1.
In 1979, in an article entitled “What Is Wrong with Slavery,” the British philosopher R. M. Hare wrote: “Nearly everybody would agree that slavery is wrong; and I can say this perhaps with greater feeling than most, having in a manner of speaking been a slave.” The first time I read this I was incredulous: how could a comfortable Oxford don, in our day and age, dare to claim that he had been enslaved? Was he talking about some run-of-the-mill hazing ritual to which he had been subjected in his student days? Was he talking about the burdens placed on him by his family?
No, of course not. I had somehow forgotten all about World War II. Hare, it turns out, was a prisoner of war held by the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 until the end of the conflict three years later. He was forced to perform hard labor in the construction of the Burma Railway during a good portion of that time. Throughout his enslavement, he kept a notebook hidden on his person, and jotted down observations about fundamental ethical questions, notably the matter of how to lead a meaningful life under extreme duress. Biding his time, he also learned Italian and Persian. Upon release, he was, as those of his generation were expected to be, generally silent about his wartime experiences. So silent, in fact, that when decades later he would casually mention his time as a slave in a scholarly article, this seemed entirely incongruous with everything we thought we knew of him as a quiet academic leading an uneventful life.
This observation may be extended to account for the style of mid-century British philosophers in general: the war significantly shaped the lives and destinies of most of the prominent figures of that generation, yet we find scarcely any mention of it in their written works. The war is thus a conspicuous absence, a black hole of unreason, unpredictability, and, yes, trauma, at the heart of the lives of the men (mostly) who would work so hard to cultivate a public image of themselves as ideal embodiments of the paired philosophical virtues of rigor and wit.
Why does Hare’s avowal come as such a surprise to a reader like me, who of course knows full well that terrible things happened between 1939 and 1945? In part it may be that we have been conditioned in recent years to think of “slavery” as something approaching a proper noun, referring unless otherwise specified to the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery conducted by Europeans and Americans and inflicted upon Africans. I suspect Hare himself was playing on this presumption, in order to deliver this deadpan account of his own horrific experience in a register somewhere close to that of a joke. In this, Hare is exemplifying one of the two key virtues I have just identified in twentieth-century analytic philosophy — not laugh-out-loud wit, but the wit that is imparted with a sly and subtle Shaftesburian grin; and to do so he momentarily slips out of character, violating a key rule that prevailed among his peers: that you must never make it about yourself, that your background motivations, your childhood dreams, or your earlier life as a POW, must never come through to the surface as an explicit part of the account of why you believe what you believe.
When on other occasions analytic philosophers speak freely about the life experiences that shaped their thought, they often go out of their way to make clear that this is the sort of thing they only do on their “down time.” For an analytic philosopher, life itself is extracurricular. Thus John Rawls, in an autobiographical note, reflects on his adolescent experience working in a doughnut factory in Baltimore in the 1930s (his father would send a driver to drop him off and pick him up), watching the owner struggling to keep his bills paid through constant toil. He observes that seeing this example of the disparate economic plights of different members of society may have played a role in his “original position” thought-experiment. But there is nothing uniquely compelling about this reflection; after all, what human being, other than perhaps the young Siddhartha Gautama, has not witnessed economic inequality?
The autobiographies of the analytic philosophers often come across to the discerning reader as exercises in vanity. (Nicholas Rescher was so impressed with his own career that he made time to write two autobiographies.) One exception may be W. V. O. Quine’s somewhat eccentric memoir, The Time of My Life, which appeared in 1985: we may credit it, at least, for revealing to us just how happy Quine was to build his personhood up entirely out of rigor and wit. Anything that might trigger the rumbling within him of any more surprising sort of interiority is something he explicitly portrays as in need of avoidance. “I am deeply moved by occasional passages of poetry,” Quine writes, “and so, characteristically, I read little of it.” Hare briefly violates this rule about avoiding your own passions, but only so as to reconfirm the sharpness of his wit. Later in the article he affirms the idea, which Quine would share, that any conviction that comes to us laden with emotion is worthy of grave suspicion. Indeed, in the very next sentence, having just acknowledged his own time as a slave, Hare immediately corrects course and returns us to the familiar rigorous detachment of his tradition: “However, there are dangers in just taking for granted that something is wrong.”
Such detachment from one’s own passions obviously has its virtues. Analytic philosophy made wonderful progress in several areas of logic and the philosophy of language, and has even succeeded in dissolving some nasty paradoxes that had been weighing us down and making us look bad since antiquity. But such dispassionate focus also, quite obviously, has its limits, and in an era in which the most effective engine of dispassionate inquiry is the computer, analytic philosophy as conducted by humans runs the risk of degenerating into a faint imitation by human beings of what in any case the machines will always do better.
