Analytic Philosophy’s Discovery of What It Can Be *

Abstract

Christoph Schuringa’s Social History of Analytic Philosophy is a lesser but worthy sequel to Gyorgy Lukacs’s comprehensive ideology critique of twentieth century philosophy in The Destruction of Reason. Like Lukacs, Schuringa identifies analytic philosophy’s weak critical sensibility with its bourgeois liberalism, which impedes its ability to address adequately class, gender, and race discrimination. Schuringa is most interesting when he turns to the revival of metaphysics within the analytic tradition, especially modality, which is pivotal for the political imagination, given its focus on what can and ought to be. Saul Kripke is the focal figure, whose relationship to deconstruction and artificial intelligence is probed.

Introduction: Schuringa in the Shadow of Lukacs

In 1952, Gyorgy Lukacs published a mammoth book that he had worked on during the Second World War, but which came out both too late and too early to have the desired impact: The Destruction of Reason (Lukacs 1952 [1980]). People who have never read the book—including, it seems, the publicists of the new edition at Verso Books—think it is about how German philosophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paved the way for Fascism, understood as the self-destruction of reason. In fact, the book is an omnibus critique of all the major Western philosophers active in this period, including the likes of William James, Henry Bergson, and Bertrand Russell. Germany functions only as the lens through which Lukacs surveys the entire intellectual landscape, a reasonable convenience since during this period, the German-speaking world was the default home of philosophy—and certainly formative for James, Bergson, and Russell, albeit in rather different ways. Early in the book, Lukacs justifies his comprehensive approach in terms of wanting to perform a critique of bourgeois ideology in the multifarious forms that its espoused ‘liberalism’ permits, which in the end only resulted in the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

Now, that is what I call ‘ideology critique.’ Lukacs took seriously the hegemonic character of capitalist ideology, which implies that seemingly opposed philosophies—such as idealism, vulgar materialism, pragmatism, vitalism, phenomenology, and the emerging analytic school—in fact reinforce the same totalizing regime. Since Lukacs regarded Marx as continuous with Hegel as the standard-bearer of world-historic reason, he lumped all these philosophies as variants of ‘irrationalism.’ In the case of analytic philosophy, the main offense to ‘reason’ in Lukacs’s sense was that based on his knowledge of the school—the early Wittgenstein and logical positivists, both of whom received Russell’s blessing—its restriction of the scope of reasoning to strict logical formulation rendered it incapable of thinking strategically. And so, while analytic philosophers are quite good at criticizing faults in the reasoning of others, their lack of an overarching ends-orientation made them useless in terms of advancing the ‘Revolution.’ Indeed, in the case of the early Wittgenstein (and arguably his later version as well), the uncritical deployment of critical reason veered into nihilism. Kant’s immediate idealist followers had at least avoided that tendency in his philosophy. According to Lukacs, Marx then made the second correction of Kant by replacing idealism with dialectical materialism.

Be that as it may, I have no doubt that a latter-day Lukacs could write a similar omnibus book about Western philosophy over the past 75 years, since nothing has changed to obscure his original vision. The likes of Habermas, Rorty, and Derrida are also easily interpreted as simply variations on the theme of liberalism, which Lukacs Redux would undoubtedly dub ‘irrationalism.’ To be sure, Destruction 2.0 would be envisaged through an English rather than a German lens, but a Lukacs-style ideology critique could be easily applied across the purportedly ‘deep’ analytic-continental divide. However, Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is not that book, though it is not without merit. The book is small beer by Lukacsian standards, perhaps reflecting the diminished epistemic aspirations of ideology critique after the fall of the Soviet Union. For his part, Schuringa mentions Lukacs only in passing, as part of the choir led by the Frankfurt School condemning logical positivism in the 1920s.

Schuringa specifically targets the analytic school because it has now long been the dominant school of Western philosophy, while admitting that its ascendancy has been accompanied by a dilution of its initial distinctiveness, which in turn may reflect its intellectual decline and/or simply its institutional default position for what counts as ‘philosophy’ these days. Moreover, Schuringa's book does not pretend to be comprehensive even within analytic philosophy, but it does largely mirror the school’s own bias towards matters of logic, the philosophy of language and metaphysics over those of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, even though analytic philosophy is equally well-represented across all branches of philosophy. Curiously, aside from the obligatory discussion of logical positivism, philosophy of science hardly appears in the book. Karl Popper’s only mention comes when Popper said he did not join the Vienna Circle simply because he was never invited. (Nevertheless, after some wrangling, they did agree to publish Logik der Forschung in their book series.)

