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The Name
The word “metaphilosophy” and the disputes over it belong to Western philosophy, from the twentieth century on.
The word and its dispute
Morris Lazerowitz claimed to have coined the English word in 1940, though equivalents in other languages are older, and defined it (1970) as “the investigation of the nature of philosophy”. The name itself is disputed, over what the “meta” means:
- The philosophy of philosophy. On the first-order reading, applying philosophy to itself is simply more philosophy (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §121; Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, 2007). On the second-order reading, metaphilosophy stands to philosophy as philosophy stands to its subject matter (Nicholas Rescher, 2006). Williamson prefers his title to “metaphilosophy” because the word suggests looking “down upon philosophy from above, or beyond”.
- After philosophy. “Meta” can also mean after, and metaphilosophy then means post-philosophy. Lazerowitz sometimes used it for the inquiry Wittgenstein had described as one of the “heirs” of philosophy; some French philosophers used it with reference to Heidegger or Marx. The IEP treats post-philosophy as one position within metaphilosophy rather than its definition.
Explicit metaphilosophy
In the IEP’s account, explicit metaphilosophy, pursued as a field of its own, is small: even when it waxes, it “generates much less activity than philosophy”, and book-length works on it are “not the rule but the exception”. It names three: Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy, Rescher’s Essay on Metaphilosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?. It counts as probable causes of the field’s growth in the early twenty-first century analytic philosophy’s growing awareness of itself as a tradition, the rise of more empirical philosophising, and a softening of the analytic–continental divide.
Other names
- What is philosophy? — the question as a title, from Windelband (1884) to Ortega, Heidegger, and Deleuze and Guattari; see The nineteenth century, Continental philosophy and Philosophy and the special sciences.
- Post-philosophy — metaphilosophy read as what comes after philosophy; see The end of philosophy.
- Philosophy as a way of life — Hadot’s phrase for his reading of ancient philosophy, and the title of the English collection of his essays; see Continental philosophy.