Contemporary philosophy owes a lot to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took the Linguistic Turn around another bend, towards Anthropology, a discipline that’s self critical and introspective, yet always cultivates awareness of other cultures, a practice academic philosophy had hitherto neglected.
LW was impatient with all the ethnocentrism he encountered among the snobbish Oxbridge Brits, still high on their imperial ego trip, not unlike the Manifest Destiny cohorts in the United States.
In anthropology-minded philosophy, we’re allowed to posit tribes, not just wait for a first encounter, and for thought experiment purposes, we might endow these posited tribes with alternative forms of life than we have, obviously — what it means to be another tribe.
However, likewise in the realm of thought experiment, or call it science fiction (speculative in nature), we might posit ETs (extraterrestrials) as well, as Robert Heinlein pioneered in his Stranger in a Strange Land.
These experimental worlds, we might call them, are not new in literature obviously. We have Flatland, Wonderland, Narnia, Middle Earth, Oz and so on, plus the utopian and dystopian brave new worlds extrapolating from our world now.
What a philosopher does is isolate specific language games within these parallel imaginary…
