Three metaphilosophies

We have proposed three metaphilosophies.  Phenomenological metaphilosophy involves understanding the timeless and universal principles of the phenomenological method and program which are found across a great variety of different philosophical systems, times and places.  Formal metaphilosophy takes a highly skeptical view of common philosophical practice with a focus on the logical and linguistic aspects and proposes a methodology based on axiomatic-deductive systems and rigorous definition of all concepts involved in all philosophical arguments and debates. Critical metaphilosophy (inspired by Frege, the early Husserl, Gödel, Gellner (backed by Russell), Mundle, Preston, Findlay, A. Wierzbicka, J. Fodor, C. Ortiz Hill, Rosado Haddock and Unger, John W. Cook and also some considerations of Marcuse) questions the value of much of 20th and 21st century philosophy from a predominantly logical and linguistic point of view as well paying great attention to presupposed or insinuated materialist hypotheses found therein (Preston and Unger should have engaged in exhibiting substantial textual evidence for  'scientiphicalism').  Every accusation is a confession and if linguistic philosophy/ordinary language philosophy is patently bad philosophy, the kind of condemnations it engaged in towards previous philosophy prophetically turned out to apply remarkable well to itself. And indeed this linguistic philosophy never ceased to be an underlying powerful force until today despite its various disguises and apparently sanitized versions, including analytic metaphysics. A true scientific linguistics deployed in a critical metaphilosophical way  is what is called for - the study of the psychology, sociology and linguistics of professional philosophy/sophistry. Even in non-orthodox philosophers in this tradition (Robert Hanna, George Bealer)  we find a strong presence of many of its assumptions and rhetorical-argumentative patterns.

We do not loose sight of the hard problems and limitations involved both in phenomenological and formal metaphilosophy.  

Why use the term phenomenology rather than psychology or introspective psychology.  For the greatest of problems involves what is most primordially given. And how can truth be found or based on anything but this ? The goal of philosophy is to see fully, to know fully, it is self-transparency and liberation.  Locke, Berkeley and Hume dealt with the deepest and most fundamental, most fertile of all questions. They looked in the right direction and had the right perspective. The great question: what is a concept ? Without concepts there is no logic, no language, no reason, no knowledge.  Can we admit knowledge without any conceptuality ? Or mind without conceptuality ? Certainly ordinary knowledge involves concepts. Even asking about knowledge and truth, are we not asking about concepts ? Is not truth a concept ? Is not knowledge a concept ? And do we have a concept of a concept even it is an unclear, vague, definition-lacking concept ?

And what about ethics, specially an ethics based on compassion ? Schopenhauer, as we mentioned before, offers us a purely phenomenological ethics based on compassion which thus would appear to have a non-conceptual anchor.

If philosophy is foremost a quest for individual clarity and knowledge regarding one's own consciousness, how can we express the truth we find to others ?  How can we argue, how can we persuade ? What are the rules which must govern or direct this argument or persuasion ? There are no arguments without concepts. If we do not know what a concept is, we do not know what an argument is. We have a concept of concept yet this concept is not an adequate concept. We can know things and yet not know how to define them. Sentences express concepts (they can be nominalized) just as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc.  And concepts are not vague. It is difficult to find two different words (from hundreds of thousands) which have exactly the same meaning. If meaning boundaries were fluid we would not expect this to happen.

Without concepts there is no language. It is erroneous and foolish to go about theories of language and profess to talk about the mind without first venturing into the vast realm of the philosophy of concepts. 

Our stream of consciousness is not a stream of sensations or recollected images of simple sensations but includes a stream of concepts (in-consciousness concepts, not Fregean concepts obviously).

As a temporary remedy for this state of affairs we propose formal philosophy, carrying out philosophical arguments in an entirely mathematical fashion.

Husserl's Logical Investigations is a great textbook in philosophy, a kind of summa of the best psychological introspective, logical, linguistic and ontological work of the 19th and 18th centuries.  Likewise Frege is a model of clarity and elegance - regardless of one's views.

The danger of philosophical introspective (and transformative) psychology is turning into mere psychotherapy or psychoanalysis or becoming uncritically influenced by occultism and religion. Equally harmful is naturalism and neuro-reductionism and behaviorism and the dogmas of 'linguistic philosophy' or 'ordinary language philosophy'. Speech acts and language games are still abstracted, isolated, analyzed and understood conceptually.

The dilemma here seems to be between staying safely at the periphery or venturing to where lurks the great danger of religion, occultism and cults.  Philosophy is indeed a psychotherapy which aims heroically to overcome the deep ingrained conditioning of religion and materialism alike (cf. Gödel's statement: religion for the masses, materialism for the intellectuals). There are no royal roads or shortcuts in philosophy.  See this essay by Tragasser and van Atten on Gödel, Brouwer and the Common Core thesis. Gödel's theory, as recounted by the authors, is of utmost significance. Gödel was promoting the restoration of the authentic meaning of Plato's dialectics and the role of mathematics expounded in the Republic and other texts.  Perhaps Gödel has pointed out the best path (at once philosophical and self-developmental) (for so called "Western man" ) which avoids the double pitfall of materialism and religion/psychotherapy/occultism. In the 21st century (inheriting from the 20th century) we are inundated by the cult of the irrational, by anti-rationalism in every conceivable and subtle and insidious form. The "rational" is only allowed to thrive in its most miserable, limited and adulterated form, harnessed and enslaved to the lowest materialistic/technological/economical/military goals.  And the technological and economical goals here do not even aim at the common good and equal and fair distribution of the earth's resources.

And here is what is remarkable about the Platonic-Gödelian method: the confluence between pure mathematical thought and introspective transformative philosophical psychology.  But this project can be discerned in Husserl's Logical Investigations and Claire Ortiz Hill has written extensively about the objective, formal and logicãl aspect of this work, in particular the important connection to Hilbert's lesser known philosophical thought.  However the psychological and phenomenological aspect is just as important, just not in the way of the later Husserl, rather in the Platonic-Gödelian and transformative philosophical psychological way.

The epokhê as Husserl outlined is not possible (and even less is the Heidegger alternative valid), rather such a clarity and 'transcendental experience'  is possible through the Platonic-Gödelian method. 

For a good summary of the role of mathematics in Plato see Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol.1, Ch. IX.