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Dag½nn Føllesdal & Michael Friedman

American in the twentieth century Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

In 1900, Europe was the philosophical dents. It was to Europe one went for ad- center of the world, as it was the center vanced study of philosophy, and some of for and scholarship in all ½elds. the main American philosophers, such America was a province–in philosophy as , eagerly did so. there were few teachers and few stu- However, some influence had begun to flow in the opposite direction as well. James’s Principles of (1890) Dag½nn Føllesdal, a Fellow of the American was widely studied in Europe and was since 1984, is Clarence Irving Lewis a major influence on the young Edmund Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. Husserl when he started to develop phe- He has written ½ve books, including “Rational nomenology. ’s Argumentation” (1986) and “Referential Opac- logical work also became well-known in ity and Modal ” (2004). He is also coed- Europe, primarily because of the atten- itor of “Phenomenology and the Formal Sci- tion Ernst Schroeder gave it in his im- ences” (with Thomas M. Seebohm and Jitendra portant Vorlesungen ueber die Algebra der Nath Mohanty, 1991) and editor of the series Logik (1890–1905). “The Philosophy of W. V. Quine” (2000). Now, one hundred years later, the situ- ation has changed dramatically. America Michael Friedman, a Fellow of the American has more philosophers and more philos- Academy since 1997, is Frederick P. Rehmus ophy students than do all the countries Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford in Europe combined. But mere numbers University. His research interests include Kant are no good indication of quality. Two and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, better indicators are where students go in particular, the interaction between philosophy and where one prefers to publish. Stu- and the exact from Kant through the dents from Europe and the rest of the logical empiricists. Among his publications are world now go to America to do their “Kant and the Exact Sciences” (1992), “Recon- graduate work. The American Ph.D. sidering Logical ” (1999), “A Parting programs are known to give a broad of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger” and thorough education in philosophy, (2000), and “Dynamics of Reason” (2001). with great stress on written work. Un- like their European counterparts, Ameri- © 2006 by the American Academy of Arts can students hand in written work sever- & Sciences al times a term and receive detailed com-

116 Dædalus Spring 2006 ments from their teachers. European Although was native to American universities are too understaffed to give the , the three classical philosophy in the similar attention and feedback to their American pragmatists–Charles Sanders twentieth students, and they often lack teaching Peirce, William James, and John Dew- century staff in sub½elds that in America are re- ey–all had signi½cant roots in European quired for accreditation. Not only in phi- philosophy. There, late nineteenth-cen- losophy, but in all disciplines, the Ameri- tury developments in logic mixed with can system of graduate education is one parallel developments in psychology of the main factors in explaining Amer- and psychophysics in a particularly ex-

ica’s increasing dominance in science citing way. And it was precisely this mix- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 and scholarship. ture that stimulated both the develop- That students go to America to study ment of American pragmatism and the philosophy, however, may attest more main European movement that interact- to the quality of American higher edu- ed with it during and after World War cation than to the quality of American II–namely, the of logical philosophy. Another indicator of qual- empiricists led by Moritz Schlick. ity, though, is that one has to read Peirce made fundamental contribu- English in order to have access to the tions to the new symbolic, or mathe- best scholarly contributions and write matical, logic that would eventually re- English in order to be read by the best ceive its de½nitive formulation in the scholars. English has taken over as the work of the German main language of scholarship, in philos- and philosopher , now ophy as in other ½elds. That English has often considered the ‘father’ of analy- replaced German and French as the pri- tic philosophy. Unlike Frege, however, mary language of science and scholar- Peirce was also deeply immersed in the ship reflects, it seems, a corresponding new ‘historical’ sciences dealing with move of most of the research activity. time and its directionality: geology, pa- What happened in the twentieth cen- leontology, and cosmogony, tury that transformed America from a psychology, and Darwinian evolutiona- province to a center for philosophy? ry biology. Peirce argued that these sci- We shall focus on two interrelated de- ences could in no way be comprehended velopments. On the one hand, during within a scienti½c and philosophical the ½rst third of the twentieth century, framework premised on necessary caus- pragmatism, a philosophical tradition al connections but instead required a indigenous to the United States, made radically new probabilistic, or ‘tychis- rapid strides and became a worldwide tic,’ standpoint in which chance plays movement. On the other hand, many an irreducible role. Therefore, he con- leading European philosophers immi- cluded, a generalized form of grated to the United States following by natural selection was the only possi- the Nazi seizure of power and continu- ble source of uniformity, and thus law- ing through World War II and beyond. likeness, in . Peirce’s ½rst formu- These immigrants interacted fruitfully lation of a pragmatic theory of meaning with the American tradition of prag- and inquiry, in his famous paper “How matism, resulting in the characteristic to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878), was shape of late twentieth-century Amer- thus inseparably connected with the ican philosophy. characteristically late nineteenth-centu- ry vision of both nature and human sci-

