What is this?
An ongoing list for books that fit into that oddly and not very tellingly-titled thing called "Post-Analytic Philosophy". As someone who started out admiring the likes of Foucault, Marx and Heidegger - but was introduced to the method(s) of analytic philosophy (and was also impressed by it no matter how many issues there lied), I sought a reconciliation between the argumentative firepower and conceptual abstraction of the analytic tradition while retaining a stereotypical "continental" concern for broader human life and a sense that the "Traditional Philosophical Enterprise" had gone wrong in some ways. If you're reading this and don't want to be hit with a wall of text - then I recommend just looking at the books and to stop reading here! If what I've said intrigues you, and you want some elaboration on why anyone cares about analytic philosophy (isn't that for STEMassholes and libs?) or my criteria for including books on here or an explanation about what's interesting about this, keep reading...

So this list is an ongoing work in process where I add books I've read and discern them to be of good quality. I may also start re-visiting some of them by writing reviews on here, as a sort of hobby and companion piece to this list. There are many more books of interest that seem to fit this list, but which I have not read. In due time, they will hopefully also be added to this list.

The Criteria
Anyway, these books seem to fulfill some of these vague criteria:

A) Written in some way where a straightforward argument is easy to discern for a thesis. Also includes other analyticisms like drawing conceptual distinctions, presenting explicit propositions, references to the natural or social sciences, the use of formal techniques (paradigmatically logic) and an attention to the the logical forms of sentences. Note however, that questioning the legitimacy and fruitfulness of these methods itself can also be a characteristic. E.g. one may believe in drawing conceptual distinctions yet eschew the idea of constructing logical forms.

B) References to (and developments of) the ideas of both the Analytic and Continental Traditions. For example, when discussing the correspondence theory of truth (analytic) - one may draw on Nietzsche's (continental) criticisms and questions about why we even care about truth and what normative significance it has as a concept.

C) A willingness to question the foundational commitments in a topic in Analytic Philosophy or to question the significance a topic holds/held in the sociology of Analytic Philosophy. A great example here is the Later Wittgenstein's "quietism" (or "deflationism") where he rejected the idea of coming up with a theory of meaning in the philosophy of language - instead philosophy ought to be attentive to the specific ways we use language within our everyday social lives. Constructing a general theory that explains what the meanings of our linguistic expressions are, will dangerously distort our idea of what the linguistic expressions are actually used for by constructing an illegitimate theory that cannot possibly explain something as diverse and pluralistic as a natural language. It's the commitment to this sort of theoretical philosophy that muddies the waters and confuses us. Of course, Wittgenstein thought that this was a problem that had infected the whole of philosophy itself, not just the search for a theory of meaning. Which leads us nicely to...

D) A rallying against what I've badly called the "Traditional Philosophical Enterprise". I take it that throughout much of the history of at least Western Philosophy (and still today in contemporary mainstream anglophone Philosophy) there have been some predominant tendencies.

One is a tendency to think of thought/language/knowledge as in representational relations to an outside external world (for the Ancients however, this relation was probably more one of "resemblance". For example, x resembles y by sharing a form with y. Whereas x representing y need not require a shared form, like how names can represent people despite there being no shared form between the linguistic item and the physical embodied person). Often, it has been claimed that such representations give us an undistorted access, and thus knowledge, of reality.

Another has been to highly value the power of rational a priori deductive arguments. A boring Philosophy 101 example of such an argument is: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. This in turn seems at least interrelated with a rationally grounded belief in the legitimacy of "metaphysics" (the study of the general categories and existing things in reality) which is conducted through such a priori methods.

A further tendency is to privilege "Ideal Theory" over what may be called "Applied Theory". Where the philosopher's task is to be digging for the general required conditions of a concept, whether it be Justice, Truth, Moral Goodness, Beauty, Knowledge or Reason. Hence, the philosopher constructs an Ideal Theory that abstracts away from the unnecessary empirical contingencies, and thus also does not always have to explain those "contingent" features that do exist. For example, the philosopher studying Reason - need not concern themself with how people actually use Reason in their practical activities (that's left to psychology or cognitive science) - the philosopher is tasked with the more abstract question of "What is Reason?" The philosopher comes up with a set of required conditions that identifies Reason on the basis of arguments - and these conditions perhaps even hold for all times and places.

Why can “Post-Analytic Philosophy” be of interest?

Before we get into the ice of rationality, I think the warmth of aesthetic pleasure will serve as a good starting point. I know virtually nothing about painting nor the broader history of art – but I think the hypothetical points I draw from this analogy will still work.

