Philosophy Today

Online First: May 26, 2021

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2021524417

The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

LAWRENCE CAHOONE

Abstract: Post–World War Two philosophy in America has been divided into the
mainstream of analytic philosophy and a family of nonanalytic schools of thought,
for example, continental philosophy and American pragmatism. The current balance
of power among these perspectives reflects an event that occurred forty years ago:
the “Pluralist Revolt” at the 1979 APA Eastern Division Meetings. What follows is a
progress report on the Revolt’s hopes. The tale has something to do with the recent
history of philosophy, Richard Rorty, truth, and with the New York Christmas of 1979.
It also has to do with recent politics. For while, as the Pluralists hoped, nonanalytic
philosophy is today more prominent, and mainstream analytic philosophy more
pluralist, than in the 1970s, political trends of recent decades have differently affected
analytic and nonanalytic philosophers. The result may be a new version of what C. P.
Snow called “The Two Cultures.”

Key words: analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, American philosophy, Plural-

ist Revolt, Bruce Wilshire, Richard Rorty

T
here are thousands of philosophers in America, each pursuing their
trajectory.1 But like birds, they come from particular nests. And
they flock. The dominant flock in America is “analytic,” a twentieth-
century tradition based in logic and the philosophy of language, its major sources
in the English language (including Germans who adopted English). Far smaller,
the next biggest flock is “continental,” based in German and French philosophy
from early nineteenth (i.e., Hegel) through the twentieth-century. But there are
other smaller nonanalytic flocks, including American pragmatists, metaphysi-
cians, historians, Catholic philosophers, comparative philosophers, etc. Many of
these have their own philosophical organizations, while occasionally presenting
papers at the American Philosophical Association (APA) meetings, the largest
association and predominantly analytic. Each flock has a core subject matter area

© Philosophy Today ISSN 0031-8256

 Lawrence Cahoone

where its distinctiveness is most prominent, from which its self-identity is gener-
ated, but also contains multiple dialects and family squabbles, the adjudication
of which is its main business. Interaction among flocks is far greater in the more
applied areas of philosophy—political or environmental philosophy or medical
ethics—where the subject matter requires non-philosophical reading that every
practitioner has to do, regardless of orientation. And there are rare birds who
cross territory (e.g., Marjorie Grene, Hubert Dreyfus). But the flocks rarely debate
fundamental issues. Speaking different languages and playing by different rules
makes for an uninspiring contest, like a hockey team playing a basketball team.
Some philosophers resent such generalizations. They pride themselves on
transcending divisions, on regarding each philosopher as an individual avian.
Like pacifism, that is a noble view which hides realities. True, most American
philosophers work in small programs where flock membership does not much
affect their day job. While they have specializations embodied in the subject matter
and method of their dissertation, most earn their bread by teaching core courses
to undergraduates—Introduction to Philosophy, Logic, and Ethics—which any-
one should be able to do in a pinch. Even so, many small departments maintain
a primarily analytic or continental character, since birds of a feather prefer to
flock together. The larger the departments, the more specialized each member
can afford to be, culminating in doctoral programs, where the professor is paid
for a specialization. The great majority of the more than 150 PhD programs in the
United States are predominantly analytic. A small number are “pluralistic” where
no one flock constitutes, say, more than three-fifths of the department. Then there
are about twenty predominantly nonanalytic programs. The differences matter.
Any graduate student seeking a nonanalytic program such as Stony Brook or
DePaul or the New School, who accidently wanders into Indiana or Rutgers, will
be in for a shock.
I cast no pox on any flock. The best work on inductive logic or the philosophy
of physics is usually done by analytics, the best work on Heidegger or Arendt is
normally done by continentalists. Specialists inevitably set the standard for scholar-
ship in any subfield. All are doing philosophy, and no flock has any right to peck
the others on the grounds of moral superiority.
Some feel that contemporary philosophy in America is pretty pluralistic.
Compared to, say, 1970 it is. We are in the later stages of a seventy-five year his-
tory, from 1945 to today, characterized by the dominance of analytic philosophy.
Our current pluralism, such as it is, reflects something which changed the balance
of power among the flocks forty years ago. That was the “Pluralist Revolt” at the
1979 Eastern Division Meetings of the APA, a rebellion by nonanalytics to gain a
more prominent place in the mainstream. Perhaps it is time for a progress report.
There will be good news and bad news. Nonanalytic philosophy is more prominent
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

now, and the mainstream, while analytic, is more pluralist. That is good. But it
has come at a price.
My tale has something to do with truth and politics, with Richard Rorty,
and with the New York Christmas of 1979. It also has something to do with how
we philosophers are now. For fate placed the fortieth anniversary of the Pluralist
Revolt smack in the middle of the Trumpian Interregnum. A divisive period for
America, to be sure; in its final months, unprecedentedly so. But not so much for
philosophers. For the interregnum pushed certain long-term trends in philosophy
further than ever before, reinforcing a new version of some very old divisions.

