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 is a cryptic product and tool of liberal ideology. That may well be true, but as I complain in my recent review—to which this post is something of a sequel—Schuringa’s history, where accurate, does little to unveil the hidden play of ideological forces, and where it is more severely critical, his sociology seems off.

There’s a lot in Schuringa’s book to which I am sympathetic, including his impulse to look beneath the surface of the discipline to its political unconscious. But there are numerous errors of detail. If you are an academic philosopher, the following quotations need no comment—others may consult the footnotes or skip ahead.

On Principia Ethica:

Moore’s ‘open question argument’ [is] shockingly bad … in spite of this it is still treated with reverence by analytic philosophers.¹

On the “imperatival” ethics of R. M. Hare as a successor to emotivism:

Commands could be more or less consistent with each other, and exhibit relations of implication among themselves, as emotions could not. (To a typical analytic philosopher, emotions are just an irrational mess.)²

On Saul Kripke’s influence on philosophy:

hardly anyone is sympathetic to Kripke’s approach of building metaphysics on Cartesian and Aristotelian intuitions.³

On EA:

In recent decades, utilitarianism has been rebranded ‘effective altruism’. The units of utility are now called ‘QALYs’ (quality-adjusted life-years).⁴

On Judy Thomson and the trolley problem:

[Looking] back on her career … [she] mused: ‘I came to think that the main, central problems consist in efforts to explain what makes certain pre-philosophical, or nonphilosophical, beliefs true.’ Unfortunately, these ‘pre-philosophical, or nonphilosophical, beliefs’ might not be true in the first place.⁵

On social construction and reality:

To [analytic philosophers], it is confounding that anything socially constructed could be real; after all, for them, the paradigm of what is real is small physical items like atoms, or bigger physical items like pieces of furniture, not people or institutions.⁶

There are further examples like this, but I won’t bore you with them. Schuringa does not read his targets carefully or with interpretive charity—which makes his approach to defining “analytic philosophy” more ironic. I don’t mean his history of analytic philosophy, which is broadly reliable through 1970. I mean what he says in direct elucidation of his subject.

Schuringa begins by suggesting that analytic philosophy is like pornography (for Justice Potter Stewart): “While analytic philosophers go on debating whether there is any such thing as analytic philosophy,” he writes, “for outsiders it is very easy to recognize when they see it.” Coming from someone who complains that appeals to intuition are antithetical to philosophy, this is disappointing.

When Schuringa’s precursor, Ernest Gellner, savaged “linguistic philosophy” in 1959, one of his targets was the “paradigm case argument.” According to this argument, the meaning of a term is fixed by its actual use, so that its paradigm applications cannot be mistaken: a panacea against the sceptic. As Gellner points out—here he is in good analytic company—this mode of argument is flawed. We can be radically mistaken in the use of words.

Schuringa does not purport to defend the paradigm case argument, but he relies on it. Pressed by his opponents to define the opposition between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy, he cries foul: “analytic philosophers seem to handle the contrast with ease, and without any apparent confusion.” Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean they are applying it correctly, or even that it makes sense.

What does Schuringa hate about analytic philosophy, whatever it may be? In part, its failure to find sufficient value in the post-Kantian tradition. It’s crucial to his project, I think, that analytic philosophers have dismissed the likes of Kant, Hegel and Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, and Foucault, without good reason:

As it works to sustain and reproduce its hegemony in the academy, analytic philosophy expels its challengers. Its most important out-group consists of those nourished on the post-Kantian philosophical tradition that analytic philosophy circumvents in order to take things up where David Hume left them: what analytic philosophers have called ‘continental philosophy’.

But while there is a lot of ignorant neglect, the picture on which analytic philosophy returned to Hume, as if Kant had never happened, is at best misleading.

On one reading, post-Kantian philosophy is preoccupied with the relationship between our concepts and the reality they represent. Kant tells us that we impose spatiotemporal form on “things-in-themselves”; post-Kantian philosophers find more locality, contingency, and historicity in our conceptual schemes—yet at the same time struggle to overcome the Kantian dualism of concepts vs. things. Since our concepts are contingent and historically local but we have access to reality only through them, the idea of objective reality, as such, becomes problematic.

One thing that arguably unites the earliest “analytic” philosophers, including Frege, Russell, Moore, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is that they argue against the dualism of conceptualized propositions and unconceptualized facts. Although they disagree about the nature of propositions, they share the conviction that what you believe (the object of thought), when you believe the truth, is literally a fact.

Schuringa has a soft spot for the early Wittgenstein, whose work “holds the promise of a difficult and important insight: that there is no outside to the languages by means of which we communicate. This has the potential to transform our social self-understanding.” But part of Wittgenstein’s point is that, once you overcome the Kantian dualism, throwing away the ladder of meaningful words vs. meaningless world, one thing you lose is any sense of “objectivity” that could contrast with what is merely “our conceptualization.” This is not to give up on facts but on the idea that what we think and say somehow falls short of them.

Wittgenstein flirts with paradox: the ostensible philosophy of the Tractatus cannot be expressed by its own lights. Analytic philosophers have grappled with this puzzle. But one thing they have tended to resist is a return to the dualism of conceptual schemes and unconceptualized reality, with its implicit relativism. Instead of reforming Kant’s idealism, with Heidegger, Sartre, and their compatriots, they transcend it. That’s why, when analytic philosophers read contemporary French philosophy—like the “speculative realism” of Quentin Meillassoux—they are often bemused. It seems trapped in a debate between transcendental realism and idealism that they have rightly left behind.

How far this picture is true—of analytic philosophers or of their counterparts in Germany and France—is a large and difficult question. The fact that it’s sensible to ask it complicates the narrative of a naïve return to Hume. Answering the question calls for respectful dialogue between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophers, something Schuringa’s book seems calculated to impede.

1. It is treated with the opposite of reverence: refuting Moore’s argument is a standard exercise for students of analytic philosophy.

2. There has been a wealth of work on emotions by analytic philosophers; if it can be criticized en masse, it is for a Stoic tendency to treat them as more rational than they are.

3. The Cartesian intuition behind Kripke’s argument against mind-brain identity is widely shared—it seems possible to feel pain without correlative brain states and vice versa. His novelty lies in arguing that the appearance cannot be explained away. As for others being sympathetic: Kripke’s strategy is at the root of The Conscious Mind, probably the most-cited book on this topic in the last thirty years. Meanwhile, neo-Aristotelian metaphysics has flourished.

4. One of the main aims of EA is to distinguish itself from utilitarianism, arguing that one should optimize one’s beneficence even if is constrained by respect for rights or by permissible partiality, as opponents of utilitarianism believe.

5. Thomson notoriously changed her mind about the trolley problem, giving up the orthodox view that it’s permissible to turn a runaway trolley on to a track with fewer victims.

6. The few philosophers I know who don’t believe in people or institutions don’t believe in furniture, either.