Professor P. M. S. Hacker
PMS Hacker, or Peter to his friends, is a born Londoner who went to read Philosophy at Oxford, studying as a graduate under H. L. A. Hart - the hugely influential legal philosopher. After years of hard graft, he is now an Emeritus Research Professor at St. John's College, Oxford, with world renown too boot. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, where he takes an uncompromising Wittgenstinian stance. For those of you interested in the hopes for a philosophy-phychology alliance, Hacker is also well known as an outspoken critic of neuroscience-based philosophy.
(And we're very glad to have him)
An excerpt from his paper:
"Wittgenstein is sometimes criticized for being a philosophical quietist. Nothing could be further from the truth. For he gave philosophy a license to criticize scientists. He showed, for the first time, why philosophy has a right to interfere with empirical sciences – for its role is as a conceptual critic. Philosophy is a tribunal of sense, before which erring scientists can be arraigned for transgressing the bounds of sense. They can be arraigned, not by criticizing them for deviating from ordinary usage – which deviations may be wholly innocuous – but for invoking ordinary usage and then misusing the terms invoked, through misunderstanding and conceptual confusion. Philosophy is no policeman, but an impartial judge. Scientists must be condemned out of their own mouth – by demonstrating the incoherence of their assertions. It is not the task of philosophy to sing the Hallelujah chorus to science or to police its pronouncement. It is rather to identify conceptual confusions that are rife in science, and to eradicate the scientific myth-making that is endemic in the culture in which we all live today."
Philosophical Views (pulled from Wikipedia)
Peter Hacker is one of the most powerful contemporary exponents of the linguistic-therapeutic approach to philosophy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this approach, the words and concepts used by the language community are taken as given, and the role of philosophy is to resolve or dissolve philosophical problems by giving an overview of the uses of these words and the structural relationships between these concepts. Philosophical inquiry is therefore very different from scientific inquiry, and Hacker maintains accordingly that there is a sharp dividing line between the two: "Philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge, but to human understanding" (quoted from "An Orrery of Intentionality"). This has led him into direct disagreement with "neuro-philosophers": neuroscientists or philosophers such as Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett who think that neuroscience can shed light on philosophical questions such as the nature of consciousness or the mind-body problem. Hacker maintains that these, like all philosophical problems, are not real problems at all, but mirages arising from conceptual confusion. It follows that scientific inquiry (learning more facts about humans or the world) does not help to resolve them. His 2003 book "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", co-authored with neuroscientist M. Bennett, contains an exposition of these views, and critiques of the ideas of many contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers, including Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and others.
Hacker in general finds many received components of current philosophy of mind to be incoherent. He rejects mind-brain identity theories, as well as functionalism, eliminativism and other forms of reductionism. He advocates methodological pluralism, denying that standard explanations of human conduct are causal, and insisting on the irreducibility of explanation in terms of reasons and goals. He denies that psychological attributes can be intelligibly ascribed to the brain, insisting that they are ascribable only to the human being as a whole. He has endeavoured to show that the puzzles and 'mysteries' of consciousness dissolve under careful analysis of the various forms of intransitive and transitive consciousness, and that so-called 'qualia' are no more than a philosopher's fiction.