One question on Tuesday was, "What do the discussions of the external world an the mind-body problem have to do with the current discussion of the Russell-Strawson debate?"
As I said, not much of anything. However on reflection I think this needs further elaboration because it has to do with how many analytic philosophers, including me, understand philosophy.
We don't see it as the business of developing "a philosophy" or coming up with a grand unified theory of everything. Philosophy is just a collection of puzzles. Some of the classic puzzles are: the problem of perception and the external world, the mind-body problem, the problem of what there is, and so on. There may be some connections between the solutions we adopt to these various puzzles (and we'll talk about that) but then again lots of these puzzles are just independent of one another.
In any case, as a matter of procedure, we're just looking at these puzzles independently, playing with them, assessing the arguments for various proposed solutions.
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