Is anyone else sick of modern philosophy?

Some of the modern trends in philosophy are frustrating to me. For example, the fact that most philosophers seem like they have a disdain for the past. I'm going through a program in analytic philosophy and it seems like most people can't wait to get past the history of philosophy and get to the good stuff.<br><br>I've heard modern philosophers, including experts in the history of philosophy, belittle the ancient Greeks and call them "dilettantes" (not sure why that's an insult, but it seems like one). It's common to hear that after Kant, German philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel were just a couple of crackpots who didn't know what they were talking about. It seems to be assumed that if you're interested in Nietzsche, you're either some edgelord or a crackpot yourself.<br><br>There seems to be a growing trend in philosophy to make it strictly a positivist exercise. Many philosophers insist that if a question in philosophy can't be answered by science or statistics, then it's not even worth asking. For example, the nature of qualia can't be settled in labs, so why bother? What it means to be "rational" is also something that can't be settled by empirical evidence, so many philosophers see it, too, as a worthless exercise.<br><br>I read a paper from a philosopher at Princeton in which he insisted that if a philosophical argument's conclusion is already agreed upon by the majority of Earth's population, then the argument is worthless. This is someone in the field of ethics who does not believe that ethics can be of any real value to our personal lives or inform our decisions.<br><br>I've been reading a lot of continental philosophers, and while they have their own issues, they truly want to use philosophy to change human civilization for the better, and they think philosophy is powerful enough to do so. Many of them insist that we will be better off once we abandon science altogether and go into a post-scientific age.<br><br>That sounds crazy to analytic philosophers. The only thing we can do to change the world is by working with scientists. But as soon as the lab gets the final answer to questions like consciousness or free will, philosophy is useless. This is the only vision of philosophy that I see in the field currently.<br><br>The other trend in philosophy that I've noticed is that, while everyone seems to hate the history of philosophy, philosophers from ancient and modern times are still studied, if not revered. The problem is that they're only studied through the lens of how can they inform *current* debates. Many philosophers won't read a text if it doesn't in any way inform modern scholarship.<br><br>So if you want to read Kant, you have to read the papers from the last 20 years on Kant and how he informs modern debates in the philosophy of perception, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, etc. The problem is that these papers can only be understood if you understand the underlying debates in modern philosophy. It seems like in order to read Kant, you need to first study modern scholarship on perception, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, etc. *and then* you can read Kantian scholarship on how he informs those debates.<br><br>It's not like you can just go straight to the source anymore. I can't imagine going straight to, say, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and being able to understand it without first reading thousands of pages of papers on the modern scholarship that it informs.<br><br>This is a very frustrating trend in philosophy. It's like nobody cares about understanding the past or historical philosophers any longer. We don't read past philosophers in order to know the past. Anybody who knows anything about Nietzsche knows that he didn't believe in, or even think about, "will to power" in the way that scholars talk about it today. But we all pretend that he did because his actual views on *it* cannot inform any debates in modern scholarship.<br><br>It can be frustrating, and certainly disappointing, to read the actual text of a historical philosopher and realize that whatever they actually believed in has no place in modern scholarship. The way this is treated in academia is just to continue to use the philosopher's name while ignoring anything they actually said.<br><br>I don't think that anybody actually wants to completely abandon historical philosophers. I wish that philosophers today would stop trying to make philosophy a science or a statistics-based exercise. They're not doing science or statistics. If you want to be a scientist, join a lab. If you want to do statistics, join the CDC.<br><br>And I wish more philosophers would try to actually understand, sympathize with, and interpret historical texts for their own sake. I want to know the history of philosophy. I want to know how Western civilization has understood reality throughout history. I want to study the ancient Greeks and try to understand what it meant to live in those times, not try to see how they can inform debates on consciousness.<br><br>I want to know what it meant to understand causation in the 18th century. What it meant to call something "rational". How it was thought of to live a flourishing life. What it meant to be beautiful. What it meant to be in love. What it meant to love someone. I can't see myself ever being satisfied with that level of understanding without the context of history.<br><br>**Edit 2:** I am completely blown away by the response this post got. I never expected to see this level of engagement in anything I posted here, so thank you all for being so interested in this topic and for providing so many insightful comments. It's obvious after reading the comments that there are a lot of people who agree with everything I said. I am so glad I'm not alone.<br><br>I want to respond to a couple things I noticed, though.<br><br>One thing I think everyone can agree on is that if you go into philosophy to learn about the history of philosophy, you're in the wrong place. This is, apparently, a common frustration for a lot of people who join philosophy programs only to learn that no one actually takes the history of philosophy seriously, including the philosophers who specialize in it. This is why, as many have pointed out, philosophy is not to be confused with classics or ancient studies. The vast majority of philosophers want nothing to do with ancient texts.<br><br>The other thing I can see that people widely agree on is that if you don't like trends in academia or scholarship, you're in the wrong place. If I want to study ancient texts or Continental philosophy, then I should be in a completely different department with completely different methodologies and priorities. As I said in the OP, while Continental philosophy is in a much better position than the history of philosophy, many academic Continental philosophers see themselves as doing the same work as analytic philosophers, just with different priorities and different methods.<br><br>The same goes for how to study historical texts. In academia, it's standard practice to study historical texts by looking at what other people have said about them. That's what peer-reviewed journals are good for. When your job is to write peer-reviewed articles, that's mostly how you'll study texts. So if that's not how you want to study texts, then you're in the wrong place. I completely agree.<br><br>But isn't that a big problem? I truly can't be the only person who wants to treat philosophy as more of a humanistic exercise, someone who sympathizes with the historical figures, who is interested in learning more about the people who live in the texts. I want to study ancient Greece, not "ancient Greece studies". I want to study Kant, not "Kantian scholarship".<br><br>As I said earlier, there are academic fields that consider philosophy a humanistic exercise, but Continental philosophy has become a completely different method with a completely different set of priorities than just sympathetically interpreting historical figures. So can't we all just agree that there is a problem with the fact that if I want to study philosophy as a humanism, there is nowhere in scholarship for me to do this?<br><br>I think there should be a place in academia for philosophers who treat philosophy as a humanistic exercise. If that makes me a crackpot, I'll own it.<br><br>Thank you again to everyone who commented. This has been a truly insightful discussion for me and I've learned a lot from it.