Review: A Social History of Analytic Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy traces the evolution of Analytic Philosophy from its early 20th century roots in Cambridge, Oxford, and the Vienna Circle, through its rise to hegemony in anglosphere academia in the second half of the 20th century, to its absorption of feminist and decolonial schools of thought in the 21st century. Schuringa challenges Analytic Philosophy’s self-mythologizing: the origin story that Analytic Philosophy sprung from Gottlob Frege’s natural language approach to logic was constructed by Michael Drummett in the 1970s. Schuringa also criticizes Analytic Philosophy for viewing itself to be largely synonymous with western philosophy, despite its disregard for Western philosophical developments after Kant. 

Schuringa attributes Analytic Philosophy’s present hegemony to its alignment with liberalism. Unlike Marxism and other critical theories, Analytic Philosophy largely escaped McCarthyism. Its Humean conception of the world as an unchanging collection of facts to be interpreted by the mind leads it to regard the world as unchangeable beyond the (liberal) status quo, even as it takes on questions of gender and race. Schuringa argues that this liberalism shapes not only analytic philosophy's content and conclusions but also its mode of philosophical inquiry:

The ideology of analytic philosophy is that of liberalism. Accordingly, participants in its discussions are conceived of as entering a liberal marketplace of ideas. Circulation on the market is the mechanism by which the best ideas win out. It is presupposed that each participant may enter the market as they see fit, and take full part in the process of exchange. Entry conditions are not considered – it is taken for granted that all are free, sovereign individuals. The maintenance of the fiction of equal entry, of course, just as in the case of the commercial marketplace, serves the interests of those who in fact exercise power.

The author identifies three tendencies in Analytic Philosophy which results in its stodgy resistance to change and its liquidation of other forms of philosophy:

1. Deference to science: analytic philosophers either attempted to turn philosophy into a science (empiricism, Bertrand Russell) or serve as science’s handmaiden (Vienna Circle), thereby limiting the scope of philosophy to only what science could not answer.
2. Retreat to common sense: taking on a “noble savage” view of the common man and never questioning how culture, religion and other such factors shape our expectations, philosophy became a series of thought experiments and appeals to intuition (“intuition pumping”).
3. Impulse to therapy: the skepticism arising from empiricism turned philosophy into an ailment that must be cured; what is needed is not a constructive philosophy but a critique of philosophy.

These intellectual developments are presented through the book's social history of the discipline. But the “society” of this social history is narrowly scoped: beyond university administration and academic publishing, there is relatively little discussion of Analytic Philosophy’s interaction with the general public. Other than Analytic Philosophy's relatively friendly encounters with McCarthyism, Schuringa discusses only effective altruism as a significant point of contact between Analytic Philosophy and the broader public. Proponents of this utilitarian strain of analytic ethics seek to maximize their own wealth so that they can devote it to charities that maximize quality-adjusted life years. I ran into many “effective altruists” during my time in the Bay Area, and concur with the author’s assessment of its philosophical poverty, although it seems fairly largely confined to elite tech circles. But several generations of students have now taken philosophy courses at universities dominated by Analytic Philosophy. What broader impacts has it had on society? Schuringa stops short of answering this question.

I found this book valuable for its coherent overview of the major figures and overall trajectory of Analytic Philosophy — things I had put together piecemeal while reading about other 20th century philosophical movements. However, I also recommend it with reservations: the author sees little of value in Analytic Philosophy, thus reassuring me of my own pre-conceived notions. Schuringa writes polemically; I agree with the author that western philosophy’s preoccupation with Analytic Philosophy has not met the needs of our times. Schuringa also writes dismissively; he credits a handful of thinkers for their rigor and originality (Wittgenstein in particular), but dismisses most for narrow-mindedness, sloppiness, and oblivious recourse to metaphysics. Why did so many thinkers pursue this dead-end approach to philosophy? Schuringa's answers of McCarthyism, tacit support of liberalism, and journal monopolies don't satisfy me as a full answer for its appeal. Rather than feeling challenged to integrate new material into my philosophical views, I found myself suspiciously wondering what was left out, or painted with too snide a brush. 

Review: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

The Brides of High Hill is the fifth novella in Nghi Vo's Single Hills Cycle, and continues in the footprints of the last two instalments by making the nonbinary cleric Chih its protagonist. This structure is a departure from the first two novellas where Chih’s mission to collect stories serves as a framing device for other characters’ journeys. This latest episode includes virtually no recounting of stories to be stored in the archives of Chih's monastery; instead, Chih is a bewitched witness to triumphant revanchism, watching history unfold before their eyes.

