The rhetoric of analytic philosophy: The making of the analytic hegemony in Swedish 20th century philosophy (original) (raw)
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分析哲学的生命与时代 The Life and Time of Analytic Philosophy 摘要 Abstract 2
All his life, Bertrand Russell took realist metaphysics as the most important item in all philosophy. The refutation of the theory of meaning as denotation, he argued in great detail, led to a crisis in this metaphysics. This led Ludwig Wittgenstein to give up all articulation of all metaphysics. It led Popper to adopt Frege's view of meaning as truth-value and Einstein's view of science as refined everyday thinking and of its theories as testable, putative truths, always given to improvement. This way Russell is at the center of analytic philosophy. This is contrary to received opinion within this school of thought that takes commonsense as the basis of a worldview and opts for some linguistic variant of empiricism in the hope that it would this way preserve logic and uphold realism without landing in a metaphysical morass. This hope is waning and realism that Popper has offered as well as solutions to diverse philosophical problems that he and his disciples have proposed are gaining public notice. The special attraction of the popper heritage is that it takes realist metaphysics for granted and debates the diverse versions of it that are on the agenda of science.
In the last seventy years, the philosophical community, i.e the people professionally engaged in philosophy, has faced an immense growth, due to huge public investments in universities and research after the Second World War in Western countries [Rescher 2005, Marconi 2014]. We can say that in no other period of the history of philosophy there were so many professional philosophers as in the last fifty years, as there were not so many scientists [Price 1963]. This quantitative increase questions the historian of contemporary philosophy in multiple ways. In the present paper I would like to address the methodological issues in historiography of philosophy related to this increase. Therefore I will ask which are the concepts and methods that we should use in order to understand properly the new situation of contemporary philosophical research. In particular, I will argue that traditional concepts and assumption used in writing the history of philosophy are today just partially fit to describe the contemporary evolution of philosophy. The historical object they aim to describe is transforming in such a way that they are more an obstacle than a help to its comprehension. In order to reach this conclusion, my contribution is structured in the following way. In the first part I will provide some quantitative data about the growth of philosophical enterprise in the second half of twentieth century; secondly, I will sketch an analysis of the key notions used in the traditional everyday work of the historian of philosophy. I will focus on the very workaday " toolkit " , which comprehend notions such as " author " , " text " , " tradition " , " philosophical school " and so on. In the third part, I will present some tensions to which these very commonplace notions are subject due to the quantitative growth of philosophy. In particular, I will attempt to show how the traditional notion of " author " as the central unit of history of philosophy is partially inadequate to describe contemporary philosophy. Hence, I will suggest that quantitative methods used in contemporary studies of science, such as scientometrics and science-mapping, can in part supply this inadequacy, opening at the same time new perspectives on the development of contemporary philosophy. Finally, in the light of the previous considerations, I will reflect upon the role of this non-standard history of philosophy in contemporary philosophical research, situating my view in the debate started with the collection of essays about historiography of philosophy edited by Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner in 1984 [Rorty-Schneewind-Skinner 1984].
The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)., 2020
This landmark achievement in philosophical scholarship brings together leading experts from the diverse traditions of Western philosophy in a common quest to illuminate and explain the most important philosophical developments since the Second World War. Focusing particularly (but not exclusively) on those insights and movements that most profoundly shaped the English-speaking philosophical world, this volume bridges the traditional divide between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy while also reaching beyond it. The result is an authoritative guide to the most important advances and transformations that shaped philosophy during this tumultuous and fascinating period of history, developments that continue to shape the field today. It will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary philosophy of all levels and will prove indispensable for any serious philosophical collection.
Signifies and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy
Studying the literature on the history of analytic philosophy may leave the impression that the members of the Vienna Circle?or more appropriately, the Schlick Circle and the associated advocates of logical empiricism?were the main agents leading philosophy to take the so-called linguistic turn. One may also think that the Circle's inspiration was, in turn, born out of the philosophical and logical contentions of Ernst Mach,1 followed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is true that the seemingly rapid penetration of logical empiricism into early twentieth-century thought widely influenced the choice of markedly ana lytic topics in the philosophy of language, among them accounts of refer ence, predication, truth, and intentionality. It is equally true that
The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy
2013
If you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the vigour of the present. (Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', 1874, p. 94) The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. (Russell, 'On History', 1904c, p. 61) History begins only when memory's dust has settled. (Ryle, 'Introduction' to The Revolution in Philosophy, 1956, p. 1) Nietzsche opens his brilliant early essay 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life' with a quote from Goethe: "In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity." He goes on to argue that we need history "for the sake of life and action", and this forms a central theme throughout his subsequent work. We find it expressed again, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he attacks modern historiography for aspiring merely to mirror and hence resisting any kind of judgement (1887, 'Third Essay', §26). In his early essay, Nietzsche distinguishes three species of history, which he calls 'monumental', 'antiquarian', and 'critical', corresponding to three ways in which history relates to the living person: "as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres, as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance" (1874, p. 67). Monumental history provides a supply of the greatest moments in history for emulation and inspiration; antiquarian history gives a sense of the local coherence and rootedness of previous life and thought to satisfy our nostalgia for their imagined certainties; while critical history submits the events of the past to the tribunal of reason for examination and critique. Nietzsche argues that all three types of history are needed, each correcting the excesses of the other. Antiquarian history reminds monumental history of the terrain that makes possible the mountain peaks, for example, while monumental history rectifies the myopia of antiquarian history. Critical history encourages The historiography of analytic philosophy 2 us to tackle the mountain peaks for ourselves, while foiling the epistemological escapism of antiquarian history. The historiography of analytic philosophy provides excellent illustrations of Nietzsche's three species of history. Standard textbooks tend to represent analytic philosophy as a progression from one mountain peak to another, from Frege's Begriffsschrift through Russell's theory of descriptions to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, to name but three familiar summits. There are detailed works of scholarship that offer antiquarian powder to explode monumental mythology, such as Griffin's book on Russell's break with idealism (1991) and Uebel's account of the Vienna Circle debate about protocol sentences (1992, 2007). As to critical history, this has been alive and kicking from the very dawn of analytic philosophy, from Frege's criticisms of the views of his predecessors in the first half of The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Russell's reconstruction of Leibniz's philosophy (1900), and Moore's simplification of idealist arguments (1899a, 1903b), onwards. 1 Kripke's use of Frege and Russell as the stalking-horses for his own theory of reference (1980) and his interpretation of Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following to motivate his idea of a 'sceptical solution' to a 'sceptical paradox' (1982) are just two more recent examples to illustrate the power and prevalence of the genre. However, it would be misleading to suggest that any of these examples involve only one of Nietzsche's three species of history. Rather, each combines different aspects of those species in varying degrees. Dummett's first book on Frege's philosophy of language (1973), for example, might be seen as combining the monumentalizing of Frege with critical reconstruction to further his own concern with developing a theory of meaning. Candlish's recent book on the dispute between Russell and Bradley (2007) does not just provide a much-needed corrective to received views of this dispute but has its own underlying agenda-to argue for a view of philosophy that does justice to its historical dimension. Nietzsche's tripartite distinction, though, offers a useful initial typology to indicate the range of accounts of the history of analytic philosophy and of analytic 1 I discuss the role of what I call 'historical elucidation' in Frege's Foundations in Beaney 2006a, and the significance of Russell's 'rational reconstruction' of Leibniz in Beaney 2013a. For an account of Moore's 'refutation' of idealism, see Baldwin 1990, ch. 1. The historiography of analytic philosophy 3 approaches to history, and a fruitful framework to explore some of the historiographical issues that arise from these accounts and approaches. 2.1 Context and connection Nietzsche's essay was written in 1874, which was a significant year in the development of modern philosophy. 2 Lotze's so-called 'greater' Logic was published, an expanded version of his 1843 'lesser' Logic. Whether or not Lotze counts as a neo-Kantian himself, he undoubtedly had a major influence on both neo-Kantianism and analytic philosophy as it originated in its two main-German and British-branches. 3 This was especially true of his anti-psychologism and the Kantian distinction he drew between psychological genesis and logical justification. 4 A new edition of Hume's Treatise was also published, to which the British idealist Green wrote long introductions attacking what he called 'the popular philosophy', a form of empiricism with roots in Locke's Essay and confusions that became clear in Hume's Treatise, according to Green. Green's Cambridge contemporary and sparring partner, Sidgwick, also published his main work, The Methods of Ethics, in 1874. While Sidgwick may be far less well known today than Mill, he developed a more sophisticated form of utilitarianism which had a major influence on Moore and many subsequent ethical theorists such as Hare, Parfit, and Singer. 5 2 See the chronology of analytic philosophy and its historiography that follows this chapter. 3 Defining 'neo-Kantianism' has proved controversial. In its narrowest sense, it covers the philosophy of the so-called Marburg and Southwest Schools, originating in the work of Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband, respectively, dating from the early 1870s. More broadly, it also covers earlier philosophers writing after Kant, who in some way concerned themselves with Kant's philosophy, such as Kuno Fischer, Hermann Lotze, and Otto Liebmann (who originated the 'Back to Kant' slogan in 1865), as well as other philosophers not directly associated with the two main schools such as Hans Vaihinger and, more controversially, Wilhelm Dilthey. Gabriel (2002) suggests that Lotze is the founder of neo-Kantianism; while Anderson (2005) distinguishes between 'orthodox' and 'non-orthodox' neo-Kantianism, the former corresponding to the narrower sense just identified. In his helpful account of the relationship between neo-Kantianism and anti-psychologism, Anderson defines orthodox neo-Kantianism precisely by its commitment to anti-psychologism, in emphasizing both the objectivity and the normativity of logical and philosophical principles. The concern with normativity is an important feature, according to Anderson, and rules out as orthodox neo-Kantians others such as Frege and Husserl who also stressed the objectivity of logic (2005, pp. 291, 305-6). On the nature of neo-Kantianism, cf. also Köhnke 1986; Adair-Toteff 2003; Makkreel and Luft 2010. 4 On Lotze's influence on Frege, see Gabriel's chapter in this Handbook. On the importance of the distinction between psychological genesis and logical justification in analytic philosophy, see Beaney 2013a. 5 See Schultz 2011.
The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015
2019
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