Replies to My Commentators

teorema Vol. XXX/1, 2011, pp. 115-144 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2011) 30:1; pp. 115-144]

Replies to My Commentators

Hans-Johann Glock

I am very grateful to Professor Luis Valdés for instigating and oversee- ing this project. It is a privilege to have a roster of such distinguished scholars pay attention to one’s work. Of course I am also grateful to the contributors. Whether by chance or design, between them they have raised what I take to be the most important and controversial ideas in the book, and without redundancy. Reading their comments was an enjoyable experience, if also an educational and sobering one. Almost all of the criticisms have been friendly and constructive, and I hope to be able to respond accordingly. Le- gitimate worries about the possibility of philosophical progress notwithstanding, it is at least tempting to feel confident that when it comes to the metaphilosophical and historical understanding of analytic philosophy, some progress can be made. I have divided my responses according to topic rather than commentator, while also indicating in the headings whose contributions will be discussed.

I. DEFINING ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY (DUMMETT, MARCONI, MONK)

My stated ambition was to answer the question ‘What is Analytic Phi- losophy?’ I was therefore disappointed to read that Michael Dummett could not find ‘any such answer’ in the book. Fortunately my spirits were lifted when I remembered that my answer is explicitly and prominently stated at least three times in the text. It also features on the back cover, which Dummett must have read, since he refers to the generous blurb by David Stern: ‘analytic philosophy is a lose movement held together both by ties of influence and by various “family resemblances”’. My reasons for combining a family-resemblance and a genetic/historical account are developed at length in chapter 8 and summarized in the Introduction [pp. 19-20; see also pp. 223-4]1. On the one hand, merely rely- ing on family-resemblances would overshoot the acknowledged extension of the term, since overlapping strands relate analytic philosophers to some non- analytic philosophers no less than to each other. On the other hand, merely re-

115 116 Hans-Johann Glock lying on historical ties of influence leaves the problem that such ties extend beyond the analytic tradition as commonly recognized, both backwards and for- wards, and there have even been notable cases of mutual influence. Curiously enough, Dummett himself quotes one of the plain formula- tions of the answer he purports not to have found [from p. 231]. His real gripe is that the book will not put a reader in a position to ‘recognise’ a piece of writing as belonging to analytic philosophy, ‘unless he were already familiar with some of the specimens of it that Glock refers to’. According to Dummett, a ‘skilful verbal characterisation of baroque art or architecture, without illustrations, should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at whether a painting or building which he is shown does or does not exemplify that style. Similarly, a verbal characterisation of analytic philosophy should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at whether or not something that he reads is a product of that philosophical school’. But this demand ignores one part of my account, according to which being a text of analytic philosophy depends partly on belonging to a historical tradition. Such membership may not be evident from a philosophical text. And to the extent that it is, for instance through references to particular works, thinkers, schools or labelled problems or theories, my book will put attentive readers in a favourable position to tell. For it discusses at length how various figures and schools fit into that tradition according to various historical and philosophical parameters. Of course no characterisation, however skilful, could put a reader in a position to know for certain whether an anonymous text bereft of historical references belongs to a certain genetic category. Incidentally, this holds just as much for the architectural categories Dummett invokes. In so far as they are genetic (as when we distinguish between gothic and neo-gothic buildings), a mere description of a specimen will not put one in a position to assign it to one of them, and even visual acquaint- ance need not be sufficient to settle the matter. Dummett does take note of the second part of my account, yet complains that ‘[Glock] says very little of what the [family] resemblances are between different examples of analytic philosophy and an archetypal instance of it’. This statement betokens a misunderstanding of the notion of family resemblance, both as Wittgenstein develops it by reference to ‘game’ and as I clarify and apply it to ‘analytic philosophy’. The idea is not that there are resemblances radiating out from a central archetypal instance, but that there are overlapping features running through some but not all of the instances. In any event, the complaint that I have said very little about the features shared by many though not all analytic philosophers is quite wrong. On page 218 there is a prominent diagram showing the degree to which archetypal specimens of analytic philosophy form a family on account of sharing certain pertinent features. While there may be a need to add further features, all of the ones listed are discussed at great length in the preceding parts of the book. And so are Replies to My Commentators 117 additional thinkers or schools that help to determine the contours of analytic philosophy, including not just paradigmatic specimens but also borderline cases [e.g. pp. 15-6, pp. 214-9, pp. 224-30]. Extending the open-ended category ‘analytic philosophy’ to novel texts would indeed be greatly facilitated by familiarity with specimens of analytic writing. But why shouldn’t it be? The same holds true for taxonomic classifi- cations in art and architecture. Furthermore, even my descriptions of the overlapping features shared by many though not all analytic authors will help to assign a text by Frege, Moore, Carnap, Ryle, Austin, Quine or Lewis to analytic philosophy.

Unlike Dummett, both Diego Marconi and Ray Monk recognize not just my answer to the title question, but also the reasons that lie behind it. They are even minded to accept it as correct. At the same time, there are also points on which they agree with Dummett. My answer is not as helpful (Marconi) or substantial (Monk) as I seem to believe.

Marconi regards my answer as ‘extensionally accurate’, yet fears that it is insufficiently ‘vivid’ or ‘physiognomic’ [this issue, pp. 23-24]. He pro- poses an ‘extensionally equivalent’ but ‘perhaps more vivid’ alternative. It amounts to an interesting variant of what I called the rationalist conception. I shall attend to that proposal below. At this juncture I should merely like to grant that this characterization would be easier to apply than mine, since it omits historical factors and focuses on a narrower range of descriptive features. I hope, however, that my account is not quite as cumbersome and arti- ficial as Marconi would have it. He doubts the wisdom of explaining to a layperson what an analytic philosopher is by telling her that it is someone who was influenced by at least one of its emblematic figures and satisfies a sufficient subset of features from my list of family-resemblances. But even if this casts me in a dreadful light, I confess that I would have no compunction about answering the question somewhat as follows:

analytic philosophy is the most influential philosophical tradition of contemporary Western philosophy. It predominates in Anglophone countries, and is the single most important movement in continental Europe… Analytic philosophy emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in the work of Frege, Moore, and Russell, work that mainly concerned the formal and philosophical aspects of logic, semantics and metaphysics. It then took a linguistic turn through the early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists. Two distinctive branches emerged in the 1930s, logical constructionism on the one hand, conceptual analysis on the other…. Analytic philosophy is a highly diverse movement. Nevertheless there are some overlapping doctrinal, methodological and stylistic features that are shared by many – though not all – analytic philosophers from its inception to the present day. These include… 118 Hans-Johann Glock

Properly done, this would indeed ‘require some time and quite a few examples’, as Marconi notes. I think it would be time well spent.