There are some fun themes in this little story. Echoing literature from across cultures and centuries, financial pressures push a young woman into marriage with a much older, domineering man. Recalling works like Jane Eyre, a mad and sometimes violent family member is hidden away in the stately residence of the would-be husband (also as in Jane Eyre, a pining soul finds themselves sketching the likeness of the one they miss). There are the plot beats of many Victorian novels: etiquette questions, servant whisperings, immoral lords, negligent parents, and a curious and plucky young woman who deserves better than enslavement in marriage. Like many novels of that era (say, Middlemarch), the setting features political tensions in the background, with family drama taking the center stage.

However, the central twist didn't land for me because the novella never builds enough unease to prepare for it. The tone of the first three-quarters of the novel is sort of a low-stakes, Cozy Fantasy twist on 18-19th century literature — rather than Jane Eyre’s impassioned internal monologues, we have George R.R. Martin-style descriptions of lavish banquets. I therefore expected the climax to revolve around a family drama, resolved through emotional openness and understanding.

But then comes the reveal: the Pham family Chih accompanied are not who they seem. They are actually foxes who have enchanted Chih and intend to reclaim their former territory. Discovering that you are surrounded by monsters and can no longer trust your own memories should be terrifying. But in Vo’s cozy castle explorations, there were no increasingly eerie signs to heighten suspense — like the mysterious laughs and strange servant behavior in Jane Eyre. Nor did the narration convey that Chih was under an enchantment. An offhand comment about a teapot’s style being out of character for the Pham clan did not pique my curiosity enough to make its transformation into Chih’s companion, Almost Brilliant, feel earned. In fact, I felt rather chided as a reader, for not questioning why the story started in medias res or why Almost Brilliant was absent (recalling the end of the last story, I assumed Almost Brilliant remained on maternity leave). The plot and setting showed potential, but needed more horror woven in with the coziness.

Review: The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War 2, and divided up the USA between Germany and Japan. The title refers to the within-world author of a banned book that imagines what would have happened if the Allies won.

This premise is overtly political, however I was overall disappointed in its exploration of political topics. Nazi ideology was simplified into genocidal hatred of Jewish people and Black people, and the desire to ever expand their territory. But the ideology of fascism is broader than that, and shifts as the needs of the fascist party do. What would a victorious Nazi party transform into? Moreover, how would American culture adapt to occupation by German and Japanese fascists? (We should remember that US racial segregation laws were the inspiration for Nazi regulations around race, disability, and other methods of categorizing people.) These questions were not explored.

One of the most important pillars of fascism is irrationalism and mysticism, both of which were missing in Philip K. Dick’s imagined Nazism. This absence was rendered starker by mysticism being the philosophical guidance of the protagonists: the American and Japanese characters continually consulted the I Ching to aid in decision-making. In fact, the author himself used the I Ching to determine key plot points. The climax of the book revolves around characters discovering the plurality of worlds, the absence of a singular truth. Our world, the world of the novel and the world of the novel within the novel are all suggested to co-exist. In sum: history is subjective, constructed; truth is what you make of it; Nazism is bad, but irrationality and mysticism are very, very good.

Still, there were a few aspects of the novel that I thought were fun. Several story lines revolve around the art world, where Americans scavenge and counterfeit their own culture and history to satisfy buyers with stereotyped, fetishized views. It was a good exploration of how imperial subjugation shapes one’s relationship with one’s culture, and reminded me a little of A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. However, I preferred Martine's handling of this theme: her fantasy world was distant to our own, which allowed for richer exploration. Dick's novel leans on the shock of, "what if people did to us what we did to other cultures?"

Dick captured wonderfully the awkward tension of social situations where individuals of conflicting political persuasions are confronted by their differences but feel the need to maintain social ease. For example, I enjoyed the scene of the American comprador dining at the house of a curious, possibly radical, Japanese couple. This scene was narrated through the perspective of the American, who misses the subtext to the conversation, and this irony heightened the suspense. The scenes between Juliana and her undercover Nazi lover were also well done; here, suspense was driven by concern for her safety at the hands of a violent man. Maybe it is unsurprising that this facet of the novel was deftly portrayed while its political philosophy remained shallow: Americans have a simplistic understanding of Nazism, but ample experience keeping the peace during family Thanksgiving dinners with political opponents.

