Rise & Fall of Analytic Philosophy

[Veritas Aequitas]

I believe people like PH, FDP and others[?] belong to the Analytic School of Philosophy.
While the traditional Analytical Philosophy is dead, what is still going on with 'analysis' is post-analytic philosophy which has veered off the fundamentals of traditional Analytical Philosophy toward pragmatism.

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Rise & Fall of Analytic Philosophy
by Hanna Robert

The origins of the Analytic tradition lie fundamentally in an extended intellectual struggle, driven by the “anxiety of influence,” between

• (i) some mid-to-late 19th and early 20th century philosophers—principally Bolzano, Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle, especially Carnap, Ayer, and Quine—and
  
  (ii) the Kantian, Hegelian, neo-Kantian, and neo-Hegelian philosophy that was institutionally dominant and culturally hegemonic in Europe and Anglo- America during the 19th century.

In other words, early Analytic philosophy couldn’t have existed without Kantian philosophy; and their passionate grapplings with it were always as implicitly concessive to it as they were overtly critical of it.

So early Analytic philosophy was, in a broadly Freudian way, kantalytic philosophy.

Nevertheless it was an authentic, substantive, and (in its day) revolutionary post- Kantian philosophical project.

Simultaneously, early Analytic philosophy was also in a direct, fruitful dialogue with pragmatism and organicist philosophy—Peirce, James, Dewey, Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Whitehead—and phenomenology—Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Heidegger— from the end of World War I right up to the outbreak of World War II.

§9. But after World War II, things shifted dramatically.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Analytic philosophy itself became the institutionally dominant, culturally hegemonic form of philosophy, at least in Anglo-America, in two special ways:

• (i) via its strong tendency to intellectual normalization, it was closely allied with McCarthyite anti-communist, big-capitalist, Cold War politics of the 1950s, and
  
  (ii) via its scientism, it was (and still is) fully entangled with what Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex” (or, nowadays, the military- industrial-university-digital complex) in (neo)liberal democratic States.

This is compellingly documented in two books by John McCumber.7

And by the 1970s, the Analytic take-over in Anglo-America was complete: mainstream Analytic philosophers were The Man, The Establishment, The Power Elite.

§10. Yet by the early 1980s, mainstream Analytic philosophers were shocked to discover that an internal push-back and indeed rebellion of sorts was emerging from a group of younger philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy, existential phenomenology, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and Deweyan pragmatism.

This revolt was epitomized and widely-publicized by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).8

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mainstream Analytic response to Rorty was swift, critically uncharitable, and personally vituperative.

And then Rorty was out of professional philosophy, powered by a MacArthur so-called “genius” grant, forever self-exiled to various Humanities departments, by the end of the 1980s.

§11. At roughly the same time, so around 1980, coinciding with the publication of Rorty’s two controversial books, the term “Continental philosophy” came into common use in Anglo-American philosophy9 as a conceptual dumpster into which every kind of non-Analytic philosophy could be tossed without differentiation, rejected without argument, scorned, and permitted to live only with the explicit permission of the Analytic mainstream, and only for the purposes of teaching undergraduates and filling the requisite number of lines on their CVs under “Research and Publications” on their annual departmental evaluations.

§12. In Spring 2018, I read three excellent essays that collectively prompted me to start thinking about all this philosophically flammable material again—

Walter Cerf ‘s “Logical Positivism and Existentialism,”10
Joel Katzav’s and Krist Vaesen’s “On the Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy,”11 and
Joel Katzav’s “Analytic Philosophy 1925-1969: Emergence, Management, and Nature.”12

So what follows in this set of notes are some follow-up thoughts provoked by that recent re-thinking.

Continue s13 - 18
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Any views on the above?

[Veritas Aequitas]

§13. ‘Way back in 1951, focusing on two contemporaneous and culturally important sub-types of Analytic philosophy and so-called Continental philosophy—namely,
Logical Positivism, aka Logical Empiricism, and Existentialism—Cerf very correctly picked out the core substantive first-order philosophical issue at issue between Analytic philosophy and non-Analytic philosophy: Scientism vs. Humanism.

This is also what Sellars later called the clash between The Scientific Image and The Manifest Image, in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”13 in the early 1960s.

And it’s also nicely-captured, although somewhat less rigorously, in C.P. Snow’s famous lecture on “the two cultures.”14

But neither Cerf nor Sellars nor Snow has an adequate way of reconciling or unifying these two conflicting world-conceptions.

§14. For better or worse, my own two-part solution to the “Two Images” problem is

• (i) to provide an adequate metaphysical, epistemic, and normative grounding for The Manifest Image, thereby thoroughly enhancing and enriching it, via an appropriately updated and refined version of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and then
  
  (ii) to embed the scientific inside the humane, but in a metaphysically, epistemically and normatively intact way, thereby throughly re-enchanting the scientific.15

Or in many fewer words, to humanize the scientific, without either reduction or relativism.

