Much of Philosophy Today is Self-Indulgent - Walter Veit

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Much of Philosophy Today is Self-Indulgent<br>Can philosophy be saved?

Walter Veit<br>Aug 03, 2026

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Can philosophy departments survive the 21st century?<br>In 2016, the journalist Olivia Goldhill published a short interview with the provocative clickbait title One of the most famous living philosophers says much of philosophy today is “self-indulgent”.<br>Famous, indeed, for the philosopher in question was the late Daniel C. Dennett. If you don’t know him, Goldhill offers a brief intro:<br>Daniel Dennett’s philosophical achievements cannot be neatly summarized. To some, he’s familiar as one of the four horsemen of new atheism, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He’s known for his focus on Darwinism, and applying the evolutionary theory to ideas and cultural development. And he’s one of the greatest living philosophers of the mind, arguing that consciousness requires no magic other than the physical mechanics of the brain, that similarly complex robots would be equally conscious, and that the “self,” or ego, does not exist.

This is far from an exhaustive list given Dennett’s many contributions to philosophy, but what one should mention is that he was one of the last great philosophers, who not only contributed to a niche area of academic philosophy, but tried to change philosophy as a whole. It is in this context that one needs to understand his comments about the self-indulgence that left him “unimpressed with many of his contemporaries in philosophy”, as Goldhill paraphrased him.<br>“A great deal of philosophy doesn’t really deserve much of a place of the world,” he says. “Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest.”

As it happens, I agree with Dennett, but without being familiar with current academic debates in philosophy, it may be hard to understand where he is coming from. Does Dennett have an example? Yes! First, and foremost, analytic metaphysics.<br>Much if not all philosophical work in analytic metaphysics, for example, is “willfully cut off from any serious issues,” says Dennett.

I have criticized this literature myself previously on this blog in a post that has remained my most popular one here:

To Hell with A Priori Metaphysics<br>Walter Veit<br>Feb 16

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The problem isn’t that analytic metaphysicians aren’t smart, perhaps they are too smart for their own good even, for the belief that they can understand the fundamental nature of reality through pure reason alone. Almost all of analytic metaphysics remains insulated from and poorly informed about the sciences, trying to understand reality through introspection into their own intuitions about things.<br>While one might imagine that the philosophy of science is the least affected by this problem, work outside the philosophy of physics has also suffered greatly from self-indulgence.<br>To use an example without having to punch down on anyone, let me use Brian Epstein’s book The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Published a year before Dennett’s comments about philosophy’s self-indulgence, the book was awarded both the Lakatos Award (the highest honour for a book in the philosophy of science) and the Joseph B. Gittler Award (the highest honour for a book in the philosophy of the social sciences). Epstein could hardly hope for more.<br>And yet, these awards are somewhat surprising… since it contains disappointingly little contact with the social sciences at all.<br>Worse, despite Epstein’s promise that analytic metaphysics can cure the social sciences of their problems, Don Ross offered a detailed review lamenting that Epstein “does not provide an instance where a model, explanation, or hypothesis from social science is improved by specifying grounds and anchors for types.” How could no reviewer or the dozens of Epstein’s interlocutors have flagged this before publication? Might it be more important to engage with an objection from within analytical metaphysics than to actually show how analytic metaphysics can help? What should a social scientist should take away from reading this book? Perhaps that the application of ideas from analytic metaphysics in the social sciences wouldn’t be helpful after all. And they’d be justified to think so. In the end, it’s a book of one philosopher for other philosophers. And not for anyone else, which is just the self-indulgence Dennett criticized.<br>Worst of all, it sends a signal to young graduate students, who are the future of our field, that deep engagement with the sciences isn’t even necessary in the philosophy of science. Not to win the most prestigious prizes in the field anyhow. “It’s excellent evidence,” Ross said, “that much of the philosophical establishment remains rooted in neo-scholastic disconnection from science.”<br>It is no surprise then that John Maynard Smith warned...