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Part II - Methods and Criteria
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Description of the Report |
This report ranks graduate programs primarily on the basis of the quality of the tenured faculty, though some weight is given to the following factors as well: (i) age of faculty (since very good but very old faculty do not make for an attractive program from the standpoint of prospective students); (ii) breadth of faculty; and (iii) quality of junior faculty.
Assessment of quality of the faculty is based on the current professional reputation enjoyed by the faculty members, as this is reflected in professional journals, books, professional honors, informal polls, and conversation. I keep track of publications in the leading journals and with the top presses; I look at whose work is being discussed and whose books favorably reviewed; I regularly solicit input from leading experts, junior and senior, in the various sub-fields of philosophy. E-mail, together with the general "fame" of the Report, has made it easier in recent years to stay abreast of current reputations. The Report does not reflect "my" opinion about various departments, but rather my judgment about what professional opinion regarding departments is. I must emphasize that my personal opinions differ quite a bit from the overall and specialty rankings in this Report.
In August 2001, I conducted an on-line survey of nearly 200 philosophers about faculty quality; more than 60% responded and completed the reputational surveys. (About 80% of those who actually accessed the on-line survey responded.) About a dozen indicated that they did not feel competent to assess more than a few departments, and so declined to participate. In so doing, some expressed worries similar to this one: "The only information I have [about many departments] is third-hand, or so broadly impressionistic that its bona fides cannot be established. I had the brief thought that I would try to find out about them the way I normally would if I were doing some casual research on a department, namely by looking at the Leiter report--but then I heard a very high-pitched screeching sound in my brain that I recognized as feedback."
The survey gave 68 faculty lists, and began with the following instructions:
"Please evaluate the following programs in terms of faculty quality, using the following scale:
5 - Distinguished
4 - Strong
3 - Good
2 - Adequate
1 - Marginal
0 - Inadequate for a PhD program
You may use .5 intervals if necessary, but no scores higher than 5.0, and no smaller fractions, are permitted. Do not check any box if you lack sufficient information to make an informed judgment about faculty quality.
You should not evaluate your own department. Those scores will be discounted.
Faculty quality should be taken to encompass the quality of philosophical work and talent represented by the faculty. Since the rankings are used by prospective students, you may also factor in, as you see fit, (1) the age of faculty, (2) the status (full-time, part-time) of faculty, and (3) the quality of training the faculty provide, to the extent you have information about that.
Please take a moment to scan the faculty lists before you begin assigning numbers.
The faculty lists are based on current information as to their shape for fall 2002, and are confined to full- or part-time faculty (status indicated), excluding lecturers. Emeritus faculty are also excluded. Faculty with joint appointments in the Philosophy Department and another non-Philosophy unit (e.g., Law, Linguistics, Political Science) are marked with an *. (HPS faculty are not so-marked, given the close connection to philosophy at most universities.) Departmental homepages are the benchmark for determining which faculty are joint."
The lists that followed indicated which faculty were over 70, and which were part-time.
Different respondents had different "centers of gravity" in their scoring: some gave no 5s, others gave no score lower than a 2. It was also clear that respondents had different philosophies of evaluation: some clearly tried to consider the breadth of strength in a department, while others ranked a program highly or lowly based simply on its strength in his or her fields. The range of evaluations for single departments should be a cautionary note to all undergraduates about relying too much on the advice of just one or two faculty advisors. Idiosyncrasy abounds, even at top departments!
As in the past, I did not include the name of the university with the faculty lists. This was, in the past, beneficial in forcing evaluators to respond to the current faculty. As one respondent noted last year: "surprisingly tough to say what I think, without the institutional halo effect front loaded." (The National Research Council has also noted the distortions produced by the "halo effect," though has not taken any steps to avoid them.)
Some faculty moves and developments transpired subsequent to the survey: Radu Bogdan is going from Tulane to Louvain; Daniel Stoljar is leaving Colorado for the ANU; Carl Posy has left Duke; Bruce Aune and Ed Gettier are now emeritus at U Mass/Amherst. Only the last of these changes might have had had a significant impact on the results, perhaps even changing the peer groupings. The other changes certainly would not have affected the peer groupings.
