John Anderson, Inquirer and Critic: A Radical Interpretation of the Logical and Methodological Bases of His Philosophical Position

Abstract

This dissertation is not exegetical, but critical and reconstructive. It recognises serious difficulties within Anderson's core philosophical position and attempts to present a consistent account of his central doctrines, especially his view of empiricism, based on some of his fundamental views, while rejecting others. It argues that Anderson was wrong in his identification of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism: in his assumption that this opposition centres on the metaphysical or ontological issues of being and truth. It argues that rationalism is founded in theological assumptions, but particularly in the notion of soul or mind. The main thesis being argued for in this dissertation is that Anderson's core philosophical position is not metaphysical but is founded in an overt method of inquiry: effectively Socratic dialectic, which makes no assumptions, does not depend upon the notions of mind, forms, ideas, concepts, etc.; which method is empiricism, and so empiricism is not a doctrine. It is argued that the rationalist notion of mind has influenced the conceptions of philosophical method, logic, science, and scientific method to their great detriment. Accordingly, Anderson's central and distinctive doctrines -- his empiricism (doctrine of one way of being), realism, pluralism, determination, his many claims about "things", his criticisms of relativism and his quest for a theory of categories -- are interpreted here in a non-metaphysical way, as methodological principles of dialectic, while the notion of mind and all its associated paraphernalia are totally rejected.