This short piece is a response to Liam Kofi Bright’s essay ‘The End of Analytic Philosophy’. (It’s partially a response to Walter Veit’s same-titled ‘The End of Analytic Philosophy’ too.) Bright argues that young philosophers want to “change the world, not just understand it”. This is, of course, a rewriting of Marx’s well-known words: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.” Marx didn’t mention understanding at all. He didn’t even conclude, “not just interpret the world”. Bright, on the other hand, does say, “not just understand it”. Yet I’d argue that this is a difference that effectively doesn’t make a difference when the goal of radical political change is always and forever in the driving seat.
“[W]hen students ask us why they should major in something as apparently fanciful as philosophy while the world burns, we want to have something to say besides ‘stick with us, we’re pretty sure that any day now we will have a viable theory of reference magnetism’.”
— Liam Kofi Bright
Liam Bright’s Own Successor Paradigm
Liam Bright talks about there being no “successor paradigm” to analytic philosophy. Some readers of his work may assume that Bright actually does have a successor paradigm in mind — his own! Yet that won’t really be a successor paradigm at all: it’ll be a complete alternative. That explains why Bright believes that no successor paradigm could replace analytic philosophy.
All this chimes in with Christoph Schuringa’s ideas — and in many ways. (Schuringa’s relevant ideas can be found in his ‘The never-ending death of analytic philosophy’.)
Schuringa has written a lot on Marx. So perhaps Marx’s own well-known words against philosophy may well sum up Schuringa’s own position on analytic philosophy. Indeed, there’s a reference to “Marx on the ‘supersession’ of philosophy” in Schuringa’s academic webpage. Now are Schuringa’s words “supersession of philosophy” basically the same as Bright’s “successor paradigm”?
Both Bright and Schuringa believe that analytic philosophy is politically flawed and politically compromised. One example, among many, is the following extract from Schuringa:
“Philosophy as a discipline has a huge whiteness problem, and it is right that the hegemony of Western philosophy in the academy must be addressed if the curriculum is to be effectively decolonized.”
The above isn’t quite as shouty as Professor van Norden’s words (as can be found in his ‘Western philosophy is racist’):
“Mainstream philosophy in the so-called West is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic. [ ] Academic philosophy in ‘the West’ ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India and Africa. This must change.”
This means that Professor Norden trumps Professor Schuringa in that he widens the target to “mainstream philosophy” and “Western philosophy” as a whole.
Perhaps all this partially explains why, according to Walter Veit, naturalised philosophy wasn’t even considered by Liam Bright. That’s because this “third kind of philosophy” will inevitably be deemed to be politically flawed and politically compromised too.
Others on the Death of Analytic Philosophy
Many of those who write titles like ‘The never-ending death of analytic philosophy’, ‘The End of Philosophy’, etc. come at this issue from an almost exclusively political angle.
Bright and Schuringa themselves aren’t former analytic philosophers who rebelled against it, but were always on the outside looking in. The following is from one of Schuringa’s early academic biographies:
“I am Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities (part of Northeastern University), and Editor of the Hegel Bulletin.[ ] My chief interests are in the history of philosophy (especially Kant, Hegel, and Marx), in the traditions of Marxism and critical theory, and in social and political thought more widely. Specific current research projects concern Marx’s critique of Hegel, the concept of Gattungswesen, and ‘tragic’ conceptions of philosophy. My large-scale current project is a monograph I am writing on Marx. [ ] I was recently in the Philosopher’s Zone [ ] talking about the history, and prospects, of analytic philosophy [ ].”
There’s not much about analytic philosophy in the biography above — save for the final bit about “talking about the history, and prospects, of analytic philosophy”. In addition, none of Schuringa’s publications, dating back to 2011, can be classed as analytic philosophy.
Similarly when one looks at Liam Bright’s publications — no analytic philosophy at all. Take these titles dating back to 2014:
‘On The Stability of Racial Capitalism’ (2025), ‘Du Boisian Leadership through Standpoint Epistemology’ (2024), ‘To Be Scientific Is To Be Communist’ (2023), ‘White Psychodrama’ (2023), ‘Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory’ (2016), and Bright’s first paper, ‘What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?’ (2014).
Now there’s nothing wrong with any of these subjects being studied and written about. It’s just that they aren’t analytic philosophy. They are classic examples of academic political activism.
Neither Schuringa nor Bright are like Richard Rorty in these respects. They didn’t take umbrage at analytic philosophy after writing many — or even just some — papers within that tradition. They didn’t grow bored with analytic philosophy either, as some argue Rorty did. Instead, Schuringa and Bright probably had problems with analytic philosophy from the very beginnings of their publishing careers, if not even before that.
True of All Academics
Is there a (to use Bright’s words) “well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest” in other types of philosophy? In all other disciplines? What’s more, is it necessary that there should be “grand topics"? Much of what Bright says about analytic philosophy can be said about other types of philosophy and other disciplines too. But he doesn’t say it about them.
Bright states the following:
“Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983 — they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don’t know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining.”
Again, all the above can be said about all types of professional philosophers. It can be said about sociologists, physicists, political scientists, etc. too. What’s more, it can even be said about academic philosophers with strong political biases, especially if their own brands of politicised philosophy chime in well with the departments they teach at.