Historical Background
The dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States was achieved, not
ordained. It arose later than many think. Some of the ground covered in what
follows has already been well plowed, by Kuklick (2001) and by Putnam (1999,
2015, 2016).
The new logic Russell and Whitehead championed in Principia Mathematica
(1910–1913) was represented, not solely but famously in early twentieth-century
America by the pragmatist C. I. Lewis at Harvard starting in 1920. In the 1920s its
variant Logical Positivism grew up in Central Europe, partly inspired by the contents
of Wittgenstein’s 1918 prisoner-of-war rucksack, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The positivists rejected Russell’s logical realism, but shared much of his picture of
the philosophical task. In the early 1930s students like Willard Van Quine, Ernest
Nagel, and Charles Morris, all three connected to pragmatism, travelled to Europe
to bring back the sermons of Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Alfred Tarski to
Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago. The émigré positivists came soon after—Car-
nap to Chicago, joined briefly by the peripatetic Carl Hempel, who then moved to
CCNY, Yale, Prince­ton and Pittsburgh; Philip Frank to Harvard; Herbert Feigl to
Iowa, then Minnesota; Hans Reichenbach to UCLA; and Tarski to Harvard, CCNY,
finally Berkeley. Positivism was powerful enough by the 1940s that key depart-
ments became divided into traditional “metaphysicians” vs. the new “naturalists,”
as positivists were sometimes called. Remnant American pragmatists were largely
on the same side as positivists against older idealists and metaphysicians. Dewey’s
1939 Theory of Valuation had been published by Neurath in the Encyclopedia for
the Unified Sciences. The most famous logician in America in 1950 was still Lewis.
He and the other Harvard “analytic” philosophers—Quine, Morton White and
later Nelson Goodman—remained connected to pragmatism. At that time the new
“continental” émigrés were barely known outside New York and Chicago.
Then the early 1950s brought the Oxford linguistic explosion. First Gilbert
Ryle, then G. E. M. Anscombe, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Philippa Foot, Stuart
Hampshire, R. M. Hare, Mary Midgely, Iris Murdoch, Peter Strawson, and Bernard
 Lawrence Cahoone

Williams. Simultaneously came Quine’s 1951 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and

the 1953 publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (his Blue and
Brown notebooks had already been familiar to the cognoscenti). Ernest Gellner,
Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor made their names as critical participants in
and of the new linguistic philosophy. The new analytics retained a distant relation
to pragmatism, evident in Quine, in Wittgenstein (imbibed from Frank Ramsey),
and later Wilfred Sellars (from his father, Roy Wood Sellars). Some connected
linguistic philosophy to phenomenology because it functioned within everyday
language. And in the hands of Peter Winch, the new analytics embraced cultural
relativism. The dust had not yet settled.
Analytic philosophy thereby rose to dominance in a two-headed form: a
chastened positivism fueling philosophy of science programs (especially at Boston,
Minnesota, Pittsburgh, and Columbia), and their ordinary language offspring, who
studied their mentors’ logic but rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction and
the restriction of rationality to mathematics, logic, and science. The two-headed
movement achieved ascendency around 1960, but even then there were exceptions.
(As late as 1966–1967 Paul Weiss could be president of the APA Eastern Division.)
The broadest analytic hegemony, the low point for nonanalytic philosophy, was
achieved in the early 1970s.
Neil Gross, in his excellent biography of Rorty, argues that analytic philosophy
rode the post-war cultural wave of what Carl Schorske called the “new rigorism,”
the conviction that logico-quantitative methods could assure knowledge in as
many disciplines as possible.(Gross 2008) Schorske wrote, “The polarization of
the human sciences today follows, however roughly, the line of division between
Anglo-Saxon and continental philosophic cultures . . . the legacy of the 1950s was
to separate the Anglo-Saxon empirical-scientific strand in American intellectual
culture from the continental, value-oriented, and existential strands that were
also strong in it”(Schorske, 1997: 308). The historical and value-laden pre-war
tradition, still continuous with the nineteenth century, was replaced by rigor, se-
curable topics, and a unifying politically-neutral method, in economics, political
science, English, and philosophy. Gross points out that sociologically, this new
rigorism corresponded to the post-war academic arrival of a new generation of
Jews, Catholics, and other working class types. Their doctor-fathers in the 1920s
and 30s achieved what minor status they had in the overwhelmingly Protestant
academy through assimilation—for the acquisition of high culture always demands
a change in manners. Rigorism allowed post-war Jews, Catholics, and others on the
GI bill to make up for their lack of cultural capital with technical and quantitative
skills, allowing technique to trump cultivation. This must have been experienced
as a kind of social liberation.
But it also fortified what C. P. Snow identified as “The Two Cultures,” the
post-war segregation of Western brain-power into sciences and humanities (Snow
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

