The last post here was about the phrase ‘analytic philosophy’, with the focus on ‘philosophy’. Let’s turn back to the thing most people talk about: ‘analytic’.
Famously, or perhaps infamously, there is no good analysis of the ‘analytic’ in ‘analytic philosopher’. Perhaps you think that’s not surprising because it follows from a much more general principle. But it’s still a challenge for people writing things like handbooks of the history of analytic philosophy. Finding necessary and sufficient conditions for something is a fun parlour game/way to get paid, and it’s fun/renumerative even if it doesn’t work, but you have to make decisions about what to include and what not to include. And that job is not fun/renumerative if you don’t in fact make those decisions.
The usual way to define a philosophical school is in terms of the theses it endorses. So the realists believe in a mind-independent external world, and the idealists don’t. Of course, we need to fuss a lot with that for a few reasons. What does ‘dependent’ there mean? Is that really what divides the schools? But at least it’s a starting point.
If there’s one thing that is more or less universally agreed upon in this field, it’s that this does not work. There are no defining theses of analytic philosophy. This is for a few reasons.
The big one (in my opinion) is that analytic philosophy got going in the mid-20th century as something of a coalition between two somewhat hostile groups: the realists and the positivists. And they were more or less in coalition against the other two big groups of the preceeding decades: the idealists and the pragmatists.
Now this isn’t going to lead to a nice statement in terms of theses for a few reasons. One is that they will be disjunctive: the realists and the positivists disagreed with each other a lot. Another is that the things they did agree on were things that many other philosophers (especially medieval philosophers and some realist South Asian philosophers) also agreed with. But perhaps the biggest is that the line between positivism and pragmatism is either blurry or the Atlantic Ocean. Either we count all the American pragmatists as analytic philosophers, which was not how people at the time thought of themselves, and would make the notion ‘analytic philosopher’ less than useful for understanding the history of philosophy in the US, or we have to find some thesis that was endorsed by all the different positivists, but not the pragmatists. Neither option seems appealing.
And even if we solve that problem, things get worse when we move into the later twentieth century. Absolutely paradigmatic analytic philosophers like Quine and Austin were heavily influenced by pragmatism. If we somehow managed to find a set of theses that got the right classification for philosophers pre-1950, it wouldn’t work after it.
We could go with something like an attitude about what’s important in philosophy. That’s sort of what Dummett does, when he says what’s central to analytic philosophy is that it places analysis of language before analysis of mind. But as Dummett notes, this requires reclassifying many significant figures. It makes Lewis and Stalnaker not analytic philosophers.
It might even remove Russell, or at least the anti-ordinary language Russell of the 1950s, from analytic philosophy. This won’t do: it’s just about analytic that Russell was an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophy is philosophy broadly in the style that Russell did it.
This suggests the view that many people have landed on. Analytic philosophy just is philosophy that is influenced, in the right kind of way, by the founders (whoever they are) of analytic philosophy.
This account has several virtues. You won’t end up saying that Russell isn’t an analytic philosopher. If you insert Wittgenstein as a founder, you won’t say that Wittgenstein is not an analytic philosopher. This is not-trivial, since if you tried to define analytic philosophy in virtue of its style, you would surely exclude the author of the Investigations. On the other hand, you won’t include Ockham or Scotus as analytic philosophers. Say what you like about the similarities between their philosophy and ours, they certainly weren’t influenced by Russell, Moore, etc.
Of course there are several problems with this account. You need to say who the founders were, and not quite everyone agrees on those. Given how influential these founders were across a range of fields, you need to lean very heavily on the account of what ‘philosophy’ is to not have this massively overgenerate. After all, von Neumann was influenced (in roughly the right way) by this tradition, and von Neumann influenced approximately everyone, so there is an immediate danger of overgeneration.
But the problem I want to end with for today is that this doesn’t have an ending. The kind of influence involved here is transitive. So as long as everyone is influenced by their teachers, on this view analytic philosophy will never end. It’s Trotsky’s permanent revolution come to philosophy. This seems implausible to me. Movements end. A periodisation that has no ending is of no use.
To be sure, not everyone agrees with this. Michael Beaney (2013) thinks it is a virtue of his view that there cannot be post-analytic philosophy. (Beaney doesn’t endorse the kind of influence view I’ve just outlined, but the methodology based view he does endorse is like it in having the permanent revolution consequence.)
Thirdly, and following on from this, we can see what is mistaken about talk of ‘post-analytic’ philosophy, and why ‘analytic’ can qualify just about any philosophical position or tradition. Talk of ‘post’ anything is to suggest having gone beyond something, its errors or limitations recognized, the problems solved or shown to be insoluble, its possibilities exhausted. Such critical distancing is always overdone. But if analytic philosophy is seen as methodologically based, and the toolbox is still in use, even if some tools have been added and some have dropped to the bottom, then talk of ‘post-analytic’ makes little sense. No one is a post-carpenter or post-plumber, though they can be an ex-carpenter or ex-plumber. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, far from being replaced by ‘post-analytic’, ‘analytic’ is being used as a qualifier with ever greater frequency. But this, too, is unsurprising, if to talk of something being ‘analytic’ is just to say that it can be done in an analytic way, that is, by using the analytic toolbox. (Beaney 2013, 28)
I guess this does not seem appealing at all to me, at least from the perspective of having helpful labels. It’s true that the qualifier ‘analytic’ is being used more often now than it used to be, and that’s interesting, but it would be more useful to have a view where analytic philosophy could, at least in principle, be superseded.
That’s enough for today. Hopefully in a future post I’ll say a bit more about how I think the account of what is analytic should be amended to make things better.