PHILOSOPHY AT THE END OF THE CENTURY

Abstract

I survey the present impasses of Western philosophy and suggest a fresh beginning. The largest conceptual options at the present time are three: scepticism, cognitive privilege, and historicism. The first is a scandal; the second is rejected on all sides; and the third is now largely neglected. Historicism, or historicity - the notion that thinking is inherently historied, that thinking is history - is the single large novel contribution of modern philosophy to the principal conceptual resources of the Western tradition. Contemporary philosophy, particularly Anglo-American analytic philosophy, is essentially the continuation of seventeenth- and pre-Kantian eighteen-century philosophy distracted by nineteenth-century »irrelevancies«; and continental philosophy, chiefly French and German, is now disposed to conform to the ahistoricism of analytic philosophy. I recommend the recovery of historicism and identify a number of different strategies favoring such a policy - which I predict will have its inning once again in the next century. In particular, I scan the prospects of First Philosophy, closed systems, the resolution of the problems of reference and predication, the relation between nature and culture, between realism and idealism, and the nature and function of persons or selves. I find that contemporary philosophy must come to terms with the contributions of Kant's constructivism and Hegel's symbiosis and go beyond both. In the process of the argument, I sketch the general trajectory of Western philosophy up to our time.