In What is Analytic Philosophy? (CUP, 2008 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/what-is-analytic-philosophy/AD2E62BC22FFF9363216428C1D9EDC81) Hans-Johann Glock asks whether analytic philosophy’s commitment to clarity, logic, and linguistic analysis has led to an overly narrow focus.
Aaron Preston, in an interview a few years back (2021 https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/the-illusion-of-analytic-philosophy-and-metaphilosophical-eudaimonism-as-personalism), compares Analytic Philosophy to Sophistry due to its reliance on unarticulated knowledge rather than defensible principles, even pointing out that analytic philosophy has marginalized other approaches that do not follow the same idea of linguistic and logical rigor by excluding them from debates. But the most interesting book on this topic is Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy from 2025 (https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3018-a-social-history-of-analytic-philosophy?srsltid=AfmBOopi6zMoEpCuQr8WdZ4Wxfp9DrrC5BYWdeq7MxzsneJlKauNeZyB). This work reflects on the dominance of analytic philosophy and its role in marginalizing alternative traditions, and it does so from a historical perspective, analyzing the external factors that led to the dominance of analytic philosophy in academia, such as how analytic philosophers managed to establish dominance in the publishing business, mainly in academic journals, which was and is gatekeeping in the strongest sense.
Morgan Gallo also deserves to be mentioned in this regard. In the article “Lost Connection: Philosophy’s Decline” (published in Medium in 2023 https://medium.com/@socialstocktrades/lost-connection-philosophys-decline-c13a754eda74), Gallo argues that analytic philosophy’s focus on hyper-specialized overly technical work has disconnected philosophy from public discourse. He describes the style of analytic philosophers as “impenetrable and stylistically barren prose.” While the decline of philosophy surely has multiple causes, the exclusivity and the gatekeeping of analytic philosophers had definitely played an important role. The same issues are addressed by John Mac Ghlionn in his article “The Startling Deterioration of American Philosophy Departments” (2024 https://jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/the-startling-deterioration-of-american-philosophy-departments/). It directly addresses the dominance of analytic philosophy and its role in philosophy’s academic decline, though it’s not a book and focuses more on institutional consequences than the destruction of traditions
What I am about to say is not “new,” and many better people have written on this topic. But perhaps my humble writing reaches the ears of someone who the others were not able to reach. I also speak from the perspective of someone who works as a continental philosopher in research areas that are heavily dominated by analytic philosophers, who are in charge of the journals and who don’t let anything through the gates that deviates from their belief-system. I speak from personal experience. And I am frustrated. I write this because I am convinced that philosophy could be so much better, which in turn would be so much better for so many people. I believe that philosophy has shot itself in both knees, by turning “analytic,” and by turning its back on non-analytic philosophy. If we want philosophy to mean anything again, we must thoroughly criticize analytic philosophy, criticize in the sense of delimiting its possibilities and impossibilities.
Analytic versus Non-Analytic Philosopher: Another Story of Marginalization
AI gave me this overview, which is probably “informed” by Schuringa’s recent book on Analytic Philosophy:
“Analytic philosophy has dominated Anglophone philosophy departments since the mid-20th century, particularly in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. Key factors include:
- Institutional Capture: By the 1950s, journals like The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and The Philosophical Review shifted toward analytic approaches, marginalizing pragmatist and continental perspectives.
- Methodological Appeal: Its emphasis on clarity, logical rigor, and engagement with science/mathematics aligns with academic trends toward specialization and empirical validation.
- Historical Context: The migration of logical positivists (e.g., Carnap) to the U.S. during the 1930s, combined with McCarthyism’s suppression of Marxist and other non-liberal philosophies, reinforced analytic philosophy’s dominance.
- Educational Structures: Philosophy PhD programs prioritize analytic methods, training students in linguistic analysis and formal logic, which perpetuates its dominance.”
For the historical context, it definitely also matters that analytic philosophy was the philosophy of the victors, and as we know, whoever wins, decides history. There was a clear normative distinction between the old way of doing philosophy, what was later called continental philosophy, and the analytic-logical philosophy of the anglophones.
The same is true, by the way, for the clash between Western and Non-Western Philosophy, for instance, how Japan, Korea, and China were engaging with Western Philosophy, based on the normative distinction between “modern Westerners” and their Scientific Worldview, and the backwards, stagnating, mummified Asian countries with their allegedly non-scientific and therefore “outdated” irrational, nonlogical, nonrigorous philosophies. The damage done on the intellectual level in the 19th and 20th century when Asian Philosophers frantically tried to adopt Western philosophies and cursed everything that was identified with the traditional ways, was immense; and some argue that it led to an identity crisis or a cultural-spiritual vacuum. In China, for instance, it took decades to escape the Westerners’ intellectual grip and to find the confidence to engage with and acknowledge their own traditions from a non-western perspective, that is, not in terms of the nomenclature and the perspective of Westerners, but rather reflecting on the unique potentials of these traditions. It took confidence to acknowledge that what is non-Western is not necessarily backwards, nor outdated, or in any way less good; and that a deviation from the Western Way of Scientific Progress does not lead to Irrationality, but perhaps to an ever better, and brighter, less-violent, less-problematic future.
