The Illusion of Analytic Philosophy and Metaphilosophical Eudaimonism as Personalism.
'Analytic philosophy has been the ruling paradigm in Anglophone philosophy for the better part of a century now. In combination with its sense of superiority, this disciplinary dominance has enabled analysts to marginalize other approaches. But if the analytic revolution was based merely on a sense of shared know-how that has never been sufficiently articulated or defended, then it would appear that its dominance is philosophically unjustified, that the Emperor has no clothes.'
'Consider how dissenters from “progressive” narratives concerning racial inequality, transgenderism, or any number of “social justice” issues, have been treated in various spheres of “public discourse” over the last decade or so. I’m thinking of people like Adolph Reed, Roland Fryer, Heather MacDonald, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Holly Lawford-Smith, Kathleen Stock, Rebecca Tuvel, Alex Byrne, and many others. These are highly intelligent people who present reasoned opposition to perspectives which, without any real evidence or argument, have managed to get themselves accepted as established truths by an appreciable number of people. But rather than engaging dissenters intellectually, proponents of “progressive” positions resort to demonizing and “canceling” dissenting voices. The pattern of moral denunciation without rational justification characteristic of “cancel culture” shows that we are not operating in the domain of moral knowledge, but in the realm of dogma and of “bullshit” in the late Harry Frankfurt’s sense – the domain of (apparent) truth-claims made to advance one’s own agenda, whatever it may be, without any real regard for truth.'
'As a retrospective generalization, I think it’s fair to say that Personalism’s overarching concern was to determine what must be true of human beings, and of the larger orders we inhabit, in order for that value to be both fully real and fully realized. That makes it a form of metaphilosophical eudaimonism. Like all significant philosophical movements, Personalism gave rise not to a single, “orthodox” position, but to a number of competing variations on a common theme. Some Personalists (Lotze, McTaggart) tried to get by with person-friendly variants of Absolute Idealism. Others were Berkeleyan Idealists (Borden Parker Bowne), existentialists (Gabriel Marcel), phenomenologists (Max Scheler), or Thomists (Jacques Maritain), and some combined phenomenology and Thomism (Edith Stein, Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II).'
Aaron Preston is interested in the history and historiography of analytic philosophy, ethics and the philosophy of religion. Here he discusses Analytic philosophy, Rorty's and Leiter's views about it, Frege's place, why its defining content is illusory, the problems and fallacies of revisionist accounts, why defining it as 'the separation of the practical and political from the theoretical aspects of philosophical work' doesn't help, why defining it as just 'good philosophy' is no good either, logical positivism, scientism, the illusion of promise, understanding the analytic/continental divide, whether analytic philosophy reduces to western philosophy, whether there is a crisis, its link to the disappearance of moral knowledge and its consequences, Dallas Willard, the role of philosophy of religion, Metaphilosophical Eudaimonism, Personalism, and the tribalism in public discourse.
3:16: What made you become a philosopher?
Aaron Preston: The most significant factor in my becoming a philosopher was my relationship with Dallas Willard, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. Academically, he was best known as a Husserl scholar who translated many of Husserl’s early works on the philosophies of mathematics and logic, and who maintained that Husserl was, from beginning to end, a metaphysical and epistemological realist: that he never endorsed psychologism, that Frege’s supposed influence on him in this regard is widely misunderstood, and that he never abandoned realism for transcendental idealism. Dallas was also a profound Christian thinker who wrote and taught about Christian spirituality for nonacademic audiences.
