Analytic Philosophy Is a Flawed Framework for the Left
Analytic philosophy has become the dominant school in anglophone philosophy departments since 1945. Christoph Schuringa persuasively argues that it has served to reinforce a liberal common sense that blocks the idea of radical change.
Plato and Aristotle carry on an animated dialogue at the center of Raphael’s fresco Scuola di Atene (1509–1511) in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. (Wikimedia Commons)
In his famous 1925 essay “A Defence of Common Sense,” the philosopher G. E. Moore wrote: “There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.” For Moore, such an utterance is an example of a “truism” that might seem so obvious that it is not worth stating. And yet state it he does.
Moore’s point is that there are propositions about the world that are completely certain, that cannot be refuted, and they are not simply dependent on the activity of the mind. These propositions make up what we might call “common sense.”
The term “common sense” has been central to analytic philosophy’s hegemony in academic philosophy circles. It is a term that is sufficiently obvious, but also usefully vague, that it can be wielded to dismiss any countervailing idea without having to engage in any kind of argument.
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