On the other hand, Russell came badly unstuck when he attempted to extrapolate all math from first principles with Principia Mathematica. Soon after, Kurt Godel demonstrated that in any given formal system, consistency and completeness were mutually exclusive.
It seems to me that this had the same devastating impact on philosophy as Einstein's relativistic theorems did on classical mechanics and the popular acceptance of scientific determinism (please note I am not positing any scientific relationship between Godel's theorem and Einstein's work on relativity). Einstein apparently found quantum mechanics an equally alarming intellectual innovation.
So between incompleteness, relativity and QM, 20th century intellectuals were hit with a kind of triple whammy showing that our beliefs about logic, observation and causality were all inherently limited and that in many respects The Truth is fundamentally unknowable. Prior to this one could argue that philosophy as an intellectual pursuit was the foundation which underpinned all other kinds of academic endeavor, even if one felt privately disappointed about the prospects of finding any sort of ultimate truth or philosophical 'theory of everything'.
For every philosopher who could accept this with a shrug and move on to examining the limitations of critical thinking itself, there are probably 9 others that can't bring themselves to stand up and say plainly that there's not really anywhere else to go from here, and that their legacy is likely to be no more than another footnote to Plato.
It seems to me that this had the same devastating impact on philosophy as Einstein's relativistic theorems did on classical mechanics and the popular acceptance of scientific determinism (please note I am not positing any scientific relationship between Godel's theorem and Einstein's work on relativity). Einstein apparently found quantum mechanics an equally alarming intellectual innovation.
So between incompleteness, relativity and QM, 20th century intellectuals were hit with a kind of triple whammy showing that our beliefs about logic, observation and causality were all inherently limited and that in many respects The Truth is fundamentally unknowable. Prior to this one could argue that philosophy as an intellectual pursuit was the foundation which underpinned all other kinds of academic endeavor, even if one felt privately disappointed about the prospects of finding any sort of ultimate truth or philosophical 'theory of everything'.
For every philosopher who could accept this with a shrug and move on to examining the limitations of critical thinking itself, there are probably 9 others that can't bring themselves to stand up and say plainly that there's not really anywhere else to go from here, and that their legacy is likely to be no more than another footnote to Plato.