Running notes on Schuringa's A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, pt. 2 (Chapter 1)

In my first post (recall here) on the introduction of Schuringa’s (2025) A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso; herafter: Social History), I was somewhat critical of

Kieran Setiya

’s review of it (here) in the LA Review of Books. But subsequently, I was alerted to a splendid post by Setiya on it (here) that I warmly recommend. Today’s Digression will be on chapter 1. (I will try to write these posts on Schuringa as self-standing digressions, but the overall argument ought to be cumulative.)

One of the difficulties with writing a book like Schuringa’s is that analytic philosophy is a moving target. And, unless one is embedded at a leading PhD program (as Schuringa (Northeastern London) is not), one always risks being out of date and, worse, coming off as a bit quaint. This is most evident in Schuringa’s treatment of “The Analytic Style” (pp. 10-13), which draws on testimony over half a century old. It also seems unaware of initiatives to change noxious norms. (The best known of these are probably the NYU guidelines for respectful discussion so I link to these.)

Crucially, even analytic philosophy’s retrospective intellectual canon is much less stable than one might suspect because there is no canon constitutive of the field. Because analytic philosophy's self-identity is constantly re-invented over time, it has no felt requirement for a fixed canon of texts to give it identity. So, for example, Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis was welcomed as a "book" which "contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods." Most, but certanly not all, of the authors of these classics are still familiar names: "Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, [C.I.] Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, [Ernest] Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reichenbach (2)" But it is to be doubted that most of the articles themselves, or even what they argue for, play much of an explicit role in contemporary undergraduate or graduate education (outside those that cater to specialists in the history of analytic philosophy). I also bet a few names are completely unfamiliar even to seasoned scholars. One can play a similar game with Rorty's (1967) more recent (and larger) Linguistic Turn.

Schuringa handles the phenomena hinted at in the previous paragraphs in three ways: first, he thinks there is a fairly stable style that characterizes analytic philosophy (pp. 11-13). I leave this aside in what follows. Second, he doesn’t want to claim there is only style to the analytic philosophy because, crucially, there are three “elements” to the practice that evoke features of Hume’s philosophy (p. 5 & pp. 15-22.) I describe this in depth below. Third, he thinks there is a fairly stable master-narrative to analytic philosophy in which it becomes unified Stateside after the Second World War out of three streams originating in Cambridge, Vienna, and Oxford (p. 5). I discuss the second and third in turn (although they are connected).

To understand the significance of the second (the three evocations of Hume’s philosophy), it is important to recall that for Schuringa, analytic philosophy, while having an ahistorical self-image, is a “continuation of a basically eighteenth-century mindset marked by bourgeois ideology’s twin faces – liberalism and empiricism – that we will be able to understand its twentieth-century history.” (p. 15) Hume is the “high point” of this tradition. (p. 15)

The interesting meta-philosophically claim here is not that the three evocations are “deference to science, the retreat to common sense, and the impulse to therapy.” (p. 18) But rather that these are responsive to a “predicament” and have a status quo bias built into them. The predicament is described as follows:

Characteristic of empiricism–liberalism is an emphasis on equity, coupled with a fantasy of neutrality. In Hume’s terminology, the ‘impressions’ of sense, the most immediate deposits of the world in our minds, record ‘matters of fact’. These are received passively by the subject. The subject is, by contrast, in principle autonomous and free. But their autonomous freedom pertains only to them as a private individual, and so effectively has nowhere to go. It cannot reach back into the world; and so, after all, the self is just as inert and ineffective as what comes their way through the senses. Far from being a subject, they are merely subject to the world as something they can do nothing about, just as they are simply subject to capital as it reproduces itself through them and through all the other cogs that it turns. (pp. 17-18)

In my first post on Schuringa, I noted that Schuringa is quietly retracing Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, first by suggesting that analytic philosophy and a form of neoclassical economics (what he calls ‘marginalism’) have more than important affinities. In this chapter this point is evoked again (pp. 13-14). Here the mutual emphasis is on a decompositional tendency.* (p. 14—Arrow matters greatly to Schuringa’s subsequent argument, but Arrow & Debreu not at all. That is, general equilibrium theory is notably absent in Schuringa.) But the comparison between economics and philosophy is also deepened by Schuringa who argues that the Humean agent stands in for the agent subject to capital. (This is not Foucault’s version by the way; Foucault grasps that the Humean agent’s identity over time is tenuous (if you are interested in the tricky details go here.) But Schuringa and Foucault agree that utilitarianism “springs from” Hume’s “empiricism and liberalism” (p. 16)

As an aside, in Schuringa utilitarianism is treated as a “native” British tradition. Undoubtedly a story can be told in which Hume, Hutchison, Godwin, and Paley prepared the way for Bentham. But it is odd to see Helvétius and Beccaria effaced. The cosmopolitanism of Bentham is given no credit at all.

