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| ISBN-13: | 9780810146075 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2023 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 529,473 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Chapter One
Philosophy's Family Secret
The Nature and Impact
of the McCarthy Era
The fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) was held in Toronto from December 27 to December 29, 1950. It seems to have been an enlightening and successful affair, as well as a rather cozy one. Of the division's 744 members (APA 24:55), only a couple hundred presumably chanced the train rides, primitive aircraft, or the two-lane highways required, in those days, to get to the capital of Ontario—and to the redoubtable Canadian winter. Those who did so were amply rewarded. True, they had no choice about what to hear: as befits so small an organization, all ten sessions were plenary and everyone attended them. But those sessions included, among other things, discussions of "Recent Trends in Philosophy," "The Modern Distemper of Philosophy" (with George Boas and Gilbert Ryle), "One Hundred Years of Canadian Philosophy," "Problems of General Systems Theory" (with Carl Hempel and Hans Jonas), and "Leibniz and the Timaeus." Evenings brought the meetings of no fewer than three associated societies: the Association for Realistic Philosophy, the Personalist Discussion Group, and the Peirce Society.
The traditional presidential address was given that year by Professor Arthur E. Murphy of Cornell University, who had been elected president the year before. Its title was "The Common Good." Murphy analyzed this expression in strikingly contemporary terms, seeing it as both "a term of praise and an instrument ofpower"(APA 24:3). Murphy also took the occasion to reflect on philosophy itself, the discipline and where it was going. Here—along with expressing the typically American inability to acknowledge Canadian sovereignty—he sounded a note of caution: "There are enemies outside and enemies within our national borders. And there is also the enemy within ourselves—the pressure of fear and confusion and partisan advantage to break down those hard-won habits of rationally self-controlled behavior in which agreement is maintained through understanding and freedom actualized in community. A philosophy that can tell us how to make our ideas clear may be an aid to honest speech and wise decision in the years that lie ahead" (APA 24:18).
There was, as we will see in chapter 2, much going on at that particular meeting, and the ominous tone of Murphy's comments was fully justified. But I will come back to Eastern Division, for it was not the only part of the APA to hold meetings that year. Eastern Division, in fact, is only one of three separate divisions constituting the American Philosophical Association. This structure is based upon the most philosophically irrelevant of possible criteria: geographic location. Regardless of their interests and approaches, philosophers belonged, then as now, to either Eastern, Western (now Central), or Pacific Division of the APA. Each division has its own officers and holds its own meetings in its own area of the country. Eastern Division is by far the largest and, partly because most job interviews take place at its December meeting, the most important division. But the fact remains that, in all strictness, Murphy was the president of only about half of the APA's membership.
Five months later, at the beginning of May, Western Division held its yearly meeting in Evanston, Illinois. D. W. Gottshalk, from the University of Illinois, was its president, and in his address he too sounded a note of caution. His talk was entitled "Twentieth Century Theme" and, though with the male chauvinism typical of the time, he had this to say about philosophy itself:
Today, philosophy seems to be in a lull. The greatest living philosophers are venerable old men whose main work is done, and the younger men have not yet grown to greatness. In this situation, amid the shattering perplexities of twentieth-century life, a natural impulse has been to mark off some limited domain for attention, and to concentrate great effort on it. Perhaps the most energized phase of philosophy in the last three decades has been its investigations of language, symbolic systems, and techniques of analysis.... But philosophy is more than a technological enterprise. As our whole argument has tended to show, it can reach to the presuppositions of our common life, and submit them to critical examination. (APA 24:28)
The same kind of reflection on the discipline of philosophy itself also found its way, if only cursorily, into Pacific Division's presidential address. Speaking on "The Science of Creation" at the divisional meeting, held in Berkeley simultaneously with Eastern Division's meeting, Hugh Miller of the University of California, Los Angeles, pointed out that "the philosopher should learn that to defend science he must defend it in its social-economic consequences" (APA 24:44). Whether this was or was not an accurate reflection on philosophy or good advice to philosophers, it would seem strange to many later philosophers, who held that science was fully legitimated as a quest for truth and were rather dismissive of its socioeconomic consequences.