Review: Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

This is a fun, thorough, “people’s history” of Palo Alto, and as Malcolm Harris argues, the history of Palo Alto is the history of capitalism in the United States. Harris’s narrative is a counter-history; rather than recounting the story Silicon Valley prefers to tell about itself — geniuses working out of their garages to found the companies that will bring about the information age and/or save democracy, for example — he emphasizes labour relations, privatization of the commons, exploitation of legal grey zones, and (neo-)colonial relationships. Harris draws out many historical patterns that continue to play out in our present era: Palo Alto’s long history of union-busting presaged the labour regulation evasion of start-ups like Uber; the eugenics program of Stanford University’s founder shows an ideological continuity with Elon Musk’s technocratic right-wing beliefs; the close ties between industrial capitalists and the US government forged by President Hoover find their echoes in the revolving doors between the US White House and Silicon Valley tech giant. 

It’s an approachable book, packed with interesting historical details, and condenses an impressive variety of secondary historical sources into a quickly-paced narrative. It would make a great entry-point into contemporary criticism of capitalism.

Because of these characteristics, I found myself comparing it to Tyler Shipley’s Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, which I think serves as a fantastic introductory read for Canadian lefties. Shipley revisits Canadian history, understanding it to be driven by the demands of capitalism and settler colonialism, with even its foreign policy today being shaped by this core ideology. Though not short (452 pages), it is tightly written — that so much of Canada’s counter-history can be told without meandering too far from the topic of settler capitalism is a testament to the parsimony of his thesis. 

Palo Alto performs more of a bait-and-switch: ostensibly about the history of a relatively tiny patch of the United States, it is actually about American settler capitalism. Harris colours quite a bit outside the lines of the municipality of Palo Alto. Conveniently for Harris, President Hoover was a Stanford graduate, providing a tangential excuse for covering the US state response to the Great Depression. In a further afield digression, Harris explains the different paths to economic liberalization pursued by the USSR and China — the connection is that Silicon Valley companies set up manufacturing operations in China during this period, you see. Perhaps because Harris can connect nearly every historical beat a beginner leftist ought to know to Palo Alto somehow, the book crams in a lot, and I think Harris’s argument gets a little lost in all the details. A more discerning selection of anecdotes could have trimmed the book down from a rather bulky 720 pages and allowed the major historical patterns to shine through more brightly.

While Canada In The World is a pop history, Tyler Shipley is an academic; the book’s tone is conversational but precise, opinionated but not over-dramatized. Harris is a journalist, and his writing style is more melodramatic, more podcasty, more cute. While not quite my taste, perhaps Harris’s book will pique readers’ curiosity to learn more, which I welcome.

Review: Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

This was a good read, although more therapeutic than enlightening. Sophie Gilbert catalogues the portrayal of women in pop culture in the ‘00s and 2010s, surveying music, reality TV, teen comedies, celebrity journalism, and Girl Boss feminism.

Having spent my most impressionable years in that era, it was helpful to revisit things that had faded in my memory and interrogate how that might have shaped me. The discourse around women and women’s sexuality was horrible: the jokes about waiting for child actresses to turn 18, the expectation of women to act as sexual gatekeepers for men, the level of scrutiny applied to women’s bodies. At the time, I read feminist criticisms of all these things, but when you’re 16 you have no frame of reference for how else the world could be. The distance, education, and worldliness I acquired over the last two decades have enabled me to better assess the wretchedness of that time, and Gilbert’s well-structured and comprehensive book was a means of reviewing the era.

Still, I think Gilbert doesn’t quite manage to transcend beyond cataloguing. In the Introduction, she writes,

My main goal was to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other.

I was therefore excited to see more interweaving of history and culture; however, I found this aspect lacking. Events like the Great Recession and Obama’s election were mentioned, but these passages often felt more perfunctory than really revelatory of shifting attitudes or mutual disruption or derailment. For example, in the introductory passages to her chapter on confessional auteurs (e.g., Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham), Gilbert writes

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 seemed to signal that the future would be postracial and postfeminist—a progressive America that was bruised by the Great Recession but optimistic about the possibilities of a new intellectual age. Looking inward for inspiration, writers offered up a new wave of prickly, difficult studies of the self.

Obama’s election convinced many people that hope and change were possible. Few lives were left untouched by the Great Recession, and many Americans lost their homes and jobs. However, Gilbert fails to illuminate how these political events ended up producing “prickly, difficult studies of the self.” I think part of the challenge is that Gilbert is a cultural reporter, not an economics or political reporter, and seemed shy about venturing too far from her beat.

