(I hope you don't mind me riffing on this a bit - if you do, send me a message and I'll delete it straight away)
From the perspective of someone who is in philosophy academia right now, I think we have every reason to believe that the next 20-30 years will be a period of rapid change in the philosophical landscape. The same kinds of forces that cause the rapid shift that we saw in the 40s and 50s (the emergence of the analytic/synthetic divide, the institutionalization of 'philosophy of science' as its own thing, the shift towards heavy use of formalism, and the sidelining of ethics from anything that wasn't specifically called 'ethics') are present again.
The philosophical job market has never been great, of course, but it's never been worse than it is now in basically all anglosphere countries. British, Australian, and Canadian academia is broke, US academia is operating under increasingly onerous government interference (it's increasingly difficult to, say, host a conference in the US, since half of your speakers won't be willing or able to travel there). These factors are forcing more and more philosophers out of the anglosphere and into Europe and Asia.
The last time we saw a similar mass philosophical migration was in the 30s, as the Nazis forced out Jewish and Communist academics (first unofficially, then officially) and many of them fled to the US or UK. That caused relatively regionally-isolated philosophical traditions, like Logical Positivism, to suddenly explode into American academic circles (though of course, after the war, their politically radical elements were censored). The fact that these people were moving between academic contexts also shook up a lot of the traditional disciplinary barriers (Wissenschaft does not perfectly translate to Philosophy, and neither did their respective departments). A lot of people who didn't have what we would call a philosophy degree (like, say, Karl Popper) ended up in philosophy departments as important movers and shakers. Basically, what it meant to be doing philosophy (as opposed to mathematics, or history, or psychology, or social science) changed pretty quickly, and then the change was then calcified within newly-minted post-war academic funding structures like the NSF. That's where the current anglophone philosophical landscape comes from, and it's been pretty stable since then. (one of my professors in grad school had been teaching his Leibniz class exactly the same way since 1970. Not a lot of structural change)
I'm of the opinion that the same factors are all at work now. We see serious and sustained movement of people away from an environment in which they're increasingly unwelcome, combined with a dramatic contraction (and hopefully eventually re-building) of funding structures, and a heavy focus on interdisciplinarity in what few jobs remain. If this all continues for a little while, the philosophy that comes out on the other side will not, I think, closely resemble the philosophy of the 20th Century. And with a new philosophy comes a new canon, necessarily. I don't know who the Carnap figure of this new era will be, nor what their work will look like. But I'm pretty sure it won't look like more Carnap.
origamiaround
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
baratheonpilled
titsay
