History is often said to be written by the winners. In the case of analytic philosophy, however, there is a danger that history will be written predominantly by the losers. One reason is that analytic philosophy is a somewhat anti-historical tradition, especially where it most resembles a science, in aspiration or achievement. For there it tends to be oriented towards the future rather than the past, in the manner of a science – hardly surprising when progress is expected. Those who do not like history cannot complain when their history is written by people who are not like them. A second reason is that recent analytic philosophy seems to subvert the global narratives it might otherwise be tempting to tell about the history of the subject – most notably, in the resurgence of realist metaphysics, often unashamedly concerned with things in themselves. For those sympathetic to Kant or Wittgenstein or Dewey, it must be tempting to see much recent analytic philosophy as an insignificant anomaly, a passing throwback, in the long march of philosophy.--Timothy Williamson, “How Did We Get Here From There?” (33)
As noted yesterday, Williamson's receptivity toward history appears to represent a change of heart. It is notable that the reasons he offers to do philosophical history are not themselves, well, philosophical. Rather, while he still thinks that philosophy is scientific enough to be progressive, he now thinks it is dangerous to decouple the present from the discipline's history. The danger he correctly seems to discern is that history is written by those that reject the status quo. Even so, Williamson's imagination deserts him because he only seems to recognize one kind of dimension on the status quo: you either represent the vengeful 'losers,'' and, thereby, probably mistakenly -- because of a lack of technical competence -- buy into a global narrative at odds with the philosophical present, or you represent, the technically more competent, 'winners' who embrace the status quo.
For Williamson the mission of history is to explain the internal -- as it were, causal sequence -- development of a series of doctrinal as well as methodological disputes and technical innovations that can explain how the philosophical status quo (as represented by, well Williamson in the Lewisian-era) came about from some arbitrary starting point. Interestingly enough, the starting point is given by unnamed "opponents of analytical philosophy" (7)--the very first words of the article!
In fact, one can welcome the status quo, write history that is philosophically competent and yet be distrustful of the narratives we tell ourselves. For these narratives may efface not just figures from the past, but also historical resources that can help us improve on the status quo. Let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- Williamson his claim that philosophy is like a normal, progressive science (with a commitment to abduction and in which theoretical disputes are adjudicated with appeal to theoretical virtue); then the unfolding of philosophy will generate Kuhn losses along the way. The philosophical history of philosophy would then be committed to recovering lost insights that may help improve the path forward from the status quo. Williamson's recognition that Bradley was not all wrong about the role of metaphysics in motivating anti-metaphysics is a nice case in point. It is, after all, no surprise that some of the most exciting contributions to recent work in history of philosophy are by Jonathan Schaffer, Michael Della Rocca, and analytical feminists like Eileen O'Neill (and those of us inspired by them), all of whom present new large-scale narratives without much fondness for Kant and Kantianism. Recovery projects simultaneously fill-the-gaps and allow us to imagine alternative futures to the present status-quo.
Of course, Williamson's own narrative undermines the idea that philosophy is akin to a mature science. He recognizes "the power of fashion in philosophy." (34) Now, in this piece, he aims to defuse the observation, by insisting that philosophy is relevantly akin to mathematics (which he claims is also fashion-driven). One need not be a Kuhnian to recognize that Williamson has few resources to marshall against the person who, accepting that philosophy aims to be scientific, points at the same phenomenon and argues that this is evidence that philosophy is in a pre-paradigmatic stage.*
In a pre-paradigmatic stage, losers can hope to regroup and fight another day. For example, just a generation ago, 'friends-of-Carnap,' who chafed under a Quine-ean orthodoxy, united in a then-marginal intellectual society (HOPOS: History of the Philosophy of Science) to help nurture a better appreciation of Carnap's enduring contribution to philosophy. They did so both by providing a better understanding of the Kantian, Nietzschean, and logical roots of Carnap's philosophy and by articulating the ongoing virtues of the Carnapian program as well as by encouraging new Carnapian projects that have vindicated the original faith. If you don't like the previous example, consider the fate of McTaggart--sadly unmentioned by Williamson; once thought outdated in light of Quine's technical sophistication on ontology, yet his way of framing the issues in the metaphysics of time has endured (for good and ill).
I close with a methodological (that I then use to make a new point and reinforce my philosophical-historical claims) observation: that opponents of a tradition (as analytical philosophy is) have a stereotypical, perhaps even misleading, image of a tradition is no surprise. For such an image to be effective rhetorically and even intellectually, it must contain enough grains of truth, but the work it does is designed to de-legitimate an opposing approach. In this case the image also has plenty of resonance within analytical philosophy in the ways it conceived and taught itself from the 1950s onward. This self-understanding is often captured by a succession of names Carnap-Quine-Kripke-Lewis (both [recall] by those within analytical philosophy that contest the received interpretation [see Price] and those like Putnam that wish to insert themselves into the tradition).
Now, when images and concepts are contested one ought to be alert. For example, even in the early ages of analytical philosophy some central players (not the least Russell) had non-trivial metaphysical aspirations. Once alerted to this, one can recognize other previously forgotten metaphysical projects within analytical philosophy (e.g., Stebbing [recall]). Stebbing was taken to have 'lost' the debate with Max Black, but as I have argued, history may well judge otherwise. (Certainly Stebbing's vision of a public role for analytical philosophy is now warmly being embraced by all kinds of figures.)**
In fact, Williamson himself admirably broadens the standard story considerably; he pays serious attention to the roles of Cook Wilson, A.N. Prior, and Strawson. Of these three, Wilson and Prior are not really analytical philosophers. Prior has been so assimilated, but he himself insisted that historical commentary was a key philosophical enterprise (something that certainly does not fit Williamson's understanding of analytical philosophy). Outside of formal logic, one of Prior's main contributions to present metaphysics (see the work by Jessica Wilson) is the influential restatement of W.E. Johnson's distinction between Determinates and Determinables. Johnson (neither an Idealist nor an analytical philosopher) is commonly effaced in narratives that insist that analytical philosophy successfully rebelled against British Idealism and vanquished it.
*As it happens Williamson has argued that his program, modal logic as metaphysics, has reached the mature stage (recall my discussion); he has tried to frame the discussion about it as between the informed judges and the skeptics. But Williamson does not pay sufficient attention to neutral quantification (Azzouni, Nolan, et al.), and so the seeds of the demise of his pre-paradigm are already sown.
**Whitehead's work on the "nature of existence" was taken by Ernest Nagel in 1930 (!) to be "a notable addition" to a revival of interest in metaphysics among scientific philosophers. (Recall; I am not claiming that Whitehead still ought to be understood as analytical philosopher.)
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