The Future of `Philosophy' in America

Abstract

Consideration of future of philosophy in America, if it is to be more than idle and irresponsible speculation, must first take account of present situation of discipline, and of recent and more mediate historical developments which have contributed to making of present. For some present situation is marked by displacement of once dominant analytic philosophy by, among other things, de-disciplinizing considerations of issues in fields other than philosophy, and by questionings of grounding assumptions of basic fields and attempts to create new ones. Central to these developments have been challenges to key notions of rationality, with implications for equally important notions of ''truth, ' 'morality,' humanism and human development. On important occasions these challenges were extended to sometimes latent, sometimes explicit, philosophical anthropologies and philosophies of history that previously undergirded philosophy as part of collection of beliefs and commitments which regarded certain intellectual traditions, with philosophy at apex, as part of an official nationalism (and, at times, racism and ethnocentrism) that presented Western European and American histories as the universal future for rest of world (John Rajchman and Cornel West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). A crucial result of these challenges is that philosophy is a discipline in crisis marked by serious debates, self-questioning, fundamental disagreement about its purpose and identity, and proliferation of agendas and styles of reasoning (Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1989, xi). In The Future of 'Philosophy' in America I intend to expend these explorations and characterizations of situation of philosophy through critical examination of possible ways in which norms and beliefs with regard to race, implicitly and/or explicit-