Canon formation within Analytic Philosophy

One of the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers has concerned the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis. As a first step toward improving this situation we have prepared the present volume of selections. Our idea was this: In the tremendous bulk of the periodical literature of recent decades, there is a small percentage of articles definitely worthy of reproduction in an anthology. This material required only proper grouping to provide a usable text for intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.
The project in preliminary form was presented by circular letter to about ninety teachers of philosophy in this country and in England. We asked for responses to our proposed selections, that is, endorsements or rejections of titles contained in a list of about 130 items. We also asked for recommendations of valuable material that we might have overlooked. We are pleased to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the enthusiastic and most helpful reactions received from an impressive majority of our correspondents. Because of the limitations of space we had to exclude, with a heavy heart, several excellent articles by authors from whom we had already obtained permission for reprinting.
With the exception of a very few cases in which it seemed clear from the beginning that an article belonged in our collection, we have pondered our choices seriously and long. In many instances it was extremely difficult for us to make up our minds. The exclusion of any article which was either on our original list or had been recommended by our friends was painful; and here, as everywhere, to choose is to exclude. Recognizing in the end that it would be impossible to make our choices coincide with the valuations of all prospective users of this book, we can only plead that within the given aims and limitations we have selected what, after countless considerations, comparisons and consultations seemed the most suitable body of material available for reprinting.
We have been guided in our selections on the whole by the reactions and suggestions of our correspondents. Since some of our own articles met with a very favorable reaction, we felt it would not appear presumptuous to include them. Generally our tendency was not to concentrate exclusively on the work of the great and the famous thinkers, but rather to select on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices.
The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism, and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish logicians have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy.
Although it is realized that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between this and other contemporary schools, we could not possibly have attempted to represent them all. Since the clearest and most helpful formulation of an idea is not always the first in order of time, or historically the most representative, we have paid relatively little attention to originality as a condition for inclusion. It was rather the penetration, the finesse, and the challenge of the work which counted most. In some instances we succeeded in grouping together divergent and mutually incompatible contributions around controversial subjects. We have tried to avoid definitely obsolete material. Certainly up-to-date-ness in any significant sense is not a mere function of date of publication. Frege, one of whose contributions we included, and Peirce, whose work is not represented because it is so amply available, have more to say to us than many who are writing today....
Courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language, etc., should find ample material for reading and discussion in this anthology. Although some basic articles in Philosophy of Science, Modern Logic, and Theoretical Ethics have been included, we can conceive of additional volumes of selections, very much needed, in these special fields. We express the hope that others will consider work on anthologies along those lines. May we assure them that such work, while arduous, is at least intrinsically rewarding.--"Preface" by Feigl, H., and W. Sellars. in Readings in Analytic Philosophy." New York (1949), pp. v-vi. [HT Alan Richardson]

An informal social media exchange with Jason Stanley got me thinking about canon formation within analytic philosophy. In particular, I started to reflect on the (temporary, but not trivial) dominance of philosophy of language within analytic philosophy such that many analytic programs organized proseminars for entry level PhD students around familiarity with certain classics of that field (which also includes semantics and some bits of philosophical logic). 

While I don't want to claim that the dominance of such philosophy of language was a contingent fact, it's worth noting that as this dominance developed others who were recognizably influential at the time within analytic philosophy, were pushing for, say, philosophy of science as first philosophy (e.g. Ernest Nagel), and one can easily imagine some others to have pushed epistemology in a foundational role (and certainly in some a background empiricism or sense-data theory does play a non-trivial authoritative role). The reason I deny it is wholly contingent is that, for example, axiology or aesthetics cannot have been, then, the dominant core.

Alan Richardson suggested that it would make sense to look at the textbooks of the 1948-53 period as formative. In particular, it is worth noting that, as Alan reminded [Leonard was one of my teachers] me, Leonard Linsky's (1953) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, clearly anticipates much of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar. Linsky's book is not the definitive canon -- it lacks "On Denoting" (and has no Frege at all) --, but I hope to discuss it some other time. 