According to Monk, I have not really provided even a non-analytic definition of the kind that I promise. He is kind enough, however, to regard this is ‘a strength rather than a weakness’. Monk shares Wittgenstein’s dislike for ‘What is X?’ questions, let alone the attempt to answer them through a definition. My account, despite my ‘stated aims in producing it, does justice to that fluidity [of our notion of analytic philosophy]’. Yet it does so only because in effect it amounts to a Wittgensteinian answer. ‘First one enumerates a list of things that are correctly called “analytic philosophy” (Glock’s genetic conception), then one adds “and similar things” (his family resemblance conception)’ [this issue, p. 39]. In some ways, my account plainly goes beyond this. It states a rationale for why some things count as generally accepted specimen of analytic philosophy – namely membership in a historical tradition. I also indicate pertinent respects in which things can be similar; and I state reasons for thinking that these amount not to necessary and sufficient conditions, but only to family resemblances. These differences are important. There is a reasonably uniform pattern in our current application of ‘analytic philosophy’. If there weren’t, if, for instance, one could not confidently pronounce that Carnap is whereas Heidegger is not an analytic philosopher, then the label would not fulfil a useful function. The Socratic quest for a definition is right at least to the extent of seeking to bring out the rationale underlying such patterns. Like Wittgenstein and Monk, I am happy to grant that this rationale may take the form of a family resemblance pattern. Unlike both, I deny that simply providing a list of examples amounts to a genuine explanation, unless some underlying commonality or other is immediately obvious. At least in our case, this hope would be vain. It is not ‘What is X?’ questions per se that are misleading. It is rather the failure to recognize that some such questions need to be rejected or reformulated, and preconceptions about how legitimate questions of this kind have to be answered. ‘What is X?’ questions actually serve a useful role in achieving a clear understanding of concepts, genetic and family resemblance concepts included. For it is only through ex- ploring them that one can legitimately rule out the feasibility of an analytic definition in any given case. This leaves a serious worry raised by Monk. I haven’t done enough to show that my account of analytic philosophy passes my own test of ruling in clear positives, ruling out clear negatives and showing why some cases are borderline. I plead guilty to this charge, as well as to García-Carpintero’s more general complaint that the defence of that account is ‘disappointingly short’. Yet I remain reasonably optimistic that Monk’s challenge can be met. Let us first consider clear negatives. Derrida scores less well in the family resemblance chart than any of my examples. He draws emphatic blanks con- Replies to My Commentators 119 cerning both argument and clarity (any lingering doubts can be allayed by (re)reading Limited Inc, but that’s not advice I am callous enough to dispense lightly). Such ‘formal’ parameters relating to methods and styles of philosophising, I am now inclined to stress, weigh heavier than ‘material’ ones concerning philosophical doctrines, such as hostility to metaphysics. As regards the historical aspect, the positive influence of Derrida that Monk mentions is on people that would be widely regarded as eminent representatives of ‘post-analytic’ philosophy. More important is a point that was not sufficiently emphasized in the book. An intellectual tradition constitutes or defines itself not just positively, by regarding certain authors, texts, problems, theories, institutions, etc., as part of itself, but also negatively, by excluding other things. And ever since ‘continental philosophy’ emerged, the analytic movement has conceived of itself in opposition to it; and it has treated Derrida as perhaps the most conspicuous epitome of that ‘Other’. Monk may be right in speculating that some day people might start calling Derrida an ‘analytic philosopher’. But in that case the label will have changed its meaning. My ambition was only to elucidate the meaning it has had from its inception to the present, with the main emphasis on its contemporary employment. I am inclined to play the tradition card also in tackling the trickier task of prising apart Husserl and the later Wittgenstein. Had Husserl died in 1906, he would clearly have passed at least as an associate member of the early analytic movement. As it was, he became the universally acknowledged founder of a distinct philosophical movement, just as the later Wittgenstein became a leading source for an important strand within the analytic movement. The influences both have had beyond the confines of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, respectively, are noteworthy to be sure; yet they pale by comparison.

This defence does invite a comment made by Marconi, namely that my real reason for adding family resemblances to the genetic picture was not really the exclusion of the comparatively minor mutual influences across the (vague) limits of the analytic tradition, but the desire to make my account more vivid [this issue, p. 24]. This is true in so far as these features help in understanding the ‘diachronic’ identity of analytic philosophy as a current phenomenon. But there is also a third reason, to which Marconi, as a propo- nent of a rationalist conception, should be sympathetic. The family resemblances allow one to speak of figures outside of the historical analytic mainstream as more or less analytic [see p. 223].

II. TRADITIONS AND FAMILY-RESEMBLANCES (GARCÍA-CARPINTERO, PRESTON)

Manuel García-Carpintero praises the book in terms that I would dearly like to hold true of it. But he also raises some penetrating questions about the 120 Hans-Johann Glock standards I impose on an acceptable definition, and about my invocation of family-resemblances. To begin with, García-Carpintero considers my claim that ‘analytic philosophy’ cannot be given a real definition along the lines of those suggested for natural kind terms by Kripke and Putnam. He promises to question this presumption. It seems to me that his challenge is four-fold. First, only ‘experts’ are in a position to frame the ‘precise details’ of a definition of ‘analytic philosophy’. Rightly understood, this is something that I would accept for many expressions, including not just philosophically contested ones but also humdrum expressions like ‘chair’. Competent speakers need not be capable of proffering an adequate explanation, but only of recog- nizing those presented to them by linguists and conceptual analysts. García- Carpintero also has in mind the stronger claim that in the case of ‘analytic philosophy’ only experts are competent to recognize the adequacy of an explanation. This is also something I can underwrite. For, as I point out, ‘analytic philosophy’ is something of a technical term, one employed by ‘professional philosophers and those that have to cope with them’ as García- Carpintero nicely puts it [this issue, p. 43]. The third point is somewhat trickier. It is that experts might provide an explanation that is more precise and less vague than the appeal to family resemblances, an explanation that amounts to an ‘analytical’ characterization or definition [this issue, pp. 49-50]. This suggestion is in turn connected to a fourth point. By considering the analogous case of the definition of art, García-Carpintero argues that a proper definition of analytic philosophy should not appeal to ‘intrinsic features’, those dis- cernible by looking at a work without knowing its origins, but to ‘extrinsic features’, notably historical features like the ones invoked by semantic exter- nalists such as Kripke and Putnam. I am in partial sympathy with this proposal. As I argue in my response to Dummett, the demand that a definition should allow classification on grounds of intrinsic features alone is misguided in the case of notions that have an essential historical or genetic dimension. And I agree with García-Carpintero (and thereby disagree with proponents of ‘material’ or ‘formal’ definitions such as Dummett, Marconi and Beaney) that a work does not qualify as analytic unless it belongs to a certain intellectual tradition [this issue, p. 47].2 In the book I distinguished between an honorific and a descriptive use of ‘analytic philosophy’. The latter is associated with what I call the ‘rationalist conception’, according to which analytic philosophy is characterized by tackling philosophical problems in a clear and argumentative manner [pp. 205- 12]. Furthermore, in a descriptive capacity the label can be used either according to genetic or to non-genetic (alias intrinsic) features. The former cor- responds to the historical part of my own account, the latter might involve any number of attributes to be included in the family resemblance part of that account. Replies to My Commentators 121

As regards the relationship between these two parts, García-Carpintero and I seem to agree that a historical account needs some supplementation by appealing to intrinsic features, in order to establish the origins and contours of a tradition [this issue, pp. 46-48]. The main difference appears to be this: for Garcia-Carpintero an appeal to intrinsic features that form a family- resemblance is either vacuous, or inevitably leads to some kind of analytic definition by appeal to ‘more hidden and appropriate characterizations’ [[this issue, p. 49]. The only rationale he states for the charge of vacuity, however, is that everything resembles everything else in some respects [this issue, p. 45]. But I had at least tried to defuse that charge. To say that a notion is a family- resemblance concept is not to rule out that there are necessary conditions for its application. Nor is it to rule out that it is part and parcel of the concept that only certain types of features potentially qualify something for falling under the concept. I cannot preclude the possibility that there may be individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of a non-genetic kind for being an analytic work. But, first, competent users do not apply the label on that basis; and, secondly, it is not obvious what features other than the ones I discuss might fit the bill [pp. 213-7].

In his thoughtful contribution Aaron Preston has more definite reserva- tions. He doubts whether my combination of genetic and family resemblance accounts can achieve what it was designed to do, namely ‘keep to the commonly acknowledged extension of “analytic philosophy”’. As he wittily re- marks ‘I do not see why their combination gets us something that fits the desired extension rather than something that extends beyond it along two tra- jectories rather than one. So here, as elsewhere, two wrongs don’t make a right’ [this issue, p. 54]. Preston acknowledges that my combination could work if ‘the expansion-blocking phenomena were specifically tailored to fit the desired extension’. But this is precisely what I attempted to do. Starting out from membership in a historical tradition I claimed that on an independ- ently reasonable conception of what constitutes ties of influence we can dis- count the few significant instances of mutual influence by appeal to family resemblances. To be sure, we may have to weigh formal features more heav- ily than others. Now, Preston has a principled objection to what he calls my attempt ‘to reverse-engineer the concept of “analytic philosophy” on an ex- tensional basis’. Like Marconi he feels that this procedure may capture the extension of ‘analytic philosophy’ (at least in its current use), but without displaying the underlying rationale, the intension that determines the extension. Analytic philosophy ‘is a tradition that exhibits these phenomena, to be sure, but they do not bind it together; for if they did we would not need something else set its boundaries’. Preston grants, however, that I was right to start out from a preliminary, pretheoretical understanding of ‘analytic philosophy’. Such a starting point is 122 Hans-Johann Glock indispensable partly because it gives us at least a rough idea of the acknowledged extension. But in that case I cannot see what is wrong about my reverse engineering. There have been various attempts to explain what precisely we mean by ‘analytic philosophy’. If these fail to meet the acknowledged extension, they are inadequate. If they meet that extension, as I still think mine does, they need not capture the ‘intension’, loosely conceived. This would be the case, for instance, if it turned out that all and only analytic philosophers can spell ‘Husserl’ but not ‘noemata’ correctly within 10 seconds. Yet as I already intimated in response to Monk and Marconi, my proposal does not fall at this hurdle. I submit that we currently apply the term to its acknowledged extension on the basis of a combination of genetic and descriptive considerations, referring to highly general and predominantly formal or methodological features. Perhaps I am rashly extrapolating from my own case here, but that these are the two balls to be juggled is suggested by the extant alternatives, if nothing else. Indeed, Preston comes close to ac- knowledging this. He blames contemporary analytic philosophers for employing ‘analytic philosophy’ ‘to an open class of cases along lines of influence and overlapping similarity rather than lines of ideational identity’, i.e. precisely on the grounds that I identified.

