 Hi! Welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. Today we're talking about Willard Van Orman, Quine, Morton White, and the strange path of analytic philosophy in America. To set up today's discussion I'm gonna I'm gonna sort of take us back to some earlier things that we've talked about and look at it look at Quine and White in a larger historical context because I think that will help our discussion today. So if we go back to earlier in the semester we think about one of the key commitments shared by the progenitors and early figures of both analytic and continental philosophy, besides stylish beards of course, was a form of anti-naturalism specifically in the form of anti- psychologists, right? So the early figures in both traditions were keen to argue that psychology, the science of psychology, did not bear a lot of relevance to philosophy and philosophy was a kind of independent activity from science as we understand it from the natural sciences as we understand them. Now an outlier in this respect are the the pragmatist philosophers from America who remained strongly naturalistic in their orientation, especially William James and John Dewey who both made substantive contributions to the field of psychology and continued to sort of synthesize philosophy and psychology into their later work. I don't mean, I don't mean to say that that these philosophers defended a kind of simple minded psychologism about philosophy, a simple kind of reductionistic view, but only that they insisted on maintaining the kind of close connections that the anti-psychologism sort of movement in early analytic and early continental philosophy rejected. So this brings me to an important bridge figure in this story which is Clarence Irving Lewis. It's actually not a lot of good pictures online of Lewis I discovered, so this is the best I could find from this book cover, C.I. Lewis, The Last Great Pragmatist. Anyhow Lewis developed a version of pragmatism that he called conceptual pragmatism and he was a particularly important influential figure in American philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to his sort of pragmatist philosophy and epistemology, he also worked in formal logic. He sort of critically engaged with the logic of Russell and Whitehead and the Principia Mathematica, receptively but also critically, particularly concerned about the way they represented the conditional, sort of if-then statements. And Lewis developed what some have called the first sort of true system of modal logic, formal modal logic. So given the timing in the 30s and 40s, given Lewis's particular style and approach to philosophy, it's clear how Lewis might play an important role in the reception of analytic philosophy in America. If we think about where Lewis himself came from, right, Lewis was trained at Harvard in the first decade of the 20th century by the pragmatist philosopher William James and then by a Josiah Royce, who was a kind of interesting eclectic figure on his own right that, unfortunately, we haven't had time to talk about. Royce was a kind of, well, he was a proponent of German idealism, perhaps the greatest proponent of it in America, but he was also kind of a quasi pragmatist and he and James had a long sort of set of debates. By the time that Royce was sort of advising Lewis's dissertation at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he described Royce described his own view as absolute pragmatism, kind of a middle position. Royce himself was also quite interested in logic, including formal logic, and he developed his own kind of quasi formal logical system. That's a quite interesting topic, but beyond our scope. So after receiving his PhD from Harvard, Lewis taught elsewhere in California for a while, eventually he returned to Harvard in 1920. I would say a few years later, he was joined there by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell's collaborator on the Principia Mathematica. Whitehead had sort of first focused on mathematics and logic, had kind of moved into studying more philosophy of science and philosophy of education. But by the time he was moving over to Harvard, he had kind of moved into a sort of study of really a quite traditionalist and pretty abstruse sort of metaphysics. So at that time, he was he was working out his so called process philosophy, or process metaphysics. Willer Van Orman Kwein received his PhD at Harvard in 1932, training with Lewis and Whitehead. I believe Whitehead was his dissertation advisor, because he was writing a dissertation on Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Shortly after he received his PhD, Kwein traveled to Europe and spent significant time with Carnap. And I think we can see the influence of of Lewis and Carnap on Kwein's work. Kwein then came back to Harvard and ended up basically working there until 1978. Now, after World War II, Kwein emerged as a kind of central figure in American analytic philosophy, especially after publishing his two dogmas of empiricism, which was taken to kind of dismantle major aspects of the logical empiricist program of his mentor, Carnap. And it was done on sort of broadly pragmatist grounds. So so these key notions of the analytic and synthetic distinction, the sort of a priori questions of logic and empirical questions of science, those kinds of a lot of that machinery was broken down by by Kwein and hid in a series of articles. And then in his 1969 article, Epistemology Naturalized, which we're talking about today, Kwein articulated what might be seen as a actually a pretty simplistic version of epistemological psychologism. So here we have Kwein kind of going back and saying actually, psychologism is not so bad. It has a lot to it. We should be naturalists of the really kind of flat footed sort, right? So rejecting effectively the sort of origins of analytic philosophy in some sense. Now, in 1953, the same year that C.I. Lewis retired from Harvard, Morton White joined Harvard as a colleague of Kweins, and he would become a kind of major