On the emergence of American analytic philosophy

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review's editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy.

Analytic philosophy, 1925–69: emergence, management and nature

“…This institutional control, it will further be argued, partly explains the emergence and eventual dominance of analytic philosophy in Great Britain and the United States of America. More specifically, already documented takeovers of the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review (PR) by analytic philosophers (Katzav andVaesen 2017a and2017b) are here shown to be part of a pattern. The pattern is of philosophers with a shared commitment to a form of critical philosophy either (a) founding journals that are dedicated to promoting that form of critical philosophy or (b) using journals with a history of openness to diverse philosophical approaches to promote that form of critical philosophy at the expense of rivals.…”

“…6 SJP's founding editor is William B. Barton Jr., a speculative philosopher (see, e.g., Barton Jr. 1964). And while my focus has been on pre-1970s generalist journals, the case of PPR suggests that, at least to some extent, the pattern described here continued beyond the 1960s (to offer a further potential illustration, The Personalist, which was renamed Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 1980, appears quickly to have transitioned into an analytic philosophy dominated journal in the early 1970s, after it came to be edited by the analytic philosopher John Hospers (Rasmussen 1988) Second, Katzav and Vaesen (2017a) suggest that, in the case of the takeover of PR, speculative philosophers' pluralism about philosophical approach may partly explain why analytic philosophers were given editorial roles. The broader picture provided above suggests that pluralism may have also had a stage-setting role at other American journals.…”

“…While Katzav and Vaesen (2017a) only explicitly characterise critical and speculative approaches to philosophy in terms of tendencies to make certain types of claims, these approaches can also be characterised in terms of views about how philosophy should be done. Authors in PR, JoP and elsewhere (see, e.g., de Laguna (1951), Frankena (1951) and the references in the previous paragraph) make it clear that, according to speculative philosophy, philosophy should provide its own distinctive substantive claims.…”

“…PQ was founded in 1950 by the speculative philosopher Thomas M. Knox and was then open to speculative philosophy(Katzav and Vaesen 2017a) and to analytic philosophy. However, PQ was not an established journal in the early 1950s.…”

The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters, 1929–1932

“…How did they respond? And in what ways was the 2 See, for example, Giere (1996), Galison (1998), Butts (2000), Kuklick (2002), Richardson (2003), Reisch (2005), Limbeck-Lilienau (2012), Katzav and Vaesen (2017), and Pihlström et al (2017). 3 It is quite surprising that this period has been largely ignored thus far.…”