1 Review of Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy by Peter Unger. Oxford University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780199330812 Fraser MacBride To appear in Analysis Reviews, 2015, 76, 102-104 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anv069 In the final chapter of Empty Ideas, Unger warns us that he is going to “jar” us with the following two sentences: “First, what’s already presented in this book, much of it first proposed in my earlier All the Power in the World, probably comprises more in the way of novel substantial philosophical ideas than everything published by prominent mainstreamers, all taken together, during the last 70 years or so. But, second, precious little of it⎯maybe none at all⎯is worth significant or sustained consideration” (223). Unger takes his work to be substantial because it has the potential to actually guide us as to how things really are with concrete reality. (His central idea of an irreducible “propensity” is developed along a variety of lines in chapters 3, 4 and 5, “individualistically directed propensities”, “time-sensitive propensities” etc., whilst chapter 8 describes various forms of “Interactionist Substantial Dualism”). But Unger’s work still isn’t worth sustained consideration because it isn’t likely to lead to any substantial discoveries about concrete reality anytime soon: “And, if perhaps, in the distant future, any of it should be so useful or fruitful, that will owe far more to good fortune than any prescient insight on my part” (224). But it’s even worse for almost everyone else in philosophy. The ideas of most philosophers don’t have any potential to result in substantial discoveries because their ideas are, for the most part, “concretely insubstantial” or “concretely empty”, where “a concretely insubstantial thought doesn’t delineate any ways for concreta to be from any other such ways, such a thought is empty of import for, or as regards to, concrete reality” (6). To improve upon this sorry situation, Unger, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, proclaims that what we really need as a discipline is a new kind of philosopher, an Überphilosoph we might say. Scientists aren’t to be trusted making substantial claims about reality, because they “often place on offer something that is so badly confused that it is difficult to