There have never been so many professional philosophers as today, yet philosophy has never been considered so irrelevant. This chapter argues that analytic philosophy has special responsibility for this, because it assumes that philosophy is not acquisition of knowledge, that is, an inquiry aimed at acquiring knowledge of the world, philosophy aims only to understand what we already know. As a result, philosophy has become more and more inward-looking and self-referential, of no interest to people working in other fields, and to cultured people in general.