The Paradox of Analytic Philosophy’s Success
“The paradox is that the more analytic philosophy became dominant in the universities, the more it became removed from the concerns of the average person with philosophical interests.”
And “it has had little impact on the general culture and on other parts of the academy.”
[Josef Albers, “Structural Composition”]
Crane’s conception of analytic philosophy is somewhat historical (a la Bill Blattner; see this, too) and externalist—what he calls a “deflationary” account of it. Correspondingly, the story of its “institutional success,” he says, “must be largely historical, rather than philosophical.” But it’s not entirely deflationary, for those historical and contingent forces contributed to “the way analytic philosophy has developed its own distinctive way of thinking” and its “institutional success.”
Crane thinks that overcoming analytic philosophy’s cultural isolation must involve analytic philosophers recognizing that they’ve been a part of—and hence influenced by—the broader culture all along, including broader conceptions of philosophy:
If philosophers are to seriously address the hostility and incomprehension that they encounter, they need to start with a plausible account of their own intellectual discipline. They may tell themselves that philosophy is a technical subject-matter, with its own techniques and high standards, and in a way this is correct. But they also need to tell a story about how philosophy in this sense relates to many other things that the world has counted as philosophy.
Schuringa’s book, Crane says, is one such story, “a serious attempt to understand why analytic philosophy confronts certain problems and questions and ignores others—where these questions come from and which contingent intellectual circumstances led to those becoming the dominant questions.”
Analytic philosophers need to do more of this kind of work, Crane thinks, in part because it will help them better understand their own tradition, which is crucial for them getting others to see the value in their type of philosophy:
[I]f analytic philosophers were to reflect in a more disinterested, less defensive way about their tradition, it could help them understand why philosophers of other traditions find it so obscure, and why those outside philosophy can find it so pointless…
To convey to those on the outside why these questions [that analytic philosophers take up] matter, though, is no easy task. Analytic philosophers would need to develop both a historical sense and a better way of talking to those whom they see as “non-professionals”… [A]nalytic philosophers… have not done a good job of explaining to their critics the importance or interest of the particular problems that preoccupy them. It would be a first step in improving this situation if they could first explain these things to themselves.
This is an interesting conjecture, and I’m curious whether it is true. Will historicizing analytic philosophy actually lead critics and the disinterested to see its “importance or interest”? Are there examples of that happening?
One might think that such historicization would tend to have the opposite effect, that it would undercut the perceived value of analytic philosophy’s inquiries by emphasizing the arational influences on its choice of methods and subjects. Indeed, that externalist histories of analytic philosophy can be intellectually humbling for the discipline is one reason to encourage more of them.
Perhaps the history of philosophy can provide useful perspective here. We tend not to think less of the greats of the history of philosophy now that scholars have pointed out to us all of the social, political, institutional, and personal contingencies that played a role in them thinking about and writing what they did.
Analytic philosophers might nonetheless balk. We tend to understand our work in terms of justification, not causation. But perhaps this, too, is a prejudice, ingrained in us by various contingencies.
After all, the genetic fallacy is a fallacy no matter what led us to believe so.
I honestly do not understand why anyone in 2025 would continue to identify as an analytic philosopher, or (what is worse) a continental philosopher, or whatever. These are not significant boundaries but are rather categories leftover from our teachers’ teachers. Nor do I understand why anyone finds the impetus behind Christoph’s book – its details are another matter and like all books may become a subject for dispute – to be offensive. To me the joke is on anyone who felt even the slightest pang of offense, and they prove themselves (in my I suppose not so humble opinion) to be unserious as scholars.
Even worse would be to take the time to author defenses of anything as ephemeral as ‘analytic philosophy’. Let these things die and move on to better days, to better ideas and arguments and books.
My apologies for being dismissive, but everything I see in “the discipline” as such is such a disappointment, especially as there’s so much to learn and so much to study in this world.
I’m not sure what it means to “identify as an analytic philosopher”–I don’t think I’ve ever said “I’m an analytic philosopher”–but I do work in the analytic tradition and (in my I suppose not so humble opinion) I think that only an unserious scholar could think that there weren’t significant differences between the analytic and continental traditions. That doesn’t mean that there’s not significant overlap between the traditions, vagueness in their boundaries, etc. But there *are* significant differences between them. Perhaps these differences aren’t very deep, perhaps they should be overcome, but they’re *there*, and they’re practically important in a whole host of ways that it would be foolish to ignore.