1959). The “classical” education of the earlier aristocracy had been pushed aside.
Masses of students now needed a more professional education, and were in the
position to specialize. The analytic/nonanalytic distinction was the “Two Cultures”
within philosophy: analytic philosophers, based in logic and math, pursuing spe-
cialized research programs with the newest techniques in recent journals, versus
hermeneuts steeped in the history of philosophy, largely disinterested in science,
writing books on history, culture, and human experience. Schorske noted, “Of
all the humanistic disciplines, philosophy had, in its analytic incarnation, most
systematically distanced itself from the problems of culture” (Schorske 1997: 307).
So from the mid-60s to the late-70s, the modern form of the philosophi-
cal “Two Cultures” was established in philosophy: analytics on one side; on the
other side continentalists and pragmatists, with various metaphysicians, process,
comparative, and Catholic philosophers straggling along. There were lacunae
of resistance (or anachronism, as one prefers). As noted, the original post-war
opposition was naturalism vs. metaphysics. That is perhaps why the first major
opposition party was Paul Weiss’s Metaphysical Society of America, founded in
1950. Several departments became holdouts against analytic modernity: Chicago
(with Richard McKeon, Charles Hartshorne, some Dewey and Mead students),
Yale (Robert Brumbaugh, Paul Weiss, John Smith), and Columbia (J.H. Randall,
Justus Buchler, and Nagel). Continental philosophy spread from pockets in Chi-
cago and New York: with émigrés Leo Strauss and, for a time, Hanna Arendt at
University of Chicago, William Earle and James Edie uptown at Northwestern,
joined briefly by the peripatetic John Wild; and Aron Gurwitsch, Alfred Schutz,
Hans Jonas and finally Arendt at the New School, with William Barrett across
town at NYU. There was also George Schrader and Maurice Natanson at Yale;
Joseph Kocklemans at Penn State; Marvin Farber at Buffalo; Herbert Spiegelberg
at Washington University in St Louis; and Calvin Schrag at Purdue. (Also Susanne
Langer and Marjorie Grene, who were regrettably not in positions of influence.)
The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was founded by Wild
at Northwestern in 1962. Remaining pragmatists organized the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy in 1972, led by: John Lachs, Vanderbilt;
Beth Singer, Brooklyn College; John McDermott, Queens College, CUNY, then
Texas A&M; Richard Robin, Mount Holyoke; Thelma Lavine, George Washington,
then George Mason; Justus Buchler, Columbia, then Stony Brook; Evelyn Shirk,
Hofstra; and Bruce Wilshire, Rutgers.

The Pluralist Revolt of 1979

As Gross recounts, the late 1960s saw a culture-wide anti-rigorist rebellion.
The educated wing of the political revolution demanded critical, non-neutral
social-political methods; Schorske termed it the “revolt of the grandchildren.”
 Lawrence Cahoone

Intellectuals of the New Left mined continental philosophical sources—Marx,

Freud, and Husserl, channeled by the embodiment of all things radical, Herbert
Marcuse at UC San Diego. This fact may have had something to do with con-
tinental philosophers outpacing other nonanalytics as the loyal opposition to
analysis when the graduate students of the time started to fund the professoriate
in the 1970s. The revolution also changed analytic political thought, leading to
John Rawls and other progressive political theories of the 1970s, but the influx
of non-rigorous, nonanalytic methods was limited. Marcuse largely remained
a “continental” interest.
The nonanalytic philosophers teaching at PhD granting institutions in the
mid-1970s had been born in the mid-to-late 1930s, and attended prominent PhD
programs in the late 50s to mid-60s. They had studied with prominent profes-
sors that were, unbeknownst to them, becoming anachronistic in departments in
the process of turning analytic. By the late 1970s this established generation of
nonanalytic teachers had become, as Wilshire wrote, “styled as beaten, middle-
aged, mushy, second-rate philosophers,” meeting at “ghetto hours” at the APA.
Mid-career, they were all dressed up with no place to go, the profession rushing
past them in the opposite direction. But they were ready to rumble.
Then came the spark. In 1977 the State of New York Accrediting Agency en-
gaged a group of philosophers, chaired by Maurice Mandlebaum (and including
the youngish Richard Rorty of Prince­ton), to review its PhD programs in Philoso-
phy. The Committee delivered its very negative reviews of several New York state
programs in October 1977. Worst on their list was the continental Mother Ship,
the New School. The committee found far too few areas of (analytic?) philosophy
represented, threatening the program’s existence. As a first semester graduate
student at another New York school, that semester the present author listened
to the reading of the same committee’s report on his own program, putting it on
“probation.” A now prominent feminist turned to the skinny neophyte beside her,
to ask “Aren’t you glad you came here?”
The New School situation was galvanizing. New York nonanalytics formed the
“Saturday Group,” the movers and shakers being Wilshire, Lauer, Lachs, Smith, and
Charles Sherover. At the APA in December 1978 they established “The Committee
for Pluralism in Philosophy,” and at the official business meeting Wilshire fatefully
proposed a “sunshine motion.” The APA Eastern Division Executive Committee
each year sent out cards asking for nominations from members for the major of-
fices, then, at the next business meeting, would produce a list of nominees for the
membership to vote on. Wilshire’s sunshine motion asked that the tally of mailed
nominees be read aloud, with the number of nominations for each. This passed,
Wilshire recalled, 26 to 23.
In December 1979 the balloon went up. In preparation for the meeting, the
Pluralists had solicited philosophers to turn in their suggestion cards with a select
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