Generally speaking, Schuringa’s observations become more acute as he approaches the present day. I especially recommend the book’s final two chapters (9 and 10), which tackle head-on analytic philosophy’s normative shortcomings. These he diagnoses in terms of the school’s inability to transcend its liberal political horizons, even when it comes to matters of class, race, and gender, to which analytic philosophers have paid increasing attention. Schuringa directs some of his most pointed criticism towards Miranda Fricker’s (2007) influential theory of ‘epistemic injustice,’ which not only presumes the presence of common intuitions about what counts as injustice but also treats the injustice as simply a failure of dominant parties to listen properly to subordinate parties in society. In other words, there is neither a sufficiently worked out theory of justice nor a sufficiently worked out theory of social change that might underwrite such claims of injustice in a philosophically or politically satisfying way.

Schuringa rightly traces this normative shallowness to analytic philosophy’s excessive reliance on intuitions across all its branches. To those not privy to such intuitions (i.e., non-analytic philosophers or simply non-philosophers), analytic normative accounts appear hostage to various Western liberal prejudices that require accommodation. Thus, were Fricker to construct a positive theory of ‘epistemic justice,’ it would probably resemble Rawls (1971), whose fundamental principles were specifically designed to generate a just society that satisfies pre-existing liberal intuitions. To his credit, Schuringa acknowledges Gellner (1959), which specifically targeted Oxbridge-style ordinary language philosophy, as a pioneering critique of such fabricated intuitionism. However, Schuringa’s own critique of analytic-philosophical reliance on intuition focuses more on their sheer unreliability (undermining the pretensions of Joshua Knobe’s ‘experimental philosophy’), instead of trying to probe experimentally the background conditions under which such intuitions are and are not salient. That would at least circumscribe these intuitions’ range of applicability (cf. Fuller 1989 [1993]).

Analytic Philosophy’s Increasing Turn to Metaphysics

Perhaps Schuringa’s shrewdest move in his treatment of analytic philosophy is to devote an entire chapter 8 to the increasing centrality of metaphysics—especially modality—to the movement. Here he is keen to portray this development as a failed left-wing revolt against the ontological austerity associated with the depoliticised turn taken by analytic philosophy after the Second World War, largely in response to the growing American wave of Anti-Communism. To be sure, there have been a spate of books over the past quarter-century, including by George Reisch (2005), John McCumber (2001) and myself (Fuller 2000), covering the US philosophy establishment’s peculiar adaptations to the Cold War environment. Schuringa follows McCumber in presenting Harvard logician W.V.O. Quine, the de facto doyen of US analytic philosophers, as the fall guy in his narrative. While Schuringa does a decent job explaining why and how modality became such a focal point for philosophical activity and controversy, sometimes his focus on intertwined personal histories obscures the larger intellectual issues involved, which are themselves of potential sociological import, but perhaps not in a way that easily reduces to ideological affiliation.

It is worth recalling the specific objection that the logical positivists had to metaphysics, which helps to explain why later analytic philosophers first seemed simply to ignore metaphysics, but subsequently engaged in great feats of metaphysical creativity. Much of what had passed for metaphysics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved what Lukacs would regard as ‘reifying’ specific aspects of one’s actual being in the world, indefinitely projecting it across all possible worlds, often in the spirit of what by the end of the nineteenth century was routinely called ‘determinism.’ I refer here to ‘vitalism,’ ‘scientism,’ and ‘historicism,’ major metaphysical movements of the period that attracted philosophers, scientists and the greater public. Both the logical positivists and Popper were opposed to these movements, less because of their empirical bases than their presumptive restrictions on personal freedom. Lukacs, who is usually credited for inserting ‘reification’ into the Marxist lexicon, also accepted much of this critique. However, his unconditional Jesus-like commitment to Marx prevented him from applying the point to Marxism, resulting in the spectacle that Thomas Mann beautifully depicted in the character of Naphta in Der Zauberberg.