By 1961, a different format was firmly in place for APA presidential addresses. The three divisional presidents, Carl G. Hempel, C. L. Stevenson, and A. I. Melden, all adhered to this second format, as have most presidential addresses since. Hempel spoke on "Rational Action," Stevenson on "Relativism and Non-Relativism in the Theory of Value," and Melden on "Reasons for Action and Matters of Fact." Each of these papers took a philosophical issue and argued for a thesis that would resolve it. None of them even mentioned philosophy itself. The presidential address, in other words, had become an occasion to do philosophy rather than to reflect upon it. Though a reflective dimension could be found in some later addresses, just as some unreflective addresses could be found earlier, a balance had clearly tipped. It has remained tipped. In 1997, the most recent year available as I write, the three presidential addresses—by Arthur Fine, Philip Kitcher, and Robert Nozick—all involved the notions of objectivity and truth, with Nozick and Kitcher defending and Fine diffusing them. But none of them even broached the relation of objectivity and truth, if any, to philosophy itself.
This change in format went along with a significant change in personnel. Unlike Murphy, Gottshalk, and Miller, the speakers from 1961 whose names I just gave are all still well known today. Hempel was one of the important logical positivists, an approach whose influence today is still enormous. The main claim of the positivists, of which we will hear more, was that if a statement could not be verified, it had no meaning. Though most philosophers would now disagree with this, it remains beguiling in its simplicity and self-assurance, so influential that much subsequent American philosophy since has been informally characterized as suffering from post-positivist depression.
Stevenson was a leading proponent of a related view in ethics, emotivism. He argued that though ethical statements cannot be verified and so do not have meaning (that is, they do not convey information), they are not wholly trivial. They are in fact very important because they recommend attitudes. If I say "Murder is evil," for example, I am not telling you anything about murder. I am expressing an attitude that can be formulated as "I disapprove of murder, and you should do likewise." Melden, though not as clearly identified with a particular approach as the other two, was an influential ethicist and rights theorist and was still publishing in 1988.
The doctrines and approaches of emotivism and logical positivism, however, did not survive as long as their authors' reputations. Indeed, they have largely fallen by the philosophical wayside. Many if not most philosophers today hold views more akin to those of Murphy than to those of Hempel and Stevenson. Yet the names of the two later philosophers remain much more familiar to us today. Why is this? Why are Hempel, Stevenson, and Melden, whose presidential addresses are now almost forty years back, known and remembered today whereas Murphy, Gottshalk, and Miller, only ten years older, are not? Is it possible that the emotivists and logical positivists are on "our" side of some historical break, while their predecessors by a few years are not? What might this have to do with the change in format for presidential addresses? Did the disciplinary mores themselves also change? In short: was the decade of the 1950s a sort of axial period during which a new (and apparently unreflective) paradigm, represented by new people, got put in place for American philosophy?
The answer would seem to be obvious from demographics alone. In 1950, the APA proudly boasted almost 1,400 members (APA 24:55). In 1990, it would have close to 9,000 members, and the 1995 membership list (in APA 69, no. 2) would run to 145 pages. In part because of the increasing ease of travel, attendance at the Eastern Division meeting, the largest of the three yearly meetings, is now ten to fifteen times as great as it was in 1950. The fact that the overwhelming majority of APA members are teachers in postsecondary education points to something already well known to American academics: that there was an explosive growth in the number of teaching positions in philosophy after 1950. Moreover, given that the philosophy job market virtually collapsed in 1967, that growth lasted for less than twenty years. Hence, the demographic history of American philosophy does not exhibit a steady pattern of retirements and hirings over the postwar period. Instead, it is overpopulated with people who entered the job market between 1950 and 1967.