list of candidates. At the business meeting on Saturday December 29th the APA
Eastern Executive Committee read the latest iteration of their usual list of analytic
nominees. From the floor the stentorian Wilshire asked that the suggestion card
tallies be read aloud. Drama ensued. Lo and behold, none of the Executive Com-
mittee’s nominees were top vote getters from the membership. Indeed, the top
vote-getters were the Pluralists’ candidates to a “man” (yes, all were men). After a
motion for floor nominations, a vote resulted in John Smith being elected President,
with Lauer and McDermott to the Executive Committee. But Ruth Marcus of Yale
objected that non-members in the room (i.e., graduate students or members of
other divisions) had voted, and asked the President of the Division to invalidate
the vote. In response the President ordered a recount and deferred decision until
the next day. That President was Richard Rorty.
Rorty was at that moment a 48-year-old, tenured Prince­ton linguistic phi-
losopher, co-inventor of eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind, and
editor of the very successful anthology, The Linguistic Turn. Few analytics realized
that he had started out as nonanalytic as possible. Rorty had studied with McKeon
and was influenced by Strauss at Chicago, written his MA thesis on Whitehead
under Charles Hartshorne, then did his dissertation at Yale under Paul Weiss on
the metaphysics of possibility in 1956. Only once he was hired by Prince­ton in
1962 did he recreate himself as a linguistic philosopher. Some have since regarded
this as opportunism, but there was a common thread. Rorty had always been an
historicist “metaphilosopher,” perhaps following McKeon. All major philosophi-
cal perspectives, especially in metaphysics and epistemology, were self-justifying
cultural frameworks. The question of which was “more true” was naïve. Influenced
by Sellars’ 1956 attack on “the myth of the given,” Rorty seemed to think that
linguistic analysis had promise in exhibiting that with clarity.
But a dozen years after tenure at Prince­ton, the very year of the Revolt, Rorty
had just detonated a bomb called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (The same
year brought Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne: rapport sur le
savoir, the Iranian Revolution, the demise of Jimmy Carter, the rise of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Regan. A watershed year.) Rorty’s book argued that the
modern “foundationalist” epistemology of Descartes, Locke, and Kant, which
had informed analytic philosophy (Russell and Carnap), and phenomenology
(Husserl), was in the post-war period being replaced by the holistic methods of
Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, on one side, and the late Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Derrida, on the other. Rorty argued that both analytic and continen-
tal philosophy were converging on the pragmatism of James and Dewey, which he
interpreted as the rejection of any theory of truth. This was an historicist critique
of the entire Western philosophical establishment. Rorty had seriously gnawed on
the hand that fed him. Most philosophers at the APA Eastern had probably not
read that new, complex book by December 29. They were in for a shock. Rorty’s
 Lawrence Cahoone

presidential address on Saturday was the paper “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Ir-
rationalism.” Less scholarly and more direct than his book, it was a Nietzschean
slap in the face for mainstream analytic philosophy as “neurotic.” This was not
gnawing on a hand; it was chopping it off.
The Revolution was not televised, but it did make the papers. On Sunday
the 30th, with Rorty’s decision on the election results pending, members could
read over their hotel breakfast a New York Times article, “Philosophical Group’s
Dominant View is Criticized,” with quotes from Evelyn Shirk, John McDermott,
Quentin Lauer, William Barrett, and John Lachs. (The reporter had been invited to
cover the convention.) Later, at the special meeting, it was announced that fifty-six
non-members had indeed voted in the election. But Rorty decided that because
there were enough legitimate voters in the room to account for each result—for
each vote on a position, the total of yeas and nays was still less than the number
of legitimate voters present in the room—the results would stand. Rorty had sided
with the Pluralists, making John Smith his successor. The deed was done.
In 1980 the Pluralists again were organized, but so was the opposition. William
Barrett, the Pluralist nominee for President, was defeated by Adolf Grunbaum in
the analytic revanche. The same Times journalist, in “Analysts Win Battle in War
of Philosophy,” reported that a letter had been “circulated” at the meetings before
the vote with the signatures of past APA presidents, warning that the Commit-
tee on Pluralism “seeks to obtain through political means a position of influence
which its members have not been able to through their philosophical work.” He
concluded, “in a battle fought with . . . every traditional academic weapon short of
hemlock, proponents of ‘analytic’ philosophy reasserted their control” (Lask 1981).
We may note that none of this means analytic philosophers are, or were,
uniquely bloodthirsty. Any flock in the position to rule the pecking order in a
territory will do so. Like the man said, academic politics are so bloody because
so little is at stake. Or, in a loftier but perhaps apocryphal Canadian version, after
meeting a prominent philosopher considering a run for office, a former Canadian
Prime Minister is supposed to have quipped, “Powerlessness corrupts. Absolute
powerlessness corrupts absolutely.”
Anyhow, Smith was still President, and there was no going back. In three years
Rorty would be gone from Prince­ton and from philosophy itself to the Humanities
program at Virginia. While not taken seriously by most analytic philosophers, he
was by Hilary Putnam who, like Rorty, started out with a pragmatist education
then swung back to it in later years. The 1980s renaissance of interest in pragma-
tism was largely due to the ongoing debate between Putnam’s “internal realist”
kind of pragmatism and Rorty’s “neopragmatism,” itself akin to the French post-
structuralism that was then streaming into continental philosophy departments.
After the 1980s (with the exception of Pittsburgh) Rorty remained a significant
figure only for nonanalytics. Putnam remained a revered figure for his earlier
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

work, but the more widely he roamed, and changed, the less he was respected by
mainstream analytic philosophy, inclusiveness of thought being always suspect.

