Philosophy Adrift

__"Trends in Recent American Philosophy" by Alexander Nehamas, in Daedalus (Winter 1997), Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.__

American philosophy—which for the last half-century has largely meant "analytical" philosophy—is today in a state of confusion, with no canon, no common ground, and no "clear overall direction," writes Nehamas, a humanities professor at Princeton University. If it is to revive, he says, it must recover its lost heritage of engagement with the larger world.

In the 1930s, pragmatist John Dewey was the leading American philosopher. For him and his followers, Nehamas notes, "philosophy was essentially a public enterprise," concerned with "large-scale practical problems." Then Rudolf Carnap and his fellow logical positivists arrived in flight from Vienna and Berlin, with a much narrower conception of philosophy, one that made it seem more purely "scientific." Gradually, as these émigré scholars found university positions here, their ideas began to take hold.

Chief among these was the theory that there are only two kinds of meaningful utterances: "analytic statements" (such as "All bachelors are unmarried males"), which are true simply by virtue of their words’ meanings, and "synthetic statements" (such as "Bill Clinton is a married male"), which involve the empirical world. Strictly speaking, this "verifiability" theory maintains, logic, mathematics, and empirical science are the only meaningful parts of language. Thus summarily ousted from the domain of philosophy was "metaphysics," and all moral and aesthetic evaluations.

By the late 1940s, Nehamas says, under the influence of Carnap and Willard Quine, a Harvard University philosopher who worked closely with the positivists and shared their austere conception of philosophy’s proper domain, the discipline came to be widely seen as essentially theoretical. Philosophers began to don the white coats of scientists. They now distrusted common sense and ordinary language as lacking in clarity, and they had virtually no interest in the works of the great philosophers of the past, which were flawed in the same way. Philosophy, as they saw it, bore no direct relation to the larger world, and served instead as a handmaiden to other disciplines, providing advice about epistemic reliability. (Some analytical philosophers, influenced by British thinker J. L. Austin [1911–60]), did not share the positivists’ distrust of ordinary language, but rather favored close attention to its complexities and nuances. These philosophers, too, however, regarded their discipline as a "second-order" one.)

But then, Nehamas says, several profoundly unsettling developments occurred. Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1963) "showed that the positivist distinction between the pure data of sensation on the one hand and the conceptual operations of the theoretical understanding on the other could not be maintained." Science, in other words, was not simply the unfolding of pure reason. The philosopher Wilfrid Sellars similarly attacked the idea of pure sensory data and argued "that philosophy cannot be done completely independently of its own history." Soon, philosophers began to take some steps back toward engagement with the world: John Rawls’s influential Theory of Justice (1970) appeared; "applied philosophy," particularly business and medical ethics, emerged; and feminism arrived on the scene. There has even been renewed interest in the thought of the pragmatists.

Still dominated by the analytical approach, American philosophy today, Nehamas says, seems in "a holding pattern, [without] an explicit sense of unity and mission." To regain that sense, he suggests, philosophers—who now, for the most part, are simply going their own separate ways— must look outward more and try to make their common discipline, once again, a public enterprise.