My Crystal Ball
At the end of October, 2015 I made five predictions about “the state of philosophy in ten years.” How was my forecasting?
[“Opus of Time” by Ben Sack]
Below are my predictions, along with my verdict for each, in bold text. (You can check out the original post with its predictions here.)
1. Philosophy’s popularity as a major will increase.
False. According to data compiled by Eric Schwitzgebel, while the number of students graduating with undergraduate degrees in philosophy in the US increased year-by-year from 2016 through 2021, it started to decline in 2022.
At the time, I predicted an increase in part because of “economic growth making people more comfortable with a major lacking a clearly-defined career path.” However, I did not at the time predict Donald Trump’s election as president nor the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, two of the most significant socially destabilizing forces of this century.
2. Philosophy will have an increased presence in the business world—especially moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, philosophy of science, and experimental philosophy—as humans become increasingly served by “intelligent” automated services and goods.
Mixed. The number of people in the workforce with degrees in philosophy has increased from around 302,000 in 2015 to 362,000 in 2023, according to one source. Many AI and other technology firms are employing or working with people with graduate training in philosophy, and the technology has seemed to bring greater attention to questions of ethics and consciousness. Additionally, the development of AI technology has had some influential business people advising students, as prospective employees, to study philosophy and other humanities disciplines. Yet the extent of these developments is difficult to measure.
Under the same heading I predicted that “the American Philosophical Association will move from three annual meetings to just two: one focused on academic philosophy and one focused on ‘philosophy in practice,’ aimed to attract philosophers and those doing philosophical work in the worlds of business, technology, medicine, and elsewhere outside academia.” This has not happened, though the APA has adjusted its schedule to two in-person meetings and one remote meeting per year.
3. The topic of “women in philosophy” will not be newsworthy.
Mixed. As I noted in a comment on the original post, I got a fair amount of pushback on this prediction, which led me to clarify it. Here’s an excerpt:
First, I’m not saying that philosophy in 10 years will be a utopia. Nor am I saying that there aren’t serious problems today. Nor am I talking about other groups who have been treated inequitably.
What I’m saying is that a lot of what the woman’s movement in philosophy is after—for fairness when it comes to inclusion of women, recognition and valuing of their work, and their holding positions of responsibility in the profession, and against gender bias (explicit and implicit) and sexual harassment and assault—will be achieved. Does this mean that in ten years, say, there won’t be any episodes of sexual harassment? No. But it does mean that any such instances of sexual harassment will not be reasonably thought of as symptomatic of a widespread problem in the discipline.
Is this optimistic? Yes. Is it unreasonably optimistic? I don’t think so. I realize it’s provocative but who wants a list of boring predictions?
There has been a lot of progress. The number of women earning PhDs in philosophy in the US increased by about a third over the decade ending in 2024. During roughly the same time, the share of undergraduate degrees in philosophy earned by women went from around 33% to over 41%. The number of women in faculty positions in philosophy has been increasing, according to US and UK reports (though those reports do not include the past 5 to 7 years). A 2022 study concluded that applicants who are “women have 58 – 114 percent greater odds than men” in finding a permanent academic position in philosophy.
The gender distribution among honors and grants in philosophy does not seem extremely skewed, given the gender make-up of the profession, and at this point, I believe every major award in philosophy has been won by at least one woman (“at least one” is not trivial, taking into account the demographic cohorts of those suitably senior to be considered for what are typically “lifetime” achievement awards).
Along with the rest of society, philosophy went through a “#metoo” period in which several high profile cases of sexual harassment were exposed. The extent to which this and other cultural changes have contributed to a reduction in sexual harassment of women in philosophy is not something about which I have data. Nor do I have data on the prevalence of gender discrimination in philosophy. I invite women to share their impressions of how things have changed in these regards over the past decade.
4. Those working in academic philosophy will increasingly seek interdisciplinary collaborations with those outside the liberal arts.
