1

I would guess that this journal has two kinds of reader, very broadly speaking. On the one hand are those (philosophy students and teachers) with an academic and/or professional as well as – one hopes – an intense personal interest in the subject. On the other hand are those, ‘informed lay persons’ as they used to be called, who come to it for all sorts of reasons but at least in part with the idea of finding out what's currently going on amongst the academic types. I don't know what the majority make of it but the chances are that very often they come away baffled by the range of arguments, issues, and debates typically on show. What I want to do here is offer a few reflections on the current state of things which may serve partly as a front-line report for readers in the second broad category and partly as a prompt for self-examination – or at least some measure of critical detachment – among those belonging to the first.

One big complaint has to do with the perceived technicality of much philosophical discussion, by which is mostly meant some variously weighted combination of jargon-prone style, narrowness of focus, specialist readership, arcane interests, and – above all – remoteness from the sphere of shared or commonplace human concerns. Of course there is a place for technical discussions in philosophy, as in any branch of enquiry that develops investigative methods or analytical techniques with no use – anyway no direct application – in everyday contexts. Still lay readers tend to be repelled by an ethos (not to say cult) of technical expertise that places such a distance between experts and non-expert but genuinely interested parties in the case of a discipline or practice like that of philosophy. For unless philosophers manage to communicate outside and beyond that self-enclosed specialist sphere then they are not only risking its rapid disappearance under present economic and socio-cultural conditions. They are also failing in respect of one of its basic and most important functions, namely that of acting as an intermediary between areas of discourse (from physics and biology to medicine and law) where technicalities are pretty much unavoidable and hence need explaining or laying out more perspicuously if they are to gain any measure of informed consent amongst the wider community.Footnote ¹ Otherwise philosophy is liable to forfeit its claim to public attention, not to mention public funding, by giving every sign of routine indifference to that major part of its responsibility which consists in the promotion of intelligent debate about issues that are too important, or just too interesting, to remain the exclusive preserve of a specialist few. It will also run the risk – in an academic culture so largely given over to ‘research’-interests driven by the next round of the assessment exercise – of becoming what George Orwell aptly although in a different context described as a ‘smelly little orthodoxy’.

One factor here is the widespread notion that philosophy can best lay claim to academic respectability by pushing as far as possible in its emulation of the physical sciences, or determining to tackle only those well-defined technical problems that are sure to have some likewise well-defined technical answer. Such was Thomas Kuhn's description of how ‘normal science’ typically carried on during those periods of relative calm between great ‘revolutionary’ shake-ups when it was business as normal for most working scientists since any paradigm-threatening obstacle – any discrepant data or empirical anomaly – could always be put down to some observational error, imperfection in the measuring apparatus, or questionable choice of auxiliary hypotheses.Footnote ² I don't at all wish to go along with the popular misreading of Kuhn which ignores his stress on the comparative rarity of full-scale scientific revolutions and finds nothing of interest in the idea of science as making progress through a placidly constructive engagement with manageable problems. Still I do want to say that the discourse of present-day academic philosophy in the analytic mainstream is ‘normal’ to the point of intellectual stagnation and that this has to do with the effect of an overly specialised professional culture and an over-concentration on issues that lend themselves to quasi-scientific formulation. What's needed is a more Aristotelian breadth of approach such that philosophers shouldn't be so keen to advertise themselves as philosophers of or experts in some particular, closely specified subject-domain.

No doubt it will be said that we nowadays know a lot more than Aristotle about all those multifarious topics, the natural sciences included, that he took as falling within his investigative purview. In which case – so the argument goes – philosophers had much better pick their specialism with an eye to current trends and should definitely not, on pain of ignorance or amateurism, aspire to such delusive multi-competence. Philosophy started out as a universal discourse of (purported) knowledge and truth but was then subject to a long history of rifts, separations, or independence-movements whereby its erstwhile component disciplines achieved intellectual maturity and, along with it, a new-found sense of autonomy. Probably the last one to go was psychology, at least to the extent that empirically-minded psychologists increasingly defined their discipline so as to exclude all reference to epistemology or philosophy of mind, while philosophers were just as keen to reciprocate by disavowing any taint of vulgar ‘psychologism’. Thus there is general agreement that the exponential growth of human knowledge across so many fields of enquiry has produced a situation in which, for better or worse, it is no longer possible for anyone to claim expertise – or even a decent level of competence – in more than one such specialist corner of one such specialist field. This applies all the more in the case of philosophy since here, it is maintained, there is a standing temptation for some practitioners (especially philosophers of science) to issue large claims on the basis of a knowledge that is often simply not up to the mark in terms of the latest research. After all, if scientists have learned to respect disciplinary bounds – even with respect to areas of closely convergent interest such as molecular biology, organic chemistry, and genetics – then surely philosophers will be best advised not to stray across them.

