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Chapter 3 - Philosophy

Making Philosophical Discoveries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2025

By
Thaddeus Metz
Edited by
Jonathan Jansen
Jonathan Jansen
Affiliation:
Stellenbosch University
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Summary

This chapter is a reflection on three intellectual moves that tend to be revealing and influential in English-speaking philosophy, set in an autobiographical context. One move is to apply a new method to an issue that has been treated for a long time in other ways. A second is to look for data that are not entailed or adequately explained by existing theories and then to develop a theory that accounts for them while also making sense of data for which existing theories can account. The third is to find an assumption common to two long-standing disputants and advance an alternative to them both that does not rely on it. This essay includes strategic advice for budding philosophers who might want to take such approaches to their work.

Keywords

philosophical noveltymeta-philosophyinference to the best explanationintuitionsphilosophical methodsreflective equilibriumtheory construction
Type
Chapter
Information
On Discovery
How Knowledge is Produced across the Disciplines
 , pp. 35 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Aristotle, . 340 BCE. The Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. Trans. Irwin, Terence. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 1999.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. 2007. The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Frankfurt, Harry. 2004. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan; or, the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. Repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation. Macmillan.Google Scholar
Metz, Thaddeus. 2002. ‘Recent Work on the Meaning of Life’. Ethics, 112 (4): 781–814.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Thaddeus. 2007. ‘Toward an African Moral Theory’. Journal of Political Philosophy, 15 (3): 321–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Thaddeus. 2013. Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Thaddeus. 2022. A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and beyond the Continent. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wolf, Susan. 2010. Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

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