True. At least I think it is. For one thing, the past decade has seen dozens of multi-million-dollar grants for large interdisciplinary projects (funded by the John Templeton Foundation, many European government research councils, and other organizations) and the founding of philosophy-centric interdisciplinary research centers. New interdisciplinary philosophy journals have sprung up, bridging philosophy, the sciences, and other disciplines.
As part of the same prediction, I said that “Disciplinary standards regarding the need for support for empirical claims made in philosophical works will be more stringent.” This strikes me as correct but I’d welcome input from others about their sense of things. Yes, anecdata—ironic here, I know.
5. (a) Philosophy will continue to be a refuge for those who insist that most important philosophical questions are not empirical, and who wish to study those questions. (b) Additionally, atheism will become more commonplace in the broader culture, leading fewer atheists to feel the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. For these and other reasons, (c) there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists. (d) This could result in another fracturing of the discipline (along the lines of what happened in the 20th Century with analytic and Continental philosophy).
This was four predictions in one. The results are: (a) True, (b) Unknown, (c) False, (d) False. (a) wasn’t much of a prediction, so I’m not going to give myself any credit for that. As for (b), it’s true that atheism is on the rise around the world, and philosophy of religion seems to have broadened its focus a bit beyond questions of theism, yet it’s not at all clear whether fewer atheists have felt the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. A quick look at PhilPapers suggests that over the past decade we’ve seen a reduction, year-by-year, in the articles that mention “atheism,” but that doesn’t tell us much. Those who work in philosophy of religion: have there been fewer philosophy papers defending atheism over the past decade? (c) According to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, there was a slight swing towards atheism since 2009. I don’t know of any data for the past few years that would indicate a change in that trend. (d) The speculated fracturing has not come to pass. There’s tons of disagreement, but no commonly accepted bright lines have emerged across which people accuse those on the other side of not really doing philosophy.
* * * * *
As it turn out, I’m not much of a prognosticator. Or at least I wasn’t in 2015. Have the intervening ten years given me more insight into the future? Answering that would seem to involve making a prediction about the future, which I dare not do today, after the above showing (though we did recently speculate about academia ten years in the future). Maybe some other day.
In the meanwhile, your comments—and predictions—are welcome.
I predict the AI craze will die out. There will be some useful, human aided uses for it (rewriting emails or comments so I don’t sound like a jerk), but that it will be enshittified to the point of being unusable. Students will gravitate away + teachers will do more paper focused stuff. An entire generation will be reliant on it, sandwiched between two generations who are not so reliant.
Agreed.
I think this is optimistic (or pessimistic). There are powerful drivers behind AI development, but I don’t know enough about AI to make a prediction. What does seem likely to me is that an AI bubble will develop/is developing and that will burst sooner or later. I think this is reasonable to predict given the nature of late capitalism. However, just as with the tech bubble etc, this in itself will not stop AI from developing. Some companies will go bankrupt, people will lose a lot of money (mostly those who already have a lot), usual story.
“Late capitalism”? C’mon.
“Late-stage” implies it’s going to end soon. For all we know, this could all just be the beginning.
I partially agree but I’m more pessimistic. For one thing, a lot of bets have been placed on AI being the transformative technology its cheerleaders claim it is. If that’s wrong — and like you I’m near certain it is— there will almost certainly be a recession. That will be bad for higher education generally and particularly bad for the humanities. I also suspect that managers and here I include some admin will use AI as a cudgel to beat workers. My nightmare scenario is admin buying some worse than useless program that promises to quadruple our productivity and then jacking course caps through the roof on that excuse. “C’mon folks stop whining! Since you’ve got Epictetus AI to do all your grading and slides you’re actually doing less work with 150 students er class than you did before!” I don’t think admin where I work now would try that but I’m practically certain some places will try that sort of nonsense. I hope I’m wrong!
