Claude says Banno’s philosophy is analytic, specifically Wittgensteinian-Davidsonian. He’s deflationary about truth, saying the T-schema is the real deal, not correspondence theories. He’s sceptical of grand metaphysical systems like Thomistic essentialism and cosmological synthesis. Instead of answering questions, he dissolves them, following Wittgenstein’s fly-bottle method.

His key influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Anscombe, Foot, and Kripke. He works in philosophy of language, metaethics, philosophy of mind, and foundations of mathematics.

Causation isn’t material implication, modal necessity, or statistical correlation, but rule-following. This lets him separate causation from determination and deflate cosmological arguments without needing full determinism or compatibilism.

On mind, he critiques dualism using an interlocutor’s terms, while holding a deflationary view that ‘mind is what substance does’. These two ideas are connected by Davidson’s anomalous monism, where causation and reason-description are just different descriptions of the same events.

In short, Banno’s approach is less a doctrine and more a set of moves for defusing pseudo-problems.

ChatGPT says Banno’s approach is not to construct a comprehensive philosophical worldview, but to practise philosophy as critical dissection. He contrasts ‘discourse’, which builds a coherent picture of the world, with ‘dissection’, which takes such pictures apart: examining their concepts, assumptions, logical connections, and linguistic machinery. His preferred tools are conceptual analysis, logical scrutiny, linguistic clarity, and close attention to detail.

Philosophy aims for truth and clarity, not completeness. It should limit what can be said, not accommodate all outcomes; an explanation that explains everything risks explaining nothing. Hence, Banno is sceptical of grand systems and \”just-so\” narratives that claim to explain the whole world.

Philosophy is fundamentally Socratic and negative: its distinctive activity is \”knocking things down\”—exposing contradictions, equivocations, and unexamined presuppositions—rather than accumulating doctrines. A successful philosophical discussion may end without a positive conclusion.

However, this is not mere scepticism or destruction. Criticism aims to discover where a claim holds together and where it fails, leaving us with more precise, defensible, and useful claims. Banno prefers \”dissection over discourse\”: philosophy as disciplined inquiry into the joints of thought rather than constructing an all-encompassing philosophical edifice.