the future of philosophy

the ancients believed philosophy provided the means and the ends for solving questions of the universe, but then science came along and provided a more decisive way for proving many of these questions to be correct or not. so philosophy is left with two dilemmas. first of all, is science the correct approach for philosophy to model itself after? secondly, if it is, then we have the means for some of the ends, but not all. so, the debate is whether we wait for science to progress to the point where we have the means for all of the ends, or do we address all of the ends in the meantime using non-scientific approaches? so both analytic and continental philosophy are two sides of the same coin, a natural and expected evolution in the history of philosophy. the problem with continental philosophy is it doesn't approach issues with a non-scientific approach that is grounded in any sort of system resembling something that the ancients would've approved of. instead, it has undermined the spirit of the ancients in employing "anti-philosophy" (typified by someone like nietzsche), thus leaving philosophers with inherently flawed means for addressing ends that it has designated as unattainable. so it has essentially killed philosophy from both approaches (i.e., "philosophy is dead"), both scientific and non-scientific, and instead replaced it with anti-philosophy. anti-philosophy will continue to persist, as will philosophy aligned with science, as simply determining the ends as unattainable does not prevent the idea of progress occurring. in addition, a philosophy revival (which i will term "revivalist philosophy" for here on out and is mainly centered around the work of badiou, although zizek can also be considered in this category to some degree) has already started occurring by revisiting where philosophy first encountered a crisis point -- which i believe was caused by kant, including, but not limited to his idea of "the things in itself" (i might in a later piece explain why this created a crisis in forcing philosophy to go down the path of german idealism because the only other viable option was an acceptance of "non-western" metaphysics, a problem which threatened the stability of traditional philosophy and a problem which was postponed about a hundred years thanks to german idealism) in having its foundations threatened by a "non-western" realization that was countered by the implementation of a system with the absolute as a goal. it is this very idea of a system that allowed philosophy to "progress" along a western path that was still mostly grounded in traditional philosophy, but later opened the door for anti-philosophy. so the problems philosophy revivalists face are twofold. first of all, how do they reconcile the metaphysics of the ancients with the "horrible revelations" -- i.e., the undermining of traditional metaphysics -- of anti-philosophy? secondly, how do they establish a system with the absolute without having it devolve into anti-philosophy? thus, philosophy revivalists are about attaining a perfect philosophy from learning from philosophy's "mistakes" over the course of its natural evolution during its first incarnation (ancients through post-structuralists).

the prospects for philosophy at present are rather bleak. analytic philosophy's failure in the 20th century was not realizing how philosophy of language was supposed to solve all of philosophy's problems. instead, philosophy of language has taken a back seat to other issues, as it is no longer considered the sub-field that will someday solve all of philosophy's problems, and has been largely "outsourced" to linguistics. thus, it has moved from philosophy's domain to that of science. philosophy of mind will not be solved by science as some are hoping but will instead remain a quagmire with implications from computer science and neuroscience largely shaping opinions in the field. however, computer science and ai will simply introduce new questions into the field and will not provide hard answers for consciousness, nor will they provide adequate enough simulations to turn cognitive science into a true "hard science". analytic philosophy, neither by itself nor with the help of cognitive science, will be able to establish a "middle distance" with the proper analytic tools and categories necessary to analyze social and political issues that are predominantly addressed by continental philosophy at present. i think the only hope for analytic philosophy to truly realize its initial goals is to envision someday reaching some philosophical utopia, in which linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science somehow solve the mind-body problem by exhausting the complete domains philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and in doing so, uniting them as the same discipline that has solved the mind-body problem, thus killing two birds (the mind-body problem holding implications not only for philosophy of mind, but also philosophy of language) with one stone. if this were to occur, a "middle distance" could also be established, and social and political philosophy could be reduced to being examined on a cognitive level. as such, many of philosophy's original problems would be solved and viable frameworks could be established for other areas of philosophy (the viable frameworks rendering continental approaches to those areas as obsolete) with only "transcending" issues like god and love and some of the fundamental questions like the problem of universals remaining.