In addition to remaining rooted within the cultural realm, Gilbert’s analysis is limited by its narrow focus on the 2000s and 2010s and the years immediately leading up to them. To her credit, she astutely begins her narrative in the 1990s music scene, populated by fully-grown, independent women writing political songs. She identifies the teen-dominated pop of the early 00s as a manufactured reaction to scenes like Riot Grrrl:

I can’t help but read the arc of music in the 1990s as an explicit response to women’s taking control of their art, their image, and their careers…. And as outspoken women proved their power commercially and collectively as touring acts, they were replaced on the radio and in the media by teenagers who didn’t—or couldn’t yet—complain.

Gilbert continues to emphasize how one cultural movement was a response to another — Girls, for example, was Dunham’s reaction to “a cultural climate that ogled and sneered at women, even loathed them.” But Gilbert doesn’t look back further than the 90s. What can we say about early 21st century attitudes towards women in the context of the century of rapid change in women’s liberation that came before? Nor does Gilbert look forward. What can we say about the portrayal of women in the mid-2020s based on her survey of the 00s and 10s? She does muse a little about current trends, but her analysis remains shallow and contradictory:

In moments when I’m galled by archaic trends given a modern twist—tradwives, bimbo chic, stay-at-home girlfriends, twelve-year-old skincare influencers—it’s consoling to remember that most women watching have both newfound language and skepticism that I couldn’t have dreamed of while watching Girls Gone Wild or the video for “Money Maker.”

This optimism proves unfounded when we recall the many feminists writing about objectification, pornography, beauty standards, purity and youth standards, etc. long before the turn of the millennium. Perhaps this misplaced optimism is symptomatic of Gilbert’s neglect of older feminist movements, but even the Riot Grrrl scene, discussed by Gilbert at some length, anticipated some of the patriarchy and sexism of the 00s and 10s in its critique.

Gilbert identifies in the various trends of the 00s and 10s a unifying ideological current: postfeminism — exemplified by characters like Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw:

Less an explicit ideology than a mechanism to attract media attention and sell things, postfeminism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to women’s activism, bolstered by the sense that second- and third-wave feminists were somehow inhibiting our collective freedom…. Postfeminism was vague; it seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired. All these things were insistently sold as being empowering[.]

I found this term useful, but not fully compelling. Postfeminism is more of a vibe than an ideology, defined by what it is reacting against than what it is pushing for. To better grasp its development, it would have been fruitful to compare it to the other reactionary currents of the era (e.g., anti-science, anti-diversity) and to reactionary currents arising from earlier waves of feminism.

Still, while I found the analysis overall shallow, I thought the book was a rewarding read. I’d recommend it for millennial women or others who were shaped by the sexism of the time, or those with a particular interest in pop culture history. Reading is not a process of passive absorption of information, and Gilbert’s book provides the reader with plenty of fodder for reconsidering the era.

Review: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin wrote this novella during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the book’s laser focus on the issues raised by that conflict means it has aged less richly than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven.

This story tells the tale of a colonial expedition: a crew of a few hundred men travel to a distant planet and extract its natural resources. To do so, they enslave the indigenous population, who they treat as animals, even while they rape them. The indigenous people — Athsheans — rise up and destroy one of the settlements. In the civilization’s core, instantaneous interplanetary communication is invented and brought to the planet, radically changing the relationship between the colonial outpost and the governing interplanetary League. A settler anthropologist, Lyubov, stands in for the US anti-war movement. He alone recognizes the humanity of the Athsheans, and advocates for their liberation.

In a surprisingly Hegelian turn, the State reigns in the colonizers and negotiates a permanent withdrawal from the planet, promising to return only in five generations’ time and even then only a handful of visitors for scientific expeditions. (Hegel viewed the Sovereign as a limit on the ability of the aristocracy to exploit the masses.) It is interesting to see Le Guin’s optimism in the role of the state to impose justice, since she is usually identified as an anarchist and her fictional works are quite critical of centralized authority (see, for example, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven). Still, an Athshean character, Selver, questions how capable the League really is of enforcing its ban on interfering with the planet, whose future is left open-ended:

“You decide matters all at once, your people,” [Selver] said, again between statement and question.
“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.
“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop. And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the people in the world at once…”
“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when you gave an order, Selver, it was obeyed by everybody on every island here at once. How did you manage that?”
“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.

