The paper was written in 1998 for a symposium organized in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the School of the Humanities at Stanford University, and first published in German translation in 2000. It is mostly devoted to the history and sociology of analytic philosophy in American universities after the Second World War. The author argues that analytic movement has failed to keep its promise of putting philosophy on the secure path of a science. Thus it may not have lived up to its pretensions. A permanent, extremely valuable contribution to philosophy has been made by those analytical thinkers who undermined the scientistic pretensions of the movement. The general lesson of the paper is that this particular failure of analytic philosophy and its various internal critiques give additional strong reasons to abandon the hope of making philosophy into some sort of science.