Though the baby boom generation is working its way through American society at large like an elephant through a python, in philosophy it is the next older generation—often called the silent generation—that has, for the last thirty years, constituted the bulk of the profession. Among them are many former students and junior colleagues of professors like Hempel, Stevenson, and Melden, who remember them well and often fondly (as I remember Stevenson). To put the matter in brief: because of the way the job market has functioned, many American philosophers are about the same age. They have good memories of the people who educated them, but none at all (apparently) of those a few years older, and they have taught their own students accordingly.
What about the disciplinary mores, the nature of philosophy itself? That American philosophy received a new and enduring shape in the years after World War II is confirmed by at least a couple of its most eminent representatives. For in general, American philosophy is what is called analytical philosophy; and both Richard Rorty and Richard J. Bernstein—themselves past presidents of Eastern Division—have publicly noted that analytical philosophy came to dominance in American universities in the early 1950s. This was a major revolution—an influential British anthology of analytical philosophy was even entitled The Revolution in Philosophy. Like all intellectual revolutions, this one made those who came even just before it, like Gottshalk, Miller, and Murphy, seem antiquated and forgettable.
Silence, Isolation, and Secrets
Demographics and meeting programs thus suggest that the postwar years brought two significant developments in American philosophy: an important change in philosophical personnel and a revolutionary change in philosophical orientation. These developments have been maintained since, which suggests that we should take a close look at those years if we are to understand American philosophy today.
Dysfunctional families, however much they may differ from one another, tend to engage in two types of behavior. One is that their talk diverges from their reality: they have a lot of family secrets, such as alcoholism or even incest, which may be very obvious but which, like the proverbial elephant in the living room, are never openly acknowledged. Partly to preserve those secrets, such families often tend to isolate themselves from the surrounding community. Two characteristics of American philosophy today push us toward viewing it, in some ways, like such a dysfunctional family. One, which I have noted above, is the ongoing and general absence of reflection on the discipline. The second is philosophy's self-imposed isolation from other fields. Chapters 3 and 4 will discuss both of these phenomena, and some of their consequences, in more detail. For the moment, I am interested in how they may have come about.
Reflective comments on American philosophy, its prospects, and its needs have not merely grown rare at the APA since the days of Gottshalk and Miller, they have become almost completely absent. Even the most specialized discourses in the academy, from time to time, publish work by senior figures reflecting upon where the field is and where it is going. Consider the important 1991 anthology on philosophy of science edited by Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper, and J. D. Trout. The articles routinely rehearse the entire development of the discipline before making their own contribution, and every section of the anthology—except for the final one on the philosophy of psychology—begins with an essay by a logical positivist, that is, by one of the early figures in the field. But philosophy in general, it appears, feels no such need to confront its own history.
In 1964, for example, the leading American philosopher of his generation, W. V. O. Quine, responded as follows to questions put to him about philosophy by Robert Ostermann, the editor of the National Observer: "'[P]hilosophy' is one of a number of blanket terms used by deans and librarians in their necessary task of grouping the myriad topics and problems of science and scholarship under a manageable number of headings.... I am not alluding to the fragmentation of specialties; I speak of the insignificance of a certain verbal grouping." Contemporary postmodern proponents of the death of philosophy are thus too late; for America's most prominent philosopher had denied philosophy's existence, as anything other than a flatus vocis, thirty-five years ago.
Quine's refusal to reflect on philosophy has since been upheld by his colleagues. One ransacks the pages of the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and the Review of Metaphysics looking for articles that reflect intelligently on philosophy in America, its problems, and its prospects. Largely, though not wholly, in vain.
Absences are of course difficult to demonstrate, but the change in format for APA presidential addresses is telling in itself. Presidential addresses to the APA are not, to be sure, the only places where the need for reflection might be addressed; but if any prominent analytical philosopher has addressed it elsewhere in the last twenty years, I have not found where. As Richard Rorty has written, "Analytic philosophers are not much interested in either defining or defending the presuppositions of their work. Indeed, the gap between 'analytic' and 'non-analytic' philosophers nowadays coincides pretty closely with the division between philosophers who are not interested in historico-metaphysical reflections on their own activity and philosophers who are."
