The debacle of philosophy in the 20th century

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Can philosophy progress, or is there an eternal  dialogue on fundamentals that just keeps the issues in play without resolving any of them and moving on, like the successful natural sciences?  Unlike the progress of science,  there are signs of decline in philosophy judging from some of the schools of thought that achieved great prestige in the 20th century.

This situation could be seen as a comedy or a farce, but it should be seen as a tragedy because ideas have consequences and bad ideas are likely to have bad consequences. Some examples are Heidegger’s phenomenology, Sartre’s existentialism, Wittgenstein in both his early and later stages and the logical positivists/empiricists

On the bright side

Of course there are alternatives to the bad philosophers and a some  good philosophy may be done by people who have a notional allegiance to some of the defective movements such as “linguistic philosophy” inspired by Wittgenstein in his second phase.

Phillip Kitcher is reviving the science and practice-oriented philosophy of the pragmatists (Peirce and Dewey) and there are the critical rationalists.

I have taken out most of the post because I want to use some of it for a magazine. It will be substantially different but there is some overlap and I don’t want to prejudice their policy of publishing original work.

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One Response to The debacle of philosophy in the 20th century

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