Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds

In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors. We cannot know whether dualism is true, whether pain is identical to some complicated neural state, what knowledge really is, or what makes an action morally permissible. The good news is that there are important issues and philosophical projects in the neighborhood of most of the dismissed philosophical issues, and these are within our epistemic reach, including a once-central intellectual endeavor: the analysis of concepts.