Such absence of critical reflection, we have seen, was not always the rule for American philosophers, at least not for those elected to the presidencies of the APA. And it is certainly not the rule for philosophy in general. Indeed, critical reflection on itself is traditionally one of philosophy's most central and distinctive parts—for philosophers since Plato's Republic have been charged with establishing not only the starting points of other disciplines but also of their own (Republic 7:533c). Gottshalk alludes to this at the conclusion of his presidential address to Western Division:
The truth is, whether we like it or not, philosophers today have a tremendous work on their hands. This work is nothing more, yet nothing less, than revealing our civilization in its true light, of depicting its elemental actualities, and its inherent and imperative possibilities. It is the task of critical reflective self-understanding. This task is what the great philosophers have always faced and tried to perform in their own times, in light of the evident features of their existence. It is, as I see it, the obligation and the opportunity that we have in our day, to gain the greatness that philosophy at its best has always had. (APA 24:30; emphasis added)
The recent silence of philosophers concerning philosophy itself thus amounts to the professional abandonment of what for over two millennia, from Plato to Gottshalk, was central to them: that of seeking critical, reflective self-understanding. That the philosophical profession in America has so largely, and quietly, abandoned this task is certainly odd enough to call for an explanation.
Several are possible. One is that American philosophers are simply too busy doing philosophy to step back and reflect on their discipline. That is, in a way, very true. Philosophers in the United States are also busy teaching and mentoring students, serving on committees, conducting relationships, raising children, coping with illnesses, and performing the many other chores that fall to human beings. But that the multifaria of life leave little time for philosophizing is nothing new; and that philosophers should be too busy doing philosophy to engage in one of philosophy's traditionally central tasks merely epitomizes the issue I am raising here.
The distinction between reflecting on philosophy and doing philosophy may seem, at first glance, utterly specious; but, in fact, there is an honorable philosophical side to it. The refusal of American philosophers to reflect on philosophy can be seen as part of their positivist heritage, for as Habermas writes, "that we disavow reflection is positivism." This disavowal is not mere spleen, however. It dates back at least to one of analytical philosophy's founding distinctions, that between language and metalanguage. This was advanced by Bertrand Russell to solve (among other things) what is called the paradox of self-reference, the problem that arises with sentences that proclaim their own falsity: if "This sentence is false" is in fact true, then that sentence must be false; but if it is false that the sentence is false, then it must be true (and so, once again, false). Russell solves this by asserting as a general principle that any logically correct language has a specific domain of objects it can talk about and that its own sentences cannot be part of that domain. Hence, if I talk about a sentence such as the one above, I cannot be doing so in the language in which that sentence is written, but in another language, or metalanguage. If philosophy is, as it is, a kind of language, then any language that talks about philosophy must not be philosophy but some other discourse. It follows that reflections such as those in Murphy's and Gottshalk's presidential addresses are not philosophy. And since the job of philosophers is to do philosophy, it would be mere laziness or tomfoolery for them to engage in reflection on philosophy.
But even if we conceded all this (and the unspoken presuppositions which, as will be seen, it contains), it would not follow that reflection on philosophy should be tacitly banned from its public journals and meetings. Such a ban, in short, is too convenient to be wholly comfortable. For if philosophy professors provide no account of themselves, of how they got to be where they are or of where they are going, then the impression given to their students is inevitably that they somehow dropped from heaven. What drops from heaven is hardly open to discussion, much less to criticism. The usefulness of such a standpoint to the professor can hardly be disputed. But neither can its harm to the student.