The evaluators were selected with an eye to balance, in terms of area, age and educational background--though since, in all cases, the opinions of research-active faculty were sought, there was, necessarily, a large number of alumni of the top programs represented. The philosophers, by field, who filled out reputational surveys this year are listed below; those with more than one area of specialization are listed more than once (the second time in italics). The school from which the evaluator received the PhD (or equivalent) is listed in parentheses. An * indicates faculty who have been in teaching more than 20 years. Faculty were not permitted to evaluate their own department or the department from which they had received their PhD in the last ten years.
This was an unusually distinguished group of philosophers, senior and junior, who participated in this year's reputational survey. Their contributions are invaluable, and greatly appreciated.
| Philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology |
| Murat Aydede (Maryland) | University of Florida, Gainesville |
| *Lynne Rudder Baker (Vanderbilt) | University of Massachussetts, Amherst |
| *David Bell (McMaster) | University of Sheffield |
| José Bermudez (Cambridge) | University of Stirling |
| *Ned Block (Harvard) | New York University |
| *Robert Brandom (Princeton) | University of Pittsburgh |
| Alex Byrne (Princeton) | Massachussetts Institute of Technology |
| Joshua Dever (Berkeley) | University of Texas, Austin |
| John Martin Fischer (Cornell) | University of California, Riverside |
| *Owen Flanagan (Brandeis) | Duke University |
| *Graeme Forbes (Oxford) | Tulane University |
| Tamar Gendler (Harvard) | Syracuse University |
| *Alvin I. Goldman (Princeton) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| *A.C. Grayling (Oxford) | Birkbeck College, University of London |
| Rick Grush (UC San Diego) | University of California, San Diego |
| *Gilbert Harman (Harvard) | Princeton University |
| Benjamin Hellie (Princeton) | Cornell University |
| *Christopher Hill (Harvard) | University of Arkansas, Fayetteville |
| Richard Holton (Princeton) | University of Edinburgh |
| *Christopher Hookway (Cambridge) | University of Sheffield |
| Jeffrey King (UC San Diego) | University of California, Davis |
| *Peter Klein (Yale) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| *Bernard Linsky (Stanford) | University of Alberta |
| *Barry Loewer (Stanford) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| Peter Ludlow (Columbia) | State University of New York, Stony Brook |
| *Penelope Maddy (Princeton) | University of California, Irvine |
| *Ruth Barcan Marcus (Harvard) | Yale University/University of California, Irvine |
| Alex Miller (Michigan) | Cardiff University, Wales |
| *Ruth Garrett Millikan (Yale) | University of Connecticut, Storrs |
| Cheryl Misak (Oxford) | University of Toronto |
| Stephen Neale (Stanford) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| Timothy O'Connor (Cornell) | Indiana University, Bloomington |
| *Graham Oddie (London) | University of Colorado, Boulder |
| Alex Oliver (Cambridge) | Cambridge University |
| *George Pappas (Penn) | Ohio State University |
| Laurie (L.A.) Paul (Princeton) | University of Arizona |
| Michael Rea (Notre Dame) | University of Notre Dame |
| Mark Richard (U Mass/Amherst) | Tufts University |
| Gideon Rosen (Princeton) | Princeton University |
| Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers) | University of Massachussetts, Amherst |
| Thomas Senor (Arizona) | University of Arkansas, Fayetteville |
| Ted Sider (U Mass/Amherst) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| *John Skorupski (Cambridge) | University of St. Andrew's |
| David Sosa (Princeton) | University of Texas, Austin |
| *Ernest Sosa (Pittsburgh) | Brown University |
| *Robert Stalnaker (Princeton) | Massachussetts Institute of Technology |
| Jason Stanley (MIT) | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