Thanks to JDRox and Bilingual (below) for making good points. To JDRox I would only appeal to an element of Justin’s framing in the OP: a social history of any academic movement might reveal all sorts of unseemly facts about the people involved, the circumstances of their rise to institutional prominence, etc. Now imagine that a very compelling and accurate social history of analytic philosophy appeared in print, and the results were very bad as far as the anglophone philosophers of the mid-twentieth century are concerned. What would be the implications for JDRox’s work, granted that such work is meaningfully describable as “in the analytic tradition”? My assumption is that there would be no implications at all. That you’d be fine and it would remain perfectly good for you to continue studying whatever particular subjects you study. Is the integrity of your work is somehow tied to the integrity of the mainstream anglophone institutions of 75 years ago? My worry is that people *feel* as if their work is, but that they might as well liberate themselves from that sense of tradition.
To Bilingual: my undergraduate teachers 30 years ago identified as continental philosophers, and portrayed analytic philosophers as members of some kind of evil empire. Moreover, they took pretty much all anglophone philosophers not in their clique for analytic philosophers. The latter expression was just shorthand for ‘mainstream anglophone philosophy’. Meanwhile they were engaged in what I took to be a kind of larping (we did not have this expression then), acting like they were French (in most cases) or German (in a few). So to me it seemed less innocent than just being a regular member of the mainstream. I agree that what you call purists do not understand each other. But I find it regrettable that anyone younger than I am would be such a purist, because there is too much opportunity to learn what other people are talking about. You can read analytic philosophy and find conversation partners more familiar with the tradition. They might sound mysterious to the purist, as they did to me in grad school. But after a few years you get the hang of it. To me a purist, in the sense you highlight, is just someone who hasn’t yet taken much trouble to understand things that thousands of others are doing their best to explain.
Indeed, my understanding is that the so-called analytic/continental divide thirty years ago tended to be a great deal more acrimonious than it is today. And I actually agree with you that it’s somewhat risible for anglophone scholars (skilled though they may be in their languages) to call themselves ‘continental philosophers’ rather than ‘scholars of continental philosophy’ or some such. Nevertheless, I’d protest that there really are such things as continental philosophers; they simply live(d) and train(ed) on the continent!
As to the clique-ishness of yesteryear’s continental studiers, I might try to contextualize (though not excuse) their behavior by noting that there was back then (and in some instances still is) a concerted effort to fill the best academic positions with scholars trained in a certain kind of recognizably analytic methodology (this has been brought up elsewhere in this thread, incidentally). This created, and still creates to some degree, a sense among continental studiers of being constantly embattled, besieged by a stronger and more numerous faction which disdains them and their work. A somewhat fanciful notion, to be sure, and of course the ‘evil empire’ is not so homogeneous as all that, but I do believe there was/is a kernel of truth to this idea.
I agree, Bilingual, that there is a degree of truth to the idea you’re sketching. It’s an unenviable situation when you’re on the losing end of the particular institutional dynamics. And the assimilationist imperative – ok so just draw ideas loosely from continental figures but present them in an overstylized analytic-sounding way – gets repeated for all sorts of smaller collections of philosophers. In light of that I make the assimilation sound too natural above.
Why exactly is identifying as a continental philosopher worse?
Similarly to JDRox, while I have never once called or thought of myself as “a continental philosopher”, I do work on distinctively continental figures, and I belong to a program which actively advertises itself as a ‘continental-centric’ one. Inevitably, this means (whether through textual necessity or simply through cultural transmission) that I’ll absorb a slightly different methodology from that employed and passed down at, say, UCLA or UT Austin. Sure, maybe you think these differences are shallow or superable in principle, but it does seem wrong to simply denounce them as entirely irrelevant. I’ve watched purists from both sides (and these are not elderly scholars, mind you) try to understand one another, and I’ll testify to the fact that unless both are willing to step outside of their proverbial comfort zone, the dialogue goes precisely nowhere.
I don’t understand these types of complaints. “Applied ethics” and “practical ethics” are largely “analytic” enterprises, as are many forms of “applied” philosophy. And all that’s about as high impact on the broader as anyone gets in philosophy.
Well I am not sure.
