A few years ago, I published a book on the history of American philosophy after World War II called Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. It was a history of social pressures placed on philosophers by political forces. Since philosophers like to think that philosophy is independent of low things like politics, my book was not very popular in some parts of the profession. This I expected; some of these philosophers actually believe what they think.
Other aspects of its reception I did not expect, however. One of these is that six years after its appearance, my small book would be part of a growing literature. There are now three other histories which deal with political pressures which were placed on philosophers during the Twentieth Century, and which may have affected the subsequent development of philosophy itself:
Michael Friedman A Parting of the Ways (Open Court, 2000)
Aaron Preston Analytic Philosophy: the History of an Illusion (Continuum 2007)
George Reisch How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 2005)
Not that any of the other authors copied me, or even followed me. Friedman’s book came out before mine. As far as I know, the other two books were already underway when my book appeared.
This is a classic case of convergent research. All four books, begun independently, use similar methodology to arrive at their answers: namely, that who wins and who loses in philosophy is determined not solely by who has the better arguments. Also in play are political forces which have nothing to do with phiulosophical merit.
They have to do with Crazy Things.
These books apply historical methodologies first developed in the philosophy of science to philosophy itself. Basically, what you do is: you go back to some watershed turning point in the history of science—say, Einstein’s rejection of the Quantum Theory. Then you try to figure out what was really going on among scientists at that time. What you find at these turning points, as Arthur Fine once put it to me, is not merely disinterested argument, but “all sorts of crazy things.” The next part of the job, after several decades, is to sort through everything, subtract what we can now recognize as crazy, and reevaluate the merits of the case.
It was inevitable that this style of historiography would come to be applied to philosophy itself. That is what Friedman, Reisch, I, and to a degree Preston have done. We took major turning points—say, Carnap’s break with Heidegger, or analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States. We tried to figure out what was really going on. And we discovered all sorts of Crazy Things.
The others may not agree, but it seems to me that our research converges around the notions that:
(a) The blanket rejection of what became Continental philosophy by what became Analytical philosophy was a Crazy Thing (i.e., politically motivated);
(b). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States was a Crazy Thing;
(c). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s present dominance in the United States just may be a Crazy Thing.
Given that no one even seems to know what Analytical philosophy is these days, it is hard to tell just what its dominance consists in, and how much of it could survive critical scrutiny. But if philosophers want to be critically rational beings—if they want to be philosophers—they had better accept that a Crazy Thing happened in philosophy just at the time that Analytical philosophy was coming to dominance, and they need to get started thinking about it.
These four books are a good place to make that start.
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