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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

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August 27, 2006

Though philosophy in America today is overwhelmingly, philosophy in the analytic tradition, there is no longer an American strain of the tradition that is substantially different from what is found in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. If there is an integrated community of analytic philosophers from different countries, within which individuals move back and forth, then America is the center of that community, but it doesn't define it. So argues Scott Soames in 'Analytic Philosophy in America', where gives a history of the analytic tradition in the US without reference to its relationship to non-analytic continental philosophy.

The quote below is from Soames article:

In understanding the transition to the analytic period in America, it is important to remember that analytic philosophy is neither a fixed body of substantive doctrine, a precise methodology, nor a radical break with most traditional philosophy of the past -- save for varieties of romanticism, theism, and absolute idealism. Instead, it is a discrete historical tradition stemming from Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, characterized by respect for science and common sense, belief in the relevance of logic and language for philosophy, emphasis on precision and clarity of argumentation, suspicion of apriori metaphysics, and elevation of the goals of truth and knowledge over inspiration, moral uplift, and spiritual comfort -- plus a dose of professional specialization.

This continuity thesis is at odds with the standard modernist interpretation that postulates analytic philosophy, as a discrete historical tradition that stands for, and is, is a radical rupture with nineteenth century philosophy. The radical rupture thesis has been analytic philosophy's self-understanding. Both the continuity and rupture interpretations treat analytic philosophy as a stand alone, self-contained entity, thereby reflecting the tradition's ontological assumption of external relations and its rejection of internal relations.

Soames goes on to say that the emergence of analytic philosophy in America was marked by three events:

(i) the arrival from Europe of leading logicians, philosophers of science, logical positivists, and other analytic philosophers (ii) the transformation of the Harvard department led by Quine in the 1950s, and 60s, and (iii) the vast post-war expansion in higher education in America, which came to encompass a substantial drain in philosophical talent from Britain to the United States----including (for varying lengths of time) such figures as Paul Grice, Stuart Hampshire, J. O Urmson, and the British trained (though American born) Philippa Foot.

I didn't know about the last bit--but it was the same as in Australia upon reflection. Here it was also held, along with Quine's well known thesis that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough," which reworked Carnap's claim that "Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science--- that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences" in his The Logical Syntax of Language (1934, 1937). This stream of philosophy subsequently broadened into metaphysics, physicalism, the nature of time and space etc.

Quine's heroic claim that could no hold up, given the effect of logical positivism on ethics. As Soames points out the period from the mid-30s to the early 60s had been the heyday of emotivism and evaluative non-cognitivism.

For many years, one of America's most well-known analytic writers in ethics was Charles Stevenson, whose 1937 "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms," and 1944 Ethics and Language, had become classics. In these works, he argued that the function of evaluative terms --- like good, bad, right, and wrong--- was not to describe the world, or courses of action, but to express one's emotional attitude toward them. Sentences containing such terms were not, he maintained, used to make statements that could be true or false, but to express feelings and guide action. As a result, normative theories about the right and the good could not be objects of knowledge, or even rationally justified belief, and so were excluded from the proper domain of philosophy. As Stevenson put it at the end of his famous article, since "x is good is essentially a vehicle for suggestion, it is scarcely a statement which philosophers, any more than other men, are called upon to make. To the extent that ethics predicates the ethical terms of anything, rather than explains their meaning, it ceases to be a reflective study." Accordingly, he thought, the only job for the moral philosopher was to explain how evaluative language works.

That got rid of ethics in a way. It meant that utilitarianism ruled in Australia unchallenged until the work of John Rawls began to have its impact.

My experience was that a large part of the analytic identity was that it was defined against non-analytic continental philosophy which was treated as an enemy--eg., Derrida and Foucault. It was an antipathy to naturalism that was often thought to be constitutive of the Continental tradition and that much of the antipathy of Anglophone philosophers to the Continental tradition is justified.This antipathy goes back to to Hegel, who is interpreted as an obscurantist metaphysician who rejected the first great naturalistic turn in philosophy in modernity.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:47 PM | | Comments (0)
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