I was struck by philosopher Chris Bertram’s remark, regarding Davidson’s death, that “a succession of philosophical giants” have died recently, mentioning David Lewis, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Bernard Williams.
The death of David Lewis (1941-2001) was the first memorial notice posted on the Update Service, back on October 16, 2001. Since then the following memorial notices for eminent senior philosophers have appeared (in this order):
Robert Nozick (1938-2002)
R.M. Hare (1919-2002)
Jerrold Katz (1932-2002)
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)
Rogers Albritton (1924-2002)
Gordon Baker (1938-2002)
Richard Jeffrey (1926-2002)
John Rawls (1921-2002)
Paul Ziff (1920-2003)
Bernard Williams (1929-2003)
Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003)
Donald Davidson (1917-2003)
James Rachels (1941-2003)
Of course, shortly before I began posting memorial notices, W.V.O. Quine died as well.
All these philosophers are known to any student of the subject, and certainly Professor Bertram’s list of the “giants” is not implausible, even if some might wonder: why not von Wright? Hare? Gadamer? Yet Professor Bertram’s comments raise a more general issue, namely, who among philosophers of the 20th-century, including those recently lost to us, will students of philosophy still be reading at the end of the 21st-century, not simply for reasons of historical interest, but because they are really “giants”?
Consider, for example, that around mid-20th-century, the Harvard Philosophy Department, then clearly the dominant department in the U.S., included on its faculty (not all at the same time) a young W.V.O. Quine, a much older C.I. Lewis, as well as Donald Williams, Ralph Barton Perry, John Wild, William Ernest Hocking, Raphael Demos.
Just a half-century later, almost all these (at the time) eminent and widely respected figures are largely forgotten. Quine, of coures, is not, and C.I. Lewis is still read. Perry, the dominant figure in value theory mid-century, is almost never discussed any longer (though he was still important enough in the 1950s that the political and legal philosopher Joel Feinberg wrote his dissertation on him!). Occasionally, a paper in metaphysics by Williams turns up, but little more.
If in the space of 50 years, most of the philosophers at the leading department in the nation can disappear in to oblivion, what does that bode for today’s great figures? Perry, Wild, Hocking, Demos, to be sure, had the misfortune to precede the rise of “analytic” philosophy, but with the subsequent demise of “analytic” philosophy as a substantive research program (thanks to Quine, among others), who is to say that philosophical fashions may not change in radical ways again?
Since the 1960s, of course, the dramatic expansion of the size of the academy and the increasing professionalization of all fields has likely had a stabilizing effect on philosophical fashions, since, as Dennett remarks in his famous essay on “Higher Order Truths about Chmess,” “a self-supporting community of experts” can sustain interest in trivial problems (and in non-trivial ones, too).
Thomas Nagel, in his 1995 collection Other Minds, makes the following pertinent observations:
“Which philosophical writings of this century will be of more than historical interest in another hundred years? Near the end of the twentieth century, very few philosophers of the nineteenth are much read: Peirce and Frege, Mill, Bentham, and Sidgwick, Hegel, Nietzsche, and perhaps Schopenhauer. [Marx is, bizarrely omitted–BL.] What will a comparable list look like next time around? But then, who would have bet on Peirce, Frege, or Nietzsche in 1894? Greatness is rare and the fourth century B.C. and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D. remain, in my view, unrivaled. The strongest recent candidate for immortality is Wittgenstein; he certainly identified a new set of problems, though his response to them is still poorly understood and very difficult to evaluate. Russell, Husserl, Sartre, and Carnap will continue to be familiar names for a while, and so, unfortunately, will Heidegger. Of those who have flourished in the second half of this century, however, it is difficult to guess who will actually be read more than a hundred years from now. I would bet on Rawls and perhaps Nozick, partly because of the linear character of the history of Western political thought and its need for exemplary figures, but I have no confidence that the most influential recent work in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language will survive. But perhaps it is the wrong question; perhaps it is possible to contribute greatly to the developent of philosophy within writing a classic.”
So Nagel thinks only Rawls and maybe Nozick–not apparently Quine, or Kripke, or Lewis, or Davidson. Rawls seems a good bet, insofar as the problems he address seem bound to be of continuing interest, and his way of addressing them fits so brilliantly in to a reasonably well-established canon of historical figures. Perhaps Nozick, too, will survive as a kind of footnote to this debate, and like Donald Williams, I expect some of his fruitful ideas and pithy formulations in epistemology and other areas will likely command some attention for another generation (if not a century from now). But ultimately much of what made Nozick an invaluable presence in the Harvard Philosophy Department–his breadth of interests, his iconoclasm–will cost him in terms of long-term interest, once his personal influence fades: namely, that he was not a systematic philosopher, with distinctive philosophical doctrines.
Quine and Kripke are bound to be read, insofar as 20th-century analytical philosophy remains at least a topic of historical interest. (Just as the professionalization of philosophy–and the endless need for doctoral students to find new topics–has brought us a large volume of scholarship on obscure figures of dubious philosophical merit associated with, e.g., 19th-century German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, so too it is hard to imagine that there won’t be for a long time scholarship on the central figures of 20th-century analytical philosophy, like Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Kripke.) The fact that Frege has fared better after a century than he did in his lifetime is also some indication that Quine and Kripke are likely to remain alive as philosophical figures, not simply historical ones, since they are party to a way of thinking about philosophy that Frege helped initiated, and which has survived sufficiently well a century later to maintain Frege’s status as a must-read figure.
For a somewhat different perspective, consider the philosophers deemed worthy of a volume in the well-known Library of Living Philosophers book series:
1939: John Dewey
1940: George Santayana
1941: Alfred North Whitehead
1942: G.E. Moore
1944: Bertrand Russell
1949: Ernst Cassirer
1952: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
1957: Karl Jaspers
1959: C.D. Broad
1963: Rudolf Carnap
1967: Martin Buber
1968: C.I. Lewis
1974: Karl Popper
1980: Brand Blanshard
1981: Jean-Paul Sartre
1984: Gabriel Marcel
1986: W.V.O. Quine
1989: Georg Henrik von Wright
1991: Charles Hartshorne
1992: A.J. Ayer
1995: Paul Ricoeur
1995: Paul Weiss
1997: Hans-Georg Gadamer
1997: Roderick M. Chisholm
1998: P.F. Strawson
1999: Donald Davidson
2001: Seyyed Hossein Nasr
2002: Marjorie Grene
Forthcoming volumes on Arthur Danto, Michael Dummett, Jaakko Hintikka, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Putting aside the non-Western figures, or those included for reasons of “diversity,” one may surely fairly observe that, as philosophers, Santayana, Weiss, Blandshard, Hartshorne, Broad, and Ayer have not fared well. Some, like Santayana again, but also Cassirer, Sartre, and perhaps Marcel, survive because of substantial interest among those outside philosophy. Danto seems an odd choice–putting aside his interesting art criticism work in The Nation–what philosophical work will he be remembered for? Putnam has changed his views more times than most men change suits, so whether he is read will be entirely a function of whether, e.g., the problems about content to which he has famously contributed remain live ones–which seems dubious, for the reasons Robert Cummins and others have noted, namely, their desperate dependence on intuitions that are easily vulnerable to changing times, developments in empirical knowledge, and so on.
So predictions anyone? Who among the living and recently lost will be read a century from now as of more than historical interest? I’ll wager on Rawls, and, with less confidence, on Quine and Kripke. (I am more confident both Quine and Kripke will be studied as figures of historical interest at least.) I’ve activated the “comments” function on this one, and invite predictions.
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