ABSTRACT

Richard Rorty recognizes the orientation of analytic philosophy away from the literary tradition to science in the early twentieth century. This is characterized by the desire to attain the rigor of the natural sciences, the humanities and high-brow cultural criticism. The way professional philosophy insured the perpetuation of its own disciplinary concerns through its claim to be an adjudicator of the valueconflicts, between kinds of knowledge. The crisis of the analytic tradition then is the collapse of the progressive development of an autonomous philosophy, and philosophy no longer functioning as the critical appraisal and dismantling of a closed mechanistic ontology worked up from the natural sciences. The proper end of philosophy is the realization of human freedom, and philosophy functions in public culture as a form of critical thinking to realize that freedom, then the ragpickers post-analytic philosophy has its critical purchase based on its reference to substantive values of the good life that transcends capitalism.