Dædalus Spring 2006 117 Dag½nn enti½c inquiry as developing historical- chapter on “The Stream of Thought” in Føllesdal & ly in accordance with Darwinian evolu- his ½rst great work, The Principles of Psy- Michael Friedman tionary processes. chology (1890), and it reached its culmi- on the This broader philosophical vision nation in his later conception of ‘radical humanities was shared by the Austrian physicist, ’ and ‘pure ,’ as psychophysiologist, and ‘historico- expounded in such essays as “Does Con- critical’ analyst of science Ernst Mach, sciousness Exist?” (1904). Here James who also played a central role in the posits the fundamental stuff of development of logical empiricism. as a constantly changing and evolving

Indeed, when Schlick was called to the flux of ‘pure experience,’ whose evolu- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 University of Vienna in 1922, he took tion, moreover, is necessarily driven by over the Chair for the Philosophy of interests. This resulted in a pragmatic the Inductive Sciences earlier held by conception of the aims and methods of Mach, and what we now call the Vien- scienti½c inquiry closely allied with the na Circle of½cially referred to itself as views of Peirce and Mach. James also the Verein Ernst Mach. What most im- strikingly extended this conception to pressed Schlick and the other members moral and religious in such works of the Circle was Mach’s critical analy- as The to Believe (1897) and The Vari- sis of the Newtonian concepts of abso- eties of Religious Experience (1902). In the lute space, time, and motion–an analy- end, both human scienti½c inquiry and sis that played a crucial role in Einstein’s human spiritual progress are aspects of articulation of the in a single evolutionary process, governed the early years of the twentieth century. pragmatically by selective human inter- Mach’s own scienti½c and philosophical ests and values. ambitions were quite different, howev- But it was who was des- er, and were rather directed at securing tined to complete the development of a new kind of unity of the sciences–es- the pragmatist movement and make it pecially the physical, psychological, and a dominant force within American intel- biological sciences–in his speci½cally lectual culture and beyond. Dewey had late nineteenth-century context. And, an early interest in both psychophysiol- for Mach, this new kind of psychophysi- ogy and philosophy, studying logic with cal unity was also intimately connected Peirce and learning about Hegel from with a biological and evolutionary con- George Morris during his graduate stud- ception of scienti½c method. ies at Johns Hopkins. Dewey began to Peirce’s close friend and collaborator have serious influence on American in- at Harvard, William James, took a keen tellectual culture following his appoint- interest in late nineteenth-century Ger- ment as chair of the Department of Phi- man psychology and physiology. In the losophy, Psychology, and Education 1880s, James had struck up a friendship at the University of Chicago in 1894– and correspondence with Mach, and it where he also participated actively in appears that the psychophysical doctrine ’s Hull House and thus be- now known as neutral –accord- came deeply involved with social and ing to which the same underlying stuff economic problems as well. Togeth- constitutes both consciousness and the er with his colleagues at Chicago, he physical world–was, in fact, a product assembled the volume Studies in Logical of their correspondence. For James, this Theory (1903), which they dedicated to doctrine began to emerge in the famous William James. In 1938, Dewey’s lifelong

118 Dædalus Spring 2006 interest in what he called ‘logic’ and opment of modern logic left a perma- American ‘inquiry’ culminated in the publication nent impression on his work. On this philosophy in the of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. basis, he engaged in a well-known po- twentieth In harmony with the ‘pragmatism’ lemical exchange with Martin Heideg- century of James–and with Mach’s concep- ger in the mid-1930s (during which tion of scienti½c method–Dewey saw time Heidegger assumed the rectorship inquiry as a developmental evolution- at Freiburg under the new Nazi regime). ary process, driven by a generalization Carnap then immigrated to the United of the experimental method. Like James, States during the winter of 1935–1936.

