Am I an Analytical Philosopher?

Am I an Analytical Philosopher?

The question is not easy to answer. On the one hand, I have written extensively on topics not usually covered in the analytic tradition typified by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore, and their successors—disgust, good and evil in literature, sport, mind manipulation, Shakespeare, dreams, movies, the hand. I happen to have studied Husserl and Sartre, I have a background in psychology, and have written two novels. My prose style is more literary than your typical analytical type, as well as more demotic (I also write pop songs, which I don’t think Frege ever did). I range outside the analytical canon and I do so in a more congenial style—you might think of me as assertively non-analytical (even anti-analytical).  And you would not be wrong: I am self-consciously rebelling against the norms of respectable analytical academic philosophy. This entire blog is in many ways a rejection of the prevailing norms and practices. I am thus seen as an intellectual nonconformist, a “maverick”, a free-range performer. And yet, on the other hand, I am a staunch advocate of conceptual analysis as the proper method in philosophy–a throwback, a traditionalist.[1] I also believe that philosophy is a science in the strict sense; it is not one of the “humanities”.[2] I am all in favor of necessary and sufficient conditions, argumentative clarity, rigor, refutation. So, I appear to be a shape-shifter, a mongrel, a divided self.

But there is really no tension in me. I am just a wide-ranging philosopher who believes philosophy is analytical. I don’t believe that philosophy is all about language, or even about concepts. I think that the philosopher analyzes things, not concepts of things for their own sake: he or she analyzes things conceptually, i.e., by examining concepts. Concepts are the method not the subject. Philosophy is unlike empirical science in that it doesn’t do experiments in the lab or make observations in the field: it isn’t based on the five senses, particularly vision (you can have bad eyesight and be a good philosopher). There are really two senses to the phrase “analytical philosopher”: a certain tradition and a certain method. You can belong in the tradition founded by the likes of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Moore (among others) and be interested in what interested them (and only in that); or you can adopt and advocate a particular method of doing philosophy, which may be called “conceptual analysis”. This latter has nothing to do with avoiding science: nothing is to prevent you from studying science avidly and analyzing it. I myself am a scientist by training and inclination; I read a lot more science than philosophy (biology, physics, economics). I write about this stuff. I even think that philosophy is a branch of biology. I am amused by scientifically illiterate (or inexperienced) philosophers bowing down to the latest piece of methodologically dubious psychology; they should spend some time in the lab doing experiments themselves! In any case, I am an analytical philosopher in the method sense but not the tradition sense: I don’t endorse the kind of exclusivity of traditional analytical philosophy as to subject matter, but I do endorse carving out a place for philosophy distinct from empirical science (or literature for that matter). Philosophy is uniquely itself. I just cast the analytical net more widely. So, am I an analytical philosopher? In one sense no, in another yes.

Where do other professional philosophers fall in this respect? I think they are nearly all analytical in the second sense, even though they might repudiate the label. Wittgenstein is, early and late, so is Quine, so is Rorty; ditto Davidson, Kripke, Lewis, Strawson, Dummett, Fodor, Nagel, Rawls, and a great many others. All these people give conceptual arguments for their positions, and they attempt to tell us what certain things are without making empirical observations. Fodor, for example, gives a priori arguments for the language of thought (he is not a practicing scientist). Has Quine ever offered any experimental results proving that to be is to be the value of a variable? Good for them, I say. In fact, I can think of only one philosopher in my lifetime who was clearly not an analytical philosopher, and hence not really a philosopher at all—Richard Wollheim. That would have been far too conventional for Richard. Why do I say this? First, because his only real philosophical interest was in pictorial art; I never saw him take a serious interest in anything else (we were friends and colleagues for many years). Second, he approached everything via psychoanalysis (which he pronounced with a hard “p”), never conceptual analysis (he believed in psychoanalytical philosophy). I never heard him produce a counterexample or offer a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. And third, he was a deeply obscure, indeed obscurantist, writer, though a writer of great elegance. No one else writes like Richard Wollheim. Philosophically, he is unclassifiable—which is just the way he liked it. He alone is no analytical philosopher. His first book was on Bradley, an exceedingly unlikely choice for an Oxford-educated philosopher of his generation. He was not what you would call mainstream.[3]

[1] See my Truth by Analysis (2012).

[2] See my “The Science of Philosophy” in Metaphilosophy (2015).

[3] I cannot resist offering one Richard anecdote illustrating his deviations from the norm. He once called me on some departmental matter and I remarked ruefully that I was just going to the launderette. He immediately ejaculated, “Oh, I love the laundromat!” When we talked philosophy I hardly ever understood a word of what he was saying.