The Poverty of Contemporary Philosophy

Every time I make the mistake of reading a work of analytic philosophy, I become both disgusted and elated; disgusted at what passes for philosophy right now, and elated that I am not enrolled in a philosophy program at the University level. Philosophy there has been largely reduced to conceptual and linguistic analysis; that is, the task of the philosopher is no longer seen as understanding the world and our interaction with it. It is taken to be a "second-order" discipline whose central task is to clarify and explicate the concepts and language used by "first-order" disciplines such, popularly, science. This assumption is so accepted among analytic philosophers that Jay F. Rosenberg, in his The Practice of Philosophy: Handbook for Beginners, is able to make this statement without so much as a qualification.

The history of analytic philosophy extends back more than 100 years, with the relevant beginning in theMoore-Russell-Wittgenstein trinity. These three advocated an approach to philosophy based in common sense, rigorous logic, and language, respectively. These techniques were viewed by them as means to an end: tools by which the philosopher may more acutely carry out his tasks.

Over time, these ideas were seized upon by third-rate philosophers undeserving of the title. While ostensibly utilizing the tools created by and paying homage to the three philosophers mentioned above, they created systems of thought which viewed the analysis of concepts and language as an end in themselves. First, with Logical Positivism, which saw the task of philosophy as differentiating between meaningful and meaningless propositions by setting every statement against a scientific standard, and later with Linguistic Analysis and all of her bastard children, which saw philosophy as being "talk about talk," with its highest task, according to one of the guiding lights of the movement, J.L. Austin, being the elucidation and dissection of ordinary-language speech acts, determining the fine distinction between, for instance, a "tool" and an "implement", and the implications of that distinction. Gilbert Ryle, a major figure of that period, had the audacity to call this the "whole and sole function of philosophy."

By their estimation, all so-called philosophical problems arose out of confusion over the language involved. Once that was cleared up, they maintained, the problems simply vanished. So there was no first-order task for philosophy to carry out, no questions of its own to answer. Instead, they should take their methods and turn them loose on other fields.

This view of philosophy has certainly changed somewhat, but the central premises under which it flourished have not, by my estimation, been abandoned. The modern philosopher understands a number of things to be basically true: that the sciences have taken the task of learning about the universe farther than any philosopher could, and what's more, it has taken over the field of epistemology with cognitive science, and so these fields are no longer accessible to the philosopher in the traditional way; that ethics and aesthetics are basically metaphysics and therefore propositions about these things are logically meaningless; that philosophers are in the business of analysis, not of theory or system building; and, though this is not often clearly stated, that while historical figures like Kant are interesting and had a lot to say, they were basically wrong about their whole approach to philosophy, and really, when you think about it, were not truly philosophers at all.

This analysis (ha, ha) of analytic philosophy is probably uncharitable and partially misinformed. I am speaking as an outsider; but I am a happy outsider, because I am not convinced that the serious philosophical problems that pervade our lives--problems of time and space, of perception and of human knowledge--are simply linguistic confusions, or that (as was often said) any problem that butted heads with common sense is simply not a problem at all, or at any rate not one worth addressing. Analytic philosophy is the worst sort of self-conscious intellectualism, and I'm glad to have no part in it.