he also regarded inquiry as embracing Charles Morris was instrumental in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 much more than the specialized exper- bringing Carnap to the University of imental sciences and, accordingly, as Chicago in 1936. Morris, then an asso- comprehending values, norms, and in- ciate professor at Chicago, had earlier terests in general. Unlike James, how- received his Ph.D. there under George ever, Dewey emphasized the essentially Herbert Mead–who had in turn been social or communal character of inqui- brought to Chicago by his good friend ry and, in particular, the way in which and philosophical colleague John Dew- the norms and values constitutive of ey. Whereas Mead appealed to Dewey’s inquiry themselves depend on the exis- extension of pragmatism to the social tence of a community of inquirers. No sphere in creating the discipline of so- such rule or is ½xed and de½nitive: cial psychology, Morris emphasized the all are subject to correction and revision social dimensions of language in creat- within a democratic community of free, ing the discipline of ‘pragmatics’ as a equal, and self-consciously open-- supplement to syntax and semantics. ed inquirers. It is in this way that the Morris viewed pragmatics as a natural values of what Dewey called ‘science’– extension of the more formal and pure- that is, the values of inquiry–are identi- ly logical analysis of language practiced cal with the values of progressive West- by Carnap–a direction in which Car- ern democracy. And it is precisely here nap himself was also moving at the time. that Dewey’s philosophical and political After meeting Carnap in Prague in 1934, interests intersected, in 1938, with those Morris not only began his efforts to of logical empiricism. bring Carnap to the United States, he also became a leading participant in the The most important members of International of Uni½ed Sci- the Vienna Circle, aside from Moritz ence, the of½cial monograph series (pub- Schlick, were Otto Neurath and Rudolf lished in English) of the logical empiri- Carnap, and all three were caught up cist movement in exile. in the shattering events in Europe fol- The ½rst volume of this Encyclopedia, lowing the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. published in 1938, began with a program- The Vienna Circle leaned distinctively to matic section on the “Encyclopedia and the left, and it could not survive intact. Uni½ed Science,” which included Dew- Schlick was murdered by a deranged for- ey’s “Unity of Science as a Social Prob- mer student in 1936. Neurath, the most lem,” Carnap’s “Logical Foundations politically active of the three, fled to Ox- of the Unity of Science,” and Morris’s ford in 1940, where he died in 1945. Car- “Scienti½c Empiricism.” Following this nap was a student of Frege’s before mov- section was “Foundations of the Theory ing to Vienna in the 1920s, and the devel- of Signs” by Morris (where he ½rst out-

Dædalus Spring 2006 119 Dag½nn lined his threefold conception of syn- Nevertheless, this timely confluence Føllesdal & tax-semantics-pragmatics) and “Foun- of interests masked equally important Michael Friedman dations of Logic and Mathematics” by differences–which con- on the Carnap. Neurath was the general editor- cerned, above all, the nature of philos- humanities in-chief, with Carnap and Morris as as- ophy as a discipline, together with the sociate editors. In his introductory essay closely related question of the status of Neurath invoked the modernist Weimar norms and values. For Carnap, philoso- vision of a return to the humanistic and phy as a discipline reduced to the logical scienti½c Enlightenment of the French analysis of the language of science (Wis-