For Dallas, these seemingly disparate endeavors were organically connected, twin aspects of an attempt to present a vision of human flourishing grounded in knowledge of the real. Dallas was a legendary teacher. After his passing in 2013, Scott Soames eulogized him as “that Professor of lore who students hope to find but don’t really expect to – the one who enriches their lives by getting them to see more in themselves, and in life itself, than they had imagined.” That pretty well describes my experience with him. As a freshman, friends had told me that I should really take a course with him at some point before I graduated. So in my sophomore year I jumped into an upper-division course on British Empiricism simply because it was what Dallas was teaching that term. I found myself enthralled both with the subject matter and with his manner of teaching, which really opened the world to me in a new way. I was completely blown away by the breadth of Dallas’ learning, the perceptiveness of his insights, the depth of his wisdom, and also by his character and personal presence. He was the perfect fusion of scholar, saint and sage. By the end of the course I had decided that I needed to at least try to be that sort of person, so I declared a major in philosophy and took as many courses with Dallas as I could.
Soon I was visiting his office hours and telling him about some existential and theological struggles I’d been having. Over time, he taught me how to use philosophical thinking to settle my theological questions. Along the way, he became a mentor and a friend. And he encouraged me to continue in philosophy, which I did. After graduating from USC with a degree in Classics and Philosophy, I took some time to study Theology at the University of Edinburgh. But I eventually returned to USC as a grad student, and completed my doctorate in Philosophy under Dallas’ supervision. We remained in touch until he passed away in May of 2013. And I was honored to be one of three former students to whom Dallas entrusted, literally from his death bed, the completion of his final academic book, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (more on which later).
3:16: You’ve written extensively about the nature of Analytic philosophy and its history. You cite Richard Rorty and Brian Leiter as both saying that there’s no principle of unity holding the philosophers designated (and self-designating) as analytic philosophers together. So what’s the thinking behind Rorty and Leiter’s comments, and should we be worried by this?
AP: Questions about the nature of analytic philosophy first arose for me in the course of my doctoral studies. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I had double-majored. That meant that I didn’t take as many courses in philosophy as I otherwise might have, and it turned out that I took most of my courses with professors who were more pluralistic and historically oriented than the average analyst of the era. But as a graduate student in the late 1990s, I began to encounter more analysts. Right away I was struck by the difference of approach – the narrowness of focus, the emphasis on a certain sort of technical precision and an associated ideal of clarity, the tendency toward deflationary, naturalistic views, the relative lack of attention to history and to other schools of thought, the restriction of any such attention to generating “rational reconstructions” of non-analytic views, and the frequent irrelevance to real-world concerns, especially those of non-philosophers. I wanted to understand why there was such a difference between analysts and non-analysts in philosophical practice, and what the analysts took to be valuable about their approach.
So I began to ask methodological and metaphilosophical questions. And I received a number of differing answers, none of which I found very illuminating. My next move was to dig into the history of analytic philosophy, to try to understand how and why the analytic approach had been developed in the first place. And I found that analysts had never given good answers to the sorts of questions I was asking. Similar questions had been raised by Susan Stebbing and R.G. Collingwood in the early 1930s, at the Royamount Colloquium of 1958, and again by Richard Rorty in the 1970s, to no avail. The comments to which you refer, from Rorty and Leiter, are from the 1990s and the early 2000s, and they confirm that this void in the metaphilosophical foundations of analytic philosophy persisted through the turn of the 21st century.
Rorty’s 1967 volume, The Linguistic Turn was reprinted in 1992 with a new retrospective essay. There he says that analytic philosophy had long since ceased to be the application of linguistic analysis to philosophical problems, and had become a more or less arbitrary set of problems discussed by a certain professors in certain parts of the world, with no clear set of shared philosophical commitments. And by at least the early 2000s, Leiter had included a section in the Philosophical Gourmet Report explaining that “‘Analytic’ philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views.” It’s not clear that Rorty or Leiter saw anything terribly problematic with this state of affairs, although a posthumously published lecture that Rorty first delivered in 1994 suggests something disturbing in the vicinity. He says that, after analytic philosophers gave up on linguistic analysis, they remained united only by “a sense of shared know-how, combined with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority to philosophers of other ages and lands.” This, he says, “has sufficed to keep analytic philosophy intact and self-assured for half a century.” I think that’s basically correct, but Rorty failed to see that this had been true of analytic philosophy from the beginning, even during the heyday of “linguistic analysis.”