Bright also tells us that
“it’s not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field’s youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable”.
Readers may wonder if Bright has done any surveys or empirical research on what “the field’s youth” believe when it comes to analytic philosophy (or its “triple failure of confidence”). However, Bright does state the following:
“My anecdotal impression is that junior philosophers are hyper aware of these bleak prospects for anything like creation of a shared scientific paradigm.”
Without examples and detail, it’s hard to know which “problems” Bright is referring to. So it can’t be known if they have been “solve[d]” or not. What’s more, who, exactly, decides whether a problem is “worth solving in the first place”?
“Now is a time of woe for analytic philosophy.”
Bright’s essay, at least the extracts selected by Walter Veit, is hyperbolic and highly general.
For a start, why should analytic philosophy be seen as (or even be) “a [single!] research programme”? And why should there be a single “shared project”? Moreover, the examples Bright gives of a shared project (“analysing key concepts or a mutual commitment to the linguistic turn”) weren’t really “projects” at all — they were ways or methods of doing philosophy.
Oddly, Bright himself acknowledges that “the lack of such shared projects in themselves didn’t really cause a problem for the field”. On this, Bright mentions Rorty’s position that “analytic philosophy is held together mainly by a certain kind of style and sociological bonds among its practitioners”.
Analytic Philosophy and Science
Veit quotes Bright saying that “[a]nalytic philosophy has long had ambitions to something like scientific status”. That statement should really be rewritten as:
Some — perhaps even many — analytic philosophers in the 1920s to the 1950s had ambitions to make their work more scientific in nature. And, yes, sometimes some philosophers who had this ambition did reach the point of “cringingly insecure self parody”.
Interestingly, this was also the case with philosophers well outside the analytic philosophy tradition, such as Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, etc. This is something Veit too recognises when he says that
“in many ways naturalist philosophy can often be closer to the work of continental philosophers, who had naturalist leanings, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Georges Canguilhem”.
Colin McGinn on Philosophy and Science
In a sense, Bright’s point about the “science envy” (a cliché he doesn’t actually use) which analytic philosophers supposedly suffer from is answered in an article he actually links to in his piece. In that piece for the New York Times by Colin McGinn (‘Name Calling: Philosophy as Ontical Science’), he writes:
“[P]hilosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons).”
McGinn then added:
“I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics and chemistry [ ].”
This helps show readers that the New York Times piece which Bright links to shows us that he treats analytic philosophers almost as straw targets. No philosopher has ever argued that analytic philosophy is an empirical science. In fact, Wittgenstein and many others went out of their way to say that philosophy isn’t a science. This is odd, then, because Bright has a penchant for the logical positivists, who did see their philosophies as being “scientific”. Yet this too all boils down to politics. Bright has a penchant for the logical positivists because some of them were socialists. (Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap were socialists, as well as some lesser names.) So some of them, as a consequence, attempted to link philosophy (or their philosophies) to politics and societal change, just like Bright himself. (The logical-positivist movement actually included “conservative right”, “radical left”,” and “liberal” wings, who all lived and worked within “Red Vienna”.)
To return to McGinn.
McGinn does state that “philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science”. Personally, I’m not sure about that. However, what matters to me is that good philosophy does employ “rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being”… To qualify even more. I’m not even sure about all those characteristics either. McGinn has smuggled philosophical positions in with philosophical methods. (For example, “universality” and “the concern with the nature of objective being” are positions within philosophy, not ways of doing philosophy.) However, rigor, varying degrees of technicality and connections with the sciences are indeed important.
Whether all this makes such philosophy a science is another matter.
Science and Philosophical Naturalism
Walter Veit says that “[p]hilosophy in this vision is part of science”. He explains:
“Naturalist philosophers are excited about the progress enabled on old philosophical problems with the aid of the sciences, be that the mind, the nature of life, or the structure of reality.”
Veit even offers his readers some concrete examples of what philosophy could be like. He continues:
“[I] was able to work together with scientists, such as Nicola Clayton’s corvid lab, to bring us closer to answering what it is like to be a crow, my work with biologists at Oxford in measuring biological complexity, or my ongoing work on several projects together with animal welfare scientists.”
Is all that (as Bright puts it) “cringingly insecure self parody” too?
Veit also states the following:
“Some of my readers, no doubt, will already be skeptical of analytic philosophy, not because they necessarily share my naturalist view of how the field should operate, but because they have a fondness for philosophers such as Nietzsche and the like that fill popular book sections.”
I believe most of the above also goes for Bright, although not in exactly the same way. Bright has a fondness for philosophers who’re explicitly political (just like himself), regardless of how the “field of analytic philosophy should operate”.
Note:
Liam Bright has something to say about “puzzles” too:
“[W]e will, keep generating puzzles for any particular answer given, we will never persuade our colleagues who disagree, we will never finally settle what to say about the simple cases in order to be able to move on to the grand problems of philosophy.”
[Note the royal ‘we’!]
I too sometimes find some philosophical puzzles annoying. The problem here is that what many of the critics class as the “puzzles of analytic philosophy” aren’t actually puzzles in any strict sense of the word. Yet there are indeed puzzles in analytic philosophy: it’s just that critics deem many of the central subjects to be “mere puzzles” too.
