Jason Stanley (Rutgers) comments, and makes a number of sensible points (including ones he's made here in the past). He is surely right that the continuity between, say, David Lewis and Aristotle or Leibniz or Hume is much greater than that between au courant European thinkers like Zizek and any of the major historical figures in Western philosophy. One thing that occurs to me in reading Jason's essay is that a perhaps distinctive development in philosophy over the last 150 years has been the emergence of specifically anti-philosophical theorists, i.e., theorists who want to repudiate central aspects of philosophy's (purportedly) traditional concerns: one sees this in Marx and Nietzsche, and in different ways, in Dewey and Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Rorty was a minor synthesizer of this line of anti-philosophical thought, though he was too often read as attacking "analytic" philosophy, rather than as repudiating the entire philosophical tradition going back to Socrates and Plato. Perhaps part of what is happening is that in other parts of the humanities, the anti-philosophical theorists (those who repudiate metaphysics and epistemology as meaningful or fruitful activities, or, in any case, ones that philosophers have distinctive tools for addressing) are taken to represent philosophy, and thus insofar as contemporary Anglophone philosophy, in its professionalized form, is more closely aligned with the tradition than the anti- theorists, it seems beside the point?
Signed comments from readers on all these issues are welcome.
UPDATE: I suppose, predictably, the IHE article is bringing all kinds of interesting characters out of the woodworks (though there are several interesting commnets too, some also posted below here). My favorite is the one that comes to the defense of Carlin Romano without actually responding to any of the detailed evidence that Mr. Romano has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to philosophy. 'Tis also a shame that some commenters appear to have read Jason as attacking Nietzsche, which he was not doing at all.
REMARKABLY the disgraced ID apologist Steve Fuller shows up in the comments to attack the discipline that has expelled him. At the same time, some of the comments by self-identified "analytic" philosophers are becoming embarrassingly parochial, in ways that will just confirm the worst suspicions of colleagues in other fields. There is also the suggestion that philosophy should look to the sciences for its more congenial home--except, of course, scientists generally have an even lower opinion of philosophy than most humanists!
