My PSA 2014 talk (title, abstract and change in time)

This week is the 2014 edition of the Philosophy of Science Association conference. A great program has been assembled here.

Due to an oversight on my part, a conflict developed, and I had to request that the program chair move the time for my talk. The talk will now be presented on Friday Nov. 7th in the 4-6pm session on Explanation. I am grateful to the program chair for accommodating this last minute request.

Title: Newton, Laplace and Salmon on Explaining the Tides
Abstract: Salmon cites Newton's explanation of the tides in support of a causal account of scientific explanation. In this paper I reconsider the details of how Newton and his successors actually succeeded in explaining several key features of the tides. It turns out that these explanations depend on elements that are not easily interpreted in causal terms. I use the explanations offered after Newton to indicate two different ways that non-causal factors can be significant for scientific explanation. In Newton's equilibrium explanation, only a few special features of the tides can be explained. A later explanation deploys a kind of harmonic analysis to provide an informative classification of the tides at different locations. I consider the options for making sense of these explanations.

New Symposium on Glock's What is Analytic Philosophy?

The most recent issue of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy has just appeared with a long-awaited symposium on Glock's book on the nature of analytic philosophy. Discussants include me, Leila Haaparanta, Panu Raatikainen and Graham Stevens. Glock also offers an extended and helpful reply. This issue marks the end of the term of our first editor in chief, Mark Textor. I would like to thank him for all his work in getting this new open-access journal going. I would also like to welcome our new editor in chief, Sandra Lapointe!

Conference: Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy

From May 24-26 at McMaster University, the first annual conference of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy will be held. The keynote speakers are Michael Friedman, Paolo Mancosu and Thomas Uebel. Additional information is available here. Thanks go to Sandra Lapointe for all her hard work of organizing and hosting!

New Book: Mancosu, The Adventure of Reason

While it came out in 2010, some of the readers of this blog may still not be aware of this important collection of Mancosu's articles on the interactions between logic and philosophy in the 1900-1940 period. I recently completed a summary of the book's contents for Zentralblatt Math that might be useful.

Vincent on Mander on British Idealism

Andrew Vincent provides a positive and helpful overview of Mander's recent book, British Idealism: A History. Based on Vincent's summary, it appears that Mander supports the claim that early analytic philosophers never actually "refuted" British idealism, at least in the sense of finding an argument from premises that the idealists themselves would have accepted. Another important theme of the book is the way in which British idealism arose as a reaction to empiricism and naturalism. This a point that Wollheim explored in his now classic study of Bradley. If British idealism is a reaction to British empiricism, especially Mill, then it is hard to accept something else that Vincent says:

In addition to the above philosophical influences, there was a range of issues and debates which also contributed to the rise and popularity of Idealism. For example, Idealism did respond very effectively to the social issues of the time. It was a philosophy that radiated optimism at a time of extreme social dislocation and pessimism concerning the appalling social and industrial conditions of the age. It offered a philosophy and a form of sophisticated understanding of political practice that gave a much needed emphasis to social cohesiveness and to the closeness of the relation between individual and collective responsibility. Its highlighting particularly of the importance of active social citizenship subsequently became an important theme in the early twentieth-century politics of welfare. In this sense many aspects of its output became associated, in some interpretations, with the development of a new social liberalism in the period from 1906 to 1914.

In the case of Bradley, at least, this seems implausible. I get the sense reading Bradley that it was the link between Mill's empiricism and Mill's liberalism that motivated Bradley to attack Mill's empiricism so thoroughly.
A point which Vincent emphasizes and which is more plausible is the internal divisions within British idealism:

