The End of Analytic Philosophy
One of the nice things about having a blog and job security is that I can just make things up. So here's my sense of the recent historical trajectory of what can broadly be called analytic philosophy, and what I think that says about the current moment. 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 -- here's a discussion of Rorty cheerfully noting, in 1982, that analytic philosophy is held together mainly by a certain kind of style and sociological bonds among its practitioners. He didn't think it was a problem, and this more detailed but equally sympathetic metaphilosophical analysis comes to a broadly similar conclusion. It also doesn't strike me that there is any particular institutional crisis for anal