| *Stephen Stich (Princeton) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| Daniel Stoljar (MIT) | Australian National University |
| Ted Warfield (Rutgers) | University of Notre Dame |
| Robert Wilson (Cornell) | University of Alberta |
| *Crispin Wright (Oxford) | University of St. Andrew's/New York University |
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| Theory of value |
| Brian Bix (Oxford) | University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul |
| David Brink (Cornell) | University of California, San Diego |
| *Dan Brock (Columbia) | Brown University |
| Ruth Chang (Oxford) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| *Jules Coleman (Rockefeller) | Yale University |
| Justin D'Arms (Michigan) | Ohio State University |
| John Doris (Michigan) | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| James Dreier (Princeton) | Brown University |
| *Gerald Dworkin (Berkeley) | University of California, Davis |
| David Estlund (Wisconsin) | Brown University |
| John Martin Fischer (Cornell) | University of California, Riverside |
| *Owen Flanagan (Brandeis) | Duke University |
| *Gerald Gaus (Pittsburgh) | Tulane University |
| *Karen Hanson (Harvard) | Indiana University, Bloomington |
| *Gilbert Harman (Harvard) | Princeton University |
| Richard Holton (Princeton) | University of Edinburgh |
| Brad Hooker (Oxford) | University of Reading |
| *Shelly Kagan (Princeton) | Yale University |
| *Peter Lamarque (Oxford) | University of York |
| Rae Langton (Princeton) | University of Edinburgh |
| Brian Leiter (Michigan) | University of Texas, Austin |
| *Andrew Levine (Columbia) | University of Wisconsin, Madison |
| *Jerrold Levinson (Michigan) | University of Maryland, College Park |
| Cheryl Misak (Oxford) | University of Toronto |
| *Christopher Morris (Toronto) | University of Maryland, College Park |
| *Martha Nussbaum (Harvard) | University of Chicago |
| *Thomas Pogge (Harvard) | Columbia University |
| Arthur Ripstein (Pittsburgh) | University of Toronto |
| Mathias Risse (Princeton) | Yale University |
| Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Pittsburgh) | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| David Schmidtz (Arizona) | University of Arizona |
| *George Sher (Columbia) | Rice University |
| *A. John Simmons (Cornell) | University of Virginia |
| *John Skorupski (Cambridge) | University of St. Andrew's |
| Michael Smith (Oxford) | Australian National University |
| Sarah Stroud (Princeton) | McGill University |
| Larry Temkin (Princeton) | Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
| Jeremy Waldron (Oxford) | Columbia University |
| Jonathan Wolff (London) | University College London |
| Nick Zangwill (Glasgow) | University of Glasgow |
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| Philosophy of science |
| *John Earman (Princeton) | University of Pittsburgh |
| *Daniel Garber (Harvard) | University of Chicago |
| *Gary Gutting (St. Louis) | University of Notre Dame |
| *Daniel Hausman (Columbia) | University of Wisconsin, Madison |
| *Don Howard (Boston Univ.) | University of Notre Dame |
| Christopher Hitchcock (Pittsburgh) | California Institute of Technology |
| Jim Joyce (Michigan) | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
| *Philip Kitcher (Princeton) | Columbia University |
| *Mohan Matthen (Stanford) | University of British Columbia |
| Marc Lange (Pittsburgh) | University of Washington, Seattle |
| *Alexander Rosenberg (Hopkins) | Duke University |
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| Logic |
| J.C. Beall (U Mass/Amherst) | University of Connecticut, Storrs |
| *John Etchemendy (Stanford) | Stanford University |
| *Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh) | University of Pittsburgh |
| *Penelope Maddy (Princeton) | University of California, Irvine |
| *Ruth Barcan Marcus (Harvard) | Yale University/University of California, Irvine |
| *Graham Priest (London) | Universities of Melbourne and St. Andrew's |
| Gila Sher (Columbia) | University of California, San Diego |
| Jamie Tappenden (Princeton) | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