Another response, also justified in its way, would be that such reflection has, in fact, begun. The view that the origins of analytical philosophy are in fact relevant to its current situation has come, in spite of its radicality, to be rather widely accepted. Scholars such as Michael Dummett, Michael Friedman, and Peter Hylton have begun to reconstruct the philosophical debates of the early century, when analytical philosophy first arose in England. But even those thinkers are far removed from the kind of reflection we saw in Gottshalk, Miller, and Murphy, for their books focus on the philosophical origins of analytical philosophy; that is, they remain within the basic view that philosophy is an autonomous enterprise whose nature, though it changes, is not deeply affected by the kinds of cultural and political factors that all three of the earlier philosophers addressed.
The reasonable next step would be to admit that some, at least, of contemporary philosophy's origins may not be philosophical at all but rather lie in the politics and culture of the historical period in which current American philosophy took shape. If so, then those circumstances need to be discussed and understood. Even those who are wholly resolute in their ahistorical view of their discipline—those many who, in the words of Peter Hylton, see analytical philosophy "as taking place within a single timeless moment"—cannot escape this. For in the eyes of such people, political and cultural circumstances are failings and defects that at the very least need to be weeded out. You can't weed them if you don't see them, and you can't see them if you won't look for them.
A third possibility is the one appealed to by Quine in my quotation of him above, from 1964: that philosophy is simply too disparate a set of enterprises to be unified other than nominally. As I mentioned, this view has been maintained in practice since. The subject index for the Journal of Philosophy from 1990 to 1996, published annually, does not, for example, contain a single entry for "philosophy," though there are entries for subfields, such as "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of language."
But this appeal to (intellectual) diversity raises two important questions. One is whether mainstream American philosophy really is as diverse as Quine and others suggest. Perhaps its seeming diversity really masks an underlying unity. I will argue later that this is in fact the case. For the moment, let me just note that the diversity in question is simply asserted by Quine, not shown or argued for.
Second, even if the description is accurate, should philosophy be left in such a disjoined state? Would it not be worthwhile to try to give it more coherence than it happens, on this view, to have? Is it not precisely the job of the most influential thinkers in a given discipline to give it some degree, though not overmuch, of unity and direction? Is there not a strange abdication taking place in these words from the man who, at the time he wrote them, was America's most influential philosopher?
A fourth possible reason for contemporary American philosophy's neglect of reflection is that philosophers simply do not have answers to the kinds of questions that such reflection poses. The failure of the philosophical establishment, over the last twenty years, to find a persuasive answer to Richard Rorty's critique in his 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature suggests this. But if that is the case, then we need to explain the persistence of an approach that has been unable to respond to such a serious challenge. If Rorty finished them off, why are the analysts still here? Could it be that what holds them in place is political circumstance rather than philosophical merit? Is it possible that analytical philosophy, the most resolutely apolitical paradigm in the humanities today, is itself more a political than a philosophical phenomenon?
There is one more possible explanation. Could it be that open reflection on the history of and prospects for American philosophy would bring something unpleasant to light? Some dark family secret that those in the know are afraid to mention and that those not in the know are afraid to see? Something like little Bertie's strange resemblance to the milkman or Grandpa's year at the Betty Ford Clinic?
All of these explanations probably hold to some degree. In this book I will be primarily concerned with the final possibility: that there is something important buried in American philosophy's not-so-distant past—something that many philosophers do not want to face, even though it explains much about the structure of their discipline.
American philosophy's disavowal of reflection is not the only clue that something is wrong with it. In spite of efforts to break down some of the barriers between philosophy and other disciplines—efforts that are beginning to pay off in philosophy of science—American philosophy remains strangely isolated from other fields, not only in the humanities and the sciences but within philosophy itself. As Richard Rorty writes, analytical philosophy "has pretty well closed itself off from contact with non-analytic philosophy, and lives in its own world." Some of the criticisms of analytical philosophy made by postanalytical philosophers such as Rorty and Stanley Cavell actually suggest a discipline that defines itself as being not merely isolated but under attack.
