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American Philosophy Today

Brian Leiter

UPDATE: I’m moving this to the front, since this was originally posted on a Saturday morning. Comments so far have been extremely helpful; more welcome.

========================

Peter Momtchiloff, the philosophy editor at OUP, has asked me to prepare a short essay (1,000 words) for the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy on “American Philosophy Today” which “looks at what the intellectual trends and changes have been over the last couple of decades–what have been the areas of particular activity, how philosophy is different now from what it was in previous decades, what the great centres of philosophical research have been and how they differ in character from each other, who some of the leading figures have been.” (Note that many of the leading figures will have separate entries, so it won’t be necessary to go in to great detail on them.)

I would be grateful for advice from philosophers on what they would like/expect to see in such an entry. I’ve activated comments; no anonymous postings. Thanks.

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17 responses to “American Philosophy Today”

  1. jdsm

    Maybe you can complete your assignment for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy first. It's more interesting.

    Reply
  2. Brian Leiter

    One well-known philosopher wrote via e-mail with some useful observations that I want to share (since others may want to comment or endorse this view):

    "Two big trends in the last twenty years are (a) the return of metaphysics with lots of good work, (b) the increase in interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with psychology and neuroscience.

    "Another might be much more serious history of philosophy, seeing philosophers in their actual historical context."

    Reply
  3. Brian Leiter

    More useful thoughts from another philosopher:

    American philosophy is now, to some extent, what we might call "post analytic:"

    1) There is a fairly general suspicion of conceptual analysis, or at least its mid 20th century excesses.

    2) Relatedly, there is a healthy skepticism about consulting intuitions. A greater awareness of the issues posed by multiculturalism has engendered suspicion about appeals to "our" and "we" in such contexts.

    3) There is a strong trend to genuinely interdisciplinary work. This is especially striking in the philosophy of science, where it is now typically the case that new PhDs have to be conversant in a special science. In other areas, there is attention to literature, and
    philosophers are more self conscious regarding the importance of narrative and allied notions.

    4) Much philosophy has taken an "empirical turn." First Mind and Epistemology, and now–mercifully — Ethics, with the recent(substantially post 1990) growth in empirically sophisticated moral
    psychology.

    5) All of these trends, it seem to me, help to superannuate the old "analytic/continental" distinction in philosophical method (a point
    you have made many times), although institutional structures–unsurprisingly–are a bit slower to change.

    One more observation, perhaps not so neatly related to the first 5:

    6) Philosophy continues to be historically self-conscious, and a good bit of our output reflects this fact. One hopes that philosophical exegesis will continue to grow more sensitive to issues in the approximate areas of historiography and literature, although much of what is written is still surprisingly ahistorical.

    Note that these observations regard American philosophy only; the naturalistic themes running through much of what I have said are rather less evident in the UK, where I have the sense that "high church" analytic philosophy holds more sway than it does in the US.

    Reply
  4. mark steen

    In regards to (a) above, I would expect some mention of the huge effect PVI's _Material Beings_ has had, with its emphasis on 'The Special Composition Question,' to spurning a huge new literature on composition, mereology, and the new ways the foregoing have given us to consider classical metaphysical questions. Also, some brief mention should perhaps be made about the issue of vagueness, which has been huge recently, in large part due to Timothy Williamson' _Vagueness_. I'm not sure if you could do this however in a 1000 word essay.

    Reply
  5. Matt

    I also wanted to say that the return of a priori metaphysics, really hitting its stride after the publication of _Naming and Necessity_ was one of the two biggest changes. I can't say I think it's good. I suppose lots of work there is good by its own internal standards, but I find it dreadful and a horrible waste of time. The other big changes that I see are 1) the revival of political (and also moral) philosophy after Rawls (if one looks back to the old Oxford Readings in philosophy volume or even the later prentice-hall volumes on political philosophy the changes are striking). 2) A great increase in interest in Kant in all areas of his work, and Kant-inspired projects. (There is obviously some over-lap w/ the first issue here, and serious tension w/ the first, since Kant is one of the great traditional enemies of a priori metaphysics.)

