For those interested, I also bring to your attention Johnston's "Second Natures in Dappled Worlds" (in Umbr(a) 2011) -- it's a whirlwind tour, a bit more Lacan than I'm usually comfortable with, but he calls McDowell out on the extremely high cost of refusing to cash out the ontology of 'second nature,' and he also uses Cartwright's work to suggest that "the realm of law" is the illusion of a problem, not the real problem that McDowell takes it to be. Best of all, though, he takes his Cartwrightian critique of McDowell to also exemplify that Hegelian move in which a science discovers its own limits from within itself. On a personal note, I'd like to thank everyone at New APPS for reminding me what an exciting and interesting time this is in which to be a philosopher!

On Hawking: it was recently brought to my attention that Huw Price talks about his exchanges with Hawking in Time's Arrow (which I have not read). It seems that Hawking has more acquaintance with contemporary professional philosophy than he lets on with his casual remark. It would then take some careful reading to figure just which kind of philosophy Hawking thinks is "dead," and why. On 'scientism': I've done some work in 'Continental' and 'analytic' philosophy, and I encounter these worries about 'scientism' all over the place. But it's just completely obscure to me just what exactly 'scientism' is, and who holds it, and why it's mistaken. It admits of a wide range of uses (and abuses). (McDowell accuses Sellars of 'scientism,' but I have a lot of trouble locating just what exactly is supposedly 'scientistic' in Sellars. And so on.) I've read Haack, and Olafson, and Margolis, and I'm still terribly frustrated.

I'm a relative newcomer to "American philosophy" or "pragmatism" (which are neither synonymous nor coextensive) -- my graduate school training is in modern history of philosophy, and I've written on some 'Continental' figures (Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas) and on more recognizably 'analytic' figures (Carnap, Davidson, Sellars) -- as well as on Rorty and McDowell, who are harder to classify. So I'm intrigued by this question, 'who has the authority to characterize a tradition?', but as an outsider to that tradition. (I've not written on any of the classical pragmatists, though I do read them and teach them.) On the one hand, it seems right to me that members of a minority tradition should be averse to even well-intentioned appropriations of that tradition, if the appropriators then claim to speak on behalf of that tradition. (As I understand it, Rorty's claims to be a pragmatist were not well-received.) On the other hand, a philosophical tradition, qua philosophical, is part of our common intellectual inheritance and has an implicit claim to universality (however nuanced). So I think that those of us who, like myself, come to American pragmatism from 'outside,' so to speak, do need to be very careful in not claiming to speak on behalf of that tradition. (A similar point holds for other 'minority traditions' in professionalized Anglophone philosophy -- 'Continental,' Hispanic, feminist, etc.)

Old habits die hard!

Wait a minute . . . if you're the Jason Hills I'm thinking of, don't we have five mutual Facebook friends? We'll continue this conversation privately, if you don't mind -- no need to do so on New APPS.

The very distinction (let alone dichotomy!) between 'analytic philosophy' and 'Continental philosophy' is remarkably ahistorical (even anti-historicizing?) and deeply problematic. A pox on both their houses! For one thing, what about the pragmatists? And feminist philosophers? And non-Western philosophers? And . . . and . . . On the taxonomy of pragmatisms, I'd be interested to hear what others here think. I'm presently finishing up a paper on C. I. Lewis and Sellars. Part of what I hope to indicate, in the 'framing' around the paper, is that the distinction between "classical pragmatism" and "neopragmatism" looks more significant than it ought to, because the 'transitional' figures, like Lewis and Sellars, have been written out of the pragmatist canon. But Lewis was a student of James and studied Peirce carefully, and called his own view "conceptualistic pragmatism"; Sellars was a student of Lewis' and wrote two papers in the 1950s on Lewis. Rorty claims that he was a Sellarsian up until the mid-1970s, and both Brandom and McDowell came to Sellars through Rorty -- as did Michael Williams. So there's much more continuity going on behind the scenes than the conventional taxonomies let on. (The same has been said of the analytic/Continental split itself.)