This strikes me as worrisome. Analytic philosophy has been the ruling paradigm in Anglophone philosophy for the better part of a century now. In combination with its sense of superiority, this disciplinary dominance has enabled analysts to marginalize other approaches. But if the analytic revolution was based merely on a sense of shared know-how that has never been sufficiently articulated or defended, then it would appear that its dominance is philosophically unjustified, that the Emperor has no clothes. Moreover, this would indicate that the Emperor is, in an important sense, an impostor. One of Plato’s complaints against the Sophists (in the Gorgias) is that, in their reliance on oratory, they were operating on the basis of an unarticulated know-how, a “knack” (empeiria) without any rational explanation (logos). This is part of what made ancient sophistry different in kind from philosophy. And as Moritz Schlick observed in a 1932 paper, “every philosophical movement is defined by the principles it regards as fundamental, and to which it constantly refers in its arguments.”
If analytic philosophy is not united around a set of shared philosophical “principles,” then it is not a philosophical movement or school or tradition in the proper sense of those terms. It may qualify as a “philosophical” entity in some secondary or tertiary sense – perhaps in the way that the American Philosophical Association is a “philosophical” entity – but it is not a philosophical school, movement, or tradition in the way Platonism or Rationalism or Absolute Idealism are.
3:16: How does Frege and linguistic analysis fit into this ?
AP: As traditionally understood, analytic philosophy was born in “the linguistic turn.” This was supposed to have occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, in the work of Moore and Russell – and some include Frege – as they developed a powerful, new method for solving or dissolving philosophical problems, a method called “analysis.” “Analysis” was usually prefaced with the adjective “linguistic” or “logical.” But logical analysis came to be understood as “ideal language” analysis, as opposed to “ordinary language” analysis; so, in one way or another, it was all “linguistic analysis.” The turn to linguistic analysis was widely taken to be an epoch-making philosophical revolution, replacing early modern philosophy’s “new way of ideas” with what Wilfred Sellars dubbed “the new way of words.” This audacious view was predicated upon the idea that linguistic analysis was not just a novel and powerful method, but the uniquely correct method for philosophy, and hence that philosophy, insofar as it was a legitimate enterprise, was nothing more than the analysis of language.
Now, historians of analytic philosophy have discovered that this traditional understanding is false in certain key respects. Neither Moore nor Russell made the linguistic turn, and neither did Frege, if “the linguistic turn” is understood as embracing a particular metaphilosophy and methodology. This metaphilosophical position was Wittgenstein’s invention, and it was appropriated, altered, and promulgated with evangelistic zeal by the logical positivists, beginning in the late 1920s. By the mid-1930s it was becoming customary to read Wittgenstein’s “linguistic turn” back into the earlier work of Moore and Russell, and to see these superficially similar but really quite different streams of thought as one united confluence, referred to as “analytic philosophy.” So the category “analytic philosophy” was constructed retrospectively and on the basis of what I’ve called “the illusion of unity.” The illusion of unity was the false impression that analytic philosophers were united around a metaphilosophical and methodological vision centered on linguistic analysis.
It has two dimensions: on the one hand, some core, canonical analysts did not make the linguistic turn at all. On the other, those who did disagreed sharply about what “linguistic analysis” amounted to, but the extent and significance of this disagreement regularly went unnoticed or ignored in the heyday of linguistic philosophy. This is both surprising and ironic, since the disagreements would have been immediately apparent if analysts had subjected their own metaphilosophical views to the same kind of scrutiny that they applied to other philosophical issues. So it’s difficult to see this as anything other than willful disregard. In any case, when Arthur Pap claimed, in 1949, that analytic philosophers were united in “the unanimous practice of the analytic method,” he was dead wrong: there was no single “analytic method” that united analytic philosophers, and there never had been. There was at most a common aspiration to such a method, but that aspiration was never fulfilled in the form of a workable form of linguistic analysis, with widespread buy-in, whose assumptions and implications stood up to philosophical scrutiny. And eventually the analysts stopped trying to fulfill it. They gave up on the whole idea of “linguistic analysis” as a definite method by the late 1970s.
