The End of Analytic Philosophy

Where do we go from here?

Is analytical philosophy suffering a slow death?

A few years ago, while I was pursuing my PhD at the University of Sydney, the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright wrote a provocative blog post titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. It painted a bleak and rather depressing picture of the field and its capacity to make progress.

Unsurprisingly, it caused, to put it mildly, a fair amount of controversy. While many argued against his pessimistic view of the field, my agreements and disagreements were largely the inverse of most of his critics. Like Bright, I share a negative view on the prospects of analytic philosophy. Yet, I did not share his bleak outlook that philosophy itself was doomed. Unlike him, I strongly disagreed with his assessment that there is “no successor paradigm” that could replace analytic philosophy. This successor paradigm is naturalized philosophy and I found myself surprised that Bright did not really consider it.

In a brief comment on DailyNous (the news for the philosophy profession), I briefly raised that option, which most commentators seemed to neglect:

Here an old proposal: move on to naturalist philosophy in the style of Dennett, Churchland, Sterelny, and co.

As it happens, I always wanted to write a longer response to it, but to land a job in philosophy, there is little to gain from writing a blog or for that matter to criticize the very methods of philosophers sitting on hiring committees. So I kept pushing it off, focusing on writing journal articles instead. But almost five years have gone by and I’ve landed the UK version of a tenure-track position over two years ago, so I really have no excuse to push it off further now that I have started to blog regularly. Let’s get into it.

Bright begins his essay by asserting that:

Analytic philosophy is a degenerating research programme. It’s been quite a long time since there was anything like a shared project of analysing key concepts or a mutual commitment to the linguistic turn. But the lack of such shared projects in themselves didn’t really cause a problem for the field -- here’s a discussion of Rorty cheerfully noting, in 1982, that analytic philosophy is held together mainly by a certain kind of style and sociological bonds among its practitioners. He didn’t think it was a problem, and this more detailed but equally sympathetic metaphilosophical analysis comes to a broadly similar conclusion. It also doesn’t strike me that there is any particular institutional crisis for analytic philosophy beyond the general woes of the humanities right now -- and even here we may be doing relatively well.

The language of a degenerating research programme is more harsh than it may at first appear. The terminology is due to the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, who’s aim was to demarcate genuine science from pseudoscience. If one were to compare different approaches to philosophy, one might thus read Bright’s declaration that analytic philosophy is on its way to become a pseudophilosophy, only saved by the absence of a viable alternative. He contests that the confidence in analytic philosopher has taken three major hits:

Analytic philosophy suffers from a triple failure of confidence, especially among younger philosophers. People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place. The first two problems are resultant from internal pressures, the latter a mix of internal and external. However, there is no successor paradigm in a position to really take advantage of this weakness, and so the field listlessly drifts on, anxious and insecure and filled with self-recriminations.

The reason analytic philosophy hasn’t been abandoned like a scientific theory that fails to advance our understanding, Bright suggests, is not because of its merits or ideals behind it, but rather because of the lack of a competitor paradigm.

The reason, I suspect, that neither he nor other commentators brought up the competing paradigm of naturalistic philosophy - a philosophy that treats itself as strongly continous with science - was that philosophers typically consider naturalist philosophy to be just another niche area of analytic philosophy. This is reflected in how Bright talks about naturalistic metaphilosophy:

Analytic philosophy has long had ambitions to something like scientific status -- often expressed in works of naturalistic metaphilosophy, and at times to the point of cringingly insecure self parody. Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983 -- they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don’t know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it’s not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field’s youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.

Now I think the identification of naturalist philosophy as just one strand of analytic philosophy is a mistake. The very approach to doing philosophy, as I emphasized in my last blog post, is fundamentally different and opposed to each other. But I acknowledge that most philosophers I have ever discussed this topic with were quite surprised to hear me say that I did not consider myself an analytic philosopher. That I considered naturalist/naturalistic/naturalized (I’ll treat these terms as synonyms for the purposes of this post) philosophy as a different kind of philosophy altogether.

Just as we might split analytic from continental philosophy, so we can split naturalist philosophy off as a third kind of way philosophy is done. To create such a tripartite distinction, I believe would be incredibly valuable. For one, in many ways naturalist philosophy can often be closer to the work of continental philosophers, who had naturalist leanings, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Georges Canguilhem. It would in principle be possible to create a diagram in the form of a triangle in which different philosophers could be placed according to their orientations.

We should distinguish naturalist philosophy as a third kind of philosophy next to the common split between analytic and continental philosophy

The existence of philosophers who embrace hybrid or more permissive methodologies does not deny that these approaches capture genuine differences, though continental philosophy is admittedly hard to capture without its traditional categorization as non-analytic philosophy. This is one of the reasons naturalist philosophers and continental philosophers often have much closer affinities than opponents of ‘scientistic philosophy’ may realize.

Some of my readers, no doubt, will already be skeptical of analytic philosophy, not because they necessarily share my naturalist view of how the field should operate, but because they have a fondness for philosophers such as Nietzsche and the like that fill popular book sections. While naturalist philosophy is often straw-manned as a naive scientism, I hope to encourage my readers to seriously consider it as a different and more pluralistic way of doing philosophy altogether - one that draws on the plurality of the sciences, rather than the traditionally restrictive a-priori toolkit of analytic philosophy.

If nothing else, naturalist philosopher offers a much more optimistic view of the future of philosophy* than the more bleak image offered by Bright:

For what I think is gone, and is not coming back, is any hope that from all this will emerge a well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest. We can, and we will, keep generating puzzles for any particular answer given, we will never persuade our colleagues who disagree, we will never finally settle what to say about the simple cases in order to be able to move on to the grand problems of philosophy. My anecdotal impression is that junior philosophers are hyper aware of these bleak prospects for anything like creation of a shared scientific paradigm.

Among naturalist philosophers, whether faculty or students, there is no pessimistic sense of being trapped on a ship without sail and a crew that is unwilling to row together. Naturalistic philosophy is rather like a modern ship with an engine driving us ever forward. Philosophy in this vision is part of science, part of a larger enterprise of natural philosophy, before it was separated into the artificial boundaries we know today. Naturalist philosophers are excited about the progress enabled on old philosophical problems with the aid of the sciences, be that the mind, the nature of life, or the structure of reality.

To make philosophy prosper once more, in universities and the public, we must ask it to return to a state it was once in: a part of natural philosophy continuous with the sciences.

*Anecdotally, I have never felt more enthusiastic about the future of philosophy, then when I was able to work together with scientists, such as Nicola Clayton’s corvid lab, to bring us closer to answering what it is like to be a crow, my work with biologists at Oxford in measuring biological complexity, or my ongoing work on several projects together with animal welfare scientists. Young philosophers in search of a shared and progressing paradigm won’t have far too look. It is not all doom and gloom.

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