https://www.researchgate.net/publica...c_Philosophers'Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy ... by Sandra Lapointe, Christopher Pincock
"academic philosophy is analytic and critical rather than speculative" (speculative = synthetic or contextual)
The rise of ‘analytic philosophy’: When and how did people begin calling themselves ‘analytic philosophers’?
Greg Frost-Arnold
6.2. Earlier contrast classes
Some of the most common contemporaneous contrast classes for people doing what we today would call ‘analytic philosophy’ from the 1930’s through the 1960’s are (i) speculative, (ii) traditional, and (iii) metaphysical philosophy. There may be others (including ‘Idealist’ and ‘synthetic’); let us briefly consider these three.
(i) Speculative: Ammerman writes, in the Preface to his anthology, “[w]e will contrast the analytic with the speculative philosopher, who, if he studies language at all, does so only in order to facilitate the achievement of his main goal: speculation about the metaphysical foundations of the universe” (1965, 2). The UNESCO report, mentioned above in §5.3, states “[W]e are admittedly, in Britain, living in a period when the dominant temper of academic philosophy is analytic and critical rather than speculative” (1953, 119). There are many further examples (Wisdom 1931, 14, Wisdom 1934, 1, Nagel 1936-I, 9, Stebbing 1932-3 and Broad 1923, 2026). Several of these authors stress that analytic philosophy does not discover any new information about the world, but instead aims to better understand the information we already have, via analysis.
(ii) Traditional: Near the end of the Vienna Circle’s Scientific World-Conception manifesto, the authors write “we now see clearly what is the essence of the new scientific world-conception in contrast with traditional philosophy” (1929/1973, §4). Black, in a symposium on the method of analysis, says that some advocates of this method “subject most traditional conceptions of the nature of Philosophy to adverse criticism” (1934, 53). Nagel also draws this contrast in his pair of Journal of Philosophy articles (1936-I, 9, 11).
(iii) Metaphysical: The anti-metaphysical animus of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, and their allies is well known, and is a defining theme throughout their work, especially from the 1930s onward. Returning to the Ammerman quote in (i) just above, we see that the speculations at issue concern ‘the metaphysical foundations of the universe.’ And Nagel’s pair of articles combines (ii) and (iii), depicting Moore as combating “metaphysics of traditional philosophy” (1936-I, 11; cf. 16). That said, although many prototypical analytic philosophers rejected what they call ‘traditional metaphysics’ or ‘idealist metaphysics,’ some Cambridge analysts thought a reformed metaphysics was possible. This is Russell’s position (e.g. 1918/2010, 110); Stebbing (1932-33) provides a detailed attempt to characterize and defend metaphysics as a proper part of the method of analysis.
Can we explain the shift in contrast classes, from ‘speculative /metaphysical/ traditional’ to ‘continental’? Here is one exploratory hypothesis. In the early part of the 20th Century, the British analysts’ (non-linguistic) piecemeal, analytic endeavors were quite different from traditional or idealist speculative metaphysical systems. Then, in what I called ‘Phase two’ above, these analysts agreed with the logical empiricists that philosophy should be pursued linguistically. Then, at some point in the later 1960s or 70s, the analytic philosophers realized that the people they were aligning themselves against were also very interested in language (Glock 2008, 132), and often at least as hostile to traditional, systematic metaphysics as the analytic philosophers. Thus a new label needed to be fashioned, which could still serve to distinguish the two (by now) sociologically distinct groups. The term ‘continental’ fit this bill.
Here is a further hypothesis: the shift in contrast class from ‘speculative/metaphysical’ to ‘continental’ helped allow the resurrection of metaphysics within analytic philosophy, and skepticism towards the linguistic turn. Once analytic philosophy’s other espoused staunchly anti-metaphysical stances, and became more interested in the workings of language, analytic philosophers could once again take up the mantle of metaphysics. Of course, there are many other likely causes of the revival of metaphysics in analytic philosophy: e.g. Quine’s claim at the end of “Two Dogmas” that rejecting the analytic-synthetic distinction blurs the line between metaphysics and science, Strawson’s Individuals, and Kripke’s making modality appear intellectually respectable.
7. Conclusion
I have argued that, in line with previous scholarship, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ in our sense first appears in the 1930s, but doesn’t being to gain wide currency until around 1950. I then discussed various rationales people during that time period gave for grouping these (in many ways) disparate philosophers under a single heading. But the later rationale grounding the grouping, namely that philosophical inquiries are at bottom linguistic, contradicts certain earlier actors’ explicit descriptions of their activities. So, unsurprisingly, some historical actors resisted this grouping—and this may in part explain why the term ‘analytic philosophy’ did not begin to spread widely until the 1950s. Finally, the contrast class for ‘analytic’ has not always been ‘continental’: that is a relatively recent development—in part because the previous ways the analytic community distinguished itself from outsiders ceased to hold of the analytic and non-analytic philosophers.
Reply With Quote