But first I want to focus on the Feigl and Sellars text-book, which explicitly sets the agenda for the other textbooks, and simultaneously helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in modern philosophical analysis) and not. And, pertinent for my present purposes, they do so by using a kind of partial, snowball sampling method to create a canon of texts worthy of inclusion.+ 

To be sure, their grouping of who is included in the "decisive turn" -- (i) the Cambridge movement, (ii) the Vienna Circle, (iii) the Berlin group, (iv) American Realism and Pragmatism, and (v) the Polish logicians -- is not original. We find this nearly exact combination already in 1936 in Ernest Nagel's two-part essay on "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe."* And certainly there is some contingency in what gets passed on. They themselves note that Peirce would naturally fit their agenda, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see that as time passes on the opportunity costs to find a way to include Peirce into the fold grows so great that effectively -- with the exception of some of his informal essays in the philosophy of science -- he ends up terra incognita for analytic philosophers. 

The influential textbooks of the period are nearly all American. Presumably they were created there not just because it was at the time the wealthiest place around, but also because of the sudden demand due to expansion of Higher Education there. Feigl and Sellars are clearly anticipating fine-grained "courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language" etc.! (And note these are not intended as introductory courses, but "intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.")

One interesting claim that Feigl and Sellars make is that they selected "on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices." This is a rare admission that the canon of analytic texts does not reflect originality, or historical priority, but didactic or pedagogic suitability. To be sure, I am not claiming this remains the case in analytic canon formation once analytic philosophy is suitably securely dominant (relative to "other contemporary schools"), but it is prominent at the start. 

And it is worth remarking that several of the features they explicitly mention are de facto rhetorical in character (e.g., "incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge.") That is to say, these are the texts that will persuade students of many different grades of competence of the pertinence of analysis. Of course, it's left vague what counts as pertinence (or clarity, which by no means (recall) means the same in, say, Quine, Carnap, Nagel, or Stebbing). 

One may suspect that the previous paragraph is written in the spirit of unmasking. But that's not the case. It is essential to our self-understanding that we recognize that many of the standard intellectual virtues we associate with analytic philosophy almost as our second nature are originally pedagogical in character. And that is, of course, to be expected of an intellectual school. To what degree their origin in pedagogical (and recruitment) needs generates intellectual problems today, if any, is something I shall consider an other time.

 

+It would be marvelous if an archive rat could find and publish this correspondence and the mutual judgments of their circle of friends. One also suspects lots of gendered patterns of exclusion got entrenched hereby.

*Nagel does not really emphasize American Realism. For details on this episode, see my "Philosophic Prophecy"

Comments

[Michael Kremer]

I have had experience with three graduate departments -- Pittsburgh as a grad student and Notre Dame and Chicago as a faculty member. None had the "standard" philosophy of language based proseminar in my time there. Pitt (80-86) had a series of four "core courses" we all had to take, in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics and Epistemology, and Ethics. The first two were viewed as equally foundational. ND (1986-2002) had a "proseminar" in which individual faculty came in and talked about their work. Chicago has a "first year seminar" but it's content can vary with instructor and is often pretty idiosyncratic, including such figures as Sellars and McDowell. Of course these are three somewhat unusual departments but also all three are top 25 grad programs or better; this is just to say the model you are talking about is not universal.

[eric schliesser]

Fair! I agree the pro-seminar is not universal, and certainly I would be amazed if the curricula in *even* the ones that treated philosophy of language as dominant core would be identical in departments that do have it. But the proseminar is not the theme of this post. What this post is really about is the intertwined dominance of philosophy of language within analytic (for some time) and canon formation (the proseminar is only an important vehicle in that to some degree), and certain intellectual virtues we associate with analytic. And while I am not suggesting this post is the final word on that, I hope to have started or restarted a discussion about it.

