Alasdair Mac!ntyre Philosophy and its History* '\ Abstract: Richard Rorty argues that the present state of analytic philo­ sophy is the result of the collapse of the logical empiricist program. But most of the characteristics of analytic philosophy which Rorty ascribes to that collapse predated logical empiricism. The historical explanation of the present state of philosophy must begin not later than with the schism between philosophy and the other disciplines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin then leads to a differ­ ent view of how philosophical problems are generated. Many recent philosophers, especially perhaps those educated in some of the analytic traditions, have treated the history of philosophy either as only having marginal relevance to con­ temporary philosophical enquiries or as interesting only inso­ far as historical figures can be presented as contributors to contemporary discussions. On this latter view Descartes for example is still interesting because he provides a position for G.E.M. Anscombe to criticise, Hurne because his views on causation are relevant to John Mackie's. It is therefore an occasion worthy of remark and even celebration when analytic philosophy itself is presented as drawing its significance from its place in the overall history of philosophy, as it is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979) and in a series of articles and papers which he has published before and since. The essay to which I shall be particularly addressing myself is 'Philosophy in America To­ Day' (Rorty 1981), a central thesis of which is that the present state of analytical philosophy is to be explained by the disintegration of the neopositivist program of the Vienna Circle and its allies. The consequence of th~s disintegration, a result of the way in which "all the positivist doctrines ... were deconstructed by Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Kuhn", (Rorty 1981, 4) has been that analytical philosophy has lost any serious intellectual unity. It no longer can identify it­ self by reference to "a finite number of distinct, specifiable philosophical problems to be resolved - problems which any serious analytic philosopher would agree to be the outstand­ ing problems." (7) Rorty's thesis about analytic philosophy extends and completes a central thesis of Philosophy and the Mirror of Natu.re. For in * Originally presented in a symposium on Philosophy in America To-Day at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Milwaukee, April 25, 1981. Analyse & Kritik 4 (1982), S. 102-113 (G) Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen Comments on Rorty that book he argued that philosophy as such had dissolved it­ self by attaining an understanding that the whole set of prob­ lems which concern the relationship of mind to realitites external to mind had been generated by a false Cartesian con­ ception of mind and the objects of knowledge. Philosophy has in so doing lost its traditional claim to provide a kind of understanding which was specific to its enquiries and which gave it a right to a certain hegemony among the disciplines. Rorty's paper spells out for analytic philosophy the implica­ tions of his general thesis about how philosophy as traditio­ nally understood has ended its history by delegitimating itself. Underlying both the book and the paper is an unargued thesis about the history of philosophy, namely that traditionally 'philosophy' was always the name of one and the same distinct and autonomous discipline which was believed to have a sub­ stantial rationale for its distinctiveness and its autonomy. Without that presupposition the kind of contrast that Rorty draws between philosophy and other disciplines would scarcely make sense. And yet it is just that presupposition which only needs to be examined in order to be rejected. 1. Three Possible Worlds, One of Them Actual Imagine a possible world in which there is no discipline named 'philosophy' within the academic curriculum. The history of this possible world is identical with that of the actual world up to the seventeenth century and therefore in its past as in our own 'philosophy' used to be the name for a very wide range of loosely unified intellectual enquiries and activities. But in that imaginary world when from the seventeenth to the nine­ teenth century a variety of disciplines seceded from philoso­ phy, and declared their independence as autonomous fields of enquiry, each entitled to its own self-sufficient place in the curriculum, each of these disciplines carried away with it that part of philosophy relevant to its own concerns. In that imaginary world when in the transition from Adam Smith to Ricardo political economy detached itself from moral philoso­ phy, it did not leave moral philosophy behind just as it was, but carried away with it a whole range of enquiries into the moral presuppositions and moral characteristics of economic activity. And when physics in the age after Newton detached itself from natural philosophy, it defined itself so that debate about the status of theoretical entities and the nature of laws was as much a part of physics as thermodynamics or the study of electricity and magnetism. Even those academic dis­ ciplines, such as history, which had not been part of philoso­ phy in the older sense, annexed the relevant parts of the philosophy of action, explanation and narrative. And the out­ come was that, apart from logic, which became an independent discipline, the whole of philosophy was absorbed into, was divided up between the other subjects, without any part being left over. Hence there were no professional philosophers, no departments of philosophy, no philosophical journals, no American Philosophical Association or Aristotelian Society, and those who pursued philosophical questions always did so in the context of some other academic discipline. Naturally 104 Alasdair Macintyre enough the point and purpose of conceptual enquiries was under­ stood in terms of their place within each specific discipline. Imagine now a second possible world the history of which once again is identical with that of the actual world up to the seventeenth century, but in which 'philosophy' remains the name of intellectual enquiry. Not only are there 1no acts of secession by such subjects as physics and political economy, but subjects such as history, which had not been part of philosophy, are absorbed into philosophy. In the first of the imaginary worlds nobody was a professional philosopher, in the second imaginary world everyone engaged in the academic intell­ ectual and educational enterprise is by profession a philosoph­ er. There are indeed many different lines of specialized en­ quiry in this second world, but these lines are as likely to cross what we in our world take to be disciplinary boundaries as to remain within them. What this second imaginary world shares with the first is that in it there is no separate discipline of philosophy. What would be the advantage and disadvantages of each of these three modes of intellectual and academic organization, that provided by these two imaginary worlds and that provided by the actual world? The first would suffer from one large dis­ advantage, as compared bo'th with the second and with the actual world. Not only would what are substantially the same philo­ sophical questions be posed separately in a number of distinct and different disciplinary contexts, but no discipline would have any specific responsibility for those problems which arise precisely at the boundaries of the autonomous disciplines, which arise, for example, when the beliefs about human respons­ ibility which inform the moral and legal practices studied in such disciplines as ethics and the sociology of law are con­ fronted with the beliefs about the causal determination of human action which inform a good deal of psychology, biochem­ istry and neurophysiology. But both the first and more par­ ticularly the second imaginary world would enjoy one .outstand­ ing advantage over actuality: the conceptual, philosophical parts of complex intellectual enquiries would not be detached from their context in these enquiries and grouped together contextlessly as 'philosophy', a set of fragments lacking any fundamental unity. Any such characterisation of philosophy in the actual world is of course bound to encounter immediate and strong resistance. For one central preoccupation of philoso­ phical enquiry ever since Kant in Germany and ever since Reid in Scotland has been to identify the unity of philosophical enquiry in some non-trivial way; and we are all of us to some large degree the heirs of both Kant and Reid. Nonetheless one underlying thesis of this paper is that all attempts to iden­ tify such a unity have in fact failed. Why I believe this will emerge in part at least later in the argument. For the moment I want to consider a second disadvantage of actuality. The professionalised separation of philosophy from the other disciplines has not only left philosophy without any real unity; it has also systematically concealed from the profess­ ional practioners of the other disciplines the extent to which their own enquiries necessarily involve philosophy. Nurtured in the belief that their disciplines long ago achieved independence from philosophy, their responses to the recurrent 106 Alasdair Macintyre one discipline among others. Professionalisation with all its drawing of boundary lines and its invocation of sanctions against those who cross them, its conceptions of what is cen­ tral to 'the' discipline and what is marginal, is the inevi­ table accompaniment of bureaucratisation. Hence there is at le~st a tension between the professionalisation of philosophy and its flourishing, except of course as technique and idiom. For professionalisation is always favorable to the flourish­ ing of technique and to making narrowly technical proficien­ cies the badge of the fully licensed professional; and it is equally favorable to the development of idiosyncratic idiom, an idiom by which professionals recognize one another and for the lack of which they stigmatise outsiders.