III. WHAT MAY COUNT AS A PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT OR TRADITION? (PRESTON)

At this juncture Preston’s underlying qualm comes into play, namely that this kind of employment, or this kind of concept, is illegitimate. Like García-Carpintero, he holds that if a notion fails to fit the traditional model of an analytic definition and instead displays a family resemblance pattern, this calls out for terminological reform, at least for philosophical purposes. But as far as I can tell, he does not give a reason for rejecting the legitimacy of family resemblance concepts, let alone tackle my attempts in the book to block the reasons given by others. This leaves a final worry, namely that some of the descriptive features I invoke are inadequate to hold together a legitimate category of philosophical taxonomy. Both Preston and I have tried to clarify the question whether analytic philosophy (still) constitutes a distinct phenomenon by discussing what type of taxon it might constitute. Thus I distinguish between close-knit philosophical schools and looser groupings such as movements or traditions. Ana- lytic philosophy comprises schools similar to the ancient schools of philosophy, e.g. the Vienna Circle, the Canberra Planers, groups officially united by shared articles of faith. But analytic philosophy itself is a much loser phenomenon, a philosophical movement. In fact, because of its longevity across several genera- tions, analytic philosophy amounts to a tradition [pp. 151-2, 220-1]. Replies to My Commentators 123

Preston accepts that this is a legitimate sense of ‘school’. At the same time he maintains that there is also another sense of ‘school’ used in philosophical discourse. A ‘school of thought’ is defined by ‘ideational structures (concepts, propositions, arguments, theories)’ rather than historical ties. And even in the case of a ‘socio-historically embodied school of thought’, per- sonal transmission of ideas is less fundamental than a shared ‘way of thinking’, according to Preston [this issue, pp. 55-56]. To me it would seem that both shared ideas and historical ties must be necessary conditions for membership, at least in an embodied school. Otherwise, why distinguish the notion from that of a school of thought simpliciter, a notion which is doxographic rather than strictly speaking historical? The main bone of contention, however, lies elsewhere. For Preston ‘analytic philosophy’ is not a legitimate taxon unless it constitutes a socio-historically embodied school of thought. And he further insists that the latter requires more than sharing a set of methods, namely sharing a set of doctrines or ‘views’. In the absence of doctrinal consensus, analytic philosophy can only be a ‘social phenomenon’ rather than a genuinely philosophical one [this issue, pp. 59-60]. This verdict presupposes that only doctrines or views but not methods can count as genuinely intellectual or philosophical rather than ‘merely social’ phenomena. This assumption is mistaken. From Socrates through Kant to the present, many philosophers have felt that it is precisely the problems and methods that mark out philosophy as a rational enterprise, rather than shared articles of faith. Indeed, within analytic philosophy the emphasis on methods rather than doctrines is particularly pronounced. Many practitioners past and present have proclaimed that the analytic movement is superior to other ways of philosophizing precisely on account of the way it tackles philosophical problems rather than on account of specific philosophical views. In blowing the trumpet of analytic philosophy, Russell promoted the scientific method in philosophy instead of particular philosophical views (how could he, given his notoriously frequent changes of mind). And he ex- tolled the method of analysis. Thus he maintained apodictically that ‘all sound philosophy begins with logical analysis’, and that this realization represents ‘the same kind of advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo’. Accord- ing to Moore, the ‘difficulties and disagreements’ that have dogged philosophy are due mainly to a tendency to answer with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ ‘questions, to which neither answer is correct’ [see Russell (1900), p. 8; (1914), p. 14, Moore (1903), p. vi]. This influential – though currently underappreciated – strategy of ques- tioning the question attempts to clarify rather than answer questions which lead to misguided philosophical alternatives. It accords a more fundamental role to a method – that of conceptual clarification – than to specific doctrinal answers to questions. Wittgenstein went one step further. According to him, there simply are no legitimate philosophical doctrines or views. Philosophical problems are 124 Hans-Johann Glock based on misunderstanding and hence call out for dissolution rather than answers. What counts is solely a method of analysis and clarification. Wittgen- stein pronounced his ‘new method’ of philosophising to constitute a ‘kink’ in the ‘development of human thought’ comparable to the Galilean revolution in science. And he insisted that what mattered about his work was not its specific results but its new way of philosophising, a method or skill which would enable us to fend for ourselves [see Glock (1996), pp. 258-264, 292-299]. The manifesto of the Vienna Circle is another founding document of analytic philosophy. And, to be sure, it was entitled ‘The Scientific Concep- tion of the World’ (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung). But it states in no un- certain terms that ‘the scientific world conception is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by a basic attitude, its points of view and the direction of research’. ‘It is the method of logical analysis that essen- tially distinguishes recent empiricism and positivism from the earlier version’ [Carnap, Hahn and Neurath (1929), p. 305]. The image projected by the Vienna Circle was that of a shared canon of rational methods through which doctrinal differences – differences of philosophical opinion – might be settled. Herbert Feigl once summed up this methodological ethos by saying that the philosophical tradition he presented revolved around two humble questions: ‘What do you mean?’ and ‘How do you know?’ Finally, many contemporaries who have given up on analytic philosophy’s early promise of providing lasting and definitive solutions or dissolutions to philosophical problems nonetheless cherish a more modest ideal: essential to analytic philosophy is the value of the process rather than the durability of the result [see Aune (undated), Føllesdall (1997), pp. 193-208 and Beckermann (2004), pp. 1-12]. Of course, philosophical methods are standardly supposed to yield philosophical views – though not by Wittgenstein and his followers. And I would agree that philosophical methods presuppose certain views. But philosophical views also require methods for their generation. Indeed, views which are simply haphazard rather than resulting from the application of some method or other cannot constitute a doctrine. So the dependency of views on methods is at least as pronounced as that of methods on views. And such interdependence in no way favours defining a philosophical movement through certain views over defining it through certain methods. The fact that a bona fide philosophical movement can revolve around a method or style does not suffice to rehabilitate the notion of analytic philosophy against Preston’s animadversions, however. For not even the method of analysis or the pursuit of clarity and argument can be used to define analytic philosophy, or so I have argued. In my view, the commonly acknowledged extension of ‘analytic philosophy’ is determined both by a family of overlapping ideational features (doctrinal, methodological and stylistic) and by historical ties of influence. On account of the latter, analytic philosophy is indeed not a purely intellectual or philosophical category; it does have a Replies to My Commentators 125 socio-historical dimension. But of course it does not follow that the notion is illegitimate or spurious. Indeed, it does not even follow that it is useless for the purposes of philosophy. After all, the history of philosophy is interested not just in schools of thought like rationalism, but also in embodied traditions like the ancient schools, scholasticism, continental rationalism, British empiricism or Neo-Kantianism. Needless to say, the precise identity and contours of such embodied schools is notoriously contested among scholars. That only goes to show, however, that the case of analytic philosophy does not differ in principle from those of other recognized philosophical schools. One point does follow, however, and it may be the underlying source of Preston’s scepticism about of the very idea of analytic philosophy [see Pre- ston (2007), pp. 9-17]. The label cannot carry any direct argumentative, evaluative or normative weight. One cannot legitimately defend or refute, praise or condemn a method, view, work or philosopher simply by ascertain- ing that it is or is not analytic. Admittedly, some proponents of analytic philosophy have used it as an honorific title, but such an employment of philosophical taxonomies in general and of ‘analytic philosophy’ in particular can and has been resisted, not least by employing analytic tools [see pp. 4-9, 205-12 and Marconi, this issue].