Under the label of “wit,” in a broad sense, we must surely include the performative dismissiveness that was once so common in seminar settings. More than once in graduate school I had professors, trained up broadly on the Oxbridge model, who delighted in raising an eyebrow as an anxious graduate student struggled to express a half-formed thought, only to scoff at the end of the student’s failed effort: “I haven’t the slightest idea what that is supposed to mean.” Rather than taking the charitable approach of a philosopher such as Leibniz, who was convinced that everyone is always speaking the truth, albeit with greater and lesser degrees of clarity, and that it is the purpose of philosophical dialogue to draw out the latent truth that we all already possess, the analytic philosopher instead attempts to convince an “adversary” that what has just come out of his or her mouth is complete nonsense. Of course, asymmetrical power relations and the broader pragmatic context of a seminar effectively ensure that when a professor says to a graduate student that what has just come out of that student’s mouth is complete nonsense, it is effectively guaranteed that whatever the student has just said, it will indeed sound stupid — somewhat as in a book review, if the reviewer writes that “this book contains such awful sentences as the following,” it is safe to predict that whatever that sentence says, the reader will be primed to agree that it is indeed awful. The haughtiness of many analytical philosophers would be hard to exaggerate.
It is of course an irony that even in a seminar studying questions of pragmatics through the lens of philosophy of language, the pragmatics of what is happening then and there, in its time and in its place, remain off-limits, beyond the bounds of legitimate consideration. To acknowledge that a power differential could in part shape the perception of the truth-value or meaningfulness of the claims of the different parties to the dialogue would be to abandon the project of philosophy itself, and to lapse into something approaching “critique” in the spirit of, say, Michel Foucault. The almost phobic avoidance of such a turn has resulted, for analytic philosophers, in a variety of inquiry utterly under-resourced for resolving the questions it has set for itself. In early analytic philosophy, these questions were almost exclusively within the subfields of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In more recent decades, there is no particular limit to the range of questions that analytic philosophers may choose to address, and today some of the most prominent analytic philosophers work primarily on such things as microaggressions committed by hospital nursing staff or the social construction of medical obesity. It is not so much the focus that warrants the appellation “analytic” but the style, and to some extent the methodology: to be precise, a total absence of any awareness of rootedness in humanistic tradition, and a fairly thorough STEMification of the tools and the resources deployed for thinking about the human good — that is, a tendency to prefer citing the latest poll results about Shakespeare or Cicero, and an almost childlike unawareness of the inescapably tragic dimensions of human existence.
2.
One significant development in the thirty years that I have spent in philosophy is the sharp rise in course offerings focused on the history of analytic philosophy. Back in the 1990s, the party line, often implicit but sometimes also explicit (as when Gilbert Harman posted a note on his Princeton office door warning against any mention of works that dated back more than ten years), held that analytic philosophy simply has no history, or at least that there is nothing an analytic philosopher might gain by attention to its historical development. Philosophy was thus conceived much as physics or cosmology is: if you are a working cosmologist, you are perfectly free, in your own time, to look into Aristotle’s theory of the motion of the heavens, but this can be no part of your professional duties strictly speaking.
By now things have loosened up a bit. Today analytic philosophy largely accepts that it has a historical life to it, that it is one tradition alongside others. This amounts to a significant retreat from the aspiration to scientificity of much analytic philosophy throughout the twentieth century. Nikhil Krishnan’s recent book, A Terribly Serious Affair: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900–1960, skillfully reflects this latter shift. Krishnan’s work may be described, without too much stretching, as a form of ethnographic participant-observation. He is both an insider and an outsider, able to look at the supreme values of the Oxford philosophers, the rigor and the wit, with both admiration and bemused detachment. And this detachment is grounded in a familiarity with other traditions, notably those emerging in Indian history, that have the power to satisfy their adepts’ intellectual, spiritual, and social needs in a way analytic philosophy never could.
I have been focusing so far primarily on British philosophers, but have also drawn at will on examples from their American counterparts. If this can be justified, it would be by appeal to the fact that in the twentieth century analytic philosophy departments in the United States were one of the few pockets of American life in which ties to the former imperial occupier, of the sort that Ralph Waldo Emerson had sought to break already in the early nineteenth century, remained strong. In other words, the philosophical declaration of independence that was announced already in Emerson’s sermons was effectively rescinded by the mid-twentieth century, when, for better or worse, an influx of brain power from Central Europe into the Anglosphere brought about, once again, a new period of trans-Channel and trans-Atlantic hybridity.