interlocutor for Kwein, they would have a lot of sort of back and forth and White drew a lot on Kwein's ideas in his own work, and expanded upon them. Now, White himself received his PhD at Columbia under Herbert Schneider, who had been a student there at Columbia of John Dewey's. Now White worked in ethics, social and political philosophy and the philosophy of culture. He also had a major White had a major project of attempting to synthesize analytic philosophy with pragmatism kind of create a synthesis there. Already White's views were somewhat similar to Kweins before they really started interacting. You know, drawing on Dewey, White also had opposed the analytic and synthetic distinction. And once they were working together at Harvard, White became quite engaged with Kwein's work. White accepted many of those sort of holistic and pragmatic elements of Kwein's philosophy, but also criticize what we might call Kwein's scientism, Kwein's exclusive sort of exclusive focus on on science. Because White, as I said before, is quite interested in the social, political, cultural, ethical stuff. As an aside, I think it's quite striking the role that Harvard plays in this story, how many of the figures in this story who are really, I think, crucial figures to the evolution of analytic philosophy in America. And they were so many of them were associated with Harvard. So that's something I think that's quite interesting. So if we think about analytic philosophy in America in the latter part of the 20th century, we see a number of themes developing out of the work of people like Kwein, White, others like Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, and so on. We see a kind of pragmatic form of empiricism that, you know, breaks down some of the rigid, rigid features of logical empiricism, but maintains a certain kind of connection to empiricism. We see an emphasis on naturalism, which distinguishes it from sort of earlier European forms of analytic philosophy, and British analytic philosophy. We see concerns about normativity, and this really gets at the back and forth between Kwein and Morton White, this sort of concern about how are you going to maintain the sort of normative aspects of epistemology, and ethics in the face of a naturalism that relies heavily on descriptive science. And then sort of pride of place falling to logic and epistemology is another kind of key aspect of the movement. So at this point, you might find yourself asking the question, did analytic philosophy absorb American pragmatism when it came to America? And there's definitely some scholars who've thought that and some reasons to think that. I mean, on the one hand, you have the sort of lines of influence on these early, these early American analytical philosophers from the pragmatists, you have a lot of pragmatic themes, breaking down of dichotomies, naturalism, and some of these other aspects that come come through. You have a number of these important American analytic philosophers, not just Kwein. White, although white is is something of a marginal figure, a sort of a bridge figure, you have Wilfred Sellers is one, Nelson Goodman is one, you have the reception, the sort of friendly reception that the logical empiricists receive when they come to America, and a lot of collaboration, cooperation over projects like the Unity of Science movement. So you do have sort of some reasons, some some really compelling reasons to think that elements of American pragmatism were absorbed into analytic philosophy, as it became dominant in America in the decades following World War Two, into the later part of the 20th century. On the other hand, you know, one of the things that I think characterizes the pragmatist movement is its sort of social engagement, you see this in Dewey, in his writings on democracy and education and politics. You see this in Jane Addams, in her in her social settlement work, you see this in the work of Du Bois, Cooper, to a lesser extent in person James, although I think there's still a significant element of social engagement there. And that seems to disappear as it sort of filtered through the work of Quine, in particular, and some of the other pragmatists, or you might say sort of analytic pragmatists in this period. I think one of the reasons is the centering of logic and epistemology. Although, you know, definitely those are major themes in the pragmatist tradition. But but the way they were taken up post World War Two was definitely less socially engaged. A lot of the kind of thinking that the pragmatists were doing continued, but it continued in sort of social science context as opposed to within philosophy. So there's a lot of a lot of interesting questions about what's going on there. By the by the later decades of the 20th century, 1980s, 1990s, there definitely is a resurgence of focus on the classical pragmatists interest in the work of Dewey and James, and purse, and the re incorporation of some of those more socially engaged themes, especially as feminist philosophers start engaging with pragmatism, and the sort of broader perspective Africana philosophers as well at Cornell West, and a kind of broader sort of perspective is gained, especially as analytic philosophy becomes a less sort of restrictive, well defined movement and kind of sort of disperses into the mainstream without having a particular program to speak of. So those are some of my thoughts about the larger historical movements and questions here with with reference to the themes in the in the quine and Morton white readings for today. We'll obviously dig into the arguments in those readings in more detail in class and on discord. If you have any questions, please feel free to raise them in those contexts or on the comments of this video. Otherwise, I'll see you next time as we take up another movement in American philosophy, the sort of importation of not analytic, but a form of continental philosophy as the Frankfurt School of critical theory moves to California. So I'll see you on the West Coast next time. Bye