The Confessional Turn

Something is happening in philosophy, something unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontained. “Starting around 2010,” writes Crispin Sartwell in the LA Review of Books, “there was a striking change, surprising to someone trained in the 1980s”:

Some philosophy professors began to write a lot more personally; they tried to show how philosophical ideas had affected and might affect their own lives. Some started writing what came to be thought of as philosophical self-help.

Sartwell calls this “The New Hellenism,” after the Hellenic tradition of philosophy as a way of life. (On the “Old Hellenism,” he cites Pierre Hadot.) Sartwell makes bold claims both about the stagnation of philosophy before the new wave and about its (potential) significance, citing it in the same breath as the “linguistic turn.” Call it the confessional turn.

I am not a neutral observer of this phenomenon: I am grateful to be mentioned as a New Hellenist in Sartwell’s essay. But I don’t think I am biased in saying that hi…