The effects of such thinking are everywhere apparent in the choices of topic (narrowly prescribed), the tone of address (briskly efficient), the presumed readership or audience (a small peer-group of like-minded specialists), and above all the manifest aim (to move things forward by just so much as make one's distinctive mark but not so much as to run the risk of offending one's colleagues or the academic community at large). This tendency is reinforced by the periodic scourge of a research assessment exercise that encourages savvy types to focus their efforts on short-term, ‘manageable’ projects of a suitably conformist and unambitious kind. Beyond that, it maintains an incentive structure whereby those who have most thoroughly internalised such habits of thought are then strongly placed, as subject panellists, to ensure their effective passing on to the rising generation. It is a thoroughly depressing scene and one that belies the constant stress on ‘research’ in an academic culture where any genuinely innovative work – anything that raises a significant challenge to communal norms of belief, not to mention established reputations – amounts to the equivalent of letting down the side (in this case one's departmental colleagues) in a vital qualifying match. Meanwhile the philosopher-specialists are apt to play themselves off the field, as did the logical positivists before them, by imitating science in a different field of endeavour and thus inevitably lagging behind by any measure of substantive (as distinct from merely notional or intra-peer-group) contribution to knowledge.

This is plain to see than in the current exchange of hostilities between ‘experimental philosophers’ who want to put things on a third-person empirical or observational basis and thus eschew all appeals to apodictic or first-person epistemic warrant and their opponents, the unreformed thought-experimentalists, who cleave to precisely those traditional (and, they would say, philosophically indispensable) modes of enquiry.Footnote ³ It is also apparent in that wider context of the perceived imperative, amongst philosophers of an analytic bent, to hitch their professional-academic wagons to the star of what counts (again in that particular community) as a properly scientific method. Just as the positivists mortgaged their enterprise to the formal sciences on the one hand and the physical sciences on the other – through their programmatic refusal to recognise as truth-apt any statements other than logical tautologies or empirical observations – so philosophers in the present-day ‘core’ disciplines strive to come up with results that would invoke either rational self-evidence or else some kind of natural-scientific warrant. Hence the unfortunate impression often given by exercises in, e.g., philosophy of mind or philosophy of perception that these are somehow hoping to bootstrap their way by sheer analytical acuity to discoveries of the sort more typically (and aptly) claimed by disciplines like neurophysiology or cognitive science. Hence also the tendency amongst analytic philosophers to adopt a pseudo- or, less unkindly, a quasi-scientific rhetoric in order to dismiss any line of argument that fails or on principle refuses to comply with currently prevailing modes of thought.

This practice has been something of a stock-in-trade since the heyday of logical positivism when its exponents delighted in facile demolition-jobs on sundry ‘continental’ (i.e., typecast wild-and-woolly-minded) philosophers and when standards for that kind of knock-down rejoinder were, if anything, even less demanding than today. Still there is a need to muster some resistance when received ideas – or existing institutional mechanisms for preserving them – are so heavily weighted toward the maintenance of a professional (rather than critical-philosophical) status quo that effectively excludes or massively discounts anything too much out of kilter with its own norms of reputable discourse. The effect is to render philosophy peculiarly impotent or tongue-tied against the imputation of those, like Stephen Hawking in a recent polemic, who proclaim its demise or chronic obsolescence in the face of giddying scientific (or techno-scientific) progress.Footnote ⁴

2

Where analytic philosophers tend to go wrong is of course not in striving for conceptual precision or explanatory power such as typifies the physical sciences at best. Rather it is through the wholesale adoption of a (notionally) science-led ‘research’ culture where Kuhnian normalcy or piecemeal problem-solving is the order of the day and there is little or no room for the kind of nonconformist speculative thought that has been a hallmark of major advances in philosophy as well as the physical sciences. By surrendering that crucial margin of autonomy – the space for independent critical reflection on whatever engages its interest – philosophy in effect aligns itself not so much with science in some vaguely encompassing sense of the term but with a markedly conformist, workaday, or paradigm-conserving type of scientific activity. Thus it fails to make creative or self-renewing contact with just those developments – whether in the physical sciences or in other regions of enquiry – that might yield a high rate of mutual benefit from philosophy's approaching them on independent and equitable terms. This is to put the case for an idea of what philosophers can best, most usefully do which goes clean against the self-image routinely endorsed by the majority of those in the academic trade. It is to argue that philosophy is the proper place – the institutional locus but also, in a larger sense, the natural home-ground – for just the kind of free-ranging yet intellectually disciplined enquiry that can and should question received ideas concerning the proper, academically sanctioned division of specialist labour.

