Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning in the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy. The phrase is often confused with modern philosophy, postmodern philosophy, and with a non-technical use of the phrase referring to any recent philosophic work.
Professionalization
Process
is the social process by which any trade or occupation establishes the group norms of conduct, acceptable qualifications for membership of the profession, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs. The transformation into a profession brings about many subtle changes to a field of inquiry, but one more readily identifiable component of professionalization is the increasing irrelevance of "the book" to the field: "research communiqués will begin to change in ways... whose modern end products are obvious to all and oppressive to many. No longer will researches usually be embodied in books addressed... to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the field. Instead they will usually appear as brief articles addressed only to professional colleagues, the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only one able to read the papers addressed to them." Philosophy underwent this process toward the end of the 19th century, and it is one of the key distinguishing features of the contemporary philosophy era in Western philosophy.Germany was the first country to professionalize philosophy. At the end of 1817, Hegel was the first philosopher to be appointed professor by the State, namely by the Prussian Minister of Education, as an effect of Napoleonic reform in Prussia. In the United States, the professionalisation grew out of reforms to the American higher-education system largely based on the German model. James Campbell describes the professionalisation of philosophy in America as follows:
Professionalization in England was similarly tied to developments in higher education. In his work on T. H. Green, Denys Leighton discusses these changes in British philosophy and Green's claim to the title of Britain's first professional academic philosopher:
The result of professionalization for philosophy has meant that work being done in the field is now almost exclusively done by university professors holding a doctorate in the field publishing in highly technical, peer-reviewed journals. While it remains common among the population at large for a person to have a set of religious, political or philosophical views that they consider their "philosophy", these views are rarely informed or connected to the work being done in professional philosophy today. Furthermore, unlike many of the sciences for which there has come to be a healthy industry of books, magazines, and television shows meant to popularize science and communicate the technical results of a scientific field to the general populace, works by professional philosophers directed at an audience outside the profession remain rare. Michael Sandel's book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit are examples of works that hold the uncommon distinction of having been written by professional philosophers, but having been directed at and ultimately being popular among a broader audience of non-philosophers. Both works became New York Times best sellers.
Professional philosophy today
Not long after their formation, the Western Philosophical Association and portions of the American Psychological Association merged with the American Philosophical Association to create what is today the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States: the American Philosophical Association. The association has three divisions: Pacific, Central and Eastern. Each division organises a large annual conference. The biggest of these is the Eastern Division Meeting, which usually attracts around 2,000 philosophers and takes place in a different east coast city each December. The Eastern Division Meeting is also the USA's largest recruitment event for philosophy jobs, with numerous universities sending teams to interview candidates for academic posts. Among its many other tasks, the association is responsible for administering many of the profession's top honors. For example, the Presidency of a Division of the American Philosophical Association is considered to be a professional honor and the American Philosophical Association Book Prize is one of the oldest prizes in philosophy. The largest academic organization devoted to specifically furthering the study of continental philosophy is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.Concerning professional journals today, a 2018 survey of professional philosophers asked them to rank the highest quality "general" philosophy journals in English, yielding the following top 20:
Concerning continental philosophy specifically, a 2012 survey of mostly professional philosophers asked them to rank the highest quality "continental tradition" philosophy journals in English. Listing the survey's top 6 results:
The Philosophy Documentation Center publishes a well-known Directory of American Philosophers which is the standard reference work for information about philosophical activity in the United States and Canada. The directory is published every two years, alternating with its companion volume, the International Directory of Philosophy and Philosophers.
Since the start of the 21st century, philosophers have also seen the growing utilization of blogs as a means of professional exchange. A few notable milestones in this development include an informal listing of philosophy blogs begun by philosopher David Chalmers which has since become a widely used resource by the profession, the establishment of a partnership between ethics blog PEA Soup and the prominent journal Ethics to post featured articles for online discussion on the blog, and the role of blogs such as What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? in bringing attention to the experience of women in the profession.
Analytic–continental divide
Beginning of the divide
Contemporary continental philosophy began with the work of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Martin Heidegger and the development of the philosophical method of phenomenology. This development was roughly contemporaneous with work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell inaugurating a new philosophical method based on the analysis of language via modern logic.Analytic philosophy dominates in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the English-speaking world. Continental philosophy prevails in Europe, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and parts of the United States.
John Searle, in an interview with Bruce Krajewski, said while there are differences in style and tradition between analytic and continental philosophy, he thinks the "deep issues in philosophy cut across those distinctions".
Analytic and continental philosophy share a common Western philosophical tradition up to Immanuel Kant. Afterwards, analytic and continental philosophers differ on the importance and influence of subsequent philosophers on their respective traditions. For instance, the German idealism school developed out of the work of Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and culminated in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is viewed highly by many continental philosophers. Conversely, Hegel is viewed as a relatively minor figure for the work of analytic philosophers.
Analytic philosophy
The analytic program in philosophy is ordinarily dated to the work of English philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in the early 20th century, building on the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. They turned away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism and began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis based on recent developments in logic. The most prominent example of this new method of conceptual analysis is Russell's 1905 paper "On Denoting", a paper that is widely seen to be the exemplar of the analytic program in philosophy.Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests, assumptions, and methods—and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic movement between 1900 and 1960—analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."
Some analytic philosophers at the end of the 20th century, such as Richard Rorty, have called for a major overhaul of the analytic philosophic tradition. In particular, Rorty has argued that analytic philosophers must learn important lessons from the work of continental philosophers. Some authors, such as Paul M. Livingston and Shaun Gallagher contend that there exist valuable insights common to both traditions, while others such as Timothy Williamson have called for even stricter adherence to the methodological ideals of analytic philosophy:
The "crude stereotypes" that Williamson refers to in the above passage are these: that analytic philosophers produce carefully argued and rigorous analyses of trivially small philosophic puzzles, while continental philosophers produce profound and substantial results but only by deducing them from broad philosophical systems which themselves lack supporting arguments or clarity in their expression. Williamson himself seems to here distance himself from these stereotypes, but does accuse analytic philosophers of too often fitting the critical stereotype of continental philosophers by moving "too fast" to reach substantial results via poor arguments.