properties are ways things can be, ways like being green, while relations are the
generalization of properties to ways of being that involve more than one object: being taller
than, for example, is a relation. As suggested above, it doesn’t seem like a commonsensical
view that there are properties, and trying to say something about their nature is even more
difficult, but if you want to do metaphysical theorizing, these are issues you need to deal
with, and both have and do receive a lot of attention. Nowdays most are realists about them,
as opposed to nominalists, who don’t think they really exist.

But if they do really exist, what are they? The next sentence lays out some of the seminal
options. The key feature of a theory of universals is that for an object for it to be a certain
way is for it to possess a certain universal, and, since two objects can be the same way,
more than one object can possess a given universal. When one beholds, for example, a
cup’s being green, the thing one is seeing (maybe) is a cup being related to the property
green, while if you turn your head and see the grass’s being green, you see the grass being
related to the very same object, the property green. One possible way to gloss this is to say
that universals are objects located at more than one place in space. A trope, sometimes
called a particular quality instance, is, unlike universals, not shared. In the situation just
described, there would be one green trope associated with the cup and another with the
grass. Tropes are particular objects, like, for example, human beings, but unlike human
beings, they do not possess qualities, but are qualities. Tropes go well with a bundle
theory of objects, according to which objects are just collections of tropes. According to
the third view, properties are just sets of objects. The property blue would be the set of blue
things. There needs to be something more to it than it, because for any objects, there is a set
consisting of those objects, but it’s not the case that for any objects, there’s a property they
share (or, at least, it does some violence to our intuitive notion of property to say this.) And
that, I take it, is why they have to be special.

() We believe in unrestricted mereological composition, and believe in the existence of sets

The fourteen syllable ‘unrestricted mereological composition’ is perhaps as hard to

understand as it is to parse. Let’s break it down. ‘Mereological’ means to do with the theory
of parts and wholes. Composition is how parts come together to form unified objects.
Unrestricted mereological composition is a particular view about how parts come together
to form wholes according to which, for any objects, there is an object which has they and
only they as parts.

This is super weird. For the friend of UMC, the Eiffel tower, Jonathan Franzen, and Ume
the dog are all (and only) parts of some object. This is a very weird object which, of course,
none of us would be inclined to believe in, but there’s a certain logical neatness to it —
since we think sometimes objects compose to form another object (as the parts of my body
compose my body) the thought goes that the simplest solution is to say that they always do.
Although it sounds ridiculous, here’s a challenge: fill in this sentence in a way that is
motivated. Objects, x1,x2,…,xn compose an object w if and only if _______ where you can
and should mention x1,x2,…,xn in the blank bit. It’s not so easy! Belief in sets is pretty
common among philosophers interested in sets, although there is at least one interesting
opposing view (David Lewis, who put forward a view for how to do set theory using the
resources of mereology).

() We believe in possible worlds (though we admit puzzlement about their nature).

This is another important one. You won’t go far in contemporary philosophy before
encountering possible worlds talk. It was introduced by Saul Kripke in the ‘50s as a way of
formalizing what is called modal logic, an important variety of which is the logic of
possibility and necessity. What is it to say that 2+2 is necessarily 4? On this thought, it’s to
say that there are these things, possible worlds, which are ways things the world could be
and for something to be necessarily true is for it to be true relative to all possible worlds.
For it to be possibly true is for it to be true at at least one of these things. Just as we
typically understand truth as relative to a world (to say that it’s not raining is true is really
to say it’s not raining (here) in this world) we can and should also consider truth relative to
ways the world can be other than it actually is.

You might wonder what the fuss is, but we have very good understanding of the logic of
expressions like ‘all these x’ and ‘at least one of these x’, and we can use that
understanding (replacing ‘x’ with ‘worlds) to develop formal mathematical theories of
modal logic, as Kripke famously did.

But equally important is that you can do a lot of philosophy with possibility and necessity.
Here is but one example. Remember we said that one view of properties is that they are just
sets — so, the property of having a heart is just the set of things that have a heart. But all
and only those objects that have a heart have a kidney (at least for the sake of this example,
I don’t know about the biological accuracy of this). That means that the property of having
a kidney is the same set of objects as the set of objects having a heart — the behearted,
bekidneyed ones. That means the two properties are the same — but surely they aren’t.

If we can use the resources of possibility and necessity, we can avoid this problem. We can
say that two properties are the same provided it’s necessary that their associated sets have
the same members. A property isn’t just one set, but is rather a bunch of different sets, one
different one for each possible world. Even if, as a matter of fact, all hearted creatures are
kidneyed creatures, this obviously isn’t a necessary truth, and so the sets the two properties
correspond to will differ at some possible worlds, allowing us to tell them apart.

