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Nov 30, 2025
Editor: The final paragraphs of Sarah Richmond’s review/essay:
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This is rich historical material, but ill suited to Schuringa’s accusatory purposes. Whatever funding Quine and Davidson may have received as young men, the work with which they later made their names, in logic and the philosophy of language, had nothing to do with “Cold War rationality”. Arguably, it had no political dimension whatsoever. As for Davis, it was not her philosopher colleagues who evicted her; they defended her against the UCLA administration. Furthermore, although Davis’s work may not have received particular attention, much of the recent philosophical literature on academic freedom and, more widely, free speech problematizes it as a liberal ideal.
Schuringa’s account is presented as an exercise in ideological critique. It aims to be “in line with a Marxist tradition” while avoiding crude or reductive approaches. But this potentially valuable project imposes demands that Schuringa does not meet. We need to be shown how analytic philosophy is ideological; how, for example, it bolsters the status quo. I’m not sure if the information that Schuringa provides about the social background of the philosophers he discusses – Quine was “the son of a businessman who would go on to found a tyre mould company” – is meant to be relevant here, but it surely isn’t. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both came from bourgeois families.
As if to make his task even harder, Schuringa decides not to focus – as one might expect – on political and moral philosophy, but instead on logic, metaphysics and epistemology. Quine’s vehement dispute with Ruth Barcan Marcus about modal logic is a case in point. Their dispute turned on whether formal logic (which translates into symbolic language the structure of propositions and arguments) should or could incorporate modal concepts such as necessity and possibility. If this arcane disagreement has an ideological aspect, which is hard to believe, it needs to be exposed to the clear light of day. Schuringa appears to believe, as his subtitle hints, that apolitical philosophy is impossible. He views any apparent neutrality with suspicion, as if that necessarily amounts to reactionary political quietism. (Qui ne dit mot consent.) As for epistemology and metaphysics, which have historically steered clear of politics, recent work – much of it written by women – has introduced social and political elements into these areas. This forms part of a wider “social turn” in analytic philosophy which Schuringa notes, but nonetheless slights on the grounds that it is insufficiently radical.
In the same vein, Schuringa downplays the criticisms made by insiders. For instance, Bernard Williams, whose training was analytic, has ridiculed the approach on several occasions for its nit-picking, scientistic tendencies and neglect of history. Like Schuringa, he also roundly rejects utilitarian ethics. One might have expected all this to be music to Schuringa’s ears but he damns it with faint praise, presumably because Williams (a hero of mine) is not inspired by Marxism.
In general, Schuringa’s verdict on analytic philosophy is that it leads to a dead end. But where does he want it to lead? Many philosophical questions in the western tradition were first formulated in ancient Greece. If they remain unanswered, it may be because, since they do not seek matters of fact, they are not definitively answerable.
Analytic philosophy has attracted some fine minds, who have contributed to various areas of the discipline. Examples include John Rawls (political philosophy), Christine Korsgaard (moral philosophy), John McDowell (philosophy of mind), Dorothy Edgington (logic) and David Lewis (metaphysics). New topics, some of which were historically impossible in Plato’s time, have also emerged. This list would include the ethics of abortion and disability, posthumanism, feminist philosophy and the philosophy of AI. Writings such as these may not have solved the problems they address, but they have expanded our understanding and introduced new perspectives on them. Hardly a waste of time.
Editor: Jonathan Ree’s review of Schuringa book is more cosmopolitan in it’s outlook and approach, even when he is critical of Schuringa.
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For Schuringa, analytic philosophy ‘comes into its own’ in the United States in the Cold War era, slowly developing into the ‘monolith that we now know’. The analytic philosophers were, it seems, willing to do as much as they could to make America a ‘bulwark against totalitarianism’, especially after several leftist colleagues lost their jobs following appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Analytic philosophy as a whole began to show ‘close affinities’ with two better-established academic enterprises—‘marginalism in economics’ and ‘behaviourism in psychology’—emulating their project of replacing the amateurish value-driven inquiries of the past with dispassionate, specialized professional research. The government-funded rand Corporation sponsored several prominent analytic philosophers—W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson for instance—to conduct research into game theory and the mathematics of rational choice, with a view to buttressing the intellectual defences of American free-market capitalism.
This is a brave and original book, but Schuringa’s claim that it is an exercise in ‘social history’ is a little misleading. His narrative is constructed not from data about social classes, social trends or social movements, but from profiles of individual analytic philosophers—more than a hundred of them, by my count. He also speaks at one point of practising ‘psycho-social history’, but instead of exploring the inner compulsions of analytic philosophers he provides compressed summaries of their principal publications, accompanied by sketches of their public careers, focused on top jobs at elite universities. He tells us, for example, that Ruth Barcan Marcus ‘genuinely established a quantified modal logic’, for which, after suffering institutionalized misogyny for many years, she was eventually rewarded with a named chair at Yale; but that this displeased the imperious Quine of Harvard, who stuck to his dictum that ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’. Those who care about such things will protest that Quine was really referring to ‘bound variables’ or ‘variables of quantification’, rather than variables in general; but readers unfamiliar with logical quantifiers, predicate logic and modality are likely to end up feeling browbeaten and rather confused.
Schuringa builds on this foundation to argue that analytic philosophy as a whole—or at least ‘analytic philosophy proper’—is a suitable case for what he calls ‘ideology critique, in line with a Marxist tradition’. He is well versed in Marxism—he has just published Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (2025)—and this could have been the prelude to some high-wire Marxist hermeneutics; at the beginning of the book he suggests that ‘the mechanisms by which liberalism drives liberalism are less far to seek than, say, the mechanisms by which liberalism drives the development of modal logic’. In practice, however, he finds that ‘the underlying ideologies are not difficult to read off’. John Rawls, for instance, in his celebrated Theory of Justice (1971), set out to revive ‘social contract theory’—the basic template for individualistic bourgeois liberalism—and gave it such allure that even radical critics were, according to Schuringa, ‘led back into the ideology of liberalism’.
