Contemporary philosophy

• 1. Introduction

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  Contemporary philosophy is not a single idea or school of thought. It is an era, beginning in the early 20th century, defined less by any shared doctrine than by a transformation in how philosophy itself is practiced. The discipline split into two broad camps, analytic and continental, that differ not just in their conclusions but in their very sense of what a philosophical question is. And underneath both camps runs a deeper shift, one that had been quietly reshaping the field since the late 19th century: the professionalization of philosophy as an academic discipline. What does it mean when thinking for a living becomes a career with entrance requirements, peer review, and annual conferences? And can a discipline that once spoke to anyone willing to think still find its public? Those questions run through the whole story of philosophy's contemporary era.

• 2. Philosophy Becomes a Profession

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  Germany was the first country to professionalize philosophy. At the end of 1817, Hegel became the first philosopher appointed professor by the State, installed by the Prussian Minister of Education as a direct consequence of Napoleonic reform. What followed over the next century was a sweeping institutional change across Europe and North America. In the United States, reform of higher education drew heavily on the German model, and the professionalizing of philosophy followed. In England, the process was tied to parallel changes in universities, and T. H. Green has been put forward as Britain's first professional academic philosopher.

  The sociologist Thomas Kuhn captured the deeper shift with clarity. Once a field professionalizes, he observed, research stops appearing as books addressed to any interested reader and starts appearing as brief articles written only for professional colleagues who already share the same background assumptions. Philosophy today fits that description. Work in the field is now done almost exclusively by university professors holding doctorates, publishing in peer-reviewed journals. The general reader is rarely the intended audience.

  Two books stand as notable exceptions to that pattern. Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit were both written by professional philosophers yet reached far beyond the profession. Both became New York Times best sellers, an outcome the source describes as holding "the uncommon distinction" of work simultaneously meeting professional and popular standards.

• 3. The Institutions That Govern the Field

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  The American Philosophical Association is today the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. It was formed from a merger of the Western Philosophical Association and portions of the American Psychological Association with the Association itself. The organization runs three divisions, Pacific, Central, and Eastern, each holding a large annual conference. The Eastern Division Meeting is the largest of the three, typically drawing around 2,000 philosophers. It takes place each December in a different east coast city and doubles as the country's largest recruitment event for academic philosophy jobs.

  A 2018 survey asked professional philosophers to rank the top general philosophy journals in English. The Philosophical Review came first, followed by Mind, Noûs, Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Among journals devoted specifically to continental philosophy, a 2012 survey placed the European Journal of Philosophy first, ahead of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

  The Philosophy Documentation Center publishes the Directory of American Philosophers, the standard reference for philosophical activity in the United States and Canada. The directory comes out every two years, alternating with its companion volume covering philosophical activity in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and Latin America. Since the start of the 21st century, blogs have also become a venue for professional exchange. Philosopher David Chalmers began an informal listing of philosophy blogs that grew into a widely used professional resource. The ethics blog PEA Soup partnered with the journal Ethics to post featured articles for online discussion. The blog What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? brought professional attention to the experiences of women in the field.

• 4. The Analytic-Continental Divide

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  Analytic and continental philosophy share a common ancestor in the Western tradition up to Immanuel Kant. After Kant, the two paths diverged. German idealism grew out of Kant's work in the 1780s and 1790s and culminated in Hegel, who is viewed highly by many continental philosophers. For analytic philosophers, Hegel remains a relatively minor figure.

  The analytic program is conventionally dated to Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in the early 20th century, building on the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. Russell and Moore turned away from the dominant Hegelianism of their time, objecting to its idealism and its opacity. Russell's 1905 paper "On Denoting" is widely regarded as the exemplar of the analytic method. Contemporary analytic philosophy is typically characterized by precision on narrow topics and resistance to broad, imprecise philosophical claims.

  Continental philosophy's institutional roots trace to phenomenology, and Edmund Husserl is often credited as its founding figure. Franz Brentano, Adolf Reinach, and Martin Heidegger were also central to that early development. The continental tradition is harder to define by a single method, but several features appear consistently: a rejection of scientism, attention to how context, language, culture, and history shape experience, a concern for the relation between theory and practice, and a strong interest in metaphilosophy, the study of what philosophy itself is and should do. The tradition's movements include phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

  Geographically, analytic philosophy dominates in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the English-speaking world broadly. Continental philosophy prevails in Europe, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. John Searle, in an interview with Bruce Krajewski, acknowledged differences in style and tradition between the two camps but argued that the deep issues in philosophy cut across those distinctions.

• 5. Arguments About the Divide Itself

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  Timothy Williamson has called for stricter adherence to the methodological ideals of analytic philosophy. His argument takes aim at what he calls the "crude stereotypes" that each side holds of the other: that analytic philosophers do careful work on trivially small puzzles, while continental philosophers reach profound conclusions by deducing them from broad systems that lack supporting argument or clarity. Williamson distanced himself from those stereotypes but still accused analytic philosophers themselves of sometimes moving too fast toward substantial results via poor arguments, a charge more often aimed at the continental tradition.

  Richard Rorty, at the end of the 20th century, argued from within the analytic tradition that its practitioners needed to take seriously the lessons offered by continental philosophy. Paul M. Livingston and Shaun Gallagher contended that genuine insights exist in both traditions and can be brought into conversation. Richard J. Bernstein and A. W. Moore explicitly attempted reconciliation, using themes shared by scholars in each tradition as their common ground. The debate over whether the analytic-continental distinction carves philosophical reality at its joints, or whether it is more pejorative than descriptive, remains unsettled. It has been suggested that the term "continental philosophy" functions primarily as a label for types of western philosophy that analytic philosophers reject or dislike, a characterization the tradition's defenders dispute.