Defining a philosophical paradigm

Ha, ha, ha! My original MPhil thesis was titled, "Towards an Empirical Theory of Ethics", an enormous project if ever I heard of one, and one where I had to content myself of necessity with simply exploring some of the many issues that such a project would face. I can now see that I am setting myself another almighty task, of moving towards a philosophical paradigm--but at least it keeps me off the streets...

Many philosophers seem to have high hopes about the capability of philosophy to progress in the way that science does. In any case, they find both science and mathematics to be inspiring models for philosophy. Yet we have already seen that in order to progress in this way, philosophy must be capable of generating a dominant paradigm for the branch in question that is to progress--hardly an easy task. Nevertheless, part of the problem may well be that philosophers have never tried to approach philosophy from the perspective of defining a philosophical paradigm.

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