In one regard, however, Chinese Academia is still struggling from the dominance of analytic philosophy, which is that the most influential philosophical journals are still under the strict control of analytic philosophers. Not only the ranking of universities, but also the ranking of journals is defined by Western practices and Western scholars, which also means that “academic success” is measured by Western standards. Among the top 50 journals, there is perhaps one that publishes work in Chinese philosophy. The same is true regarding African Philosophy, indigenous philosophies, Japanese or Indian philosophy. China tried to react to this onesidedness by creating their own very rigorous journal-ranking, and Chinese scholars who choose to publish in Chinese journals, are accredited in much the same way as if they would publish in Western journals. It is, what we call in German, a “Notlösung,” born out of necessity; but it is not the optimal solution to create a parallel system, because it does not the fix the main problem. It would be much better to have much more non-English and non-analytic journals within the already established journal ranking, thereby representing the diversity of existing viewpoints. Instead, most of the top Western journals are still dominated by English-speaking analytic philosophers, and other viewpoints are not represented in an adequate or fair manner.
This is not simply a language barrier, implying that English is the dominant language and people must learn English if they want their voices to be heard (“speak English or Perish“). There are major constraints also in terms of “What people can write about” (if they want to get published), and also “how people must write their papers” (if they want to get published). If you want to get published in one of the top journals it is almost mandatory that you…
- 1) write in English,
- 2) that you write about a topic from within analytic philosophy, and
- 3) that you write in an analytic style.
It is “almost mandatory,” I said, because there are some alternatives: some journals that focus on Non-Analytic Philosophy and publish Non-Analytic Philosophy in Non-English Languages. The problem is that All Non-Analytic Philosophers compete for these few outsiders, while the analytic philosophers share the majority of the cake (of the money, the success, the funding, the publicity) among themselves.
2. Publish or Perish, But How to Publish?
The Situation currently in Academia is defined by the motto: “Publish or Perish.” — Even from philosophers, people demand quantifiable results. A Major part of this amounts to publishing articles (other parts include acquiring funding, getting projects, patents (less common), publishing books, publishing textbooks, giving key note lectures, teaching hours, teaching evaluations, number of supervised students, and Ranking of your present and past universities).
If you do not want to perish as a Philosopher, you must figure out how to publish your Work. Here, condition number 2 needs to be considered: “Speak English or Perish.” If you do not speak English as an academic, you are naturally restricted to a very small number of publishing houses and journals. If you can’t even read English works, then you won’t be able to quote the “Big Guys,” which is one of the cardinal sins in academic publishing (“how dare you not quote at least one of the most famous philosophers, who happen to be English-speaking and probably analytical”).
Now you could rightfully object that AI has helped a lot in this regard: It has become much easier to translate any language into English, but this is not really true for academic writing. If you use state of the art AI (ChatGPT, Deepseek, DeepL) to translate your Chinese paper into English, this paper will definitely be “readable,” and there won’t be many mistakes. But it needs still hours and hours of polishing and editing before it would be able to avoid desk rejection, especially in one of the top academic journals.
The AI translation is not that good. Technical terms are mistranslated, there is no continuity in the translation, there are many stilistic issues, the biggest one might be that AI translations have a certain “style,” and are easily detectable as AI translations. Most of the editors seem to be allergic to any writing that was “touched” by AI, even if we only use AI to translate or polish our papers. Perhaps they think that it was AI coming up with the ideas, or they simply have a disdain for the specific style of AI writings.
Beyond that, it is also possible to detect whether an article has been written by a native speaker or not: I can easily discern from an English translation whether the author is German or Chinese, just by being familiar with both languages, with their sentence structure, with their grammar, with common mistakes.
There have been studies about a pro-English-language bias, and a negative bias towards non-English languages in journals, which means that if the editors have the feeling that the paper is written by a non-English-native, they would consciously or unconsciously rate it lower. One solution for this issue is to have professional copyeditors polish and edit your paper. For one 8.000-words article you must easily pay between $500 and $1500 (USD). I don’t know many young academics who have this kind of money; some more advanced academics might already have some kind of funding that can be used for copyediting; but then again the question is: how did they get the funding? without any publications you do not get funding, – we are back at the beginning : “publish or perish” – “speak English or perish”.