§15. But in any case, Analytic philosophy as a substantive philosophical project—by which I mean, roughly, Logicism + the theory of the analytic proposition + Logical Empiricism/conventionalism —was already effectively dead by the middle of the 20th century.

Quine killed it with a devastating 1-2 punch consisting of “Truth By Convention” in the mid-1930s and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in the early 50s.

After Quine, only three elements of the Analytic tradition remained, each of which was originally parasitic on the substantive early Analytic project—yet since that time, by a magical metamorphosis of social-institutional life, they’ve become collectively essential to its 70-year survival as a zombie of its former self, the Night of the Living Philosophical Dead:

• (i) scientism as an unargued, dogmatic presupposition and sociocultural attitude or worldview,
  (ii) logical theory, especially including conservative extensions of classical logic like modal logic, and, beyond that, “deviant logics,” and the logico-semantic analysis of natural language, as formal methods, but without any coherent, defensible metaphysical, epistemic, or normative foundations,16 and
  (iii) academic institutional domination and hegemony, under the self-selected label “professional philosophy."

§16. In spelling out the historical foundations of this intellectual horror-story, I think that neither Cerf nor Katzav/Vaesen pays sufficient attention to the specifically political dimensions of The Great Divide between Analytic philosophy and so-called Continental philosophy.

After World War II, as I’ve already mentioned, and as McCumber has compellingly documented, the scientism and institutional consolidation of the Analytic tradition closely mirrored the rise, dominance, and hegemony of McCarthy-style anti- communist, big-capitalist politics in the USA.

§17. Then what happened?
In the 1960s and early 70s people came out of their McCarthy-era deep freeze, discovered civil rights, neo-Marxism aka The New Left, personal liberation, sex, drugs, and rock-&-roll—and partied till dawn.

But after they slept it off, and slowly turned into middle-aged and then late-middle- aged or even old-aged people, between the mid-1970s and the early decades of the 21st century, the emergent massive new political force was liberal (and now fully neoliberal) identity-politics, aka multi-culturalism, aka multi-culti, for example, Clinton(s)-Obama style Democratic politics.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, and certainly by the turn of the millennium, this larger political dynamic was fully mirrored in the professional academy in general and professional philosophy in particular.

So for at least the past twenty years, currently, and probably for the next ten years too, professional academic philosophy in Anglo-America has been, is, and will be, essentially, a struggle-to-the-death between

• on the one hand, (i) classical mainstream Analytic philosophy (The Man), with its roots in the anti-communist McCarthy period, under the banner of “Analytic Metaphysics,”

  and

  on the other, (ii) (neo)liberal-identitarian/multi-culturalist coercive moralist philosophy (The Anti-Man), with its roots in the Clinton(s)-Obama period, under the banner of “Philosophical Diversity and Inclusion.”

§18. In any case, based on 30+ years of personal experience wage-caged inside The Ivory Bunker, from graduate student to full professor to final escape and liberation, my own fairly confident prediction is that (neo)liberal identitarian/multi-culturalist coercive moralist philosophy will triumph decisively within the next five to ten years, and therefore that Analytic philosophy, after its 100 year end-to-end run, will finally burn up completely and, to borrow Trotsky’s notoriously nasty-witty phrase about the Mensheviks, go down into the dustbin of history:

You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!

Should we mourn the fall and dustbinning of Analytic philosophy?
—Hell no. On the contrary.

And that concludes my funeral oration for the Analytic tradition.19
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Discuss??
Views??

[Veritas Aequitas]

Notes: KIV

[Atla]

I believe people like PH, FDP and others[?] belong to the Analytic School of Philosophy.

You just said something that could be more or less true. Did something happen? Were you kidnapped, is this an SOS message that your kidnappers wouldn't notice?

[phyllo]

I believe people like PH, FDP and others[?] belong to the Analytic School of Philosophy.

Do people who frequent these kinds of public forums really align themselves with schools of philosophy?

[Iwannaplato]

To me the oddest thing about this thread is that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is part of the analytic tradition, especially the whole language games, etc, portion.

So, AP has influenced Veritas,
viewtopic.php?t=41861
and lives on in part through him.
Not dead.

Wittgenstein has aspects that generally go against parts of analytic philosophy, but those parts are not the parts VA seems inspired by.

And, the, well, it is such an enormous broad group of philosophers.

Maybe the specific puported dead ideas should be listed.

[FlashDangerpants]

I believe people like PH, FDP and others[?] belong to the Analytic School of Philosophy.

Do people who frequent these kinds of public forums really align themselves with schools of philosophy?

He got me dead wrong, but he is very weak on the subject of what other people are thinking. Very very very fucking weak.