continental philosophy will, if it hasn't already, pretty much run out of original ideas for new approaches as anti-philosophy will reach a dead-end. however, because analytic philosophy will not be able to adequately address many issues in social and political philosophy -- not to mention love, god, culture, etc. -- continental philosophy will continue to address these issues, with marginal success in my opinion. and there will be so much change in the world that there will always be new events to investigate, which will spawn semi-new, but ultimately derivate approaches in order to examine these events through different lenses. so, in short, continental philosophy will remain pertinent because of the changing content that it assumes in its domain, not because the methods or approaches of the field will make much "progress"; if the events of the world relatively stable, then continental philosophy would be less prominent since it wouldn't be as pertinent to social and political philosophy and would be left studying topics of love and god through an anti-philosophy lens. philosophy revivalists will have a different perspective on world events and topics like love and god, so it will cover the same domain as continental philosophy but with a different, more "optimistic" approach. however, i don't feel that it will be any more -- or at least to a significant degree -- accurate than continental philosophy in its ability to define the correct ontologies and the interactions among them in order to explain issues in social and political philosophy. and while its investigation into traditional metaphysical issues will result in some more fruitful conclusions than the relativized, nihilistic outlook of anti-philosophy, i don't feel that any true progress will be made, as the new systems created will not lend themselves to any sort of conceptual verification or siphoning off parts from metaphysics to physics. rather, the revivalist philosophy will simply turn philosophy into a means of creative expression -- borderline art, if you will -- that will instill a prolonged hope in people regarding philosophy again for the first time since early german idealism (i view pragmatism as a form of compromise, which isn't hope so much as it is an attempt to avert failure). however, i believe it is a false sense of hope, as i have indicated before since no "progress" will be made. so for those who think philosophy should be done for the sake of doing philosophy (a culture of its own and a self-contained system with no intentions for implications to "reality", i.e., thus existing exclusively in an imaginary domain much like a work of fiction), revivalist philosophy will be a success. for those who view philosophy as the pursuit of knowledge, i feel that it will be a big letdown. for those who feel that philosophy is the love of wisdom, while having a revival of philosophy focused on its roots and escaping the self-destructiveness of postmodernism might seem compatible with this belief, i also think that it is going to be a letdown. the reason for this is that, to put it in street terms, "the game has changed". what i mean by this is that philosophy has already proven itself incapable of fulfilling its original goals in that the ancients believed that there attaining wisdom and knowledge were synonymous, and we know this, after the descent of the world into modernity (and postmodernity) not to be the case (e.g., "the mad professor"). in short, the universe has become too complex to grasp (there is too much knowledge already for a person to understand and too many different experiences for a person to comprehend, and at the same time we know there are theoretical limits to what we can know or experience, so even though there are an infinite number of possibilities to explore, there remain some very basic questions that we know can never be answered) and neither a pure intellectual pursuit -- i.e., undertaking the task of knowing all there is to know -- nor an existential experience -- i.e., not existential as in the twentieth century philosophical movement, but an embracing of as many varied experiences as the world has to offer -- with both equating success with a person's ability to reach a position closer to infinity in either case offer a satisfactory solution to this problem. if one wants philosophy that entails the love of wisdom, i suggest acquainting oneself with some eastern philosophy/religion. however, one must be aware that in embracing this approach, one is also limiting the intellectual flexibility needed to also pursue knowledge after a certain point; thus, it appears that knowledge and wisdom are only compatible at a certain level, and beyond this the two paths diverge and one must choose whether to pursue one or the other (or neither).

finally, i would like to establish where i stand in having to arrive at some sort of uniform conclusion regarding the different approaches to philosophy. as far as a general belief about how the world operates, i am inclined to follow the realism of analytic philosophy as opposed to the anti-realism of much of continental philosophy or the idealism of german idealism and revivalist philosophy. the way i've interpreted the situation is that kant basically proved that we can never know with any certainty the reality external to us, but his position was predicated on acting as if there were an external reality. the following quote reveals this:

"But, unlike later idealists, Kant does not say that the mind creates objects but only the conditions under which objects are perceived and understood. According to Kant, "we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them." The attempt to preserve a realist orientation leads Kant to distinguish between the appearances of things (phenomena), as conditioned by the subjective forms of intuition, and the categories of the understanding and things-in-themselves (noumena). In brief, mathematics and science are true because they are derived from the ways in which the mind conditions its percepts and concepts, and metaphysics is an illusion because it claims to tell us about things as they really are. But since the mind constitutes the appearances and their intelligibility, we can never know noumenal reality (as it exists apart from mind) with any certainty."

