Nominalism!

Aaron Preston has a very interesting comment in response to this post by Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports.

In his post, Leiter excoriates Nancy Holland -- and by extension the editors at Notre Dame Philosophical Review for letting it pass -- for saying this in her review of Jason Powell's Jacques Derrida: A Biography:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America "has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise" leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy "has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization" (pp. 124-125).  Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument.

Here's my two cents, on what Preston says, not on Leiter, Holland, Powell, or Derrida:

Aaron Preston has made a very interesting comment. I tend to support a nominalist position in these matters: I think the terms "analytic philosophy" and "continental philosophy" are illegitimate abstractions from the concrete entities with which we should be concerned and of which we should speak. But I'm not a methodological individualist as that term is usually understood, that is, I don't think we need to restrict the discussion to individual persons. If, in addition to individual philosophers, we can demonstrate the individuation of social institutions by means of hiring and citation networks, then we can talk about AP and CP and perhaps even "analytic continental philosophy" (ACP) and "continental continental philosophy" (CCP) in their sociological reality as networks.

Preston's suggestion asks whether we can discern trends in the writings of philosophers belonging to these networks ("certain tendencies in analytic practice"), and suggests some sort of "emulation" of "scientific method" as that tendency. I take it he tries to establish this at length in his forthcoming book, Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, which I very much look forward to reading. I'd like to see this treated as a practice that is both established in the training of young philosophers in the AP network, and that is used as a boundary-producing test: if you don't demonstrate this tendency in your work (in seminar papers / general exams / dissertations) then you don't get your degree and you don't belong to that network.

If he's able to makes his case for this as a practice whose testing and enforcement usefully demarcates the AP network, I may have to revisit my nominalist outlook, but I'll hold onto it for the time being, if only for the sake of some peace and quiet in the profession. Here's my plea: if you have something to say about Derrida, cite the work and give your critique: don't launch a broadside about "continental philosophy." And of course, the converse: don't generalize about "analytic philosophy": cite the authors you don't care for, and tell us why.

If Professors Powell and Holland (and probably Derrida, though I haven't read the work to which Powell refers) had taken the time to write as carefully as Professor Preston, we could have gotten more quickly to this interesting point.

Along these lines, we might have to revisit the suggestion by John McCumber in Time in the Ditch (Northwestern, 2001) and later taken up in Reshaping Reason (Indiana, 2005) as well as by Simon Critchley in Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2001) that "historicity" is a tendency we find in the work of the CP (or just CCP?) networks. By this they mean both the essential historical structure of human being and the epistemic status of philosophical work. And as a result, the concern with the history of philosophy and philosophical concepts that marks contemporary CP work. (To make it pass my sociological test, I think I can testify that there are testing and enforcement mechanisms at work in training young scholars in the CCP network that demand this sort of historical awareness. At least I wouldn't pass a dissertation that didn't demonstrate a historical treatment of the concepts at stake.)

Echoing Preston (if I'm reading him correctly) McCumber and Critchly oppose to the historicity of CP the "scientism" on the part of philosophers working in the AP network, whom they see as striving to establish "atemporal" results, and, as a result, not being very interested in the history of philosophy or of their movement (prior to Dummett's Origins of Analytical Philosophy in 1993, at least, but perhaps later than that for many).

Note that these are only the roughest paraphrases of Preston, McCumber, and Critchley. I don't want to get into whether these characterizations of AP are correct. Instead, I just want to say  -- whether or not "atemporality" was the goal of an appreciable number of AP thinkers and whether or not it ever functioned as a litmus test for belonging to the AP network -- that the "image of thought" (as Deleuze would say) we need to cultivate to go beyond the "analytic - continental divide" is that of a science in which history is essential: cf. "path dependence" in non-linear dynamics or "complexity theory."

I think that Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy has succeeded in explicating Deleuze as laying out the epistemology and ontology of a world in which the results of complexity theory are obtained. That's the most important reason why I think that book is "beyond the divide"; the fact that he references lots of thinkers in AP philosophy of science in explicating a CP thinker like Deleuze is secondary. If you're interested, I have a PDF outline of ISVP here and a review of it here: Download delanda_jbsp_review_long_version.pdf.

Comments

[Matt]

Interesting stuff, but I'd contest the claim that it's only w/ Dummett's book that analytic philosophers (whatever that means) became interested in the history of the movement. There has been a large group of philosophers, often associated (sometimes wrongly, I think) with Burten Dreben, who have done serious historical work on the development of analytic philosophy and have spent a lot of time working it out in a much clearer and interesting way than Dummett- people like Tom Ricketts (now at Pitt, at Penn and later Northwestern for a long time), Warren Goldfarb (Harvard), Peter Hylton (Illinois-Chicago), Michael Friedman (Stanford), Nancy Cartwright (LSE), Michael Kramer (Chicago), etc. Much of this work pre-dates Dummett's book and is independent of (and to my mind better) than it.

[John Protevi]

Matt, thanks for these references. Your point is well taken. Do you know of an online bibliography of work in history of AP?

[joncogburn]

I wrote my dissertation on Dummett, but I agree with Matt that the people he lists are at the minimum more helpful to read. I think most people take Dummett's history to be significant just because it restored Frege to his rightful place. Friedman's reappraisal of the logical positivists as heirs of Marburg school neo-Kantianism is just dynamite.

The big books people are talking about now are Scott Soames' recent volumes I and II of "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century" (Princeton). From reading secondary sources on Soames' work, I think it is probably extraordinarily good, albeit (pace what I take Soames view to be, not having read the work) I don't think that Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" has heralded in a new day of metaphysics. [Digression- Kripke, Quineans like Putnam, and Goedel all did in the logical positivist's linguistic account of necessity, which according to some views was part of classical analytic philosophy (of course this is a cartoon, people like Friedman showing the original positivist's to have much more interesting views). Unfortunately, I think the possible worlds account that has canonically replaced it suffers from exactly analogous problems.]

Books I'd add to your list are MacIntyre's "After Virtue," Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and (perhaps most importantly) Rorty's edited volume "The Linguistic Turn." While people who agree with the substantive conclusions of these authors are probably in a small minority, I think their interpretation of the previous century's dialectic has been far more influential than most philosphers, analytic or continental, realize.

[John Protevi]

Hi Jon, thanks for these. I really enjoyed Rorty's review of Soames in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/print/rort01_.html

I don't pretend to get all the issues, but the review provided a good roadmap.