I once taught business ethics, and I assigned Zwolinski’s 2007 classic paper on the ethics of sweatshop labour. Some of the students then told me they had an entire class on that topic (taught by a geography professor I think) which did not contain a single “applied ethics” style reading. The teacher apparently just assumed sweatshops are wrong and then assigned various “critical geography” style works on how economic exploitation interacts with neoliberalism and stuff like that.
I also worked in various interdisciplinary centres with various projects in applied economic ethics, and I noticed that most people were really puzzled by what it was I was doing. One point of tension was that many of my colleagues were clearly upset I would use hypotheticals or ‘philosophise’ about other people’s life as it were. Overall, I noticed a worryingly genuine incomprehension of what philosophy is as an intellectual enterprise and what its methods are.
In studying that history, one inevitably encounters Philosophical Investigations and finds a trenchant diagnosis of analytic philosophy’s distance from ordinary concerns. So if the historicizing alluded to here includes that, I agree it would be quite useful. 😉
Here is a hot take: Analytical philosophy should not care about the concerns of the common person. *NOTICE what I am NOT saying is “purposely gatekeep philosophy and determine some areas as non-rigorous.” If rigorous mathematical research cared about what the common person cared about, what then would be the programs at the forefront of mathematics in the big 2025? Is there a paradox in the rigorous work of physics, math, and biology simply because its success is now “So fAr rEmOvED” from the concerns of common people? Tell me, why does philosophy care so much about appealing to the common person when we are focused on completely different problems? Why can’t we have our own productive projects that do not need the appeal to the common person?
Also, analytic philosophy has several areas that appeal to ordinary issues. What then do you want? Analytic metaphysics to appeal to the common Joe? For philosophy of mathematics and physics to appeal to the common Joanne?
We have to respect our discipline and feel no need to dumb it down to my neighbor who thinks I ponder the meaning of life all day, whether he did or did not care about my research, it would not change or enlighten my thinking, because it is impossible in some cases to make questions in philosophy legible to common people. Think about it, so assume we go with the “let’s focus on issues that ordinary people care about” strategy, we then would care about a very particular subset of issues that would relegate the rest of the interesting questions in philosophy as useless because Joe doesn’t care about them. So, I don’t think I want to be a slave of my neighbors’ interest; he doesn’t determine what I get to research.
Your neighbor probably has some sense of how research in physics or biology might benefit him even if he doesn’t care to read that research.
Those of us in public institutions need elected politicians to continue to be willing to pay us. Those of us at private institutions still need people to actually take our classes. It might help to have an answer as to why they should do so other than “you’re not the boss of me.”
“Your neighbor probably has some sense of how research in physics or biology might benefit him, even if he doesn’t care to read that research.
“
I hope so, but I think that’s a bit optimistic. Think about how much he would have to know or care about philosophical research (whichever comes first) for him to develop a positive opinion about x, (x being the hyper abstract philosophical research) to then advocate-> vote->elect politician -> gives us, the philosophers money OR if you are in a privite uni, somehow the causal chain is that they advocate to others or find it of interst to take our classes? Ok, cool, it’s our job (if this is you) to then research what we find essential in our field, AND to act as a mix between researchers/public philosophers, liaising with those who don’t care about our ideas? Notice, this then is not a problem for us, it’s a problem for all of us in academia, so tell me what fields are intuitive enough for Joe to be like “ah yes, now that’s worth my interest and society’s investments? The trades? agriculture, business? Why can’t our research have intrinsic worth for the sake of producing knowledge and understanding? If we can’t find the value in that as a society without convincing Joe, we are cooked. I am not sure how much talk about modal logic, HOL, space, and time will convince someone who thinks TIG welding is better than MIG welding, and that is of the highest interest to society. So, yeah, I would rather be and continue to be my own boss (which is a good way of thinking about it, I didn’t think of it that way, thank you)
I agree that the average person has a rough idea what might benefit them from Physics or Biology research. But it seems to me that the average person has a similar level of understanding regarding philosophy. Surely most people understand how Ethics can be useful to them or broadly how discussions of “How one should live” might benefit them.
I don’t think they do understand how our work in these areas is beneficial for them. I think they have a much clearer idea of how they might benefit from research in Physics or Biology. One advantage that Physics and Biology have is you usually don’t need to understand the work of a physicist or biologist to benefit from it, whereas you usually need to understand the work of a philosopher to benefit from it.