Post-Revolt Developments
More than four decades after the Pluralist Revolt, what can we say were the
results? The analytic/nonanalytic divide did indeed thaw somewhat over the
ensuing four decades. Nonanalytics are now regularly elected to APA officialdom,
major presses publish nonanalytic philosophy, an apparently solid minority of
nonanalytic (meaning mostly continental or continental-Americanist) programs
survive. In some analytic specialties it is respectable to include nonanalytic work,
e.g., political philosophy and philosophy of mind. The analytic establishment is
itself more pluralistic. In this respect the view from 2021 is good.
But how good depends on what one thinks the problem with analytic
hegemony was in the first place. Was it ignorance of history? Scientism? Profes-
sionalization? Over-concern for epistemology? Neglect of public issues? All these
epithets were (and are) thrown around by nonanalytic philosophers. Or was the
worst feature of the analytic/nonanalytic segregation something else, something
that not only went unaddressed in the Revolt but may have actually grown worse
since then?
One such thing is arguably specialization. Analytics and nonanalytics both
specialize, but in different ways. Most analytic philosophy is specialized into
problem areas, often into narrow research programs, somewhat like science, from
the point of view of which more general work is often suspect. Nonanalytics, es-
pecially continental philosophers, specialize in literatures and literary figures, like
twentieth-century French philosophy, or Heidegger, Dewey, or Butler, which makes
any critique of those sources that does not use their language suspect. Perhaps
analytics are more specialized, but then there are more of them, trying to carve
out a niche. Suffice to say that this is a trend the flocks share.
And for good reason. Specialization is more or less unavoidable in any form of
modern inquiry. Again, the best work on topic A is likely to come from a lifelong
A-specialist. Graduate education in any field teaches us to pursue some subject
matter in one language with one method, and career success usually comes, if it
does, in that community. Stretching your research community’s language to new
territory is always welcome—that’s how the flock expands its territory—but roam-
ing across linguistic communities makes you a member of none. In subtle ways
you cease to speak any language like a fluent native, making it difficult to publish
in journals, which are community organs.
But specialization carries a danger that is especially problematic for philoso-
phy. Any methodic community’s conception of its subject matter must rest on a
distinction from other subject matters. The student of A must have some back-
 Lawrence Cahoone

ground conception of what makes A, A. To do that she must presume a notion

of not-A. But what if that notion, on which her concept of A in some sense rests,
is faulty? The specialist can never learn that. That makes specialization a problem
for philosophy, the most general of all forms of inquiry.
The opposite of “specialized” is “systematic,” by which I mean something
more than non-historical but less than constructing an architectonic system. It
is the attempt to coordinate inquiries into different subject matters. It is a gambit
that some areas of philosophic inquiry can only be advanced if we relate their
investigation to other areas, that getting a better account of mind or agency might
require a better account of the physical, or a better understanding of knowledge
might require an advance in aesthetics, etc. Some analytics and nonanalytics do
this kind of work, usually later in their careers, but it is rare, and more rarely re-
spected. Anybody writing about A and B and D and F, will likely know less about
A than the A-specialists, less about B than the B-specialists, etc., not to mention
the howls of the C- and E-scholars! Marketing also plays a role. Pluralism does
not sell very well: “We don’t do anything in particular!” is uninspiring to the
aspiring. Younger students and faculty want to do is what is hot. Hard economic
times make this compulsory.
This is linked to historiography. Some will say that the point of inquiry is to
examine the current theories dominating the main journals, the living theories
that have survived past scrutiny. Progress requires burying the dead. Yes, but not
too deep. Putnam quipped that every generation of philosophers likes to throw out
the baby with the bathwater. The complaint against studying dead theories would
be legitimate if philosophy were cumulative in the same way as science. Students
of ethology learn “Morgan’s Principle,” but they don’t read Lloyd Morgan, and the
gain of doing so would be marginal. Philosophy in contrast seems to spiral: with
each advance new versions of “un-dead” options keep popping up, and have to be
dealt with. Without knowledge of history, nobody knows these are revenants, or
what the arguments were for or against them in their time. While continuous with
science, philosophy has a different job, requiring that it maintain some systematic
and historical inquiry in potential dialogue with more specialized inquiries. A
century ago, Morris Cohen, a philosopher of logic, science and law, and teacher
of Nagel, Weiss, Buchler, and White, wrote: “We may laugh at system building
as much as we please, but some such ideal must be held up by somebody if the
present anarchic tendency to over-specialization is to be controlled. . . . If not,
we shall soon have a condition in which everyone is a specialist and no one can
intelligently follow his neighbor” (Cohen 1910: 409). While the, as Kuhn would
say, “normal” philosopher must inevitably specialize, arguably someone has to
relate the specialties to each other and to the past, even if doing so tends to lead,
as Donald Campbell put it, to “paranoid isolation” (Campbell 1988: 439).
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

So while today there is indeed more philosophical pluralism in America, in

that a wider variety of specializations now gain entry to the mainstream (e.g., the
APA), and a number of nonanalytic doctoral programs do flourish, discussion
across these flocks and territories remains remote. The “Two Cultures” remains
strong. That is a feature of the analytic hegemony of the 1970s which the Pluralist
Revolt never confronted: the specializing drive of philosophers on all sides which
regards systematic work across the “Two Cultures” with unrelieved skepticism.
Indeed, a recent development has arguably made it worse.

