On Philosophy, Found Here:
"The near future of philosophy will be the continued unpicking of analytic philosophy in order to reveal just how much its purported rigour is just a cover for another set of biases. Certainly there is value in it, but it has no flesh: analytic philosophy is a matter of rejecting meaning as a human means the term for a shallower conception of meaning that leaves the reader unsatisfied.
This would almost be fine if there were no meaning to be had; then philosphy would be a matter of slowly waking up to nihilistic reality, but analytic philosophy doesn't even address that well: the way in which it handles meaning is by rejecting that which cannot easily be put into words, and expressed mathematically.
After the boldness of the 20th Century, analytic philosophy lives on as a kind of pedants' corner. Unfortunately, logical positivism, having engendered a general cleanup of thought across disciplines, now leaves large areas of study distinctly less human in its wake.
Beyond philosophy, we have Dennis Skinner's influence upon psychology, leading to perverse failures to understand conditions of mind, since all that is deemed real is the externally measurable. This means that if one condition obscures another, where the second would be said to occur in the general population under the same circumstances, the second is said not to occur in this case, which cannot be the conservative assumption. This kind of thinking results in a general inhumanity in caring for people.
That is only one example, there are many fields that need rehumanising. This, I would suggest, is philosophy's most urgent task. But it is only the beginning of the process, since purported rigour feeds the cult of "expertese"; experts will be lothe to overturn the methodological aloofness that is intrinsic to their own social status. The war needs to be won in every discipline, so that the hardening arteries of positivism can be countered early in each student's development."
~Tim Wesson
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