Just when many of us had concluded that philosophy had finally breathed its last, the old girl has unexpectedly kicked her legs, dragged herself out of the muddy creek and staggered back into view. It is an image that resonates with me because I grew up on a farm where cattle occasionally slipped into deep muddy sections of a river. Once a heavy cow lost its footing, its own weight became its enemy. Every struggle drove it deeper into the mire. Without machinery there was often little anyone could do. It was a grim reminder that some things, once trapped, seldom escaped.
For much of the past half-century, philosophy appeared to have suffered a similar fate. Once regarded as the queen of the sciences, it gradually disappeared beneath layers of hyper-specialisation, impenetrable jargon and academic careerism. Many departments abandoned the great questions about truth, reality, morality and human purpose in favour of increasingly narrow technical disputes understood only by a handful of specialists. To the outside world, philosophy seemed to have become little more than an elaborate word game played inside universities.
Yet reports of its death may have been premature. Even publications that rarely devote much space to philosophy are now observing renewed public interest in the discipline. The reason is not difficult to understand. The modern world is confronting questions that science and technology alone cannot answer. Artificial intelligence forces us to ask what consciousness is. Gene editing raises profound questions about human nature. Free speech, censorship, identity politics and the limits of liberal democracy all require philosophical analysis before they can be sensibly addressed. Climate policy, transhumanism and the ethics of surveillance similarly demand reasoning that extends beyond technical expertise. In an age overflowing with information, wisdom has become increasingly scarce.
Ironically, many of the people who declared philosophy obsolete now find themselves desperately in need of it. Data can tell us what is possible, but it cannot tell us what ought to be done. Scientific knowledge explains how the world works, but not why certain goals deserve pursuit. Economics measures efficiency, but not justice. Technology provides power, but not necessarily direction. These are philosophical questions whether we acknowledge them or not.
There is, however, another reason philosophy is enjoying a modest revival. Increasing numbers of people have begun to notice that many supposedly settled intellectual orthodoxies are less secure than once believed. Replication failures in psychology, disputes over the interpretation of quantum mechanics, debates surrounding artificial intelligence and continuing controversies over consciousness, have reminded us that certainty is often more fragile than experts admit. The great philosophical questions stubbornly refuse to disappear.
This does not mean philosophy itself is beyond criticism. Much academic philosophy remains trapped in the same muddy creek that nearly claimed it. Too much effort is still devoted to polishing tiny conceptual pebbles while civilisation wrestles with existential problems. If philosophy wishes to remain relevant, it must once again engage with the questions that ordinary people actually care about rather than retreating into technical puzzles of interest only to professional philosophers.
The encouraging development is that many thoughtful people outside universities have begun reclaiming philosophy for themselves. Podcasts, public lectures, independent scholars and online discussions have created a flourishing intellectual culture largely independent of traditional academic gatekeepers. Some of the most interesting philosophical work today occurs well beyond the walls of elite universities.
Perhaps philosophy has survived because the human condition itself has not changed. Every generation still asks who we are, why we exist, how we should live and what can truly be known. Those questions cannot be eliminated by technology because they arise from the very nature of being human.
The old girl may still limp. She may carry the scars of decades spent bogged down in academic mud. But if philosophy is indeed climbing back onto firmer ground, that is something to celebrate. Civilisations rarely perish because they ask too many difficult questions. More often they decline because they stop asking them altogether.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/why-philosophy-is-having-a-moment
"The number of philosophy degrees handed out by American universities declined from close to 8,000 in 2011 to less than 6,000 in 2024; in computer science it more than doubled to over 100,000. In 2015 Japan's education minister asked the country's universities to take "active steps to abolish" social-science and humanities departments "or convert them to areas that better serve societies' needs". A love of wisdom would still ease entry into the British establishment, so long as you bundled it with politics and economics at Oxford. Now, as technology up-ends what society needs, philosophy is staging a royal comeback. Its practitioners are in high demand. Philosophy majors are already likelier to be employed than computer scientists, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Both freshly minted Wittgenstein wannabes and their professors are being snapped up by artificial-intelligence companies, where they test models' reasoning and imbue them with morals. Anthropic has a resident philosopher (main task: teach its Claude chatbot to be good). Palantir is run by one."