John Roemer, John Roemer.... Oh yeah, I remember him. Berkeley, 1969.
Undergraduate math major and head of local Progressive Labor Party chapter.
"People's Park are a bunch of reactionary hippies stealing parking spaces
from the working class." Also, get other people to front for you and get
arrested or suspended from their academic careers, but you keep safe behind
the scenes and build you academic career because the inner party
intellectuals are too valuable to sacrifice to the struggle.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2000 6:01 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:21586] Re: M once again
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
>>