By the later 1890s and early 1900s, younger members of the Idealist school began to divide up into factions. The key binary (although it is still a marked simplification) was between Absolute Idealists (Caird, Bradley and Bosanquet) and Personal Idealists (Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison, C.C.J. Webb, Hastings Rashdall, Boyce-Gibson, Henry Sturt and McTaggart). Absolute idealism, because it tried largely to characterise the totality of experience, was indicted for a multitude of crimes. It was accused of losing God in man, or man in God; dissolving things into thought; matter into spirit; abolishing all right and wrong; and truth and error. Its comprehensiveness and inclusivity was a virtue for some, but it was also the source of major problems for others. Idealist and non-Idealist critics alike were concerned largely about the idea of a unity above and beyond the individuals who comprised it, and which had a will of its own. This doctrine of the Absolute can also be found, to a degree, in Green's problematic idea of the eternal consciousness, as well as in Hegel's notion of Geist. What role God has in relation to these terms remained a divisive and unresolved issue, even among the more Absolutist-inclined thinkers. The metaphysical, moral and political danger of a diminution of the individual and subordination to a 'higher' entity was connected by some critics, such as L.T. Hobhouse, to both German militarism and the conflict of the First World War. These critics of Idealism became known as the Personal Idealists. Amongst them, though, there was -- as amongst the Absolute Idealists -- a good deal of internal diversity of opinions. The Absolute / Personalist debate is most vividly illustrated in a meeting of the Aristotelian Society in July 1918 entitled 'Do individuals possess a substantive or adjectival mode of being?'

I hope that Mander's book and other scholarship on the internal history of idealism can lead to new contacts with historians of analytic philosophy who are not always ready to recognize the important internal divisions within their own movement.

How Widely Known is Broad's Anticipation of Jackson's Knowledge Argument?

As part of my seminar on emergence and reduction we spent two weeks reviewing the classic discussions of Mill and Broad, along with McLaughlin's helpful paper "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism." One interesting feature of these early discussions that McLaughlin relegates to his interesting footnotes is the perennial appeal to qualia. In particular, it is striking to come across the following passage from Broad's 1925 The Mind and its Place in Nature:

We have no difficulty in conceiving and adequately describing determinate possible motions which we have never witnessed and which we never shall witness. We have merely to assign a determinate direction and a determinate velocity. But we could not possibly have formed the concept of such a colour as blue or such a shade as sky-blue unless we had perceived instances of it, no matter how much we had reflected on the concept of Colour in general or on the instances of other colours and shades which we had seen. It follows that, even when we know that a certain kind of secondary quality (e.g., colour) pervades or seems to pervade a region when and only when such and such a kind of microscopic event (e.g., vibrations) is going on within the region, we still could not possibly predict that such and such a determinate event of the kind (e.g., a circular movement of a certain period) would be connected with such and such a determinate shade of colour (e.g., sky-blue). The trans-physical laws are then necessarily of the emergent type.

This should remind anyone of Jackson's famous Knowledge argument involving the physicist Mary who knows the correct physical theory of color, but who lacks color experiences. I would not say that the arguments are identical, of course. Jackson is arguing against physicalism, while Broad is arguing against what he calls mechanism. But both physicalism and mechanism have reductive implications, and the appeal to color experience in both cases to block this sort of reduction is quite similar.
This made me wonder how widely known this sort of overlap is, and if there are obvious antecedents that Broad is drawing on. Brie Gertler notes in her Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Knowledge argument that "Arguments in the same spirit had appeared earlier (Broad 1925, Robinson 1982)". And one finds a section on the Knowledge argument in Kent Gustavsson's entry on Broad in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Broad is also noted in the entry on the Knowledge argument by Martine Nida-Rümelin. So, maybe it is well-known.
It appears to me that Broad is drawing on the obvious chapter in Mill's Logic, especially Mill's remark that "from no knowledge of the properties of those substances could we ever predict that it [the tongue] could taste, unless gelatine or fibrin could themselves taste; for no elementary fact can be in the conclusion, which was not in the premises" (Bk. III, ch. vi, section 1). Indeed this style of argument could perhaps be traced back to Locke's Essay and God's power to superadd the power of thinking to matter (Bk. IV, ch. III, section 6).
Update (Feb. 13): Chalmers has drawn my attention to two prominent discussions of Broad's knowledge argument: Stoljar's introduction to There's Something About Mary and Chalmers' own "Consciousness and its Place in Nature".