Throughout the 1990s it remained nearly impossible to come up through an American Ph.D. program in philosophy without becoming, or pretending to become, a proper Anglophile. You had to be able to order a “pint” without appearing flustered; you had to be able to speak competently of soccer — excuse me, football; you had, under threat of ostracism, to express your appreciation for John Cleese’s comedy sketches exploring the quirks of Ludwig Wittgenstein, or at the very least Monty Python’s far more famous sketch about the football match of the philosophers. Sooner or later, almost all American philosophers made some sort of pilgrimage through the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, finagled invitations as guests at high table, and commonly described this experience in terms familiar from the believer’s description of a visit to the Holy Land. Many of the most elite American philosophers stayed on longer at those venerable old institutions, for doctoral research, post-docs, lectureships, or the rare coveted professorial chair. The pay was significantly below what one might expect in an elite American institution, but the prestige remained enormous, and irreducible to any dollar amount.
Yet by the time I arrived in England, in the early 2000s, one already had a distinct sense of nostalgia for a lost golden age. In the same motion by which American philosophy curricula have begun to cast analytic philosophy as a historical phenomenon, so, too, at high table there was by now a sense that whatever had been great about the generation of British wartime philosophers had not managed to survive into the present. The stories related to a guest generally sounded, even to a first-time visitor, like stories that had been told before. Much of the talk was literally small — I can recall one elderly fellow next to me complaining that back when he first dined there in 1956, they offered two savories before they brought the concluding sweet. When conversation turned to philosophy, as with culinary matters, the general refrain was one of decline: back in the good old days, when the great masters of the twentieth century were still alive, my, how uncompromising, sharp, and again, how rigorous, the disputes could be! No one pulled any punches! You should have seen it! There was never any accounting for why these old veterans could not simply demonstrate that lost rigor themselves rather than bemoan its loss, but the message was clear enough: in the old days, we were man enough to accept that philosophy is, in its essence, a combat sport, a sort of sublimation of war, in which the faculty of reason is more a blunt weapon than an inner power that might facilitate our individual happiness, thriving, or liberation.
War, as we have already been seeing, shaped twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy in at least two respects. First, most philosophers of the right age were in the war, even if their experiences were not generally as arduous as Hare’s. Second, regardless of any individual philosopher’s experience, the war, and the global post-war order that it helped to shape, did much also to determine the cultural values and political imperatives that these philosophers would largely take for granted as the default setting of human existence. In other words, British philosophy in the twentieth century was philosophy pursued at a highly peculiar and special moment in history, even if its practitioners for the most part engaged in their inquiries as if the contingencies of their historical moment had no role in shaping the style and the aims of their thinking. Though we are often loath to admit it, philosophy has always been found downstream from culture: the dominant classes determine what sort of things should be said, and the philosophers, for the most part (always with at least some dissenters), articulate the reasons why this is so. Sore thumbs such as Marx or Nietzsche have thus been in a position to complain, with some legitimacy, that the prevailing schools of philosophy are only the intellectual laundering of ideology, or that the canonical texts of mainstream moral theory are really only etiquette manuals for the bourgeoisie.
At the very least, we may agree with the counterfactual: if World War II had not happened, twentieth-century philosophy would have been very different. For one thing, the English-speaking world would not have benefitted from the massive continental brain-drain triggered by the rise of fascism in Europe. For another, it was largely the great leap forward triggered by the war, in the technologies of cryptography, intelligence, and computing, that would end up shaping the priorities of research in philosophy, and in particular the overwhelming focus on logic, decision theory, game theory, and related fields. Ultimately, in the post-war period this focus made it possible to conceive of philosophy largely as a politically neutral endeavor, as a technical field rather than a critical one. This argument is familiar from George A. Reisch’s important book, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Reisch argues that the early Cold War era brought about, first and foremost, a de-politicization of philosophy. This was somewhat reversed by John Rawls in 1971 with A Theory of Justice, his epoch-making work of liberal political philosophy. But even here the theory remained so abstract, or so “ideal,” as to seem to many to have very little to say about actual human society and about what the real challenges are for those who would improve it.
