Christoph Schuringa

I think of this as "proper names" week. Each of the four posts this week will have a proper name in the title.  Yesterday's, of course, is already "in the books". The proper name in the title of yesterday's post was, of course, Frank Sinatra. The proper name used in today's, and in the posts of the next couple days, will be violations of the Frank Sinatra rule.   

Today we discuss a recent book about analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa.  As a Christopher who generally drops the "er" at the end of that given name when called upon to give my signature, I highly approve of his spelling. 

Schuringa wrote a book, published last year by Verso, entitled A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Its point is that most of what we think we know about analytic philosophy is wrong.

The term "we' here can refer to anyone without an academic position who might nonetheless read a book with the phrase "analytic philosophy" in the title.  I am happy to include my "I" in that "we".  Anyway: the usual account is that analytic philosophy was created by four great philosophers at the turn of the 20th century: Bertrand Russell, Alfred Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore. It began as the logical analysis of mathematics and it soon turned to logical analysis as such, of facts, the scientific method, and ordinary language. It is apolitical in its bones, although its practitioners often have political views (notoriously so in Russell's case) -- they are separate from the philosophizing proper.

That is the conventional view, as Schuringa sees it.  But, he goes on, that is wrong. The Cambridge University group only came to be seen in this light because this was useful retroactively, from the perspective of the 1950s, when American philosophers frightened by the anti-intellectualism of McCarthyism purposely created an apolitical message. "No politics here, folks, so no Commie agitation either.  We all are much more interested in whether 'emeroses are gred' than in whether the struggle of class against class is the central theme of human history."

The political gist of an apolitical view of philosophy is, in Schuringa's view, both clear and lamentable. He notes that philosophers  often appeal to "intuitions" as if they are verdicts issued by some epistemological jury -- subject to appeal but not something one can ignore.  Schuringa doesn't approve. "The results are unsurprising: a philosophy whose wheels spin idly in the service of well-entrenched patterns of thought.  Here analytic philosophy wears its social function on its sleeve."  

The book has excited a lot of attention. Really, though, it shouldn't.  The points are old and familiar and could benefit from the sort of cross-examination and rigor that has long been the strength of the analytic tradition. 

If you want to go further: Peter Ludlow has the goods. So far as I can tell, Ludlow's politics are as far left as Shuringa's.  The animating difference is that he admires many of the thinkers Ludlow indicts. 

His review is long so, if you want to save some time, skip the first 20 paragraphs or so and find the bit that says "We are going to walk through this book, claim-by-claim, defamation-by defamation, deception-by-deception, to try and sort this out.We are going to walk through this book, claim-by-claim, defamation-by defamation, deception-by-deception, to try and sort this out."

Then walk it through with him.