I want it to be the case that Zabala is pulling a Sokal hoax on us, and that he's deliberately parodying what a "Continental philosopher" thinks of "analytic philosophy". Alas, I know he's not. I assume that with the New APPS audience, the exaggerations and confusions of Zabala's article are transparent, but I do want to make one point about Rorty. Rorty did not "proclaim the death of philosophy" -- he argued that (1) epistemology ("theory of knowledge"), as the Descartes-to-Kant search for "privileged representations", relies on a conflation between causation and justification; (2) epistemology and metaphysics are not necessary and essential to philosophy, and (3) that professional philosophers in modern, secular democracies should not arrogate for themselves a superior epistemic position than that of their fellow citizens.

Thank you, Jon! In looking around on-line, I found von Wright's "Explanation and Understanding," which I'd never heard of but which looks to be exactly what I'd wanted. So I'll start there.

I have a question about this knowledge/understanding distinction. On the one hand, something like this strikes me as basically right, but on the other hand, I try to restrain my enthusiasm for distinctions I don't fully understand (or know?). I've come across this distinction before, too, in the guise of the Neo-Kantian distinction between Verstehen and Erklaren. (Same distinction, right?) Could anyone here perhaps recommend something I could read that would better elucidate this distinction? Is there a relevant textual/historical tradition? Are there criticisms of this distinction I ought to bear in mind? Please feel free to email me: carl(dot)sachs(at)gmail(dot)com Carl

Very interesting! Reading this, I noted a slight difference between Nagel's doubts in Mind and Cosmos and Plantinga's EAAN. Plantinga's EAAN, on my reading at any rate, is about semantics (or, using a lovely phrase I just picked up from Chalmers, "epistemological semantics"). I interpret the worry posed in the EAAN to be his: how confident should we be that the propositional content of our beliefs is causally related to our behavior? There are four options: (1) beliefs have no causal relation to behavior at all; (2) beliefs are causally related to behavior, but their propositional content is not; (3) propositional content is causally related to behavior, but false beliefs are sometimes (usually?) adaptive; (4) propositional content is causally related to behavior, and true beliefs are usually adaptive. Plantinga argues that if one assumes "naturalism" (that neither God nor anything like God exists, or as I would put it, that there are no persons that are not also animals), then one has no basis for preferring (4) over (1)-(3), and so the naturalist must assign a very low (or inscrutable) probability to (4), which means that there's a very low probability that evolution has favored true beliefs, etc. The point is, Plantinga's EAAN is an exercise in epistemological semantics, about whether propositional content has causal efficacy, and I think that's somewhat different from what Nagel is doing.

This is a very exciting project! It connects up with my work in two minor respects. Firstly, I've tried exploring how analytic philosophy constituted itself as de-historicized. There are many aspects to that story, but I focused on Carnap's attitude towards Nietzsche (History of Philosophy Quarterly 28:3). Briefly, I thought that it was Carnap's interest in the very modernity of logic that led him to adopt a conception of philosophy that "suppresses" or "silences" its own historicity. (Though Frege's anti-psychologism would also be a big part of the story here, if it could be shown that there's a connection between anti-psychologism and anti-historicism -- Husserl obviously thought there was, but I don't know if Frege shared that view.) Secondly, I've been working a good bit on Sellars lately, and Sellars is fairly unusual among analytic philosophers in taking the history of philosophy seriously. Ken Westphal has written a bit on this aspect of Sellars ("Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy" in The Owl of Minerva 42 (1/2), 2010/2011). Sellars consistently explicates philosophical terminology within its historical usage; thus, for example, Sellars situates his (and his father's) 'physical realism' within the issues raised by Berkeley, Hume, Kant, C. I. Lewis, Russell, etc. (This is in his article "Physical Realism".) So it might be possible to see "conceptual genealogy" as an option that Carnap suppressed (although he does call his own constructional system a "genealogy of concepts" at the very beginning of the Aufbau) and that Sellars briefly revived -- a sort of "genealogy of 'conceptual genealogy'", if you will.