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Schuringa recognizes, however, that most analytic philosophers take very little interest in political philosophy; on the other hand, nearly all of them profess admiration for the eighteenth-century Scots philosopher David Hume, from whom, according to Schuringa, they have imbibed the idea of the individual self as an ‘autonomous subject’ confronting ‘a world of inert “matters of fact”’. That interpretation is not incontestable: Hume famously described the self as a ‘fiction’ imposed on ‘a collection of different perceptions’. But Schuringa is convinced that the dichotomy between individual subjectivity and external facts is part of a ‘Humean tradition’ whose incorrigible individualism ensures that ‘the ideology of analytic philosophy is that of liberalism’. Analytic philosophy ‘wears its social function on its sleeve’, he says, and ‘its practitioners speak with one voice to feed their own ideology back to themselves’.
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This system suffered severe shocks in the course of the nineteenth century, as university systems expanded to cater for the sons of the bourgeoisie, who sought exam-based qualifications in the hope of entering as quickly as possible into a modern professional career. The old curriculum was dismantled and levelled down, and philosophy ceased to be the keystone of the entire arts course, becoming simply one academic discipline alongside many others.
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Several luminaries of the new dispensation—Edmund Husserl in Germany, for instance, and Bertrand Russell in Britain—believed they were inaugurating a new era in which philosophy could free itself from the drudgery of teaching and textual interpretation, and become a field of pure intellectual research, comparable to advanced physics or mathematics.
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And even where philosophical education took an analytical turn, it continued to be bound up with the study of Plato and Aristotle, often in the original Greek. Oxford University, for example, now had a complement of almost fifty philosophical tutors, but Gilbert Ryle, leader of the analytic modernizers, noted that there was still no place for a ‘Greek-less philosophy don’. The young Iris Murdoch took delight in teaching philosophy at Oxford, and like many of her colleagues she attached special importance to Plato and Aristotle, seeing them as an antidote to the ‘dryness’, as she put it, of life in ‘a scientific and anti-metaphysical age’.
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Schuringa passes over these moments in educational history in order to present ‘analytic ideology’ as a ‘hegemon’ in the field of ‘politics’. Analytic philosophy, for him, is not only ‘the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world’, but also a ‘hegemonic form of philosophy in the service of liberal-colonial capital’.
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We are also invited—on the authority of F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence—to deride the ‘modernist’ aspirations of the Bloomsbury group. In the end analytic philosophy is deemed to have sunk into ‘methodological decrepitude’, which means that it now functions, as Schuringa alleges more than once, as ‘the antithesis of philosophy’.
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He might perhaps have referred to the campaigns of mass philosophical education conducted by Communist parties and some of their socialist rivals in the 1920s and 1930s: they certainly involved a concerted philosophical onslaught on liberalism, even if, as I argued in Proletarian Philosophers (1984), the outcomes were rather disappointing. But all he comes up with is a suggestion that genuine philosophy ought to give expression to ‘the fundamental human impulse to expand the imagination’, which seems a little vague, not to say somewhat bourgeois.
Editor: Jonathan Ree’s final paragraphs offer to the reader what she is after !
A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is full of ingenious argument and unusual information, but it fails to deliver the political knock-out that it promises. Schuringa is surely right to think that ‘no one is exempt from having class interests speak through them’, but in that case it should not come as a surprise that analytic philosophers employed by bourgeois universities tend to be bearers of liberal ideology. (On the other hand the continued salience of Plato and Aristotle—two great fountains of anti-liberalism—might seem rather anomalous.) Moreover he offers no evidence that students of analytic philosophy are exposed to larger doses of bourgeois liberalism than students of other subjects, or that they are especially susceptible to it: my own experience would suggest, in fact, that lots of them end up thoroughly disgruntled, and wishing they had studied something else.
Schuringa seems to think that analytic philosophy deserves a special scolding, on account of ‘the powerful critical forces that its hegemony helps to keep suppressed’. But even if he is right about the ‘powerful critical forces’ challenging modern capitalist societies, he is surely mistaken in supposing that analytic philosophy plays a significant part in keeping them in check. Back in 1957, Perry Anderson described it as a ‘peripheral phenomenon’, and its proportional presence in educational institutions has dwindled drastically since that time. Analytic philosophy has always been a minority pursuit, rather like fly-fishing or musical serialism but considerably smaller. It barely exists outside colleges and universities in the English-speaking world, and even there it accounts for little more than three thousand instructors out of a total of more than one and a half million—in other words, around 0.2%.
Schuringa’s argument made me think of the famous butterfly effect, but in reverse: a massive global cause—‘liberal-colonial capital’—invoked to explain a minuscule effect. And while his vehemence is impressive, it is a little overdone. There is surely something to be said in favour of philosophical teachers with a knack for turning the tables on their students: for persuading them to talk and to explain, if they can, exactly what they mean. The technique is obviously individualistic—it aims, after all, to get individuals to think for themselves—and it may also be biased, for better or for worse, towards liberal ideology. But if analytic philosophy is a hegemon, it is a diminutive one: a superstructure of a superstructure of a superstructure, and unlikely to make much difference to the rest of the world.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii154/articles/jonathan-ree-the-analytic-ideology
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