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy: Update

About a year ago I posted an announcement of the launch of a new, open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the history of analytic philosophy. I am pleased to report that 2 articles and 1 substantial book review have already appeared:
James Pearson, Distinguishing WV Quine and Donald Davidson
Francesco Orsi, David Ross, Ideal Utilitarianism, and the Intrinsic Value of Acts
Kevin Klement, Review: Gregory Landini, Russell. London and New York, Routledge 2011.
Interested readers are encouraged to subscribe to the journal's Facebook page for news and updates on new articles. Our goal is to publish articles as soon as possible after they have been through our review process.
Update (Feb. 19): The journal also has an RSS feed that will list recent articles.

New Journal: Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy

This week marks the official launch of the new Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. I think it is a very exciting opportunity for scholars working in this field. I would emphasize the open access character of the journal. All articles will be freely available in electronic form. The hope is that the journal can provide a forum for rigorous scholarship for the broadly conceived history of analytic philosophy.

As the mission statement of the journal indicates:

JHAP aims to promote research in and discussion of the history of analytical philosophy. ‘Analytical’ is understood broadly and we aim to cover the complete history of analytical philosophy, including the most recent one. JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions. In addition to research articles, JHAP publishes discussion notes and reviews.

This goes some way to addressing Leiter's recent skeptical remark that "I trust they will publish articles that also explain how what used to be an actual movement in philosophy ceased to exist!" I would suggest that one of the issues worth discussing in the journal itself is the sort of position that Leiter alludes to here. But of course I also hope that more ordinary scholarship directed at questions in the history of analytic philosophers, and their relations to other philosophers, can be addressed.

The editorial team is

Editor in Chief
Mark Textor, King's College London, UK

Associate Editors
Juliet Floyd, Boston University, US
Greg Frost-Arnold, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US
Sandra Lapointe, Kansas State University, US
Douglas Patterson, Kansas State University, US
Chris Pincock, Purdue University, US
Richard Zach, University of Calgary, CAN

Assistant Editor
Ryan Hickerson, Western Oregon University, US

Review Editor
Mirja Hartimo, University of Helsinki, FI

and the advisory board is

Steve Awodey, Carnegie Mellon University, US
Michael Beaney, University of York, UK
Arianna Betti, Free University of Amsterdam, NL
Patricia Blanchette, University of Notre Dame, US
Richard Creath, Arizona State University, US
Michael Friedman, Stanford University
Leila Haaparanta, University of Tempere, FI
Tom Hurka, University of Toronto, CAN
Peter Hylton, University of Illinois, Chicago, US
Bernard Linsky, University of Alberta, CAN
Ulrich Majer, University of Göttigen, D
Paolo Mancosu, University of California, Berkeley, US
Volker Peckhaus, University of Paderborn, D
Eva Picardi, University of Bologna, IT
Ian Proops, University of Texas, Austin, US
Erich Reck, University of California, Riverside
Alan Richardson, University of British Columbia, CAN
Thomas Ricketts, Pittsburgh University, US
Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin, IRE
Thomas Uebel, University of Mancherster, UK
Joan Weiner, Indiana University, Bloomington, US
Jan Wolenski, Jagiellonian University, PL

More on Epimenides

As Jonathan Livengood helpfully pointed out in a comment on my last post, Bayle links Epimenides to the semantic paradoxes in his Dictionary entry for Euclid (1740, although perhaps also in an earlier edition). A modern source cited by Bayle is Gassendi, and when you track down that reference you indeed find a link between Epimenides and the semantic paradoxes:




This comes from p. 40 of the first volume of the Opera Omnia from 1658, which has been scanned and posted online here. I don't know Latin, but the reference to this case as "celebre" suggests that Gassendi does not take himself to be making a new connection.

