I’ve been reading a few things recently in history of analytic philosophy, and one recurring question is who counts as an analytic philosopher.
Usually the way this question is asked, the implicit focus is on ‘analytic’. The question becomes “Who is an analytic philosopher?”, with a background presupposition that they are indeed a philosopher. There is, at least in the bits of the literature I’ve been reading, less attention to the other form of the question: Who is an analytic philosopher? Are there people who are unambiguously part of the analytic movement, but where it is an interesting question whether they are an analytic philosopher?
Actually, to put the question that way, the answer seems to be obviously yes. Einstein, Gödel, von Neumann, Blackwell, and Arrow are all analytic philosophers if they are any kind of philosopher at all, and it’s a trickier question what place they should each have in our history of analytic philosophy. Maybe it’s not so hard in every case, but hopefully you get the point.1
1 The impression I get from the introductory papers Michael Beaney wrote to the 2013 handbook he edited (Beaney 2013) is that he thinks Einstein and Gödel clearly are, von Neumann and Blackwell are clearly not, and Arrow is a borderline case. I’d prefer a more expansive view, but that’s reasonable.
I was struck by this when I came across the following passage in a (very good) paper by Thomas Baldwin on G. E. Moore.
Thus if one looks for major contributions to analytic philosophy during the 1930s, Cambridge does not provide anything comparable to the great works of the period 1910–30 except for Moore’s late papers such as his 1939 ‘Proof of an External World’. Instead, as far as analytic philosophy is concerned, there is no question that the most productive debates were taking place in Vienna and Prague between the members of the Vienna Circle and its associated groups. (Baldwin 2013: 447)
Now I think this is rather dramatically wrong. The single best work of the Cambridge analytic school came out in 1936: Keynes’s General Theory. Now I don’t really think Baldwin is claiming, implausibly, that the General Theory is not as good as Moore’s Defense of Common Sense or whatever. I think he’s assuming, plausibly but I’d say incorrectly, that it is not a contribution to analytic philosophy.
I said earlier that most historians of analytic don’t really question who counts as a philosopher. But ‘most’ doesn’t mean ‘all’, and it’s worth noting the exceptions. In a recent paper on migration of European philosophers to America, Sander Verhaegh starts by quantifying the number of philosophers who migrated. This requires a definition of who is a philosopher, and here’s how he presents the methodology he uses.
In compiling the list, I followed the DDEp in working with a broad conception of ‘philosophy’. Table 1 includes both academics with rich careers as philosophy professors and scholars who formally worked in different fields—e.g. physics, history, or sociology—but who had a degree in philosophy or regularly contributed to debates on (the history of) philosophy. (Verhaegh 2025: 5)
By that definition, Keynes would count. Even if you disagree that the General Theory is philosophy, and don’t count the work on probability or on historical figures (esp Newton, Hume, and Jevons) as history of philosophy, he had a philosophy degree.
To end more speculatively, I wonder whether history of analytic should pay more attention to the separation of the economics tripos from the moral sciences tripos in the early 1890s. It’s a commonplace that analytic philosophy is defined as much by its history as by any theories shared by its protagonists. In that history, the four foundational figures are Frege, Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Three of them worked at Cambridge, within a few years (on in Wittgenstein’s case, a couple of decades) of the split.
This matters in part for classificatory purposes. I don’t think there would be as much dispute that Keynes was part of the history of analytic if he was teaching in the same program as Moore all of his career. But more importantly, it’s worth thinking about what it means for philosophy that Moore and Pigou (to pick just two early C20 names) did not have as many scholarly and administrative interactions as, say, Sidgwick and Marshall.