not ‘true’ – please read david kiron’s & miy ‘philosophy eats AI’ article and argument in this past january’s sloan management review….over 100K downloads (and not by bots….!). 🙂
what process do you envision making AI ‘enshittified to the point of being unusable’? It is already highly usable so if for some reason it degrades, we could just revert to the current models. But I really think it’s here to stay, it’s already too good not to use for many people
Well one thing that’s pretty easy to imagine is that they start charging for the free services and really jack up prices for the paid subscriptions all while quality more or less plateaus. Since even the big boys like Open AI are practically feeding money into a furnace with shovels at the moment and rapid improvement has clearly stopped I’d wager on this happening.
I don’t know. This is LLM, but AI has so much more going for it, not all of it is necessarily commercial. All the research. Protein folding with AI help got the Nobel prize last year e.g. and so on. No expert, but while I can see commercial companies running into trouble with AI, that’s not the same as the AI craze dying out or whatever.
In the current climate of AI hype, I doubt many people are thinking of protein-folding. And that’s no surprise, because AI is being sold to them as something that will revolutionize facets of life that are much closer to their everyday concerns. Of course, breakthrough discoveries relating to protein-folding will almost certainly be relevant to their lives in some way, such as through advancements in medical technology, but that’s an indirect benefit of a very specific, niche research application of AI—which is, again, not how it’s being marketed to the wider world by these corporate giants. People are being told to expect revolutionary direct benefits from their own personal use of AI for their own purposes. The wider societal benefit that they too partake in from, say, AI-driven research on protein-folding is not a large part of the sales pitch.
In that sense, you’re right; it won’t go away entirely—it will find continued use in those areas where it’s shown to be effective, such as in research on protein-folding. But the “AI craze” likely will go away as it becomes clearer to more and more people that the fantastical promises made for a great of consumer-facing AI are hollow. That and the wider societal harms of certain uses coming into view will likely dampen the overwhelming positive regard it’s currently being pitched at.
sure, get it, but then I think the claim really hinges on the definition of ‘AI craze’ and ‘AI hype’. And the definition is or contains ‘commercial success’, well, fair enough, but who cares? AI might still go on revolutionizing our life, if it does so while not feeding giant companies (mind you, protein folding was done by DeepMind or whatever it’s called these days), so much the better. (It will still be big companies, since no one else has the money to finance these projects. Of course, it is a big question what happens if these companies themselves ‘fold’ because the truly commercial side of AI is no longer works as a cash cow.)
It’s worse than that. Many companies have actually moved R and D money and resources from things like protein folding to LLMs. In her “Empire of AI” Karen Hao talks about one company– I think it was Google but I wouldn’t swear to that– literally taking scarce chips from it’s medical research division to give to the people making chatbots. That’s another reason to hate all this AI bullshit: It’s not just that it wastes our time as teachers or that it’s probably going to wreck the economy, it’s taking resources from things that might do great good so that our worst students can cheat and lousy blogs can have uncanny, plasticky art.
You have just described capitalism….
People will pay for it, of that I’m certain. Especially the coming generations of students who grow up with it. So your suggestion doesn’t really move me at all.
Also, my understanding is that even the models that can be run locally are pretty good by now.
It’s been around what three years now? No one has “grown up with it.” It’s going to get much more expensive while becoming progressively less useful as more and more teachers take countermeasures while its improvements in quality stall out. Yeah of course some people will continue to pay for it and even try to use it to cheat. But I predict the numbers have peaked or will very soon. If you’re not swayed by that reasoning I suggest you glance at an economics textbook or at least ask ChatGPT to explain a demand curve.
Hello Justin! You wrote: “(b) Additionally, atheism will become more commonplace in the broader culture, leading fewer atheists to feel the need to go into philosophy to argue about gods. For these and other reasons, (c) there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists.”
Most importantly here, the demographic contrast with theism in the US is not atheism. Rather, what contrasts with theism in the US is the more nebulous “spiritual but not religious” (the SBNRs), aka the “religiously unaffiliated” or the “Nones”.
