Philosophy and Its Future

Philosophy is the only human enterprise that has created a field of study out of puzzlement over its method of operation. Nearly from the time of the earliest practitioners, philosophers wondered about how they could do what they were doing and frequently even about what they were doing in the first place. Of course, there always were unselfconscious souls who pursued what was of interest to them without concern for method or the arbitrary limits of fields of study. But such people tended to be labeled amateurs and dismissed as lacking technical sophistication. This left philosophy in the hands of professionals who crafted novel concepts, gloried in minute distinctions, and spoke in a torrent of neologisms.

Uncertainty about the nature, scope, and value of philosophy was, in the history of the discipline, often combined with arrogance based on its purported excellence. People supposed that since philosophy may accomplish nothing in particular, it must be good for doing everything in general—that is, for serving as the thought behind or the self-understanding of all human endeavors. In graduate school, I was taught that, as philosopher, I needed to learn no facts; I had only to think. The reason offered for this remarkable luxury was the sheer power of philosophical thought: by means of it, my professors seemed to agree, we can understand, criticize, and improve the meager cognitive output of everyone else.

This extraordinary combination of self-doubt and swagger played a central role in the social history of philosophy. Groundless haughtiness tended to suffuse the attitude of philosophers not only toward those who worked in other fields, but also toward fellow practitioners who used different methods of reflection or reached unfavored conclusions. The intellectual history of philosophy is, therefore, as much a story of summary dismissals as of respectful controversies. Lucretius dismissed Plato and was, in turn, disregarded by almost everyone in the Middle...