But now we’ve moved from logic and language (the modal logic stuff) to metaphysics. We
want to say what properties are, and for that to be in good standing, it seems we are
committed to saying both that possible worlds are something, and to saying what they are.
And so, given the role they can play (and this is just one example) philosophers felt led to
take possible worlds seriously. And that’s what the credo is saying here.

() We believe in morals, and colours, and all manner of “secondary qualities”.

This is another statement of the nice robust realism that typifies much contemporary work.
Earlier in the 20th century, anti-realism about morals, for example, was in vogue. People
thought that properties like being wrong didn’t really exist, and that to say, for example,
‘murder is wrong’ was just to say that you weren’t a big fan of murder — to express your
disapproval of it. Nowadays, I think, to a large extent philosophers tend to be moral realists.
Secondary qualities are ways things are that in some sense depend on the properties of an
observer — colour is a paradigm, but other sensory properties should be included here too.
I think the reason it’s being mentioned is because it was thought such things are harder to
square with a materialist view of the world, or in some sense less real because not entirely
mind-independent, and plenty of work in twentieth century philosophy has been concerned
to push back against this.

() We are consequentialists, but of all shades, and with a variety of meta-ethical

justifications.

Continuing with the discussion of morality, consequentialism is the idea that the goodness
of an action is determined by its consequences. Utilitarianism, for example, as the most
famous consequentialist theory, is concerned with those actions which produce the most
happiness or utility or pleasure, where that is found by totting up how much happiness (or
etc.) the action produces and taking the amount of unhappiness it produces away from it.
There are a ton of different consequentialist theories (some think, for example, that it’s
rules rather than particular actions that we should judge based on — do actions which are in
accordance with maximising rules). And one can be a consequentialist for different reasons.
Opposing consequentialist theories are deontological theories, which is the idea that an
idea is right provided it is done in accordance with the rules of right behaviour, regardless if
it has less than the best or even bad consequences some times.

() We believe in the substantial correctness of the doctrines of David Lewis about most
things (except the nature of possible worlds).

You might not think you know much about David Lewis, but if you’ve been following
along you do know some. He is an extraordinarily influential figure who set the terms of
many of the debates, including some of those mentioned above, and I would have to
imagine that ranking any hundreds or thousands of years hence would put him in the top ten
philosophers of all time. (On the topic of ranking: a very important feature of analytic
philosophy is that we are obsessed with rankings. Ranking is probably the third most
important concept necessary to understand contemporary philosophy, alongside externalism
and possible worlds. I’m — only just — joking.)

It’s thus kind of unfortunate that the thing for which he is most famous is the rather
implausible view of modal realism, a view of possible worlds according to which all
possible worlds are concrete objects just like ours. The only thing that differentiates our
world from other possible worlds is that this world is ours — the one we’re located at (the
other possible worlds are spatio-temporally separate from ours — we can’t travel to them).
He believed this wacky doctrine in part for the reason mentioned above — having possible
worlds around really makes metaphysical theorizing go smoothly.

() We respect the opinions of the folk, and are naturalists, with great respect for the
findings of science (suitably interpreted).

You might question this first bit in light of, among other things, the talk of mereological
universalism! But nevertheless this is mostly accurate, I think, of how contemporary
philosophers view themselves. If at any point reading this you’ve thought a view must be
wrong because it conflicts with something from a natural science, you probably — only
probably — want to think again, because views ignorant of relevant science will typically
pretty quickly get tossed aside (although sometimes this process might take a while before
we realize the science in question is relevant).

()We look for inter-theoretic reductions,

And the supervenience of all on the microphysical,

And this final sentence indicates a desire to reduce theories belonging to a given level of
abstraction to ‘lower’ theories. To know how, for example, to reduce one’s theories of
chemistry or psychology, say, to physics ending with the thought that reality is at bottom
what fundamental physics tells us, and changes at the higher levels of reality (in
psychology, say) are always the result of (supervene on) changes at the lowest
microphysical level.

So ends our quick tour of contemporary philosophy. Any of these sentences could have
been the topic of its own article (book, research program, lifetime, …) and so this has been
necessarily quick and incomplete. But I hope you now have a better grasp of the often
forbiddingly technical jargon of contemporary philosophy as well as a broad sense of how
(some) contemporary philosophers view the world and the aim of philosophy. In particular,
hopefully you can see that much contemporary philosophy is realist in spirit, with an
interest in exploring the structure of reality in a way guided by science and commonsense
but never afraid to diverge from it if that is where argument leads.