3. If you want to be heard, speak our language and speak it how we speak it.
The third aspect is about the style of academic papers. There must be certain constraints and there must be quality control for any form of science. One constraint must define how long papers can be. Most of the journals have a 8.000 or 10.000 word-limit, which is totally reasonable for most topics. But you could imagine that any approach that aims to combine historical and systematic research, or any arguments that only work based on a deep engagement with the existing literature, are thereby excluded.
The alternative for these lengthy papers would be to publish them as a standalone monograph, some journals allow authors to publish their lengthy articles in two parts, but journals who receive 200 articles per month and have an acceptance rate of 1-5% almost never publish two- or three-parts articles. This also means that academic works that are too long for journals and yet too short for monographs are in no-mans-land, they must be forcefully cut down or lengthened, which is not good for their quality. Also, anglophone analytic philosophy does not really appreciate monographs. One could joke that analytic philosophers stopped reading books a while ago, or that they do not have the time to read books; but it might be simply the case that the research practice and the way they do philosophy is tailored for short articles; they have adapted to this format; and their kind of philosophy works perfectly well within these constraints.
Side-note, this is where we could talk about the Ahistorical Bias within Analytic Philosophy. Only rarely you can meet an analytic philosopher who is familiar with any of the classics of philosophy. They might be familiar, however, with all the research articles of many analytic philosophers. It must not even be the case that they claim that the history of philosophy is irrelevant to their current research (even though some do think that), it could simply be the case that they prioritize engaging with contemporaries. They deem it more important to know what the already famous analytic philosophers have said. Why? Because quoting them and engaging with them is the way to get published. That is how they do analytic philosophy, how they get published, how they get positions, how they get money.
I was very recently at a conference where I met a few very succesful analytic philosophers. Succesful means: They have published many papers in top journals, have at least one position (full professors or at least tenured), and beyond that might have some prestiguous fellowships or research projects. They told me pretty non-chalantly that there is a certain strategy of how to get your paper published in these top journals, and this strategy looks somewhat like this:
If you want to get published in top journals, the first step is to find out who the editors and the reviewers of that journal are. For highly specific topics on very certain issues, it is fairly easy, they told me, to predict who the reviewer for their paper will be. Because you know who you are writing for, make sure that you have read most of the work of that specific reviewer. Engage with their work, quote them a lot, don’t be too critical, just point out one or two potential errors in their arguments. If you do that, they told me proudly, your chances of getting published are pretty high.
There are certain other requirements, of course. For instance, you must try to copy the style, that is: try to copy the formatting and structure of their papers, try to copy how they write it, speak their language, and speak it how they speak it.
They also told me that it is even better if you are already within that circle. There are certain PhD-programs, especially in the US at their top universities, that not only get you a degree, but also give you some kind of membership in a specific circle. What does that mean? Perhaps your Phd-mentor knows the editors of one of these top journals. Your mentor will also teach you all the tricks, and make sure that you follow all the rules. At minimum everybody knows that quoting each other is good for everyone within that circle. This is how you keep “the thing” going.
Who could argue that analytic philosophy is not successful and is not showing any results if they continue to publish in top journals, continue to be quoted, and indirectly continue to get the majority of the funding, the majority of the positions, and so on?
4. The Smaller the Better. Or, Don’t Think too Big.
Another reason could be that analytic philosophy is hyper-specialized. Their approach is to tackle with highly defined and cut-out issues of debates that have been going on within their circles for 50 or 60 years. They are dealing with very small problems in a very meticulous, logical, analytical way. And they have defined a specific kind of nomenclature, where all possible positions seem to be defined as a specific -ism; everybody belongs to a certain group. If you are not a relativist, you are an objectivist; if you’re not a materialist, you are an idealist; – or you are known for creatively combining two or more of these -isms. As long as you keep it simple and definable, you’re good to go. Good to be published.
In contrast, an expert for Kant’s philosophy has to deal with hundreds of years of academic engagement with Kant, and better also know Kant’s contemporaries, the German idealists, Neokantian, and perhaps even Post-Neokantian Philosophy (ideally this is someone who is also able to read German). Even the description of one of the problem of one of Kant’s Critiques takes hundreds if not thousands of words, and most importantly, probably cannot be defined by an -ism; and if it can be defined by an -ism, this definition itself needs a lengthy explanation and argumentation, but it never straight-forward. Non-analytic philosophers are very careful with ascribing any “-ism” to philosophical positions. One could say that they focus on the underlying problems, raise questions about these problems, make this problems question-worthy (fragwürdig); whileas “-isms” are used for specific answers to these problems.