    Reply
  6. the hanged man

    I'm really quite sympathetic to the characterization of "post-analytic" philsophy that you've given, here. One thing that I think the characterization you've given is sorely missing is the rebirth of the pragmatist tradition. One of the most important things that this movement is giving us is an emphasis on the relationship between philosophy and social action and a renewed emphasis on the primacy of human values.

    Reply
  7. Sam Nicholson

    In light of Matt's comments: I think it would be worth noting that analytic philosophy has become balkanized to the point that certain sub-disciplines are no longer in conversation with one another. I mean, could you imagine the Churchlands engaged in a meaningful discussion with Stephen Yablo or Pete Van Inwagen? I can't. There are two different developments at work, both due at least partly to Quine. Some take his uncompromising naturalism to imply the necessity of interdisciplinary work in the sciences. Others take his rebuttal of the Logical Positivists wholesale rejection of metaphysics to sanction a return to it in all of its decadent, a prioristic glory. (e.g. Davis Lewis)

    Reply
  8. Brian Leiter

    Another philosopher has e-mailed me directly with yet more useful observations, some complementary to those above, some raising new points:
    ============

    I think that these are some important trends.

    1. There was the flowering of serious philosophy of religion and philosophical theology after Plantinga and others did much in the 70s to make it seem like a legitimate discipline. The Society of Christian Philosophers has over 1000 members, I think, and is the biggest subgroup of the APA.

    2. There was the flowering of serious metaphysics, again after people like Chisholm, and Lewis did much during the 70s to make it seem like a legitimate discipline.

    a.De re modality has gone from something that needed to be defended to something whose legitimacy is pretty much unquestioned.

    b. Much serious work in the metaphysics of time and material objects has taken place.

    c. In America and Australia "sexy" positions like anti-realism and eliminativism about the mind exploded and then fizzled as more "sane" intuitions took over.

    3. In epistemology

    a). Serious thought about the role of intuitions in philosophy and a priori knowledge.

    b) Externalism of some sort now is the dominant research project in epistemology, as opposed to attempting to find a "fourth condition" on knowledge. The trend toward some sort of reductionism of the normative to the non-normative (this also has taken place in ethics) has fueled this. Many don't like taking certain normative epistemic properties as primitive; they're to be analyzed naturalistically, usually in terms of truth-conduciveness.

    4. There was the working out of some of the semantic and metaphysical consequences of the attack on Fregeanism in the 70s. Direct reference was worked out in great detail, and serious attempts to solve problems of opacity and the like were made.

    5. There has been a serious attempt to naturalize intentionality causally, and to a lesser extent functionally.

    6. There has been a serious attempt to naturalize qualia, and strong resistance from non-naturalists or "qualia freaks."

    7. Analytic aesthetics emerged.

    It is instructive, I think, to see how movement away from Quinean scruples has led to so much of the above.

    We see a re-emergence of "core" philosophy among professional philosophers. But I'd be interested to see how many jobs are advertised in these areas, and how many there are in things like applied ethics or ethics/social/political more generally. Are we training our graduate students for jobs that aren't there?

    Reply
  9. Daniel Nolan

    A comment on the previous comment, in particular its 2c:

    2c. In America and Australia "sexy" positions like anti-realism and eliminativism about the mind exploded and then fizzled as more "sane" intuitions took over.

    I don't think your correspondent is right about Australia – certainly in the philosophy of mind case, the overwhelming tradition is stil the "Australian materialism" of Smart, Place and Armstrong (and Lewis and Jackson and Sterelney and Braddon-Mitchell and Pettit and…) Anti-realism and eliminativism never gained many adherents. (I'm hard-pressed to think of _any_ prominent examples – Huw Price or Barry Taylor or Richard Routley/Sylvan, perhaps). There wasn't really an eruption of non-realism at any point, so far as I understand the history. That stuff tended to be a West-Coast-US phenomenon (the Churchlands, Stitch, Feyerabend etc.), as far as I'm aware.

    Perhaps your correspondent had in mind some genus of which anti-realism about the mind is a species, but I can't work out what it might be. Australia has had a few "sexy" things take hold, I suppose (in that very stretched sense in which your typical philosophical research program is sexy!): gung-ho metaphysics, paraconsistent logic, post-structuralist French feminism, 2D views of content… but I doubt any of these things are really of a piece with the trendy explosion of anti-realist views in philosophy of mind.