Encyclopédie. The implication was that senschaftslogik): cognitively (or theoreti- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 international and scienti½c cooperation, cally) meaningful statements were limit- as exempli½ed, above all, in the global ed to the factual or synthetic sentences ‘ of ,’ could now serve of the empirical natural sciences and as a bulwark against the currently rising the purely formal or analytic sentences tide of nationalism and ‘metaphysical of logic and mathematics. Thus, state- irrationalism.’ ments about value were not, strictly This wider implication of the Encyclo- speaking, cognitively (or theoretically) pedia project was even more explicit in meaningful at all. Carnap made a clear Dewey’s contribution: and sharp distinction, then, between the purely formal or analytic sentences At the present time the enemies of the sci- of philosophy as Wissenschaftslogik and enti½c attitude are numerous and organ- the factual or synthetic sentences of the ized–much more so than appears at su- empirical natural sciences–and a simi- per½cial glance. The prestige of science is larly sharp distinction between (theo- indeed great, especially in the ½eld of its retical) questions of fact and (practical) external application to industry and war. questions of value. In the abstract, few would come out open- Both of these distinctions, however, ly and say that they were opposed to sci- were entirely foreign to pragmatism. On ence. But this small number is no measure the one hand, the pragmatist conception of the influence of those who borrow the of scienti½c was frankly results of science to advance by thorough- and explicitly naturalistic, embodying ly unscienti½c and antiscienti½c methods the generalized late nineteenth-century private, class, and national interests.1 vision of both nature and human scien- There could be very little doubt, in 1938, ti½c inquiry as developing in accordance who these “enemies of the scienti½c at- with Darwinian natural selection. And, titude” were supposed to be, and there on the other hand, given this evolution- can be similarly little doubt, accordingly, ary standpoint, it was then natural to that what initially brought logical em- incorporate both facts and values with- piricism and American pragmatism to- in the single ‘selective’ or experimental gether was a shared commitment to sci- process of what pragmatism called sci- enti½c internationalism as the best cur- ence or inquiry. rent hope for the preservation of pro- Now it was Charles Morris’s hope that gressive democratic values. his own work on the theory of linguis- tic signs would function as a bridge be- tween the different philosophical move- 1 International Encyclopedia of Uni½ed Science, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ments, and, more speci½cally, between 1938), 33. the socially oriented pragmatism of

120 Dædalus Spring 2006 Dewey and Mead and the logical anal- While the influence of ideas from American ysis of language practiced by Carnap. American pragmatism undoubtedly philosophy in the Morris hoped that his own development played a signi½cant role in the develop- twentieth of the ½eld of pragmatics would be the ment of Carnap’s later view, at the same century key to such a bridge, and Carnap himself time, it is clear that a fundamental dif- was quite open to this idea. ference between his orientation and that Indeed, Carnap used Morris’s notion of American pragmatism remained. For of pragmatics to re½ne his conception the entire point of Carnap’s mature phi- of both philosophy as a discipline and losophy was to persist in a sharp distinc-

the fact/value distinction. In his mature tion between formal and factual ques- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 theory of formal languages, or linguistic tions–both of which are adjudicable, at frameworks–½rst articulated in The Log- least in principle, on the basis of previ- ical Syntax of Language (1934) and later ously adopted logical rules–and practi- developed most explicitly in “Empiri- cal or evaluative questions–which are cism, Semantics, and ” (1950) adjudicable by no such rules. –Carnap emphasized that philosophy So despite his lifelong passion for is concerned with investigating and eval- moral and political questions, Carnap, uating various alternative proposals for to the end of his life, maintained a non- logically structuring the language of cognitive, emotivist theory of value (uni½ed) science. Within a given for- judgments: unlike properly theoretical mal linguistic framework are (internal) judgments, where questions of formal or questions of theoretical or falsity, factual evidence can always be brought which are settled, in accordance with to bear, moral and political value judg- the logical rules of that framework, by ments are, in the end, pure expressions either formal or factual considerations. of character and attitude, where the only The question of which framework to devices that ultimately can be brought to adopt for the language of (uni½ed) sci- bear are “persuasion, educational influ- ence, however, is not itself a theoretical ence, [and] appeal.”2 question of truth or falsity. Rather, it is what Carnap now called a purely prac- Among the younger American philos- tical or pragmatic (external) question ophers who took a strong interest in log- of convenience or suitability for one or ical empiricism in the early 1930s was another practical end, as judged, in the . After ½nish- long run, by the practice of the scienti½c ing a dissertation on mathematical log- community itself. ic at Harvard, Quine spent the academ- Carnap deployed these distinctions, ic year 1932–1933 abroad in Vienna, in particular, in explaining a peculiar Prague, and Warsaw before returning characteristic of speci½cally philosophi- to Harvard for the rest of his academic cal problems–their constant liability to life. In Vienna he met Schlick and oth- misunderstanding and miscommunica- er members of the Vienna Circle, and tion. Carnap thereby hoped to reform in Prague he spent six intensive weeks the discipline by turning philosophical learning from Carnap about the new attention away from the truth or falsity scienti½c philosophy. As Quine himself of competing philosophical doctrines and toward what he took to be the far 2 Rudolf Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” more fruitful question of ‘language plan- in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Rudolf ning.’ Carnap (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1963), 81.

