When one surveys the landscape of giants of English-speaking philosophy who have died during the last decade – Donald Davidson (2003), Carl Hempel (1997), Nelson Goodman (1998), David Lewis (2001), WVO Quine (2000), John Rawls (2001), Bernard Williams (2003), PF Strawson (2006) – it is clear that the discipline has passed a milestone. Only three of the “greats” of post-WWII Anglophone philosophy are still alive: Michael Dummett (b. 1925), Saul Kripke (b. 1940), and Hilary Putnam (b. 1926). All appear to be well past producing seminal, agenda-setting work, though perhaps Kripke may yet surprise.
There are perhaps a handful of living philosophers who can even pretend to dominate the central issues in the field – the nature of truth, knowledge, and value – like the recently deceased. John McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh stands out in this regard, though the range of philosophical opinion about his work is so wide that it is hard to see him occupying anything like the place of the recently departed. (A famous and influential philosophical naturalist, for example, refers to him as “McDarkness,” which is indicative of the extremities of opinion about his philosophical merit.)
There are other contemporaries whose work is “must reading” in various subfields – Kit Fine at New York University, Jerry Fodor at Rutgers, TM Scanlon at Harvard, Timothy Williamson at Oxford, and Crispin Wright at NYU and St Andrews are all obvious examples. But there is no one active today who seems poised to “set the agenda” for philosophy from Canberra to Los Angeles to Ann Arbor to Princeton to Oxbridge, the way the deceased greats of the last decade did.
The situation on the European Continent is not much different. Hans-Georg Gadamer (who died in 2002), the defining figure for post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, has had only one real rival for general philosophical influence, namely, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), but neither has left behind a student or disciple with comparable impact on the philosophical scene in Europe. A host of lesser figures who died over the last dozen years or so – Gilles Deleuze (1995), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1998), Jacques Derrida (2004), Paul Ricoeur (2005), and Jean Baudrillard (2007) – are largely more notable for their impact outside philosophy than for their legacies in the discipline.
Continental Europe, meanwhile, has witnessed an explosion of what is usually called “analytic” philosophy – meaning, more or less, styles of philosophy common in the Anglophone world, which are continuous with the modern tradition exemplified by Descartes and Hume – while the most important scholarship on post-Kantian “Continental” philosophy has been coming, ironically enough, out of America and Britain (GA Cohen on Marx, Hubert Dreyfus on Heidegger, Michael Forster on Hegel, and Michael Rosen on the Frankfurt School are examples). In scholarship on the history of modern and ancient philosophy, the interpenetration of scholarly cultures among the Anglophone, German, French, and Italian philosophical communities is now essentially complete.
The central fact about philosophy over the last fifty years has been the total professionalisation of the discipline: all those, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have died in the last decade were university professors. Kant and Hegel, to be sure, were university professors, and so too were William James and Martin Heidegger. But they are the exceptions in the pantheon of great philosophers, even after the era of the modern research university arrived in the early 19th-century. Schopenhauer, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, and even Wittgenstein, for example, were not primarily “university professors”, though most spent some time in that role. Philosophy is now a vocation, and its major figures are simply members of the profession, answering to “professional” expectations about teaching, publication in “peer-refereed” fora, “committee” service, and the like.
This fact – which is the fact that distinguishes the discipline of philosophy at the dawn of the 21st-century from the prior two millennia – invites us to recall the observation of Max Weber about the scholarly vocation: “I know of hardly any career on earth where chance plays such a role.” Could “chance” explain the figures who are dominant in the profession of philosophy today?
Perhaps, but it is not entirely “chance” that is at work. The sociologist Randall Collins, in his monumental The Sociology of Philosophies, has documented how, even before the professionalisation of the discipline, “connections” and group loyalties of one kind or another still marked the major developments in the field. Professionalisation has only exacerbated these tendencies. One can easily trace in contemporary philosophy the “networks” of those who take, for example, McDowell/Wittgenstein most seriously in philosophy of language and mind, and those who take Quine/Fodor as their point of departure. Contemporary moral and political philosophy is perhaps more diffuse, though even here a careful student of the profession will notice distinct chains of influence. To take a current example: the “make-it-up-as-you-go” ethical naturalism of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson (where morally appealing traits of people are deemed to be natural, the facts be damned) is taken seriously in Pittsburgh and Cambridge (Massachussetts), while the ethical naturalism (of Gilbert Harman, Stephen Stich and others) that is actually interested in what we know about human psychology sets the agenda from New Brunswick to Chapel Hill to St Louis. This brute sociological fact about contemporary philosophy– about hierarchies of prestige and influence – is what makes rankings of philosophy departments, and information about job placement, so essential to those entering the field.