As Giovanna Borradori summarizes them, those criticisms maintain that analytical philosophy "canonized a philosophical discourse that remains within rigid disciplinary and professional confines, bleakly isolating philosophy from history, culture, and society" (Borradori 20). Rigid confinement and bleak isolation sound, at first hearing, like the defensive posture of a threatened discipline—threatened, presumably, by that from which it seeks to isolate itself: the historical circumstances of the surrounding culture and society. In the case of philosophy this posture is, like the absence of reflection it exhibits, mysterious, for if we look at analytical philosophy today, comfortably ensconced in the best American universities to the virtual exclusion of other approaches, we are at a loss to identify what those threatening circumstances might be. Surely a country that can tolerate Watergate and l'affaire Lewinsky is not going to shower hemlock on a few philosophers!
If we look back fifty years, however, a possible answer emerges, A serious threat might have been posed to philosophy by the anti-intellectualism of the McCarthy era, if it were strongly enough directed against philosophers. And if so—once again—it is unlikely that we will fully understand analytical philosophy, or achieve an adequate critical appreciation of it, until we understand how and to what degree it served as a response to such specific historical circumstances. And we cannot understand those circumstances without setting them into a wider context.
... as Apple Pie, American Suspicions of Philosophy
As Richard Hofstadter showed thirty-five years ago, hostility to philosophy—as to other manifestations of intellect—is a long tradition in America. The United States was the first country to be founded on a philosophy—a sometimes uneasy synthesis of Locke and the Scottish enlightenment. This places philosophy in a most peculiar position. Because philosophical work underpins the Republic, philosophy is very important. But, for that reason, it is also very important that philosophy be over with, done, its basic issues settled, for any innovation calls old doctrines into question—and if the innovation is in philosophy, those doctrines could be the precise ones that serve as the foundation of the Republic. Under such a regime, philosophy cannot be what most philosophers today think it should be—an ongoing process of critical inquiry that can lead anywhere and overturn anything. Rather, it must present itself publicly, if at all, as a body of established doctrine, like geometry or arithmetic, or as inquiry that, though critical, has somehow been diverted into nonthreatening fields.
American suspicion of philosophy is enhanced by the country's Puritan heritage. Hofstadter has brilliantly traced the evangelical roots of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Puritan ministers, he points out, were by comparison very intellectually accomplished and alive. But it should not be forgotten that the intellect they so admired was quite different from the critical, skeptical modern or postmodern mind that we see today. Puritanism was classically directed, of course, against the temptations of the body. But the mind presents a similar set of dangers: free thinking and adultery went together as early as The Scarlet Letter. Hence, those today who think they need to resist, for example, the intellectual seductions of modern science—the fundamentalists—are not simply a deluded tribe of media pulpiteers. They carry forward an ancient and deeply rooted American tradition, one that is as deeply disturbed by the free use of the human mind as by that of the human body.
American suspicions of gratifying either the mind or the body came together over a philosopher in 1940, when Bertrand Russell arrived in the United States to teach at City College, New York. Russell was better known in this country as a libertine atheist than as a mathematical logician, and his pedagogical employment was pronounced by a judge to be dangerous to the public health, safety, and morals. Russell, who was in serious financial difficulties at the time, had to withdraw his acceptance of the post.
World War II made this already chilly climate notably harsher, and five years after Russell's fiasco Brand Blanshard could write: "[M]athematics, physics, engineering, medicine—all the sciences, theoretic and applied, that have to do with the art of war are riding high; the humanities, including philosophy, have gone into temporary eclipse."
Eight years after that, Blanshard himself became an example of American dislike of free-thinking philosophers. He had sent a letter to the editor of the New York Times (July 1, 1953) saying that as an American traveling in Europe he found it tiresome to have to apologize continually for Joseph McCarthy. This drew a scorching tirade from William F. Buckley:
What about Mr. Blanshard—Phi Beta Kappa, senior professor of philosophy in Yale University, sometime co-president of the American Philosophical Association, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences? Why Mr. Blanshard is, in respect of ... McCarthyism, a charlatan. He has, in fact, according to all academic rules, given his university grounds for dismissing him. Not, heaven knows, because he disagrees with McCarthy—in American universities, people are hired, not fired, because they disagree with McCarthy—but because to make such a statement as that McCarthy is engaged in searching out "men who have dared to utter liberal opinions, even in the remote past, and branding them as Communists," is to say a demonstrable untruth, and the person who utters it, in the teeth of the evidence, demonstrably ignorant or mendacious.