Dædalus Spring 2006 121 Dag½nn tells us, “It was my ½rst really consider- similarities to Carnap’s mature theory Føllesdal & able experience of intellectually of linguistic frameworks. In Mind and Michael Friedman ½red by a living teacher rather than by the World Order (1929) Lewis developed on the a dead book.”3 what he called “conceptualistic prag- humanities Though Carnap’s deep influence is evi- matism,” a theory that was explicitly dent throughout the whole of Quine’s intended to add a pragmatic theory of subsequent philosophical career, Quine the (logico-mathematical) a priori to was also responsible for the eclipse of the thought of Peirce, James, and Dew- Carnap’s particular conception of logi- ey. All a priori truth in the exact sciences

cal analysis within the Anglo-American is analytic in nature, insofar as logico- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 tradition. In particular, Quine came in- mathematical concepts are rigorously creasingly to doubt the fundamental de½ned in an abstract deductive system. distinction between the purely formal, In applying such abstract concepts to logical, or analytic sentences constitut- the empirical world, however, we have a ing the rules of a Carnapian linguistic choice of which such system of axiomat- framework and the contentful, empiri- ic de½nitions to adopt, and the choice of cal, or synthetic sentences, which the any particular such system is made on rules of the framework then adjudicated. instrumental or pragmatic grounds. Quine ½rst expressed his in Thus, what Lewis called a “concep- print in his famous paper “Two Dogmas tual framework” is similar to what of Empiricism” (1951), which struck the Carnap called a “linguistic framework,” world of like a thun- and Lewis’s central idea that the choice derbolt. of a particular conceptual framework An important part of the background is then made on instrumental or prag- for this paper was the last major repre- matic grounds is also similar to Carnap’s sentative of classical American pragma- views. Quine, for his part, appears sim- tism, Clarence Irving Lewis, who taught ply to have assimilated Carnap and Lew- at Harvard from 1920 to his retirement is on this point, as suggested by the con- in 1953. Lewis acted as Quine’s mentor cluding paragraph of “Two Dogmas”: during the early 1930s, when Quine was Carnap, Lewis, and others take a prag- a student. Although their relationship matic stand on the question of choosing was very far from smooth, it was Lew- between language forms, scienti½c frame- is, among the American pragmatists, works; but their pragmatism leaves off whose views were closest to those the at the imagined boundary between the logical empiricists in Europe were de- analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating veloping simultaneously. He was the such a boundary I espouse a more thor- ½rst thinker within the pragmatist tra- ough pragmatism. Each man is given a sci- dition to attempt to do to early enti½c heritage plus a continuing barrage twentieth-century developments in log- of sensory stimulation; and the considera- ic, the foundations of mathematics, and tions which guide him in warping his sci- mathematical physics; and his response enti½c heritage to ½t his continuing senso- to these developments bore important ry promptings are, where rational, prag- matic.4 3 W. V. Quine, “Autobiography,” The Philoso- phy of W. V. Quine, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn and 4 Reprinted in W. V. Quine, From a Logical Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 1986), 12. University Press, 1953), 46.

122 Dædalus Spring 2006 Leaving aside the legitimacy of Quine’s One important outcome of Quine’s American less restrictive conception of philoso- philosophy straightforward assimilation of Carnap in the and Lewis, it is clear that Quine’s ‘more phy–and one that would certainly twentieth thorough pragmatism’ was indeed more have been congenial to James and Dew- century attuned, on precisely this point, with the ey–was a blurring of Carnap’s sharp earlier pragmatism of James and Dewey. distinction between theoretical and By rejecting Carnap’s sharp distinction practical questions, so that substantive in principle between logico-mathemati- theoretical means could once again ad- cal (analytic) and empirical (synthetic) dress moral and political questions. In-