The Politics of Philosophy

Analytic and nonanalytic philosophers have always misunderstood each other
politically. Almost all are political progressives—i.e., “liberal,” center-left, Demo-
crat or Labor or Green Party. But each regards the other as inadequately so. The
conflict is at least as old as Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment, which linked positivism to fascism, versus Karl Popper’s 1945 critique of
Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Nonanalytics have been taught that
analytic philosophy is somehow a representation of a soul-less, technological,
quantified, official establishment. Analytics have always smelled in continental
work the whiff of authoritarianism.
This is perhaps largely a matter of historical contingency. Positivism grew up
in a world facing a tide of “irrational” fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, and believed
only rationality and science could maintain a liberal, indeed, social democratic
order. Continental Europe, the family home of fascism, and later the winter retreat
of Stalinism, was a place to leave, not a place to go and study. The notion that
philosophic wisdom is acquired not by study of arguments open to any clever stu-
dent but by linguistic initiation into high cultural practices—that one can answer
the question, What do you work on? by saying the name of a person or literature,
not a subject or problem—has always seemed illiberal to many analytics. For the
continentals, it was in 1968 that the Germanic-funded New Left reinforced the
notion that there was something “conservative” about analytic philosophy. The
only remotely factual aspect of that association was that the analytics were the
philosophical establishment in America when the New Left rebelled. That is socially
relative; in Frankfurt, the students rebelled against Adorno. I am not endorsing
either side’s prejudices. Frege was an anti-Semite, Heidegger was a Nazi, Mussolini
admired William James—we need not rehearse the list. Philosophical method is
too mediated in relation to politics to justify anyone’s sense of superiority.
Even today some nonanalytics like to paint analytic philosophy as continuous
with regressive politics, like Cold War McCarthyism (McCumber 2016). While
many parts of the academy have been pushed and pulled by political winds over
the decades, there has never been any significant political daylight between the
 Lawrence Cahoone

views of American analytics and nonanalytics. (Some people also try to argue that
“science” is left-wing, others claim that it’s right-wing. Good luck to both.) And
they have undergone parallel transformations. Starting in the 1970s but reach-
ing fruition in the 1990s each flock underwent its own Feminist Revolt. On the
nonanalytic side, the mostly-males who staged the Pluralist Revolt discovered
that women students wanted power and were no longer content with philosophy
as usual. On both sides feminism did not just change the bodies, or genders, of
the philosophers, but philosophy itself. Certainly any philosopher, male or female
or otherwise, can have a passion for any subject matter. Nevertheless, a host of
topics have arguably been ushered in mainly by female philosophers—not just
feminist epistemology, feminist political theory, and gender studies, but the public
vs. private distinction in political philosophy, ethical concerns about disability,
family, and trauma, etc. All this seems to have affected analytic and nonanalytic
philosophy equally.
More recently, in the past two decades, a new politicization of certain areas
of philosophy have been championed not only by feminists, but by people who
do philosophy of race or critical race theory or Africana and Latinx philosophy,
post- or de-colonization theory and LGBTQ studies/Queer Theory. Part of this
came from a concern to rewrite canons, to find neglected thinkers embedded
in nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy. Part of it is a drive to include
students of color and gay and trans philosophers in scholarly communities. All
this should be applauded across the political spectrum. We are in the business of
expanding perspectives and participation, not shrinking them. As to specialization,
whether these new fields of research and hiring will serve as a counterweight to
it, or merely as new forms of specialization, remains to be seen.
But now to the point. While both analytic and nonanalytic philosophy de-
partments have been affected by these developments, the effect has been different.
Analytic graduate programs have added professors whose main job is the new
specializations. But they still churn out young people who, while now familiar
with the new disciplines, remain interested in traditional epistemology, ethics,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind and science, other areas of political philosophy,
etc. That is, there seems to have been an expansion of subject matters that retains
much of the earlier tradition. But continental and Americanist philosophy have
become increasingly politicized. That is, on the nonanalytic side, partisan identity
politics has been pushed to the center of the philosophical project.
Two data points can be taken from the now ended Trump interregnum.
First, we can note the annual programs of the APA and those of the two largest
nonanalytic societies, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(SPEP) and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP).
As a sample, we may take my own pencil-and-paper count of session/panel/paper
titles from 2018–2019, the anniversary of the Pluralist Revolt. The question is:
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