Le Guin’s Athsheans are a mishmash of idealized indigenous stereotypes. They live in harmony with nature in peaceful, egalitarian communities. Their women are political leaders and their men are spiritual leaders. Dreams are culturally and spiritually significant, and can be consciously directed to communicate with others. They lack the concept of murder until the settlers arrive in their lush garden — an event that is an allegory for colonialism’s impact on the societies it collided with as well as an allusion to biblical Original Sin. Although the colonizers leave, this knowledge of murder and violence is something the Athsheans are permanently left to grapple with. “You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity,” Selver answers in response to a League representative asking if the Ashtheans have returned to their pre-colonial ways.

The story is fine, but a little overly simple. Le Guin’s other works challenge us to confront dearly-held or deeply-rooted beliefs. The Lathe of Heaven asks us if gender is really real and fixed, or socially constructed and fluid. The Dispossessed questions if liberalism and anarchism are really as free and fair as their proponents argue. The Lathe of Heaven examines the ramifications of trying to impose one’s vision of a better world on others. These are still pertinent, fiercely-debated political questions. In contrast, The Word for World is Forest questions colonial exploitation, a matter that seems well settled now, if it was not already settled for most people by the 1970s, following decades of national liberation movements. If her narrative had been more subtle — its colonial representative are near caricatures of racism and misogyny — it may have been better able to challenge any lingering settler ideology in the typical Le Guin reader. On the other hand, that may have made it a less pointed critique at its time of publication.

Review: Survival by Margaret Atwood

Writing in the 1970s, Atwood surveys Canadian literature and identifies a few of its central themes and tendencies. In doing so, she helped bring self-consciousness to the literature of this frigid, confused, often-violent child of Britain, nudging it toward a distinct national identity.

Atwood identifies “survival” as the idea coursing through Canadian literature (in contrast to the US’s “frontier” and England’s “island”): survival against Mother-Nature-the-Monster (having discovered that Canada’s natural bounty was nothing like the idyll pictured from the shores of England), survival against the dominance of its southern neighbour, survival of the francophones in a sea of anglophones.

Survival is precarious in these works. Most of its characters succumb to some travesty or other. Atwood attributes this pessimism to a victimization complex, which she breaks down into four stages: denial of victimhood, resignation to the inescapability of victimhood, belief in the possibility of overcoming victimhood, and some fourth stage of transcendence (more of a theoretical possibility than something typically achieved, in reality or in literature). Most Canadian literature lingers in the second phase.

The book is well-structured; each chapter investigates a particular facet (nature, animals, settlers and immigrants, family, women, francophones, artists, death, failure), critiquing poems and novels that touch on these topics or motifs. Each chapter comes with a shortlist of 3-4 key works and a longlist of perhaps a dozen referenced works. Atwood’s writing is colourful, wry, and incisive, and her tour through CanLit is well-paced and enjoyable.

Having surveyed the previous century or so of writing, the work is now over half a century old. It was highly influential in shaping Canadian literary criticism, and thus the Canadian publishing industry broadly. It is therefore undoubtedly dated. I thought this was particularly true of the chapter on artists: with the advent of CanCon laws and funding for the arts (not to mention self-consciousness as a nation or the ease of distributing media across the globe), the lack of audience is no longer so existential for Canadian artists. Canada has also changed. Now several generations later, our identities as and associations with settlers and immigrants have shifted. Indigenous literature was absent from Atwood's investigation due to its near-total exclusion from the publishing industry. A modern revision would presumably investigate ideas of indigeneity and settler-colonialism founded on Indigenous literature that has since made it to print.

Still, I found it very easy to see themes of survival and the ways it ripples through other topics in many of the Canadian works I have read lately. Ducks is all about survival in the bleak capitalism and soul-crushing misogyny of the oil sands, first as a bare survival but then transitioning to an insistence on thriving and overcoming victimhood. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic narrative; survival means navigating a sparse and hostile world to find meaning in life. Study for Obedience picks up on many of the family themes Atwood discusses, with the brother taking the position of domineering patriarch. To this protagonist, survival means finding a way to coexist as a Jewish woman and an immigrant with the backwards villagers.

This is, obviously, a book about Canadian Literature from front-to-back. But I think it holds interest outside that narrow scope too. By honing in on this niche, Atwood demonstrates the value — or even the necessity — of literary critique and literature for developing a cohesive community identity. This work therefore may be of interest for someone hoping to develop other national or political identities. Second, although dated, Atwood hits upon some very persistent aspects of the Canadian identity. Those interested in learning who Canada really is, or taking a good look at themselves in the mirror, may also wish to pick it up.