Grice on Practical Use of Philosophy

But I doubt if any of the other tasks which I would like to see the philosophers fulfill will be enough to satisfy some people who raise this objection. They want philosophy to be grand, to yield one important, nonempirical information which will help one to solve either the world's problems or one's personal problems, or both. To them I feel inclined to reply in the end: “You are crying for the moon; philosophy has never really fulfilled this task, though it may sometimes have appeared to do so (and the practical consequences of its appearing to do so have not always been very agreeable). It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events.”
Paul Grice (1958) Postwar Oxford Philosophy
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Grice on Conceptual Analysis and Mystification

Many of the great philos­ophers’ questions can be interpreted as requests for a conceptual anal­ysis (not necessarily in full with the greatest precision). No doubt the great philosophers themselves did not recognize the possibility of this kind of interpretation (how could they have?), but the link between contemporary discussion and their work is sufficiently close to pro­ vide some justification for the continued use of the term “philoso­phy.” Moreover, it seems to me that many of the questions and puz­zles raised by the great philosophers are capable of really clear and detailed and rigorous treatment after reinterpretation of this kind. If I have to choose between reinterpretation and continued mystification, I choose reinterpretation.
Paul Grice (1958) Postwar Oxford Philosophy 
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Foot on why she wrote psychologism at the beggining

I wrote it because I knew that I needed to attack that preconception in order to get so much as a hearing for the thought that there is no change in the meaning of 'good' between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will’.
Foot, 2001, Natural Goodness
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