Some Problems of Philosophy, Empirically Considered

Some Problems of Philosophy, Empirically Considered is a book on philosophical methodology which owes a great deal to the work of Charles Peirce. It provides a clear description of a new philosophical paradigm, what its knowledge base is, and why the base should be completely accessible by the methods of observation used in philosophy. The method operates by out-flanking, rather than building on, the relevant efforts of those in the Anglo-American tradition. The book is a demonstration project aiming to show that the new method works by applying it to several topics in philosophy. These include the nature of philosophy itself and a variety of problems in epistemology, the nature of values, ethics, universals, free will, and others. Although the work is intended to be of scholarly interest, the problems are treated in ways that are simple and not very hard to understand for people with little or no prior acquaintance with philosophy. The simplicity of the work arises from its particular type of empiricism and from its outflanking strategy, which aims to show that a large body of material in philosophy was built up by and is an artifact of wrong methods.