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A whole generation of the “greats” of post-WWII “analytic” philosophy is now almost entirely in the past

Brian Leiter

Kripke most recently, but since 2000, we have also lost Quine, Rawls, D.K. Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Dummett, Putnam, Davidson, B. Williams, Fodor, among others.  From that generation (born 1940 or earlier), the only philosophers of comparable stature who are still with us are David Kaplan, Thomas Nagel, and T.M. Scanlon.   I am reminded of this observation by Harry Frankfurt from a few years back:

In the United States, even after interest in William James and John Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald Davidson, John Rawls and Saul Kripke. In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead. Heidegger was having a massive impact on European philosophy, as well as on other disciplines–and not only in Europe, but here as well. And, of course, there was everywhere a vigorously appreciative and productive response to the work of Wittgenstein.

The lively impact of these impressive figures has faded. We are no longer busily preoccupied with responding to them. Except for a few contributors of somewhat less general scope, such as Habermas, no one has replaced the imposingly great figures of the recent past in providing us with contagiously inspiring direction. Nowadays, there are really no conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations. For the most part, the field is quiet. We seem, more or less, to be marking time.

Frankfurt's remarks provoked a lively discussion last time, but I'll invite further comments on this occasion as well.

CLARIFICATION:  I am inviting comments on Frankfurt's assessment, not who else belongs on the list of pre-1940 greats.  Sorry for being unclear about that.

 

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13 responses to “A whole generation of the “greats” of post-WWII “analytic” philosophy is now almost entirely in the past”

  1. assistant prof

    For better or worse, I think many (most?) analytic philosophers conceive of analytic philosophy along the lines of normal science, whereby incremental progress on largely agreed-upon problems is driven by a division of specialized labor. Even if whole fields don't fit this description, many subareas seem to. If philosophy is conceived of as normal science, it's only nature that big, synoptic figures don't play the role they used to, even 50 years ago. Such figures are generally found in periods of revolutionary science, where few can agree upon even the problems, let alone the solutions.

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  2. Euro Prof

    I will make the obvious point that every generation reveres the great old figures from the previous generation that we looked up to when starting out as students. I expect you can find similar laments about how there are no great figures any more from almost every era in almost every discipline. Personally I see no reason to think that future generations will treat figures like Tim Williamson or Crispin Wright or Chalmers or Korsgaard or McDowell or Millikan etc etc as being particularly more or less important than Davidson or Quine or Strawson. (And of course it is likely that future generations will simply forget about most of these names sooner than we would like.)

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  3. jj

    isn't this a function of how many philosophers there were? I imagine the circles who so lively responded according to Frankfurt is mentioning are more or less London/Oxbridge and a few Ivy Leagues and top US universities? There is a lot more going on now and at a lot more places and by a lot more voices and there are lively debates within various fields though perhaps none claims the dominance that once was awarded to people working, roughly, in met/language/epistemology/mind and at posh places.

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  4. Steven Hales

    I would be astonished if there were more professional philosophers working now than in 2000. Second-tier and below places are rapidly divesting themselves of philosophy (Tulsa's recent turnabout is the exception that proves the rule). Jobs For Philosophers in 2000 had far more listings than PhilJobs does now. So the difference is not some imagined clique of elites in the past. I think Assistant Prof's analogy to normal science is partly right. I also think that there is increasing interest in what used to be peripheral areas of philosophy, e.g. phil of race, Asian phil, feminist phil, applied ethics, etc. It's mighty hard to be an all-encompassing colossus when that has to include everything from modal logic, epistemology, and metaphysics to aesthetics, bioethics, and Mencius. Even Russell never published anything in aesthetics.