    Reply
  10. Ralph Wedgwood

    This is slightly off-topic, I'm afraid, about your comments on the differences between UK and US philosophy.

    It's not completely wrong to say that "high church" analytical philosophy still holds sway in UK much more than in the US. Certainly, Quinean and naturalistic hostility towards the a priori found much less sympathy over here in the UK. But in recent years, the belief in philosophy as a primarily a priori inquiry hasn't generally been regarded as a reason for cultivating a serene indifference to empirical research.

    E.g. there is a small but thriving group of UK philosophers of science, especially philosophers of physics (e.g. here at Oxford, Jeremy Butterfield, Harvey Brown, and Simon Saunders), who all pay a lot of attention to recent natural science. Philosophers of mind like John Campbell have worked hard on integrating an a priori theory of the mind with recent advances in empirical psychology. Philosophers of language like Tim Williamson have taken account of recent work by linguists in the field of formal semantics. An earlier trend, initiated by Dummett, has also led a lot of UK philosophers (e.g. Crispin Wright and Ian Rumfitt) to take account of fairly advanced work in formal logic. Another earlier trend, initiated by Hart, and still going strong, has led legal philosophers (e.g. Antony Duff) to pursue work that is deeply informed by legal scholarship.

    So the trend towards interdisciplinary work has clearly been present in the UK as well as in the US.

    It is true that reductionist programs (e.g. the project of reducing the normative to the non-normative, or the intentional to the non-intentional) have found much less sympathy over here than in the US. But the quietist Wittgensteinian approach of philosophers like McDowell has largely been abandoned. One reason for this is that a lot of philosophical work in the UK is, if not interdisciplinary, at least intersubdisciplinary, working at the interface between different philosophical subdisciplines.

    This is possible partly because the balkanization of philosophy, and especially the ghettoization of ethics (epitomized by the to my mind regrettable use of the phrase "core" to pick out metaphysics and epistemology and exclude ethics), has thankfully been less in evidence here in the UK. Ethicists in the UK like John Broome are more open to the Scandinavian tradition of formal ethics, which is less averse than most of the research in ethics that is done in the US to take account of formal work in decision theory and deontic logic.

    Reply
  11. Stephen

    It seems to me that the real news is the emergence of trends to replace the analytic/continental distinction.

    Between your work and the posters, you seem to have begun to pull together a good outline of the trends in America and in other places.

    I think, also of note, is that interdisciplinary work has been pulling up other discipline's "philosophy of x" courses out of the sophmoristic approaches that seemed to be the staple of interdisciplinary work (e.g. look at law & economics 20 years ago compared to today, or law & philosophy 30 years ago and now) while at the same time helping to redefine what philosophy is.

    Philosophy has ceased to be irrelevant outside of logic and circuit board design and seems to have some real vitality, as if to become a completely new discipline, which is news.

    Reply
  12. John Taylor

    This may be merely an artifact of my interests, but it does seem that computers have gained some prominence for philosophers in the past decades, as subject matter, intuition pump, and research tool. Personally, I would appreciate mention of this "computational turn" in "American Philosophy Today".

    Reply
  13. Jason Stanley

    Here are some brief comments on some trends I think characterize the last couple of decades in a wide swath of areas excluding normative ethics (though not, I think, metaethics):

    (1) The reemergence of modality as a serious object of study in the 1960's and 1970's led to an explosion of work on the nature of modality, and to an explosion of interest in modal or counterfactual analyses of a range of philosophical notions (e.g. causation, free will, dispositions, knowledge). A lot of work in the last twenty years has been devoted to evaluating the success of such analyses.

    (2) Methodologies for addressing a wide range of problems across areas of philosophy have attracted a lot of attention. Fictionalism is an obvious example; first, there was fictionalism about fiction, then fictionalism about negative existentials, then fictionalism about modality, and now, and now there is a well-developed fictionalist position in almost every area. Contextualism is another example — first contextualist accounts of the liar paradox, knowledge-ascriptions, and vagueness, then it becomes a more general methodology for addressing philosophical problems. Expressivism is a third example; although it is most clearly a player in the subfield of metaethics, expressivist (or at least non-truth conditional) analyses have been advanced elsewhere (e.g. in the analysis of indicative conditionals), and is a well-entrenched methodological tool for analyzing a problematic discourse. A lot of work has been done in the last several decades developing and evaluating these methodologies.

