system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is the way of making philosophy based on "first principles" dead?

I read somewhere that Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" invalidated the pursuit of "first principles" from which truth could be determined and a system of philosophy could be constructed from. It is true? Are there philosophers still working in this way?
gpt
Systematic philosophy is alive and well, though it certainly is not as popular as in the early modern period.  Just for a few names, in the analytic tradition there is Mario Bunge, and in the continental tradition you have Alain Badiou.  Overall the continental traditions nowadays is much more amenable to systematic philosophy, in part because of authors like Quine and Russell in the analytic tradition arguing very forcefully against systematic philosophy.  In some of the early sorts of battlecries for the analytic tradition you see their response to systematic philosophy, for instance Russell addresses it in the last chapter of *A History of Western Philosophy*.  He describes a new vision for philosophy where we deal with individual problems instead of trying to solve everything all in one go.