Thus I agree with Jürgen Habermas that philosophy is often called upon to mediate between everyday or lay knowledge on the one hand and on the other those various expert discourses from mathematics and physics, via law, economics, and the social sciences, to certain challenging or avant-garde practices in the contemporary arts. It is – or it should be – able to engage them at an adequate level of informed comprehension while none the less having enough in common with everyday thought and language to communicate effectively across and between their otherwise separate spheres.Footnote ⁵ Yet I would also want to emphasise, again like Habermas, that if it is to perform this intermediary role in a serviceable way then it will need to hold onto that particular range of critical-reflective resources and conceptual-analytic skills that constitute not only philosophy's professional stock-in-trade but also, more importantly, its prime vocation as a discipline of thought. Thus the last thing needed is the sort of advice issued by a neo-pragmatist or ‘post-philosophical’ thinker such as Richard Rorty for whom ‘the tradition’ – the mainstream Western discourse of philosophy from Plato, Descartes and Kant right down to his own analytically-minded ex-colleagues – has finally run out of intellectual steam and should henceforth give up its deluded claims to any form of specialist expertise.Footnote ⁶ Rorty sees this as a consummation devoutly to be wished since it will enable philosophers at last to find a voice in the ‘cultural conversation’ most vigorously carried on by poets, novelists, and literary critics of a strong-revisionist persuasion. For Habermas, conversely, it is vital that philosophers should hold out against any such move to (in his phrase) ‘level the genre-distinction’ between philosophy and literature. It is only by preserving certain distinctive, i.e., discipline-specific and truth-oriented standards such as those of logical rigour, conceptual precision, and a constant readiness to justify its claims in the court of critical reason that philosophy is able to sustain its go-between role.

So my case is, first, that one can and should philosophize about any topic that justifies the effort by presenting philosophically pertinent issues, and second, that any specialist knowledge then deployed had much better be on the philosophical side rather than a matter of vainly striving to catch up with the latest stage of advance in this or that extra-philosophical domain. Of course – to take one salient example – it requires a good deal of well-directed reading around in neurophysiology, cognitive science, optics, kinaesthetics, and so forth, if a philosopher of perception is to make any valid or worthwhile contribution to the subject. Still they will be spending their time more wisely if they focus more on conceptual problems as these arise in the discourse of practising scientists rather than issues at the cutting edge of current research. What tends to happen when philosophers adopt the latter approach is that their own discourse soon becomes subject to the same law of sharply diminishing returns that dogged the logical positivists. Thus it falls into the same pattern of chronic alternation between, on the one hand, empirical or empirical-sounding claims that inevitably lag behind the science they emulate and, on the other, claims of a more ‘philosophical’, i.e., conceptual or analytic sort which have only a notional scientific import and which contribute little to philosophy save a heightened sense of intellectual and cultural isolation. This applies even to developments, like the present-day revival of causal realism, that would seem to hold out the promise of a genuine and decisive break with that whole range of vexing dualisms – subject/object, mind/world, concept/intuition, scheme/content, etc. – that was Kant's bad legacy to modern thinkers on both sides of the (likewise Kant-induced) analytic/continental rift. The realist revival marks a welcome advance in so far as it offers to reconnect philosophy with a world of scientific or everyday realia that earlier thinkers – whether toilers in the wake of logical positivism or adepts of the linguistic turn – had seemed to count a world well lost for the sake of their own pet theories. However all too often it takes the form of a second-order, drily formal, at times almost neo-scholastic disquisition on the various terms and concepts that characterise causal-realist talk or that are presupposed by the kinds of truth-claim typically advanced in its name.