And twentieth-century analytic philosophy was shaped by war in another sense, too: it was conceived by its participants as a variety of dialogical combat. Though the idea of “interpretive charity,” stemming from the work of Donald Davidson, often came up in the conversations of the old-guard analytic philosophers, they were frequently anything but charitable in their interpretations of what their juniors, or those less quick-witted than they, were trying to say. It is hard in fact to imagine that anyone who had not been socialized exactly as they had been might be perceived by them as appropriate partners in dialogue. What they were missing, then, was any sense whatsoever of the ethnological dimensions of the human encounter — sometimes we argue with our peers, and we can indeed learn something from that experience, but sometimes we might want to learn, too, from people who are not our peers. To attempt to do so involves a particular set of challenges, since non-peers will not have been socialized in the same way, will perhaps have a very different sense of what counts as quick wit or decisive refutation. Yet as long as philosophers only talk to other philosophers, or even more narrowly to other philosophers working in the same tradition, in the same language, with the same points of reference and more or less the same values and background presuppositions, while they may be preserving for themselves the satisfaction of a fair fight with a suitable adversary, they are also preserving themselves from the vast majority of human minds, and choosing instead to remain in the comfort zone of high table and all the other rituals that perpetually reconfirm for them who exactly belongs, and who can be safely ignored.
None of this is to say that analytic philosophers, even if their methods have been gladiatorial, have been particularly bellicose or inegalitarian in their actual political commitments. There is, happily, no particular political litmus test for membership in this tradition, and I would say that overall the political opinions of academic philosophers are generally downstream of culture, or at least the urban and educated culture, as a whole. Around 2020, academic philosophy veered sharply to the left, or at least to the peculiar strain of left politics that was being called “progressivism.” But this was not the result of any internal developments, let alone any of new conceptual innovations or unprecedently persuasive arguments — it was just a matter of watching which way the wind was blowing. In this, the philosophers of the early twenty-first century demonstrated that they were no longer operating as the “handmaidens of science,” as many analytic philosophers a century before imagined philosophy ought to do, let alone as the handmaidens of theology, to invoke the formula often used in the Middle Ages, but had now become the handmaidens of the university HR department.
Analytic philosophers, again, are generally good center-left social democrats, who are ready to make room for Marxists in their midst, as well as some anarchists, and at least a few full-blooded conservatives. Quine was famously of a generally right-wing disposition. (The most offensively reactionary statement that I have seen from him was also undeniably funny: he said of lotteries that they are a “subsidy for smart people.”) This does not seem to have shaped any of his explicit commitments in the domain of philosophy to which he limited himself — indeed, the conclusions he came to about, say, the indeterminacy of translation parallel in interesting ways the work of the doubt-mongering continental postmodernists, who generally sought to position themselves, sincerely or not, somewhere on the far left. In terms of political orientation, we find a great outlier in the philosopher of language Scott Soames, author of the magisterial two-volume history of analytic philosophy, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, and, more recently, an ardent Trump supporter. In his illustrious career at Princeton and at the University of Southern California, Soames has trained up numerous graduate students in his field, who have largely been more in line with the prevailing political sympathies of their community, have been proud feminists, Democrats, centrists, and progressives. None, as far as I know, has ever reported any sense of incompatibility with their advisor on the basis of political differences.
The cases of Quine and Soames are instructive. It is difficult or impossible to imagine a continental philosopher whose political commitments do not significantly shape their philosophical commitments. This is not to say there are no productive left/right crossovers or collaborations; indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that most post-war European philosophy has been devoted to finding ways to make the lucubrations of a certain prominent Nazi thinker palatable on the left. But the great difference is that this effort constituted the project of philosophy itself, as the continental philosophers conceived it: not so much to extract from Martin Heidegger what little may still be used once the Nazism is subtracted, but rather, much more ambitiously, to engage with the problem of his Nazism in order to understand critically how this ideology could have become so central to the history of Western metaphysics and its “overcoming.” By marked contrast, no disciple of Soames will feel compelled to engage with his Trumpism in any way. There is no need. In analytic philosophy, your political commitments are extracurricular, even if, at certain moments, as for conservatives in the post-2020 era, or for communists in the McCarthy era, it can be difficult for a political black sheep to feel at home within the broader sociology of academia.
The surface neutrality of analytic philosophy, however, is undergirded by a deeper sort of conservatism. What has enabled analytic philosophy to present itself as not having a political valence has been precisely its ability to distinguish sharply and confidently between what belongs to the sphere of philosophy and what lies beyond it, while continental philosophy typically sees all domains of culture — not just politics but also the arts, entertainment, fashion, to some extent science, and, most important of all, history — not just as potential source material for philosophical reflection, but as directly constituting the discipline’s subject matter. Analytic philosophy can accommodate viewpoint diversity about politics — easily placing, say, Scott Soames in a seminar room alongside liberals and socialists — but only at the cost of suppressing any viewpoint diversity about what philosophy itself is.
