Quietism - Quietist Philosophers

Quietist Philosophers

Quietism is by its very nature not a philosophical school in the traditional sense of a body of doctrines, but can still be identified by its methodology, which is to focus on language and the use of words, and its objective, which is to show that most philosophical problems are only pseudo-problems.

The genesis of the approach can be traced back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work greatly influenced the Ordinary Language philosophers. One of the early Ordinary Language works was Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, an attempt to demonstrate that dualism arises from a failure to appreciate that mental vocabulary and physical vocabulary are simply different ways of describing one and the same thing, namely human behaviour. J L Austin's Sense and Sensibilia took a similar approach to the problems of scepticism and the reliability of sense perception, arguing that they arise only by misconstruing ordinary language, not because there is anything genuinely wrong with our empirical knowledge. Norman Malcolm, a friend of Wittgenstein's, took a quietist approach to sceptical problems in the philosophy of mind. More recently, two other philosophers to take an explicitly quietist position are John McDowell and Richard Rorty.