IV. THE LINGUISTIC TURN (DUMMETT)

Dummett’s well-known proposal that analytic philosophy is tied to the linguistic turn has been roundly rejected by commentators as diverse as L. J. Cohen, Hacker, Monk and Williamson.3 In chapter 4.2 I take pains to distinguish various aspects of Dummett’s ‘linguistic’ characterization and to provide a more nuanced assessment. Thus, in defence of Dummett, I point out that in their philosophical practice, many analytic philosophers take a linguistic turn in spite of renouncing it in their metaphilosophical doctrines [pp. 133-4]. Dummett acknowledges (somewhat grudgingly, perhaps) that I have accurately represented the four claims about the connection between philosophy and thought that he takes to characterize analytic philosophy [p. 123]. Ac- cording to ‘(1) the basic task of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought’. But Dummett charges me with ignoring the fact that (1) was not meant to maintain or assume that ‘philosophy defines itself as the analysis of the structure of thought’. Instead, (1) is supposed to follow from the fact that ‘philosophical problems’ arise out of ‘conceptual entanglements’ that can only be resolved by attending to the structure of thought, which in turn im- plies scrutinizing the structure of the linguistic expression of thought. Is the idea that philosophical problems evince conceptual confusions distinctive of analytic philosophy? It was endorsed enthusiastically by Witt- genstein and the early logical positivists, but it has been emphatically repudi- 126 Hans-Johann Glock ated by a majority of analytic philosophers both before and since. Moreover, in none of the passages in which Dummett develops his account of analytic philosophy can I find the claim that philosophy should analyse thought because its fundamental goal of resolving philosophical problems requires the disentangling of conceptual confusions.4 On the contrary, having described analytic philosophy as ‘post-Fregean philosophy’, Dummett’s writes in a passage I quote: ‘Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy [my emphasis] is the analysis of the structure of thought.’ Dummett here explicitly takes the view about the goal or task of philosophy he accuses me of having foisted upon him, and he strongly suggests that he takes this view to be constitutive of analytic philosophy. More importantly, Dummett’s response confuses two questions, namely what philosophy should be and what analytic philosophy actually is. Thereby he nicely illustrates the pitfalls of identifying analytic philosophy with the kind of philosophy one regards as proper, dangers of which I warned in the book [pp. 2-3]. When it comes to defining analytic philosophy, the real issue is whether (1) would be underwritten by all and only analytic philosophers, irrespective of what their rationales may be or whether these rationales are compelling. As regards that issue, I point out that paradigmatic analytic philosophers from Moore and Russell through Neurath to contemporary naturalists and modal metaphysicians have rejected (1). They have insisted that philosophy should be concerned with the world rather than our thought about it. In defence, Dummett seeks to undermine the contrast between the two. He accepts the gloss put on his position by Green, according to which ‘an account of thought’ is ipso facto an account of ‘the objects of our thoughts’, and hence ‘of the world about which we think’. I had accused this move of trad- ing on an equivocation between the content of our thought and its object: when the content of my thought is that Vesuvius is a volcano, the object of that thought is just Vesuvius. ‘Only the object, not the content, is part of “the world about which we think”’. According to Dummett, however, ‘this criticism is simply silly. A comprehensive account of the world would not consist in a list of all the objects there are in the world: reality is to be characterised by everything true that holds good of it; the world is everything that is the case’ [this issue, p. 21]. This argument is surely very feeble. That a comprehensive account, i.e. description, of the world would consist of statements of fact rather than a list of objects does not entail that those facts are part of or constituents of the world about which we think. Moreover Dummett’s comment in no way un- dermines the distinction between the content of a belief – which is a fact if the belief is true – and what the belief is about – which is an object rather than a fact, except for special cases (e.g. ‘[The fact] that nuclear fission is Replies to My Commentators 127 possible was discovered in 1938’). Ironically, Dummett here invokes a realist conception of facts and propositions (the contents of assertoric sentences) associated with Russell and the early Wittgenstein. Such a conception was criticized by Frege in his famous correspondence with Russell, and later repudiated by Wittgenstein, at least partly influenced by Frege. Facts do not have objects as constituents. And unlike objects, facts are not occupants of the spatio-temporal world. They have no spatial location and cannot move; and while one can point out a fact, one cannot point at a fact. Consequently facts are not the sort of thing of which the world could consist. The world is not everything that is the case – ‘the totality of facts rather than things’, in the idiom of the Tractatus. In so far as the world is a totality of anything, it is ‘the totality of things, not of facts’, as Strawson once remarked.5 Since an analysis of ‘the structure of thought’ is an analysis of ‘contents’, of the sorts of things that are facts if the thought is true, such analysis is not directed at the world we by-and-large think about. Consequently the contrast between the aforementioned analytic philosophers and those who accept (1), and thereby conform to Dummett’s definition of analytic philosophy, remains intact. At the end of his intervention Dummett declares that he still ‘stands by’ the contention that ‘the theory of meaning is prior to all branches of the subject’. But that is not the bone of contention between him and me. The question is whether Dummett’s contention is characteristic of analytic philosophy. And the answer to that question is indisputably that it is not. Even if ‘theory of meaning’ here does not mean a formal theory of meaning for a natural language but instead covers any account (definition, explanation, analysis) of the concept of linguistic meaning, Dummett’s claim would be rejected by a host of important analytic philosophers, and for good reasons.

V. THE CONCEPTUAL TURN VS. NATURALISM (ACERO, HACKER)

In his stimulating piece, Juan Acero distinguishes two theses of mine. According to the ‘Thesis of History’, analytic philosophy is a historical or genetic category; according to the ‘Thesis of Resemblance’, among the different authors belonging to this tradition, there are at most family resemblances. Acero accepts the first, while repudiating the second. There is, he grants, a distinctive ‘analytic philosophy as tradition [= APT]’, and the only feature that unites ‘all those who are who are considered analytic in one way or another’ is ‘belonging’ to that historical tradition. Yet he believes that within that tradition there is one feature which goes beyond a family resemblance amongst others and constitutes ‘analytic philosophy as metaphiloso- phy [= APM]’. It is subscribing to ‘the metaphilosophical proposition that philosophical problems are due to inadequate understanding of the logic of our language’. When that proposition was abandoned because of the rise of 128 Hans-Johann Glock naturalism in the second half of the last century, this was not merely a shift of emphasis within APT, but a ‘sharp’ or ‘clear-cut rupture’, and indeed the ‘fall of analytic philosophy’ [this issue, pp. 65-67, 69-71]. As Acero realizes, his APM combines themes from two candidate definitions that I discussed separately, the repudiation of metaphysics and the linguistic turn. APM promotes a linguistic or conceptual turn because of a particular view of the source and nature of philosophical or, more properly speaking, metaphysical problems. Acero is also aware of the fact that APM is close to what Hacker regards as the distinctive feature of analytic philosophy, namely the separation of the scientific task of achieving factual knowledge and the philosophical task of resolving conceptual problems through logico- linguistic clarification. The difference is that APM explicitly emphasizes the rationale for this division of labour, namely that philosophical problems are rooted in unclarity about language. Finally, Acero acknowledges that the contrast between his position and mine ‘might possibly rest on no objective basis’. I suspect that it is mainly a matter of terminology and emphasis. In so far as Acero is talking about APM, there is no gainsaying his claim that the rise of Quinean naturalism with its assimilation of the analytic and the synthetic, and hence of conceptual and factual problems and of philosophy and science, constitutes its decline rather than ‘just another moment in [its] development’. The moot question is whether this also amounts to the ‘collapse’ of the assumption on which ‘the distinguishing metaphilosophical feature’ of ‘analytic philosophy’ full stop rests [this issue, p. 70]. I denied that there is such a distinguishing assumption, and Acero seems to agree, as far as APT is concerned. He himself rejects that assumption, maintaining instead that not all philosophical problems are problems of language; and he accepts that people who reject the assumption – e.g. Quine, Fodor and Williamson – are nonetheless part of APT. So he himself is committed to distinguishing APM from analytic philosophy simplicter. This leaves several interesting questions. One is whether one shouldn’t distinguish between different linguistic turns – one taken for reasons of conceptual clarification, another taken for reasons of analysing thought, and yet another one taken for reasons of resolving specific problems that can be ren- dered more amenable through semantic ascent. These options I associate with the figureheads of Wittgenstein, Frege and Quine respectively. And I should have placed more emphasis on the first option, which, as Acero reminds us, lay at the heart of Rorty’s eponymous writings on of the linguistic turn. An- other question is why precisely proponents of the specific technique of semantic ascent think that it works. To this question I, at any rate, have not found a compelling answer in either Quine or Williamson. In any event, I doubt that all the important metaphilosophical changes within APT are connected to the rise of naturalism. Other features high- lighted in my narrative of the analytic movement also played an important Replies to My Commentators 129 role. The most important one, as far as the metaphilosophical and institu- tional profile of philosophy as a whole is concerned, was the revival of normative ethics and political philosophy [pp. 57-60, ch. 7]. That revival does amount to a rejection of APM, yet it owed very little to naturalism. Acero’s case-study concerning the fate of the notion of logical form does not establish a single development from APM to naturalism either, for all its merits. As he concedes, the idea of reading the metaphysical traits of reality off the logical form of propositions is part of the Davidsonian programme, and the latter continues to be more influential than he recognizes. Still, Acero is right to point out that discussions of logical form underwent an important transformation. They were initially tied directly to perennial philosophical problems concerning existence and the nature of the universe, but they have increasingly become part of highly specialized debates in philosophical logic, the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. Yet this development is quite independent of the naturalistic bandwagon. Even in Strawson’s critique of Russell’s theory of descriptions the traditional philosophical problems started to recede into the background in favour of the question of how definite descriptions and the definite article actually work in natural languages. In so far as this specialization is not just a ubiquitous feature of academic progress (so-called) but due to distinctive metaphilosophical developments, the switch from linguistic philosophy to the philosophy of language [pp. 52-3] is at least as important as the naturalistic turn. Grice, Dummett and Searle, among others, believe that any linguistic analysis for the sake of resolving staple philosophical problems must be part of systematic theories de- scribing the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of natural languages. None of the three mentioned subscribe to Quinean naturalism. On the contrary, all of them resist Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and therefore qualify as part of APM.

By the same token, they are also part of the analytic tradition as conceived by Peter Hacker. In his generous and perceptive contribution, Hacker refrains from discussing our differences over whether Frege and Quine should be counted as analytic philosophers. Hacker is also kind enough not to mention some inaccuracies that he pointed out to me in conversation. Thus my account of the positivist line on the analytic/synthetic distinction [p. 37], while fairly standard, holds strictly speaking only for Ayer among the figures I mention. For neither Carnap, nor Schlick, nor Neurath accepted that there were bona fide philosophical propositions of any kind, though for different reasons.6 Hacker does, however, take up the role which the separation of philosophy and science plays for the identity of analytic philosophy, mentioning my thoughts on the matter in a footnote. While he concedes that Russell’s views were never forgotten even among conceptual analysts, I am ready to concede 130 Hans-Johann Glock that they were a positive influence mainly on the logical construction side of analytic philosophy dominated by the logical positivists. Among the latter we find not just loosely speaking ‘Wittgensteinian’ positions (Carnap, Schlick), but also naturalistic ones (Neurath, Hahn). And the spirit of the ‘scientific philosophy’ propagated by Russell is prominent even in Carnap. Although for Carnap philosophy does not have the same subject matter as science, it abides by the same methodological standards [pp. 160-3]. Finally, many of the associ- ates of logical positivism, whether Polish logicians or American and Scandina- vian philosophers of Science, did not and would not have drawn a sharp Kantian distinction between philosophy and the various special sciences, whether empirical or formal. It is an important historical fact, rightly high- lighted by Hacker, that such a philosophy/science dichotomy was accepted by a majority of eminent analytic philosophers between the 1920s and 1960s. Yet it was never consensus omnium within the analytic movement as a whole, on account of positivism and post-positivism. And it was repudiated in both theory and practice even by a leading conceptual analyst such as Austin. The latter propounded the Russellian image of philosophy as a proto-science, whether or not under the influence of Russell [Austin (1970), pp. 175, 183, 231-2].

VI. THE RATIONALISTIC CONCEPTION REVISITED (MARCONI)

According to Marconi, the extension of analytic philosophy can, after all be captured by a version of what I called the rationalist conception in the book. Marconi develops this proposal through the ingenious ploy of contem- plating the standards imposed by an analytic as opposed to a continental or traditionalist journal. He concludes that

A contribution to analytic philosophy should be

(1) theoretical as opposed to hermeneutical: it should put forth substantial philosophical claims that are intended to be original;

(2) argumentative as opposed to dogmatic: it should argue for its claims in accordance with established argumentative patterns;

(3) part of an ongoing discussion, as opposed to expressing a thinker's solitary ruminations; (4) rigorous as opposed to rhapsodic, imprecise, or obscure.

Let me first observe that there is a potential tension (not inconsistency) between the second part of (1) and (3), which Marconi calls the ‘communitarian requirement’. Being original ought to include not just making novel contributions to an ongoing debate but also effecting paradigm shifts, like diagnosing Replies to My Commentators 131 new, hitherto unnoticed problems or employing hitherto unheard of intellectual tools. But such originality has a tendency of alienating its progenitor from the academic mainstream at least initially, and analytic philosophy is no exception to this rule. Immediately connected to this is the observation that some eminent analytic philosophers were original or non-conformist in precisely this way. In Frege’s case, this isolation was certainly involuntary, yet that cannot be said of Wittgenstein, who famously or infamously opined: ‘The philosopher is not a citizen of a community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher’ [Wittgenstein (1967), §455]. True enough, Wittgenstein, like Frege, would have fared very badly at the hands of contemporary editors and referees. But that just goes to highlight a limitation of Marconi’s thought- experiment. Meeting the standards of an analytic journal is a more specific challenge than composing a work of analytic philosophy. Note further that the desideratum of connecting with an ongoing debate is at least as pronounced for traditionalist journals covering the history of philosophy as it is for analytic journals devoted to substantive issues. Marconi does a very nice job both at elaborating on my category of ‘traditionalist philosophy’ and at casting doubt on the idea that all philosophers (traditionalists included) would accept the ideals that characterize analytic philosophy according to the rationalist conception. Contrary to what he suggests, however, my basic objection to the rationalist conception was not that it would equate analytic philosophy with good philosophy. Even if they are not shared by all philosophers, these ideals are shared by many philosophers that are not part of the analytic tradition, with the result that the definition is much too wide. I did consider the option of using an honorific conception of analytic philosophy as a revisionary definition [pp. 210-2]. However, the non-analytic opponents of the rationalist ideals notwithstanding, it is praiseworthy even to pursue the goals of clarity and argumentative rigour. And therefore this revision would in effect turn ‘analytic philosophy’ into an honorific label and make classification dependent on assessment.

VII. ANALYSIS REVISITED (BEANEY)

It is striking that Monk and Beaney have almost been alone among leading contemporary commentators in characterizing analytic philosophy as a philosophical movement which employs the method of analysis. My book takes this proposal very seriously. I genuinely regret, therefore, that Mike Beaney feels that my objections carry the ‘conversational implicature’ that his approach is ‘irrational’ or ‘simple-minded’. I must leave it to others to de- cide whether the passage quoted by Beaney [this issue, p. 89, from p. 153] gives this impression. But it was certainly not what I intended. Along with the rationalist conception, I regard the analysis conception as the most plau- 132 Hans-Johann Glock sible alternative to my own account, partly because both are capable of covering a wide variety of methods. As regards analysis, moreover, no one has done more to demonstrate this than Beaney.7 That is not enough, however, to justify the analysis conception. In the book, I detected a ‘serious obstacle’ to defining analytic philosophy as the movement which employs analysis. And while I acknowledged that Beaney is aware of that obstacle, I simply did not see how he could overcome it, and I still do not see how it can overcome. The initial problem is that analysis is a method that is invoked by (highly diverse) philosophers outside of analytic philosophy as commonly recognized. Starting out from this fact, accepted by Beaney, I go on to construct a dilemma for the analysis conception. Either analysis is conceived so weightily and narrowly that it no longer covers the whole range of analytic philosophy, or it is conceived so liberally and widely that it includes non-analytic philosophers as well. In attacking this suggestion, Beaney certainly leaves nothing to the va- garies of conversational implicature. His first complaint is that I ignore what he calls ‘interpretive’ or ‘transformative’ analysis, the translation of propositions into the language of quantificational logic. Now, this type of analysis is mentioned both in my historical survey [pp. 32-43], and in the section on analysis [pp. 157-8], though under labels such as logical analysis (a term Beaney also employs), sentential paraphrase or same-level analysis. Beaney maintains that this type of analysis covers ‘the Frege-Russell-Carnap-Quine strand in analytic philosophy’. That is correct only if interpretive analysis is meant to include both reductive (new-level) and non-reductive (same-level) analysis, both analysis proper (namely the discovery of logical forms pos- sessed by sentences of extant languages) and logical explication (the construction of novel languages). Even in that case, however, it does not cover the other, equally important strand of analytic philosophy, namely conceptual analysis, whether decompositional à la Moore or connective à la Strawson. The latter might be accommodated by including ‘conceptual articulation’, as I do in a passage that Beaney quotes [p. 223]. Even in that case, however, it is the opposite of ‘bizarre’ to resist a definition of analytic philosophy by reference to analysis, given that there are bona fide analytic philosophers who fit neither the logical construction nor the conceptual analysis paradigm. This leaves Beaney’s second complaint. To conclude from the fact that there is no ‘single unifying method’ employed by all and only analytic philosophers that analysis ‘cannot be used to define analytic philosophy’ is a ‘gross non-sequitur’, he opines. For there is the option of ‘a disjunction of specific notions of analysis’. In extremis, one could specify ‘uniquely indi- viduating conceptions of each of the analytic philosophers in the “commonly acknowledged extension”’ [this issue, p. 91]. Now let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that this procedure can somehow be extended even to those analytic philosophers who neither propound an explicit conception of Replies to My Commentators 133 analysis nor seem to be guided by any such conception in their work. Let us also assume – contrary to Wittgenstein’s own reflections on family resemblances – that such a disjunctive account can be given genuine content, for instance through being embedded in a historical narrative about how those conceptions are connected. Beaney promises such an account, and he is certainly the person to deliver on this promise. Even under such extremely favourable (and arguably unattainable) conditions, the account would not amount to an analytic definition of analytic philosophy. For one would equally have to exclude philosophers outside the commonly acknowledged extension who promote and/or practice some kind of analysis. And of course one would have to achieve all that without taking recourse to factors independent of analysis, such as the historical connections or the other ‘family resemblances’ that are invoked in my account. When the chips are down, the challenge posed by the book remains [p. 159]. What is it about the metaphilosophical theory or philosophical practice of analysis that makes the investigations of von Wright (on hermeneutics), Frankfurt (on bullshit), Craig (on knowledge) or Williams (on genealogy) part of the disjunctive family of ‘analytic’ analysis, while excluding the investigations of Nietzsche (on the genealogy of morals), a Neo-Kantian (like Natorp and Cassirer), Husserl (post 1913), Scheler, or Habermas (post 1968)? The answer would have to include at the very least some mention of membership in a historical tradition, a point that my account shares with purely genetic ones (like the one favoured by García-Carpintero).

VIII. HISTORICISM (BEANEY, ALVAREZ)

Beaney detects an inconsistency or at any rate a tension between my officially declared attitude towards the history of philosophy and the practice of the book. According to him I misleadingly suggest that ‘analytic philosophy can be characterized without reference to its roots’, when in fact I spend a lot of time talking about those very roots [[this issue, p. 87]. The second claim is correct, the first one is not. I state that ‘my main focus’ is on what analytic philosophy currently is rather than where it comes from, yet that ‘the second question will loom large, not just for its own sake but also because of its implications for the first’ [p. 4, see also p. ix]. Beaney’s underlying worry, however, is that paying attention to history and regarding it as relevant to the present is at odds with my account in chapter 4 (which he succinctly summarizes) of the relationship between history on the one hand, analytic philosophy and substantive philosophy more generally on the other. Beaney generously maintains that my book ‘has offered an excellent illustration’ of the truth of instrumental historicism, something I fail to appreciate because I regard the latter as ‘unproven’. It is gratifying to be accused of underestimat- 134 Hans-Johann Glock ing one’s achievements. Alas, I still cannot see the point. Instrumental historicism is a claim about philosophy in general. That claim may well be unproven, and indeed false, even if it can be demonstrated that some types of philosophical tasks require recourse to history. Furthermore, taxonomic tasks like establishing the nature, if any, of a philosophical movement like analytic philosophy obviously belong to that group. Even if I were wrong in maintaining that the notion of analytic philosophy is partly genetic, that could only be the result of establishing that a non-genetic account captures the extension of ‘analytic philosophy’, where that extension is provided by a historical se- quence of thinkers, works, etc. The real bone of contention between Beaney and me is whether ideas like ‘analysis’, ‘logic’, ‘reason’ (his list) can only be understood by studying the past. These, he would presumably agree, are non- genetic concepts. And I have yet to encounter a compelling refutation of my reasons for holding that such concepts, as currently employed in philosophy, formal logic and psychology can in principle be elucidated without recourse to their historical development [pp. 100-3].

In her extremely perceptive and generous comments, Maria Alvarez summarizes my objections to intrinsic historicism and various cases advanced for instrumental historicism better than I could have done. She also holds, however, that the weak historicism I end up with is ‘too weak’ [this issue, p. 983]. Let me first point out that weak historicism is not entirely trivial. The idea that knowledge of the history of philosophy is advantageous to philosophising is not quite as uncontroversial as Alvarez takes it to be. Some philosophers inside and outside of analytic philosophy – Wittgenstein and Nietzsche being preeminent among them – have felt that creative thought can be hampered by the dead hand of the past, and that it is advisable to philoso- phize auf eigene Faust. As an occasional corrective to the perils of always knowing in advance what one is supposed to think such an attitude can be lib- erating. As a general recipe – one which seems to guide some current mainstream analytic philosophy – it is baleful, at least partly for reasons on which I agree with my historicist critics. Alvarez proceeds to construct a novel rationale for instrumental historicism. I applaud that effort, and not just because it is entirely consistent with my claim that extant attempts to vindicate instrumental historicism were un- successful [p. 90]. But whereas Beaney propounds an instrumental historicism on grounds that I regard as uncompelling, I wonder whether Alvarez’s position really goes significantly beyond weak historicism. First of all she concedes, as one must, that one can do decent philosophy without concerning oneself with either the remote past, details of historical development or exe- getical disputes. But, Alvarez suggests, one cannot do philosophy without ‘studying, in the sense of engaging at a deep level with, at least some parts of the history of the subject’. Even Wittgenstein did that, since he reacted to the Replies to My Commentators 135 thought of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Frege and Russell. At a more implicit and abstract level, he even engaged with Descartes in his attacks on what came to be known as the Cartesian conception of the mind. In my view, this is a rather emaciated sense of studying the past. Alvarez’s claim boils down to the important yet ‘weak’ point that it is ‘folly – or perhaps worse’ [this issue, p. 101] for philosophers to respond to ideas without making a serious attempt to understand them. Yet this leaves open whether such understanding requires knowledge of the historical genesis of those ideas, and even whether philosophers need to be correct in attributing these ideas to particular thinkers or works; there is, after all, such a thing as creative misinterpretation. Alvarez is dead right that we often react to problems, insights and mistakes of the past, irrespective of whether we are aware of it or not. But as far as I can tell, what she advocates or is in a position to advocate is the need for philosophical understanding rather than for historical knowledge. Alvarez recognizes that her historicism is far from ambitious. ‘Perhaps all that this amounts to is the truism that philosophical thinking does not oc- cur in a vacuum’. To this I am happy to accede. But not as a conceptual truism. In my view there is no inconsistency in the idea that a philosophical genius might develop all of her ‘problems, positions, concepts and arguments’ entirely off her own bat. Nonetheless I agree that in fact philosophers have always proceeded in part by ‘challenging, refining, improving, or over- throwing’ ideas of others. But this amounts only to the thesis that philosophizing in fact requires a ‘community of ideas’ (Wittgenstein notwithstanding). It does not go to show that this community must as a matter of principle be constituted by genuine ‘predecessors’ rather than contemporaries. At the end of the day, one should not labour the question of whether instrumental historicism can be demonstrated to be true. As I stress, demon- strating strict indispensability is a tall order for any philosophical method, however venerable and important. Instead, the prudent line is to establish by way of general argument and specific illustration how useful knowledge of the history of concepts and of the history of philosophy can be. And in this respect there is much to be learnt from the reflections of both Beaney and Alvarez.