It is unlikely that, if the United States or Britain were today to enter full-scale war with China or Russia, academic philosophers would have much of a presence among the people these countries might tap for heading up their intelligence operations. I myself speak Russian, and probably know what they are currently saying in Russian state media as well as any intelligence officer, but I am quite certain no intelligence agency will ever hope to get anything useful out of me. I am probably an outlier here in my public attitudes towards the sort of power that intelligence agencies represent, having spent many years now insisting, like Diogenes of Sinope, that to be a philosopher necessarily involves stepping away from all the endless contests over earthly dominion — to telling even Alexander the Great, should he come and offer his patronage, to stand the hell out of our light. Most of my philosophy colleagues would likely sit out any future war less for reasons of principle than simply because our particular set of competences no longer seems suitable for substantially contributing to any war effort, such as these are fought in the twenty-first century.
To some extent, we may see a figure such as J. L. Austin, whose military and philosophical careers are exhaustively recounted in M. W. Rowe’s magisterial biography, J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer, as arriving at the end of a long lineage of polymathic thinkers and doers, extending back to the likes of Leibniz in the seventeenth century, who was at once a metaphysician, a mathematician, a cryptographer, and a diplomat. Austin’s contemporaries who best fit this polymathic model, notably Alan Turing and Norbert Wiener, have not gone down in history first and foremost as philosophers. But that is definitely how they would have been identified had they been born a few centuries earlier, and in this regard they remind us that throughout the World War II era, probing into the fundamental nature of reality was still often held to be of a pair with the project of shaping reality: theoria cum praxi, to cite Leibniz’s favorite motto. But again, whether Leibniz was seeking to reunite the main camps of post-Reformation Christianity, or to convince Louis XIV to invade Egypt, or to work out the relationship between the Slavic languages and ancient Scythian, he was always motivated by a unifying philosophical vision, that of “unity compensated by diversity,” which he saw as furnishing the basic truths both for understanding fundamental metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, as well as the concrete social and political questions that arise in diplomacy or ecclesiology. By the time Austin, Turing, Wiener, and others signed up for the war effort, such a unity was no longer so clear: they are simply adaptable intelligent men, with background competence in thinking about questions that prove to be relevant to wartime intelligence efforts.
Rowe describes Austin’s intelligence career in vivid detail, and one comes away from his excellent work fairly convinced that Austin’s contributions to military history are even greater than his contributions to philosophy. For one thing, he played an indispensable role in planning the Allied invasion of Normandy, as well as several other key offensives. As with Hare, we also see in Austin an extraordinary fatalism, an ability to accept the twists and turns of life in a turbulent world without complaint. One remarkable scene recounted by Rowe takes place during a Luftwaffe bombing of London in April, 1941. Rather than retreating to a basement, Austin and his wife did what many Londoners had taken to doing on such occasions: they went up to the roof to watch the incendiary spectacle, only both to be injured, he superficially, his wife rather gravely. And, like Hare, Austin spoke little of it after the war and allowed his experiences in it no evident role in the shaping of his great innovations in ordinary-language philosophy in the 1950s.
Here, indeed, being disciplinarily outside of philosophy narrowly conceived may have enabled other thinkers who played a role in the war to arrive at more comprehensive reflections on the relationship between their wartime duties and their postwar academic interests. The American cybernetician Wiener, who made crucial contributions to developing new anti-aircraft technologies during the war, would go on to offer profound reflections on the inextricable links between information theory, the progress of technology, the interests of state, and the new threats of global conflict. In this respect Wiener, more than the philosophers narrowly conceived, was following much more closely in the footsteps of Leibniz, and if this is what caused him to have gone down in history as something other than a philosopher, we may have here a clear measure of just how much the scope of philosophy had been reduced between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.
3.
What are the broader cultural and historical forces that led to this reduction? On Griesch’s account, postwar philosophy in the United States was both narrowed and depoliticized by a complex system of application of top-down pressure, shaping the way different grant applications were prioritized, and the way hiring decisions were made. This effectively ensured the long reign of a radically austere conception of philosophy that had already been articulated before the war, according to which this discipline’s exclusive concern is with analyzing the logic and the language of the claims of the natural sciences and mathematics. These claims, it was maintained by A. J. Ayer and others already in the 1930s, are meaningful only to the extent that they are susceptible to being proven false, and therefore the only true claims there are, while the claims of aesthetics, moral theory, and metaphysics, not to mention substantive political claims about the human and social good, are quite literally “nonsense.”
