How Philosophy Killed Itself

(Or, why your friend who majored in philosophy now sells artisan soap on Etsy)

Part 1: Wait... Philosophy Died?

Not long ago, someone told me: “Philosophy is dead. I read it in a Stephen Hawking book.”

Well, shoot. If Stephen says so, it must be true, right?

But here’s the twist: philosophy didn’t die in a tragic accident. It wasn’t run over by the march of science, or buried under modern distractions like TikTok and oat milk lattes. Nope. Philosophy, brace yourself. philosophized itself to death.

And the murder weapon? Wasn’t a paradox. It was… a school.

Yep. Philosophy schools. The very places that were supposed to keep this ancient flame alive somehow turned it into a flickering lightbulb in a windowless room that smells faintly of chalk and despair.

Today, philosophy seems as relevant to daily life as Morse code. Most people only hear about it when someone misquotes Nietzsche on Instagram.

So how did we get here? Let’s rewind.

PART I: Philosophy Used to Be the Cool Kid at the Party

Once upon a time, back when people wore togas unironically, everyone was a philosopher.

You didn’t need a PhD or a podcast. You just needed curiosity. Life was weird and scary, and philosophy was how humans tried to make sense of it all.

You’d stroll into the Athenian agora, and boom: there’s Socrates, barefoot and unapologetically smelly, harassing passersby with questions like, “But what is justice, really?”

It was messy. It was raw. It was loud. But it was real.

Back then, philosophy wasn’t an elite hobby: it was an everyday sport. The Stoics gave practical advice on how to deal with loss, failure, and people who talk during movies. The Epicureans taught moderation, not indulgence (contrary to every wine label quoting them). The Cynics? They were basically the ancient world’s professional trolls, but with ethics.

Philosophy was public, useful, and deliciously chaotic.It had dirt under its fingernails and something wise to say over wine.

PART II: From Street Cred to Ivory Tower

Then came Plato.Good ol’ Plato. He had a brilliant idea: “Let’s build a school for this stuff!”

And build it he did, the Academy, humanity’s first philosophical clubhouse.Then Aristotle, his star student, decided to one-up him with the Lyceum.

Boom. Institutions were born. Philosophy had gone pro.

At first, this was a win. Ideas got written down, preserved, debated. Philosophers were basically the tech bros of their time, starting schools like startups. But just like all things institutional, things got… complicated.

Skip ahead a few centuries and philosophy is now trapped in a dimly-lit monastery arguing about whether angels have knees.

The Middle Ages, bless them, turned philosophy into a theological Sudoku puzzle. Think Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus debating whether God’s essence is identical to His existence. (Spoiler: no one really won.)

By the time we got to the 1600s, Descartes rolled in with “I think, therefore I am” and suddenly everyone needed a backup Latin dictionary to play.

Meanwhile, the average person was just trying to figure out how to survive the bubonic plague without accidentally committing heresy.

PART III: The Philosophical Civil War (No Capes, Just Confusion)

Now enter the 20th century. Things really go off the rails.

Philosophy splits into two tribes like a messy academic divorce.

1. Continental Philosophy: Brooding, mysterious, vaguely poetic. Think Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault. These folks loved talking about “the Other,” “the gaze,” and how everything is a social construct.Their writing style? Imagine Shakespeare had a baby with a French postmodernist during a blackout.

2. Analytic Philosophy: These guys (and they were mostly guys) were allergic to anything poetic. They wanted clarity. Logic. Clean lines. Precise arguments. Think Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer ... men who could win an argument with a toaster.

Now, you’d think with two camps, we’d get double the wisdom. But instead, we got mutual disdain, lots of jargon, and a growing distance between philosophers and, well, everyone else.

As the rift grew, the general public quietly slipped out of the room.

PART IV: Academia: The Place Philosophy Went to Hide

Let’s talk about philosophy departments. (Trigger warning: existential disappointment.)

Once philosophy cozied up with the university system, it decided it wanted to be taken “seriously.” It wanted tenure. Grants. Footnotes.

And in doing so, it forgot its roots.

Here's what happened:

1. Jargon Took Over Like a Moldy Fungal Infection

Read any recent philosophy journal and you'll find sentences like:

“The dialectical interplay between the noumenal substrate and epistemic conditions produces a hermeneutic ambiguity.”

Translation: No idea, bro. But it sounds deep, right?

This kind of language isn’t about clarity. It’s about gatekeeping. Philosophy became a secret handshake between academics, and the rest of us weren’t invited to the party.

2. Hyper-Specialization

Modern academic philosophy doesn’t just study ethics or metaphysics. It studies the 13th footnote of Kant’s appendix.

Want to write about the meaning of life or the ethics of dating apps? Sorry, that’s “not rigorous.” But a 65-page thesis on modal logic and unicorns? Approved.