I think there is plenty of benefit people can receive from philosophical work without personally understanding it. If work in epistemology helps lawmakers or statisticians organize some social structure in a way that is more favorable for the spread of truth, or if work in ethics helps governments and non-profits better allocate resources, or if work in philosophy of language or mind helps develop better artificial intelligence or communications systems, then ordinary people can benefit without knowing anything about the work that made their life better.
As far as I can tell, ordinary people think ethics come from either religion or personal belief. The more pretentious among them draw a hard distinction between ethics and morality.
This is true of lots of other academics, too.
(Note: the situation is different in places where philosophy is more socially prominent or part of school curricula.)
So, many people are incapable of understanding the point of philosophical ethics because their self-understanding of their practically rational nature as human beings is so underdeveloped that they can’t recognize the self-study of that form of who/what we are for what it is.
It seems to me the that the “Why should people care about/pay for philosophy?” question has answered itself in the process of being properly formulated.
Just to be clear: I agree with/share your view/experience regarding the inability of many people to easily understand what philosophical ethicists are up to. The intention of my comment is simply to suggest that the nature of philosophical research is interestingly such that it is justified by failing to be recognized for what it is, and that this is nothing but a reflection of our nature being simultaneously so familiar and incredibly difficult to understand.
I would have liked to end by adding to this that this difficulty signals the fact that our nature is actually nothing but – nothing other than – the understanding of itself. But out of fear of being labeled a continental lunatic by the more analytically minded – as I myself am inclined to label myself in my more analytic moods sometimes – I will not mention this.
If the criterion of whether a discipline belongs in a (largely) publicly funded university is that the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ needs to feel that it it is relevant to the concerns (whatever this horrid phrase means) then such institutions are doomed.
Quite obviously, stuff like proper pure maths (eg the langlands programme), much literary analysis and research, much historical research, and a great deal of philosophy is of no interest whatever to most people and has nothing to do with their concerns. This was presumably always the case.
These disciplines preexisted contemporary universities (well maths and philosophy did anyway; history and lit crit a bit more tenuous 😉 ) and can survive their passing… but hopefully can muddle on for a bit until the current age of moronism passes.
Three unrelated observations:
You write in closing: “I don’t think I want to be a slave of my neighbors’ interest; he doesn’t determine what I get to research.” But he (via taxes) must pay for that research? I am not sure who is “a slave” to the other person’s interests…
That would be an argument for him acquiring an interest in it then? Rather than saying that, because it does not interest him, it should not occupy the time of interested researchers?
Why should the neighbor pay for it through taxes?
Physics works pretty hard to support outreach and popularization. One of my former colleagues was on of the team leads on the Large Hadron Collider – he was passionate about how important it was for the public to learn something about what physicists do and why it is interesting, and that if physics as a community failed to do so they would lose government support. So I don’t think the comparison with physics does the work you want it to do.
one reason why physics/maths/etc doesn’t need to care about common people’s opinions is that it actually produces some tangleable and significant results (“progresses”, as some might say), be they academic consensus or new inventions or whatnot. Philosophy, on the other hand, is notorious for endless disputes over basics among philosophers: Humean vs non-Humean metaphysics, utilitarian vs non-utilitarian ethics, you name it. So, I don’t think resorting to “physicists and mathematicians don’t do that either” is a good strategy…
I think that’s too strong of a claim. If analytic philosophers want to write about what common people care about then let them. If they don’t then they don’t have to. At the very least, they should make some public philosophy writing of their subfield to make their research more easily understood by the public. That’s the bare-minimum since they do fund professors’ salaries.
What “concerns of the average person with philosophical interests” is analytic philosophy failing to address?
Quick, additional plug for Christoph’s excellent book. It was a great read. More of that, please.
Hi Michael,
I’d be curious if you could say more about it! I picked it up this summer and was very excited to read it. I certainly buy into the general idea that analytic philosophy is not removed from the general culture it grew up in, and that analytic philosophers tend to ignore/overlook this fact, so it wasn’t the thesis I objected to. (I am a trained analytic philosopher, but as I get older I find myself more and more identifying with some of these criticisms of analytic philosophy’s claims to ‘just following the arguments where they lead’ abstracted away from any ideological commitment.)