For Griesch, then, the apolitical character of postwar philosophy was but the superficial reflection of a cultural and institutional shift that was political through and through. In the United States and Great Britain in the postwar period, it was crucial that the project of philosophy be separated from the project of critique, that is, the project of exposing the pathologies inherent in the present organization of society as a first step towards remedying them. Philosophy had to be updated to a point where Marx’s admonition to philosophers a century earlier — that the time had come for them not just to seek to understand the world, but to change it — would now appear, even though it mentioned philosophers by name, to be describing a very different discipline than our own.
The opposite of critique, in this sense, is analysis: the project of attending to claims that are already circulating out there in the world, and taking them apart in the same way one might take apart an engine in order to learn how it works. Sometimes the philosophers, on this conception of their project, will end up putting their engines back together again, but they will seldom take the newly disconnected parts and try to use them to build another more powerful engine than the one they started with.
Of course, in spite of the extreme austerity of Ayer’s generation, analytic philosophy eventually did make room for the return of political and moral theory, aesthetics, and other species of alleged nonsense. But even these were reintroduced in a way that ensured their exponents would mostly be shooting blanks. In perhaps the most extreme example of this, the new field of analytic “metaethics” presupposed that the most productive engagement with ethical questions was the one that moves up a level, so to speak. Rather than asking whether some given x is “good,” metaethics instead analyzes the logical structure of claims of the form “x is good.” Whatever the results of such inquiries were, they seemed little likely to change the world, or even the personal behavior of anybody who was exposed to them.
Eventually, substantive claims would also return in moral and political philosophy, notably, as we have already mentioned, in the work of Rawls, who continues to represent the high-water mark of analytic political philosophy. But here, even if we cannot accuse Rawls of insisting on remaining “meta” — for he does make weighty claims about, among other things, what justice is, rather than simply analyzing what other people mean when they say things like “justice is x” — there has been a further persistent concern that in order for the Rawlsian liberal project to work, it must remain at the level of “ideal theory,” proceeding through thought-experiments so abstract and detached from lived experience as to reveal next to nothing about that experience. In recent decades, proponents of “non-ideal theory,” notably Charles W. Mills, have sought variously to supplement or to break down the Rawlsian program by insisting that in fact we experience no “original position” in human life, that we are “always already” (to speak with the continentals) in the world as members of particular groups defined by class, gender, ethnicity, and so on, and that this brute fact has very real consequences for how the members of various social identities will tend to understand what is at stake in the “original position” experiment.
Undoubtedly the most significant English-language work in moral philosophy of the postwar era was done by Derek Parfit, whose two milestone contributions in this field are Reasons and Persons, from 1984, followed by On What Matters in 2011. Parfit was a moral realist, whose singular obsession over much of his adult life was to discover the nature of moral truth in an age when this could no longer be referred back to a transcendent cause of the sort that religion had long provided. Although David Edmonds has recently written a fine biography of him, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, Parfit’s life is not terribly interesting. He was born in China to doctor parents in 1942, but he returned to England in his first year and stayed in Oxford more or less continuously, sticking to a raw-food diet, until his death in 2017. His widow, the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards, has suggested that he suffered from, or perhaps thrived from, an undiagnosed case of Asperger’s syndrome.
It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that postwar analytic philosophy amounted to a jobs program for Aspies, but there is no denying that Parfit’s particular set of personal traits served him well in the field: a singular and downright obsessive dedication to following every detail of arguments through to their end, and a monumental faith in the power of reason to solve, potentially without limit, humanity’s problems. As Edmonds tells us in one particularly sad passage, Parfit never celebrated his own birthday, since he could find no rational ground for taking that single day as more meaningful than any other. Nor did he celebrate other people’s birthdays, nor even did he give his wife a card or a gift when her birthday came. Birthdays were not among the things that “mattered.” You can see here, I believe, what happens when substantive questions, such as “What matters?” or “What is good?” are reintroduced into philosophy after some decades of banishment, but where the people who take up the task of answering these questions remain largely shaped by the earlier generation of philosophers dedicated to pure analysis and the pathological avoidance of “nonsense”: you get people asking big questions, whose minds and reading habits and manners of inquiry are ideally shaped for the asking of small ones; you get highly abstract answers to questions, about the nature of goodness for example, from people unable to see concrete instances of goodness — the celebration of your loved one’s birthday, for example — right before their noses.
