I've hinted at this in other threads, so I thought I'd start up a thread just on this idea: Big Philosophy is Dead. I'm referring to the types of philosophy that we all know and love and studied in college, like metaphysics, philosophy of mind, etc. i.e. all the big questions. My thought is this: we are limited beings, with a certain set of concepts available to us. We have no way of knowing whether or not that set of concepts is enough to answer the big questions. Therefore we should just stop with the big questions, and focus on the here and now and applying what we can to more manageable questions like ethics, etc. (And yes, I do see the irony in posing a 'big question' arguing against big questions. I guess it's self-referential.) The reason I think this is my fish tank. I look at my tropical fish and their world, and think, maybe there's a really smart fish in the tank thinking about who fish are, how'd they get there etc. There's no possible way for that fish to think about cosmology, quantum physics, etc. etc. his set of concepts is very limited. And then I think, how are we different from the fish? We aren't. It's a matter of degree, not kind, as far as concepts go.
You ask: how are we different from the fish? But what if you ask: how are the fish different from us? And not just the fish, but
all other beings? We can postulate that they aren't essentially different; we're all limited beings, regardless of whether we live in a tank or in a pond or in an ocean.
But this is itself a metaphysical postulate! And, as Laurence Lampert puts it, "it has an arguable and plausible superiority as an interpretation, and it is able as well to account for both the world of concern to us and the world in itself." (Lampert,
Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 43.) Big philosophy is not dead; only dogmatic philosophy is. And in fact, actual philosophy was never dogmatic, never considered itself wisdom; that was just Platonic
political philosophy, the Platonic politics for philosophy. That politics is now no longer viable, and therefore philosophy must adopt a
new politics: coming out into the open as what it is, "the passion to understand the whole rationally, the love of wisdom that is, Socrates indicated in the
Symposium, the highest eros of a whole that can be understood as eros and nothing besides." (Lampert,
How Philosophy Became Socratic, page 13.)