What Kind of Philosophy Might Survive the History of Its Failures? Gadamerian Reflections on Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy

Stephen Gaukroger’s final book, The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay, presents a compelling historical overview of a discipline threatened with irrelevance, a fate that he diagnoses as a consequence of its having attempted at its birth to establish itself entirely at the level of a “second-level” inquiry. Stephen presents his book itself as “a historical essay”, but read as exemplifying a historically influenced way of doing philosophy, the book itself testifies to the possibility of a healthy and relevant form of contemporary philosophical culture. Here I present Hans-Georg Gadamer as both exemplar and self-conscious theorist of such a mode of philosophy as enacted by Stephen’s book as well as his celebrated Descartes biography.