3. Real-World Irrelevance™

Once upon a time, philosophers inspired revolutions, reshaped governments, and questioned the divine.

Today? Many academics would rather debate whether chairs exist in all possible worlds than tackle climate change or inequality.

The result: philosophy became academic jazz. Technically impressive, but only other musicians are listening.

Part 2: The Great Escape: Philosophy Goes Underground and Gets a Podcast

So, by the 21st century, philosophy was basically that band you loved in high school that went full experimental and stopped playing songs with choruses.You still respected it... but did you actually want to listen to it?

The good news? Just when the universities had nearly smothered philosophy in a blanket of jargon and footnotes, it escaped.Like a rogue prisoner breaking out of an ivory tower, philosophy slipped through the bars and into the real world.

And it got... weird. But also kind of wonderful.

I. Podcasts: Where the Thinkers Went to Think Out Loud

If universities became echo chambers, the internet kicked the doors open. Suddenly, people realized you don’t need a PhD to ask big questions.

You just need Wi-Fi and a microphone.

Enter the philosophy podcast. From Philosophy Bites to Very Bad Wizards, the digital age gave us long-form discussions where actual ideas were chewed on, rather than sterilized.

People like Massimo Pigliucci (a real-deal philosopher who’s surprisingly not boring) and Stephen West of Philosophize This! began translating dusty old ideas into something your Uber driver might quote between trips.

These folks made it okay to ask things like:

• “What if Stoicism could help me deal with my annoying coworker?”

• “Is it ethical to ghost someone?”

• “Was Nietzsche actually just very, very tired?”

In other words: philosophy got practical again. (And definitely more fun than a Kierkegaard conference.)

II. Self-Help Books: Stoicism Becomes the New Kale

If you’ve ever been told to “control what you can and let go of the rest,” congrats! You’ve been Stoic-washed.

Books like The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday took ancient wisdom and filtered it through an Instagram-friendly aesthetic. Epictetus is now basically the life coach of Silicon Valley.

Want to endure suffering? Meditate with Marcus Aurelius.Need to make better decisions? Channel Seneca.Trying to justify your $120 Lululemon pants? That’s probably a stretch, but still very Stoic of you.

Of course, some philosophers groaned. “This isn’t real philosophy!”But you know what? It works. And it’s popular. And it’s helping people live better, which is more than we can say for 80% of peer-reviewed philosophy papers that nobody reads.

III. Movies & TV: Philosophy Hiding in Popcorn

You may not know it, but you’ve been thinking philosophical thoughts every time you watch:

• The Matrix (What is reality?)

• Black Mirror (Should we trust technology?)

• The Good Place (What makes someone good?)

• Everything Everywhere All At Once (What even is meaning??)

These aren’t just films with explosions and googly eyes. They’re sneaky thought experiments with big budgets and cooler outfits than Plato ever had.

Screenwriters, it turns out, are better at explaining moral dilemmas than most professors. (And they do it without 65 citations and a footnote in German.)

Even comedians are getting philosophical. George Carlin, Bo Burnham, Hannah Gadsby—they all explore truth, power, identity, and death. With punchlines.

In a world where philosophers argue about whether numbers are real, comedians are the ones asking, “What the hell is wrong with us?”

IV. The Realization: Philosophy Never Died. It Just Moved Out.

So no: philosophy isn’t dead.

It just packed its bags and left the university.

It’s now living in your podcast app, scrolling Reddit threads, hiding inside YouTube essays, and occasionally whispering wisdom from behind a gym bro quoting Marcus Aurelius between deadlifts.

The real tragedy isn’t that philosophy stopped being relevant.It’s that the people who were supposed to protect it, "academics", got so obsessed with being smart that they forgot to be understood.

They became the intellectual equivalent of a restaurant that only serves food if you can pronounce “amuse-bouche” correctly.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here starving for meaning and kinda tired of self-help books written by people named Chad who trademark their affirmations.

V. How to Be a Philosopher Without Getting a PhD (or a Headache)

Here’s the good news: you don’t need a degree to do philosophy.You just need to care enough to ask questions most people are too tired to entertain between episodes of Love Is Blind.

Try these:

1. Ask “why?” like a toddler. Especially when things seem obvious.

2. Read weird old books. Don’t understand them? Welcome to the club. Keep going.

3. Write things down. Your brain is full of soup. Words are your ladle.

4. Talk to people who disagree with you. (Harder than it sounds, I know.)

5. Accept that sometimes, there is no answer. That’s not failure. That’s philosophy.

And please, for the love of Socrates, don’t let jargon scare you off. Any philosopher who can’t explain their ideas to a smart 12-year-old probably doesn’t understand them either.

Part 3: Resurrection Manual (Or, How to Do Philosophy Without Becoming Intolerable at Parties)

So far, we’ve seen how philosophy lost the plot, how it ditched its formal wear and ran off into podcasts and pop culture, and how it quietly survived despite the best efforts of tenure committees.

