Nova et vetera

No one can rightly deny that there are important strengths of modern analytic philosophy. It places emphasis on clarity of definitions, rigor of argumentation and its logical forms, the centrality of empirical features of our experience, ordinary language as a key to thinking about reality, and a strong attentiveness to the modern sciences and their discoveries. In addition, at least some analytic philosophers in recent years have been busy rehabilitating a series of important classical themes that are of a metaphysical character, for example: the consideration of essences or natures, the reality of causality, and the notion of capacities inherent in larger substantial wholes (which is another way of speaking of potencies inherent in things). And we could even say that a whole branch of religious thought has opened up within analytic circles, attentive to issues such as reasoned argument for the existence of God, divine eternity and divine knowledge, the problem of evil, the metaphysics of the soul, religious experience, and the question of the truth of Christianity. This is all quite valuable.

However, we might consider here briefly at least three significant weaknesses that also should be named. First, analytic philosophy, at least in its early twenty-first-century instantiation has had difficulty assuring the centrality of philosophy in the life of the contemporary university. Arguably, this is because it has not succeeded in providing a unifying theory for the diverse forms of learning that are pursued in the university. Take for example your standard undergraduate course [End Page 585] schedule: Introduction to Medieval Chinese Literature, Calculus II, the History of Early Islam, Evolutionary Theory, Readings in Feminism from de Beauvoir to Irigaray. If the student asks him- or herself, “what holds all these disciplines together, epistemologically?” or “what makes for a synthetic point of view to understand the unity of various forms of learning and rationality?” or “What allows us to adjudicate between diverse fields of learning in the contemporary university?” … what course should he or she take in an analytic philosophy department to find out the answer? Typically, I think we would not find one. This means that contemporary philosophy is failing to articulate to the university why the university exists, or how the universality of knowledge exists—how all the bodies of knowledge correlate within a larger whole and what for. And if philosophy cannot do this, no other discipline can. Political liberalism and post-modern semiotic theory cannot do it. So, as long as analytic philosophy continues to predominate in universities with this aforementioned absence, they (the universities) will have a multitude of exciting selling points, but one fears that they will not have a soul. The technical and scientific, economic and legal prowess may advance. The fundraising may continue. Grants for scientific research projects will be given. But the center will be lacking. The heart of a classical education is based on the search for truth about the meaning of the whole, and this search is frequently absent in contemporary education, as the modern university becomes driven primarily by concerns for professional formation and cooperation with the culture of technological efficiency.

A second point can be stated more briefly, but it is related: analytic philosophy has an ambiguous relationship with the modern sciences. On the one hand, it is frequently employed to promote the discoveries of quantum physics, evolutionary theory, and neuroscience as these harbingers of progress usher us into the modern scientific age, assisted by philosophy, which has become increasingly the handmaiden of the modern sciences. On the other hand, modern philosophers can have a difficult time explaining why these scientific disciplines should not simply supplant philosophy entirely as an explanatory discipline. Extreme versions of eliminative physicalism provide a noteworthy case. Philosophers exert great mental effort to explain, in effect, how their discipline can be supplanted by being reduced to neurobiology and chemistry and, in seeking to do so, fail in truth to succeed (because modern scientific studies of physical phenomena can never be invoked to explain comprehensively distinctively human modes of conceptual thought). And thus, they illustrate negatively and inadvertently [End Page...