The landscape of post-war analytic philosophy, to be fair, is somewhat more diverse than I have so far acknowledged. As Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s collective intellectual biography, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, reminds us, it was largely the women philosophers at Oxford in the World War II era and after who kept alive alternative philosophical styles, and kept their colleagues at least minimally aware of the existence of other ways of doing things. Midgley and Murdoch in particular were gifted essayists who reflected in their writing a surprising vulnerability, and even a willingness to appear foolish. Anscombe was one of the key disciples and Anglicizers of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, for better or worse, and she was at least as defiantly eccentric as the peculiar Austrian she worked so hard to promote. A devout if idiosyncratic Catholic, Anscombe argued against birth control and had an unusually large brood of her own. She chain-smoked and was known to eat baked beans straight from the can during her lectures. Her greatest contribution to philosophy was made in the field of virtue ethics, which involved an innovative and original transformation of Aristotle’s account of virtue into a substantive position in moral philosophy known as “virtue theory.” She also made significant contributions to the philosophy of action, a field in which Wittgenstein’s influence on her is particularly evident.
Midgley found that she was unable to commit to Christianity, but her work is shot through with theological reflections and attests to an enduring preoccupation with matters of faith. She is also singularly preoccupied with the question of animals and their moral status, something that could hardly hold the attention of her most prominent male colleagues for long. In the 1980s she went and picked a battle with Richard Dawkins, characterizing his version of evolutionary theory as akin to religious faith. Seldom have two people so different, yet so alike in their utter willingness to risk looking foolish in public, faced off so dazzlingly. Midgley remains, like Anscombe, committed to a view of the project of philosophy along basically Wittgensteinian lines, in which it is best understood on analogy to plumbing: philosophy is for solving problems, and you tend not even to notice it unless something is not working as it should. This is “WASP philosophy” at its most minimalist, which essentially rehashes an old familiar bit of folk wisdom — “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — and it does so at the same moment in history when a French philosopher such as Gilles Deleuze could articulate a far bolder conception of what philosophy aims to do, asserting that to be a philosopher is intrinsically to be in the business of “concept creation.”
Philippa Foot is perhaps best known for releasing the famous “trolley problem” into the world, in an important article in 1967 on abortion and the doctrine of double effect, thus giving rise, eventually, to the proliferation of memes we now see on social media offering up humorous variations on the basic problem that she sought to address: whether it is “good” or “bad” to push someone (a “fat man” in the original version) in front of a trolley in order to prevent five people tied further down the tracks from being run over. (Some of the memes by now feature Trump, or overweight cats, variously eliciting unexpected moral intuitions, or just making us laugh.) The more serious side of “trolleyology,” such as it has developed in recent years, seems as if custom-made not just for social-media memetics but also for what is now deceptively called “tech ethics” or “AI ethics,” as for example the problems that programmers face when trying to “teach” a self-driving car to run over, say, two old men rather than a baby and its mother, when no third option is available. It is, in other words, the kind of “moral” reasoning even a machine can engage in, and it is a very worrisome sign of the times that so many people, inside philosophy and out, now take for granted that trolley-problem-style thought-experiments are basically all it takes to cultivate moral personhood.
The women who were, in Lipscomb’s phrase, “up to something,” were in some respects idiosyncratic, but in other respects very much of the same time and place as their male counterparts. One striking difference between them and most of their male counterparts was their openness to the world, their sharp reception of the tragedies of history. Whereas Hare, who endured World War II in the most grueling way possible, scarcely found fit to mention it in his later career, these four women were profoundly affected — emotionally and intellectually — by newsreel footage from the concentration camps. As Clare MacCumhaill and Rachel Wiseman show in their excellent book Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, they seem to have been triggered into probing the depths of ethical theory by this incontestable documentary proof of man’s lupinity towards man.
These women’s singular character as thinkers may result in part from a form of selection bias: you had to be a bold person at the outset to enter as a woman into a field that was presumed male by default. In this light very little seems to have changed since the seventeenth century, when women philosophers such as Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, and Damaris Masham, excluded from all official positions at Cambridge, ended up playing a vital and unique role in the extramural circle of the Cambridge Platonists, as, in some regards, freer and less guarded thinkers than the men who frequented them when they were not busy in their official roles at the university.
