Why I Still Care About Philosophy
(And You Must Too)

by Mane Tatulyan

December 2025 – A spectre haunts the world — the spectre of philosophy. The spectre of a philosophy that died only barely interpreting the world, but never actually changing it. Philosophy is today a doomed shade that must carry its unbearable, stale being, trying to convince everyone of its relevance, of its utility, of its right to exist, of its once-existing title of ‘Mother of the Sciences’.

Total phantasmagoria. Every year, in all the universities around the globe, millions of papers are produced, yet their destiny remains unclear, vapid, imperceptible. We got philosophy campuses, departments, research labs, chairs… yes. Students visit them, classes are held there, conferences and congresses as well. Things happen in them, but they actually do not. Like zombies, neither dead nor alive, these entire structures are the fossilized reminders of what we have lost, the museic doubles of an almost extinct idea.

In three different continents, this is the academic landscape I witnessed. After being rejected from a dozen universities for 60 ECTs in my master’s application, after being told that my PhD proposal is ‘too ambitious’, that it’s a crime to combine phenomenologists with pragmatists, and that it’s even worse to speak about metaphysics, I understood that something was not right. In fact, something was wrong, very wrong.

This picture is the result of an overly bureaucratic, deeply capitalistic, and conceptually relativistic underlying education dynamics. The fall of philosophy into these constraining frames turned philosophical education into an alienated, sterile, and superficial process. What we see today is the progressive degradation of philosophical education due to a multifactorial variety of reasons: extreme bureaucratisation, total politicization, political correctness, nihilism and relativism, industrialization of knowledge, excess of specialization, intellectual irresponsibility, and the list can continue for a long time. As a consequence, the rigor of academic practice is weakened by the focus on minor and superfluous problematics, rather than exploring the role of philosophy in a deeper, historic, total sense, as well as its contribution to the (non-philosophical) public, and its value outside the constrained walls of the academic departments.

First of all, after the triumph of the positive sciences since the XIX century, philosophy had no option but to reject the possibility of a metaphysics, being forced to either be assimilated into the norms of the positive sciences or escape via the reactionary path of irrationality, anti-scientism, or literature. So detached from the ‘ultimate and supreme’ questions, forced to renounce its claim of first science as well as any absolute access to truth, philosophy has been reduced to a theoretical tool of treatment of local and particular issues, boxed in a series of knowledge units analogous to the compartments of the philosophy departments at the universities. Moreover, philosophy has turned into a mere circularity between academics; a purely academic affair, a technical and specialised subject, an indecipherable nomenclature only available for those who speak the academic jargon and are able to understand fancy-looking Latin or Greek terms. I can’t help but always ask: Who on earth can understand this? The answer is clear. I am also always perplexed at how academics take, let’s say, 100-page books and turn them into a 400-page analysis or ‘introductions’ of the former book. It does take some talent, I suppose. The result can only be: the reduction of philosophical reflection to a language that only a few speak. Isn’t this a return to a new form of scholasticism, where knowledge was only available for those who could read? Aren’t we reducing the vast task of philosophy to a technicality exclusive to an academic nobility?

And of course, the most important: You must publish! So you can get the dysfunctional circuit going nice and smooth. I remember that, maybe intuitively back then, but I told myself: ‘I will finish my PhD without having one single academic paper. I will!’ — and I have succeeded so far. Back then, more intuitively, now more clearly, I refused to contribute to that milieu. What the publishing circuit does is reproduce the standards agreed on the conceptions and the tasks that philosophy should fulfill today, ensuring that this norms are reinforced as habits of thought and continue to be replicated in the loop of students and professors — the latter having become effective transmitters of the ruling interpretations, perspectives and methods, carefully conducting their students through the predefined paths and making sure they don’t cross the lines towards unaccepted theories or positions that could be potentially discarded, criticized or not even be taken seriously. In sum, academic philosophy is the intellectual analogue of the reinforcement of one-dimensional thought, fulfilling the requirement of molding minds and predisposing them to be closed or open to certain ideas based on convenience. But do not worry, the papers are digital, so you won’t be polluting the environment at least.

