Question Is it much harder to be a philosopher now (that is, to make a contribution to the discipline) than it was 50 years ago? Is philosophy like science in that there can seem at times to be less and less left for us to "discover," over time?

Accepted:
December 31, 2006

Comments

Yes to the first one, but no to the second one, and I think no to the second one even for science. What makes science, and philosophy, harder now, in a sense, is that they are both so highly specialized. Let me use an example from mathematical logic. Fifty years ago, you could pretty much become an expert in mathematical logic by reading and understanding one book, Stephen Kleene's Introduction to Meta-mathematics. I'm not, of course, saying that doing that on one's own was easy. The central results were not understood them as profoundly as they are today. Nonetheless, the contrast with today is clear. It's not so much that there's not much left to discover. It's that, to do any serious work, there is so much that has been discovered and so that one has to know.

I agree that it is more difficult to gain access to and to contribute to highly specialized and professionalized academic communities than to less specialized and less professionalized ones. Not all fields of philosophy are as highly technical as mathematical logic, but nearly all philosphical communities are highly professionalized and can be accessed only by those with strong professional credentials.

That said, contributing to a highly professionalized academic community is by no means the only way to engage philospohical issues in a profound manner: the classical philosophical texts and problems are just as amenable (or not) to human thought as they have been, and it is no harder for anyone to think philosophically about them now than it has been in the past.

Question Is it much harder to be a philosopher now (that is, to make a contribution to the discipline) than it was 50 years ago? Is philosophy like science in that there can seem at times to be less and less left for us to "discover," over time? Accepted:December 31, 2006

Question Is it much harder to be a philosopher now (that is, to make a contribution to the discipline) than it was 50 years ago? Is philosophy like science in that there can seem at times to be less and less left for us to "discover," over time?

Accepted:
December 31, 2006