I should start by saying that I found Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy enjoyable and informative. But it’s also rather spicy. Above all, it’s never dull.
I can live with that combo.
As someone trained in analytic philosophy, readers might expect me to dislike A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. After all, Schuringa takes an unsympathetic approach to the field. On the other hand, I did work that crosses the borders between the analytic and the Continental. And I sympathize with the critique of even ‘dissident’ analytics as using abstract and disengaged methods. So, readers might expect me to love it.
In reality, I neither disliked nor loved the book. I thought it had its merits and shortcomings.
The Upshot
Schuringa provides a social history of analytic philosophy that engages both with its ideas and their social and political context. He gives enough background on the philosophy itself to motivate it for readers. But he also focuses on ideological critique – locating central ideas of analytic philosophy in bourgeois liberal ideology.
In short, he does for analytic philosophy what the history of science does for science.
So, from where, both ideology and history, does analytic philosophy come?
Schuringa sees it as a return to the ideas of David Hume, in the sense of a synthesis between empiricism and political liberalism. Analytic philosophy adds to this synthesis a focus on formal logic and, eventually, a return to the project of metaphysics.
It’s easy to see the empiricism, with a few notable rough edges. The liberalism part, though, takes a bit of explanation. Schuringa sees a link between analytic philosophy and bourgeois liberalism in three forms. These include Russell’s deference to science, Moore’s return to common sense, and Wittgenstein’s promotion of philosophy as therapy.
History of Philosophical Ideas
While the book earns its title A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Schuringa also hits the history of actual philosophical ideas. And he tells the tale reasonably well in most places.
His story begins with Russell and Moore – not with Frege, who he leaves for later. It then moves on through Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, ordinary language philosophy, Davidson and Dummett, and Kripke and Lewis’s modal logic. Finally, he concludes with more recent crises of methodology.
We’ll get to the crises in a bit.
For now, I’ll say that I found most of the history informative and enlightening. Schuringa rightly busts some myths about the Russellian and Moorean ‘rebellion against idealism.’ And he reminds readers that many Vienna Circle members saw their philosophical project as part of a larger project of leftist politics.
The story of ordinary language philosophy is much more of a mixed bag. Schuringa helpfully reconstructs and elevates the work of the women of Oxford philosophy – especially Midgley, Anscombe, and Foot. He also points to the sense in which it involved setting politics aside and breaking philosophy into practical problems.
At the same time, I think he misses the mark pretty widely on Austin, by far OLP’s most compelling figure. Criticisms of OLP (e.g., its paradigm case argument) that apply to Austin’s fellow travelers and followers don’t apply to Austin himself.
Analytic Philosophy’s Crises
Schuringa thinks analytic philosophy sits in a period of both crisis and hegemony.
On one hand, analytic philosophers aren’t happy with the work they’re doing. They’re no longer able to say what analytic philosophy is, really. And their attempts to tell the early story of the field often result in false founding myths.
On the other hand, it still dominates most philosophy departments in the U.S. This also goes for the best regarded ones in much of the rest of the world.
In attempting to intervene, Schuringa interprets analytic philosophy as a postwar (that is, post World War II) synthesis of various traditions. He reads Frege, Russell and Moore, the Vienna Circle, Oxford ordinary language philosophy, and (to some extent) even Wittgenstein as separate tendencies that came together awkwardly.
This explains much of its identity crisis, and I think there’s a lot to that story.
Schuringa comes down more harshly on the crisis of methods. As he tells the story, recent analytic philosophy relies by default on intuitions elicited by the ‘method of cases’ (i.e., thought experiments) and intuition pumps, all used as data. Insofar as it breaks out of this method, it’s via ‘X-Phi,’ which accepts the basic premise but tries to use science to measure intuitions more accurately.
He argues that this is a deeply impoverished and flawed method. He also argues that this method bitterly disappoints college students and turn them off from philosophy. This is a darker part of a social history of analytic philosophy.
And he’s not wrong about that.
A Social History of Analytic Philosophy
Finally, I should say a word about the political critique. At times it’s insightful. At times it’s even fun.
I learned a few things I didn’t know. For example, I didn’t know the extent to which the construction of Frege as a ‘founder’ of analytic philosophy was more myth than fact. And while I did know that the term ‘Continental philosophy’ was largely an analytic invention and a conflation of various traditions, I didn’t know exactly how nasty some of the debates became.
And I had no idea that John Searle was a landlord who was politically active for the interests of landlords.
However, at times, Schuringa presses his points about politics too far or in an imbalanced way. His presentation of even analytic feminist philosophy and philosophy of race as ‘colonizing’ captures this interplay between the insightful and the unfair. I also suspect that insofar as these issues are present (and they are present), they’re nearly as present in Continental feminist philosophy and philosophy of race.
I’d make much the same point about Schuringa’s appeal to funding of analytic philosophers by the defense industry. It’s likely that there were Continentals who benefited from government funding of, e.g., postmodernism. And I’m not sure there’s a lot to be learned from this, other than that the government and big corporations funded many cultural products in the Cold War Liberal era.
On the insightful side of things, Schuringa is no doubt correct that Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice is de-radicalizing in nature. He’s similarly correct about how Haslanger and Langton re-purpose the work of Catharine MacKinnon.
On the whole, this is a book worth reading. I’d recommend readers give it a look – especially readers trained in the analytic tradition (such as it is).
