I have tried (## 29-30) to show how The Philosophy Scare came to be from what went before, i.e. how I came to write it. There are two motivational factors for the book that I would like to underscore a bit further, because there are misapprehensions about them—and so about me.
One thing that motivates me is very traditional—truth. This may be surprising. I’m supposed to be a postmodernist (a thought that angered Habermas enough to end my career in philosophy departments), and postmodernists are supposed to have no truck with truth. But I do truck with it, and trailer as well. I honestly believe that whereas my earlier Time in the Ditch (2001) was suggestive, Scare is definitive. To be sure, “definitive” does not equal “final;” nothing in history is ever final. But I believe that on the basis of present evidence, no one can rationally deny that political pressures played a major role in the development of the UCLA philosophy department—and so, a fortiori, of other departments. For if UCLA, that crystalline bastion of logic, can be affected by politics, so can anyone.
The second factor is something that does not motivate me: contrary to myth (one discreetly bruited right here at UCLA), I do not write from a hatred for analytical philosophy. The truth is, I love the stuff. I have published on Davidson, Quine, and Wittgenstein (though admittedly the later one). My version of Hegel is more like Quine than like any normal version of Hegel. True, I think that analytical philosophy died about 1983 (to be replaced by what I call “mainstream” philosophy). And I am frankly exasperated by the refusal of so many current American philosophers to take responsibility for the political dimensions of their own history. But that exasperation is in their service, for doesn’t denialism tend to increase the power of what is denied?
So I hope that Scare will motivate philosophers to reflect on their position in history—not only on the ahistorical truths they usually seek to purvey, but on their own efforts to obtain such truths and how those efforts are historically situated. (The fact that such efforts are not usually reflected on by philosophers leaves them unknown and unrecognized. Philosophical successes are then chalked up to some mythical and complacent mystery called “natural talent.”)
As Robert Scharff has recently shown (How History Matters to Philosophy, Routledge 2016), the lack of historical reflection in recent American philosophy is not only endemic but constitutive. Even historians of philosophy often write in the present tense, as if Plato or Kant were standing before them, proffering ideas which must be evaluated as if they were first produced five seconds ago.
Which of course they must, but there is more to it: Plato and Kant are not only interlocutors, but ancestors. We are results of their thought, and their intellectual DNA operates in us in ways that are often very difficult to excavate. The same, Scare shows, goes for political creatures like Raymond B. Allen and Joe McCarthy. We are their grandchildren. Hiding this truth, not least from ourselves, has made American philosophy more political, not less (see the Introduction to my On Philosophy, Stanford 2013). This is a fate from which I, along with many others, hope to save it.