It is March 2025 and the Royal Institute of Philosophy is about to celebrate its 100 years of existence  … with a reception in the Middle Temple. This can be a prompt… to look at the state of philosophy at the present time.

Philosophy is obviously the most general area of scholarly inquiry, the subject which takes a look at mapping the prospects of understanding across the whole gamut of knowledge, and also looks across the current human (moral) condition.

Three basic questions may be asked:

(1)  What is the current state of knowledge?

(2)  What is the state of the human condition and the Moral Order?

(3)  What promising methodology can philosophers adopt, to throw light onto these areas?

If we ask about the size of the sheer body of current knowledge, the answer is “That it is much larger than ever before”.  But this “vast quantity” of knowledge obscures a dismal, deadly lack of illumination, structure or understanding.  The field of knowledge is now probably more confusing and impenetrable than ever before.

If we ask about the state of the human condition and The International Order, the answer here, too, is unnerving. The human condition is disintegrating before our eyes. Brazen lying by State Leaders has become more and more common in the last 100 years, morality has gone downhill and the previous, unspoken norms concerning male-female relationships —which have been respected (more or less) for 2,000 years— are falling into dangerous neglect.  Education —the agency through which the Moral Order should be renewed and passed-on to a new generation — has almost disappeared.

So what can be done about these serious existential quagmires?  If we ask about the credibility of the current methodology being applied to philosophical inquiry, it can only be said that it is in a very sorry state.  The IT sector, which has its de facto HQ in Silicon Valley, has launched an initiative round the new subject of “knowledge engineering”. Centres employing thousands of researchers are now offering a banal, ignorant concept of information (confused with knowledge) totally ignoring the ideas, clarifications, agendas and sensibility of more than two thousand years of earnest, disciplined epistemology.   In universities academic philosophy seems to have  become a kind of scholastic busywork which searches-out puzzling niches, and looks at questionable ways of talking, and operates with a notion of meaning which is still in thrall to the naive thinking of Plato.  (For example, the silly notion that <<only the timeless is real>>.)

Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century.  His major achievement was that he brought an acute degree of commonsense to the question, <<How do ordinary words and ordinary sentences acquire their meaning?>>. He succeeded in highlighting the fact that what words mean is determined by their established use in the circle in which they are being used.

This is really focusing on the purpose of ordinary language. It upended Plato’s long-standing, venerable notion that the principal function of words is to draw our attention to quasi-mathematical ideals.  Plato’s philosophy was saturated by the unqualified bedazzlement he brought to Euclidean mathematics.

So Wittgenstein changed the long-established orientation of philosophy… from the wonderful, ideal, clarity of mathematics,  to the role of earnest conversation between individuals who share common established conventions about the use of words.

But Wittgenstein’s exceptional, commonsense clarity of analysis was compromised in the 1930s and 1940s by the fact that it led to the formation of a virtual cult of devoted followers who didn’t really understand his root motivation —to clarify the roots of mathematics.  They were attracted, rather, by the spell of his over-bearing cultural pessimism and his sceptical outlook. By the 1970s it had become clear that civilisation was in serious crisis… and that this pessimism-based cult was never going to find a way out of the crisis. The leading Wittgensteinians were attaching far too much attention to the use of words, and far too little to the synoptic vision needed to pull civilisation out of a gradually developing sick, self-destructive mode.

We can date the collapse of the cult-aura around Wittgenstein to Tom Stoppard’s 1972 play Jumpers.  This brutally revealed the shallowness and linguistic gymnastics involved in ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’.

So an anti-Wittgenstein mood began to form in philosophy, and attitudes previously regarded as quite forgotten and archaic (=Aristolelian) came to predominate.

What was needed was a sustained continuation of the difficult original quest: clarifying and de-mystifying mathematics.  Morris Kline wrote a landmark book Mathematics, the Uncertain Science in 1980, a title which ought to have provoked a vigorous reaction.  But Lakatos had died young (1975) and there was no one left with the clout and the credibility needed to maintain momentum.

During the last 45 years few significant new perspectives in philosophy seem to have emerged in university departments. The subject has, as a result, lost much of its former academic lustre. Derrida’s reputation blossomed for a while, but later faded out. Today’s stand-out figures in philosophy seem to be chiefly people like Jordon Peterson and Antony Morgan, operating mainly outside academia, and scornful of the academic subject.  There is still no widespread awareness that the rot which is threatening civilisation and acceptable social conditions stems from a perverse attachment to Platonism in mathematics. As a result of the efforts of Silicon Valley we now have a world based, like never before, by automated maths.  To sustain this world we need a thriving form of maths education. But we are getting a no-hope kind of maths education in schools, because the computerists have claimed for more than 60 years that their machines <<have nothing to do with maths!>>. (This is one of the largest, most confusing lies ever allowed to stand essentially unchallenged.) The computerists have, in effect, stolen the entire body of maths’ former thunder… its amazingly dramatic feats, like bringing astronauts back from the Moon using very little fuel.

Every area of human activity is now driven by maths-based know-how generated by computers.  To sustain and develop this status quo we need lots of young, enthusiastic modelling mathematicians. Instead school maths is the black hole of the curriculum.

Ironically we have reached a point where a dramatic revolution is about to happen: a new quasi-mathematical discipline, ‘Anti-Maths’ has been discovered. It is the wholly unexpected fruit of a lot of under-the-radar philosophy.  It holds out the promise of an entirely new phase of civilisation, because an Anti-Maths model of physicality offers us a vividly understandable picture of the universe, and our essential role in it.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL 4^th March 2025  chrisormell@aol.com