Burton Dreben - Philosophical Thought

Philosophical Thought

From 1978 onwards, Dreben gave a series of lectures at Harvard which had as their primary topics the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine. Dreben took from Wittgenstein the lesson that philosophers always went wrong when they tried to provide general accounts of reality, epistemology, or metaphysics. He was in agreement with Wittgenstein's later view that philosophical problems mostly arise when language goes on holiday. Dreben took the history of philosophy as itself a proof of Wittgenstein's thesis that much philosophizing is nonsense; Dreben attempted to show how the history of philosophy is a history of people talking past one another.

Dreben interpreted Quine as attempting to show that philosophy does not provide the foundations of science. According to Dreben's interpretation of Quine, philosophy at its best merely answers a number of general questions from within science itself. However, Dreben saw even in Quine a tendency to generalize most successfully resisted by the later Wittgenstein, whose unflagging alertness to specifics Dreben took as a model.