Modern Mire

[banderson]

What is THE mistake of modern philosophy? What is the hinge point on which the strains of modern thought swing?
There have been many great philosophers in modernity, but has there been a fundamental oversight that ties them all together?
Anybody.... anybody...

[Antiseptic]

There is no such thing as "the" mistake of modernity. Some people would like to assume that there is one mistake, and we need to just avoid this one mistake. However, I believe that any attempt to discover "the" mistake could only be superficial, at best.

Philosophers should be read for themselves and not be lumped into a category. What often seems to happen is that a particular philosopher gets tagged as belonging to a certain school of thought, then people will dismiss that philosopher without ever really giving him or her a fair chance.

[banderson]

I think you are right in one regard. Lumping can be dangerous, and a philosopher can have many important things to say even if his fundamental approach is wrong.

However (and I'm not saying you denied this), there ARE strains of thought. Certain assumptions can be made by philosophers and this affects everthing (or a lot of) the remainder of their thought. Even if their thoughts are internally consistent beyond the point of the assumptions, the foundations may have serious holes. Thus, a philosopher may brilliantly answer a question that is the wrong question or, perhaps, an illigitimate question altogher. I believe that in this way, a relatively common thinker can sometimes evaluate the thought of a much more sophisticated thinker.

You are correct in another regard. There is not only one mistake of modernity. There are many mistakes and in varied categories. BUT . . . there are foundational mistakes. Descartes made one when he thought he could doubt himself to surety. When someone builds on (even with associated criticism and disagreement) the thoughts of another it is incumbent upon them to see if they are building on a false set of assumptions. My contention is that there are mistakes (at least one) that so many modern analytic philosophers make that has steered much of modern philosophy. Schools of thought are hard to deny and each of us are responsible not only for the mistakes generated within our own system, but for blindly following the mistakes of others.

In "The Battle for God" Giesler, House, & Herrera there is this paragraph "... contemporary philosopher Jerry Gill, . . . spoke of his colleagues as physicians who have the cleanest hands and the sharpest tools with which to operate. They lack only a body on which to operate. By and large analytic philosophy is a logic in search of a metaphysics. Nowhere is this failure of the logical method of analytic philosophy more apparent than in the brilliant, but largely metaphysics-less work of Alvin Plantiga.(p.271)" I would also recommend reading "The Unity of Philosophical Experience" by Etienne Gilson.

So, again, I ask - What is one of the significant errors in modern philosophy that has caused siesmic shifts in a wrong direction? Is there one, or more, commonalities that tend to be viewed by moderns as a given that, in fact, are fundamental errors?

Just probing...

[Gossioii9]

Excellent tips .I really appreciate all these points, and I agree completely…