But I was unfortunately quite disappointed with the execution of the book’s thesis, which I felt really didn’t do much to link up analytic philosophy with neo-liberalism.
I thought Katrina Forrester’s In The Shadow of Justice, while much narrower in scope (it is on the political circumstances and contingencies of Rawls’ development of his theory of justice), did an excellent job at doing what Schuringa set out to do.
I didn’t *hate* the book – it is packed with interesting historical things that I had never come across before. But the thread of the book’s broader claims are very hard to tease out from the particulars. Open to being wrong though!
I’ve never heard of applied mathematicians making such complaints about number theorists. Makes me wonder
I don’t know mathematics well enough to know, but there’s plenty of it in physics; look at the String Theory Wars.
Came for the article, stayed for the indignant comments.
y’all ever think that maybe we should just do work that is important to us and just chill out?
Haven’t read the book, so it’s possible already addressed. But does the average person on the street believe that disciplines that heavily rely on continental philosophy — e.g. literary theory — are more relevant to the concerns they have?
Analytic philosophy is notoriously difficult to define, but for me the best approximation is ‘What Continental philosophy was doing 70-100 years ago’, that being a rough timespan for the ignore-laugh-fight-assimilate process to play out.
When I teach phil of lang, I try to put it in its historical context. I do think it helps students to appreciate what is going on.
That context, as I see it, is that the idealisms of the day were similarly seen as pedantic and analytic philosophy arose largely as a reaction to this. If a non-sociological factor gave analytic philosophy an edge over competing reactions, I’d bet it was Russell’s promulgation of the Frege/Moore point: that answers to “what is X?” had better use the word “X” with the same meaning with which it occurs in the question.
If this is so, the success of analytic philosophy is perhaps less “paradoxical” than the success of other paradigms. Why exactly should the public “care” about answers to questions that use the same words but with a different meaning? The public is capable of appreciating the analytic point here.
But it seems we find ourselves again in an era of pedantry. Russell’s method leads us to divide the big questions into many small questions, but it seems we have gotten ourselves stuck in litigating minor details of small questions. Maybe this is just as well, and we have to own that.
Or maybe it can be fixed from within analytic philosophy. There are innumerate “solutions” to any puzzle or paradox, each engendering further pedantry, but with scant attention given to the bigger questions that engendered the problem. Such attention could be enforced within the norms of the discipline.
More likely however, intellectual history will move on to something new. We just haven’t found it yet. I suppose that, like the idealists before us, we did a few things right and a lot of things wrong. The next thing will brutally repudiate our wrongs, but hopefully iterate on our rights. If I had to guess, the Frege/Moore point will be counted among our rights, but our implementation of it will appear as quaint as “system building” appears to us now.
“The Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman used to have a sign on his office door that said [Just Say ‘No’ to the History of Philosophy.]”. Maybe this seemingly stupid claim for ignorance and prejudice concerning philosophy was just fun. But since Tim Cranes observes, the “academic study of philosophy tends to inspire contempt”, the universal academy of non- philosophers is on the brick of saying ,No’ to philosophy tout court. Of course, indeed, we can easily count on ignorance and prejudice as the leading causal factors of this contempt. This self-imposed immaturity in philosophical matters might even be traced back to the History of Analytic Philosophy.
Crane is surely right that the spread and success of what came to be called “analytic philosophy” is inextricably connected to the expansion of higher education in the U.S. after WWII. It’s also owed to more-or-less systematic efforts to populate departments and journal boards with philosophers sympathetic to that style of philosophy. For background here I’m thinking of work by people like Greg Frost-Arnold, Kevin J. Harrelson (who was the first to post in this discussion [hi Kevin!]), Joel Katzav, Krist Vaesen, and Adam Tuboly. Katzav and Vaesen’s archival work on the journal capture of Mind, Phil Review, and J Phil is eye-opening on that front, a development that intentionally shifted these journals away from a pragmatist-inflected pluralism to the kinds of topics that would become central to analytic philosophy. Contemporary Anglophone philosophy’s perceived insularity to people outside this tradition is doubtlessly owed in part to these historical factors.
