On Pluralism and Viewpoint Diversity in 20th century American Philosophy; Strassfeld, phenomenology, and yes some David K. Lewis.

Full disclosure: out of the blue a while ago Jonathan Strassfeld (Hopkins) sent me a gratis copy of his (2022) Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America (The University of Chicago Press), which seems to be based on his PhD in History from the University of Rochester. I don’t recall a prior acquaintance with Strassfeld, so I assume he sent it to me because of my blogging and my interest in twentieth century philosophy and the sociology of the profession. Anyway, I enjoyed reading it.

The book’s focus is on institutional factors that shaped the partial marginalization of phenomenology in American professional philosophy and also the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. Putting it like that undersells some of the intellectual content: the first chapter has a very elegant introduction to the differences among four main streams of phenomenology (roughly those associated with Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty), and there are also nice focused chapters on Marjorie Glicksman Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young; I thought the one on Schütz, especially, quite instructive.

Before I get to the actual point of today’s post, I note a pattern of omission. Strassfeld does not mention Herman Weyl and his wife Helene, Jacob Klein, nor José Benardete (about which here on youtube). This means that a non-trivial Husserlian impact on somewhat mainstream twentieth century philosophy of science, math, and metaphysics goes largely unexamined. Alexandre Koyré does get a passing mention, but not the manner in which he influenced Kuhn. I think these omissions are the effect of the dual focus on the contrasting ways in which phenomenology was received at Harvard (so with due attention to the many Harvard doctoral students who visited Husserl, and also Dagfinn Føllesdal) and also the manner in which phenomenology became a part of ‘continental’ philosophy. (It also means that Leo Strauss and his students’ engagement with Husserl are neglected.) I mention this to alert against a wider forgetting.*

Having said that, the book is very instructive on the sociology of early twentieth century American philosophy. In particular, Strassfeld has used the archives to explore how appointments are made in twentieth century professional philosophy, and how these are often dependent on wider curricular and financial considerations. In this respect it is much more informative on the manner of the rise of analytic philosophy than many works that just focus on analytic philosophy.

I want to use a striking quote to reflect a bit on this, and also on how we might theorize the cognitive division of labor within philosophy. Strassfeld quotes a 1927 report from Columbia’s philosophy department:

One of [our convictions] is that the organization of the Department should include men working in all the major fields and problems of philosophic interest, and representing opinions and viewpoints that are determined by the nature of their subject-matter. Of the other two major graduate departments of Philosophy in the country, Chicago, closely united by many ties to Columbia, shares this aim, while Harvard prefers to include representatives of differing philosophic positions.-p. 34-5

So here goes: American philosophy is gendered male until well into the second half of the twentieth century. “Indeed, no woman was appointed as an assistant professor, associate professor, or professor of philosophy in any of the discipline’s leading departments before 1949, when Elizabeth Flower was appointed as an assistant professor by the University of Pennsylvania. In this group of leading departments, consisting of Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, only one other woman—Mary Mothersill (Chicago)—was hired before 1960. During the 1960s, the group hired only three other women: Isabel Hungerland (Berkeley), Patricia Ann James (Yale), and Margaret D. Wilson (Princeton).” (Strassfeld, p. 58)

Because Strassfeld is not much interested in Cornell, he misses that James Creighton at Cornell trained quite a few early female PhDs in philosophy. (I first learned this from Margaret Atherton.) The most prominent of this group is probably Marie Collins Swabey, who eventually got a job at NYU (and was quite prominent in the 1930s), and probably the best known today is Grace de Laguna (see this post by Joel Katzav).

Second, professional philosophy is an incredibly small discipline prior to the G.I. Bill. It’s small in two ways: (i) the number of tenured faculty at places like Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia is (if I understand Strassfeld correctly) in the single digits before WWII; (ii) before that war the professional elite is just three universities. (One interesting subtext to Strassfeld’s argument is how long Yale’s internal divisions prevented it from joining this elite.) Third, in addition, Columbia had a significant tendency to hire its own graduates into tenure-track lines. This tendency reinforced the already strong network effects in professional hiring even when it expanded to about a dozen departments.

As an aside, Strassfeld makes a point that while not wholly new is, I think, worth emphasizing: because of the depression in the 1930s, when there was very little hiring, and the massive post G.I. Bill boom, when there was suddenly lots of hiring, the profession was really transformed not just in size but also through a cohort effect. While I like to claim that American analytic philosophy is the marriage of the scientific wing of American pragmatism with polish logicians and exiled Vienna, numbers-wise it really is the joint production of The Silent Generation – and the Baby Boomers (the last of which are nearing retirement). In so far as analytic philosophy is also constituted by an aesthetic, thinking of it in terms of a cohort effect may also make the ways its enduring and fragile more transparent. (About that some other time more.) Some of the cohort effects are also manifested in the rise of Pittsburgh and (later) Rutgers, but about that some other time.

