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Concept
Philosophical methodology
Summary
In its most common sense, philosophical methodology is the field of inquiry studying the methods used to do philosophy. But the term can also refer to the methods themselves. It may be understood in a wide sense as the general study of principles used for theory selection, or in a more narrow sense as the study of ways of conducting one's research and theorizing with the goal of acquiring philosophical knowledge. Philosophical methodology investigates both descriptive issues, such as which methods actually have been used by philosophers, and normative issues, such as which methods should be used or how to do good philosophy.
A great variety of philosophical methods have been employed. Methodological skepticism uses systematic doubt in its search for absolutely certain or indubitable first principles of philosophy. The geometrical method starts with a small set of such principles and tries to build a comprehensive philosophical system on this small foundation based on deductive inferences. The phenomenological method aims to arrive at certain knowledge about the realm of appearances by suspending one's judgments about the external world underlying these appearances. Verificationists focus on the conditions of empirical verification of philosophical claims in order to understand their meaning and to expose meaningless claims. Conceptual analysis is used to analyze philosophical concepts by determining their fundamental constituents with the goal of clarifying their meaning. Common-sense philosophy uses commonly accepted beliefs as its starting point for philosophizing. It is often used in a negative sense to criticize radical philosophical positions that constitute a significant departure from common sense. It is closely related to ordinary language philosophy, which approaches philosophical problems by studying how the related terms are used in ordinary language. Intuition-based methods use intuitions, i.e. non-inferential impressions concerning specific cases or general principles, to evaluate whether a philosophical claim is true or false.
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