An analogy

Consider two sorts of paintings: One is full of spectacular colours and fantastical scenes laid out with a broad frenzied brush against a very tall and wide canvas. We see the broad outlines of a (later) Heidegger-beast that bemoans how dominant instrumental reasoning (“standing reserve”) has become in our culture and warns about how we now perceive ourselves as a resource (“human resources”, “I need to become more productive”, “human capital”). We can also discern a Foucault-tomb-raider that is picking at the skeleton of Kant and finds there the possibility of doing a historical critique that looks at our contingent constraints and historical lineages – to possibly exit out of them, or transgress them. These are promethean figures. We can look at many scenes like this play out, quite brilliantly, across the painting.

Now, consider the other sort of painting. The colours are, surely, more dull – black, grey and white. There are no broadly crafted fantastic scenes. The canvas is miniscule compared with the other painting. But your immediate gaze is not innocent either, because you then start noticing that there is something indeed fantastic going on – there are intricate lines that span the work, dots that together form clusters that in turn form figures, a pattern is in play.

You then suddenly realise that it is indeed possible to actually put together multiple of the paintings of this kind together. At first, you struggle to see how they fit coherently – art is indeed long, despite our lives being short. But skilled practitioner you are (or can be), you improve at getting these paintings to fit together. Like morning slowly coming over the night, you begin to slowly discern greater and greater figures and patterns. You feel an enjoyment and even admiration at how intricate, how delicate, how careful the techniques used in each of these paintings are. And what is love, if not care?

But the greatest epiphany is even yet to come. While there had been an ongoing dispute between the two curators of this section of the gallery (one preferring and only keeping with the former kinds of speculative and colourful paintings, the other keeping with the latter kinds of intricate and smaller paintings) – you find distinctive similarities between both kinds of paintings. They are hard to spot for the newcomer, but they are there. The curators had got it wrong. One day, you sneak off into the gallery at night and start playing around with the orders and combinations of the paintings to find even more of these similarities. There are others, like you, who do the same and have been doing it for quite some time now and with quite some skill. These others are able to craft new paintings that combine that careful elaborate intricacy with the great and spectacular.

The point?

I think the analogy should be fairly clear, but let’s spell it out. The first sort of painting I write about is akin to stereotypical characterisations of Continental Philosophy – it is willing to be speculative, to be able to confront our conditions and teach us big lessons about ourselves, it consistently approaches the political. The latter sort of painting is akin to stereotypical characterisations of Analytic Philosophy – it is careful and even well-done, but unambitious and thus uninteresting.

Whereas “Post-Analytic Philosophy” is, in this analogy, akin to the third kinds of paintings and skills suggested. It is able to discern similarities, ignored historical continuities, and points of topical and logical contact between both traditions. Thus, it can be taken as combining the stereotypical virtues of both traditions – argumentative and careful, yet with, at times (for the likes of Wittgenstein and Quine are notable exceptions to this historical sensitivity), an eye over our history and the history of philosophy and capable of teaching us big lessons.

One more time, with feeling (explicit detail)

I think the first thing to be defended, is that seeing argumentative powers as a virtue in philosophy – must itself be defended as part of a, small r, rational conception of philosophy. So, yes, I am committed to the view that there are such things as better and worse arguments, as better and worse reasons – and probably also, as deductive validity (preservation of truth from premises to conclusions). One may give a characteristic radical objection here – that there is no such thing as rationality or reason in the sense that philosophers have thought. I am willing to accept this, to the extent that we acknowledge that say – deductive arguments can be terribly unsound (the premises might still be false) or be so broad as to hide all faulty sub-arguments that really do the work, that appeals to intuitions are suspect, that there may be no one single logic that works for all cases that interest us, and that many times there can be a greater sociological irrationality hiding behind argumentative rationality (for example, the cottage industry that emerged out of Gettier’s point that Justified True Belief was not Knowledge. This ended up with many papers setting out on the task of how to give the Correct Conceptual Analysis of Knowledge – without questioning the foundational assumption of whether Knowledge was something conceptually analysable anyway.)

I think that we can take all this onboard – and still acknowledge that we cannot get by without rational arguments in philosophy. Wittgenstein and Sextus Empiricus may well have thought that the point was to use such arguments and ideas as a ladder, from which then one must throw away – but the ladder must be used nonetheless. And what are those objections I’ve recited above, if not also objections that hint at more developed arguments? The ladder must remain…

Therefore, the first virtue of “Post-Analytic Philosophy” is that it is still largely “Analytic”. Attempts at self-consciously doing better reasoning, at trying to logically clarify our thoughts and propositions, doing this using many other methods (conceptual analysis or engineering, counterfactual reasoning, defending propositions with empirical evidence, following the logical implications of a thesis, thought experiments) – is a good way of doing Philosophy. It is not the only way of doing Philosophy, and it can definitely be abused to turn from a virtue to a vice, but so can anything else. As stated by Tommie Shelby:

“Part of what I admire about analytical philosophy is the high value it places on conceptual clarity, logical rigor, and detailed argumentation. Now, these intellectual virtues are sometimes overemphasized or made into ends in themselves. And, at times, they are gained at the cost of the aesthetic virtues and the compelling storytelling found in the best literary nonfiction and historical writing. But the sacrifice is sometimes worth it to garner greater confidence in one’s conclusions.”

