Historicizing Analytic Philosophy

In his new book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Christoph Schuringa makes precisely this case. Schuringa, a philosopher at Northeastern University in London who also recently released a book on Karl Marx’s philosophy, aims to provide a Marxian “ideology critique” of the field. The book is impressive in its grasp of the key thinkers and arguments that have come to be identified with analytic philosophy, now the dominant approach in anglophone philosophy departments.

That grasp is nevertheless exceeded by Schuringa’s reach when it comes to his ambitious ideological-critical project, which is severely hampered by inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies. Social History’s greatest fault, though, is that the core philosophical argument, according to which analytic philosophy helps perpetuate a baleful “empiricist-liberal” ideology that precludes emancipatory political projects, is philosophically and historically confused.

Schuringa’s project in the book, as the title suggests, is in large part a historical one. To that end, he recounts the development of what was later dubbed “analytic philosophy” out of a number of different philosophical milieus in the early twentieth century. Those milieus involved figures such as Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge, who launched a logic-influenced counterattack on the “British Hegelianism” briefly in vogue, later joined by the brilliant and idiosyncratic Ludwig Wittgenstein; the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, including Carnap, Otto Neurath, and others, who worked to develop a thoroughly scientific conception of knowledge; and (slightly later) Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin at Oxford with their “ordinary language” philosophy.

In the postwar years, some of these philosophers and their acolytes made it over to the United States, where a grab bag of philosophical preoccupations and commitments associated with these schools soon came to dominate philosophy departments, having incorporated some influence from the American pragmatists along the way (as in the thought of W. V. O. Quine and his student Donald Davidson). The inheritors of these intellectual debts, along with a distinctive argumentative style absorbed from philosophers like Moore, came to think of themselves as analytic philosophers.

They thereby distinguished themselves from something called “continental philosophy,” an umbrella term covering everyone from Heidegger to the Marx- and Freud-influenced critical theory of the Frankfurt School, later extended to poststructuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Yet by the time it had a name for itself, as Schuringa observes, analytic philosophy was no more a coherent philosophical project than the continental philosophy it often decried. It was more, to put it in contemporary terms, a “vibe.”

Yet this distinct philosophical vibe came to dominate English-speaking philosophy, Social History argues, because it has played an important role in shoring up capitalist ideology since the Cold War. For Schuringa, it served “to perpetuate a picture that is central to bourgeois liberal ideology — that of an inert realm of ‘fact,’ simply given to the subject to be passively received, against which realm that subject stands as supposedly autonomous and spontaneous.”

In this reading of history, McCarthyism helped push more radical (especially Marxist) thinkers out of the discipline, while the RAND Corporation, a research institute closely connected to the US military, briefly funded the work of prominent academic philosophers like Quine and Davidson on the market capitalism–friendly subjects of game and rational choice theory.

After recounting its rise and consolidation in the 1950s and ’60s, Schuringa traces the continued evolution of analytic philosophy through to the present. He argues that it has become increasingly less cohesive and less methodologically self-conscious, while also “colonizing” inquiry into social and political topics and themes like Marxism, race, and gender, “defanging” such study of its radical potential in the process.

An Analytical Mess

When Schuringa is recounting analytic philosophy’s origins and the personal and intellectual trajectories of its key figures, Social History is an enjoyable and sometimes illuminating read. The trouble starts with the attempt at ideology critique.

For one thing, Schuringa wants to argue that analytic philosophy is “overtly ahistorical,” proudly ignorant of its own intellectual and social pedigree; the discipline is thus in need of an unmasking treatment. But this claim is not even supported by the book’s own arguments. As Schuringa himself observes, analytic philosophers do have a sense of their intellectual predecessors, even if they may put misplaced emphasis on certain thinkers or schools or assume more continuity than actually exists.

Moreover, plenty of prominent analytic philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have made reflection on history, and the history of philosophy in particular, central to their projects: G. E. M. Anscombe, Bernard Williams, John McDowell, Stephen Darwall, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Christine Korsgaard, to name just a few. Even John Rawls — who Schuringa misrepresents as a game theory–addled standard-bearer of mid-century American liberalism — was a careful reader and teacher of the history of ethics and political philosophy (including of Hegel and Marx).

Schuringa also contends that analytic philosophy, in keeping with its empiricist-liberal foundations, is closely allied with behaviorism in psychology and marginalism in economics (i.e., neoclassical economics). Behaviorism is the now discredited theory that scientific psychology ought to be the study of how external stimuli (inputs) produce behavioral consequences (outputs); however, it has descendants in the form of functionalist accounts of consciousness that see “‘artificial intelligence’ as supposedly analogous to conscious minds.” Marginalism is the still-dominant view in mainstream economics that explains the value of goods and services in terms of the subjective preferences of individual agents.

Both schools of thought “share with analytic philosophy a preoccupation and a mindset,” according to Schuringa:

Problems are regarded as decomposable: they are to be broken down into small parts. Subjectivity is not thought of as playing any role, other than as a mechanism for choosing the decomposable parts and ordering them appropriately. In the case of behaviourism, subjectivity is even expunged entirely: mechanism is all.

There are a few baffling claims here. First, much analytic philosophy of mind is quite hostile to functionalist analogies between AI and conscious minds, as anyone who has taken courses in the subject in the last twenty years could attest. It is far from occupying a hegemonic position in the discipline. Second, subjectivity of course does play a central role in marginalism, which traces all economic activity to the subjective preferences of agents — indeed, it’s hard to imagine how subjectivity could play a bigger role in this framework than it already does.

Moreover, it is not clear how or why there is supposed to be an “affinity” between analytic philosophy and either behaviorism or marginalism, other than the fact that some philosophers in the analytic tradition have at times argued for these or related views. The same point, one would imagine, holds true for professors located elsewhere in academia.

