philosophical pathways
I would propose that the first axiom (..) is the recognition that the main philosophical pathways of the twentieth century — analytic, continental, Marxist, Christian, etc. — are exhausted, at least in the sense of being filled out within the parameters these projects have set for themselves. Institutional, academic philosophy certainly seems on the precipice of a very rough ride, to say the least. Conceptually speaking, the problems are of neo-positivism and postmodernism: on the one hand, more than a hundred years of philosophers telling the world that we really only need philosophy to explain what science is doing (and, guess what? — administrators are now listening and figure this philosophical mediator isn’t worth the money); or, on the other hand, philosophers writing middling-to-bad poetry (in a world that has little use for good poetry) and sociologically tinged texts on how everything is power (“bodies and languages,” as Badiou puts it — except, he says, there are truths, and a truth is always the exception). This bifurcation into two dead-ends (..) has been caused by the modern trend whereby philosophy has been “sutured” to its conditions, for example to science in the case of Russell and Quine, or to poetry, in the case of Heidegger and arguably the later Wittgenstein.