Analytic philosophy’s conceit is that it is inherently and necessarily meta-philosophy. It may be instructive to examine the rhetorical ruses by which the field immures itself from self-examination: the assemblage of a canon of hierophants strung together by a theogonic historiography; an idealist epistemology motivated by a will to purity; and an intellectual habitus and style that constructs loutish belligerence as truth-seeking.

Analytic philosophy’s self-conception is conjured from a myth of origin that plots “real philosophy” as a patrilineal succession of fathers — from Plato to Parfit. It isn’t a coincidence that it can conveniently fold this narrative into a curriculum, a syllabus, and a bibliography. This myth of origin also functions to render history closed. If you want one explanation for analytic philosophy’s notorious ahistoricism, look to the myth it has substituted for history. In place of history (or even of historical metaphysics), analytic philosophy is deeply cathected in what I shall call – sincerely, for lack of any better term – a conceptual/logological metaphysics.

By stipulating that introspective psychology is the irreducible starting point of inquiry, analytic philosophy at once legitimates its “epistemology first” doctrine and at the same time declares itself foundational to the disciplines. Judging itself privileged to its intuitions, fantastical thought experiments, and a bleached symbolic mathematical logic, it takes pride in being one of the sciences – or even, to the bemusement of scientists, the first of the sciences – while announcing its contempt for the critical humanities and the critical social sciences.

The desire for and the performance of genius is the jouissance of analytic philosophy. On the one hand, this entails the cultivation of disciples, fanzine academic journals, hero-worshippers, and sycophants. But on the other hand, it also normalizes a brutal hazing of graduate students, a ruthless reputation economy bolstered by cargo cult rankings, and a rebarbative, slashing interactive style.