[Matt]

Some thoughts: When I took a proseminar at Penn (in 2001) it was taught by the ...eclectic...philosopher, James Ross. https://philpeople.org/profiles/james-ross Unlike many of the other faculty, Ross liked teaching the proseminar, and so did it fairly regularly, until he was eventually taken off of it for, I think, being a bit erratic. The official texts for the class were CI Lewis's _Mind and the World Order_, Goodman's _Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, McDowell's _Mind and World_ and Brandom's _Articulating Reasons_. (Maybe we also had the Rorty/Brandom edition of _Empricism and the Philosophy of Mind_, but I'm not sure. For some reason I remember spending a bunch of time talking about my favorite paper by Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective", but that was probably in the context of reading McDowell.) But the weird thing was that we took an unplanned two or three week detour to carefully read and discuss Aristotle's De Anima. To me that was the highlight of the class, and not only because I'd read most of the other texts before (except Lewis), but because Ross clearly liked it a lot more and so had a lot more fun teaching it.

To my mind the standout thing about the Fiegl/Sellars anthology is that, in an interview somewhere, Davidson says that he learned contemporary philosophy by reading that, rather than from what he did in grad school. That was interesting to me.

When I took "Analtyic philosophy" as an undergrad, we used Morris Weitz's anthology, "20Th Century Philosophy: the Analtyic Tradition". This volume gives a good amount of space to Russell and Moore on "realism", and in particular to the problem of universals. This was a sort of fixation with the professor I took the class from, but I think this aspect of early analytic philosophy was ignored for a long time. So, I was very happy when I saw Fraser MacBride's teriffic book, _On the Genealogy of Universals: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy_, and even happier when I learned from him that he'd read the anthology on the problem of universals that my (largely unknown) undergraduate philosophy professor had put together.

Finally, the Linsky volume is great, but it's clear to me that it hasn't been much read for many years, because almost no one I've spoken to know of the papers in it by Goodman and Morton White on the analytic/synthetic distinction, despite their being, in many ways, much clearer and more interesting attacks than Quine's.

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt,
Thank you for sharing your experience, and your recommendation of MacBride's book (which I look forward to reading). It's pretty clear that by 2001 the hold of philosophy of language as the core topic was well on its way out. (Even at anti-metaphysics Chicago, by then we were reading some David Lewis!)
From my perspective, the Weitz anthology is rather late in the game.
The Linsky volume has other peculiarities (look at the XPHI paper by Naess)! But my claim is not that it was used in proseminmars for fifty years. (The proseminar is not the topic of the post by the way.) Having said that: it did generate surprisingly many citations for an anthology. Rather my claim is that its coupling of semantics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language with a certain number of key papers/themes is a sign/expression of things to come (perhaps a partial cause or effect--that needs to be explored).
On the fate of White, in particular, within analytic philosophy, it's worth thinking a lot about how narrow the funnel is what is passed on to next generations. I find Two Dogmas fascinating, but it's not a clear paper (and the less one knows about Carnap the more opaque it becomes). And so its displacement of the White paper, especially, is of sociological and historical interest, agreed.

[Matt]

Yes, I agree on the Linsky volume here. (I also really liked his volume _Reference and Modality_ in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series. I'm not certain, but I _think_ that that series was, in the time when it was otherwise difficult to get a lot of papers together (pre-internet), pretty influential.)

I wonder if White moving to the Institute for Advanced Study (and so not having students at all, being a bit cut off from philosophy, despite still being in, if not exactly "at" Princeton, and developing some unusual interests there) lead to his earlier work being neglected. Probably that could be worked out, at least to a degree.

[Eric Schliesser]

I assume you are right about the sources of White's neglect. (Is it clear he had no involvement with PHD students at all in the last decades? I really have not looked into this) But Dan Dennett kind of shows having PhD students is not necessary for enduring attention in the field. So, I suspect the story is going to be more complicated, although the centrality of Quine and narratives that situate Kripke, Putnam, Davidson, and Lewis in relationship to Quine probably did not help.