Now, it’s time to ask: what do we do about it?

Because if we don’t rescue philosophy from the academic dungeon, someone’s going to start selling “Nietzsche Was My Life Coach” mugs at Walmart, and honestly, we’re halfway there already.

Let’s start with the real talk.

I. Philosophy Didn’t Die — It Got Tenure and an Attitude

Let’s be clear: not all philosophy professors are villains in tweed. Many are passionate, generous, and quietly praying someone reads their paper on "semantic opacity in Kripkean counterfactuals" before retirement.

But the system? The system is broken.

Today’s academic model rewards:

• Writing for fellow philosophers, not for the public.

• Speaking in obfuscating dialects, not in English.

• Publishing endless critiques of other critiques about critiques. (Yo dawg, I heard you like meta.)

Meanwhile, the world is literally on fire, and someone is still arguing about whether moral realism is “ontologically supervenient on the natural order.”

(Spoiler: No one cares.)

Philosophy needs to do what it once told others to do: examine itself.

II. We Need a New Kind of Philosophy School

Imagine a philosophy school that feels more like a café than a crypt.

Here’s what that could look like:

• No tuition, just curiosity. Come with questions, not prerequisites.

• Syllabi that include memes, movies, and ancient texts. Because Aristotle and BoJack Horseman are secretly saying the same things.

• Professors who aren’t allergic to feelings. Who can say “I don’t know” and not burst into epistemological flames.

• Students from all walks of life. No gatekeeping. If you’ve survived adolescence or done your own taxes, you qualify.

Let’s create spaces where it’s okay to be wrong. Where you can wonder aloud whether life has meaning without being assigned 400 pages of Heidegger and a panic attack.

III. Burn the Old Myths (Keep the Good Ones)

It’s time we let go of a few dusty myths:

Myth #1: Philosophy is only for “smart” people.

False. Philosophy is for anyone who’s ever cried at 2AM wondering what they’re doing with their life.

Myth #2: Philosophy has no real-world impact.

Tell that to Gandhi, MLK, or the guy who invented democracy.

Myth #3: You have to read everything to have opinions.

Nope. You don’t need to read all of Kant to say, “This feels unnecessarily confusing and my back hurts.”

Start small. Start messy. That’s how every philosopher worth their sandals did it.

IV. What You Can Do Right Now to Save Philosophy (And Your Soul, No Pressure)

You don’t need to build a new academy out of clay and regret. You can start from where you are.

Here’s your cheat sheet:

1. Host a “Stupid Questions Night”

Invite friends over. Each person brings one “dumb” question. Talk about them. Laugh. Think.Some hits include:

• Is time real?

• Would you still love your dog if it could talk?

• Are hot dogs sandwiches?

2. Keep a “Philosophy Journal”

No pressure. Just jot down thoughts that make your brain itch. Questions. Quotes. That one intrusive thought about Camus at the dentist.

3. Refuse to Pretend to Understand BS

If someone says “teleological meta-ontology” at a dinner party and you don’t get it—just ask what it means. If they can’t explain it, congrats: they don’t get it either.

4. Use Philosophy to Make Life Weirder (in a good way)

Let it mess with your assumptions. Use it to think about relationships, politics, grief, hope, cake. Everything is up for grabs. That’s the fun part.

V. Closing Thoughts: Philosophy is Not Dead. It’s Just Tired of Pretending.

Here’s the thing.... Philosophy didn’t die.

It just got buried under jargon, status anxiety, and conference PowerPoints.

But it’s still here. It’s in your shower thoughts. It’s in the way you question your job, your relationships, or the ethics of buying a $9 oat milk latte while your city sinks underwater.

Philosophy is the one voice saying: “Wait. Pause. Look around. Does any of this make sense?”

We need that voice. Now more than ever.

So let’s bring it back. Not with more institutions or awards or dead German guys staring from library shelves. But with jokes, questions, awkward silences, and a willingness to not have all the answers.

That’s what philosophy has always been at its best:

Messy. Brave. Human.

If You Made It This Far, Congrats. You’re Basically a Philosopher Now.

No tuition. No diploma. Just vibes and epistemic humility.

So go forth. Think weird thoughts. Ask uncomfortable questions. Make Socrates proud (just don’t drink anything he offers you).

RECOMMENDED IF YOU WANT TO GO FURTHER (and not fall asleep):

• Pierre Hadot — Philosophy as a Way of Life

• Alain de Botton — The Consolations of Philosophy

• Massimo Pigliucci — How to Be a Stoic

• YouTube: Philosophy Tube, The School of Life, Wisecrack

• Podcasts: Philosophize This!, Very Bad Wizards, The Partially Examined Life

And remember:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

“But the unreadable one is not worth publishing.” — Me

🎤 Drop the mic. Exit the cave.