Mainstream Analytic Philosophy, The Method of Cases and Tacit Presup-positions. A Metaphilosophical Evaluation through the Lens of Heideggerian Hermeneutics

Abstract

Analytic philosophy possesses a dominance in academia that has forced phenomenology into retreat. Part of this dominance is justified by the claim that analytic methods exhibit more clarity than those of phenomenology. This paper is an attempt to challenge this claim on metaphilosophical grounds. I argue that versions of analytic philosophy that rely on the method of cases rest on philosophically non-innocent presuppositions and that analytic philosophy does not possess methods to identify these presuppositions or justify them easily against the backdrop of description or coherence within a system. I demonstrate these points by comparing the metaphilosophical frameworks developed by Williamson, Cappelen and Deutsch with the metaphilosophical framework developed by Heidegger, that does not possess the same metaphilosophical shortcomings which its analytic competitors exhibit. Concretely, phenomenological metaphilosophical frameworks that also include hermeneutics in the sense of a genealogical presupposition analysis, possess more clarity than analytic frameworks that obscure presupposition dependencies.