The dominant forms of contemporary Anglo-American ‘analytical’ philosophy tend to take their orientation from the success of the modern natural sciences in generating theories which enable the prediction and control of events in the physical universe. The dilemma for philosophy in the face of this success has been to establish a role which takes appropriate account of the power of the sciences while justifying philosophy’s own right to existence. The extreme response to this dilemma is suggested by Martin Heidegger, who, in his late work, especially the essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (1969), claims that the natural sciences have actually become what philosophy sought to be, by explaining the nature of what there is. This means philosophy has come to a certain kind of ‘end’. As a successor to philosophy Heidegger calls for ‘thinking’, which is concerned with ‘unconcealment’; the fact that the world comes to make sense at all, before it can become the object of true theoretical and other judgements. Such sense he associates with the ways in which major art changes how we relate to the world.
Views like this have been largely ignored in mainstream analytical philosophy, where the focus on epistemology and the revival of a metaphysics concerned with ‘what fundamental kinds of things there are and what properties and relations they have’ (Timothy Williamson) rarely involves reflection on just how unsuccessful the attempt to establish philosophical foundations for the scientific knowledge which determines the nature of our world has been. Agreement in epistemology and metaphysics seems only to be local and pretty short-lived, unlike agreement on many of the core scientific theories that underlie modern technology.
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