In some dank corner of the philosophical forest lies Brian Leiter, mortally wounded and yet unable to die. From his delirious lips come hacking sobs and tortured moans, hopeless cries and senseless screams. Sometime he just babbles, as if recounting good days gone by, or seeking help. Or, most of all and always, seeking attention. None comes, but on he babbles. And every now and again, filtered through the undergrowth, you might hear something that sounds like my name.
He did it again today—Dec. 14, 2016—at his leiterreport blog. Like his other posts concerning me, this one betrays not the slightest evidence of having read anything I wrote: not my 2001 Time in the Ditch (Northwestern University Press), which suggests possible political explanations of the triumph of analytical philosophy, or my 2016 The Philosophy Scare (University of Chicago Press), which gives a much more definitive treatment of developments at one American university during that time.
(I consider a philosophical approach to have “triumphed” over another approach, by the way, when many of its adherents are not embarrassed to have no serious knowledge of that other approach. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Do we all need serious knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus? No. Do we need to reopen the issue from time to time? Yes.)
Leiter’s post consists entirely of a quotation from Charles Pigden, of Otago (New Zealand), prefaced by an assurance that Pigden is correct and followed by a dig at the brilliant Babette Babich.
Pigden is not correct. His post is, it seems, rather quickly written, to the point that his argument (I can find only one) is hard to discern. (He states, for example, that the “triumph” of analytical philosophy was a “global” phenomenon, then spends half a paragraph taking that back. Did someone steal his “delete” key?) In any case, I do not seek to give an “American explanation” for a “global” or even a “pan-Anglophonic” phenomenon (as Pigden comes to call the triumph in question) and for a couple of reasons:
First, the American triumph did not occur in the Forties. As my 2016 book shows, pragmatism was viable in the United States at least through the early Fifties. Its indispensable anthology, Naturalism and the Human Spirit, often called the “Columbia Manifesto,” was published in 1944, and a sixth edition came out in 1969.
It is, perhaps, analytical philosophy’s triumph over the British Hegelians that can be dated to around 1940, but I wouldn’t know: that happened in Britain. In the US, where British Hegelians were not easily to be found, the main enemies were idealism (of a Roycean kind) and pragmatism. So if Pigden thinks that analytical philosophy triumphed in “pan-Anglophonia” in the Forties, he has done what he accuses me of doing: generalizing from his own national/cultural context to the rest of the world. This suspicion is furthered by the fact that his three main figures of socially-engaged analytical philosophy are Ayer, Hart, and Russell. Pigden’s real gripe, then, appears to be that I have not viewed the American story of analytical philosophy as wholly unified with or subordinate to the British one.
I haven’t. It isn’t.
Second, even if the relevant “triumph” had occurred simultaneously in Britain and the United States, there is no reason whatever to think that what brought it about must have been the same in both contexts. The ice cream bar in my freezer and the lions in front of the Chicago Art Institute both have temperatures, as I write, of about 19º Fahrenheit; should I conclude that the lions are in my freezer? No one who has taken intro logic should have to bother with this. I’ll give Leiter a pass on it, as he has been well beyond logic for a long time. Pigden should know better, though.
There may be other arguments in Pigden’s garbled and digressive prose, but I cannot find them. Of more interest (though not much more) is that what exercises Pigden is actually rather different from what infuriates Leiter. Pigden reads my work as, fundamentally, an attack on analytical philosophy, which he views as a unified historical movement. I protest. My books deal with American developments and are in no way an attack on Her Majesty’s Analysts, though as noted above the Brits are given short shrift.
Let me say it as plainly as I can: in my view, analytical philosophy has made important and lasing contributions to philosophy, and its two core values of clarity and rigor are values I try to serve with everything I write—I just define “rigor” differently than analysts do. (I would say that my definition of “rigor” is in fact more rigorous than theirs, but that topic is for another time.) If this gets me dismissed by continentals for being insufficiently “profound”—and it sometimes does—too bad.
