It may be objected that philosophy cannot possibly have been rejected when there are today so many academic philosophers, so many intellectuals who are called philosophers, and so many books on philosophy. Yet if one has any experience of contemporary academic philosophy and intellectual culture one knows that the philosophers who now exist, and the books they write, almost uniformly argue against a ‘previous conception’ of philosophy which is none other than the classical idea of philosophy deriving from Plato. It is now widely accepted that this idea of philosophy is no longer viable, that it is necessary to abandon this idea. This process of abandonment has been under way for some four hundred years. In the early seventeenth century the classical idea of philosophy was abandoned by Francis Bacon and Descartes, in the middle of the same century by Hobbes, thereafter by the British empiricists Locke and Hume followed by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment, followed in turn by the utilitarians, positivists, and pragmatists, then in the twentieth century by Marxists and postmodernists. The influential thinkers and intellectual currents of the past four centuries have all been abandoning the classical conception of philosophy as outdated, incredible, and undesirable. Yet these people still want something called ‘philosophy’. It is necessary to ask them why. How can it be that the thing they want is rightly called ‘philosophy’? Why have they not simply given up on philosophy and passed on to something else, as they have moved on from theology, astrology, and alchemy? What is the justification for continuing with the word ‘philosophy’?
