In the early 20 th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the syntax of ordinary language, the validity of arguments, something very formal. This has kept alive the idea in France that if you’re looking for the meaning of life you turn to the philosophers and they might produce the answer in the form of an incantation, or a huge work of metaphysics like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, or just a short story.Īcademic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17 th century, as “the handmaiden of the sciences”: it doesn’t explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesnt really intrude into the public world. Back in the 18 th century, the greatest philosophical geniuses in France were Rousseau and Diderot, who didn’t write academic philosophy as such, and that tradition lasted right up to Sartre and his followers in our age. If you look at the continental tradition, in particular our colleagues in France, you’ll see a completely different conception of what philosophy is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. Philosophy is failing the English-speaking world
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