Edouard Machery, “Philosophy Within Proper Bounds” (Oxford UP, 2017)
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What is the main focus of Edouard Machery’s new book?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. And I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Edouard Macheri, distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His new book, Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, is just out from Oxford University Press. There are five people on a track and a runaway trolley that will hit them, and you are on a footbridge over the track with a large person whose body can stop the trolley in its tracks.
Should you push the large person to his death to save the five on the track? Using hypothetical cases such as these and questions about them to elicit judgments is a prominent method of analytic philosophy to discover modal or necessary truths. Truths about what must be the case. The method is used to consider what action is right. Whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise or Whether knowledge requires something more than justified true belief Whether the mind must depend on the body, and so on. In his new book, Mashri draws on more than a decade of experimental philosophical and psychological research by himself and others to argue that the method of cases should be shelved. On his view, variations across study subjects by demographic factors such as age,
And by presentation effects, such as the order in which cases are presented, show that the results of the method are fundamentally unreliable, and that we should suspend judgment about their results. He recommends instead a reorientation of the mainstream analytical philosophical tradition. Rather than seeking modal truths, philosophers should limit themselves to modally modest questions, and they can engage in a modified psychological form of conceptual analysis in which we seek to understand what sets of automatic inferences individuals or groups tend to draw rather than seeking conceptually necessary truths. This is a very challenging book and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Hello Edouard Macheri, are you there?
Yes, I'm there. Hello Kerry, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine. How are you?
Very good.
Um well I'm I'm looking forward to our conversation about philosophy within its proper bounds, um which I take to be a your latest salvo in a way in in a or attempt to to reorient um the way a lot of analytic philosophy has been done um in the past over the past, you know, fifty years or so or a bit more.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Edouard Machery’s new book?
0:00–7:25
2
How does Machery define the “method of cases” used in analytic philosophy?
7:25–14:34
3
Why does Machery argue that judgments from philosophical cases are unreliable?
14:34–22:38
4
What evidence do demographic and presentation effects provide against the method of cases?
22:38–34:35
5
How does Machery justify suspending judgment about case‑based results?
34:35–45:41
6
What does “modal modesty” mean and why should philosophers adopt it?
45:41–52:34
7
How does Machery propose a revised, psychologically informed conceptual analysis?
52:34–1:01:09
8
What are Machery’s next research projects after this book?
1:01:09–1:03:50
Speakers
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