Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (book review)
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/08/18...l-history/

EXCEPT: If analytic philosophy benefited from U.S. military funding after World War II and was unified as a concept during a Cold War era when communism and other left-wing ideologies were feared, with many of its greatest minds fleeing the threat of the Nazis, can it still be said to be apolitical?

Schuringa quickly lays out his answer to that question in the introduction of his book, which is published by Verso and has caused ripples within the academic philosophy community. He argues that analytic philosophy, what he refers to as the “dominant way of doing philosophy,” is the “product of, and has continued to be shaped by, the social world in which it finds itself.” (MORE - details)

“In the book, I tried to do an ideology critique,” Schuringa tells Northeastern Global News, “which is to say give it a kind of Marxist treatment, where the idea is to look at the social and political cultural forces in society, and see how those have shaped this movement in philosophy.
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“It’s like, ‘Well, these are the eternal questions that we are trying to ask and the political and cultural context just doesn’t matter.’ The idea is that you can evaluate arguments by just looking at how good the arguments are and not thinking about the context of the people that are making them.
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That staying power has not always necessarily been a good thing, however, he concludes. Its commanding status means that “radical currents of thought” — he name-checks feminism and critical race theory — are “suppressed” when put through the lens of analytic philosophy.

Schuringa explains: “I think that those radical impulses, when they come into the analytic philosophy space, they get neutralized. They’re robbed of some of their radical force.”

Postmodern crap.