Abstract

There is, in my view, a striking combination in Édouard Machery’s Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds of philosophical modesty and philosophical presumptiveness. Its call upon philosophers to give up their ambitious pursuits of metaphysical necessities, or essences, and to content themselves instead with the elucidation or analysis of our concepts, is made from within a pre-Kantian framework that takes the world expressed in human discourse and captured in our concepts to be a world as it is in itself, altogether independent of how it comes into view in our discursive practices. And this, I will propose, means that Machery’s critique of much of the work that has been carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy in the last few decades, as well as his proposal for philosophical reform, end up partaking in what has been most fundamentally problematic about that work.