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| History of philosophy (through post-Kantian Continental) |
| Donald Ainslie (Pittsburgh) | University of Toronto |
| Rachel Barney (Princeton) | University of Chicago |
| Frederick Beiser (Oxford) | Syracuse University |
| *David Bell (McMaster) | University of Sheffield |
| Hugh Benson (Michigan) | University of Oklahoma, Norman |
| *Robert Brandom (Princeton) | University of Pittsburgh |
| Jan Cover (Syracuse) | Purdue University |
| *Dan Devereux (Chicago) | University of Virginia |
| *Gail Fine (Harvard) | Cornell University |
| *Daniel Garber (Harvard) | University of Chicago |
| *Don Garrett (Yale) | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| *A.C. Grayling (Oxford) | Birkbeck College, University of London |
| *Gary Gutting (St. Louis) | University of Notre Dame |
| *Paul Guyer (Harvard) | University of Pennsylvania |
| *Christopher Hookway (Cambridge) | University of Sheffield |
| *Peter Hylton (Harvard) | University of Illinois, Chicago |
| *Terence Irwin (Princeton) | Cornell University |
| *Nicholas Jolley (Oxford) | University of California, Irvine |
| Pierre Keller (Columbia) | University of California, Riverside |
| Rae Langton (Princeton) | University of Edinburgh |
| Brian Leiter (Michigan) | University of Texas, Austin |
| *Mohan Matthen (Stanford) | University of British Columbia |
| Alan Nelson (Illinois-Chicago) | University of California, Irvine |
| *Martha Nussbaum (Harvard) | University of Chicago |
| Jim Otteson (Chicago) | University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa |
| *George Pappas (Penn) | Ohio State University |
| C.D.C. Reeve (Cornell) | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| Mathias Risse (Princeton) | Yale University |
| Michael Rosen (Oxford) | Oxford University |
| *Richard Schacht (Princeton) | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign |
| Christopher Shields (Cornell) | University of Colorado, Boulder |
| Eric Watkins (Notre Dame) | University of California, San Diego |
| *Kenneth Winkler (Texas) | Wellesley College |
| *Allen Wood (Yale) | Stanford University |
The raw scores, along with the mean and median, are printed below; I also indicate the # of 5s, 4s, etc. (.5 scores are listed with the rounded-down number for reasons of space, though .5 scores were counted for purposes of calculating the mean and median). For purposes of the overall ranking, small departments had their scores augmented .1. Last year, I gave a larger handicap; in the interim, I received much useful feedback on the subject. Some argued that larger departments deserve to rank more highly, since they can offer more to students; others, generally from small departments unsurprisingly, appreciated the augmentation of their scores. Several thought large departments might actually be at a disadvantage: as one philosopher (at a small department that is handicap-eligible) wrote, "I found myself marking large departments down if they have a small group of good people spread through a much larger group of not-so-good people (which is all-too-often the case with large departments). Too big a chance that the typical grad's education will fall to mainly the not-so-good people."
Obviously, there is no clearly right answer about what kind of handicap, if any, is appropriate, or what the size cut-off should be for such an handicap. Since I do think small departments are penalized somewhat unfairly, I've continued to give them a slight handicap. But the handicaps do not, in any case, affect the peer groupings, only the ordinal rankings. The scores printed below are the raw scores, without handicap, for the 68 departments that were evaluated this year. For purposes of calculating final averages, one set of scores was disqualified since it contained outlier scores in almost all cases (e.g., 1s or 2s for departments that overwhelmingly got 4s or 5s); it appears the respondent may have reversed the scale. However, those disqualified scores are reported on the table below.