I'll admit, I got fooled by Fuller. I'd assumed that he was a reliable source of information about basic facts such as those, and it didn't occur to me to fact-check him. I won't make that mistake again!

One interesting fact about Nagel is that he wrote his dissertation on Sartre. And if one looks carefully at his famous "What is it like to be a bat?" essay, he in fact alludes to Sarte's famous distinction between consciousness (pour soi) and being (en soi) at a crucial moment. Elsewhere in his corpus -- I believe it's in the Introduction to Mortal Questions but I can't find my copy for some reason -- Nagel explicitly prioritizes "intuitions" over theories. But I take it that there's good textual evidence for thinking that his intuitions have been shaped by his reading of Sartre. As a result Nagel seem to take the Sartrean intuitions are mere common sense. I very much doubt that even Sartre thought that! As for Plantinga, his "intuitions" are so deep in American Calvinism that his are equally suspect. Mere Christianity, maybe; mere common sense, definitely not.

Two other examples of specialists in "Continental" philosophy who have strong training in "analytic" philosophy, and who use that training in both explicating "Continental" philosophers *and* in showing how the "Continental" philosophers go beyond where the "analysts" are at, are Jay Bernstein (who uses Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom in explicating and defending Adorno) and Todd May (who uses Sellars in explicating and defending Foucault). That said, it is encouraging to see "Continental" philosophers (such as Badiou, Meillassoux, and Brassier) reaching across to appropriate "analytic" problematics in novel and fascinating ways. Speculative realism goes a long way here, I think, because on Braver's interpretation, the dominant voices in Continental philosophy, as regarded in the States, are anti-realists of some version or another. I think this sheds some light on why the major Anglophone contributors to the trans-Atlantic conversation were, for a long time, Anglophone anti-realists like Putnam and Rorty. The 'rediscovery' of realism on the Continental side of the conversation seems to put us in a nice position to examine the trans-Atlantic conversation from another point of view. Lately I've taken an interest in Ernst Cassirer, who Michael Friedmann (in his "Parting of the Ways") presents as a paradigm of taking seriously both the foundations of science (epistemology in the old sense of Erkenntnistheorie) and the history of culture ("objective Spirit"). While there are problems with a "return to Cassirer" (do we really need neo-neo-Kantianism?), I think that better understanding Cassirer's influence on figures such as Sellars and Merleau-Ponty would help to de-mystify the divide to some degree. It would also help, I think, to notice that American pragmatism and critical theory do not fall terribly neatly into either camp, and that both traditions exerted considerable influence on the history of 20th century philosophy. I don't think it would be a good thing to "overcome" the analytic/Continental divide, but it would be a good thing to see more philosophers like Bernstein, May, Braver, Brassier, and Livingston to show how productive conversations across the divide can take place. I also think that a better understanding of the history of 20th-century philosophy can call into question the institutionalization of that divide. One can do that without accepting the progressivist, teleological rhetoric of "overcoming" or the Wittgensteinian rhetoric of "dissolving" that divide.

I also agree with your first point. I've seen monolingual American philosophers get so obsessed with "their philosopher" (Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, etc.) that it inhibits their ability to think critically about what these people are doing. Conversely, the Continentalists I know who manage to break free of 'the discourse of the author' are those who know enough French or German to situate so-and-so in a broader context. By the way, I've just recently taken an interest in 'speculative materialism' -- I'd read Brassier's Nihil Unbound last week and finished Meilassoux's After Finitude yesterday. I'm still not sure what to make of it all, but I think that the conversation between Meilassoux and Sellars could be taken much further than Brassier takes it.