To this extent Rorty and Hawking are right in their differently angled though otherwise strikingly convergent diagnoses. If philosophy – or the academic discipline that currently bears that name – is ever to break out of this corner then it will need to recover a sense of its own relative autonomy vis-à-vis the sciences and other topic-domains. ‘Relative’, that is, in so far as it depends upon them for its subject matter and critical orientation but ‘autonomy’ in so far as it cannot long thrive in a Lockean under-labourer role that denies philosophy the right to any exercise of critical reflection beyond whatever is currently enjoined by the arbiters of reputable doctrine and method. Moreover it will need to regain the courage of those speculative powers that Kant hived off into a quarantine zone of pure reason where they could be kept safe from science and science kept safe from them, thus leaving it for later, more zealous boundary patrollers such as the logical positivists to declare the zone itself off-limits or merely non-existent.Footnote ⁷ If one thing has become clear through all the travails of analytic philosophy since that inauspicious beginning it is the fact that any discipline whose vocation it is – or should be – to think creatively and critically as well as carefully and consistently is not well served by such doctrinaire restraints on its freedom to speculate in ways that don't conform to existing ideas of best or acceptable practice. The result has been not only to sap philosophy of much of its primary motivating force but also to create a dominant ethos wherein certain kinds of intellectual creativity become well-nigh unthinkable because the thinkable is fenced around with such a range of professional caveats. So when a ‘continental’ thinker like Gilles Deleuze puts the case – and seeks to show by example – that philosophy should properly be in the business of creating rather than merely or exclusively analysing concepts this idea is apt to strike most analytic philosophers either as wilful provocation or else as a downright category-mistake.Footnote ⁸

However, there is nothing in common between the kind of conceptual creativity that Deleuze has in mind – a range of critical-exploratory procedures as demanding as they are inventive – and the kind that Rorty recommends with his notion of philosophy as a sub-branch of literature or literary criticism. What Deleuze seeks to do through his various terminological and other innovations is open the space for a speculative (and in that sense creative) approach that invents new ways of thinking in the absence of ready-made solutions to problems that happen not to fit with current modes of institutionally accredited thought. Or again, he operates on the premise that any putative ‘solution’ to them by currently accepted communal or discipline-specific norms will be one that simply conjures away those problems – along with whatever further complications might come up – by a wave of the standard, analytically approved, all-purpose conceptual wand. Hence also the extraordinary cachet presently enjoyed by the late-Wittgensteinian idea of philosophy as a therapeutic exercise in self-abnegation, such that its sole legitimate business is to talk itself down, through a schooling in everyday ‘language-games’ or ‘forms of life’, to a wise acceptance of its own imminent demise.Footnote ⁹ That this idea has lately come to exert a powerful influence even on thinkers in the ‘other’, echt-analytic line of decent from Frege and Russell is perhaps the most striking evidence that there is – and always was – something peculiarly terminal or self-exhausting about that notion of philosophy as solely or purely a matter of conceptual analysis. The problem was pinpointed early on by G.E. Moore, another founding figure, who remarked on the ‘paradox’ – perhaps more of a classic reductio – that a strict enforcement of that cardinal precept would quickly reduce philosophical utterance to a string of vacuous tautologies.Footnote ¹⁰ That is to say, if one adhered to the rule that every statement should meet the requirement of logical self-evidence or a priori truth – the latter understood in a strictly analytic, i.e., non-Kantian or non-synthetic way – then this would exclude any possibility of those statements having any factual, empirical, informative, or communicative content.

3

Of course there is still a great deal of interesting and valuable work being done under the broad description ‘analytic philosophy’, including some that ventures into regions of speculative thought that the logical positivists would surely have banished to the realm of ’empty metaphysics’. However, to that extent it is no longer ‘analytic’ in any sense that would set it clearly apart from the kind of thinking that more conservative or unreconstructed analytic types would describe as ‘continental’, most likely with no very flattering intent.

My point is that these terms have for a good while now been defined only by contrast or opposition, with proponents of each attacking the other more through a sense of vaguely focused suspicion or blanket hostility than through any substantive issue between them, or any that philosophers on either side could formulate in a coherent and convincing way. Now at last the situation is changing so that younger philosophers – some of them – can quite respectably combine an ‘analytic’ (in the broad sense) approach with an interest in continental thinkers such as Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze. As a result those thinkers are themselves undergoing a marked new phase in their reception-history whereby they have not so much been made safe for analytical consumption as made available for readings of a different, in some ways more rigorous or exacting character than typified their earlier fortunes at the hands of (for the most part) literary and cultural theorists.Footnote ¹¹ Just as (for instance) Derrida comes out of such analytically-informed readings as a thinker of far greater analytic power and acuity than his erstwhile detractors acknowledged so likewise those philosophers of an analytic bent who have read him attentively are also among those, usually of the middling or younger generation, who have responded to the challenge of his work by taking a fresh and innovative approach to the texts of their own formative tradition.Footnote ¹² Moreover, that element of ‘continental’ influence is helping to change the culture of misplaced specialism or misdirected expertise that has characterised so much analytic debate. Thus it tends to release just the kinds of speculative or creative-exploratory thinking that were hitherto very largely held in check by various doctrinal or methodological sanctions. By the same token it works to encourage what suffered a relative eclipse during the period of echt-analytic hegemony, namely the practice of philosophy as a mode of intensely reflective, self-critical discourse that finds two of its chief (albeit in other ways highly dissimilar) exemplars in Derrida and Adorno.