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  5. Old Mole

    The ambition of the analytic turn in philosophy was to clarify those philosophical puzzles that could be clarified and to pass over the rest in silence. Frege's discovery of quantification was the earliest and most impressive example of the ability of an "analytical" approach to dissolve a stubborn philosophical puzzle: how can something's existence be denied without at the same time admitting it? "Philosophical logic" as it was called promised to clean the entire Augean stable of pre-analytic confusion. "The puzzle does not exist" supplanted "quod erat demonstrandum."
    After a century of effort, the analytical approach helped clarify sundry areas, but Frege-like breakthroughs were rare, and new puzzles seemed to pop up like dragon's teeth. Philosophical analysis (aka "conceptual analysis") came to look either sterile or indistinguishable from pre-analytic methods –if "method" is even an apt way to describe an ensemble of typical moves and counter-moves dating to antiquity.
    But where are the imposingly great figures? Frankfurt's observation segues from that question to the distinct question, where are the "conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations"? I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher's claim that you can't have a rich country without rich people. Thatcher warped the unarguable fact that a rich country has to be populated by rich individuals into the false assertion that a rich population has to include some who are vastly richer than others. Frankfurt similarly suggests that the absence of conspicuously brilliant individuals signifies that ours is a mediocre, time-marking interlude. It might be, but needn't be so. The challenges facing us at this moment are not ones likely to be met by drawing on a new dream team of lively, impressive figures.

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  6. Adam

    @Steven Hales and @jj

    Maybe someone has better data that goes further back in time, but here's historical data on job postings in philosophy between 2003-2021.
    https://www.apaonline.org/page/JFP_Data

    Focusing on this time interval, and assuming job postings closely tracks actual full-time tenure-track/tenured faculty positions (if that's what we mean by "professional philosophers"), Steven's intuition seems closer to correct.

    But maybe to jj's point, I would guess that if you go further back, when many of these figures were in their prime (say between 1950ish-1990ish), there were fewer philosophy faculty, following a general trend that there were fewer faculty across the board, not just in philosophy.
    https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_315.10.asp

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  7. Ram Neta

    I'm inclined to disagree with Frankfurt when he says: "Nowadays, there are really no conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations. For the most part, the field is quiet. We seem, more or less, to be marking time." I recently ran an open area search, for which we received hundreds of applications. I made it a point to try to read at least the beginning of each writing sample. Although of course not all of them were good, I was astonished at the amount of highly imaginative and lucid work being done in many different areas of philosophy, including areas that I had never even heard of before. Of course, there are no Putnams or Davidsons among us today, but perhaps that's for the same reason that there are no Walter Cronkites in journalism any more: it's not that inspiration has disappeared, but rather that the field has become too diverse for any one individual to attract quite as much durable and constant attention as Putnam and Davidson were able to attract in their day.

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  8. Brian Garrett

    The problem with Philosophy today is not so much the lack of "Great Men" (there are still plenty of clever analytic philosophers) but the disintegration of the discipline. It has, over the past 40 years, been transformed out of all recognition. It has become ridiculously specialised and overly diversified (often with new branches that seem devoid of point); it has become overly empirical: if you want to write papers in biology or anthropology then join those departments; and it has become overly formal (of course, formal techniques are fine if they help formulate or resolve some philosophical issue, but not otherwise – and there's a lot of otherwise!). I always took Philosophy to be an a priori/conceptual investigation, conducted in a natural language. Apparently that is now a minority view. And the Cult of Political Correctness, needless to say, has not helped matters.

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  9. V. Alan White

    Very interesting responses here. I'd only add my observation that philosophy has been irreversibly transformed by two near-simultaneous revolutions that appear almost antithetical: the rise of formalized logic, in its own way culminated by Kripke's marriage of semantics and metaphysics, and the rise of pragmatism, providing an alternative picture of truth that has hung around since Peirce to be imported into explanatory concerns about science's successes through the quite different views of Quine and Rorty and van Fraassen and Putnam to become more recently and holistically treated by Brandom. Pragmatism has trudged along, gaining ground quietly in areas as disparate as linguistics and free will and philosophy of time (much of it back-doored by science), and I'd argue even in the much disparaged (I think rightly so) conversations about politically correct language. Pragmatism–which I dismissed much of my own career only to see late as rather inevitable when all is said and done–has been a near century-and-a-quarter molasses tsunami that may not fit the usual Kuhnian model of revolution, but maybe there's a Laudan-esque story for that.