The untruth in Blanshard's statement is not demonstrable. In fact, it is not even existent. Evidence that McCarthy's movement, in many if not all cases, went well beyond merely targeting Communists is overwhelming. I will provide examples and countering testimony shortly. For the moment, I will simply note that Alistair Cooke, no lackey of the Communist line, had predicted four years previously that "once [accused spy Alger] Hiss was put on the stand there would be a movement to bring old and young New Dealers to trial, not literally, but to make them judge their past life in the present hysteria." The views Blanshard expressed, in other words, were widely and respectably shared.
But the implications of Buckley's quote reach far beyond its injustice to Blanshard. The view that ignorance and mendacity—derelictions with respect to truth—should be punished by dismissal from the university will play a long role in American thought policing, which usually presents itself as a defense of truth. Consider the following quote from Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina and a member of the House Judiciary Committee of the Ninety-first Congress, apropos of the Clinton impeachment, which he had just helped orchestrate: "What we're witnessing here is a conflict, a clash between two very different views. One view is that there is absolute truth; the other view is that everything is relative. [Clinton] is the epitome of someone who says there is no truth, everything is relative. For those of us who believe there's truth, that telling the truth is crucial and that there are right statements and there are wrong statements, it is incumbent upon us to act."
Though the differences are obvious, what Buckley and Inglis share is a view that will be stated repeatedly by McCarthyite forces and that will become constitutive of American philosophy itself: that no professor has a right to speak anything but the truth (or what she thinks is the truth or will lead to the truth). What neither Buckley nor Inglis tells us, of course, is how to go about finding the truth. Inglis, even in 1998, presents absolute truth as an object of belief, a matter of faith—as the sheer opposite, then, of philosophy. The weight of the ignorance in Buckley's book can be gauged from the fact that immediately after what I have quoted, he appeals to Socrates against Blanshard. Buckley seems wholly unaware that Socrates was a skeptic, a self-proclaimed apostle, not of truth but of ignorance—ignorance that he demonstrated over and over again in himself and others!
American hostility to philosophy, then, did not end with the chastising of Bertrand Russell. The cold war extended militaristic practices almost five decades into peacetime and made the "temporary" in Blanshard's judgment, quoted earlier, sound naively optimistic. When, as an undergraduate in the mid-1960s, I took a course in journalism, "philosopher" was on the list of pejorative terms. Who had time for philosophy when there was a war to win, appliances to buy, and a continent with some corners yet untamed?
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| List of Abbreviations | xiii | |
| Introduction | xv | |
| 1 | Philosophy's Family Secret: The Nature and Impact of the McCarthy Era | 3 |
| 2 | We're All Scientists Here: Early Effects of the McCarthy Era on American Philosophy | 33 |
| 3 | Has It Stopped Yet? The McCarthy Era's Lasting Effects on American Philosophy | 59 |
| 4 | Culture Wars, Culture Bores: Philosophy's Absence from American Academic Culture | 91 |
| 5 | Philosophy out of the Ditch: A Post-McCarthy Paradigm | 127 |
| Notes | 169 | |
| Bibliography | 193 | |
| Index | 205 |
What People are Saying About This
This book is excellent. There are many books on the market that have given an assessment (positively or negatively) of the intellectual tenor of the times, and though many of these have been well done, McCumber has done so not only in cultural critical terms, but in philosophical terms; he has shown the relevance of cultural issues for philosophy and the relevance of philosophy for culture.
—(Reginald Lilly, Skidmore College)