Astandard charge against contempo-rary philosophy is that it has grown too technical and abstruse for all but initiates to understand. Articles in philosophy journals are like chess analysis, where adepts know the arguments and counterarguments 20 moves deep. It is philosophy for philosophers, without regard for the rest of humanity. Philosophy, the critics say, involves large life-and-death issues that concern us all and should not be a professional reserve. The complaint does not impress the profession. Nobody expects molecular biology or aircraft engineering to be intelligible to non-experts; people just want these practitioners to get it right. Yet few make the same allowance for philosophers. They are expected, unreasonably, to produce serious work that non-adepts can understand after, say, 30 seconds of unin-structed thought. Nor are technicality and abstruseness in philosophy peculiarly modern; just try the medieval scholastics, or Kant.
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