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 I 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. It's point is that the 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 became its source retroactively, in 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.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog