John McCumber (1)

This is one of the stupidest books ever written.

I'm not kidding. Those who agreed to publish this mess ought to be embarrassed with themselves.

Here's a breif synopsis:

McCumber, a scholar of Post-Kantian German Philosophy, finds contemporary Anglo-American philosophy too fixated on analysis and problem solving and not focused enough on grand world hypotheses (which means he's obviously never read David Lewis or Wilfrid Sellars, but I digress).

Thus he goes off in search of an explanation for these lamentable phenomena. The explanation that emerges from the five minutes or so that he spent in the library and his one afternoon using Google is this: contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (or analytic philosophy more generally) is the product of (drum roll) MCCARTHYISM!!!

That's right, the scourge of academic philosophy is none other than Joe McCarthy. What accounts for the rise of analysis is red-baiting and fear mongering among university administrators, to whom philosophy departments appeared to be bastions of godless communism. Thus, according to McCumber, many philosophers drank the proverbial Hemlock and subsequently traded in their grand world hypotheses and their poetic, aphoristic prose for the cold, mechanistic, soul consuming tools of symbolic logic and rigorous argument (wherein conclusions about the world are expected to FOLLOW from premises believed to be true by oneself and one's interlocutors).

That's right. With out the fear-mongering of the McCarthyites, there would be no such thing as analytic philosophy. Now, there may not really be such a thing as analytic philosophy (see for example, Preston 2007), but this argument is just so stupid it's hardly worth refuting.

I mean, does McCumber not realize that analysis of the sort he rails against was born in Europe at the turn of the century, before McCarthy himself? Does he not realize that it was alive and well in US philosophy departments by the 1930s (in part due to the exodus of positivists from Europe in the years leading up to WWII). A casual glance in the library stacks would reveal that the first textbooks and collections (Feigel and Sellars for instance) on analysis emerged in the late 1940s, before the rise of McCarthyism in any form. Anyone who doubts how firmly entrenched the analytic mindset/movement/whatever-you-want-to-call-it had become in the years PRIOR to the emergence of McCarthyism should consult Bruce Aune's history of the philosophy department at Minnesota (this can be found on Aune's homepage at UMASS).

Honestly there is much about mid century Anglo-American philosophy that is worthy of criticism, but that it's practitioners were somehow complicit in a government-university conspiracy to expel traditional speculative metaphysics from the curriculum in favor of formal logic is.......well.... just nuts.

The only people who will take McCumber seriously are those humanists from outside philosophy who want to take on the task of doing philosophy without being fettered by the strictures of reason and argument but have found themselves shut out from contemporary academic philosophical discourse.… (más)