truth, Quine opened the way for a funda- deed, one spectacular fruit of Quine’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 mental reconsideration of the idea that ‘more thorough pragmatism’ was clear- philosophy as a discipline is limited to ing the ground for a remarkable revival logical analysis. of substantive moral and political theo- More generally, in the concluding sec- ry. In 1971 his younger Harvard colleague tion of his paper, entitled “Empiricism published , without the Dogmas,” Quine developed which fundamentally transformed moral an alternative, holistic version of empir- and political theorizing within the world icism in which the totality of our scien- of academic philosophy and beyond. ti½c is pictured as a vast ‘web It is clear that Rawls drew signi½cant of belief’ with sensory experience im- inspiration from Quine’s critique, al- pinging only at the periphery. When though Quine himself had only envi- faced with a ‘recalcitrant experience’ sioned a naturalized and liberalized conflicting with our system as a whole, version of logical empiricist scienti½c we then have a choice of where to make epistemology as the result of his cri- revisions. We may choose to revise rela- tique of Carnap and, accordingly, did tively low-level beliefs located close to not question Carnap’s austere concep- the periphery, or, in an extreme case, tion of the noncognitive character of we may choose to revise some of our moral and political judgments. Inter- most central beliefs, including even the estingly, however, the moral and politi- statements of logic and mathematics. cal theory actually developed by Rawls Therefore, since no statement is immune turned out to owe very little to the to revision, “it becomes folly to seek a American pragmatist tradition. Rath- boundary between synthetic statements, er, as Rawls himself explains, his cen- which hold contingently on experience, tral idea was “to generalize and carry and analytic statements, which hold to a higher order of abstraction the tra- come what may.”5 This holistic vision of ditional theory of the science, predicated on a rejection of Car- as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and nap’s central sharp distinction between Kant,” resulting in a theory that is analytic and synthetic statements, has “highly Kantian in nature.”6 been extraordinarily influential in the Rawls’s leading idea, in fact, was to use later development of Anglo-American the social contract tradition to challenge philosophy. Quine himself devoted a the utilitarian approach to moral and po- large part of his career to its successive articulation and re½nement–most in- 6 See the preface to John Rawls, A Theory of Jus- fluentially, perhaps, in tice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Har- vard University Press, 1999), xviii; for Rawls’s (1960). debt to Quine on language, see xx, and on jus- 5 Ibid., 43. ti½cation, see 507.

Dædalus Spring 2006 123 Dag½nn litical questions that had become domi- as we have seen, regarded as entirely be- Føllesdal & nant within the English-speaking world yond rational discussion? Michael Friedman since Bentham and Mill. Rather than Here Rawls makes a second major con- on the evaluating the rightness and justice of tribution by proposing a method for ad- humanities social and political arrangements pure- judicating between competing moral ly in reference to the net sum of their and political theories. This method of actual consequences (in terms of hap- ‘reflective equilibrium’ expanded to piness or welfare) for the individuals in- moral and the views volved, we instead imagine an idealized on justi½cation in the sciences and in

situation of choice in which hypotheti- mathematics and logic that some of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 cal individuals deliberate, and attempt pragmatists had anticipated and that to reach consensus, about standards for Quine and his Harvard colleague Nel- assessing social and political arrange- son Goodman had further developed. ments. These deliberations take place It consists in going back and forth be- behind a ‘veil of ignorance,’ where no tween our general ethical principles hypothetical individual knows which and our ordinary intuitive judgments position in society he or she will actually of right and wrong until we reach an occupy. equilibrium. During this process both Rawls argues that in such a situation our principles and our intuitions be- each individual would choose a paradig- come modi½ed, so that our initial intu- matically liberal societal arrangement, itions eventually become ‘considered where, in the ½rst place, certain basic judgments.’ In contrast to the utilitari- rights and liberties–such as the right an method of calculating the extremely to political participation, civil liberties, complex–and thus effectively unknow- and equality of opportunity–are invio- able–practical consequences of liberal lable. More generally, each person would democratic social arrangements, Rawls insist on an equal right to the most ex- instead appeals to basic ideas about the tensive total system of basic liberties freedom, equality, and of compatible with a similar system of lib- moral persons and political citizens, erty for all. In the second place, against from which the desirability of such so- the background of such equal rights and cial arrangements then follows by a rel- liberties, social and economic inequali- atively simple and transparent delibera- ties are then to be arranged so that they tive argument. are both to the greatest bene½t of the Rawls’s ideas have been extraordi- least advantaged, and attached to of½ces narily influential–within Anglo-Amer- and positions open to all under condi- ican moral and political philosophy, tions of fair equality of opportunity. of course, but also in political science, Such an account provides a much bet- law, and . Largely because ter articulation and defense of liberal so- of Rawls, moral and political philoso- cietal arrangements, Rawls thinks, than phy became a very active ½eld in phi- anything might offer. Like losophy toward the end of the twenti- any good analytic philosopher, Rawls eth century. Some of the most impor- does not merely claim that his view is tant recent developments include con- better but also presents arguments for tractarian approaches to quite this claim. However, how can one give generally, philosophical and interpre- arguments in the moral and political tive works exploring the viability of sphere, which some logical empiricists, Kantian moral theory speci½cally, new

