Why Post War Philosophy turned to shit

There was a time when first rate Mathematicians and Physicists looked for allies among the Philosophers. Indeed, there were Mathematicians who were also philosophers. But, over the course of the Nineteen Twenties, it became clear that Philosophy was too heavily armored against imaginary threats to keep its head above water, let alone swim abreast of Mathematical and Scientific advances.

Still the fact remains that Husserl in his prime was useful to first rate mathematicians like Hermann Weyl. Post war philosophers have been utterly useless because they seek to justify stupid or paranoid beliefs of a 'virtue signalling' sort. Their lucubrations have inspired utter cretinism of the sort parodied by Sokal.

There are no post-war philosophers who are not ridiculous- even Hilary Putnam or David Lewis whose later work was plain silly.

Consider the following paragraph by Colin Koopman writing in Aeon- 

Imagine you are asked to compose an ultra-short history of philosophy. Perhaps you’ve been challenged to squeeze the impossibly sprawling diversity of philosophy itself into just a few tweets. You could do worse than to search for the single word that best captures the ideas of every important philosopher. Plato had his ‘forms’. René Descartes had his ‘mind’ and John Locke his ‘ideas’. John Stuart Mill later had his ‘liberty’. In more recent philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s word was ‘text’, John Rawls’s was ‘justice’, and Judith Butler’s remains ‘gender’. Michel Foucault’s word, according to this innocent little parlour game, would certainly be ‘power’.

It is certainly true that Plato invented the ludicrous notion that every turd has an ideal archetype it 'participates' in, and that Descartes' 'Mind' would end up divorced from Matter- and thus the clockwork toy of an Occassionalist God- and that Locke's own ideas were refutable by the experience of their inutility to get you a sinecure. Mill, poor fellow, ended his days acknowledging that increasing political freedom meant that voters would kick his notion of Liberty to the curb.

Scientists and Mathematicians contemporary with Plato, or Descartes or even Locke and Mill would have found something reasonable, or even valuable, in their work. They were abreast of their times. By contrast Derrida, Rawls, Butler and Foucault were ignorant of the great advances made during their own lifetimes and withal were as stupid as shit. The reason they had currency was because of a Credentialist Ponzi scheme which solved an 'information asymmetry problem' of a particular type. Essentially, stupid people got to advertise their sycophancy and willingness to spend their entire lives being as boring and worthless as possible in return for the prospect of a white collar job.

I say this with hindsight. It may be that the generation which came of age in '68 genuinely believed some apocalyptic event was imminent such that either Dr. Strangelove would prevail or else Professor Timothy Leary's acolytes would succeed in pre-emptively dosing the entire planet with LSD.

Oddly, Derrida, not Rawls, was the smartest of the bunch mentioned by Koopman. But, if there can't be a purely intensional text even in Maths, how the fuck could there be any such thing in natural language? To be fair, this was not wholly obvious in the Seventies. Indeed, Kripke seemed to have a workaround of a certain sort. But it is now obvious that 'univalent foundations' can't render anything a  self-enclosed 'text'. There must be something 'extensional' outside it.

Rawls was the second least stupid. But his theory of Justice wasn't just wrong for the technical reason Harsanyi immediately pointed out, it was actually utterly fucked in the head. Behind a veil of ignorance, people do exactly the same thing they do in real life- viz. plump for a collective insurance scheme with moral hazard safeguards. This is because of Knightian Uncertainty. Still, Rawls was reflecting the Arrow-Debreu idiocy of the Mathematical Economists and was a kind of totem for Liberals nostalgic for the Warren Court. My guess is that being taught Rawls as a sophomore pushed a lot of young people in the direction of the Federalist Society. His arrival, as a public intellectual, marked the departure of his students from an Episcopalian type of Left-Liberalism whose fruits had once been sweet but which would turn to identitarian dust and ashes over subsequent decades.

Butler and Foucault were stupid, though the latter was capable of one or two purple passages of prose, but they may have some importance for 'Queer Theory'. But their notions of gender and power are silly for the heterosexual majority who are not being forced by any sinister global conspiracy into having sex and cuddling with baby and so forth. Still, I suppose, they represent an accomodation with 'Neoliberalism'- i.e. outsourcing paranoia so as to enjoy a better quality of life- and thus will retain their niches within the Globalised Market for Meretricous Gobshittery.