Furthermore, evidence of the significance of 1926 as a completion point for Stage 2 of logical atomism and the beginning of Stage 3 of logical empiricism and Cambridge analysis also comes in multiple forms:
(1) Though the Schlick-led incarnation of the Vienna Circle had been meeting for several years by this point, it was in 1926 that Rudolf Carnap—the intellectual figurehead of logical empiricism and its influence on the larger history of analytic philosophy—joined.
(2) The Vienna Circle read the Tractatus together page by page through much of the whole calendar year of 1926.
(3) This was also the year that Schlick would convince Wittgenstein to start scheduling meetings with a subset of the Vienna Circle including Waismann, Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Maria Kasper-Feigl, which would last in some form from 1927 until 1935.
(4) Russell’s work also took a different direction by this point, as indicated by Volume 9 of Russell’s collected papers applying his logical atomism to matters on language, mind, and matter ending in 1926 and the next volume being entitled A Fresh Look at Empiricism.
(5) After not publishing more than five papers in any particular year prior to that, Stebbing’s career took a significant turn with at least a dozen publications in 1926 (Chapman 2013, 202–3).
(6) Ramsey was appointed university lecturer in mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge in 1926.
(7) Braithwaite earned his highest degree, an MA, from King’s College in 1926.
Hence, while it can certainly be challenged, there is at least prima facie reason to treat 1926 as a time of transition for the analytic movement.
Going back to more of a consensus picture, there is little controversial about placing ordinary language philosophy at the center of the analytic movement following logical empiricism. Soames (2003b) follows up his discussion of logical positivism and Quinean reactions to it from Soames (2003a) with a part on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and three parts on ordinary language philosophy (including its demise under Grice). Schwartz (2012), too, goes to chapters on “Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy and Later Wittgenstein” and “Responses to Ordinary Language Philosophy” after chapters on logical positivism and responses to it. Hence, we need only say a bit about the choice of 1940 and 1960 as the transition points from logical empiricism/Cambridge analysis to ordinary language philosophy and from ordinary language philosophy to the decade of debate, fragmentation, and turmoil.
(1) Many members of the Vienna Circle had been forced to leave the European continent by 1940 as a result of Nazi activities—Neurath and Reidemeister fled to England in 1940, Kurt Godel reached the United States in 1940, Rose Rand emigrated to London in 1939, Phillip Frank made it to the United States in 1938, Friedrich Waismann to England in 1937, and Rudolf Carnap to the United States in 1935, among others (Uebel 2016).
(2) As a result, the last congresses on scientific philosophy were held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1939 and Chicago in 1941.
(3) Stebbing’s major works, Thinking to Some Purpose and Ideals and Illusions, were published in 1939 and 1941, respectively.
(4) Wittgenstein was elected to Moore’s chair in philosophy in 1939.
(5) J. L. Austin’s first publication to focus on meanings and words comes out in 1939 in a symposium on “Are There A Priori Concepts?”
As for the choice of 1960 as the transition point between the fourth stage led by ordinary language philosophy and a fifth stage where there was no single story, school, or set of problems clearly leading the analytic movement, this is much more arbitrary. That said, this is partly a result of the fragmentation of this era itself. Rather than a group like the Vienna Circle setting the institutional tone, as was done in earlier stages, this fifth stage saw a number of distinct and significant threads. There was a revival in traditional ethical theorizing from G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and R. M. Hare, which would ultimately lead to the applied ethics of thinkers like James Rachels, Peter Singer, and Judith Jarvis Thomson. During this time, the significance of modal and intensional logics was intensely investigated by Saul Kripke, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Richard Montague, and A. N. Prior. Finally, as the center of analytic philosophy shifted to the United States the traditions of pragmatism and naturalism were explored, and used to criticize some common themes of stages 3 and 4, in the works of W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Susan Haack, Cornel West, and Cheryl Misak. Thus, given this complication, I will have to leave full discussion of the choice of 1960 to chapter 7 on Stage 5.
§0.4 Preliminary Sketch of the Book
With my understandings of the meanings of “analytic philosophy” and of the outline of the history of early analytic philosophy sketched, we are now in a position to sketch the main argument of this book. As was mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, my primary thesis is that there is much to be gained by bringing together inquiry into critical theories of race and gender and inquiry into, as well as the use of, analytic philosophy. That is, because of the entrenched nature of a belief in a disconnect between analytic philosophy and matters of necessity to “moral and spiritual improvement” such as racial and gender justice and oppression, the book has the modest, but I believe important, goal of showing that there is practical value to exploring the connections between them.
Now that we have discussed the fact that I believe there to be at least two relatively distinct meanings of “analytic philosophy,” we can specify that I will argue that this primary conclusion is true on both readings of the term. That is to say, I will try to give reasons to believe (a) that there is much to be gained by bringing together inquiry involving matters of race, gender, and analytic philosophy, the method of philosophizing which emphasizes the centrality of the philosophy of language and logic and (b) that there is much to be gained by bringing together inquiry involving matters of race, gender, and analytic philosophy, the historical movement in the discipline of philosophy. Furthermore, I will argue for both disambiguations of this thesis with specific examples, which directly show something gained for our understanding of social justice issues, for our understanding of analytic philosophy, or both in some cases. More specifically, I will focus on arguing for the historical claim that many early analytic philosophers intended for their work to be public and political in nature, while trying to make good on this intention by showing how analytic thought can be useful for work on social justice issues of contemporary concern.
Given that we have two different readings of the primary thesis, I will argue for them in two separate sections. The first will be dedicated to the primary thesis on the philosophical method reading of “analytic philosophy” and the second to the historical movement reading of “analytic philosophy.” Since the method I associate with the words “analytic philosophy” focuses on the philosophy of language and on logic, this first section will include one chapter on each. In particular, chapter 1 will be on a specific example showing how we can be better practitioners of analytic philosophy and understand its history in a more just fashion by utilizing tools from analytic philosophy of language concerning how social identity influences the reception of certain speech acts. More specifically, we will use Rebecca Kukla (2014)’s notion of discursive injustice to weigh in on the (in)famous debate between Scott Soames and Quentin Smith over who deserves initial credit for the so-called “new theory of reference”—Ruth Barcan Marcus or Saul Kripke. Slightly oversimplifying, I will argue for something of a compromise position where, rather than Kripke being guilty of plagiarizing Marcus, the entire discipline of philosophy is guilty of gendered discursive