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The End of Philosophy

Since the early nineteenth century, philosophers and scientists have announced that philosophy has ended, is ending, or should end. The claims can be sorted by the word each author uses, by what ends, and by what carries on.

The scientists’ version and the replies to it have their own page, as do the conditions behind the claims (The context of the end claims) and the question of whether philosophy has a task that could be finished (A finite task?). The end of history (Kojève, Fukuyama) belongs to the philosophy of history.

The kinds of end

The word each author uses for the ending is part of the claim, and several of the words do not mean “over”.

The sciences take over its questions. Auguste Comte’s law of three stages (Cours de philosophie positive) has every branch of knowledge pass from the theological to the metaphysical to the positive state, in which the mind “has given over the vain search after Absolute notions” and studies laws (tr. Martineau). What ends is theology and metaphysics; Comte’s own project is called positive philosophy. Friedrich Engels drew the materialist version: modern materialism “no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences”, and of all earlier philosophy only “formal logic and dialectics” survive (Anti-Dühring, in the marxists.org English). Heidegger (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, 1964, tr. Stambaugh) reads the sciences’ independence as the end (Ende) of philosophy in the sense of its completion (Vollendung), and “completion does not mean perfection”: philosophy “has found its place in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity”. Quine (1969) has epistemology fall into place “as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science” (“Epistemology Naturalized”).

From love of knowing to knowledge. Hegel’s aim was for philosophy to “lay aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge”, to become science (Phenomenology, preface, tr. Baillie). The end-of-philosophy reading is Engels’s: “with Hegel philosophy comes to an end” (1886), because Hegel had shown the way out of the systems “to real positive knowledge of the world” (Ludwig Feuerbach, in the marxists.org English).

Its questions are confusions of language. Carnap’s 1932 essay overcomes (Überwindung) metaphysics by logical analysis; “elimination” is the word of his English translator, Arthur Pap. It asks what is left for philosophy: “only a method: the method of logical analysis”. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus held that its problems had “in essentials been finally solved”, adding “how little has been done when these problems have been solved” (tr. Ogden). The later Wittgenstein wanted the problems to “completely disappear”, and philosophy to be given “peace” (Philosophical Investigations §133, tr. Anscombe).

It should act, not interpret. Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” A year earlier he had put it as abolition by realisation (aufheben): “You cannot abolish philosophy without making it a reality” (both in the marxists.org English).

The foundations are given up. Nietzsche abolishes the “true world” but calls for new philosophers. Rorty separates capital-P Philosophy, “the Platonic attempt to sift out the merely contingent and conventional truths from the Truths which were something more than that”, from philosophy, and asks “whether a culture could get along without Philosophy” (Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982, as A. Salihu quotes it). Derrida glimpses the closure of an epoch of metaphysics: “I do not say the end” (Of Grammatology, tr. Spivak).

Death is the scientists’ word, not the philosophers’: “philosophy is dead” (Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010). See Scientists on philosophy.

Which philosophy ends, and what carries on

Sorted by target, the philosophers’ ends almost all aim at metaphysics or at philosophy as the foundation that judges other knowledge: Comte, Carnap, Nietzsche, Heidegger (“Philosophy is metaphysics”), Derrida, Rorty, Quine. Hegel’s end is the passage from love of knowing to knowledge; Marx’s the passage from interpretation to realisation.

Most of the announcements name a successor: for Comte positive philosophy, for Hegel actual knowledge, science, for Marx philosophy made real, for Carnap “only a method”, logical analysis, for Wittgenstein clarification as an activity, for Heidegger thinking, “less than philosophy”, for Quine epistemology “or something like it”, in psychology, for Rorty lowercase philosophy, and for Derrida reading at the closure.

End or transformation

The field’s own frame for the debate is the title of After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, 1987). The editors place Rorty, Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Derrida under “The End of Philosophy”, and ten others in two “Transformation” parts: Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Putnam, Karl-Otto Apel and Habermas in one; Gadamer, Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Hans Blumenberg and Charles Taylor in the other.

Under other names