Anyone who comes into contact with academic philosophy today quickly discovers that the field is dominated by a certain style. The style is straight-talking but jargon-laden. Arguments are finely crafted and discussion takes the form of the exchange of quick-fire objections and replies. The weighty questions one might imagine to be central to philosophy quickly dissolve into more trivial puzzles. This is analytic philosophy.

Analytic philosophy today is in a peculiar condition. This is reflected in the tendency of analytic philosophers to profess that analytic philosophy no longer exists. This phenomenon is more interesting than it seems. It might appear as if professional philosophers are now just more relaxed about cleaving to some narrowly defined approach, and perhaps more open to approaches that their ancestors had set their teeth against. This would certainly fit a story that analytic philosophers tell themselves, according to which in the past there was a clearly definable “program of analysis,” but what has grown out of it is so variegated and nuanced as to elude definition.

To understand the peculiar condition of America’s dominant philosophical tradition today requires seeing that more or less the opposite of this story is true. It is not that, in the old days, there was a clearly definable “program of analysis” that has given way to greater diversity. Precisely not. Before World War II, there was no identifiable thing called “analytic philosophy” (and the term was not used). Instead there was a set of distinct and competing movements. These movements were welded together under highly specific political and cultural conditions in the United States after World War II. The act of baptism whereby “analytic philosophy” came to be solidified the previously distinct movements into a new amalgam. The history of this new creation has been — contra the analysts’ favored story — one of rigidification, not diversification.