Price's essay is also reprinted in his Naturalism without Mirrors. I've been working on it recently. Briefly, from what I can make of it, he argues that Quine is simply mistaken to think that the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction has anything to do with Carnap's distinction between "internal questions" and "external questions". That seems right to me -- Carnap distinguishes between internal and external questions and distinguishes between analytic internal questions and synthetic internal questions. So rejecting the A/S distinction doesn't do very much to Carnap's project. I'm willing to admit that I do find something exhilarating and noble about the idea that drama and conflict can be resolved by adopting the Leibnizian dream, "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right". And perhaps -- who knows? -- the world being as dark and ugly a place as it often is, a little semantic ascent deployed in an irenic spirit could go a long way.

I do think that the whole "analytic-Continental" business is historically overdetermined, as they say. (Simon Critchley contends that one strand of it can be traced back to how J. S. Mill interpreted Bentham and Coleridge. I don't know if his version of the narrative holds water, but it's worth mentioning.) In briefly scanning the book linked to above (which has some hilarious scribblings, forever immortalized by Google), I was struck not only by the condescending language, but also by what seems to me to be the class position expressed by that language. Am I onto something here? Carl

Since commenters at New APPS are generally sympathetic to various attempts to reflect upon and think through the analytic/Continental split, I'd like to indulge in a bit of shameless self-promotion: the 2012 APA will also feature the first official meeting of the Wilfrid Sellars Society (of which I'm one of the founding members). Sellars straddled the fence without quite realizing it ("the spirit of Hegel bound in the fetters of Carnap," as Rorty described "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"). So now you have two things to look forward to in Atlanta!

Interesting points here! Two further notes: (a) Hegel and Nietzsche should both be read in relation to Kant, where there's a real tension of difference and identity that plays out at every stage -- the manifold of intuition and the unity of judgment, the plurality of theoretical judgments and the unifying power of regulative ideals, the plurality of moral judgments and the unity of the categorical imperative (and also the three 'formulations' of the CI). So maybe, whereas Kant holds identity and difference as equally important, Hegel and Nietzsche discern in this move a tension that's resolved in favor of a prioritization of one over the other? (b) The story of the suppression and return of Hegel in analytic philosophy is directly relevant to Moore's point. (I've learned this part of the story from Hylton's "Hegel and analytic philosophy" in the Cambridge Companion to Hegel and especially Paul Redding's Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought.) Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, and perhaps even Graham Priest are not far from Hegel, and they know it. Whereas I cannot think of any "analytic" philosopher who does for Nietzsche what they have done for Hegel -- which is to say, not using analytic techniques in the interests of scholarship -- there's plenty of 'analytic Nietzsche' in that regard -- but showing the substance and spirit of that philosopher as translatable into, and directly relevant, going concerns in contemporary philosophy. Is there anyone who stands to Nietzsche as "the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians" do to Hegel? The only philosopher who comes to my mind here is maybe Richard Rorty. Best, Carl

I used to want to overcome the analytic/Continental distinction. Now I want to dissolve it -- I don't want to pretend it's not there, since it is a Real Presence in the American academy, but I also don't want to invest it with my own energies by caring about it. I want to treat the very distinction itself as a symptom of a disease. One way of doing that is by undertaking a genealogy of the distinction, so, for example, by inquiring into how the two "sides" get set up. And there's more than one genealogy here -- for example, there's the nationalist romantic politics of "England" vs. "Germany" in the 19th and early 20th centuries (which is almost certainly the emotional subtext of Russell's ad hominem against Nietzsche, for example), and there's also the very interesting debate going on within Germanic philosophy between the Vienna Circle, the Frankfurt School, the phenomenologists, and the neo-Kantians. Further strands to the narrative would also have to examine the impact of the Cold War on the de-politicization of the Vienna Circle. No doubt, particular philosophers exemplify the categories "analytic" and "Continental". In reading Santiago Zabala or Michael Marder, I can discern in their picture of "analytic philosophy" a hastily-drawn, though not inaccurate, sketch of Quine. Likewise, for that matter, when I hear analytic philosophers dismiss "Continental philosophy", it's almost always a caricature of Heidegger which is doing the talking. But making the very category of "analytic philosophy" to be dominated by Quine gives Quine more authority than I think is warranted. (The same point holds for Heidegger and "Continental philosophy".) And then, we find ourselves confused and perplexed whenever it is pointed out that features a, b, c fail to hold of other philosophers supposedly in the same "camp". For example, when Zabala or Marder complain about "analytic philosophy," my first reaction is "that might be true of Quine, but what about Sellars? Or Goodman?". (Sellars is deeply historical, and clearly insists on the irreducibility of normative facts to non-normative facts, etc.) And when I hear complaints about "Continental philosophy,", likewise, I'll think, "that might be true of Heidegger, but what about Adorno or Merleau-Ponty?" (Both of whom took science far more seriously than Heidegger -- or Gadamer -- did, or could.) The more I consider the matter, the more I'm inclined to think that the very distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy is a struggle between two cults of personality: the Quine cult and the Heidegger cult. A cult of personality involves sub-personal affects at play here beneath the surface of our concepts, but we need to be aware of those affects and take responsibility for them.

