English is the language of analytic philosophy. 97% of citations in prestigious analytic philosophy journals are of works written in English, and 96% of the journals’ board members reside in English-speaking countries. That might be simply because of English being the world’s common language, but it’s having a detrimental effect on analytic philosophy itself. Deprived of the perspectives of philosophical traditions written in other languages and excluding those philosophers whose English or type of prose doesn’t pass the test of the journals’ gatekeepers, analytic philosophy has found itself in a state of decadence. From Socrates and Plato to Hume and Kant, and from Arendt to Wittgenstein, none would fit the current stereotypes of analytic philosophy. Filippo Contesi, Louise Chapman and Constantine Sandis offer some solutions to this contemporary malaise.   

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Floridi locates the roots of the problem in what he sees as the increasingly self-referential navel-gazing of philosophers. His solution was to reorient our attention towards our contemporary society and its reliance on information technologies, in particular.

Others before and since have pointed to different causes for analytic philosophy’s contemporary malaise. Some complain that it often relies on armchair speculation over the use of experimental data. Others  identify its problems with its excessive attempts to align to the mathematical method. In this essay we would like to suggest another cause of (and corresponding solution to) the decadence of contemporary analytic philosophy.

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Due in part to the general role of English as the world’s current common vehicular language, contemporary analytic philosophers are often pressured to publish their ideas in English, so as to increase the chances of their being taken seriously by the global philosophical community. In a recent study, 97% of material cited in a sample of articles published in prestigious Anglophone philosophy journals were found to be citations of work originally written in English. By contrast, prestigious non-Anglophone philosophy publications cited a much wider variety of sources: one sample was made up of 44% same-language sources, 30% Anglophone sources, and 26% all other languages combined. A similar predominance was also found in the composition of the editorial boards of prestigious Anglophone philosophy journals, where 96% of board members were academically based in majority Anglophone countries. Likewise, only one of the 100 most-cited recent authors in the standard-setting Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spent most of their career in a non-Anglophone country, writing primarily in a language other than English.

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These data illustrate the extent of the predominance of English as the language of contemporary analytic philosophy and of academic institutions based in Anglophone countries as the origins of the most influential analytic philosophy today. Those philosophers who manage to learn to speak and write the English language non-natively continue to have significant difficulties in passing academic peer review in English and in being hired as faculty. Yet majority Anglophone countries house only about 6% of the global population. Philosophical discussion is consequently deprived of a huge pool of philosophical talent. Given the tendency of native Anglophone analytic philosophers to remain monolingual, the discipline is additionally losing out on those philosophical perspectives that are afforded by competence in languages other than English.