Still, I’m not convinced that the intellectual descendants of analytic philosophers today are so generally out of touch, or are perceived to be out of touch, with what non-analytic philosophers, researchers in other disciplines, or the general public are interested in. From my own limited perspective, I’ve found that broadly Sellarsian philosophical aims and methods resonate well with people educated in the continental tradition, while there is cross-pollination going on between philosophers and social, biological, and cognitive scientists concerning phenomena like perception, shared intentionality, higher-order cognition and linguistic processing, and the teleological character of biological generation and growth.
If there’s not as much interest on the part of the public in what analytic philosophers (or their descendants) are doing today, I’d bet that’s as much to be owed to the dynamics of employment, and interview and hiring processes, as it is to anything intrinsic to analytic philosophy itself. Think of the way the discipline has become hyper-focused on the merit of publications appearing in one of five journals — the three mentioned above, plus PPR and Nous, these having been created in 1940 and 1967 respectively, and both run by the same editor for decades, with each restricting submissions for part of every year. In an information-rich environment with a lot of noise, and with greater and greater numbers of applications for each job, there’s a need for quick and reliable heuristics as to philosophical merit.
Having a widely agreed-upon collection of five top journals is at least a quick heuristic, and insofar as the people using that heuristic are convinced of the merit of the kind of philosophy that’s published in these journals, it will seem fairly reliable, too. At the same time, when publishing in one of these journals becomes a strong positive signal for employment, this incentivizes a certain degree of conservatism concerning what topics to address: best to pick something one can reasonably expect the readers of these journals will be interested in, which means tailoring one’s own work to fit with the kinds of essay published there.
“If philosophers are to seriously address the hostility and incomprehension that they encounter”
I may be some sort of outlier here, but I rather doubt it. I cannot recall a single instance in my life in which I have been met with “hostility and incomprehension” when I said I was a philosopher. Literally never. People who are not academics—in my experience—are just curious. They have no clear sense of what an academic philosopher does, and for sure have never heard of the “analytic/continental divide”. And when I explain what I do, they are generally sort of intrigued.
I suppose there may be some (usually hidden) hostility from other academics in the same university if they think that the philosophy department is being treated better than their own. But that also has nothing at all to do with the “analytic/continental divide”.
Maybe some people here can describe this “hostility and incomprehension” they have encountered. I really have no idea what that might be about.
Surely you are familiar with meeting incomprehension. Almost nobody I meet who is not a professional philosopher understands what we do and why. As for hostility, I am not sure how much worse we are doing than other humanities subjects, but surveys shows that the public’s respect for the humanities is at a shocking low.
No, I would not call that “incomprehension”, I would call that “unfamiliarity”, and I mentioned exactly that in my post. “Incomprehension” occurs when an explanation is offered and not understood. But when I explain what I do, that just isn’t the reaction I get. Do you?
As for the hostility you mention, isn’t it rather more plausible that that is due to the explicit widespread attack not just on humanities but on the entirety of academia that is extremely wide-spread and well-funded from the right? That would explain the surveys. Heck, they have stirred up all sorts of hostility towards epidemiologists and doctors and people doing climate science! But the more particular question I asked was whether individuals here have confronted “hostility and incomprehension”. Have people you have met ever been hostile to you? It’s a honest question. And have they expressed incomprehension *after* you explained what you do? Then I would be curious how you explain it. Again, I am just asking for explicit examples from people’s own lives, not references to surveys.
Tim, our dictionaries are saying different things about the definition of “incomprehension”, but maybe that’s not an interesting disagreement. That people don’t understand what we do and why ought to be enough to demonstrate the problem. I have very rarely experienced hostility personally, but someone would have to be very rude to openly express hostility about someone else’s work. The hostility is very real, and that ought to be enough to demonstrate the problem. As to the source of the hostility, I’m missing how that’s relevant. The hostility exists and is very powerful.
Well, if by “incomprehension” you mean “unfamiliarity” then your comment was odd, as I explicitly mentioned unfamiliarity, and how explaining what I did seems to largely dispel it.
If you have rarely experienced hostility personally, then I don’t understand why you would be sympathetic to Crane’s call to address the hostility you confront. If you just are guessing that there is a lot of unexpressed hostility in the people you meet, that seems pretty uncharitable to me. I don’t think the people I interact with have any.
