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Philosophy and the Egocentric Perspective
Book chapter

Philosophy and the Egocentric Perspective

Richard Fumerton
Equilibrism in Metaphilosophy, pp.86-100
Routledge
2026
DOI: 10.4324/9781003512448-6

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Abstract

The apparent fact that philosophers disagree so much on fundamental philosophical issues presents the philosopher with a dilemma. Unless one has reason to believe that one is better positioned to arrive at philosophical truth than those with whom one disagrees, it seems that a "principle of indifference" should lead us to conclude that such philosophical positions are unlikely to be true. In this chapter, Fumerton considers the possibility that philosophers are often not addressing the same question, and that the disagreement in question is merely apparent. Should that be the case, we'll be able to regain confidence in many of our own philosophical conclusions but only at the expense of conceding that we are often not really engaging the philosophers with whom we argue. The author begins with relatively mundane examples of possible verbal disagreement but concludes with a more radical supposition about why such disagreement is always a possible source of apparent disagreement over conceptual analyses.

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