Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Western philosophy > The context of the end claims

The Context of the End Claims

The end-of-philosophy claims cluster from the early nineteenth century on. The literature around them names several conditions: a philosophy that lost its place as the model of science, a subject that set the world before itself as a picture, and a turn to language.

A lost role after Hegel. Herbert Schnädelbach (Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, 1984, read here in its Spanish translation) dates an identity crisis of philosophy to the collapse of idealism. Philosophy ceased to be the model of science, lost its monopoly on defining what is scientific, and had to prove not its necessity but its right to exist. The ways out he names are making philosophy historical, and making science itself the philosophy.

The subject and the world as picture. Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) has man become subiectum with Descartes, “the relational center of that which is as such”, and the world “conceived and grasped as picture”. With Descartes, he writes, “begins the completion and consummation of Western metaphysics”, and “through anthropology” comes “the transition of metaphysics into the event of the simple stopping and setting aside of all philosophy” (tr. Lovitt).

The turn to language. Gustav Bergmann wrote in 1952 that “philosophy has taken a linguistic turn”; Rorty’s anthology The Linguistic Turn (1967) made the phrase current and already spoke of a “‘post-philosophical’ culture”. In 1979 he judged that analytic philosophy was “one more variant of Kantian philosophy”, thinking of representation “as linguistic rather than mental”, with philosophy of language in place of “transcendental critique” as the discipline that exhibits “the ‘foundations of knowledge’”: a change of medium, still “committed to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry”.