Who First Linked Epimenides to the Semantic Paradoxes?

As part of a philosophy of logic seminar on theories of truth I have developed an amateur interest in the history of discussions of logical and semantic paradoxes. As is well known, the Liar paradox can be traced to Epimenides and appears in the New Testament:

It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, 'Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.' That testimony is true. (Titus 1: 10-13, NRSV)

Russell makes allusions to this passage several times, including in "Mathematical Logic as Based on a Theory of Types" (see here.)

Given the discussion of these sorts of paradoxes in by medieval logicians, I was surprised to find this passage in Spade's article on Insolubles in the Stanford Encyclopedia:

One initially plausible stimulus for the medieval discussions would appear to be the Epistle to Titus 1:12: "One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians [= Cretans] are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies." The Cretan in question is traditionally said to have been Epimenides. For this reason, the Liar Paradox is nowadays sometimes referred to as the “Epimenides." Yet, blatant as the paradox is here, and authoritative as the Epistle was taken to be, not a single medieval author is known to have discussed or even acknowledged the logical and semantic problems this text poses. When medieval authors discuss the passage at all, for instance in Scriptural commentaries, they seem to be concerned only with why St. Paul should be quoting pagan sources.[5] It is not known who was the first to link this text with the Liar Paradox.

So, was Russell the first to make this link, or was he merely drawing on other sources?

My first thought was that Hegel or some other post-Kantian must have made the link, and Russell is merely repeating it. Through the power of Google Books I was able to find a passage in the English translation of Lotze's Logic:

One dilemma nicknamed Pseudomenos dates from Epimenides, who being a Cretan himself asserted that every Cretan lies as soon as he opens his lips. If what he asserted is true, he himself lied, in which case what he said must have been false; but if it false it is still possible that the Cretans do not always lie but lie sometimes, and that Epimenides himself actually lied on this occasion in making the universal assertion. In this case there will be no incongruity between the fact asserted and the fact that it is asserted, and a way out of the dilemma is open to us (Book II, Chapter IV).

This translation dates from 1884 and seems to be from the second edition of the Logic from 1880. I have not checked the German or the first edition.

It seems likely that Russell read Lotze's Logic, either in this very translation or the original German, as he notes Lotze's Metaphysik in his readings from 1897 and of course discusses Lotze's views on geometry in the fellowship essay. Still, it seems unlikely to me that Lotze was the first person to make the link. Any other candidates or evidence to consider?

New Book: Sociological Aspects of Mathematical Practice

Benedikt Löwe and Thomas Müller have edited an interesting collection of papers from the collaborative PhiMSAMP project. They have taken the very welcome step of making all the papers freely available for download for research use at this address. As the related page makes clear, this group aims to "to bring young researchers with foundational and sociological attitudes together and discuss a unified approach towards a philosophy of mathematics that includes both sociological analyses but is able to deal with the status of an epistemic exception that mathematics forms among the sciences."

New Entries in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Philosophy of Mathematics

Under the editorial guidance of Roy Cook a number of new entries in philosophy of mathematics have appeared on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As I understand it, the aim of this site is to present relatively short summaries which are accessible to a wider audience, esp. undergraduate students, than some other options.

Check out these recent entries:

Bolzano's Philosophy of Mathematical Knowledge (by Sandra Lapointe)

The Applicability of Mathematics (by me -- more shameless self-promotion!)

Mathematical Platonism (by Julian Cole)

Predicative and Impredicative Definitions (by Oystein Linnebo)


A list of the all of the philosophy of mathematics entries can be monitored here.

Principia Mathematica at 100 Conference Lineup

2010 marks the 100th year since the publication of the first volume of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. A major conference on Principia is scheduled for late May at McMaster University, in conjunction with the yearly meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society. The PM at 100 abstracts were recently posted here. It looks like a great lineup and I expect a great conference!

