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Originally Posted by TimMason
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).
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To be fair, Emerson counted himself as a poet and not a philosopher--but for very interesting philosophical reasons. Obviously the analytic philosophers want nothing to do with his conception of language or thinking as art, etc. What is more interesting, however, is the fact that there is an underground of so-called Continental philosophers who treat Emerson's offspring, Nietzsche. Yet, as self-loathing Americans, they are the last to acknowledge Nietzsche's indebtedness to Emerson (after all the "Gay Science" is just an English translation of a German translation of Emerson's "Joyous Science.")
Most of what counts as philosophy in America and England is a historical argumentation over "the central issues," whichever of those happen to be in fashion at the moment. Struggling with the historical dialectic, coming to terms with its most difficult figures, reading works from other traditions is seen as undergraduate foolishness that must be left behind in order to do serious work. For example how can you claim to be an epistemologist if you've never read any Hegel???
I asked one famous epistemologist (whose shocking thesis is that context actually matters in acquiring and valuing knowledge
) if his work was rooted in some of the famous figures from the first half of the 20th century like Dewey or Wittgenstein. He answered, "Oh, I don't do the history of philosophy. I haven't read anything before 1970 in years."
Yeah, I like Bourdieu too as well as Foucault, Deleuze, etc. I think France is our best hope in terms of keeping philosophy alive. My own education in America was really abnormal. I too read Freud, Dilthey and a few other cast-offs alongside the historical canon...but even reading figures in the history of philosophy means that my graduate education was atypical to say the least.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
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.
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I agree with this. The funny thing is that analytic philosophers tend to blame the public for the fact that their work has no purchase in the culture at large. Meanwhile they fail to notice that a figure like Foucault has incredible purchase in other academic fields and is of interest to folks outside the academy. They don't get it that no one really cares about the mind/body problem anymore but they do care about how power and knowledge operate in contemporary society. I mean really, artificially positing a metaphysical disconnection between mind and body admits of no resolution--or admits of any resolution you're willing to make up which is why so much can be written while at the same time no one cares. Meanwhile social science picks up Deleuze's work on psychoanalysis and finds it immediately relevant. But, to the analytics, Foucault and Deleuze are "nihilistic obscurantists," which of course they must seem to someone who has simply skipped over the last 200 years of European thought.