Be that as it may, and more important, the (rhetorical) slide from being a subject to being merely subject to the world evokes a left-Hegelian reading of post-Kantian epistemology (and anticipates features of radical version of a McDowellian interpretation of Davidson). Somewhat strikingly on Schuringa’s interpretation of Hume and analytic philosophy, the predicament is both understood as a predicament and accepted by the tradition. The mechanism with which the predicament are tackled —“deference to science, the retreat to common sense, and the impulse to therapy” — have status quo bias built into them.

To put the significance of Schuringa’s main charge against analytic philosophy in terms alien to his own framework (and analytic philosophy’s self-understanding): the situation is like knowing one is in Plato’s cave, where one might strive for “rewards and praise and prizes for the person who was quickest at identifying the passing shapes [on the cave wall and], who had the best memory for the ones which earlier or later or simultaneously, and who as a result was best at predicting what was going to come next,” [Republic 516C-D] and then take pride into the prize. It involves a form of misguided honor loving that is fundamentally characterized by bad faith. That is, Schuringa is not just claiming that analytic philosophy is politically wrong (or anti-revolutionary) it is complicit in maintaining a philosophically unpardonable status quo.

For those purposes Hume is actually a useful symbol. Of the thinkers in the ‘liberal’ canon he is often most easily assimilated to a conservative stance. Lots of respectable interpretations exist of Hume that turn him into a daring epistemologist and metaphysician who leaves everything alone when he retreats out of the study in order to play backgammon.

Regular readers may expect me to challenge Hume’s (and Locke’s) place in Schuringa’s liberal canon. Such readers know that I date the founding of liberalism in the generation after Hume (and treat Locke as a mercantilist). But here I just want to note that Hume was an active spokesperson for worldmaking, the unavoidably violent extension of civilization. Only once civilization was established would the “restraints of justice, and even of humanity,” could facilitate the amiable virtues of commerce. (EMP 3.19)

Of course, all Schuringa needs for his argument is that Hume was taken as a a useful symbol for analytic philosophy, as the distant prophet of its tradition (which is, oddly, simultaneously wholly a-historical). And he produces quotes from Ayer, H.H. Price, and Russell to that effect (pp. 16-17).

Now, the most promising of these three bits of evidence is not Ayer (as one might imagine), but H.H. Price. Price was neglected by “Mainstream philosophy…after the Second World War, perhaps partly because, when articulating his ideas, he mainly engaged with philosophers of the past.” This is why these Impressions are ephemera to my people.

Price clearly did think something in the vicinity of Schuringa’s claim by the late 1930s. But Price’s position is actually a bit more interesting, too, in the 1939 lecture Schuringa draws on in two ways. First, Price knew that Hume was no liberal strictly speaking. (Price suggests he was a “Tory in politics.”) He self-consciously ascribes a kind of liberalism to Hume for his own ends. Second, and even more interesting, Price has a social theory in which philosophy causally shapes the world: “If Empiricist philosophy is strong to-day, perhaps we may hope to see a vigorous revival of Liberalism the day after to-morrow.” (“The Permanent Significance of Hume,” p. 8) A view like this also shapes Russell in this period.

H.H. Price was quickly forgotten, “Mainstream philosophy neglected him after the Second World War.” Price is notably absent in Feigl & Sellars (1949). This illustrates my point that within analytic philosophy, its past is dispensable.

With regard to Ayer, “in the opening words of his polemical and carefree logical-positivist manifesto Language, Truth and Logic,” he is quoted as follows, “that the views set out in that book ‘derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume’.” (Schuringa, p. 16) This says less than Schuringa needs, for neither Berkeley and Hume are praised for their purported liberalism; And it says more than he wants. For Berkeley — the partisan of passive of obedience (cf. A Discourse on Passive Obedience (1712)) — is no liberal at all.