New Book: Nasim, Bertrand Russell and the Edwardian Philosophers: Constructing the World

NDPR has an instructive review by Bernard Linsky of Omar Nasim's 2008 book on Russell and his 'Edwardian' philosophical contemporaries like Stout, Nunn and Alexander. I haven't read this book yet, but it seems to mark a new level of scholarship on Russell's external world program and its relationship to Russell's intellectual context. As Linsky summarizes things,

Nasim argues that Russell took ideas that were being debated and made them precise to formulate his own views on sense data and matter. Most importantly, Russell replaced what Nasim describes as a "socio-psychological" notion of construction with the precise method of "logical construction" modeled on the construction of numbers as equivalence classes, which he brought to the "Controversy" from his work on logic and the foundations of mathematics. Both the origins of some of the unusual aspects of Russell's theory of sense data as being non-mental, but also not material, are found in the Edwardian controversy. We also learn what new ideas Russell brought to the debate to make it his own and to come up with his distinctive project of constructing matter from sense data.

This is a very helpful contribution to our understanding of the history. Linsky raises some points about the amount of detail which Nasim is able to go into about the philosophers he discusses. For example, Linsky explains how Alexander influenced the distinctive form of realism which later flourished in Australia.

A larger question about Nasim's project concerns the extent to which we can reconstruct Russell's views by focusing on philosophers alone. It seems that we may need to look beyond the philosophical context to the scientific debates, especially in psychology and physics, concerning space and our representation of space. Gary Hatfield has made some progress in this direction and my understanding is that Alexander Klein is also pursuing some research into the links between Russell's constructions and the psychology of his day. This sort of work will hopefully complement Nasim's story by expanding what counts as Russell's intellectual context.

Leitgeb Offers an "Untimely Review" of the Aufbau

Topoi has a fun series of "untimely reviews" of classic works in philosophy commissioned with the following aim: "We take a classic of philosophy and ask an outstanding scholar in the same field to review it as if it had just been published. This implies that the classical work must be contrasted with both past and current literature and must be framed in the wider cultural context of the present day."

Hannes Leitgeb has carried this off with great panache with the Aufbau. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

Philosophy is facing a serious crisis, but no one cares. When
German Idealism, Existentialism, and Marxism allied with
Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Cultural History, and Literature
Studies in the early 20th century, all attempts at conducting
philosophy in a style similar to that of the scientists got
expelled from the High Church of Philosophy. The creation
of the Wykeham Professorship in Hermeneutics (formerly:
Logic) at Oxford and the Stanford Chair of Textual Non-
Presence (formerly: Methodology of Science) are wellknown
indicators of these, by now, historical developments.
The best philosophical work since then is to be found in the
history of philosophy—if one is lucky. One cannot help but
wondering what turn philosophy would have taken if
someone had picked up the revolutionary developments in
logic and mathematics in the 1920s and directed them
towards philosophy. Maybe there would still be logic
courses in philosophy departments? Who knows?

Here's hoping that some more classics of analytic philosophy get similar treatments soon!

Richardson on Carus on Carnap

Richardson has a review in NDPR of Carus' recent book on Carnap. It is fairly sympathetic, but I think it strikes the right note of skepticism about Carus' attempts to extract an Enlightenment project from Carnap's work that will not only rescue some notion of explication in the service of clarifying scientific knowledge, but will also relate scientific knowledge to normative disputes in ethics and politics. As I read the book, Carus does an excellent job clarifying Carnap's moves towards a defensible picture of explication, but the link to values is still hard to make out. As Richardson puts it,

Carus's book leaves, that is to say, more to be done to specify and implement the project he announces. One can only hope that he continues to work in this vein and to inspire others to do so also. I am not convinced that what is at stake in interpreting Carnap's philosophy is ultimately our Western way of life, but, given the well-known social projects of the Vienna Circle, it would not be surprising if some aspects of interpreting Carnap's project aided in our philosophical understanding of our own social projects. I hope this review has given some indication of the multiple levels on which Carus's book is worth engaging philosophically. The book will be central to the continuing detailed scholarly discussions of Carnap's philosophy. More than this, it will, I hope, help raise to consciousness several larger issues regarding the social import of key projects within analytic philosophy.