what percentage of papers delivered were concerned with identity politics, either
in promoting feminism, LGBTQ- theory, Africana/Latinx/philosophy of race, or
some other partisan issue targeted at the recent administration, e.g., animal rights,
de-colonialism, climate change, capitalism, or Trump himself. (I do not count in
this category mainstream political theory or history, e.g., Rawls vs. Nozick, the
concept of justice, the nature of liberalism, studies of Arendt or Hayek, etc.) In
the 2019 Eastern Division APA program, 77 out of 353 panel/papers delivered
(22%) concerned these identity-and-partisan-political topics; at 2018 SPEP, 78
out of 192 (41%); and at 2019 SAAP 57 out of 90 (63%). Even taking my figures
with a teaspoon of salt, it seems likely that the combination of identity politics
and partisan criticism constituted in that year less than one-third of the APA
papers/sessions, but about half of SPEP and SAAP taken together (APA 2018,
SAAP 2019, SPEP 2018).
Another indicator is the societies’ response to watershed political events; for
this we can return to their reaction to the 2016 presidential election. Immediately
after the election, the APA posted this statement on its website: “In light of this
polarized post-election climate, the board of officers of the American Philosophi-
cal Association reaffirms the association’s core values of inclusion and diversity,
open and respectful dialogue, and academic freedom” (APA 2016). A month later
in response to President Trump’s January 27, 2017 executive order restricting im-
migration from seven predominantly Islamic countries: “The executive order . . .
disrupts the work of philosophers and scholars in all disciplines around the world.
. . . The APA’s mission is to foster open dialogue. . . . This order goes against these
values. . . . The APA is working to assess the impact of this executive order on
our members. . . . We stand with learned societies, colleges and universities, and
others around the world in calling on the President and Congress to reverse this
executive order and to denounce religious intolerance in all its forms” (APA 2017).
In the case of SPEP, at the time of the inauguration, while acknowledging that
it is difficult to presume “to speak on behalf of our diverse membership,” the of-
ficers posted: “silence in dark times is a form of capitulation. What can we say that
can support vulnerable populations on the college campuses where our members
serve, and more broadly in the United States and across the world? During the
electoral campaign and in its aftermath, we witnessed the amplification and even
normalization of racism, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, LGBTQ-bashing,
and ableism. . . . We condemn the bigotry and hatred mobilized and emboldened
by the election as ethically repugnant, politically damaging, and at odds with
SPEP’s commitment to diversity and inclusiveness. . . . We are committed to SPEP’s
being an organization that can invoke a principled and passionate opposition to
injustice” (SPEP 2016).
Finally, the SAAP website statement, which was up for several months but
then was removed: “The Executive Board of the Society for the Advancement of
 Lawrence Cahoone

American Philosophy issues this statement as a show of its strong opposition to

the Islamophobic, racist, sexist, ablest, anti-immigrant policy positions articulated
by the new President. . . . We must stand against injustice even when it wears a
democratic mask. . . . The Executive Board believes this necessitates a commitment
on behalf of the Society . . . and all of its members to work diligently in the com-
ing four years to . . . fight against regressive and oppressive policies and the harm
they could do to untold millions. . . . Stand with us, against hatred and injustice
in all its forms” (SAAP 2017).
Many of the things these statements cited are bad things that should be
rejected, and many of the ideals they invoke should be supported. Anyone’s op-
position to the Trump administration, not to mention its final days, can be well
understood. But the fact remains that while the APA statement above opposed a
policy and urged its retraction, the SPEP and SAAP statements implied that the
two largest organizations of nonanalytic philosophers in America officially opposed
the Trump administration, urged others to do so, and declared their commitment
to fight its “injustice.” Not to figure out what injustice is, nor to understand what
may have led half of the electorate to endorse that administration, but to fight it.
Of course, they had the perfect right to do so. Nor I am not decrying these orga-
nizations for lack of political balance (however true that charge would be). But
their declarations seem to say that the philosophic project in America ought to be
a partisan political one. It picks candidates and fights those it disagrees with. Will
that be true now that the interregnum is over, for example, in 2024?
One also wonders how much intellectual space is left in these associations to
discuss non-partisan, non-political philosophical issues, for example, the nature
of reality, or knowledge, or ethics, mind, aesthetics, God, rationality, free will,
etc.? It seems a growing percentage of nonanalytic philosophers have lost the
sense that there is a value to non-political philosophical work. Trying to formulate
understandings of reality, knowledge, mind, and ethics in general has waned as a
plausible aim. Indeed, for some even to ask a philosophical question not specific
to a literature of critical opposition is itself an error. (Consider, for example, the
Rebecca Tuvel affair—see her 2018 paper.) The situation is strangely reminiscent
of what John Passmore wrote about the idealist, mind-dependent worldview of the
nineteenth century: “Confronted with, say, our belief in God . . . or the external
world, or certain mathematical or logical principles . . . philosophers had been
accustomed to ask themselves: ‘Is this belief true?’ Post-Kantian agnosticism,
however, had undermined the presumption that this is an intelligible question.
. . . The proper question, it was now argued, is the historical one: ‘How did such
beliefs as these arise?’ To ask whether they are true . . . is scholastic, reactionary,
metaphysical” (Passmore 1957: 174–75).
We seem to be faced not with the demise of the “Two Cultures” bifurcation
but with a new version of it. On one side, an analytic establishment which accepts
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