In this context, academic philosophy turns out to be not just a quite defective form of philosophy, but also a deformation of the original desideratumunder which philosophy was born historically. Academic philosophers are alienated from philosophy, while philosophy is alienated from itself.

We are faced with a double tragedy: not only is academic philosophy in an impasse, but academia owns the monopoly of the main headquarters where philosophy is ‘produced’, since there is very little philosophical theory and practice happening outside universities. And then we wonder why philosophy has such a bad reputation, why it’s often (if not always) tagged as difficult, pointless, useless…

But philosophy’s current crisis is not a random, alien, or external process being coordinated by an invisible hand; it is the concrete consequence of concrete views, beliefs, and convictions turned into concrete approaches, practices, and methods carried by concrete individuals and institutions. So what if we thought that maybe, to improve philosophy, we could start, first, with improving philosophical education? Part of the failure in bridging philosophy with the world is, in fact, the failure of philosophical education.

If we think, since its beginnings, philosophy has had a pedagogical core: it taught us to differentiate our attitudes towards the world. From its origins, philosophy was an attitude, a new attitude. As Husserl identifies in the Crisis, what originated millennia ago in Ancient Greece was a theoretical attitude that implied a radical break with the natural attitude towards the world. In other words, philosophy was born the moment we humans carried out a change in our natural relationship with the world and, instead, adopted by pure will the attitude of an observer, of an external eye witness, an Archimedean point. The attitude of the forever questioner, the perpetual beginner. Socrates, Descartes, Husserl — they all, in different methods, taught us this. To be a philosopher is to be ready at any moment and any time to question anything accepted, established, or taken for granted, even if this means to lose, temporarily, all certainty, all ground, all truth. That is why the philosophical attitude is called to provoke a total personal transformation, which could be compared, as Husserl says, with ‘a religious conversion’. This is, in fact, the radical, subversive side of philosophy. The method is the resolution of a life against the natural attitude, a permanent internal revolution, once we make the absolute break with the world; an eternal fight against the certain, comfortable, accepted, convincing, objective world.

And only those who are willing to engage in this eternal fight can be philosophers.

But this is not an easy task.

Today, thought is our last front. And the reason it is in danger because it is dangerous. The only nook of human life left where we are the only ones to reign; a tiny little corner of existence still capable of sovereignty, still capable of standing still against the immensity of the collapsing world and saying: You shall not pass! When the world becomes so violently politically correct, technologically surveilled, and discursively controlled, radical thinking slowly moves to clandestinity. Philosophy is the army that reinforces the walls of the only remaining fortress of freedom. Freedom is to have the will to think my own thoughts, without the guidance of others. Philosophy is the highest form of this will. But only a philosophy that is alive can itself fight for life. Today’s dead, sterile philosophies can only help the enemies get in.

Through the long spans of solitary time and of radical introspection during my academic life, I remembered what had led me to philosophy to begin with — its radical potential for freedom, for disruption, for resistance; its intrinsic rebellious attitude to break in and, if necessary, cause a riot and discomfort. Philosophy taught me to speak, to interrupt, to fight back. It was its courage to always be willing to answer back against all authority, even if that meant relative, social, and institutional isolation. I will speak, I will always speak, because my cause is just: the absolute commitment to Truth. Ultimately, it was the materialization of the Kantian maxim: the bravery of using your own reason, of conducting your own thought. I remember that in a family of irrational cultural constraints, in an education system of total homogenisation, in a society of rising political surveillance, in a world of technological colonization, philosophy was my last front.

This is, in truth, the reason why I became a philosopher.

©️Mane Tatulyan | “Why I Still Care About Philosophy”, IPM Monthly 4/12 (2025).