    (3) One theme that unifies a lot of work in philosophy of language is work around what one might broadly call the semantics-pragmatics distinction. First, outside the philosophy of language, appeal to the distinction has proved to be a methodological tool in advancing or defending a philosophical position (think of appeals to the distinction between what is said and what is implicated that occur almost everywhere in theoretical philosophy). Perhaps as a result, philosophers of language have spent a lot of effort thinking about where semantics ends and pragmatics begins. Many debates in philosophy of language have ended up at this juncture (e.g. the debates about direct reference discussed above have, in large part, boiled down to questions about the semantics-pragmatics distiction — is it plausible for the Millian to give a pragmatic account of apparantly semantic intuitions). Another trend is for philosophers outside of this area to claim that these debates are just terminological.

    (4) Again, in my own area, of philosophy of language, the trend has been towards greater interest in, and awareness of, facts about language. Two decades ago, isolated philosophers of language (e.g. Higginbotham) were urging that greater attention should be paid to linguistics. Now, it is the norm for philosophy of language to be informed by linguistics. This hasn't, I think, had the feared result of isolating philosophy of language from other areas. Rather, it has given philosophers a greater range of data from which to draw philosophical consequences. As a result, philosophy of language has started to emerge from the box of the Fregean vs. Millian controversies (that did tend to isolate philosophy of language as a narrow specialist area), to become more relevant to all areas of inquiry. In particular, when a philosopher defends her claims in ethics or metaphysics by appeal to "how we ordinarily talk", there are now better methods and more data available to evaluate the claims than the ones suggested by Austin and his friends.

    Reply
  14. Stephan Blatti

    For what it's worth, it occurs to me – and perhaps you're aware of this already – that Nicholas Rescher published a chapter (in an eponymously titled book) roughly ten years ago under the very same heading that you've been given: 'American Philosophy Today'.

    Reply
  15. Brian Leiter

    Thanks, Stephen B.–Rescher will have an essay on "American Philosophy" in the same volume, but it is not oriented towards the present situation, as much as to the history of American philosophy, with some discussion of the sociology of the profession in recent decades. I'm charged, as it were, with reviewing the more philosophical or thematic aspects of the contemporary situation.

    Many thanks to all the other posters as well, your guidance and suggestions are quite illuminating, both in confirming some ideas I had and in suggested new ones.

    Reply
  16. Chris

    Given that your essay is to be only 1000 words, I think that some of the above suggestions might amount to too many trees and not enough forest. One really central theme characterizing the past 30 years is the shift from thinking of spoken language as the primary locus of meaning and reference to thinking of thoughts as the primary locus of meaning and reference. Quine, Davidson, early Putnam, Kripke were all talking about language. Fodor, Dennett, Churchland, Millikan, etc., are all talking about thought. So the philosophy of language has taken a back seat to the philosophy of mind. (My own view, if I may add it, is that this is not necessarily a good thing.) Thanks for asking.

    Reply
  17. patrick standen

    Having spent the past twenty years with philosophy as either a student or a teacher, the safest generalization I could offer about American philosophy is its enormous breadth of interest and subject matter. I began my studies within the analytic tradition, pursued graduate studies in continental philosophy and have taught courses in either applied ethics or the history of philosophy. I do not think I was at all atypical in my choices.
    The philosophers who seem to have been lionized during this time were Kripke, Quine, Rawls, Kuhn, Popper for the analytical period (up to the mid-1980's). During the late 80's and early 90's, when continental thought was all the rage, the thinkers studied were: Taylor, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida. In the post-analytic 90's, the most talked about thinkers were: Rorty, Nussbaum, et al.
    My students seem to be most interested in Asian religions, new age syncretic philosophies and the ancient Greeks.
    Any historical analysis of American philosophy should also take account of the out-pouring of all the religious, new age, mystical, quasi-metaphysical, paranormal and leftist political theory that has inundated the contemporary life of the mind during this period. It often poses as philosophy proper…
    Good luck and I hope this has been of some assistance.
    Patrick Standen, Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of the Humanities, Johnson State College.

    Reply

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