Submitted by matthewharlow t3_1084va2 in philosophy
What are your issues with analytical philosopjy
I think the explanatory ambitions of a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy are misplaced, and I am more sympathetic to old time analytic philosophy (Frege, early and late Wittgenstein).
MacIntyre has really good commentary on the analytic school in his book After Virtue. One flaw is that they are unable to philosophically analyze history he claims
I dont understand what this article is trying to state…It sounds like its just stating the origins of analytic philosophy and how philosophers were fired for expressing their opinions during McCarthyism
Can someone tell me what this article is trying to state
It's pretty clear from this passage in the middle:
>As the United States sought to cement its newfound dominance in the world, counterposed against that of the Soviet sphere of influence, it entered a period of rigorous political control of the academy. The epithet usually applied to this era of persecution and paranoia is “McCarthyism,” but the phenomenon is wider than the term suggests. The persecution extended well beyond McCarthy’s notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The chief motor of the surveillance and persecution was, in fact, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Both Carnap and Reichenbach were subjected to surveillance and harassment from the FBI. Since the FBI regularly intercepted letters, anyone could be drawn into its realm of suspicion (they had got onto Carnap by reading the correspondence of another Vienna Circle member, Philipp Frank). Mere association with the whiff of Communist ideas or activity could be enough to prompt warranted anxiety.
>The climate of fear operated according to a very simple logic. Academics who were suspected of being Communists were called before HUAC, or before various associated committees (the Rapp-Coudert Committee in New York, the Canwell Committee in Washington State). They were called as witnesses, but effectively they were defendants. If they were found guilty, either because they admitted to being or having been Communists, or by remaining silent, then dismissal followed, by means of the following straightforward argument, schematized by Victor Lowe in the pages of the Journal of Philosophy:
>>1) Professor X is a Communist.
>>2) A Communist has no respect for freedom of inquiry or for objectivity in teaching; to put it positively, he indoctrinates for the party line and the Soviet dictatorship.
>>Therefore 3) X is not fit to be a professor.
>In other words, the professor’s actual political views need not be examined, nor their teaching record.
So the articles criticizing the soundness of analytic philsophers arguments
If we're only looking at it as analytic philosophy vs. Marxism, I don't see the dominance of the former as a bad thing, since its scope is wider than that of Marxism. Marxist philosophy lives in a very human world of power relations and identity politics. it’s motivated not by increasing wisdom but by a grand ethical goal, and is profoundly indifferent to anything not related to said goal (such as questions of qualia or interpretations of QM). Analytic philosophy abstracts the humanity away, so it’s more low-level and general. Moreover, analytical philosophy allows for self-criticism, while Marxism doesn’t. If Marxist philosophy is valid, it’s possible to derive it from analytical philosophy; the same can’t be said in the other direction.
McCarthysm was horrible, but in itself it’s not a good enough reason to reinstate the dominance of Marxism, kinda like how the persecution of religion in the Soviet bloc is not a good enough reason to reinstate religiousness in Eastern Europe.
It’s really analytic vs continental
Marxism mainly focuses on history and material reality, whilst analytical Philosophy lives in an abstract, ideal world and analyses mainly the language and logical concepts. Marxism itself ignores the moral concepts entierly, while they themselves are motivated by ethics they got from somewhere else. You seem to regard marxism as a subset of analytical Philosophy, Something you can get to when analising enough,whilst it has completely different founding principals. I dont see why marxism wouldnt allow for self-criticism.
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Greg428 t1_j3smvhi wrote
I have lots of issues with contemporary analytic philosophy, but I find this article unpersuasive.
If analytic philosophy "often thinks of itself as above history and politics," that's because analytic philosophers think you can do philosophy without a lot of historical engagement, not because any of them would assert (of all things!) that the history of philosophy in the United States has not been affected by political forces. It hardly tells against the methods of contemporary analytic philosophers that their discipline was shaped by McCarthyism.
I also would report that I find "the story that analytic philosophers tell themselves" pretty plausible. Sure, there are differences in the conception and purpose of analysis found in Frege, Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. But they were unified in taking the analysis of language to be the task of philosophy. And while contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is clearly the descendent of such thinkers, it does not take the analysis of language to be the task of philosophy; it shares their style but not that commitment. That is mainly owing to Quine. The late Wittgenstein undermined the idea that analysis reveals a hidden foundation of language and perhaps loosened the hold of analytic philosophy on the philosophical world, but it seems to me that Anglo-American philosophy is really made in Quine's image. He proposed a conception of philosophy as theory-building continuous with natural science; the philosopher's task is to figure out what we need to posit in order to explain _______ (the passing show, ordinary objects, mental phenomena, whatever). That seems to me what unifies the contemporary Anglo-American philosophical mainstream today (even among people who do not share Quine's naturalism).
That's why it's accurate to say that the early analytic philosophers were genuinely concerned with analysis, while today's analytic philosophers are more held together by style and history than particular theses.