As for the source of the hostility expressed in surveys, it seems to me that the source of it is entirely the central point if the question is how to lessen it. If the source is a huge, co-ordinated right-wing propaganda attack on academia and higher-education in general, and scientific expertise in particular, then thinking it has anything at all to do with what philosophers spend their time on or how they present themselves to the public seems sort of delusional. People who have spent their lives working on vaccines are having to confront the same hostility, and not because they are not clear about how what they do is of benefit to the general population, right? And the idea that any of that has a thing in the world to do with the analytic/ continental divide just is completely implausible. If hostility exists and is very powerful, then the exact source of the hostility is actually the most important thing to figure out. Otherwise suggestions about what to do have no basis in reality.
Similarly, the decline in interest in the humanities as a whole is surely tied directly to the change in economic circumstances, the outrageous accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich, the collapse of a vibrant middle-class, the increase in costs of higher education, and the resulting sense that the main point of any degree is to situate one to make more money. Pretty much the entire humanities lose out when all higher education is conceived of as vocational training in a narrow sense. But that also has not a thing to do with what counts as “analytic” or “continental” philosophy. Stoking that extremely inside-baseball distinction—from this perspective—serves only to deflect attention from the much larger and powerful causes here.
By “incomprehension” I mean that they don’t understand what we do and why we do it. If you agree with me that people in general don’t understand what we do and why we do it, we are on the same page.
There is enormous hostility to philosophy that we need to do something about, even if we rarely hear it expressed to our faces. If you agree with me that there is enormous hostility to philosophy that we need to do something about, we are on the same page.
But if we disagree about the sources of that hostility—as it seems we do—then we are on completely different pages. I certainly don’t at all think, as Crane asserts, that there is some *particular* hostility to philosophy, as if the people he has in mind are much more inclined to support anthropology or literary studies! I don’t think the people who are largely unfamiliar with, and unconcerned about, what philosophers do harbor “enormous hostility to philosophy”. Certainly, I myself have never experienced such a thing. Maybe people largely concerned with money just can’t understand why anyone would devote themselves to a profession not aimed at making money, but that’s a completely different issue, and I wouldn’t even call their attitude “hostility” (although they might become quite angry if their children evinced a desire to major in a humanity).
Getting the cause wrong leads to getting the proposed solution wrong.
Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes. Perhaps I misunderstood your point. I never made a claim about the source of the hostility.
But if the question is “what (if anything) can we do?”, then the source is of paramount importance, yes?
If I talk about what I do to somebody from my home country in Europe who studied Philosophy in high school, where they were acquainted with most of the big figures in the history of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche and tell them the kind of work I do in Analytic Philosophy, I am generally met with – in succession – blank stares, followed by incomprehension, followed by ‘ah yes, no, ok I’m not sure about those things, I was thinking you’d be working on some great thinker’. I generally prefer not to talk much about what I do outside professional circles. In terms of the kind of intellectual western history a lot of people in Europe are culturally acquainted with, Analytic philosophy seems to have little relevance to them. Often, the reaction also includes something like ‘ah, you do something like Logic/Psychology’ even though I most definitely work in neither ‘philosophy of…’ subfield.
“Am I so out of touch? No. It’s [everyone else] who are wrong.”
It’s not entirely clear who or what this comment is addressed to. If it is to the comment I made above, as it seems to be, I asked for explicit examples, from people’s own lives, of hostility and incomprehension when telling someone one is a philosopher and trying to explain what one does. If you have such examples, I explicitly asked for them, so the proper thing would be to provide them. If not, then what is this comment supposed to achieve? And if the comment is addressed to someone else, maybe you can explain who.
Not the original poster, but this appears to be a paraphrase of a joke from the Simpsons. Principal Skinner has a moment of self-reflection, asks himself if he is out of touch, and immediately dismisses the idea: “No. It’s the children who are wrong.” I take it that this is an observation about the comments section – or maybe the discipline in general?
I didn’t find it that funny on its own, but the hostile and deathly serious reception somehow elevates it as comedy.
I recall Liam Bright (on BlueSky) saying something about philosophy eventually adopting memes as serious argument: “As memes will show, …” He was joking, I think. Unless…
Given that the public situation is reasoned public debate in the US and mutual understanding is at an all time low, this seems like a branding problem (not a need problem).
I think everyone has their anecdotes about a field where the professor refused to take well reasoned criticism of an article because it was easier to reach a conclusion if you don’t have rigor.
It seems more likely that philosophy is viewed as less relevant for the same reason Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, or even Joe Rogan are popular “journalists.”