- Afro-Analytical Marxism and the Problem of Race

Another point worth stressing here, is that this is one of the big senses in which – Analytic Philosophy is in deep continuation with much of the history of Philosophy. Conceptual analysis goes back all the way to Plato, and a skilled reader of Plato should be able to discern that he’s frequently having his characters go back and forth with such arguments. They are fixated with attaining correct definitions and clarity. There has also been scholarship on Philosophers from non-Western traditions that find similar things happening (I think here of some analytic interest in, say, Buddhism – but I’m sure there are many more examples).

The second virtue – is the willingness of Analytic Philosophy to turn back on itself, to sometimes question its own assumptions, commitments and sense of what is valuable. This is, vaguely, when Analytic Philosophy takes on a more “Post-Analytic” character. We can see this with how narrations of Analytic Philosophy’s development are often presented. There was a thing called Logical Positivism, but then Quine attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction, Sellars attacked the myth of the Given, the verification theory of meaning was seen as hopeless (how does it get verified itself?), etc, etc… I’m not saying that such histories are fully correct or that there’s now nothing of value in the Logical Positivists – but that we see here a willingness to attack the tradition and ideas one was “educated” in. Philosophy is an oedipal enterprise.

A third virtue is the richness and greater depth of ideas that can be attained by combining analytic methodology with topics, concerns, ideas and thinkers that have often eluded the mainstream of anglophone philosophy. An example here is in the analytic interest in German Idealism – where McDowell and Brandom have embraced “conceptual realism” as a live option in Philosophy (along with many other ideas). One may also point to the use of Nietzschean-inspired genealogy, the use of the ideas of Phenomenologists in Philosophy of Mind, or the greater concern for social ontology and social epistemology. By willing to work with traditionally “non-analytic” ideas, they have been imbued with a greater clarity, depth and argumentative rigour for why we should hold them (or not).

Self-referential Notes

*I am well aware that terms such as “Continental” or “Analytic” are largely bad terms. One can easily point to the influence of German thinkers in Analytic Philosophy (your Logical Positivists, your Frege) as demonstrating that Continental Europe was incredibly important for Analytic Philosophy. One could even claim that there was always a streak of Neo-Kantianism running through Analytic Philosophy which is why the return of Hegel is not perhaps that great of a surprise… Both terms also attempt to implausibly put together a huge terrain of different specific ideas, arguments, topics and methods, but often there can be greater points of agreement between philosophers from each tradition than with those belonging to their own.

But I think the terms sufficiently function well enough as Wittgensteinian family resemblances. Not as sets of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. They are also used to give a sense of what I am referring to.

*The reason why I’ve decided to use the term “Post-Analytic” instead of say "Neo-Pragmatism" (which seems much more used in Philosophy) is to try to be more general with who I include on the list. You may characterise the likes of Rorty, Davidson, Quine, Goodman, Putnam as such Neo-Pragmatists - but Wittgenstein himself would be an edge-case and I’m not fully sure (nor have sufficiently thought about) whether Kuhn and Cavell could be termed as such. There also seem to be elements in McDowell’s thought at potential deep odds with Pragmatism (the appeal to a non-distorted sense of having a rationally constrained intentional relation to reality – is something which I think a Pragmatist could dismiss as a contingent product of social or evolutionary history). I’m also not sure whether one could include the likes of Macintyre, Williams and Charles Taylor (among others) under the “Neo-Pragmatism” heading.

*One may say that “Post-Analytic Philosophy” is simply what Analytic Philosophy has turned into since the demise of Logical Positivism. There is definitely something to this point, which is why it’s acknowledged above. But I think what makes something more “Post” instead of simply “Analytic” is the hostility to what I called the “Traditional Philosophical Enterprise”. I take it that say, those that working on contemporary analytic metaphysics, (possible world styled) truth-conditional semantics or are still developing deontological or consequentialist theories of ethics in their glory – while not sharing much agreement with the Positivists, are also reminiscent of carrying on the “Traditional Philosophical Enterprise”.

*To say more about specific lessons or specific ways in which I think using analytic philosophy has improved non-analytical ideas - would very easily turn into me proselytising obscurely about the more unique and distinctive ideas I’ve begun to hold. That is an interesting task, but not one for an already bloated description of a list…

Mind and world

Mind and world

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Mind and world (1996)

Mind and world (1996)