Well, it's sort of ancient history about AM. I agree with you that there was that
aspect to the AMs. They did call themselves (informally) the "no-Bullshit Marxism
group. Course this was in the 70s, when there was a lot of bullshit Marxism about.
Still, there was an unnecessary arrogance there. However, no need to dwell on it with
the evaporation of the school.
It is still useful to have a label to refer to people who were involved in a common
project, referred to reach other's work, etc., just like with the Frankfurt School or
the Althusserians. I mean, you were a lot more likely to find me referring to Roemer
or Elster than to Adorno, or Habermas to Adorno than to Roemer, etc., so it at least
tells you the frame of reference if not who's better than what.
What planet are you from, the AMs eschew philosophical reflection? If anything, they
engage in too much it. A tendency where the leading figures were a philosopher of
history (Cohen), a political theorist (Elster), a methodologically hyper-conscious
economist (Roemer) and political scientist (Przezworeski), and historian (Brenner),
almost all of whom have written reams of philosophy of science, ethics, and political
philosophy--this is what you mean by a movement that is not philosophically
self-aware? You can't be serious. Maybe you think the stuff is all worthless, but it's
not like it's not there.
But I am not stuck on the label anyway, I just pitched in because various people were
sneering at the tendency that I was part of if I was part of any tendency, and which
in any case I thought did not deserve sneers.
As far as analytical philosophy goes, your friend has a take on it that I would not
wholly agree with. AP was something Russell and Moore invented around the 1890s when
they were bored by British Hegelianism; it was empiricistically minded philosophy with
a strong dose of logic--Russell was a very great mathematical logician; it was
infused, in England and America, by the logical positivists, themselves strongly
influenced by Kant and relativity theory, when the LPs fled Nazi-occupied Europe. For
about 30 years, analytical philosophy was either LP or its critique. LP and its
linguistic phil outliers came apart after 1950 and by 1975, Humpty Dumpty was all in
pieces. This is when I started college. It was exciting; there was a sense we were
going to get it right this time. The big tendency were (Marxist imspired) scientific
realism and social constructivism in the Kuhnian mold, or so it seemed to me, but I
was a philosopher of science.
I will add that the anti-metaphysical animus of logical positivism was wholly gone by
then; courses were offered on metaphysics, and "epistemology & metaphysics" is one of
the core specializations. Along with philosophy of mind and language, it is the
hegemonic one. So your friend is quite wrong about that aspect. He is also wrong that
APs have to reject the "synthetic a priori"; C.I. Lewis was defending a version of it
in the 30s and 40s, and if he isn't an analytical philosopher, no one is. Quine too is
happy to defend the synthetic a priori,a nd he is THE analytical philosopher. Your
friend wrongly identifies AP with logical positivism, which was only true in part and
long ago.
However, 25 years later, things have rather come apart. There are no common doctrines
or methods, the territory is pretty well mapped, and while there is a lot of
sophistication, there is not much progress or sense of progress. Granted I have been
out of professional philosophy for six years, but I keep my hand in, and others I
respect agree with me. There are no figures of the stature of Russell or Wittgenstein,
or even Quine or Sellars. The field is treading water. This is not just the case with
analytical philosophy. "Contintental" philosophy isn't going anywhere either. I mean,
postmodernism? Give me a break.
It is true that analytical philosophy is dominant in research departments. That means
a lot less than the dominance of NCE in economics departments, because you can be an
analytical philosopher and do Hegel or Marx as long as you do it analytically, that
is, rigorously. we will get static from the logicians and the episptemology and
metaphysics snobs, but you can still do analytical philosophy and do just about
whatever you like. This is a function of the lack of focus and the general
degeneration of what used to be logical positivism and its critics into philosophy
that is written with an aspiration to the clarity and precision attained by the
logical positivists.
It is true that some analytical philosophers use the language of "counterintuitive" to
describe certain results or to frame objections, but that's just a way of saying, "You
don't really want to say _that_, do you?" It's not a view that there are things called
"intuitions" that signal truths.
It is also true that AP is a turn off for a lot of students. They come to philosophy
courses having read Nietzsche and burning with existential angst, and some TA or
professor makes them parse arguments. What do these terms mean? What are the premises?
Does that follow? What about this objection? What a bore.
It's hard work and doesn't address the quest for meaning that attracted them to
existentialism to start with. I know, because I was one of those students, and had
hundreds when I was a professor. Of course, AP also turns on the students whom (in the
view of the profession) are best at philosophy. After a while, when I was socialized
into it, it turned me on too. It's called thinking, and it's no more natural to humans
than athletic achievement. And like athletic achievement, it takes painful work, and
it isn't for everyone.
-jks
In a message dated Thu, 13 Jul 2000 5:08:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<<
If you are to talk about AM as a school compared to other schools of
Marxism, you have to have some way of differentiating it from those other
schools. Or simply drop the term "AM," which would be quite useful.
And unfortunately, the AM school _was_ involved in such a product
differentiation war, lording it over the peons. (I, on the other hand,
don't like this kind of academic sectarianism. I don't need to engage in
such, of course, because I am better than everyone else.)
>As far as dictionary definitions, meaning is use, companero, the term is
>almost certainly based on "analytical philosophy," which just means (since
>the mid-60s), careful, precise, and explicit philosophy), and that is all
>the the "analytical" in AM meant. It's quite compatible with synthesis.
again, this doesn't distinguish the AM school from other non-official schools.
I asked a colleague in the LMU Philosophy Department (Mark Morelli) about
"analytical philosophy." He writes: >... it is a fairly vague notion of a
philosophical approach and technique or methodology. It has its origins in
British empiricism and tends to be empiricistic, i.e., believing, with
Hume, that all knowledge is derived from experience, and not just that it
all begins with experience. Its methodology is 'conceptual analysis',
usually beginning with ordinary language usages and then doing a logical
analysis of concepts and their relations to one another. When it comes to
the question of what's actually true in any given case, it tends to rely
upon commonsense intuition and frequently makes use of the criterion of the
"counter-intuitive." <
his evaluation of this view:
>Overall, not in my opinion a very philosophical procedure. It claims to
eschew metaphysics, although it consistently presupposes one. It rejects
Kant's synthetic a priori judgments (hence, 'analytic' as distinct from
'synthetic'). The analyses offered are occasionally interesting and
enlightening. The movement as a whole underwent severe criticism in the
'70s for its excessive detachment from the concerns of living, and this
resulted in an effort to do a lot of analysis of ethical concepts. Some
regard the entire movement as extremely bourgeois, and many students who
encounter philosophy for the first time in the analytic atmosphere are
turned off and disappointed. <
This fits with the "analytic" Marxism I've read, which generally refuses to
engage in philosophical reflection. Formal logic -- or mathematics -- are
what the school is about, generally ignoring deeper philosophical and
methodological issues.
He adds: >Happily, our department, unlike the great majority of "state of
the art" philosophy departments in California and the
USA generally, is not monolithically analytic in its orientation, but is
rather self-consciously pluralistic. Our analytically-trained philosophers
at LMU differ from the more common sort in that they do not maintain that
if you are not doing philosophy in the analytic style you are not doing
philosophy at all.<
This suggests that "analytic philosophy" tends to rule the philosophy roost
the way NC-ism rules economics.
>"Me-sophisticated:" (beat on chest) "Ugh. Me solve many simultaneous
>equations. Me real manly."
That's Roemer -- and unfortunately the hegemonic school of economics.
Paraphrasing Hegel, if it's not mathematical, it's not real.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>>
