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We need more philosophers, not merely more philosophy graduates. The distinction matters. Universities excel at transmitting intellectual traditions, preserving archives of argument, and teaching people how to navigate established bodies of knowledge. Yet the institutional pressures surrounding assessment, publication, citation, funding, and professional advancement inevitably favour particular forms of communication. What flourishes is often not radical thought but recognisable thought: arguments that can be situated within existing literature, connected to familiar authorities, and evaluated through inherited frameworks. The result is a subtle tendency toward intellectual convergence, where originality is encouraged provided it arrives wearing the correct uniform.

This is not necessarily a conspiracy or even a failure. Large institutions reproduce themselves because continuity is one of their primary functions. Yet the consequence is that much academic discourse begins to resemble politics: endless refinements, reinterpretations, and repositionings around a relatively stable centre of gravity. Novelty appears, but often as commentary upon commentary, argument adjacent to argument. The deepest questions are not always prohibited. More often, they struggle to find a place within a communicative ecosystem optimised for the reproduction of its own legitimacy. Philosophy survives, certainly, but it sometimes survives as a managed inheritance rather than the unsettling activity of genuinely thinking otherwise.