IX. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY (MONK, ALVAREZ)

In both the book and the comments on it the relationship between history and philosophy features in two respects. One is the methodological question of how important knowledge of the past is to substantive philosophical investigations. The other is the taxonomic-cum-historical question of whether analytic philosophy can be characterized by a distinctive attitude towards history. 136 Hans-Johann Glock

Analytic philosophy has been widely criticized for its attitude towards the past, whether it be for ignoring or for distorting it. But analytic philosophy’s alleged disregard for historical issues is not just a bud of criticism, as Monk suggests [this issue, p. 37].8 It has also been suggested as one if not the distinctive feature of analytic philosophy both by commentators and by some leading proponents [see pp. 89-92]. Furthermore, a superior attitude towards the past of our subject is widely reported to be part of the self-image of contemporary Anglo-American graduate students trying to project an air of analytic ‘professionalism’ in areas such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.9

Alvarez criticizes me from the opposite direction. I deny that analytic philosophy can be characterized as suffering from historiophobia; she thinks that this verdict stands in need of qualification. At least in its inception, analytic philosophy does show a distinctive neglect or disregard for the past. I accept that the early analytic interest in the history of philosophy tended to be more critical in tone, mainly as regards Wittgenstein, the logical positivists and those influenced by them. But I do not accept that Russell can be added as an exhibit to this case. Alvarez concedes that Russell was interested in the past, yet contends that his ‘motivation’ for writing his History of Western Philosophy ‘was not to aid his philosophising’. She does not adduce evidence for this assessment. Perhaps it is the fact that Russell saw fit to include chap- ters on ‘purely social history’, in order to provide the prerequisite background for certain philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, he sets historical explanations of the genesis of theories apart from their philosophical assessment, and he mentions that he has excluded ideas that ‘seemed to have little or no bearing on contemporary or subsequent philosophy’. Furthermore, Russell’s study of Leibniz defies Alvarez’s diagnosis. It adopts a ‘purely philosophical attitude’ in which ‘philosophic truth and falsehood’ are the focus of attention. And it helped him to formulate his own programme for a scientific philosophy based on logical analysis [Russell (1946), p. xi; (1900), pp. xi-xii, 8]. Alvarez rightly raises the question of what motivated the retrospective turn of analytic philosophy diagnosed by von Wright. Part of her explanation is that it was a laudable if inevitable return to ‘the standard approach’ taken to the past. I have my doubts. The interest in the history of the subject has waxed and waned throughout its development, both inside and outside, both before and after the heyday of analytic philosophy. During the heroic age of modern philosophy, most of the creative figures treated with contempt the uncritical veneration of the past they detected in the ‘schoolmen’ or the emerging philosophical doxographies – and not without reason! And the question of whether the burgeoning precursorism and historical interests of analytic philosophy are symptoms of philosophical stagnation and decline does bear scrutiny (see below). Replies to My Commentators 137

Alvarez alerts us to the fact that by comparison with other periods, me- diaeval philosophy continues to be something of a blind-spot among analytic philosophers, in spite of frequently noted affinities. She speculates that this may be due to an unwarranted abhorrence of the theological constraints under which scholasticism was operating. If so, this abhorrence extends beyond analytic philosophy. With the exception of the Neo-Thomist movement, medi- aeval philosophy is a Cinderella even for non-analytic philosophers (theology departments being a different matter). Again, I suspect that the explanation has to do more with the legacy of Descartes and the scientific revolution than with atheist prejudices on the part of Russell and the analytic mainstream.

X. THE ANGLO-AUSTRIAN TRADITION (MULLIGAN)

My book discusses whether analytic philosophy might be conceived as a geographical and/or linguistic phenomenon. In particular, it discusses the suggestion that analytic philosophy is au fond an Anglo-Austrian phenomenon, a suggestion which might be seen as a corollary of the Neurath-Haller thesis, according to which the philosophy of the Habsburg Empire is to be sharply distinguished from that of Germany. The book takes issue with parts of the Neurath-Haller thesis. In his engaging and instructive ‘grumbles and quibbles’, Kevin Mulligan in turn takes issue with some of my animadversions. I for my part now feel that we are getting usefully close on some of the crucial issues. Mulligan does not propose to define analytic philosophy as Anglo- Austrian. Instead, he makes three interrelated points. First, that its diversity notwithstanding, the Austrian tradition forms a unified current to be contrasted with German philosophy. Secondly, that I overestimate the Kantian impact on analytic philosophy. Thirdly, that I underestimate the impact of Austrian philosophy on Wittgenstein. In connection with the first point, Mulligan charitably but accurately describes as a slip of the pen a mistake which makes me blush, namely credit- ing Brentano rather than Husserl with a long list of synthetic a priori truths.10 I do not accept, however, that the issue of the synthetic a priori aligns Husserl with Wittgenstein rather than with Kant and the neo-Kantians. Admittedly, Wittgenstein classified as ‘grammatical propositions’ several of the types of propositions Husserl gives as examples of the synthetic a priori. But his point in doing so was precisely to deny what both Kant and Husserl maintain, namely that some a priori judgements express substantive insights into reality rather than being articulations or explications of concepts or linguistic rules. That Kant accepts fewer types of synthetic judgements a priori is to his credit and in fact displays a partial agreement with Wittgenstein. Both would regard many of Husserl’s cases as analytic or ‘grammatical’, rightly in my view. 11 138 Hans-Johann Glock

When it comes to knowledge of the general cultural scene in the Habs- burg Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, I cannot hold a candle to Mulligan. Unfortunately, he leaves it open with which corresponding German figures the Austrian artists, philosophers and scientists on his tri-partite list are to be contrasted, and in what respects. Whereas the Neurath-Haller thesis aligns scientific, analytic and proto-analytic philosophy with Austrian philosophy, I maintained that the former is present in Germany as well, although it plays a lesser role within the overall philosophical scene. Mulligan offers an interesting alternative to both pictures, namely that the home soil of proto- analytic and analytic philosophy included not just Austria but also Southern Germany. There may be some truth to this thesis, though Mulligan’s brief suggestion as to how to accommodate the Berlin branch of scientific philosophy within this scheme does not carry conviction. By all accounts, the Ber- liner Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie owed more to the revolutionary developments of twentieth century science and even to the in- disputable Neo-Kantian interest in science than to cues from Vienna.12 With the exception of Wittgenstein, Mulligan does not address my specific claims about Kantian influences on analytic philosophy. Instead he sur- mises that I overemphasize the impact of Kantianism partly because I regard a Kantian conception of philosophy as an a priori sui generis subject as ‘the only or best alternative’ to Quinean naturalism [this issue, p. 108]. The former is incorrect – the book displays my awareness of the revival of essential- ist metaphysics and its two-fold contrast with conceptual analysis on the one hand, naturalism on the other. The latter is correct in so far as the Kantian conception is given a linguistic twist, as in Wittgenstein and conceptual analysis. I have yet to see a compelling explanation of how a priori knowledge could yield insights into de re necessities rather than articulate our concepts or the meaning of our words [see Glock (2010), pp. 339-348]. But the Wittgensteinian position that I sketch on p. 144 is not a case of the ‘rampant normativism’ Mulligan abhors. The capacity to follow rules may underlie our conceptual capacities. But it in turn presupposes other cognitive and conative capacities, notably those of perception and intentional action. As regards his final grumble, Mulligan rightly notes that the Wittgen- stein of the book is ‘the familiar’ one. I take no particular pride in being an orthodox or mainstream interpreter; but I’d rather be an ‘old’ Wittgensteinian than a mistaken one. And I can see no reason for abandoning the idea that the main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein were, in order of importance, Frege, Russell and Schopenhauer. As regards the relative impacts of Kantian and Austrian ideas on Wittgenstein’s work, I should like to sum up my views as follows.

1 Unlike Schopenhauer, members of the Austrian philosophical tradition do not feature on the list of influences Wittgenstein drew up in Replies to My Commentators 139

1929, and even critical references to its representatives are exceed- ingly sparse.

2. There are obvious similarities between some ‘Austrian’ ideas and some in Wittgenstein.13 As Mulligan acknowledges, however, it is difficult to determine the extent to which these display an actual influence (pp. 109-112).

3. Mulligan may be right in detecting interesting parallels between the discussion of solipsism in the Tractatus and Scheler’s Ethics of 1916. But given the conditions under which Wittgenstein composed the relevant passages in 1916 and his general ignorance of contemporary philosophical writings, especially in ethics, it is extremely improbable that these betoken an actual intellectual debt on his part.

4. What is more, there are patent similarities between these passages and ideas in Schopenhauer.

5 Kantian influences on Wittgenstein were not confined to Schopen- hauer, with whose work he was intimately acquainted from early on, and to his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason after completing the Tractatus. Frege’s work also includes Kantian elements in its rejection of empiricism and naturalism [for details see Glock (1999), pp. 422-458 and (1999a) pp. 137-166].

6. Mulligan draws attention to an important fact, namely that the Trac- tarian distinctions between sense, senselessness and nonsense have their most immediate antecedents in Husserl’s Logische Unter- suchungen. But the distinction between failure to make sense and mere falsehood also featured in Russell’s theory of types.