Surveys from the Pew Research Center show that atheism in the US has increased from 2% in 2007 to 4% in 2014, to 5% in 2023-24. Atheism is barely more commonplace in broader US culture. Agnosticism has barely changed.
The Pew surveys show that the Nones have grown from 16% in 2007, to 23% in 2014, to 29% in 2023. The Nones are now the largest “religious” group in the US. The Nones often have very rich spiritualities. What is increasing in the US is something like New Age religion and spirituality.
Arguing about gods (or “the God debate”) was never significant in philosophy of religion. Both theists and atheists are far more interested in developing their own positions. That said, my own (extensive but highly unscientific) surveys of philosophy of religion articles show that very few are about atheism.
As for “(c) there will be a higher proportion of philosophers who are theists”, that’s just an empirical question which Phil Papers should survey again. But any increase or decrease in the proportion of theists probably has nothing to do with your points (a) or (b). Political or other social factors might change that proportion.
Despite the fact that the Nones are the largest “religious” group in the US, there are almost no articles in philosophy of religion dealing with them. Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers) and Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford) are leading a grant from Templeton to study the Nones. I and several other philosophers are also investigators in that grant. We aim to learn more about the philosophical background of the SBNRs.
Regarding the Nones, I commonly teach a faith-reason course with religious studies professors who have their PhD’s in theology. It has been interesting to see our students’ views on ultimate reality. Many of our students are traditionally religious and theistic (mostly Catholic, Protestant, and Black Muslim), and some (though not many) are straightforward atheistic naturalists. However, a surprisingly high number of them fall into an in-between category of rejecting all traditional religions and yet also believing (a) that they themselves have (or just are) non-physical souls and (b) that some kind of supernatural creator exists (though when I press them on whether this supernatural creator has an intellect and will, some answer “yes,” while some answer “no”). So, in short, my own experience in teaching my students for the last few years in this course confirms that the Nones are hard to pin down. Assuming atheism for the Nones is a mistake, since many of them really aren’t atheists. I’ve also noticed with these Gen Z students that many of them like the nebulousness/flexibility of the spiritual-but-not-religious Nones category, on the grounds that both traditional theistic religions and straightforward atheistic naturalism are dogmatic, authoritarian, and oppressive. I personally don’t agree with my students who think this way, since I think that theism and straightforward atheistic naturalism are by far the two most plausible views of ultimate reality. But this is indeed what many of them think.
Some of them are even into the occult and astrology. It’s very strange (incredible) to me. But I love hearing their views on why they believe this. It’s been fascinating, to be honest.
Nones are hard to pin down.
I read some sociological discussion of the “nones” a bit ago (I’ll admit that I’m too lazy to look it up again, so take this for what it’s worth) and, though it didn’t use these terms, it strongly implied that a big portion of them would be more or less normal religious believers but they are too lazy and disorganized to go to church, and want the good feelings but not the discipline that comes from most normal religion. I suppose that’s understandable, even if maybe not admirable.
I think that is part of it for many of them. But I’ve also noticed strong moral disagreements with traditional religions from many of them (e.g., over gay or lesbian issues). It’s hard to tell exactly what is going on.
Most of the Nones/SBNRs in the US have pretty strong political / moral objections to organized religions. And they often have pretty strong metaphysical objections as well. They’re not failing to go to church because they’re “lazy and disorganized” (which seems like a pretty disparaging way to characterize 29% of the US population). They don’t want to go.
right? is this the avocado toast-mortgage guy?
