upward to the heavens but downward and inward. This endless digging no
more dissolves philosophy into nothingness than Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus
made an unreality out of the continuum.
The same can be said for the diagnosis that philosophy becomes exhausted
as its contents eventually split free to become empirical sciences. This concep-
tion rests on dim awareness that there are branching paths of the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence, a polemical awareness that identifies philosophy with the
cosmological sequence alone. This misperceives the character of the philosophi-
cal attention space, and fails to see that sciences find their niche at a lower
level of abstraction. The social practices of modern rapid-discovery natural
science are not those of intellectual networks in philosophy, and their niches
in attention space to do not supplant one another. The end of philosophy was
proclaimed yet again when the modern social sciences split off from philo-
sophical networks. As we have seen, there have been substantive repercussions
of both these breaks within the contents of modern philosophy. It would be
the wrong inference to see in this anything more than the energizing flows that
happen in intellectual networks when their surrounding material bases are
changed, opening up the factional space for creative realignments.
Most recently, the organizational revolution of the modern university made
it possible to expand the number of specialized disciplines, and each new
alignment provides new topics for argument on the most abstract intellectual
space. Philosophy is more than the womb of disciplines, and there is no danger
of its emptying out to find nothing left of its own. On the contrary, the splitting
off of specific empirical disciplines has laid bare the core topics and deep
troubles of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence.
As long as there are intellectual networks capable of autonomous action to
divide their own attention space, there will be philosophy. If we but knew the
social structure of the intellectual world from now until the end of human-like
consciousness in the universe, we could chart as long a sequence of future
generations of philosophers.
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^857