Analytic philosophy’s gradual rediscovery of metaphysics—officially announced in Strawson (1959)—puts a particular spin on the movement’s curious but long-standing relationship with behaviorism, notwithstanding Strawson fils’ latter-day befuddlement (Strawson 2010). Whatever freedom we enjoy results from our having to respond to situations not entirely of our own creation. To be sure, our response may result in adverse consequences, also not entirely of our own creation. But freedom is ultimately about owning what we have done or allowed to happen. In this respect, John Stuart Mill’s promotion of ‘responsibility’ as a forensic concept in English jurisprudence captures the relevant sense of freedom, through which he sought to find common ground between the two major modern ethical theories, Kant’s and Bentham’s (McKeon 1957; cf. Hart and Honoré 1959). In Mill’s terms, Kant and Bentham differed simply over the terms for assigning responsibility. Both presuppose, albeit in somewhat different ways, a much stronger sense of freedom than, say, Aristotle-inspired theories (e.g., ‘virtue ethics’), which circumscribe the human capacity for action with a pre-emptive sense of ‘social mores’ and ‘human nature.’

Thus, two features of modern analytic ethics should be unsurprising: (1) That it ascends to ‘metaethics,’ thereby reducing the moral order to ‘rules of the game’ that can be instantiated by a variety of entities under a variety of conditions. There are few prior ‘substantive’ commitments to the nature of the entities involved or even the outcomes permitted. It helps to explain analytic philosophy’s heavy reliance on thought experiments, such as the ‘Trolley Problem,’ which are more about discovering the rules of game we have been playing (for better or worse) than scoring a policy win. A great beneficiary of this approach has been the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, who did his PhD under the master of metaethics, R. M. Hare, at Oxford. (2) That opposition to metaethics within analytic philosophy eventually comes from Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) Neo-Aristotelian retelling of the history of ethics, which marked a risk-averse approach to moral judgement. It stressed concern for others, interdependency and individual vulnerability, and associates moral reasoning with self-restraint on the exercise of personal freedom, often in deference to relatively fixed social and biological conditions. This ‘turn to virtue’ is not afraid to appeal to ‘tradition’ and some presumed sense of historical continuity, which both the Kantian and Benthamite strains of analytic ethics eschew and are accused of disrupting. And while the turn was at first enthusiastically embraced by political forces to the right of analytic philosophy’s liberal setpoint (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church), some feminists left of the liberal setpoint have also come to embrace it.

Analytic Philosophy’s Secret Sauce: Modality

Analytic philosophy’s drift to metaethics, which treats the moral world as at once abstract and exotic, rarefied and revolutionary, reveals the hand of modality as a branch of metaphysics. Modality favours a philosophical imagination inclined towards things being other than they are. In that sense, it is freedom biased. Strictly speaking, modality concerns the sense in which something ‘exists in the world’ or ‘is true of the world.’ As soon as you wonder how reality hangs together, modality comes into view. It involves reasoning about what is possible or impossible, contingent or necessary. Modality had already bedevilled Aristotle’s considerations of the truth value of events yet to happen (aka ‘future contingents’). The Stoics made early advances in the field, largely to get clear in their own minds the sorts of things over which they might and might not have control in life. All these states of being may apply equally to things or propositions, in which case we might be talking about causal or logical interdependency. However, analytic philosophy, as a non- or pre- (if not anti-) empirical discipline, has tended to deal in propositions (and their nominalist descendants: statements, sentences, etc.). The notable exception is Saul Kripke, to be discussed below, as he figures prominently in Schuringa’s book.

The High Middle Ages were pivotal in the history of modality, as elements of what we now call ‘modal logic’ were deployed to explain God’s creative capacity. Modern notions of scientific laws as ‘necessary,’ which the logical positivists strongly disputed, arise in this period. Leibniz radicalised the medieval pursuit, reducing all metaphysics to modality, resulting in his ideas of ‘optimization,’ whereby necessity is defined in terms of ‘best possible,’ suggesting that even the deity needs to make trade-offs between competing goals and perhaps even resources (given the inherent limitations of matter)—or at least, that is how the human mind can understand the divine mind, a position Voltaire famously ridiculed in Candide. Importantly, Leibniz linked these issues to what he called ‘theodicy,’ the administration of divine justice over time, which Hegel cited as an inspiration for his own philosophy of history. This way of thinking also informed classical political economy, which, as Lukacs (1948 [1975]) emphasised, preoccupied Hegel just as much Marx. Moreover, as part of his project, Leibniz also distinguished what modal logicians now call ‘alethic’ and ‘deontic’ modalities. The former concern what is physically possible, necessary, etc., while the latter concern what is morally permissible, obligatory, etc. The two modalities operate orthogonally yet according to analogous logics. The clear formulation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction found in Hume and Kant would not have been possible without this Leibnizian insight, which of course has continued to haunt all modern Western philosophy, be it ‘analytic’ or ‘continental.’