Rorty is right when he says that philosophers should give up thinking of themselves as experts in this or that technical sub-branch of the discipline – especially epistemology – since that claim most often comes down to no more than a misguided attempt to deck out their enterprise in the borrowed fineries of science. However he is wrong to conclude from this that philosophy, rather than a certain distorted or artificially narrowed conception of philosophy, has outlived its cultural-intellectual moment and should therefore now yield to a different, post-philosophical phase in the ongoing conversation. On the one hand he errs in supposing the mainstream analytic paradigm to constitute the end of the road that philosophy has been travelling ever since Descartes took the fateful turn toward epistemology as its putative foundation. On the other he mistakes the lack of self-reflective or critical capacity that typifies a good deal of analytic work for a sign that philosophy had better cultivate the kind of literary creativity – the free-wheeling openness to new turns of metaphor, modes of self-description, narrative invention, and so forth – which he sees as requiring a decisive break not only with the analytic paradigm but also with the entire previous history of thought to which, in many ways, that paradigm stood firmly opposed. Yet despite coming out very publically as one who had first espoused and then foresworn the analytic enterprise Rorty in fact continued to endorse at least one of its main suppositions, namely that concerning its own privileged status as – in both senses of that double-edged phrase – the ne plus ultra of philosophy to date. Had he not bought into this parochial self-estimate – had he recognised instead how it ran into various intellectual dead-ends through having closed off some promising ways forward from a history of far from moribund ideas – then he might have come up with some better alternative to that trademark Rortian endgame scenario. At least he might not have been led to frame so drastic and patently rigged a choice as that between ‘philosophy’ as the last redoubt of fusty academicism and ‘literature’ (albeit in his greatly expanded sense of the term) as synonymous with all the creativity or hermeneutic flair that ‘philosophy’ has managed to expel from its own discourse.

There is plentiful evidence, past and present, that this is indeed a false choice and one that numerous philosophers – among them, for reasons cited above, Derrida and Deleuze – have not for one moment felt themselves obliged or inclined to make. Thus seeing where Rorty's diagnosis goes wrong is also, for just that reason, an aid to seeing why the analytic/continental dichotomy is simply incapable of being drawn in any principled, consistent, or rigorous way. However there is more than one kind of creativity that stands to gain from an opening-up of those boundaries constructed within and around the philosophical domain by the drive to uphold a division of intellectual labour that first seeks to seal philosophy off against alien, discipline-threatening intrusions and then assigns its various sub-branches each to its own strictly circumscribed sphere of special expertise. Indeed it would be just another example of the same bad dichotomizing habit of thought if one connected any signs of new-found creativity or freedom from those earlier curbs and constraints with the growing extent of ‘continental’ influence on a once resistant but now more receptive analytic tradition. Equally significant is the evidence that many analytically trained philosophers are nowadays questioning that earlier, highly restrictive conception of their own proper role in relation to the various particular concerns – including the natural-scientific – that still provide much of their subject matter but which are no longer taken, in the Lockean-positivist manner, as assigning a strictly subaltern status to any such discourse on or about them. Thus the increased measure of speculative licence – in a strictly non-prejudicial sense of that word – goes along with an increased readiness to allow philosophy the scope to exercise its critical-reflective powers beyond the sorts of territorial imperative that hitherto governed its conduct.

This helps us to see how a philosophically informed treatment of otherwise very diverse topics can throw new light on those topics from an unfamiliar angle and at the same time work to strengthen our nowadays perhaps rather faltering sense of philosophy's purpose and relevance. Otherwise there seems little hope of its surviving the threats currently ranged against it from so many social, cultural, rival-disciplinary, and (not least) economic or administrative quarters.