Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy.
The phrase "contemporary philosophy" is a piece of technical terminology in philosophy that refers to a specific period in the history of Western philosophy (namely the philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries).[1] However, the phrase is often confused with modern philosophy (which refers to an earlier period in Western philosophy), postmodern philosophy (which refers to some philosophers' criticisms of modern philosophy), and with a non-technical use of the phrase referring to any recent philosophic work.
Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation establishes the group norms of conduct, acceptable qualifications for membership of the profession, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs.[2] The transformation into a profession brings about many subtle changes to a field of inquiry, but one more readily identifiable component of professionalization is the increasing irrelevance of "the book" to the field: "research communiqués will begin to change in ways [...] whose modern end products are obvious to all and oppressive to many. No longer will [a member's] researches usually be embodied in books addressed [...] to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the field. Instead they will usually appear as brief articles addressed only to professional colleagues, the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only one able to read the papers addressed to them."[3] Philosophy underwent this process toward the end of the 19th century, and it is one of the key distinguishing features of the contemporary philosophy era in Western philosophy.
Germany was the first country to professionalize philosophy.[4] At the end of 1817, Hegel was the first philosopher to be appointed professor by the State, namely by the Prussian Minister of Education, as an effect of Napoleonic reform in Prussia. In the United States, the professionalisation grew out of reforms to the American higher-education system largely based on the German model.[5] James Campbell describes the professionalisation of philosophy in America as follows:
Professionalization in England was similarly tied to developments in higher-education. In his work on T.H. Green, Denys Leighton discusses these changes in British philosophy and Green's claim to the title of Britain's first professional academic philosopher:
The result of professionalization for philosophy has meant that work being done in the field is now almost exclusively done by university professors holding a doctorate in the field publishing in highly technical, peer-reviewed journals. While it remains common among the population at large for a person to have a set of religious, political or philosophical views that they consider their "philosophy", these views are rarely informed or connected to the work being done in professional philosophy today. Furthermore, unlike many of the sciences for which there has come to be a healthy industry of books, magazines, and television shows meant to popularize science and communicate the technical results of a scientific field to the general populace, works by professional philosophers directed at an audience outside the profession remain rare. Philosopher Michael Sandel's book "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" and Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" are examples of works that hold the uncommon distinction of having been written by professional philosophers but directed at and ultimately popular among a broader audience of non-philosophers. Both works became New York Times best sellers.
Not long after their formation, the Western Philosophical Association and portions of the American Psychological Association merged with the American Philosophical Association to create what is today the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States: the American Philosophical Association. The association has three divisions: Pacific, Central and Eastern. Each division organises a large annual conference. The biggest of these is the Eastern Division Meeting, which usually attracts around 2,000 philosophers and takes place in a different east coast city each December. The Eastern Division Meeting is also the USA's largest recruitment event for philosophy jobs, with numerous universities sending teams to interview candidates for academic posts. Among its many other tasks, the association is responsible for administering many of the profession's top honors. For example, the Presidency of a Division of the American Philosophical Association is considered to be a professional honor and the American Philosophical Association Book Prize is one of the oldest prizes in philosophy. The largest academic organization devoted to specifically furthering the study of continental philosophy is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
Concerning professional journals today, a 2018 survey of professional philosophers asked them to rank the highest quality "general" philosophy journals in English, yielding the following top 20:
| 1. Philosophical Review | 6. Australasian Journal of Philosophy | 11. Synthese | 16. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society | ||
| 2. Mind | 7. Philosophers' Imprint | 12. Canadian Journal of Philosophy | 17. The Monist | ||
| 3. Noûs | 8. Philosophical Studies | 13. Erkenntnis | 18. European Journal of Philosophy | ||
| 4. Journal of Philosophy | 9. Philosophical Quarterly | 14. American Philosophical Quarterly | 19. Journal of the American Philosophical Association | ||
| 5. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research | 10. Analysis | 15. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly | 20. Thought |
| 1. European Journal of Philosophy | 4. Inquiry | |
| 2. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research | 5. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie | |
| 3. Journal of the History of Philosophy | 6. British Journal for the History of Philosophy |
The Philosophy Documentation Center publishes a well-known Directory of American Philosophers which is the standard reference work for information about philosophical activity in the United States and Canada.[8] The directory is published every two years, alternating with its companion volume, the International Directory of Philosophy and Philosophers (the only edited source for extensive information on philosophical activity in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and Latin America).