I present this capsule history of modality because it is quite different from Schuringa’s, though he acknowledges Leibniz’s significance and especially Arthur Prior’s (1957) pivotal role in recovering the medieval legacy for analytic philosophy. In contrast, Schuringa’s account of modality’s philosophical revival tracks the distinction between ‘extensionalist’ and ‘intensionalist’ approaches to logic, which he sees as prefiguring the analytic-continental divide in recent Western philosophy. Here he relies on a quote to this effect from the logician and metaphysician C. I. Lewis (1930), the dominant philosopher at Harvard in the 1930-40s, who, when he was not consolidating the American philosophical tradition by supervising the publication of Charles Sanders Peirce’s collected works, was assisting in Harvard President James Bryant Conant’s campaign to shift decisively the transatlantic balance of intellectual power from Europe to the United States, typically by replanting European thinkers in US soil. In terms more relevant to this discussion, Lewis was both a student of Josiah Royce, a follower of Hegel who took an intensionalist approach to logic, and a teacher of that great champion of extensionalism and follower of Russell, W. V. O. Quine.

While the extension-intension distinction has loomed large in logic at least since the Middle Ages, it is hard to capture in a way that does justice to both sides. Nowadays, extensionalism, the heir to medieval nominalism, is the easier to describe. It sees the world as populated by independent objects that can be grouped together in various ways, describable through logic. Set theory, which emerged as a branch of mathematics in the second half of the nineteenth century, codified this way of thinking, becoming extensionalism’s modern intellectual backbone. Not simply analytic philosophy, but Jean Piaget’s influential theory of cognitive development is predicated on just such extensionalism, as well as various ‘naturalistic’ accounts of the rise of mathematical practices, all of which predate Quine. Nevertheless, Quine looms large. Originally a mathematician specialising in set theory, he aspired to reduce all mathematics to set theory and logic, and one of his heirs, Hartry Field (1980), has gone further to argue that all mathematical entities (including sets) can be replaced for purposes of science by a logic of relations between the parts of physical reality being related. To Lukacsian ears, this sounds like another way of deconstructing what Marx called ‘commodity form,’ in which logic serves as science’s exchange rate mechanism for translating the value of one thing into another, which has follow-on consequences for both sides of the exchange, all quantifiable and convertible into physical laws, understood as general intellectual currency.

Intensionalism is trickier to capture fairly because the modern paradigm for presenting the extension/intension distinction is the mathematical logician Gottlob Frege’s ‘Morning Star = Evening Star,’ whereby the two objects refer to the same entity (Venus). Each object counts as a distinct intension because it is surrounded by its own set of practices relating to the time of day, even though they are ‘co-extensive’ as physical entities. Frege’s example is rhetorically biased towards extensionalism, since his readers would know that Pythagoras discovered that the two objects are the same, propelling the intuition that science is about gathering an increasing number of seemingly disparate objects into ever higher-order groupings, which constitute proper scientific entities, eventuating in laws that map their set-theoretic relations. (Quine certainly thought this.)

But the force of intensionalism is better seen in terms of Leibniz’s distinction between ‘alethic’ and ‘deontic’ modalities. The same physical act, practice or entity—however probable its occurrence—may be prescribed, proscribed or merely permitted, depending on one’s normative frame of reference; hence the philosophical significance of the ‘is/ought’ distinction. In set-theoretic terms, the resulting ontology is less likely to be shaped like a hierarchy than perhaps a more overlapping structure, as in what the later Wittgenstein’s called ‘family resemblance,’ or perhaps something consisting of orthogonal dimensions. Some of the medievals and Leibniz himself seem to have held the latter view about the relationship between extension and intension: namely, as alternative systems for classifying objects—namely, quantitative versus qualitative, the number of things versus their properties.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that early analytic philosophy clearly favoured an extensionalist approach to metaphysics that could underwrite a version of scientific reductionism. Indeed, both Russell and Quine were deeply sceptical about modality altogether. Russell (1927) set the pace by arguing against the need to postulate multiple logical levels to accommodate our modal intuitions. Inspired by Aristotle’s original formulation, he suggested that the difference between ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’ is a temporal illusion reflecting the difference between our ignorance of a state-of-affairs before it happens (‘possible’) and our knowledge of it after it happens (‘necessary’). In logical terms, it amounts to the difference between an unsatisfied and a satisfied formula (or open and closed predicate).

