Unger declares not once, but twice during the interview that he “knew, but didn’t want to know” that Wittgenstein was right about philosophy. Yet, despite this, he went on “churning” out the papers. Unger does not say what this entails about the institution of professional philosophy with its incentives and privileges for those that don’t want to know; the silencing-mechanisms of his doubts and, more significantly, those that dare to doubt; the ways in which nay-sayers are marginalized….

Unger is at the pinnacle of our profession, and… one wonders how much more he didn’t want to know about in the institution of philosophy… the patterns of exclusion… the ridiculing of alternative approaches to philosophy, the ways in which the philosophical haves manage to speak to each other and glide over the rest of us, etc.

At Digressions & Impressions, Eric Schliesser has posted a thoughtful response to Unger’s claims in his interview about the emptiness of analytic philosophy.