| School | Raw Score | 5s | 4s | 3s | 2s | 1s | 0s | Total |
| NYU | 4.8/5.0 | 81 | 37 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 119 |
| Princeton | 4.8/5.0 | 78 | 31 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 111 |
| Rutgers | 4.7/5.0 | 69 | 39 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 111 |
| Michigan | 4.5/4.5 | 39 | 66 | 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 115 |
| Pittsburgh | 4.3/4.5 | 24 | 77 | 11 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 113 |
| Harvard | 4.2/4.0 | 20 | 82 | 15 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 121 |
| Stanford | 4.2/4.0 | 13 | 91 | 14 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 120 |
| UCLA | 4.0/4.0 | 11 | 74 | 29 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 120 |
| Columbia | 3.8/4.0 | 3 | 60 | 49 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 117 |
| Cornell | 3.8/4.0 | 4 | 65 | 40 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 116 |
| MIT | 3.7/4.0 | 1 | 65 | 46 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 117 |
| North Carolina | 3.7/3.5 | 3 | 54 | 57 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 116 |
| UC Berkeley | 3.6/3.5 | 1 | 54 | 40 | 12 | 4 | 0 | 120 |
| U Arizona | 3.5/3.5 | 1 | 40 | 67 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 116 |
| Notre Dame | 3.5/3.5 | 0 | 43 | 59 | 11 | 0 | 1 | 114 |
| Brown | 3.3/3.5 | 0 | 32 | 62 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 115 |
| UC Irvine | 3.3/3.5 | 0 | 27 | 66 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 113 |
| UC San Diego | 3.3/3.5 | 1 | 30 | 62 | 22 | 2 | 0 | 116 |
| U of Chicago | 3.3/3.5 | 2 | 40 | 44 | 23 | 3 | 0 | 112 |
| U of Texas | 3.3/3.5 | 1 | 22 | 77 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 114 |
| Yale | 3.3/3.5 | 2 | 34 | 58 | 19 | 1 | 0 | 115 |
| Ohio State | 3.2/3.0 | 0 | 20 | 73 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 113 |
| U of Wisconsin | 3.1/3.0 | 0 | 16 | 76 | 23 | 0 | 1 | 115 |
| CUNY | 3.0/3.0 | 1 | 15 | 59 | 35 | 5 | 0 | 114 |
| Indiana | 2.9/3.0 | 0 | 9 | 65 | 33 | 4 | 1 | 112 |
| Penn | 2.9/3.0 | 0 | 15 | 54 | 40 | 3 | 2 | 114 |
| UC Davis | 2.9/3.0 | 0 | 9 | 68 | 31 | 4 | 1 | 113 |
| U of Colorado | 2.8/3.0 | 0 | 4 | 61 | 45 | 4 | 1 | 114 |
| U Mass/Amherst | 2.7/3.0 | 0 | 8 | 48 | 48 | 6 | 1 | 111 |
| Duke | 2.7/2.5 | 0 | 5 | 43 | 62 | 3 | 3 | 114 |
| UC Riverside | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 1 | 37 | 61 | 12 | 3 | 112 |
| U of Maryland | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 4 | 42 | 69 | 7 | 2 | 112 |
| U of Minnesota | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 3 | 42 | 57 | 8 | 2 | 110 |
| U of Washington | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 1 | 50 | 58 | 0 | 2 | 115 |
| Johns Hopkins | 2.5/2.5 | 0 | 6 | 40 | 56 | 14 | 4 | 118 |
| Northwestern | 2.4/2.5 | 0 | 6 | 31 | 51 | 25 | 3 | 114 |
| Syracuse | 2.4/2.5 | 0 | 3 | 30 | 62 | 13 | 2 | 108 |
| Georgetown | 2.3/2.5 | 0 | 2 | 28 | 55 | 19 | 5 | 108 |
| U of Connecticut | 2.3/2.5 | 0 | 0 | 31 | 57 | 19 | 5 | 109 |
| U of Miami | 2.3/2.5 | 0 | 3 | 28 | 58 | 25 | 3 | 115 |
| Rice | 2.3/2.0 | 0 | 3 | 28 | 62 | 21 | 1 | 114 |
| UC Santa Barbara | 2.3/2.0 | 0 | 2 | 31 | 62 | 18 | 2 | 113 |
| U of Virginia | 2.2/2.0 | 0 | 0 | 23 | 64 | 21 | 4 | 109 |
| Illinois/Urbana | 2.1/2.0 | 0 | 1 | 19 | 60 | 25 | 5 | 108 |
| Tulane | 1.9/2.0 | 0 | | 17 | 42 | 42 | 9 | 107 |
| Florida State | 1.8/2.0 | 0 | 0 | 11 | 44 | 37 | 11 | 101 |
| U of Florida | 1.5/1.5 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 35 | 43 | 19 | 100 |
| Wayne State | 1.2/1.5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 43 | 26 | 97 |
| U of Oklahoma | 1.7/1.75 | 0 | 0 | 16 | 42 | 36 | 14 | 97 |
| U of Georgia | 1.3/1.5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 26 | 48 | 24 | 97 |