Since the start of the 21st century, philosophers have also seen the growing utilization of blogs as a means of professional exchange. A few notable milestones in this development include an informal listing of philosophy blogs begun by philosopher David Chalmers which has since become a widely used resource by the profession,[9] the establishment of a partnership between ethics blog PEA Soup and the prominent journal Ethics to post featured articles for online discussion on the blog,[10] and the role of blogs like What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? in bringing attention to the experience of women in the profession.[11] [12] [13]
Contemporary continental philosophy began with the work of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Martin Heidegger and the development of the philosophical method of phenomenology. This development was roughly contemporaneous with work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell inaugurating a new philosophical method based on the analysis of language via modern logic (hence the term "analytic philosophy").[14]
Analytic philosophy dominates in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the English speaking world. Continental philosophy prevails in Europe, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and parts of the United States.
Some philosophers, such as Richard Rorty and Simon Glendinning, argue that this "analytic–continental" divide is inimical to the discipline as a whole. Others, such as John Searle, claim that continental philosophy, especially post-structuralist continental philosophy, should be expunged, on grounds that it is obscurantist and nebulous.
Analytic and continental philosophy share a common Western philosophical tradition up to Immanuel Kant. Afterwards, analytic and continental philosophers differ on the importance and influence of subsequent philosophers on their respective traditions. For instance, the German idealism school developed out of the work of Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and culminated in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is viewed highly by many continental philosophers. Conversely, Hegel is viewed as a relatively minor figure for the work of analytic philosophers.
See main article: Analytic philosophy. The analytic program in philosophy is ordinarily dated to the work of English philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the early 20th century, building on the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. They turned away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism (objecting in particular to its idealism and purported obscurity)[15] [16] and began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis based on recent developments in logic. The most prominent example of this new method of conceptual analysis is Russell's 1905 paper "On Denoting", a paper that is widely seen to be the exemplar of the analytic program in philosophy.[17]
Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests, assumptions, and methods—and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic movement between 1900 and 1960—analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style[18] characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."[19]
Some analytic philosophers at the end of the 20th century, such as Richard Rorty, have called for a major overhaul of the analytic philosophic tradition. In particular, Rorty has argued that analytic philosophers must learn important lessons from the work of continental philosophers.[20] Some authors, such as Paul M. Livingston[21] and Shaun Gallagher contend that there exist valuable insights common to both traditions while others, such as Timothy Williamson, have called for even stricter adherence to the methodological ideals of analytic philosophy:
The "crude stereotypes" that Williamson refers to in the above passage are these: that analytic philosophers produce carefully argued and rigorous analyses of trivially small philosophic puzzles, while continental philosophers produce profound and substantial results but only by deducing them from broad philosophical systems which themselves lack supporting arguments or clarity in their expression. Williamson himself seems to here distance himself from these stereotypes, but does accuse analytic philosophers of too often fitting the critical stereotype of continental philosophers by moving "too fast" to reach substantial results via poor arguments.
See main article: Continental philosophy.
The history of continental philosophy is taken to begin in the early 1900s because its institutional roots descend directly from those of phenomenology.[22] As a result, Edmund Husserl has often been credited as the founding figure in continental philosophy. Although, since analytic and continental philosophy have such starkly different views of philosophy after Kant, continental philosophy is also often understood in an extended sense to include any post-Kant philosophers or movements important to continental philosophy but not analytic philosophy.
The term "continental philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", marks a broad range of philosophical views and approaches not easily captured in a definition. It has even been suggested that the term may be more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers. Nonetheless, certain descriptive rather than merely pejorative features have been seen to typically characterize continental philosophy:[23]
Another approach to approximating a definition of continental philosophy is by listing some of the philosophical movements that are or have been central in continental philosophy: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and some other branches of Western Marxism.[24]
An increasing number of contemporary philosophers have contested the value and plausibility of distinguishing analytic and continental philosophy.[25] Some philosophers, like Richard J. Bernstein and A. W. Moore have explicitly attempted to reconcile these traditions, taking as a point of departure certain themes shared by notable scholars in each tradition.
The professionalization of philosophy
The Analytic / Continental divide
Analytic Philosophy
Continental Philosophy