My excellent philosopher friend ‘John’, let’s say, asked me a few philosophy questions, privately while we were chatting, but then generously agreed to let me answer them by assembling a crack team of others (and thus hand over responsibility to them), posting the results in a potentially – albeit these days minimally – public place. Obviously, despite that, I have protected his anonymity.
One feature of this is the pretext to write in dialogue,
something I would never have done while in paid academic harness. An advantage
is that one can place opposing views into a dialectical space with proper
enthusiasm. Reductionists about mental content really believe that sort of
thing. But I am not sure how to manage conflicting voices. In this case,
post-retirement, I have come to think that JL Austin is something of a hero I
never knew I had. And yet, I even have his main fan citing Wittgenstein (mainly because the questions posed didn’t seem to call for an Austin so much as a Wittgenstein), while
the character I had intended to speak for Wittgenstein speaks instead for
Davidson but with Wittgensteinian qualms. (Those wanting an Austinian attack on the Wittgenstein of On Certainty will have to wait another day. Perhaps for ‘John’ to ask the team the relevant questions. Someone go to ‘Liverpool’, as we might hypothesise – or rather: spuriously and groundlessly guess wildly – and buy him a pint, or Bacardi Breezer, or whatever!)
The results are here. I should add that ‘John’ wrote the questions while in ‘Liverpool’ pub – I assume – with friends and so they may not reflect his considered opinion of the very best questions to ask an amateur philosophy club.
