Lecture XXI

pp. 183-190

in: Leonard Nelson, A theory of philosophical fallacies, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

Intuitive (or intuitionist) philosophers seem so different from, indeed opposed to, logicists that it is easy to think the mistakes in their arguments would be equally different. In fact, intuitive philosophers (like Max Scheler and other "phenomenologists") seem not to argue at all but just to communicate their visions to the world. A careful analysis, however, shows that they do argue and in their (mostly implicit) arguments fall into the exact same concept-swapping fallacy by which synthetic judgments (about the "essences' and "values' they are able to apprehend directly) are unconsciously derived from analytic ones.