Analytic philosophers, on the other hand, are dealing which much smaller problems that they have defined and branded in a specific way. They gave their own interpretations of these problems certain “nametags” and stored them away. For example: “This position is *insert nametag*: moral objectivism.” Whenever they write or talk about related issues, they simply refer to it by using these “nametags.” It often happens that instead of talking about what exact problem “moral objectivism” (or any other -ism) was initially the answer for, analytic philosophers instead talk about the problems of “moral objectivism,” perhaps in comparison with other -isms. This could still be done with reference to the initial problem, but often turns into purely semantic or logical debates about issues that emerged from the answers that were given, without any reference to the initial problem.
This also has to do with the fact that their “tags” are often associated with the name of one of the famous analytic philosophers. – They often refer to the viewpoint of specific famous philosophers. If they have to explain a specific position, they will refer to standard definitions, which are definitions that you can find in their own analytic handbooks of philosophy (circular).
The main point here is that analytic philosophers do not shy away from authoritative arguments: something is true because one of the famous analytic philosophers has said it; and also, that it has become standard practice to throw around “nametags” to refer to specific answers to problems and less common to actually refer to the underlying problems. In short, analytic philosophers are distancing themselves more and more from the things they are talking about.
I am sure that many of my readers are familiar with what I am describing here: Analytic Philosophers tend to talk about the positions of X regarding the problem a, comparing it with the objection of Y, throwing in another viewpoint from Z, and often seem to completely lose themselves in formal debates about logical or semantic issues of either X, Y, or Z, while totally losing sight of the initial problem a.
If continental philosophers want to join these debates and ideally publish a paper in this context, they must first engage with X, Y, and Z, because the editors of top journals are analytic philosophers who think doing philosophy means exactly that: engaging (and quoting) X, Y, and Z. If you want to say something about problem a, but don’t think it is necessary to engage with what X, Y, and Z have said to each other for many years (perhaps because you think that they have completely “lost touch” with the initial problem), you are deemed *ignorant.* In a way, you actually are ignorant: You are ignoring the scientific practices of analytic philosophers, you are ignoring their back-and-forth (which must be important because it was published in top journals). “Knowing the literature” does not mean that you are getting closer to the problem a, it just means getting familiar with what certain big voices have said to each other. Unfortunately, this familiarity has now become a precondition for publishing in top journals. It has become standard scientific practice.
Additionally, because Analytic Philosophy has been dominant for so long and is still dominant, what non-analytic philosophers must do before they can “start doing philosophy” is that they must “destruct” the common analytic misunderstandings and simplifications of a specific philosopher, for instance by showing that Kant’s philosophy cannot be boiled down to any of the existing nomenclature or “-isms.” The real problems, the interesting problems, are not easily definable (that makes them so interesting); they are covered up by what X, Y, Z have said to each other and by how they have defined them. It takes thousands of words within a paper to dig out the real problem, criticize analytic philosophy for simplification, and thereby “revive” the actual problems of any of the classic philosophers.
Furthermore, if someone would try to engage with an analytic philosopher by criticizing their basic assumptions, thereby showing their indebtedness to and rootedness in history, this would not be regarded as “analytic philosophy” anymore, and would probably therefore be desk-rejected. Why? Because criticizing basic assumptions is not done on the logical or semantic level. It is not “analytical” in the sense of analytic philosophy; but is a challenge to the very framework of analytic philosophy itself. It is rare that analytic philosophers allow someone to challenge the very foundation their analytic cardhouse has been built on. All their success, their positions, their funding, their reputation is attached to this cardhouse. They might be willing to hear you if you agree to come inside and leave the foundations as they were. But why should they listen to someone who threatens their career?
Academic means Analytical?
But let us get back to the constraints for publishing papers in academia. We mentioned that there is a constraint in terms of how long the articles can be. This might not be the biggest constraint, and it is surely possible to write excellent and brilliant non-analytic philosophy articles that are under 8.000 or even 6.000 words; questionable is the disdain for monographs though; and most European Countries, even though analytic philosophy is still dominant everywhere, still value academic monographs and in-depth historical and systematic research.
Another constraint is how these articles must be written. This is a constraint of style. Again, this is determined by science itself and by the criteria that society agreed upon over centuries. That there are certain constraints for how a paper should be written is totally reasonable, and I am not arguing that we should get rid of all limitations and allow anything. The problem might be that due to the dominance of analytic philosophy, their style has become dominant; and that academic philosophers are advised to write in an analytic style, even when they write about non-analytic topics. What is part of this analytic style?