As should be clear, before WWII Chicago and Columbia embraced school-formation appointing like-minded philosophers (pretty much centered on Dewey and pragmatism) also (and this is not quite stressed by Strassfeld) in the service of joint progress. Whereas Harvard self-consciously tried to promote pluralism. Again, this pluralism was gendered male, but also quite (ahh) bourgeois and WASP. (Strassfeld is very alert to the antisemitism that refugee/exiled scholars encountered, and indirectly shines a light on the antisemitism that blocked the advancement of American Jewish philosophers.) Strassfeld nicely documents how embracing ‘pluralism’ shifted from the professional haves to the professional have-nots through the course of the twentieth century. (And he also explains nicely the contingent factors of why Harvard, whose commitment to pluralism plays a significant role in the founding of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR), retreated from such pluralism.) There is a nice story to be told how Carnap fits into this, and then how Carnap recoils from it when he encounters McKeon at Chicago.

But lurking in the quoted passage is also the contrast between philosophical generalists and philosophical specialists. And at Columbia a century ago they assumed (in a Weberian spirit) that in virtue of the cognitive division of labor, and the subsequent viewpoint/standpoint diversity, this would generate a kind of pluralism of perspectives even within a philosophical school. The Columbia/Chicago approach has a kind of structural counterpart in the academic division of labor within Husserl’s school where the disciples work on “regional ontologies” whereas Husserl works on the most general “theory of theories.” (p. 11; the Weber connection is emphasized by Foucault who is alert to how close Husserl was to the ordoliberals).

What Harvard and Chicago/Columbia of that age have in common is that pluralism is made compatible with (internal) conversation. At Chicago/Columbia this is facilitated through the shared background commitments of a (Dewey inflected pragmatist) school. At Harvard this is made possible through a viewpoint diversity that privileged the joy and skill at talking with those one disagrees. (So philosophical solipsists are not welcome.) Strassfeld nice quotes William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966) to illustrate this: “I came hoping to find the truth at Harvard. Needless to say, I did not find the finished product. I found Royce and James, Palmer and Santayana, Munsterberg and Dickinson Miller, engaged in high debate, and rejoicing in the presence of their colleagues as thinkers with whom they might happily differ.” (p.34) This is from Hocking’s (1928) “What does Philosophy Say?” (about which some other time more). This earlier form of viewpoint diversity is not tied to a particular politics, even though it could have political salience (as the lives of some of these just mentioned Harvard philosophers reveal).

I could end here. But one post-script. At a later age, the Harvard approach would have been called a "zoo department" that is that “try to procure one specimen of each main school of thought.” That’s a quote from David Lewis who confronted the decision procedure of hiring in professional philosophy at elite (PHD granting) departments, in a (1988) lecture (subsequently published), “Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right.” This essay is nicely used by Abe Stone in a paper on Cavell and Lewis and the nature of academic philosophy (here), where I first encountered it.

Lewis, who takes the cognitive division of labor explicitly seriously (with a citation to Kitcher no less), stipulated that modern philosophy departments at the professional elite have “prolonged disputes over what's true.” The purported contrast is with departments in the grip of “frenchified literary theory, where skepticism runs rampant and the pursuit of truth is reckoned passé.” (It’s noticeable that social justice warriors are not yet on the horizon a generation ago!) Importantly, Strassfeld nicely shows how far removed Husserl was from such skepticism.

What interests me is one of Lewis’ central modeling assumptions, “Each member of the department can judge, by his own lights, to what extent any given candidate holds true doctrines, and to what extent he is in error.” This means that Lewis is presupposing that the cognitive division of labor within philosophy has not yet advanced so far that at least some members of the department cannot judge the truth of a candidate’s doctrines. It’s not nice to say, but one wonders whether this assumption is still realistic (if the practice of journal editors who rely on specialist referees is to be treated as revealed preference). I suspect specialization has generated recondite knowledge, or at least rather abstruse languages even within analytic philosophy.

As Lewis notes, “if the members of the department disagree with one another” over the truth they will rationally disagree over who to prefer appointing. Part of the amusement of Lewis’ essay is his observation that in one often behaves “as if the truth or falsehood of the candidate's doctrines are weightless, not a legitimate consideration at all.” That they do so, is because of compliance with “a tacit treaty.” The tacit treaty of mutual toleration is really a contract to prevent worst outcomes. The way Lewis puts it is as follows, “A treaty requiring us all to ignore the advantage of being right when we make appointments will raise the probability of that second-best outcome and lower the probability both of the best and of the worst.” (Notice that even without paying attention to other incentives, Lewis suggests that in hiring there is pressure not to appoint the epistemically best philosopher.)

Now, the way Lewis presents the worst outcomes is as a reign of error in terms of doctrines. But, in a parenthetical, Lewis also notes something very important: “Assume, what may be none too realistic, that all concerned think the errors of their opponents matter more than the errors of their misguided allies.” Strassfeld seems to have been unfamiliar with Lewis’ writings. But Strassfeld’s book gives ample evidence for the existence of this (tacit treaty) commitment in hiring decisions if there is agreement over worst outcomes.

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*I also suspect that because of Strassfeld’s understandable focus on the origins of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, he ended up ignoring the role of Review of Metaphysics in publishing Husserlian inflected philosophy mid century.