Part of my point was about the strand of contemporary "analytic" philosophy that could be called "anti-naturalism", in the sense that there are ways of understanding distinct from the methods of the natural sciences. Brandom, McDowell, and Putnam are the leading figures in the Anglophone side of that movement. (I find it very interesting that Zabala makes no mention at all of Habermas, who one might plausibly think has done a great deal of work on the importance of dialogue and rational discourse in a technocratic age.) (I don't like 'anti-naturalism' as a term for this general view, for what it's worth: I prefer to regard it as the irreducibility of normative facts to non-normative facts -- less pithy but more accurate.) What I find far more problematic is the idea that there's something about the very nature of analytic philosophy which colludes with the moral and intellectual crisis of the university, in its various inter-related dimensions ("adjunctification" of the faculty, rise in administrative costs, lowering of academic standards, loss of tenure-track lines, etc.). Zabala's claim seems to be that analytic philosophy is somehow collaborating with the forces at work that are harming the university and the humanities. But it fits the caricatures well enough, and that's a real problem. Best, Carl

I don't even know where to begin with his description of "analytic philosophy" as "a philosophy fascinated with . . . science's unfettered methodological development". Insofar as I can attach much meaning to this at all, it certainly fails of, for example, Donald Davidson or Paul Feyerabend. And Davidson and Feyerabend are not marginalized or obscure figures -- even where they are considered to be mistaken, much of the subsequent conversation has been framed around their work, so far as I can tell. In particular, there's some really good work on Davidson and Gadamer, in particular, by people like John McDowell, Jeff Malpas, Bjorn Ramberg, and Lee Braver. Zabala writes as if he's never heard of them, or -- more to the point -- has never taken the trouble to enter into dialogue with them. And that's what I find deeply ironic -- a hermeneutic philosopher who doesn't acknowledge a dialogue already well underway, or engage with it. It is true that Davidson did not get very much of his reading of "Truth and Method" and he and Gadamer found it difficult to communicate with each other. (See Davidson's contribution to "The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer," and Gadamer's response, for an example of this.) But it's been claimed that Gadamer's exchanges with Derrida or Habermas were not much more productive. I'm not sure if it would be 'good' or 'bad' for the two traditions to merge, though it would be bad -- and has been bad -- for one to emerge as dominant over the other. So at this point, mutually respectful dialogue is the very best one could hope for. One might hope that Zabala would be leading the charge in that regard, but apparently not. Best, Carl P.S.: I believe Zabala is Italian, not Spanish.

Beautiful. Slightly reminiscent of Borges' "Borges and I" http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm

In these kinds of cases, the most commonly-asked question is something like, "what were they thinking?" But the sad part is the overwhelming likelihood that he wasn't thinking anything. He probably just thought it would be funny and gave it no more thought than that. On a positive note, I think that the professional community responds to this kind of BS much more quickly and publicly than in the past, and that might even count as a kind of moral progress, if one believes in such a thing.