a more or less traditional notion of philosophy as rational inquiry into truth, but
so specialized that few members consider wider questions and sources. On the
other side, a nonanalytic, largely continental-Americanist establishment, smaller
but significant, of whom a large number conceive the purpose of philosophy in
terms of its partisan role. This is the old “Two Cultures,” now with one culture
understood as political in aim. Strikingly, the larger economy of higher education
may promote this trend. College administrators seem to be adopting the same
bifurcation: the quantitative disciplines (STEM fields plus Economics and perhaps
the quantitative/scientific ends of Psychology and Political Science) exist to fund
specific careers, while the humanistic disciplines (qualitative social science, arts,
literature, classics, philosophy) serve to endow education with “meaning,” the
meaning currently imagined being political. Of course, majors in humanities still
gain transferable skills in reading, writing, logic, and interpretation, the general-
ized symbolic-analytic and hermeneutic skills of the middle- and upper-middle
classes, as always. But now it seems common to sell these non-scientific skills with
a political purpose to a receptive audience. What about humanities and social
science topics that are not obviously political?
So if the apocryphal person on the street were to ask a professional philosopher
at a major research institution a question, like what is relation of human nature to
human hopes, or of the universe to our existence, or whether will has freedom or
life meaning, what would the current philosopher say? The analytics of an earlier
generation—the ones the Pluralists’ revolted against in 1979—said, “I can’t answer
your question because it contains linguistic errors that make it senseless. But I
can cure you of your need to ask it.” The Pluralists did a little better, replying, “I
can’t answer your question, but I can help you see its deep significance by citing
historical examples of the question and articulating the lived experience from
which it arises.” Today many nonanalytics seem likely to say, “I cannot answer
your question because it is a rationalist leftover of white Eurocentric patriarchy’s
attempt to fix a foundational truth that serves power by distracting you from the
real issues. But I can provide a genealogy that will wake you from asking it.” A
retort rather similar to the first. What some see as a solution to a problem can
actually be an extension of it.

Conclusion
Rorty was not the cause of this, but he did play a role. He was a significant figure
for many nonanalytic thinkers, pressing forward a rejection of non-historical,
systematic philosophy. Whatever his virtues as a philosopher—and he had
many—his view was driven by a very parochial idea. Rorty’s idol Sellars (a
president of the Metaphysical Society of America, we may note) had written,
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in
 Lawrence Cahoone

the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible
sense of the term” (Sellars 1963: 369). Rorty admired this formulation, but went
on to ignore it. He never lost the belief in the complete irrelevance of natural
science to philosophy. He never doubted science’s validity, of course; he simply
denied that the “truth” science seeks and often does find has any connection to
the “Truth” that philosophy imagines and cannot find. He had to say that, or his
critique would have to be applied to science, and everyday knowledge as well,
which would have been intolerable. Rorty was a lifelong prisoner of the “Two
Cultures.”
And his purposes were always political. In a 1971 letter to Milton Fisk, he
wrote: “I think that we—the parasitic priestly class which confers sacraments like
BAs and PhDs—are the best agency for social change on the scene. . . . I don’t trust
the aroused workers and peasants to do themselves or anybody any good. . . . I
think that nothing but a revolution in this country is going to make it possible for
millions of people to lead a decent life, but I still don’t want a revolution in this
country . . . because I’m afraid of finding something worse when the revolution
is over. So insofar as I have any thoughts on the higher learning in America they
are to the effect that we pinko profs should continue swinging each successive
generation a little further to the left; doing it this way requires the continuation of
the same claptrap about contemplation we’ve always handed out, because without
this mystique the society won’t let us get away with corrupting the youth anymore”
(Gross 2008: 327). Admirably direct.
Some may say the present essay exhibits nostalgia for non-historical, non-
public, professionalized, intellectualist philosophia perennis. Doubtless horrifying,
but that is not the point. Any philosopher’s work refers to some past literature
and is informed by some institutional framework. The latter is of great historical
interest. But if our concern is the possible truth of their answers, the questions
still stand—historical, but not dead. It is fine to inquire into the racial and gender
views, or economic status, of Philosopher X, and the social justice impact of her
view Y. But may we not legitimately tarry a bit to ask whether Y is true or false?
As to the public philosophy vs. professional philosophy question, by all means
we need more public philosophy. But “public” does not have to mean “political”
and “partisan.” Political philosophy is a vibrant subfield; philosophy as political is
a different matter. Indeed, members of the public might well retort, “Look. What
we want from you people with the time to work on this stuff, is to help us with the
philosophy papers and books and ideas we have heard about but don’t understand.
We already know as much or more than you do about everything else. After all,
the difference between us is time and access, not brains. Feel free to tell us what
you believe, as long as you say why. But we’ll decide who to vote for.”
None of this implies that philosophia perennis is the first, the final, or the best
thing. That conclusion would be unphilosophical. But it may have a social role
The Pluralist Revolt: Forty Years Later

nothing else can fill, especially in an age of irrefragable specialization. Different

cultural practices do have different purposes. Wittgenstein would have said that
Soviet legal thinker Nikolai Krylenko’s insistence that “We must finish once and
for all with the [political] neutrality of chess!” would deny chess its role in our
“form of life,” hence it would not be “chess” anymore (Conquest 2008: 249). What-
ever professional philosophy’s contribution to our form of life, dropping truth as
its aim arguably undermines it. Echoing Rorty’s traditionalist metaphors about
the social roles, priests and peasants, we may conclude with a slightly different
picture from Ernest Gellner: “The notion of the Priest or the Scholar, or even the
clerk, evokes an image which is not without dignity. . . . But this sense of pride is
conditional on the fulfillment of the central task of this estate, which cannot be
but one thing—the guardianship or the search for truth. If this is gone, only a shell
remains” (Gellner 1974: 26).
College of the Holy Cross

Note
1. This is dedicated to Bruce Wilshire and Ed Casey, neither of whom would agree.

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