Quine (1948) famously captured this line of thought with the slogan ‘To be is to be the value of a bound variable.’ Just as Dewey and Rorty treated assertions of ‘truth,’ Russell and Quine treated modal terms as ‘honorifics’ designed to underscore our attitude towards a state-of-affairs, but lacking in any additional cognitive content. (Rorty also claimed that Quine agreed with him on ‘truth.’) However, C. I. Lewis (1912), equally famously, had already sowed doubts in the adequacy of this strategy by observing that the implication relation in first-order logic (i.e., ‘if-then’) is a much looser notion than what is normally meant by ‘implication,’ since the validity of ‘P implies Q’ also permits ‘∼P implies Q.’ However, when we say, ‘P implies Q,’ we normally mean to exclude ‘∼P implies Q.’ A stronger sense of necessity seems to be built into what we mean by ‘implication’ than mere deductive necessity of valid inference. Lewis called this stronger sense ‘strict implication,’ which launched his attempts to formalize the logic of modality.

The sociologically interesting feature of this wrangling over modality is that Lewis treated formal logic’s failure to conform to what he regarded as a deep intuition about ‘implication’ as grounds for amending logic through enhancement. While philosophers continue to dispute whether his intuition warrants such a revision, it is worth noting the paths taken by others: (1) Stick with first-order logic and simply demand that people clarify their thinking to conform to it. (2) Concede first-order logic’s inadequacy and develop non-logic-based modes of reasoning that conform more closely to everyday reasoning. Analytic philosophy has evolved from Russell’s and Quine’s position (1) to a more liberal position (2), which initially helped to define ordinary language philosophy, but has over the years been represented in analytic philosophy’s increasing openness to broadly ‘contextualist’ approaches to meaning, including engagement with the relevant anthropological and linguistic evidence. However, the fact that Lewis chose neither path but instead resorted to amending logic suggests how literally he took the Leibnizian ideal that logic is the language of thought, which he took to mean that we need to get its grammar right. It is an approach that should inspire artificial intelligence researchers.

While Schuringa may be correct that analytic philosophers who take the ‘modal turn’ have tended towards left-leaning views, the more general point—which also better serves his main thesis—is that modal reasoning itself tends to politicize thought by envisaging a much wider sense of reality than mere actuality. Most ideological disputes turn on disagreements over what is regarded as ‘possible’ or ‘necessary,’ in both their alethic and deontic senses. When Quine described his own position as ‘conservative,’ he was referring more to the reduction of reality to actuality than to any political doctrine that normally travels under that name—even if it happens to be true that Quine was a political conservative (though the same would not be true of Russell). In short, the aversion to modality reflects a depoliticised philosophical horizon, a stance that the logical positivists increasingly adopted after their transatlantic passage. Here Schuringa deserves credit for depicting Quine student, David Lewis, typically seen as having revived a metaphysically robust sense of possible worlds (aka ‘modal realism’), as in fact neutralizing modality’s political potential by treating possible worlds as self-contained entities, very much like the independent objects of logical extensionalism. Thus, for David Lewis, the ‘distance’ between such worlds is measured in terms of the similarity of their properties rather than their causal accessibility to one another—in striking contrast to the approach taken to modality by Saul Kripke.

This is not a trivial point, since two possible worlds may be equally coherent and similar in all but one or a few respects yet be relatively inaccessible to each other. This may apply in both alethic and deontic terms. The specific interdependency among features of a given world may be such that simply removing one of them would produce a radically different world. And one might then prefer a still different world from that resulting one, whereby many of the original world’s other features are removed. In economics, this point is covered under the ‘theory of second best’ (Lipsey and Lancaster 1956). Thus, Lewis’s so-called ‘modal realism’ does not say anything useful about decision-making contexts, in which modal considerations have practical import. Moreover, Schuringa rightly observes that Lewis’s modal realism does not even illuminate the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which takes Schrödinger’s wave function equation literally to imply that all the possible outcomes of quantum measurements are realised in alternative worlds. After all, the quantum situation also presumes that multiple worlds are generated from some initial measuring act. It is here that the power of Kripke’s approach comes into view.

Conclusion: Kripke as Analytic Philosophy’s Kryptonite?

