, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy

Verso: London and New York 2025

336 pp, 978 1 8042 9209 9

Christoph Schuringa does not pull his punches. In a pivotal chapter of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy he delivers a merciless takedown of the so-called ‘method of cases’, which he regards as a central procedure of contemporary analytic philosophy. The method can be traced to a three-page paper which appeared in the esoteric academic journal Analysis in 1963. The author was an American professor called Edmund Lee Gettier, who set out from the assumption that philosophers have always defined knowledge as ‘justified true belief’, and went on to describe a couple of bizarre scenarios (‘cases’) in which a belief is both true and justified, but seems not to deserve the name of ‘knowledge’. Suppose for example that I glance at the church clock, which stands at ten to three, and this happens to be the time even though the clock has stopped: do I really ‘know’ what time it is, or have I just been lucky? Gettier cases have proliferated over the years, and they often breed disagreement. (The one about the church clock, for instance, may well not pass muster.) They were soon joined by ‘Frankfurt cases’—problems about free will named after the philosopher Harry Frankfurt—and the notorious ‘trolley cases’ that Philippa Foot devised as part of an inquiry into the limits of moral responsibility. You might almost say that analytic philosophers can be defined as people who get excited about ‘cases’, however ludicrous or artificial.

Back in 1980 Daniel Dennett described arguments of this kind as ‘intuition pumps’, meaning that they are designed, in all their brain-bruising ingenuity, to elicit subconscious intuitions about where to draw a line between appropriate and inappropriate uses of language. It does not take a genius, however, to realize that intuitions are liable to vary from one person to another, and in 2004 the cognitive scientist Joshua Knobe launched a project he called ‘experimental philosophy’ which made use of social surveys to identify the different philosophical intuitions avowed by different kinds of people. For Schuringa, this development exposes a fatal flaw in the analytic romance with ‘cases’ and ‘intuitions’: serious normative discussions about how people ought to think are being replaced by descriptive data about what they happen to believe.Analytic philosophy, he says, has allowed ‘reliance on intuitions’ to ‘stand in for philosophical grounds’, and this, according to him, is not only a ‘surprising methodology for a supposedly rigorous form of philosophy’, but also—as he puts it, rather alarmingly—‘a symptom of philosophical degeneracy’.

The argument is neat and provocative but not entirely convincing. The ‘method of cases’ may be tiresome, but it can also be amusing and even instructive. Moreover the analytic philosophers who favour it do not, on the whole, set much store by intuitions in the sense invoked by Schuringa (and most of them share his contempt for ‘experimental philosophy’). Though today’s analytic philosophers may not declare themselves as such, Schuringa believes they are ‘very easy to recognize’ on the basis of certain tell-tale mannerisms: ‘highly combative’ approaches to debate, for example, ostentatious displays of ‘rigour’ and ‘clarity’, and drearily stereotyped turns of phrase, the most annoying of which, for Schuringa, is ‘What exactly do you mean?’ These habits stem, he argues, from their self-image as beneficiaries of a philosophical revolution which—so they suppose—occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, overthrowing an old regime of soft-minded metaphysical speculation and making room for a new philosophical order: hard-headed, modern and unillusioned. In that respect analytic philosophers have something in common with those Marxists who regard themselves as ‘scientific socialists’, in contrast to the misty-eyed ‘utopians’ of the past. Unlike most forms of Marxism, however, analytic philosophy has a chauvinistic streak. It is located mainly in Britain and the United States, it conducts almost all its business in English, and it sees itself as locked in a heroic struggle with something it calls ‘continental philosophy’: an atavistic cult, it seems, that lurks in dank corners of foreign languages where the sun of modern science does not shine. In 2011, for instance, the New York philosopher Kit Fine described his continental colleagues as ‘fraudulent’, adding that if there were any exceptions they must be as rare as ‘good Nazis’. Analytic philosophers are terrified of continental philosophy, in short; but as Schuringa observes, it is probably no more than a figment of their imagination.

Schuringa starts his story, conventionally enough, with the ‘rebellion against idealism’ associated with Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in Trinity College Cambridge in the late 1890s; but despite the fame of the ‘Cambridge school’ and its vaunted influence on the Bloomsbury group, its significance has, according to him, been greatly exaggerated. Later he moves on, rather gloomily, to Oxford University (‘the home of dullness’) and dismisses ‘ordinary language philosophy’—an Oxfordian technique which appeared to elevate standard usage into a criterion of philosophical propriety—as a licence for intellectual indolence. His mood picks up in a lively chapter on the Vienna Circle, whose members spent the interwar years promoting the militantly rationalistic and atheistic doctrines that came to be known as Logical Positivism. Schuringa traces various links between the Circle and wider progressive movements: it was connected, for example, with the political legacy of Red Vienna, and also with artistic modernism (Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath gave lectures on the new philosophy at the Bauhaus Dessau), and some of its members maintained friendly relations with Max Horkheimer’s largely Marxist Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. But these promising green shoots were to be eradicated by the rise of Nazism; most of the Viennese positivists fled across the Atlantic, shedding their radicalism on the way.

For Schuringa, analytic philosophy ‘comes into its own’ in the United States in the Cold War era, slowly developing into the ‘monolith that we now know’. The analytic philosophers were, it seems, willing to do as much as they could to make America a ‘bulwark against totalitarianism’, especially after several leftist colleagues lost their jobs following appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Analytic philosophy as a whole began to show ‘close affinities’ with two better-established academic enterprises—‘marginalism in economics’ and ‘behaviourism in psychology’—emulating their project of replacing the amateurish value-driven inquiries of the past with dispassionate, specialized professional research. The government-funded rand Corporation sponsored several prominent analytic philosophers—W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson for instance—to conduct research into game theory and the mathematics of rational choice, with a view to buttressing the intellectual defences of American free-market capitalism.

This is a brave and original book, but Schuringa’s claim that it is an exercise in ‘social history’ is a little misleading. His narrative is constructed not from data about social classes, social trends or social movements, but from profiles of individual analytic philosophers—more than a hundred of them, by my count. He also speaks at one point of practising ‘psycho-social history’, but instead of exploring the inner compulsions of analytic philosophers he provides compressed summaries of their principal publications, accompanied by sketches of their public careers, focused on top jobs at elite universities. He tells us, for example, that Ruth Barcan Marcus ‘genuinely established a quantified modal logic’, for which, after suffering institutionalized misogyny for many years, she was eventually rewarded with a named chair at Yale; but that this displeased the imperious Quine of Harvard, who stuck to his dictum that ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’. Those who care about such things will protest that Quine was really referring to ‘bound variables’ or ‘variables of quantification’, rather than variables in general; but readers unfamiliar with logical quantifiers, predicate logic and modality are likely to end up feeling browbeaten and rather confused.

Schuringa builds on this foundation to argue that analytic philosophy as a whole—or at least ‘analytic philosophy proper’—is a suitable case for what he calls ‘ideology critique, in line with a Marxist tradition’. He is well versed in Marxism—he has just published Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (2025)—and this could have been the prelude to some high-wire Marxist hermeneutics; at the beginning of the book he suggests that ‘the mechanisms by which liberalism drives liberalism are less far to seek than, say, the mechanisms by which liberalism drives the development of modal logic’. In practice, however, he finds that ‘the underlying ideologies are not difficult to read off’. John Rawls, for instance, in his celebrated Theory of Justice (1971), set out to revive ‘social contract theory’—the basic template for individualistic bourgeois liberalism—and gave it such allure that even radical critics were, according to Schuringa, ‘led back into the ideology of liberalism’.