A small aside: Ayer’s treatment of Berkeley as an empiricist may seem unremarkable, certainly if one is familiar with post-Kantian epistemology. But in the 19th century British philosophy (here presented by J.S. Mill in his (1842) essay, “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision”) Berkeley’s theory of vision (which was, in fact, the “received view” in “metaphysics”) was treated as neutral territory among the competing schools of “common sense” and “innate principles.” And in Berkeley’s theory, rational inference is an ineliminable part of any perception. The subject is not passive in experience, but an active participant. As Campbell Fraser argues in his influential study of Berkeley (1881) that Berkeley was seen as an empiricist was itself an effect of his impact on Hume and Hume’s reception. Ayer, then, is importing a post-Kantian frame by which to read Berkeley and Hume.

The significance of this is that the connection between (analytical) empiricism and liberalism is contingent. This is not only clear in ‘Red Vienna’ and the ‘Left Vienna Circle’ which Schuringa discusses in chapter 3. The greatest of the Viennese empiricists, Neurath, was a Marxist revolutionary. But alertness to this makes one notice that the quote from Russell is cherrypicked from a lecture from 1946 (p. 17). In Russell’s most fertile philosophical period —as viewed from the perspective of analytic philosophy itself — he was no liberal at all, but (recall) attracted to Syndicalism which he sees as a way to transform capitalism and forms of world government. I am unfamiliar with evidence that Schuringa is aware of this at all. (Schuringa does treat Russell’s much earlier interest in (1896) German Social Democracy later in the book, p. 36)

Of course, somebody sympathetic to Schuringa’s argument may dismiss this all as improperly focused on the historical actors’ self-understanding which is wholly irrelevant to a Marxist and materialist view of history. Fair enough. But that’s not how Schuringa proceeds. To what degree one can support Schuringa’s conclusions without his argument I will consider more in depth at the end of the series.

A more promising defense of Schuringa is to suggest that a “deference to science, the retreat to common sense, and the impulse to therapy” are, indeed Humean, and characteristic of features of analytic philosophy. All three are present under some description or another in Hume and within analytic philosophy. (And may also support the claim that analytic philosophy promotes status quo bias.)**

I write ‘partial’ for two reasons: first, as Schuringa notes: the common sense that figures into these projects often is a (rather revisionary) construction of Hume and analytic philosophy. It is not, as it were, a given manifest image. In fact, ‘constructing manifest images’ may be a much better way of characterizing the way common sense enters into analytic philosophy. In responding to this Schuringa draws on Bernard Williams.

Second, and more important for my purposes, science itself is a moving target often out of date This was explicitly recognized and theorized by Russell. So, this purported deference to science is itself an engine of ceaseless change with an uncertain destination. In fact, if such deference really existed then philosophers would risk having to change their views at any time. But that’s not our practice.

More subtly, neither Hume nor analytic philosophy really is so deferential to science (cf. Schuringa, pp. 18-19). On my reading — it almost seems a lifetime ago since I started arguing this (and here) — Hume’s early philosophy is a polemic against much then contemporary Newtonian science. Even if you think I am wrong on Hume, this spirit was also taken up by many analytic philosophers, where the point of the project (Clark Glymour is the most eloquent spokesperson today) is, where possible, to help shape and direct the sciences (we might dub this the launching of scientific images) and logic. (See below.)

That analytic philosophy embraces the idea that ‘philosophy is a kind of cure for an ailment’ is obviously indebted to Wittgenstein and his status in the profession. Schuringa does a disservice to his readers by pretending this is a broadly popular stance. Even in England such views are now often, I suspect, treated as fringe quaint.

Schuringa makes three terse charges against the therapeutic practice. First, he doubts there is a genuine healing (or exorcism). (p. 23) Second, it seems philosophy is needed to criticize and improve “forms of life,” so therapy is misguided. (p. 23) Third, it looks as if therapy is the wrong metaphor. (p. 23) But this is all discussed so briefly, that I don’t think it worth engaging with.