| U of Utah | 1.7/1.75 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 41 | 40 | 10 | 96 |
| Oxford | 4.5/4.5 | 48 | 59 | 11 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 119 |
| Cambridge | 3.5/3.5 | 3 | 45 | 55 | 17 | 1 | 0 | 121 |
| St. Andrew's/Stirling | 3.3/3.5 | 1 | 27 | 70 | 15 | 4 | 0 | 116 |
| Toronto | 3.0/3.0 | 1 | 19 | 56 | 27 | 6 | 2 | 110 |
| Birkbeck College | 2.7/3.0 | 0 | 7 | 57 | 43 | 7 | 2 | 116 |
| King's College | 2.7/3.0 | 0 | 10 | 47 | 40 | 11 | 1 | 109 |
| LSE | 2.7/2.5 | 0 | 7 | 48 | 50 | 9 | 2 | 114 |
| UC London | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 1 | 44 | 42 | 13 | 6 | 115 |
| U of Reading | 2.6/2.5 | 0 | 4 | 52 | 47 | 9 | 5 | 114 |
| U of Edinburgh | 2.5/2.5 | 0 | 4 | 36 | 49 | 12 | 4 | 102 |
| U of Sheffield | 2.4/2.5 | 0 | 4 | 32 | 49 | 14 | 6 | 103 |
| Western Ontario | 2.1/2.0 | 0 | 1 | 29 | 43 | 23 | 8 | 102 |
| U of Glasgow | 2.0/2.0 | 0 | 0 | 14 | 52 | 25 | 8 | 95 |
| U of York | 2.0/2.0 | | 0 | 20 | 53 | 21 | 12 | 103 |
| McGill | 2.0/2.0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 52 | 31 | 8 | 103 |
| British Columbia | 1.8/2.0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 53 | 32 | 12 | 101 |
| U of Alberta | 1.6/1.5 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 29 | 46 | 15 | 93 |
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A Note on "Analytic" and "Continental" Philosophy |
"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of "analytic" philosophy.) The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson.1
"Continental" philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographical label is misleading: Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all products of the European Continent, but are not "Continental" philosophers. The foundational figure of this tradition is Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).
Although it appears to be a widespread view in the humanities that "analytic" philosophy is "dead" or "dying," the professional situation of analytic philosophy simply does not bear this out. All the Ivy League universities, all the leading state research universities, all the University of California campuses, most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that overwhelmingly self-identify as "analytic": it is hard to imagine a "movement" that is more academically and professionally entrenched than analytic philosophy.
There is, of course, an important sense in which "analytic" philosophy--as a substantive research program--is dead. The idea that intellectual labor is neatly divisible between philosophers and empirical scientists; that philosophers have a special method ("conceptual analysis") with which to solve problems; that philosophical problems are essentially soluble a priori, from the armchair--all these substantive commitments have largely died thanks to Quine and others. "Analytic" philosophy, today, is the most richly interdisciplinary of all the humanities--even if "analytic" describes only a style, not a substantive program of research. Indeed, what distinguishes analytic philosophy even more than "style" is its adoption of the research paradigm common in the natural sciences, a paradigm in which numerous individual researchers make small contributions to the solution of a set of generally recognized problems.
Criticisms of "analytic" philosophy are familiar: arid, insular, boring, obsessed with logic-chopping, irrelevant. The criticisms are not without some truth. Clearly the "best" analytic philosophers do not resonate with the concerns of the broader culture in the way that figures like Nietzsche and Sartre do. Analytic philosophers do often miss the forest for the trees, and they often let dialectical ingenuity trump good sense (and sometimes science!) in terms of the views they will defend.