Today, in whatever chapter of the history of philosophy this is, we generally have a sense that the golden age of Anglophile analysis is over. The career of Kwame Anthony Appiah is perhaps most instructive in this regard. Having completed a Ph.D. on conditionals — that is, propositions that have the logical form of “if . . . then” — at Cambridge in 1982, Appiah went on to a distinguished academic career, making contributions in several subfields of philosophy. In recent years he has been racking up prizes like a Brezhnevite general racks up medals (to paraphrase Perry Anderson on Jürgen Habermas), even as he has become best known for his work as the author of “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times, that is, as a provider of agony-aunt-like etiquette advice to the bourgeoisie, answering letters from the newspaper’s readers, as hungry for exposure as they are for absolution, regarding such things as whether it’s okay to conceal your deceased parents’ long-ago infidelities from your clueless adult siblings. Not the sort of thing that Quine or Strawson or Ayer would have done. In many respects analytic philosophers are far freer today to pursue the range of things that interest them. There are blogs out there on which analytic philosophers share their parenting tips, or their exercise routines, or their strategies for pursuing “ethical non-monogamy.” And all of these activities are expected to count at least for something in their tenure and promotion dossiers. The problem is not that analytic philosophers should not turn their attention to whatever interests them. The problem is that after a century of rupture with humanistic tradition, what interests them tends not to be all that interesting.
Even if the stranglehold of Anglophile rigor and wit has loosened, in my own native country there has been no return of any Emersonian spirit, no American Renaissance. Nor, perhaps, in the present chapter of the history of the United States, could there be. We are generally happy, or we generally understand the importance of pretending that we are happy, that Anglophone academic philosophy no longer aspires to the status of a combat sport, but rather to supportiveness and inclusion, and to the highlighting of previously marginalized voices. The old habit of relentlessly rigorous argumentation and witty dismissiveness is now largely seen as masculine-coded and exclusionary, notwithstanding the fact that it was so often exemplified by philosophers who were, in their extramural lives, committed liberals and socialists. Thus Martha Nussbaum reminds us of the time at Harvard when, asking why there was no faculty women’s restroom close to the seminar room in Emerson Hall, Rawls casually invited her to go use the students’ toilets.
These changes surely are for the better, overall, no matter how wistfully nostalgic they may have left some elderly men still lingering, like ghosts, at high table. That said, both of these tendencies — both the late British imperial style in philosophy and the late American imperial one, both the exclusionary and the inclusionary, both the bellicose and the irenic, will from a global comparative perspective turn out to have been mere blips in the history of all the different things philosophy has been and might yet be. In early modern Europe, though we choose not to remember this, the primary sense of “philosophy” had to do with such natural curiosities as the use of quicklime to make transportable cooling devices, or the effects of burning coal on the quality of the air of London. Thus in the Fumifugium of 1661, John Evelyn wrote of “these unwholsome vapours, that distempered the Aer, to the very raising of Storms and tempests; upon which a Philosopher might amply discourse.”
Today there is what we might call a “global style” in philosophy. It is dictated by what happens in the United States, and to some extent in the lands of its close allies and Anglophone cousins. But it is not “American philosophy” in any meaningful sense; it does not concern itself with the “American spirit” or the “American character” in the way Emerson imagined American philosophy ought to do. It is imperial rather than republican, which is another way of saying it has the luxury of taking itself for granted. Meanwhile, in most of the developing world, philosophers are split between two models of what philosophy might be: they can join up with the global style, or they can seek to embody a style that is held to suit their national character and that draws on homegrown traditions and luminaries for its primary inspiration. The former sort of philosophy is certain to open up more opportunities for grants, fellowships, and other markers of international prominence. The latter sort comes with its own more local advantages. In spite of their verbal enthusiasm for “inclusivity,” the mainstream of Anglophone philosophers today remains largely dismissive of the aspirations of, say, a penniless young Ethiopian or Ukrainian student of philosophy concerned to articulate what a philosophy fit for Ethiopia or Ukraine might be.
Despite its pretension to having successfully transcended worldly pressures and considerations, its presumption of perfect analytical insularity, analytic philosophy has always, and usually unconsciously, been intimately wrapped up with the cultures that surround it, as well as with history and geopolitics. What gets to count as philosophy, perhaps with a few decades of lag time, has always been determined in part by who is in power. In this light, we may venture that philosophy in its current post-analytic or quasi-analytic or “open-armed analytic” phase is in a holding pattern, an interregnum, and it is very unlikely that anyone will look back on its current productions and figures as representing anything like a golden age.
