Frankly speaking, the analytic philosopher can be a bit insufferable. Into every conversation, on any conceivable topic, he enters with a confident swagger, poised to pounce at the slightest infelicity or error on the part of his unlucky interlocutors. For any slippage or equivocation, an expression of exasperated confusion and demand for clarification at the ready. To any proposal, the impulse to counter-proposal. Talking with an analytic philosopher, one has the distinct feeling of being monitored. Every word, a potential landmine; every idea, inspected for implication and inconsistency.
And as if all that weren’t bad enough, behind all the smug self-satisfaction, some might feel, is really nothing at all! The analytic philosopher is intellectually shallow and incurious about anything beyond his narrow province. The products of his thought are, accordingly, bland, a shameful shadow of what philosophy once was. To make matters even worse, none of this he finds at all disturbing. On the contrary, the analytic philosopher takes a perverse pride in his ignorance, his simple-mindedness, his utter frivolity and irrelevance.
Assholery of this kind is not an individual pathology […] it is but the analytic style to be obnoxious in this particular way
These are the opening words in a recent book review by Lily Hu of Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy
As a naturalistic philosopher who frequently attacks analytic philosophy, it is a lovely change of pace to see a criticism of analytic philosophy from a very different angle. Schuringa’s criticism of analytic philosophy comes from a Marxist perspective, lamenting its allegedly “apolitical” defense of the status quo
But for the naturalist philosopher, the problem with analytic philosophy is not its focus on rigour. When I describe myself as a naturalistic philosopher and not an analytic philosopher, I frequently encounter the question of whether I object to clear writing and rigorous thinking. Of course not. These are valuable traits. And so, in a weak sense, I am an analytic philosopher. But that is a very weak definition indeed, for spiritually, I am not
The problem with contemporary analytic philosophers is that they have taken on board the focus on rigour that characterized the logical empiricists, in their attempts to emulate the sciences, but have abandoned their interest in actual science and data that may threaten commonly held intuitions. Analytic philosophy, today, is largely incurious about the developments in science, preferring to engage with each other rather than with the actual world
The vast majority of work in analytic philosophy, if one dissects the arguments in detail, eventually arrive at appeals to premises that are meant to be “intuitive,” the rejection of which should count as an objection to a view. Schuringa is right to criticize that what philosophers think of as intuitive is shaped by their cultural environment. This is why much of analytic philosophy is concerned with uninteresting attempts to offer highly technical and formalized versions of ‘common sense,’ such as Rawls’s A Theory of Justice,which is said to have revived political philosophy.
Ironically, even libertarians would agree with Schuringa’s Marxist criticism here. See Jason Brennan’s libertarian criticism of Rawls:
Philosophers in the analytic tradition are so focused on whether a theory (or rather its conclusions) corresponds to common sense that they frequently even abandon their adherence to logical rigour and the questioning of all assumptions. Such is the inevitable consequence of fetishising one’s intuitions as guides to truth, without realizing that they are shaped by one’s cultural upbringing and social environment
Lily Hu concludes her review with a general reflection on the trend to lament the state of philosophy:
For those of us who see or have been brought to see what Schuringa sees, A Social History offers the pleasure of recognition, of nodding along to him and the so many others in the history of philosophy who have lamented the contemporary state of philosophy. Even Bertrand Russell once wrote that he ‘cannot accept’ the ‘philosophy now in vogue’, in his foreword to Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959), a predecessor to A Social History in the long line of polemics against philosophy
Rejecting philosophy is as core to philosophy as it gets
I could hardly agree more
To be a good philosopher is to question philosophical methods, not to try to create ad hoc justifications for mainstream ‘common sense’ positions. While the latter might garner a lot of popularity by defending the ‘right ideas,’ intuitions about what we should already believe to be true should play little role at all in serious philosophy. Unfortunately, I think that this problem is more central to the very methodology of analytic philosophy than even Schuringa may believe. It’s as he says in the blurb for his polemic:
“To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo.”