To be clear, I’m not attributing any bad motives to the post I’m replying to, and I’m not familiar with the specific sociological research cited regarding the ‘laziness’ of non-churchgoers. However, I want to make sure people are aware that attributing character flaws to people who stop attending religious events is a very common talking point in conservative religious groups (i.e. higher control, more authoritarian, ‘traditional family values’ etc.). Whatever the intent, it serves two functions: to make people feel shame about re-evaluating their religious practices, and to make group members feel afraid of associating with people who have left the group. These effects have caused people significant social harm when they choose to leave a religion, so we should be quite careful about how we repeat views of this sort. Ironically, recognizing this as a morally and intellectually flawed shame tactic is one of the many reasons why I chose to leave my childhood religion and now belong to the Nones. Also, for what more anecdata are worth, most everyone I know in my age range (30s) either was never religious (more common in Europe), made a considered decision to leave their religion on the basis of intellectual and/or moral objections, or continues to practice their religion in a weekly churchgoing type of manner.
I’m an atheist and think most people would be well served by giving up religion (and also the sort of BS Woo practices/beliefs discussed in this thread) but what I had in mind is the largeish group of people who profess to believe a particular religion but don’t go. In the US this is very common – people who claim to be evangelical or whatever but almost never attend church. We can easily joke about people feeling very strong ties to the church they choose to not attend. But these are people who at least claim to strongly believe what the chuch they don’t attend claims to believe – not people who are doubting/questioning it. So, I think it’s a different scenario from the one discussed by some in the thread, but a related one.
There are also those who profess a strong adherence to traditional religion (so, not nones) but who despise the institutions of traditional religion, in an almost ironically postmodern conservative way. Their reasons for despising the traditional institutions are, usually, that the institutions are too “liberal.” They don’t like attending mass, not because they are lazy, but because they see the modern mass as a departure from tradition and don’t like hearing the priest emphasize social justice—it conflicts with their politics, which are often of a hard right bent. So they seek out alternative places to worship, ones that they deem appropriately traditional.
The phenomenon of “traditional Catholics” who despise their own Church (but who, of course, would never profess to despise it) is interesting. It seems that many of them are young but also converts, and specifically converts by way of political discourse first. That is, they found radically social conservative movements espousing anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic views and then found that some portion of those movements was dedicated to providing the intellectual foundation of those various forms of bigotry, and that that foundation was often to be found in so-called traditional theology. Being a gentleman and scholar, they start reading what they take to be traditional theology (whether it is or isn’t might be arguable, of course) and the theological commitments then form in tandem with the reinforcement of the political commitments.
Of course, that analysis could be entirely wrong. I’m admittedly speculating a great deal and going off of observations from interactions I’ve had with some of those claiming to be “trad Caths.” I also don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, as there are some traditional Catholics who would no doubt be horrified by what trad Caths say and do, from a theological point of view or from a political one, or both.
How do you think about people who identify as Nones yet accept (a) or (b) (not as students, but as coherent, rational agents). Im thinking that once you accept one those sorts of beliefs, there aren’t so many options with respect to questions like “is the God a designer?, “are they all-powerful?” “is there an afterlife” and such. So their beliefs surely accord with some religion. Are they impious people (by their own lights) who should connect their beliefs to a religion?
Right – it’s that in-between category that’s interesting. Very, very few Nones (and/or SBNRs) are atheists. Tho they often have non-theistic concepts of God, or God (and gods) just aren’t relevant at all in their world-views. They’ll often believe in a vague Source, or the Universe (capital U), or spiritual energy. But very rarely would those things be persons or even personal. So, almost always no God, but they’re not atheists.
They’re certainly not “enlightenment” naturalists of the Hume-Russell-Sellars variety. I’ve often seen them criticizing so-called naturalism for not being scientific. They’ve got their own interpretations of (say) quantum mechanics etc. Sometimes these are just plain pseudo-science, but often they’re pretty plausible. And there’s all kinds of panpsychists running around in analytic philosophy, and that seems pretty equivalent to quantum woo to me.
I’ve written about divination, which is a good case of a practice that’s been distorted by a recent naturalism. Most of the folks I know who are serious about astrology (and I know quite a few, inside and outside the academy) will deny immediately that it’s about predicting the future. It’s doing something else for them. What that is, I’m not entirely sure. But it’s fascinating.
Johan De Smedt and the late Helen De Cruz wrote a very interesting paper that may be relevant here. Or at least I think it’s relevant here because a sizeable portion of nones would also say that they have a strong liking of the natural sciences. Of course, those that do aren’t necessarily going to be naturalists; De Smedt’s and De Cruz’s study includes a wide variety of theistic and naturalistic perspectives.
I imagine some of those interviewed would fall in the category of nones, which might actually put pressure on its usefulness as a category—some within it are atheist naturalists, some are non-naturalists, and some are theists who do not regard themselves as religious in a traditional sense, whatever that might be.
If its existence as a category doesn’t speak to a coherent set of philosophical commitments, then it might speak more to a sentiment of resistance to traditional religious formations; maybe even to an explicit embrace of open-endness and pluralism on the substantive issues that religion is traditionally thought to speak to. I don’t know, but I get the impression that nones are unified more by a certain set of attitudes and sentiments than a specific set of doctrines, and that this makes the category useful when considering why, historically and sociologically, we are where we are at right now, but less useful as a category of religious belief. The nature of the commitments is simply of a different category, maybe. (I say “maybe” because I’m sure that someone might argue that “religious” should encompass more than just belief, and that the nones can still be understood as religious in some relevant sense.)
I know this is mainly a US blog (most are), but it is perhaps worth noting that the US is and has been an awkward (to me) outlier at least in the western hemisphere (or the global north, or whatever is pc these days to say). Societies in (western) Europe, not to mention academia, for example, are overwhelmingly atheistic. Just for contrast.
It’s extremely difficult to find good survey data on religiosity in Europe. The surveys that do exist (e.g. Pew, Eurobarometer, European Values Survey) are all over the place. It certainly looks like there’s a lot less engagement of Europeans (mostly Western and Northern) with Christianity. But that doesn’t tell you much (and I certainly wouldn’t say that Western Europe is “overwhelmingly” atheistic). Many articles suggest that New Age religion is significant and increasingly popular in Europe. But you often need to use proxies, e.g. how popular is yoga? I’ll say that the nature of religion in Europe is far from clear.
I certainly cannot claim to have a data, so what I say is anecdotal. What I am willing to insist on, though, is that religiosity has little role to play at universities and schools. I would also be surprised if data showed that religiosity is a major factor in society at large, but I am open to be persuaded. In any case, even if it is, it does not have the same social function as in the US and I hope this remains so (and not because I am a militant atheist).
“Philosophy will have an increased presence in the business world. Mixed”
Philosophy, as a discipline, should take some responsibility here. There is an observable resistance to applied philosophy within its own boundaries and anyone doing business is viewed with significant skepticism by insiders. Despite your prediction regarding interdisciplinary growth, philosophy as a whole is one of the least interdisciplinary fields at a university. Business, science and other humanities are well ahead in this regard.
“ The topic of “women in philosophy” will not be newsworthy. Mixed”
It does seem like a mixed bag. Women do not commonly speak up about issues that affect them, especially if it puts their goals in jeopardy. I suspect progress is happening in spite of obstacles, and probably some sub-fields are friendlier to women than others. Newsworthiness may get attention, but it is not necessarily an indicator of reality.
“ Philosophy will continue to be a refuge for those who insist that most important philosophical questions are not empirical, and who wish to study those questions.”
This is certainly true for myself, except I’ve been surprised by how resistant some philosophers are to empirically informed philosophy. More cutting edge departments seem comfortable with it, but it’s not a mainstay in the discipline. It’s a shame because I truly believe a lot of empirical work could be greatly improved by strong philosophical grounding. There are people who do this, but it is not at all the norm relative to the discipline’s population.
“ Philosophy’s popularity as a major will increase. False.”