Typical of the doubts about analytic philosophy is the late William Barrett's complaint that "an 'analytic' philosopher...earn[s] this title by grinding away at the consequences of this or that particular proposition as if filing a legal brief....[B]ut [p]hilosophy is a way of seeing rather than the tedious business of a lawyer's brief" (The Illusion of Technique [1978], p. 66). Notice that a representative spokesman for the analytic orthodoxy can essentially echo Barrett, though with a rather different valence: "Philosophy is not primarily a body of doctrine, a series of conclusions or systems or movements. Philosophy...lies in the detailed posing of questions, the clarification of meaning, the development and criticism of argument, the working out of ideas and points of view. It resides in the angles, nuances, styles, struggles, and revisions of individual authors" all of which constitutes "the grandeur, richness, and intellectual substance of our subject" (Tyler Burge, "Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990," Philosophical Review 101 (1992), at p. 51). Neither extreme is very plausible: the lasting significance of, e.g., Plato, Kant, and Hegel among others surely has to do with their "way of seeing," even though these thinkers are also distinguished by their attention to "the development and criticism of argument." Nietzsche might well have been speaking of analytic philosophers when he wrote of his contemporaries in classical philology as follows:
Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somewhere--his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked....Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery....For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise--cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable--isn't that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the "man of letters," the dexterous, "polydexterous" man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back--not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the "carrier" of culture--the man of letters who really is nothing but "represents" almost everything, playing and "substituting" for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.
No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the "men of letters" and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus--to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training, [The Gay Science, sec. 366]
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These remarks remain as apt today as they were more than a century ago. Whatever the limitations of "analytic" philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world's bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history. (Surely English professor "celebrities" like Stanley Fish and Andrew Ross are fine contemporary examples of "the man of letters who really is nothing but 'represents' almost everything, playing and 'substituting' for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated....") When compared to the sophomoric nonsense that passes for "philosophizing" in the broader academic culture--often in fields like English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History--one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers. It is also because analytic philosophy remains very much a specialty that it is possible to rank departments as I do here: the standards of success and accomplishment are relatively clear, maintained as they are by a large, dedicated scholarly community.
Indeed, it is fair to say that analytic philosophy is the philosophical movement most continuous with the "grand" tradition in philosophy, the tradition of Aristotle and Descartes and Hume and Kant. Only analytic philosophers aspire to the level of argumentative sophistication and philosophical depth that marks the great philosophers--even as analytic philosophers typically fail to achieve the grand visions, the "ways of seeing" of the great historical figures.
At the same time, analytic philosophers generally become unbearably trite and superficial once they venture beyond the technical problems and methods to which their specialized training best suits them, and try to assume the mantle of "public intellectual" so often associated with figures on the Continent. The best analytic philosophers are usually very smart (clever, quick, analytically acute), but less often deep. A reflective, literate person will still find far more nourishment from the writings of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, than from the attempts of some "analytic" philosophers to become free-lance social critics or purveyors of existential wisdom. Yet as a discipline, in which students are recruited to do doctoral work, it is a bit silly to think that Philosophy Departments can train Nietzsches. Genius, one may hope, will find its way in the world without the benefit of rankings. But for those who want to pursue a scholarly career in philosophy, one can not do better than to pursue training in analytic philosophy--even if one plans to work, in the end, on Hegel or Marx or Nietzsche. As Julian Young remarks (Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 1998, p. 17):
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The Continental tradition contains most of the great, truly synoptic, European thought of the past 200 years. That is why...whereas analytic philosophy has proved of little or no interest to the humanities other than itself, the impact of Continental philosophy has been enormous. But there is also a great deal of (mostly French) humburg in the Continental tradition. This is why there is a powerful need for philosophers equipped with analytic methodology to work within...the Continental tradition--to sort the gold from the humbug.
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Footnotes |
1For the place of analytic philosophy within broader post-WWII intellectual currents, see the illuminating essay by Carl E. Schorske, "The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940-1960," Daedelus 126 (Winter 1997): 289-310 Back
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