ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY HAD reached a pretty pass by 2010. In the previous decade, many of the most eminent figures of the late 20th century—including Willard Van Orman Quine, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Jean Baudrillard, Bernard Williams, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Rawls, and Paul Ricœur—had departed for parts unknown. Both analytic and continental philosophy had long been in a period of codification and refinement rather than wild creativity or revolutionary overturning. No one was anticipating the thunderclap arrival of the next Wittgenstein or Heidegger; everyone seemed content to qualify or apply the results of their predecessors, and re-air the debates among them. Like other disciplines, and more thoroughly than most, philosophy seemed to have been successfully professionalized and contained within academia. Most of the work published in journals in almost any style was relatively inaccessible to nonspecialists. By 2010, the jargons of continental and analytic philosophy had been elaborated and refined for a century. Philosophers couldn’t speak even to one another, let alone communicate with the public. Among other things, this might have made it hard to attract students. And if you can’t attract students, administrators won’t hire professors.
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