When Schlick talks about philosophical movements being defined by their fundamental principles, he also says that it’s natural for movements to develop in ways that involve the extension and modification of those principles, but that there inevitably comes a point at which it makes sense to ask “whether we should still speak at all of the development of a single movement, and retain its old name, or whether a new movement has not in fact arisen.” Analytic philosophy reached that point when it abandoned its commitment to linguistic analysis. Hence a name-change was in order. But of course that didn’t happen. Philosophers in certain contexts kept self-identifying as analysts, and continued to refer to their approach as “analytic philosophy,” but now with little more than a shared history, itself largely mythical, to unite them.
Frege’s place in all of this is interesting. While he had always been recognized as a sort of forefather of analytic philosophy on account of his influence on Russell, it did not become customary to see him as a founder of analytic philosophy until Michael Dummett started advocating for this view back in the 1970s. To me, what’s most important about Frege’s late elevation is how it demonstrates the flexible and artificially constructed nature of “analytic philosophy” under retrospective and usually motivated construals of the socio-historical landscape of philosophy. While this sort of thing is probably always a factor to some degree in partitioning the social space of philosophy, past or present, it plays a larger-than-usual role in the history of analytic philosophy. Much larger, insofar as the very existence of the category depends on a mostly baseless construal of certain philosophers as having the kind of philosophical affinity that would warrant grouping them together as members of the same school of thought.
3:16: If you’re right then what follows? Is analytic philosophy empty of any defining philosophical content, always was, and so such grounding content can never be found?
AP: I wouldn’t say that it’s empty of defining philosophical content, but I would say it’s defining content is illusory. When the term “analytic philosophy” started showing up in print in the early 1930s, used as a name rather than a mere description, it was used to refer to a school of philosophy which originated around the turn of the 20th century, in the work of Moore and Russell, championing the use of linguistic analysis as a powerful, preferable, even uniquely correct philosophical method. This was the “social imaginary” that brought the category “analytic philosophy” into being, and which governed the philosophers who worked under its banner for nearly half a century.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes a “social imaginary” as the way people in a given context imagine their social environment. It provides a “common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” This is exactly what the original conception of analytic philosophy did for analytic philosophers. The fact that it was false did not prevent it from defining analytic philosophy for the first five or so decades of the analytic era (~ 1930-1980).
3:16: Why is the self-conception of early analytic philosophy so important, even if false? What are the problems and fallacies with revisionism in this context?
AP: Revisionism exploits the constructed and malleable nature of “analytic philosophy” in ways that create historical distortions. For example, some revisionists have claimed that linguistic analysis was never really that important to analytic philosophy, and have attempted to define it in terms of less unique views or features. But this ends up casting the net too broadly, because the features invoked are inevitably shared by non-analytic philosophers as well, and figures like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or even Husserl end up counting as analytic philosophers. Other revisionists claim that analytic philosophy was never a “school,” but some sort of looser association (a “movement” or “tradition”) that does not require shared views. Maybe it’s a tradition unified genealogically, by relations of intellectual influence, or maybe by relations of “family-resemblance,” and so on. But this inevitably leads to the same problem, because relations of influence and of similarity extend well beyond the circle of those commonly recognized as core, canonical analysts.
For instance, if we’re going to say that Frege was an analytic philosopher because of his influence on Russell, then why not Giuseppe Peano? After all, Russell once said that that his encounter with Peano at the 1900 International Congress of Philosophy was the most important event in his intellectual life. And the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations bears a closer family resemblance to certain Continental philosophers than he does to Russell. Does this make Derrida an analytic philosopher? Or perhaps it makes Wittgenstein a Continental philosopher? Such distortions are problematic in their own right, but also for practical purposes.
