losophy has not gone back to the style of thinking of the lay figures of the
Enlightenment or of the Utilitarians. Academic philosophers are now irrepa-
rably technical; and even in internecine polemics, when they deride “philoso-
phy” and call for its death, they continue to hold the turf colonized by the
initial German Idealists.
Virtually all academic philosophers in the reformed systems since about
1800 have been post-Kantians. They all do “critical” philosophy, taking for
granted that ontological claims must pass through an epistemological filter; all
search for what there is in the mind, or seek to depersonalize it further, in the
semiotic process, which shapes the nature of what is taken to be knowledge.
Kant taught philosophers to use the technique of asking what it is that must
necessarily be presumed for an argument to be made at all. Virtually all
subsequent philosophy might be described as “transcendental” in the strict
sense, however much later philosophers might despise the terminology.
It is no surprise that after the downfall of ambitious Idealist metaphysics
there should occur the revival movement of Neo-Kantianism. The philosophi-
cal tools forged in the original academic revolution still mark out the turf of
academic philosophy. The effort to delimit and then to take over the territory
of theology has been outdated. What remains are the techniques initially used
for that battle. Philosophers learned that the most widely applicable weapons
in argument are those which probe the ground beneath the argumentative
weapons of all other specialists. Philosophy claims the most general right of
the autonomous intellectual community to carry on its arguments, and to judge
the validity of everything else. This makes the same claim in intellectual terms
that the academic revolution did organizationally: the autonomy of intellectu-
als to run their own affairs, and to bring all the world under the scope of their
judgment.
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^687