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  10. Paul Weithman

    I have thought off and on about the phenomenon that Frankfurt notes, though I could not have described it as well as he did. There are no doubt lots of reasons for it, but here is one that has occurred to me. Maybe philosophy is small enough that the presence — or absence — of just a few people of extraordinary talent determines whether our field is fallow (as Frankfurt seems to have thought), fecund or something in between. But there is no guarantee that people with that kind of talent will be drawn to philosophy in each generation; whether they are depends in part upon what else seems most rewarding or attractive at crucial points in their lives. It is possible that the people who might have made contributions to philosophy comparable to those of Frankfurt's greats, had they entered the field when I did, gravitated instead to Wall Street or Silicon Valley or the human genome project or the search for the Higgs boson. After all, there are many more things of interest in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

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  11. Thomas Osborne

    Part of the story is probably that what counts as important was largely determined by the faculty of prestigious institutions. As the number of students increased, and philosophers in general were required to publish more, the power was spread out among more institutions and among more philosophy faculty, with a resulting or accompanying increase in specialization.

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  12. Preston Stovall

    I want to riff on V. Alan White's remark by looking at his two revolutions in more detail. In the process, I'll suggest that while White might be right that the two revolutions appear antithetical, there is a line of mutual support between them.

    First, the revolution in formal logic should be understood as having two primary fronts: one in the model-theoretic, truth-conditional, and word-world or representational semantic program that runs roughly from Frege (in one of his guises) through Tarski, the later Carnap, Marcus, Kripke, Montague, Kratzer, and Davidson (among others); the other in the proof-theoretic, rule-governed, and intralinguistic or inferential semantic program founded in work by Frege (in another of his guises), Gentzen, the early Carnap, Prawitz, Sellars, Dummett, and Brandom (again among others).

    From what I gather, the influence of the first front in the revolution in formal logic is largely the result of a series of conversations had among philosophers like Carnap, Church, Goedel, Quine, and Tarski in the 1930s and '40s, among Carnap, Church, David Kaplan, David Lewis, Montague, and Partee at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which resulted in the monumental successes and widespread uptake of Montague semantics and possible-world analyses in linguistics and philosophy over the last fifty years. The proof-theoretic, rule-governed, and intralinguistic semantic program has been less influential for non-specialists, but it flourishes today in proof-theoretic semantic programs in philosophical logic, computation theory, and linguistics, as well as in the work of figures like Brandom and Peregrin.

    By virtue of its emphasis on rules of inference, and on constructive methods in proof theory, this second front in the revolution in formal logic makes contact with the second revolution that White points to: that of the resurgence of pragmatism (a revolution that, as White notes, Brandom is also an exemplar of — and it should be remembered that figures as otherwise diverse as Frege, Peirce, and Hegel each at various times write of inference as the unit of meaning).

    Here's the way I'd riff on that second revolution, by tying it back into the additional structure I gave to the first (if I was a musician there'd be a jazz metaphor here). The resurgence of pragmatism is actually a resurgence of the pragmatist reception of German idealism in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. To give just two indications of the connection between the two traditions, Peirce labeled the view "pragmatism" on the basis of the way Kant uses "pragmatisch" in his practical philosophy, and the discussion Hegel gives of the individuation of the syllogistic figures, based on an earlier essay by Kant, is much the same that Peirce would give in "Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis". This latter indication has the virtue of illustrating the sense in which the two revolutions are connected: for the inferential and proof-theoretic front in the revolution in formal logic is one that figures like Peirce, Kant, and Hegel can be read as supporting as well.

    I suspect that, if we're to make some headway in understanding where we are today as a profession, we should endeavor to see the revolution in formal logic and the revolution in pragmatism as complementary. By distinguishing the model-theoretic from the proof-theoretic fronts of the first revolution, and relating the proof-theoretic front to the revolution fueled by pragmatist receptions of German idealism, I've suggested we go some way toward marking off that complementarity.

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  13. V. Alan White

    Professor Stovall–I very much deliberately hedged in the compatibility of the advances of modern logic and pragmatism in my use of the phrase that they "appear almost antithetical". I must defer to your expertise in your particular analysis, but I would add that I do not see them as truly antithetical, as formalism and truth foundations must have a wide range of possible agreement. But in any case I thank you for this particular parsing of it.

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