Errata

It is now a more or less biennial event: a professional philosopher, employed in an Anglophone philosophy department, publishes a book denouncing “analytic philosophy,” the predominant mode of the discipline in which they work.

I don’t accuse these authors of hypocrisy: if analytic philosophers are wasting their time, it can only be a good thing to displace them from their jobs. But I am dismayed at how little progress the detractors have made. They seem no closer to defining what “analytic philosophy” is; and their objections to it turn, to a disheartening degree, on a distorted picture of contemporary philosophy as funded by “intuition” and therefore bankrupt—a picture that rests on dubious sociology and epistemology alike.

Christoph Schuringa’s new book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, is the latest iteration of the trend. It differs from earlier installments in being more historical and less directly argumentative, billing itself as “ideology critique.” Analytic philosophy …