Philosophy + Critical Theory in the Age of Now, and Those of Before

Philosophy can be autonomous, totally distinct from the hard sciences and other areas of research, and there is no good reason why it shouldn’t be. The importance of the autonomy of philosophy is hardly damaged by Analytic claims about philosophy’s necessary relevance to science. That is, unless their use of “science” describes a particular “aggregation” of established work, or worse yet, a discipline itself, however broad. But if the criterion of scientific relevance refers only to the imperative that philosophy not be unscientific , that it not present claims directly at odds with what is known about the structure and components of reality, it is perfectly permissible for philosophy to deal in conceptual spheres that do not appear within science—and even permissible for philosophy to deal in constructs of its own making from top to bottom .  What philosophy often does is try to describe what is experientially ineffable, from an ordinary subject’s point of view. Science does not ...