One of Social History’s core contentions is the idea that the dominant position of analytic philosophy derives from its conservative (or at least anti-radical) political orientation or implications. Yet on this point, too, Schuringa’s own evidence is unable to sustain the claim.

It is true that McCarthyism pushed radical voices out of philosophy, along with many other academic disciplines and indeed much of public life in general. Ironically, Schuringa illustrates the effects of McCarthyism by recounting Angela Davis’s ouster from UCLA’s (heavily analytic) philosophy department for her political stances. Yet as Schuringa himself recounts, Davis landed the job in the first place in part thanks to the efforts of leading analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, and her departmental colleagues fiercely opposed her firing by the university. Why should we take any of this as evidence of analytic philosophy’s special or essential conservatism?

Finally, Schuringa claims that “analytic philosophers have been effective in subjecting a series of successive radical, non-liberal currents of thought to liberal marketization,” from Marxism to feminism to the black radical tradition, going so far as to say analytic philosophy has “colonized” these disciplines. The colonization metaphor suggests some bizarre connotations: as if certain topics were not legitimate objects of study by analytic philosophers, who are unjustly importing alien methods onto the land of others and illegitimately displacing indigenous ways of knowing.

Loaded language choice aside, Schuringa’s ire here seems misplaced. As Kieran Setiya observes in his review of Social History, academic interest in race, gender, and sexuality flourished in the humanities in the 1970s and ’80s; this development has mostly influenced analytic philosophy only more recently.

Over the past few decades, however, academic interest in these themes has not meant a flowering of fruitful anti-capitalist thought in other disciplines. In fact, it has coincided with the growth on the Left of (often anti-Marxist) identitarianism, to the detriment of effective class politics. This fact makes it hard to believe that analytic philosophy’s recent forays into feminist philosophy and philosophy of race are somehow suppressing emancipatory theoretical alternatives.

The Empiricist-Liberal Bogeyman

This discussion can necessarily only scratch the surface of Schuringa’s nearly three hundred–page polemic. (For perceptive comments about his treatment of “intuitions” and the “method of cases” oft-used by analytic philosophers, for instance, see the reviews by Setiya and Jonathan Rée.) I want to turn here to a deeper problem, though: Schuringa’s confusion about the ideological target of his critique.

That target is supposed to be “empiricist liberalism” and, more specifically, the image “of an inert realm of ‘fact,’ simply given to the subject to be passively received, against which realm that subject stands as supposedly autonomous and spontaneous.” Schuringa traces this picture to the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume and argues that analytic philosophy vigorously upholds its individualist outlook, which provides ideological support for passivity in the face of capitalist status quo.

This characterization of analytic ideology is strange in a few respects. The attribution of this picture to Hume is extremely questionable: he arguably did not really believe in an enduring autonomous subject, or an enduring “inert” world independent of the subject, at all. Another issue is that a significant amount of analytic philosophy has been devoted to questioning the distinction between “passively received” facts and the “autonomous” subject: prominent philosophers including Davidson, McDowell, P. F. Strawson, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Tyler Burge (to name a few) have in different ways assigned human cognition and social practices a greater role in the construction of meaning and knowledge.

The most fundamental problem, however, is that Schuringa gives us no reason to think that there is a connection between empiricist epistemology and the ideological defense of capitalism. Why would we think that a conception of knowledge as a confrontation between “inert facts” and an “autonomous subject” would lead a person to any conclusions at all about the capitalist social structure or what to do about it?

In characterizing the so-called Humean view, Schuringa writes:

[Facts] are received passively by the subject. The subject is, by contrast, in principle autonomous and free. But their autonomous freedom pertains only to them as a private individual, and so effectively has nowhere to go. It cannot reach back into the world; and so, after all, the self is just as inert and ineffective as what comes their way through the senses. Far from being a subject, they are merely subject to the world as something they can do nothing about, just as they are simply subject to capital as it reproduces itself through them and through all the other cogs that it turns.

This is a series of impressionistic non sequiturs. There is nothing in the “Humean” idea of sensory experience that implies one should or must have a passive attitude toward the world in general or capitalist social relations in particular. Nor does an empiricist-liberal conception of experience prevent analytic philosophers or anyone else from recognizing that social structures deeply shape the development of individual subjects or the terms on which they interact, as Schuringa elsewhere implies. (Again, Rawls is unfairly attacked on this score.)

In other words, there’s no reason for analytic philosophers to reject Karl Marx’s famous dictum from the Eighteenth Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” And it shouldn’t be surprising that this is common ground between “empiricism-liberalism” and Marxism, since Marxism is in many ways continuous with the liberal philosophical tradition.

To my mind, what unifies analytic philosophy is not a devotion to upholding a capitalism-reinforcing version of Humean metaphysics or epistemology but rather a loose set of preoccupations, conceptual and historical reference points, and, yes, a certain argumentative aesthetic. These derive in part from early British empiricists like Hume as well as later thinkers like the great utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick; but also from Descartes and Kant and American pragmatists like William James and John Dewey (and increasingly others in the German idealist tradition, including Fichte, Hegel, and Marx).

Analytic philosophers are often dogged in their applications of conceptual distinctions, in their insistence on regimented argument, and in the attention they grant to individual experience and individual agency. These, I think, are all intellectual tendencies the Left would do well to adopt.

Analytic philosophers can also, as Schuringa complains, sometimes be annoying in their insistent demands for clarification and in their proud ignorance of other disciplines. Still, there’s nothing to be gained by writing off a large, varied, and occasionally brilliant body of work with an ill-drawn caricature of it as shallow bourgeois ideology.