7. With the idea that philosophy has the task of setting limits to thought (and hence to its linguistic expression), the Tractatus is closer to Kant than to Husserl. For it explicitly presents philosophy as a second-order discipline, a discipline that stands either above or below the sciences and fulfils a primarily critical function, whether this be drawing limits to possible knowledge or drawing limits to meaning- ful speech. Husserl, by contrast, never wavered in regarding phenomenology as a strict and foundational science.14

Mulligan ends with the suggestion that Wittgenstein might not have been an analytic philosopher. That suggestion has by now achieved the status of a novel orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that I criticized in the book [pp. 226-7]. But 140 Hans-Johann Glock his reasons for making it are far worthier of consideration than those of the proponents of a ‘New’ (more American) Wittgenstein.

XI. PAST AND FUTURE

Hacker discerns and dissects several trends within contemporary analytic philosophy. He rightly deplores the first three – the revival of metaphysics, the rise of naturalism and the repudiation of a distinction between philosophy and science (metaphilosophical naturalism). But two comments may be added to his astute observations. First, the roots of all three trends now go back quite some time. This holds true in particular of the first. It should not be forgotten that it was the logical positivists themselves who paved the way for this revival by weakening or modifying their anti- metaphysical principles, notably the principle of verification, step by step. At present, post-Kripkean essentialism and post-Quinean naturalism may be said to vie for supremacy within the analytic mainstream, and even the latter is generally recognized as a metaphysical position. But in addition to remnant Wittgensteinian and verificationist scepticism towards metaphysics, there is also a powerful pragmatist or neo-pragmatist stream, which is at best indif- ferent towards metaphysics. Furthermore, various reductionist and deflation- ary approaches to topics ranging from abstract objects and truth through meaning and mind to modality and morals continue to be favoured; and such approaches are often anti-metaphysical in their implications. Finally, the con- flict between these diverse metaphilosophical positions is now being con- ducted explicitly and in earnest. This has led to a welcome renewal of methodological self-consciousness among analytic philosophers which, one hopes, will ultimately bear fruits. Like Beaney and Alvarez, Hacker applauds the increased interest in the past among analytic philosophers. But he is also sensitive to the fact that the retrospective turn is a consolation prize compared to the hopes for substantive philosophical progress that analytic philosophers of all persuasions enter- tained during its heyday. It is worth asking whether the retrospective turn is a symptom, or perhaps even a contributing factor, to the widely perceived stagnation of analytic philosophy. Elsewhere I have answered that question in the negative [Glock (forthcoming)]. But overcoming the current crisis of analytic philosophy as well as its comparative isolation from the wider cultural sphere will require more than bigger and better histories of (analytic) philosophy. In my view, it will require the creative employment of the analytic tools of conceptual reflection and critical thinking in virtually all areas of intellectual life. And it appears that some religious apologists, economists and cultural theorists need this kind of attention at least as much as the cosmolo- Replies to My Commentators 141 gists, neuroscientists and theoretical linguists to whom analytical philosophers have until now devoted more of their time.

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NOTES

1 Plain page numbers refer to Glock’s What is Analytic Philosophy? Page numbers preceded by “this issue” refer to papers included in this book symposium. 2 A methodological aside. García-Carpintero regards this as ‘intuitively over- whelmingly plausible’. I don’t know whether he meant to appeal to intuition as a special kind of evidence. Be that as it may, I am suspicious of this currently popular method. For me, the statement that the work of an obscure medieval polemicist would not count as analytic can instead amount to two claims. One is that I would not call such a work ‘analytic’, and hence amounts to (partially) explicating my understanding of that term; the other is that ‘we’, i.e. competent users of the term, would not apply it to such a work, and hence amounts to a claim about its established use. The two types of claims are not mutually exclusive, of course, yet they can come apart. With respect to the former but not the latter there is a certain kind of first-person authority. If someone insists, for instance, that he is using ‘analytic philosopher’ to refer to all and only those philosophers who practice some kind of analysis, he cannot be accused of being wrong. But it would be wrong to maintain that this captures the prevalent established use, or so I have argued. 3 Preston does not accept the linguistic conception of analytic philosophy. But he thinks that holding such a conception was a distinctive and indeed constitutive trait of early analytic philosophy. Thus he ends by writing that analytic philosophy was ‘bound together first by the mistaken notion that certain philosophers shared a certain view and thus constituted a school’, that view being the ‘linguistic thesis’ that the proper work of philosophy consists in the analysis of language [see Preston (2007) pp. 2-3, 80-2]. But while Moore and early Russell and promoted conceptual and logical analysis, they explicitly rejected the suggestion that they were analysing words or sentences. So they definitely did not labour under the illusion Preston diagnoses, nor did Neurath, not to mention countless analytic metaphysicians and ethicists at least since the 1960s [see pp. 128-34]. 4 In this I am not alone. Acero [this issue, pp. 66-68] also distinguishes what he calls ‘Dummett’s proposal’, the third claim on my list, according to which the only proper way of analysing the structure of thought consists in analysing the structure of the linguistic expression of thought’, from the idea that philosophical problems are linguistic or conceptual in nature (more on this below). 142 Hans-Johann Glock

5 See Frege to Russell 13.11.1904 and Russell to Frege 12.12.1904, in Frege (1980), pp. 163, 169; Wittgenstein (1922), 1-1.1 and (1975), pp. 200-1; Frege (1989), pp. 5-33; Strawson (1971), p. 198n. For a more elaborate discussion of both the historical and the substantive issues see Glock (2011). 6 In Neurath’s case, this being that he did not accept the philosophy vs. science dichotomy. 7 One other non-philosophical point I should like to set straight is this. While I have drawn on Beaney’s account of the history of analysis, which I duly complement for being excellent, I have also relied on some sources he has relied on – reaching from Stebbing and Black through Ryle and Strawson to Oeing-Hanhoff and Hacker – on other sources, and on my own account of analysis in Wittgenstein. The distinction between progressive (‘synthetic’) and regressive (‘analytic’) method, incidentally, de- rives ultimately from Aristotle and has been a commonplace within the Kantian tradition [see Kant (1783), §4, §5n; (1804) §117]. I was introduced to the distinction during my first year as an undergraduate in Tübingen. 8 Monk is on stronger grounds when he complains that neglect of ethical and political issues has exclusively been an accusation rather than an attempted definition. But I have heard it invoked in the latter capacity in conversation. And well into the 1980s it shaped perceptions of analytic philosophy’s contribution to practical philosophy, both inside and outside of the analytic tradition. 9 See Hacker, this issue; Wheeler (2009), pp. 768-770. In this context I remem- ber an answer occasionally proffered in British departments in response to the question ‘Have you ever read so-and-so (such-and-such)?’: ‘Read it? I haven’t even taught it!’ That joke would not go down so well among academic philosophers of non- analytic provenance. Even deconstructivists would be weary of boasting about not having studied the texts they pronounce on. 10 Brentano’s rejection of the very idea of a synthetic a priori is particularly pronounced in his Versuch über die Erkenntnis [Brentano (1903), Part I & II]. 11 Incidentally, Kant regarded as synthetic a priori not just mathematics (arith- metic and geometry) and the metaphysical principles listed in the Analytic of Princi- ples, but also the non-empirical foundations of the natural sciences. See Kant (1791), 1. Abteilung, Geschichte der Transzendentalphilosophie. But cp. Kant (1783), §2c. 12 See Hoffmann (2007), esp. pp. 41-2, 45-7. In fact, Stumpff seems to have been a hindrance rather than a help, joining hands with conservatives like Dilthey in blocking the Habilitation of the founder of the Gesellschaft, Joseph Petzoldt. At the same time Petzoldt, unlike many of the eminent philosophically interested scientists who made up the bulk of the Gesellschaft, was influenced by Mach’s positivism. One more reminder that ‘Austrian philosophy’ encompassed highly diverse movements such as phenomenology and positivism. 13 In addition to Mulligan’s own numerous writings on the topic see also Hyman (2001). 14 According to the Logische Untersuchungen [see Husserl (1900) §12], ‘pure logic’ is a ‘theory of science’ and in that sense a meta-discipline. But its purpose is constructive and indeed foundational. The contrast is even more pronounced when it comes to Husserl’s conception of philosophy as a ‘strict’ and ‘first’ science (Wissen- schaft). As ‘first philosophy’, phenomenology purports to be a ‘universal science of the world’ and a ‘science of primordial sources’ (Urquellenwissenschaft) which pro- Replies to My Commentators 143 vides an ultimate grounding of our everyday and scientific thought. See Moran (2005), pp. 31, 43-4, 49, 51, 175-6.

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