What my book does attack is the view that historical success, in philosophy or elsewhere, automatically equals intellectual merit (Donald Trump is a currently favored counterexample). Whether or not analytical philosophy rose to triumph partly as a result of political pressures has, in my view, very little to do with whether it is good philosophy. If I believed that historical success and philosophical merit were in any important way connected, why did I devote so much of my life to Hegel? He has certainly had the opposite of a “triumph” in the “pan-Anglophonic” world. That I think this miserable fate is undeserved hardly means that I think Hegel is wholly right.
Similarly in reverse. I think the present degree of dominance of analytical philosophy is in part historically explainable and, also, philosophically undeserved. That doesn’t mean I think the approach has no merit whatever. No one thinks analytical philosophy is perfect as it stands (do they??), and I join with prominent analysts in my criticisms of it (see below). It’s easy and wholesale dismissals that I am against.
Which brings me to Leiter. If you look through all the bloody spume he has puked out against me over the years—go ahead, there’s not that much of it—you will not find him issuing a single detailed citation, quotation, or intelligent engagement with any of my writings (three CHOICE outstanding academic title awards, Brian—maybe you should read more!). For example, he called my 2001 book, Time in the Ditch, riddled with errors. I asked him what they were. (We were briefly on semi-cordial terms, provoked by our common hatred for George Bush—how I long for those days!—For Bush I mean, not for cordiality with Leiter.) Leiter replied, in an amusingly insouciant email, that he had not read the book. He had heard about it from people who had.
Insouciance? This, as Normal Mailer once wrote, had all the insouciance of a drop of oil sliding down a scallion. There were two reasons why it was so amusing. First, I had double and triple-checked everything that went into that book, so I was fairly sure that unless Leiter had actual evidence that I was wrong, my points could stand. He had admitted that he had none. Oh, the innocence!
Second, I had made it a point of method that for every single criticism of analytical philosophy I made in that book, I would cite an analytical philosopher. Time in the Ditch, therefore, merely gathers and focuses criticisms of analytical philosophy that analytical philosophers themselves were already making. Check it out.
I’ll finish with Leiter for now with one further question: how did he come to hate me so much if he has never read my stuff?
Now there’s a story! I remember it well. As so often, it has to do with his beloved ranking system for philosophy departments. A couple of decades ago I was asked about it by, I think, lingua franca, an academic newsletter of those days. What I conveyed to them was that I thought it was pretty funny: the idea that experts in their own field, with heavy demands on their teaching and research, would spend any serious time and effort ranking other departments struck me as absurd. Would anyone who believes in their own work spend more than a coffee break per year scrutinizing what was happening at other institutions? Let alone ranking them? Moreover, I thought then that philosophers are wild and crazy intellectual trailblazers, each one acutely sensible of her or his own uniqueness. Who among them would sit still to be ranked against others?
It all just struck me as—well, to quote Pigden (and Leiter) “obviously silly.” When it came out, Leiter lost it and —not for the last time—threatened to sue. Of course he never forgave me. Because with him it’s not about the philosophy; it’s about the rankings. Which means it’s about him. Why does Trump love Putin and hate Kelly? Because of what they say about him. So with Leiter, who shares with Trump the policy of making many vacuous threats of lawsuits (I expect a few by the end of the week).
I close with a word of warning to younger philosophers: I am not alone. Other philosophers, and good ones, are investigating what happened to philosophy, especially post-immigration Logical Positivism, during the Cold War. I won’t drag their names into this putrid fight, but a few google searches should uncover at least some of them. Their results don’t usually agree fully with mine, but that is the nature of history. We all think that analytical philosophy in the United States has been seriously affected by political pressures, and we are trying to find out how and how far.
So you can neglect Leiter if you wish; his incoherent rages are already dying away into the laughter of forest creatures. But don’t neglect the rest of us and our historical work. Don’t neglect the archival work we have done, or our careful expositions of major texts, or our circumspect tracings of influences. And, of course, don’t accept what any of us says at face value, either. Because this is something really important: the fate of a great philosophical tradition during the heyday of the American Empire. Someday, historians of philosophy are going to ask about that. And they won’t turn to the likes of Leiter for answers