so even though kant was a transcendental idealist, his philosophy had realist implications as his view was an "attempt to preserve a realist orientation". so, idealism aside, if we were forced to choose between either realism or anti-realism, kant would've supported realism. furthermore, i believe that the idea that we can never know noumenal reality with any certainty has been misinterpreted by anti-realists or idealists coming with an anti-realist slant that because we can never know a certain type of reality, we can therefore dismiss it. for one, the very admission that we can never know noumenal reality means that there is something in theory to know, which assumes that there is an external reality -- unless noumenal reality happens to be purely abstract or idealist -- but we simply just cannot access it. whether external reality is material or not, the fact that we can conceive it as something worthy of its own category instead of not conceiving it and only accidentally discovering it at a later date presents it in the context as something that is part of a larger system and whose existence is problematic with regards to this system operating with complete compatibility, not in the context of something that is absent and is problematic because it is completely unknown (which is different from being unknowable). the idea that there is an external reality but we cannot access it is akin to the idea that we cannot know with any certainty whether god exists or not, but god exists or does not exist regardless of our ability to determine that answer. so, in light of our inability to ever access noumenal reality, i believe we must turn the question from one on theoretical grounds to a matter of functionality. and for the most part, with very few exceptions, don't we act as though an external reality exists? doesn't all of our empirical knowledge (at least outside the field of psychology -- think along the lines of the natural sciences) presuppose that an external reality exists? and even if noumenal reality were to be abstract, aren't mathematicians able to access the realm of abstraction, even in cases where what is proven mathematically can never be found in the world of nature? all of these things seem to indicate that an external reality exists, so while i believe you can still be considered sane (and technically not incorrect per se) if you don't believe in an external reality from a theoretical perspective, certainly you would have to be considered insane if you were not to believe in an external reality over the course of how you conduct yourself in everyday situations and even most academic situations outside of a specific set of philosophical areas.

unfortunately, the german idealists not only rejected kant, but took his skepticism of reality to a new level, building complex systems that sought to integrate their version of reality with grander ideas about god and the truth and demonstrate how they were interconnected and only through their system could we best establish knowledge. the advantage of realism is that it circumvents this derailment by german idealism not by disproving kant, but using both theoretical and functional implications regarding realism (discussed in another blog entry entitled "in defense of realism" from his transcendental idealism. realism does not actually claim that we can prove there is an external reality, it just makes arguments that reinforce the likelihood of this scenario and demonstrate the sizable flaws and silliness in the arguments against believing in an external reality. so in the end, realism is different from kant's conclusions about reality via the thing-in-itself, but it is still derived from kantian and pre-kantian (in the era of modern philosophy) notions about our surrounding universe. so, this, in addition to my background in cognitive science (which i don't need to explain here, except to say that it simply reinforces my opinion due to necessity of a realist paradigm to properly analyze and integrate evidence gained from cognitive science research) is why i believe in realism instead of anti-realism, forms of german idealism, or other alternative schemas of interpreting reality. i also believe that analytic philosophy offers the best approach for tackling most issues in philosophy. that being said, i am not expecting it to successfully solve philosophy's problems, for if approximately 90% of the original questions posed by the ancient greek philosophers remain unanswered by math, linguistics, or science, i estimate that by the end of the 21st century at least 80% or so will still remain unanswered (and by the end of mankind, i would be very surprised if even 50% of the questions will have been satisfactorily answered). realizing the limitations of analytic's scope, i am willing to explore continental philosophy and revivalist philosophy for social and political philosophy, but i do not expect them to provide adequate answers for the world's problems, only to help inform me marginally more than if i hadn't read them. i don't expect either continental or revivalist philosophy to provide much insight into issues like love or god, as i believe those are best determined, after a certain point of establishing a knowledge base about the various arguments for these topics, through life experiences rather than through endless philosophical pondering. i wouldn't expect any contemporary philosophy to provide fulfilling insight about love or god any more so than watching a good film or reading a good novel that covers those issues, and i might add that a film or a novel would probably be more enjoyable as well.