The End of Philosophy

The response to Heidegger in the analytical world is, to a considerable degree, a paraphrase of Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 essay “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache.” To the extent Heidegger intends to make philosophical claims with assertions like “the nothing nothings,” Carnap charges, his writings are utterly meaningless; to the extent that Heidegger is creating art, he does it poorly. Or, more likely, Heidegger’s work, like that of all metaphysicians, confounds art and philosophy:

To respond to such charges with a defense of the meaningfulness of Heidegger’s claims about “the nothing” would, however, miss the deeper point. Carnap’s analysis of Heidegger’s alleged “pseudosentences” is really ancillary to the project of rehabilitating philosophy as a discipline – a project driven by Carnap’s view of language. For Carnap, assertions are meaningless unless they have empirical content. And if they have that, they belong properly to the empirical sciences. Thus, for Carnap and many others in the analytical tradition, philosophy (at least, when properly done) has no substantive content; instead, it is “only a method: the method of logical analysis.”

This narrow view of philosophy – philosophy as a method of analysis – is grounded in a profound skepticism regarding our ability to discover truths about ourselves and our world through reason alone. Thus even analytical philosophers like Dummett – philosophers who “no longer regard the traditional questions of philosophy as pseudoquestions to which no meaningful answer can be given” – believe that “philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought.” Philosophy, the analytical philosopher concludes, ought to abandon metaphysics (thereby leaving the empirical sciences in charge of the pursuit of substantive knowledge) and restrict itself to conceptual analysis.