The essay to which I shall be particularly addressing myself is 'Philosophy in America Today' (Rorty 1981), a central thesis of which is that the present state of analytical philosophy is to be explained by the disintegration of the neopositivist program of the Vienna Circle and its allies. The consequence of this disintegration, a result of the way in which "all the positivist doctrines were deconstructed by Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Kuhn", (Rorty 1981, 4) has been that analytical philosophy has lost any serious intellectual unity. It is no longer can identify itself by references to "a finite number of distinct, specifiable philosophical problems to be resolved -- problems which any serious analytic philosopher to be the outstanding problems." (7).--A MacIntyre (1982) “Philosophy and Its History,” Analyse & Kritik, 102-3.
We might summarize MacIntyre’s analysis of Rorty’s diagnosis of the state of analytical philosophy ca 1980 that analytic philosophy has entered the critical crisis phase in which a paradigm is fracturing and in which revolutionary new paradigms can be forged. The summary of the previous sentence does not do full justice to Rorty’s aims nor, as will be clear soon, to MacIntyre’s full analysis of Rorty (nor, to be sure, all of MacIntyre’s larger aims in his paper, “Philosophy and Its History,” which include the unmasking of the Millenarian tendency in (early) analytic philosophy.)
When I entered graduate school, more than a decade after this exchange, I would hear my professors mutter things like ‘there is no dominant program,’ or ‘I would like to say we’re all Quine-ean naturalists now, except well, you know, all that metaphysics emanating from Princeton;’ or ‘I don’t try to keep up with all the changing fashions.’ Given the way(s) computers and the internet have sped up professional activity and generated more energetic echo chambers, we can confidently say that since the early 1980s contemporary philosophy is no less fashion-driven. In fact, that it is so, is now a tired trope among the folk that are first-mover, trend-setting fashionistas (recall, and, especially, here).
MacIntyre argues, contra Rorty, that the crisis phase is a permanent feature of analytic philosophy: "from the outset it exhibited just that variety, heterogeneity and instability which Rorty sees as a characteristic only of its present post-positivist state...What Rorty takes to be a cause was in fact an effect." (109-110; in Kuhnian terms: it is forever stuck in a pre-paradigmatic phase.) And, to simplify MacIntyre’s analysis, this permanent crisis is to be expected given the ways in which (a) ‘philosophy’ as a profession came to be separated from other intellectual activities that nourish it and in which it plays an indispensable role; (b) ‘philosophy’ has found a home as a profession among others within a modern research university. I quote a passage that gives a sense of MacIntyre’s diagnosis:
The bureaucratic organisation of academic work which the modern university requires and the 'philosophy' is not treated as the name one discipline among others. Professionalisation with all its drawing of boundary lines and its invocation of sanctions against those who cross them, its conceptions of what is central to 'the' discipline and what is marginal, is the inevitable accompaniment of bureaucratisation. Hence there is at least a tension between the professionalisation of philosophy and its flourishing, except of course as technique and idiom. For professionalisation is always favorable to the flourishing of technique and to making narrowly technical proficiencies the badge of the fully licensed professional; and it is equally favorable to the development of idiosyncratic idiom, an idiom by which professionals recognize one another for the lack of which they stigmatise outsiders. It is not difficult to find examples of these phenomena in recent and contemporary American philosophy...
It is instead from an examination of the nature and influence of the separation of philosophy from the other disciplines that we are likely to draw an understanding of contemporary philosophy. (106)
Even if one recoils from the thought that the institutional context leads to a permanent deformation of philosophy, MacIntyre's diagnosis is as apt then as it was today despite the fact that he (and Rorty) underestimates the extent to which David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a new kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one). (This reminds us that it is, after all, very hard to judge how the work of one's peers will shape the immediate future.) The philosophical and sociological success of Lewis also generates an unexpected, historical irony; through early Lewis quite a bit of Carnap got passed on to future generations that were told that the logical positivists were not worth reading (so much so that we now regularly encounter that elegant hybrid zombie, the Carnapian metaphysician). It follows also, then, that a suitably enlarged, systematic and modular -- perhaps so modular that it will seem unsystematic -- philosophy can provide the paradigmatic unity that eludes us today. It is an open question if such a philosophy can avoid the deformation that (recall, and, say, here) haunts our practices.
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