““Philosophy” is an almost impossibly broad category, denoting a vast collection of ideas, theories, methods, intuitions, hopes, and doubts from basically every human culture that has any written record (and probably all the ones without one as well). Thus, we must be careful when we talk about “what philosophers do” or “the current views in philosophy”. If we do speak this way, it is almost certain that what we really mean is “what this particular kind of philosopher, who publishes in my native tongue, is doing” or “the current views of the kind of philosophy I happen to have read recently and tend to like”. We should not confuse such limited surveys of a tiny sliver of philosophy for philosophy in toto.

“And yet, we do often engage in such an error—certainly, many philosophers do! I remember speaking to a philosophy professor who specialized in analytic philosophy of mind. I mentioned the work of Martin Buber, and how great an impact he had had on my thinking. She responded rather breezily, “oh, I think I read him during my undergrad work. These days, I really only read philosophers.” I was taken aback—she seemed to think that Martin Buber, one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the 20th century—didn’t qualify as a philosopher at all, presumably because he wasn’t an analytic philosopher, but rather a member of that amorphous and threatening mass known as continental philosophy (queue the Imperial Death March on your headphones).

“And, to be frank, it is very often analytic philosophers (at least in my experience!) that tend to draw the fence of philosophy in this hyper-narrow and exclusive way.1 Analytic philosophy—basically, post-Kantian English language philosophy that focuses on producing sets of indubitable propositions and relies on a strict forms of propositional logic to do so—has barely existed for 2 centuries.2 And yet many analytic philosophers seem to think that doing philosophy correctly basically means only reading other analytic philosophers and employing its methods, to the exclusion of just about every other philosophical school or method (excepting occassional references to big names from the past like Aristotle or Hume). Other contemporary approaches to philosophy, whether from the broad continental and phenomenological tradition, or the pragmatic/pragmaticist tradition (to speak nothing of Indic, Chinese, or other non-Western philosophical methods), are generally either ignored or explicitly attacked as insufficiently philosophical. It is, gentle reader, not a recipe for truly critical engagement with the world.

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