While I agree with your characterization of the economic and political influences of this trend, I would like to see an analysis that places agency in the hands of the discipline. Given that these facts are what they are, what should Philosophy do differently?
Regarding “an analysis that places agency in the hands of the discipline” — there has been plenty of discussion here about what philosophers might be able to do to improve major numbers (see here for just a few examples). Still, as I’ve noted before “not everything that is happening in philosophy is the result of the actions of philosophers and philosophy’s institutions.“
In my opinion, Artificial Intelligence could become the most important topic discussed by philosophers. In fact, it has already changed our lives.
I predict that the profs and students listed on this no-AI site will have comparatively greater skills and market value: https://certifiedaifreeskillsandknowledge.org/
Let me guess: a certain Marc Champagne is the key guy referenced in this link shared by Marc Champagne?
Is there really any need to snark at someone who is making a good-faith effort to solve a potentially devastating problem for Academia? Are we really so jaded in this field that his announcement of the attempt gets zero upvotes but the psychologizing snark gets (as of now) 14?
First time?
I don’t think it’s called an announcement any longer after the umpteenth time.
The predictions all made sense at the time, I think. Except for the way D is worded: why even think that if there were more theists entering philosophy, “this” trend would lead to a fracturing of the discipline along the lines of analytic vs. continental? I know some theists can be divisive — as can some atheists — but does anything else about their differences evoke, in any way, the kinds of grand chasms in style, method, standards and scholarly heroes often associated with the analytic-continental divide? Would we say this if, e.g., more moral skeptics were entering the field?
Again, I think, this might be a peculiarly American perspective. In Europe this is just a non-topic and has been since I can remember. Some populists in politics of course play the religious card, typically in Eastern Europe (in the west you simply don’t get anything with this given the overwhelmingly atheistic and agnostic population), but in academia there is no trace of religion.
This is just layman historicizing but my impression is that the US, perhaps to due to its colonial past, inherited the conditions that were prevalent in Europe hundreds of years ago and ever since it’s been dealing (‘struggling’?) with it.
That’s interesting. And that may explain why philosophy of religion, and theistic philosophers, are so well-represented in the US as compared to Europe (I’ll take your word).
But it doesn’t license the view that the amount of theistic philosophers in the field should have an especially significant impact on the field as a whole.
The theism-atheism issue is, after all, relatively independent of others. Being a theist implies nothing about where you stand on most philosophical issues besides those directly pertaining to religion. Nor does it suggest a difference in style, method or standards one might associate with the analytic-Continenal difference.
I am afraid I was not trying to say anything useful about that side of the debate. My point was only that the very discussion has an American taste to it since I think these issues in Europe would simply not occur to anyone. That is all. I think I may have come across a handful of philosophers of religion in my career (and I even wrote on it) and even these, like myself, were not all religious themselves.
On 5(b), you say: “it’s true that atheism is on the rise around the world,…” But this is actually quite unclear. Recent research on global trends shows that from 2010-2020, Christians, Muslims, and ‘Nones’ all grew (and Hindus and Jews, and most all other religions, grew comparably to overall population growth), but only Muslims and ‘Nones’ increased their share of the global population size. (Christians lost some share, despite their growth; Buddhists were the only ones showing declines.)
As Eric noted above in another comment, we can’t read off “increase in atheism” from these data. The difficulty with the ‘Nones’ category is that they include atheists, agnostics, and also those who deny a specific religious affiliation but might claim to be ‘spiritual but non-religious.’ Obviously, this could include many who are (vaguely) theistic, or are otherwise not committed to atheism (of the naturalistic sort typical in philosophy).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020/
It’s precisely because of atheism that Nietzsche for example became the kind of philosopher that he did, I suspect it is likely why many actually do become philosophers and seek answers to questions religion might have otherwise solved for them.
It seems Analytic philosophy is turning the pendulum back to positivistic attitudes towards empiricism, and that I would say, is a great misfortune for this field.