There’s a lot about the analytic tradition that’s hard to explain without reference to the original conception. Its power over the minds of early analysts best explains why certain philosophers came to be seen as core, canonical analysts and others not, why analytic philosophy has been characterized by ahistorical and anti-metaphysical tendencies, as well as that sense of superiority, throughout much of its history. Dispensing with the original conception also makes it impossible to adequately explain why the language-game involving “analytic philosophy” originated when and where it did. If analytic philosophy really originated in ancient Athens or medieval Paris rather than in early 20th century Britain, why did we only start talking about it in the 1930s in English? Indeed, in an important sense, the entire history of analytic philosophy depends on this false conception, for without it there would be nothing to speak of today under the heading of “analytic philosophy.” We might be talking about Mooreans, logical atomists, logical positivists, and so on, or even “scientific philosophy” (which was an early 20th century category subsumed and replaced by “analytic philosophy”), but we wouldn’t be talking about any of these under the heading “analytic philosophy.”
Thus, for a historian of analytic philosophy to treat the original, false conception as dispensable is something like a performative contradiction. Additionally, one thing Scott Soames and I agree about is that an important function of historical work on analytic philosophy is to provide a basis for evaluating the tradition, for taking stock of its successes and failures, and for making judgments about how it might do better going forward. But this requires an accurate view of the relevant history, and that’s something revisionism seems incapable of providing. Of special importance to me is the fact that revisionism tends to obscure, and to minimize the significance of, the fact that analytic philosophy came to prominence under false pretenses, that it succeeded in capturing the philosophical profession in Britain and America through what ultimately amounted to a metaphilosophical shell-game. As I see it, that’s something that must be taken into account when evaluating the analytic tradition.
3:16: One aspect of analytic philosophy that seems to differentiate it from other kinds is the separation of the practical and political from the theoretical aspects of philosophical work. It’s a school where moral and spiritual improvement are left outside of analytic philosophy aren’t they, and with it goes the grand theory building too? Isn’t this a good way of defining it, or at least, one important feature of what captures what makes analytic philosophy special, as someone like Soames claims?
AP: Back in 2003, Soames pointed to these features as “underlying themes or tendencies” characteristic of analytic philosophy. This is a heuristically useful generalization, but it will hardly do as a definition, for two reasons. First, it is a standard desideratum that a definition should characterize its target in terms of its most fundamental, positive features. It’s not entirely useless to know that breakfast is a meal that is neither lunch nor dinner, but that doesn’t really illuminate what breakfast is. Likewise, knowing that analytic philosophy is an approach to philosophy that eschews grand, metaphysical system-building and that it is not concerned “to provide a useful recipe for living one’s life,” as Soames once put it, is not useless information, but neither does it really illuminate what analytic philosophy is.
The natural response is to ask why analytic philosophy eschews these endeavors, especially in light of the fact that they were traditionally seen as central to the philosophical enterprise. An adequate answer will have to invoke some positive features of analytic philosophy. The second reason these “characteristic marks” fail to define analytic philosophy is that there are core, canonical analysts who have rejected them. I’ll mention just one: G.E. Moore. Although Moore was not himself a system-builder, this was due to his own limited philosophical interests, rather than to some grand metaphilosophical vision which put system-building out of bounds. To the contrary, in his 1953 book Some Main Problems of Philosophy, he said that 'the most important and interesting thing which philosophers have tried to do is … to give a general description of the whole universe, mentioning all the most important kinds of things which we know to be in it, considering how far it is likely that there are in it important kinds of things which we do not absolutely know to be in it, and also considering the most important ways in which these various kinds of things are related to one another. … the first and most important problem of philosophy is: to give a general description of the whole universe.'