A Course in the History of Analytic Philosophy

Following up the previous post, here is the list of lectures that I gave here in Taiwan, with the readings for each lecture. I had 22 sessions, with an hour and a half per session, but pressed into four weeks. I ended up with only 18 lectures, with some sessions having more reading than others. An introductory course in deductive logic was presupposed.

1 What is analytic philosophy? What is the history of analytic
philosophy?
Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy?, pp. 21-48.

2 Kant and Mill
(i) Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Preamble
and First Part. (ii) Mill, A System of Logic (1843), Book I, Ch. 3, sections 6-9, Ch. 5 & Book II, Ch. 6.

3 Frege, Foundations: Project & Critical Phase
Foundations, Introduction, sections 1-44

4 Frege, Foundations: Constructive Phase
Foundations, sections 45-69

5 Frege, Foundations: Implications
Foundations, sections 70-109

6 Frege, Two later papers
"Sense and Reference", "The Thought"

7 Moore and Russell
Moore, "Refutation of Idealism"

8 Russell on Denoting
Russell, "On Denoting"

9 Russell, Problems: Perception
Problems of Philosophy, ch. 1-4

10 Russell, Problems: Universals
Problems of Philosophy, ch. 5-10

11 Russell, Problems: Judgment
Problems of Philosophy, ch. 11-15

12 Wittgenstein, Tractatus: Metaphysics
1-2.063

13 Wittgenstein, Tractatus: Picturing
2.1-4.28

14 Wittgenstein, Tractatus: Logic
4.3-5.5571

15 Wittgenstein, Tractatus: Nonsense
5.6-7

16 The Vienna Circle
Neurath, Carnap, Hahn, "The Scientific World Conception: The Vienna Circle", Schlick, "The Turning Point in Philosophy", Carnap, "Elimination
of Metaphysics"

17 Protocol Sentences
Neurath, "Physicalism", "Protocol Sentences", Carnap, "Protocol
Sentences"

18 Carnap & Quine
Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology", Quine, "Two Dog-
mas of Empiricism"

Ideally there would be two more lectures: (i) one after 17 filling out the second phase of the protocol sentence debate with Schlick's "Foundation of Knowledge" and some later Neurath papers "Radical Physicalism and the 'Real World'" and "Unity of Science as a Task" and (ii) a final lecture bringing together some of the lessons for the history of analytic philosophy and noting some later developments with Quine and post-Quine. While this is a lot for one semester, for fifteen weeks I think it is a good balance of coverage of material and detailed discussion.

Teaching the History of Analytic Philosophy

Rather than worrying about the nature of analytic philosophy or taking a poll on who the most important philosophers are, I wanted to raise the issue of how we should structure an introductory course on the history of analytic philosophy. It seems to me that history of analytic has reached a kind of maturity that we associate with other areas of history like modern or Kant. With these topics, there are a few standard ways to organize an introductory course. There are also some companion introductory books that can be used to supplement readings of the classic primary texts.

But in the history of analytic philosophy, we don't really have either a standard syllabus or adequate companion books. Over the years several people have asked me how I teach my history of analytic classes. Unfortunately, I have tried out several different ways of organizing a Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein course and have always had trouble with the Russell part. My latest experience in Taiwan has convinced me that we should have a few basic goals when organizing such a course.

First, as with any history of philosophy course, the readings should be mostly drawn from the primary texts of the philosophers themselves. These readings should cover several different philosophers and span various areas of philosophy. It is not that useful, I would argue, to just focus on philosophy of language, for example, or just philosophy of mathematics. Picking just one area of philosophy would give a misleading impression of early analytic philosophy.

