• Streetlight
    9.1k
    Maybe, maybe not. Not being a speculative dogmatist about the issue, I'm not particularly keen to rule one way or the other in advance of cases to discuss. What I do know is that philosophy has certainly provided very powerful lenses for how people go about framing issues - even if in a downstream, altered manner - and will continue to do so. The question is whether one contributes to that, and how.
  • Shawn
    12.6k
    I think that I wouldn't say analytic philosophy is over; but, the linguistic turn is, and that might be somewhat confused with or associated with analytic philosophy...

    Go fish.
  • Saphsin
    383
    Analytic Philosophy seems like it has been useful to politics mostly in pieces, like providing a toolbox of better arguments here and there. Not as much in initiating a holistic system of a thought, the debate surrounding Rawls & Nozick bores me to tears.

    I really like Erik Olin Wright's work. He's a sociologist, but his style comes from a group of intellectuals steeped in that philosophical tradition. If there's a resurgent political project in Analytic Philosophy, that's the kind of thing I'd like to see.
  • Snakes Alive
    743
    I do agree that a philosophy that doesn't spend its time making shit up serves a largely negative function, so can't survive as an independent discipline. But I also think that it doesn't matter whether philosophy survives as an independent discipline, any more than it matters whether astrology does. It affects little, matters little. It's been grandfathered in, and would never survive today on its own merits.

    To the extent that Anglo-American philosophy continues to exist, it will do so because it apes other disciplines, or flails to be 'relevant' to them by means of commenting on them. But this too is uninteresting, in my view, since typically philosophers are worse equipped to comment on these things than those who actually work in them. They tend to be dilettantes, trained with a generic 'toolbox' of techniques of inquiry that don't really work. And so they remain a kind of peripheral annoyance, but one that for the most part keeps to itself.
  • Ciceronianus
    2.9k
    I do agree that a philosophy that doesn't spend its time making shit up serves a largely negative function, so can't survive as an independent disciplineSnakes Alive

    But there are so many other disciplines making up shit--even philosophical shit. That will keep philosophers busy for many years.
  • Corvus
    2.7k
    In my view it is not wrong to say that the entire Philosophy from the ancient time of Thales up to now, could be defined as Analytic. The recent anglo-american analysts just made it more rigorous system.
  • 180 Proof
    13.9k
    Analytic philosophy marked the end of speculative philosophy; the demise of making shite up.Banno
    The start of conceptually coherent, self-consistent, clearly stated speculation (i.e. making up shite) perhaps. (Don't ask for examples or exemplars – that's for another thread.) You're just channeling a cranky Lord Kelvin's 'end of physics', y'know... Anyway, where would scientific or historical 'conjectures' be without speculation (such as Feyerabend's "anything goes" context of discovery)?
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