124 Dædalus Spring 2006 insights connected with the utilitarian speculative–with little contact between American philosophy and empiricist traditions, and the arti- them. After the intellectual migration, in the culation of more skeptical stances to- parallel splits developed within individ- twentieth ward any overarching system of moral ual countries as well. Continental philos- century principles. More directly responding ophy acquired an important foothold in to Rawls’s own work, ’s the United States, while in several Euro- Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1971) criti- pean countries younger philosophers cized Rawlsian liberalism on behalf established their own associations for of political , and Ronald analytic philosophy, which they united

Dworkin’s A Matter of Principle (1985) in the European Association for Analytic Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 provided a liberal philosophical per- Philosophy. spective on law and . Fi- Fortunately, this anomalous diver- nally, these developments led also to gence between two separate philosophi- the rise of applied or practical ethics– cal traditions has recently shown signs including biomedical ethics, legal ethics, of coming to an end. During the past for- environmental ethics, and business eth- ty years philosophers on both sides have ics–which took on an increasingly im- started to read one another and have dis- portant role in philosophical education. covered that they are working on related problems where they can learn from one Before we end this survey, we will com- another’s insights. Analytic philoso- ment briefly on the much-discussed split phers have recognized that continental between the analytic and continental philosophers are also discussing prob- philosophical traditions. The split is not lems concerning knowledge and jus- between analytic philosophy and classi- ti½cation, moral obligation, the charac- cal . Kant and the ter of a good society, the nature of con- classical German philosophers have al- sciousness, communication and inter- ways been studied in the United States; pretation, and so on–although in anoth- indeed, they are a required part of the er terminology and in another setting. in American universities, Continental philosophers, for their part, along with Plato, , Augustine, have learned that most contributions to Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, analytic philosophy are part of an ongo- Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Rather, the ing philosophical discussion extending split separated analytic philosophy from back to the same European roots that late twentieth-century continental phi- continue to nourish us all. losophy, especially the dominant trend An enduring legacy of the develop- in both German and ment of analytic philosophy in America most influenced by . is its emphasis on logic and argument. We noted that a well-known polemical Although Carnap’s conception of phi- exchange between Carnap and Heideg- losophy as concerned exclusively with ger occurred during the Nazi seizure of the logical analysis of the language of power. Moreover, it was the migration science now appears–to just about ev- of from Europe to the Unit- eryone–as unduly restrictive, it arose, ed States from the 1930s and onward as we have seen, against the background that resulted in the anomalous situation of pressing concerns about the spread of of philosophy diverging into two sepa- irrationality in the 1930s and 1940s. Both rate traditions–one more analytic and logical empiricists and American prag- scienti½c, the other more historical and matists were intensely concerned with

Dædalus Spring 2006 125 Dag½nn what philosophers could do to counter- Føllesdal & act this surrender to rhetoric and irra- Michael Friedman tionality, and they stressed, as a conse- on the quence, the need to always ask for argu- humanities ments and evidence. When we are in- vited to accept a view or an attitude, we should not be taken in by rhetoric but always ask: What reasons are there to believe this? Likewise, if we try to bring

our fellow human to adopt our Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/116/1829092/daed.2006.135.2.116.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 own point of view, we should not do so through either coercion or rhetoric. In- stead, we should try to induce others to accept or reject our point of view on the basis of their own reflections. This can only be achieved through rational argu- ment, in which the other person is rec- ognized as an autonomous and rational creature. Such an emphasis is important not just in respect to individual but al- so, even more, in the social and political sphere. By emphasizing the decisive role that argument and justi½cation should play, we can reduce the influence of po- litical leaders and fanatics who spread messages that do not stand up under critical scrutiny but nevertheless often have the power to seduce masses of peo- ple into intolerance and violence. Ratio- nal argument and rational dialogue are thus of the utmost importance for a well-functioning democracy. To educate people in these activities is perhaps the most important task of philosophy in the world today.

126 Dædalus Spring 2006