Second, there should be some attempt to relate the readings together into some kind of sustained narrative. One problem with some introductory books out there right now is that they cover just one philosopher. So, they miss the important interactions and disputes between philosophers that are crucial to the development of analytic philosophy. The narrative need not be some kind of continuous advancement of understanding, but could just as easily include several false starts or strange innovations on a given issue.

Third, students should learn not only the material covered, but also come to appreciate its remoteness from many of our contemporary ways of doing philosophy. As I put this point in my most recent course, early analytic philosophy was done in a different context, where a context includes a choice of problems, methods and standard positions. So, we should acquaint our students with this different context and help them to see how radical a transformation was effected by people like Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein.

On this last point, I can imagine the reply

Aren't we analytic philosophers, after all? If we are analytic philosophers, then surely we share more or less the same philosophical context of earlier analytic philosophers. So, the sorts of misunderstandings that result from variation in philosophical context simply cannot arise when we look back at these writings.

I want to suggest that this sort of response is misguided. What it ignores is that in its early stages analytic philosophy involved a radical change in the way philosophy was done. If this is right, then these early analytic philosophers were operating in a very different philosophical context from the one we enjoy now. This is for the simple reason that their philosophical contributions changed the philosophical context in many respects. These include all the features of a context: what problems are important, which methods are appropriate and which answers are viable. Many more traditional aspects of philosophy were thrown out and many new problems and techniques were imported into philosophy. The revolutionary character of early analytic philosophy, then, means that we must be careful in our approach to these writings, perhaps even more careful than when reading Aristotle or Aquinas where the difference in philosophical context is obvious and uncontested.

In future posts I hope to flesh out more how this sort of course would proceed, but for now I would be interested in hearing from teachers and students what their thoughts are on this sort of issue.

New Book: Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy?

As part of my course here in Taiwan I have been trying to read Glock's 2008 book What is Analytic Philosophy? (reviewed here). I am only about half-way through, but it is already one of the most encouraging contributions to the field in recent years. To start, Glock shows an in-depth knowledge of the many different aspects of analytic philosophy, from its earliest stages to its contemporary manifestations in Europe. Another positive is the level at which the book is written. While some exposure to analytic philosophy is necessary to appreciate his main points, most of the discussion would be accessible to a detemined undergraduate or a beginning graduate student.

Glock's main claim is set out in his "Introduction":

According to the [historical conception], analytic philosophy is first and foremost a historical sequence of individuals and schools that influenced, and engaged in debate with, each other, without sharing any single doctrine, problem, method or style ... [But] a purely historical conception ignores the fact that philosophers can be more or less analytic on grounds other than historical ties. These worries can be laid to rest if we acknowledge that analytic philosophy is a tradition held together not just by relations of influence, but also by overlapping similarities (pp. 19-20).

So, Glock offers a hybrid account of what analytic philosophy is. He combines both historical influence with similarities in philosophical commitments.

As I continue to read the book I will be interested to see if Glock addresses a tension that I see in many attempts to characterize analytic philosophy. On the one hand, we want to understand why analytic philosophy developed at the time and place that it did. On the other hand, if we are sympathetic to analytic philosophy, we also want to explain what is good or best about it compared to other developments in philosophy. Both desires can be easily combined if there are conclusive philosophical arguments for certain distinctive views of analytic philosophy, and these arguments were presented by the early analytic philosophers. But, in my experience at least, these things are very hard to find. As a result, many historians feel forced to choose either a purely causal reconstruction of historical developments or else a timeless reconstruction of philosophical arguments. Some third alternative is clearly needed.

An Introduction to Carnap's Aufbau

As promised earlier, here is a draft of a survey article on Carnap's Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau. The article will eventually be submitted to Philosophy Compass. Comments welcome, although please bear in mind that it is hard to summarize 80 years of discussion in 6000 words! Update (May 2012): A comment has drawn my attention to the broken link -- the published version is now online here.