Is analytical philosophy suffering a slow death?

A few years ago, while I was pursuing my Ph.D. at the University of Sydney, the philosopher Liam Kofi Bright wrote a provocative blog post titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. It painted a bleak and rather depressing picture of the field and its capacity to make progress.

Unsurprisingly, it caused, to put it mildly, a fair amount of controversy. While many argued against his pessimistic view of the field, my agreements and disagreements were largely the inverse of those of most of his critics. Like Bright, I share a negative view on the prospects of analytic philosophy. Yet, I did not share his bleak outlook that philosophy itself was doomed. Unlike him, I strongly disagreed with his assessment that there is “no successor paradigm” that could replace analytic philosophy. This successor paradigm is naturalized philosophy, and I found myself surprised that Bright did not really consider it.

In a brief comment on DailyNous (the news for the philosophy profession), I briefly raised that option, which most commentators seemed to neglect:

Here an old proposal: move on to naturalist philosophy in the style of Dennett, Churchland, Sterelny, and co.

As it happens, I always wanted to write a longer response to it, but to land a job in philosophy, there is little to gain from writing a blog or, for that matter, from criticizing the very methods of philosophers sitting on hiring committees. So I kept pushing it off, focusing on writing journal articles instead. But almost five years have gone by, and I landed the U.K. version of a tenure-track position more than two years ago, so I really have no excuse to push it off further now that I have started to blog regularly. Let’s get into it.

Bright begins his essay by asserting that:

Analytic philosophy is a degenerating research programme. It’s been quite a long time since there was anything like a shared project of analysing key concepts or a mutual commitment to the linguistic turn. But the lack of such shared projects in themselves didn’t really cause a problem for the field ... It also doesn’t strike me that there is any particular institutional crisis for analytic philosophy beyond the general woes of the humanities right now—and even here we may be doing relatively well.

The language of a degenerating research programme is harsher than it may at first appear. The terminology is due to the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, whose aim was to demarcate genuine science from pseudoscience. If one were to compare different approaches to philosophy, one might thus read Bright’s declaration that analytic philosophy is on its way to becoming a pseudophilosophy, only saved by the absence of a viable alternative. He contends that the confidence in analytic philosophy has taken three major hits:

Analytic philosophy suffers from a triple failure of confidence, especially among younger philosophers. People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place. The first two problems are resultant from internal pressures, the latter a mix of internal and external. However, there is no successor paradigm in a position to really take advantage of this weakness, and so the field listlessly drifts on, anxious and insecure and filled with self-recriminations.

The reason analytic philosophy hasn’t been abandoned like a scientific theory that fails to advance our understanding, Bright suggests, is not because of its merits or ideals behind it, but rather because of the lack of a competitor paradigm.