That may be the strongest endorsement of grand, theoretical system-building that I’ve ever seen, from any philosopher of any school. And among the most important kinds of things Moore knew to exist were moral facts. Moore’s Principia Ethica is a canonical – indeed a foundational – analytic text. While much of it is given to what we would nowadays call “metaethics,” it devotes a chapter to what Moore called “practical ethics,” which includes the attempt “to provide a useful recipe for living one’s life.” Moore thought that the pleasures of personal relationship and aesthetic enjoyment are the most valuable things in the world, and hence that we ought to live so as to maximize those pleasures. That these goods were “the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress” was, for Moore, “the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy.” Incidentally, these two, traditional philosophical endeavors – giving “a general description of the whole universe” and providing “a useful recipe for living one’s life” – are intrinsically connected. As Moore says, giving a “general description…” involves determining the relative importance of things. This sort of rank-ordering of goods, with an eye to the most important, is prerequisite to providing a “useful recipe… .”
3:16: Why isn’t it good enough to pin it down to some normative function (eg analytic philosophy is just good philosophy) ?
AP: Any attempt to define analytic philosophy as “good philosophy” is going to have to justify that judgment by explaining what makes analytic philosophy good (or better, or best), and non-analytic philosophy deficient. So we can’t escape the need to define analytic philosophy in terms of philosophically substantive features simply by saying that it’s “good philosophy.” Moreover, what counts as good philosophy is a contentious issue. So even if we were able to identify some philosophically substantive, good-making characteristics of analytic philosophy, this would not automatically place analytic philosophy in the category of “good philosophy,” to the exclusion of other approaches. Someone would have to provide a plausible argument to the effect that good philosophy is philosophy with such-and-such features, and analytic philosophy is the unique possessor of those features.
While early- and mid-20th century analysts had an argument to this effect, it wasn’t a good one. And I suspect few if any contemporary analysts would be inclined to make such an argument. The attitude of superiority that Rorty mentioned in 1994 has been in decline for the last few decades. Many contemporary analysts see value in other traditions, historical and contemporary, and are actively involved in projects that seek to combine what is best in their own tradition with what is best in others. These are very encouraging developments within the analytic tradition, but insofar as they involve recognition of good but non-analytic philosophy, they point away from any simple identification of analytic philosophy with “good philosophy.”
Finally, while analytic philosophy – especially post-linguistic analytic philosophy – has its virtues, it fails to measure-up to certain traditional desiderata for “good philosophy,” such as those discussed under the previous question. The goods of clarity and rigor must be balanced against other goods that philosophy has traditionally aimed to provide, especially in connection with morality and meaning. Historically, analytic philosophy has prioritized the former to the detriment of the latter. For instance, Paul Arthur Schilpp’s 1959 presidential address to the APA, “The Abdication of Philosophy,” charged the analytic-dominated philosophical profession with a “contemptuous dismissal of ethics and of social and political philosophy.” Schilpp blamed this neglect on analytic philosophy’s preoccupation with language and logical rigor.
Just a year earlier, in his famous lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin argued that analytic philosophy’s obsession with rigor had led to a dangerous neglect of “messy” topics like political philosophy, and that this in turn was having “devastating effects” on society. Specifically, he says that it had created space for “fanatically held social and political doctrines” to take root. “When ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them,” he warned, “they sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism.” The kinds of concerns raised by Berlin and Schilpp are just as relevant today as they were in the late 1950s. I can’t read Berlin’s remarks without thinking of both Trumpism and “the Great Awokening” of the last decade. If Berlin and Schilpp were correct that such phenomena naturally result from the neglect of one of philosophy’s traditional functions, and if the rise of analytic philosophy caused or contributed to that neglect, then the idea that analytic philosophy can simply be identified as “good philosophy” is pretty implausible.
Of course, analytic philosophy has come a long way since the late 1950s, and it can no longer be accused of neglecting ethics and political philosophy, exactly. But for a variety of reasons – some historical and some contemporary, some internal to the analytic tradition and some external to it – it is still failing to provide the moral and political wisdom that we so desperately need. Even Scott Soames has recently acknowledged (in the Foreword to Willard’s The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge) that analytic philosophers have not made contributions to moral knowledge on par with their contributions in other areas, and he suggests that the analytic tradition should “reassess and redeploy” its own resources to shoulder “a greater share of the contemporary burden of a