The chapter ends with a section centered on the significance of the fact that “analytic could not be pure empiricism in the way in which prior forms of empiricisms were…thanks to its attempt to combine the empiricist mindset with the ‘new logic’ pioneered by Gotlobb Frege,” (p. 23) and others. Here Schuringa offers a number of provocative promissory theses: analytic philosophers have made contributions to logic that “are of lasting importance.” But leaving aside logic itself, Schuringa suggests it is doubtful “these contributions have been fruitful in philosophy.” (p. 24) It is totally unclear why Schuringa needs to argue this point. But I look forward to reading the argument as well as the rather surprising way of describing Kripke’s impact to be discussed in chapter 8. Schuringa goes on to claim that

Analytic philosophers often suppose that a training in logic makes people better able to think in other domains – a plausible-sounding idea for which there nevertheless appears to be no evidence. And, again, it is often supposed that work in analytic philosophy, outside logic itself, relies in important ways on the use of logical devices. This is likely to be, at best, a gross exaggeration. (p. 24)

Leaving aside the first sentence. This very last claim relies on (2021) Bonino, Guido, Paolo Maffezioli, and Paolo Tripodi. "Logic in analytic philosophy: A quantitative analysis." Synthese 198: 10991-11028. That paper (explicitly) converges with recent work of Katzav, J., & Vaesen, K. (2017) and Katzav (2018):

Especially in the United States: Anglo-American philosophy becomes fully analytic only in the 1960s. In the 1940s and 1950s, on the Anglo-American philosophical scene a different world was still alive: a world in which for a philosopher it was natural to discuss the logical views of authors such as Dewey, Bradley or Hegel, belonging to past traditions, alternative to the kind of mathematical logic that would eventually have conquered the ground.

According to Bonino et al., then, analytic philosophy is first more fully dominant in the UK and it becomes dominant Stateside later.

Schuringa himself doesn’t fully assimilate this point. For him analytic philosophy is a retrospective unification “emerging after the Second World War, when it emerged under specific political conditions in the United States, forged from an amalgam of the pre-war approaches, largely at the hands of European émigrés who fled Nazism.” (p. 5; this is repeated on p. 9.) And so de facto exported back as a finished product to the UK under the umbrella of Pax Americana.

Now, here in the first chapter, Schuringa does not alert his reader to the fact that in later chapters he will be more attentive to the great stream(s) originating in Warsaw and Lodz (as well as a distinct one in Berlin). And only in Chapter 5 does he note Ernest Nagel’s pre-war (1936) baptism of analytic philosophy in Schuringa’s sense. (Nagel is no émigrés.) So, I engage with Schuringa’s argument as the details emerge.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to note about chapter 1. But I would be remiss if I neglected Schuringa’s clever opening gambit that analytic philosophy seems to be in a state of permanent crisis. (p. 7) [Foucault makes the same point about liberalism, but this commonality is unremarked by Schuringa. Instead Schuringa seems to be following Rorty (p. 124-125).] Schuringa thinks this state of crisis “can in part be conceptualized in terms of an internal identity crisis.” (6) The other part “takes the form of an altered relationship to rival approaches.” (p. 7) This is increasingly presented as a form of rapprochement.

But Schuringa thinks the crisis of analytic philosophy and the rapprochement with other traditions are both illusory! And his grounds for denying a crisis are really quite astonishing: since analytic philosophy continues to enjoy “hegemonic status in the academy” and is the “kind of philosophy practices in elite universities in the Anglophone world.” (p. 7) It is astonishing because being hegemonic is a necessary condition for being in crisis not a refutation of a crisis.

Since Schuringa cites Gramsci in this very same chapter 1 (to undermine the idea of common sense), I permit myself the following thought. This kind of attention to the prestige hierarchy has to be understood as part of a war for position. This style of cultural polemics is familiar because it has migrated to the contemporary political (alt) right in culture wars. To the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has never encountered a Marxist war for position before.

To be continued.

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*Schuringa is on the right track here. Anyone familiar with PPE land will find that economists and philosophers can vibe very nicely with each other admiring each other’s clean approaches, while preferring to the ignore the messy political scientists.

**For me the most eye-opening paper for how analytic philosophy’s methods encourage status quo bias is Michael Della Rocca (2013) “The taming of philosophy." Philosophy and its history (2013): 178-208.