Quote:
Emerson is no longer counted as a philosopher
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Isn't it the case that many people who would have been 'counted as' philosophers no longer are? Vast parts of what used to be philosophy have been 'hived off', in a vast exercise in intellectual delocalisation. The whole of science used to be the philosopher's domain. Psychology and Sociology used to be the philosopher's domain. In France, to a large extent, they still are: most of our prominent sociologists of the last decades of the last century were trained philosophers - Bourdieu is a prominent example. (In France, Freud is seen as a philosopher, and he is taught in the lycées in philosophy classes, along with Kant, Plato, or Marx. I'll leave it up to you what to think of that list).
I recall Stanislaw Andrewski arguing that the sociologist was - or should be - a social philosopher. Today, someone like Richard Sennett is as much an old-timey philosopher as he is a scientist. In anthropology, Michael Taussig is a philosopher in the continental style. Among historians, E.P. Thompson was a philosopher, as is someone, from another angle, like Daniel Lord Smail.
So it may be that philosophy is still kicking away - but not, by your account, in the halls of university philosophy departments.