The sociology of “influence” which determines who is taken seriously and who is “worth reading”, is only one aspect of the professionalisation of philosophy. The other, also noted by Weber, is specialisation. As Weber wrote:
[S]cience [i.e. Wissenschaft, meaning scholarly or method-based disciplines] has entered a phase of specialisation previously unknown and ... this will forever remain the case. Not only externally, but inwardly, matters stand at a point where the individual can acquire the sure consciousness of achieving something truly perfect in the field of science only in case he is a strict specialist. All work that overlaps neighbouring fields, such as we occasionally undertake and which the sociologists must necessarily undertake again and again, is burdened with the resigned realisation that at best one provides the specialist with useful questions upon which he would not so easily hit from his own specialised point of view. One’s own work must inevitably remain highly imperfect. Only by strict specialisation can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialised accomplishment.
“Specialisation” in philosophy has been the source of some of the most important developments in the discipline, from the dramatic improvement in scholarship on the major historical figures over the past fifty years, to the flourishing of scientifically-informed work in the philosophy of the sciences, from physics to biology. Yet “specialisation” has also given rise to the “chmess” phenomenon, as Daniel Dennett dubbed it. “Chmess,” Dennett writes,
is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. ... There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess. ... Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy [which reminds us of studying the higher order truths of chmess] ... but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other’s laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say...
Even some of the recently departed “greats” may turn out to be remembered as innovators in Chmess studies, rather than philosophers for the ages. On the other hand, the beauty of the modern research university is that it does “let a thousand flowers bloom.”
Dennett’s tolerant attitude is usefully contrasted with that of the American pragmatist Richard Rorty (1931-2007), who felt so confident that the philosophical problems of millennia –about the nature of truth and knowledge – were misguided and pointless (all cases of chmess?), that he wanted philosophers to give up on the traditions running from Plato to Hume to Hegel, to do “something else”. What the “something else” amounted to was, alas, never very clear – and why philosophers should have been thought especially competent to do it even less so. One doesn’t need to be trained in the history of philosophy, after all, to produce pablum about “liberal” patriotism, as Rorty, sadly, ended up doing. Rorty may have garnered a substantial following among those who knew little about philosophy and its traditions, but it is a safe bet that, in the era of intellectual specialisation, his actual influence on philosophy will be short-lived.
Rorty’s appeal may, however, be partly explained by a lingering public expectation about philosophy, captured by the fact that in ordinary language we talk of having a “philosophy of life”. Philosophy, both historically and at present, has only rarely offered up much that would qualify as a “philosophy of life”. And in the era of philosophy “as a vocation”, there is no reason to think it will do so. As Weber noted:
Science today is a “vocation” organised in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable condition of our historical situation.
This remains “the inescapable condition of our historical situation” nearly a century after Weber made these remarks. There will, we may hope, continue to be world-historical geniuses – “seers and prophets” as it were – but there is no special reason to look for them in academic departments of philosophy anywhere. From those departments, we may quite reasonably look for incremental contributions to understanding of our sciences, of our moral and political lives, and of our language and our mental capacities.
Many of the other accomplished philosophers who died over the last decade that I have not remarked on so far – Roderick Chisolm (1999), Joel Feinberg (2004), Stuart Hampshire (2004), R.M. Hare (2002), Robert Nozick (2002), Wesley Salmon (2001), Georg Henrik von Wright (2003), among others – did exactly that.
They practiced philosophy as a vocation, and they achieved excellence in the job. We should be grateful to them, whatever the verdict of history.
Brian Leiter is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He blogs on philosophy and the profession at http://leiterreports.typepad.com