Contemporary philosophy
...the day of the philosopher as isolated thinker – the talented amateur with an idiosyncratic message – is effectively gone.Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation establishes the group norms of conduct, acceptable qualifications for membership of the profession, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs.
[5] At the end of 1817, Hegel was the first philosopher to be appointed professor by the State, namely by the Prussian Minister of Education, as an effect of Napoleonic reform in Prussia.
In the United States, the professionalisation grew out of reforms to the American higher-education system largely based on the German model.
[...] Bentham, the Mills, Carlyle, Coleridge, Spencer, as well as many other serious philosophical thinkers of the nineteenth century were men of letters, administrators, active politicians, clergy with livings, but not academics.
and Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" are examples of works that hold the uncommon distinction of having been written by professional philosophers but directed at and ultimately popular among a broader audience of non-philosophers.
The biggest of these is the Eastern Division Meeting, which usually attracts around 2,000 philosophers and takes place in a different east coast city each December.
The Eastern Division Meeting is also the USA's largest recruitment event for philosophy jobs, with numerous universities sending teams to interview candidates for academic posts.
[14][15][16] Contemporary continental philosophy began with the work of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Martin Heidegger and the development of the philosophical method of phenomenology.
This development was roughly contemporaneous with work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell inaugurating a new philosophical method based on the analysis of language via modern logic (hence the term "analytic philosophy").
Continental philosophy prevails in Europe, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and parts of the United States.
[citation needed] Analytic and continental philosophy share a common Western philosophical tradition up to Immanuel Kant.
For instance, the German idealism school developed out of the work of Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and culminated in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is viewed highly by many continental philosophers.
[citation needed] The analytic program in philosophy is ordinarily dated to the work of English philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E.
[20] Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests, assumptions, and methods—and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic movement between 1900 and 1960—analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style[21] characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics.
[23] Some authors, such as Paul M. Livingston[24] and Shaun Gallagher contend that there exist valuable insights common to both traditions while others, such as Timothy Williamson, have called for even stricter adherence to the methodological ideals of analytic philosophy: We who classify ourselves as "analytic" philosophers tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically grants us methodological virtue.
Details are not given the care they deserve: crucial claims are vaguely stated, significant different formulations are treated as though they were equivalent, examples are under-described, arguments are gestured at rather than properly made, their form is left unexplained, and so on.
It has even been suggested that the term may be more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.