Kripke understands possible worlds in causal terms, somewhat in the manner of genealogy—but not quite. Whereas ‘genealogy’ has been invoked by philosophers since Nietzsche to suggest both an alethic and deontic dissonance between how something now is and came to be, Kripke defines ‘necessity’ as invariant reference across possible worlds, which he calls ‘rigid designation.’ It focuses on the reidentification of the same object after its initial naming, which Kripke dubs the ‘baptism’ moment. Several interesting intuitions are at play here, four of which are: (1) Possible worlds require a grounding in at least one (‘actual’) world, where the baptism occurs (2) The ‘essence’ of an object (i.e., what is true of it in all possible worlds) is tied to its material constitution rather than the function it serves in a given world. For Kripke, an object’s essence resembles the part of a genome that is transmitted intact across successive generations of organisms, resulting in different offspring in different environments. This point was clarified in Hilary Putnam’s (1973) ‘Twin Earth’ thought experiment. (3) Modality ultimately concerns ownership across possible worlds, whereby naming effectively establishes an intellectual property right over everything with the material constitution of the thing originally named. (4) A Kripke-style continuous chain of reference starting from the object’s baptism is presupposed when, say, scientists assert that Thales was talking about H₂O when claiming that water is the fundamental principle of nature. Indeed, such presuppositions are crucial to legitimise science as a transhistorical project and not simply whatever the current scientific community thinks it is.

All these intuitions are quite contestable. In particular, Thales seems to have understood water mainly in functional terms as the source of all beings and their modifications. It is not obvious that he was committed to water having a specific material composition. He might have accepted either H₂O or XYZ (water’s functionally equivalent but materially different version in Putnam’s Twin Earth) as what he meant by ‘water.’ To be sure, this could wreak havoc on how we tell the history of Western science. Specifically, it would dissipate the sense that science is driven by a reductive materialism. However, any such revolution was ingeniously deflected by a Princeton student of Rorty and David Lewis, Robert Brandom (1994), who proposed the idea of ‘anaphoric reference,’ whereby my reference to ‘water’ is the same as that of the person from whom I learned to use the term correctly, etc. Brandom effectively flipped the temporal direction of Kripke’s referential chain by starting from the present to search for the baptismal naming rather than starting from the baptismal naming and using that to judge its subsequent referential uses. The former strategy presumes that we are competent heirs to a long-standing ‘conversation of mankind,’ as Rorty would say, while the latter might regard that conversation as having gone astray along the referential chain, such that when we say ‘water’ we are no longer talking about what, say, Thales was talking about. A version of this latter strategy also provides the basis for the radical critique of modern philosophy launched in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, which has influenced such recent French philosophers as Derrida and Deleuze. And while Derrida was in dialogue with John Searle, he would have had a more interesting discussion with Kripke.

Schuringa does not mention Brandom, who has been a subtle but pivotal figure in the incorporation of non-analytic philosophy into the analytic fold, first by taking off the rough edges from Rorty’s notorious rebellion against the analytics and using David Lewis’s (1969) theory of convention (his PhD under Quine) to domesticate the wilder impulses of the later Wittgenstein. Brandom calls his own position ‘Analytic Pragmatism,’ but throughout his career he has set his sights on the biggest game of all: colonizing Hegel for analytic philosophy (Brandom 2019). I say this as a former student of his at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, but also as someone who has admired his well-received systematic attempts to reshape all modern philosophy in the image of analytic philosophy. However, I believe that his consolidation efforts are doomed to failure as analytic philosophy’s successful self-routinization has rendered it easy pickings for artificial intelligence, which is already being used to enable non-native English speakers to contribute to the field. This is not to criticise those people, but to raise the spectre that artificial intelligence might soon be able to do philosophy as well as humans, if not better, if analytic philosophy remains the standard. Readers can judge for themselves whether they think artificial intelligence could generate one of Brandom’s carefully explicit and mannered texts. My answer is yes—perhaps now.

Schuringa discusses artificial intelligence only once, and dismissively in relation to consciousness, even though the topic has long loomed large in analytic philosophy of mind. Because analytic philosophy has tended to be less compelled by phenomenological evidence than continental philosophy, it has treated the significance of consciousness with considerable ambivalence. Unsurprisingly, then, artificial intelligence—understood as a being who recognizably thinks like us but clearly without our mental experiences—is taken to be a potential challenger to human epistemic authority. Here a ‘Kripkesque’ approach to the matter would be welcomed as a ‘circuit-breaker’ to the likely scenario of artificial intelligences doing analytic philosophy better than humans. In other words, we should treat how we address intelligent machines as we treat children when we teach them linguistic and other forms of knowledge. It was a point first forcefully made in the early days of artificial intelligence by Norbert Wiener (1964) in what turned out to be his final book. This consideration, as well as some of the others raised in this review, might make for a useful sequel to or enhancement of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy—even by Verso Books.