Philip Kitcher’s Purge of Philosophy

According to Aristoxenus, when Plato gave his lecture 'On the Good', he lost his audience.As he went on about numbers, geometrical figures, and astronomy, finally concluding 'The Good is One', they realized that they were not going to hear anything useful about means to health, wealth, or happiness.Most of them left disgruntled.According to Philip Kitcher in his latest book, What's the Use of Philosophy?, much of contemporary analytic philosophy has lost its audience, because it offers them nothing useful, though he makes no analogy to Plato (43, 58; all page references to the book).Kitcher's sympathies are with the fleeing audience.He wants philosophy to change, to win them back.Surprisingly, Kitcher treats his call for reform as novel.He complains that the question of the worth of analytic philosophy 'never even surfaces' and seeks 'to initiate a process of self-interrogation' (119, 145; his italics).This is unfair to a long-standing genre: critiques of analytic philosophy as pedantic, pointless, boring, shallow, trivial, irrelevant, etc.As an undergraduate at Oxford in the mid-1970s, I was familiar with such complaints; one of my tutors was Alan Montefiore, who had started in analytic philosophy, and still had to teach it, but had switched his own allegiance to philosophy in the style of Jacques Derrida.In his hopes for the future of philosophy, Kitcher goes further back into the past for a model, to John Dewey.In 1959, Ernest Gellner's crude attack on linguistic philosophy, Words and Things, had caused quite a stir: Bertrand Russell's denunciation of Gilbert Ryle's refusal to have it reviewed for Mind initiated a month-long controversy in the correspondence columns of The Times.Well before that, some of the same accusations were made against logical positivism, by both the extreme Right and the extreme Left.Throughout my life in academic philosophy, a recurrent event has been reading, with mild curiosity, the latest contemptuous dismissal of analytic philosophy.Many other philosophers have had similar experiences.