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Preface

The fall of 2010 was a fortunate one for me. Not only had I recently been given a fresh start after recovering from nine months of cancer treatment—during which I read Wittgenstein and Quine constantly while working on an MA in mathematics—four of the most intellectually stimulating events of my life occurred that first semester of graduate work in philosophy at Buffalo. First, I was introduced to, and began learning from, John Corcoran. Next, I stumbled upon Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century while hanging out in the Talking Leaves bookshop near my first apartment in Buffalo. After this, I heard Sandra Lapointe give a talk on Bolzano for the Buffalo Logic Colloquium. Finally, I heard Sally Haslanger give a talk on the semantics and politics of generics for a UB Philosophy Department Colloquium. Displaying her ever-admirable character, I asked a very silly question and Haslanger very supportively took it in a direction that was able to teach me something. Without these experiences, this book would never have been able to come into existence. They have largely set the agenda for my thinking of the last ten years that this book finally begins to articulate.

What all of these experiences had in common for me was their contributing to my thinking constantly about connections between history, analytic philosophy, and practical concerns of social and public life. To this, John Corcoran contributed an interest in the history of logic and an understanding of the “Inseparability of Logic & Ethics.” Sandra Lapointe opened my eyes to the history of analytic philosophy as a distinct subdiscipline, one I have adopted as my primary academic home. Sally Haslanger introduced me to the type of philosophizing I aspire to do most—analytically rigorous, while grounded in, and inspired by, social justice concerns. And, lastly, Soames explicitly articulated the neutralist stance that I saw all around me, but only implicitly, and that I wanted to argue against.

The thinking and writing which culminated here really started that semester and has not stopped since. The earliest presentation of any of the writing, which would become one of the following chapters, was an early version of chapter 4 given at the first annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy at McMaster University. Seeing this manifestation of the society she created continued the inspiration given to me by Sandra Lapointe. Since that time, I have given talks on various versions of these chapters in a number of places. So, in addition to the above acknowledgments, I would like to thank audiences in Buffalo, Potsdam, Istanbul, Calgary, Milwaukee, Boston, San Diego, Montreal, St. Louis, Miami, London (Ontario), and London (England). The most recent of these was the 2019 version of SSHAP at Boston University. Serendipitously, this brought the last decade full circle for me with a fantastic roundtable on analytic feminism, which included Sally Haslanger, along with Naomi Scheman, Carol Hay, Julie Walsh, Samia Hesni, Ann Cudd, and Nancy Bauer.

Before I get into presenting the fruits of the studies inspired by those four events, I need to address my engaging in them in the first place. This is especially the case given that I will most closely align myself with the logical empiricists and their allies when it comes to the history of analytic philosophy. One of the things I admire most about analytic philosophers in this orbit is the fact that they held self-criticism to be so important. They made lots and lots of mistakes, but were very open to being told so and learning from those mistakes. In fact, one of the few bits of the standard story on the logical empiricists which is clearly correct is that the movement was partly brought down from the inside by their own criticisms.

With self-criticism in mind, more important than addressing the history of early analytic philosophy portion of the book is addressing the race and gender aspects of the book. This is particularly necessary given that I am a privileged, white, cisgender man writing about oppressed people, as well as activism and theorizing intended to empower them and support their resilience. World history, principles of participatory and procedural justice, as well as standpoint epistemology all point toward the fact that to do this in an even potentially responsible way, I need to be doing what I can to center the thinking of people of color and those with gender identities other than my own.

In line with this, many of the arguments I put forward here are defenses and extensions of views gained from reading the work of, or having discussions with, people with marginalized and oppressed social identities. In a surprisingly close to literal sense, I’m really just saying something along the lines of, if there is going to be a reason for the continuance of a distinct tradition of analytic philosophy, it should be because the thoughts of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Stebbing, the Vienna Circle, ordinary language philosophers, and Quine have been significantly transformed by thinkers like Liam Kofi Bright, Sally Haslanger, Meena Krishnamurthy, Charles Mills, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Rebecca Kukla, and others like them I do and do not cite.

On top of this, Haslanger, Mills, and others have shown there has been a gross exclusion of people of color and women from analytic philosophy. And, far too many of the people within analytic philosophy do all they can to ignore the real world at all—let alone social justice. Because of this, I believe movements for opening up the field require every person available. Furthermore, as I will discuss later in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement, one is simply not paying attention to the world if they think rationality and morality are anything but sorely needed in our public discourses. If analytic philosophers understand these concepts as well as we claim to, we should hope to get to a point where we can support real-world movements for rationality and morality by engaging such matters. And, maybe most simply, as the front cover photo points out, silence is complicity in many cases—complicity with systems and processes I’m not okay being complicit with.

All of that said, this does not yet justify my writing a book on race, gender, and oppression even if it does open up the possibility for genuine race traitors and gender traitors. Simply because I recognize those possibilities and desire to bring them about, that does not mean I will actually achieve being either. Another related worry is that I, as a person trained within hegemonic institutions on completely different matters, will unwittingly contribute to what Tommy J. Curry has called the underspecialization problem and the derelictical crisis in American race theory (Curry 2010, 2011). The underspecialization problem arises from the fact that:

By simply continuing to proclaim American philosophy’s “potential” to deal with racism as proof of the field’s ability to contribute to race theory, American philosophy permits whites, who are willing to gesture toward a capacity to speak about race, to be recognized as legitimate race theorists. In organizational meetings, peer-reviewed journal articles, and at the general level of visibility, American philosophy permits whites pursuing a budding interest in the “concept of race” to be respected and recognized as having a specialization in “race theory.” Under this current practice, many scholars interested in exploring the themes of racism (marginalization, silencing, power, etc.) are taken to be authoritative, regardless of their formal education in the histories of oppressed peoples in the United States, or a functional knowledge of the development of white supremacy within America’s geography. (Curry 2010, 53)

On the other hand, the derelictical crisis comes from a particular view of race theory which I have tried to avoid, but could be guilty of:

The problem with this view is that it fails to fulfill the basic need in the field for organic and visceral connection to the people it seeks to study and theorize about. When Black thinkers are not seen as the primary theoreticians of their own thought, the unnamed but powerfully cogent reflections on Blackness are usurped by the established categories of philosophical legitimacy. (Curry 2011, 319)

The latter traces back to my earlier discussion about the standpoint from which I theorize about race and gender. Furthermore, as somebody not trained in critical theories of race or gender, I did have worries about the former.

That said, I was not trained in the history of analytic philosophy, either. I was trained in the philosophy of language and logic. Of course, I have been intensely studying the history of analytic philosophy and immersing myself in institutions connected to the history of analytic philosophy for a decade or so. Similarly, I have been intensely studying and immersing myself in anti-racist, feminist, and queer institutions for a decade or so. It is these experiences and the immensely helpful feedback I have received from experts in doing so which finally made me feel qualified to write this book. I do have reservations still, but I can only put it out there as a good-faith effort rather than something that actually achieves an allyship to those fighting underspecialization and the derelictical crisis. I will work to move that effort into achievement for the rest of my days.¹

Because of the reasons given in the preceding paragraphs, I will engage, but try to take the lead of scholars and activists, with more experience, and thus, knowledge, than I have. Where not, I will try to focus on the few dimensions of identity where I am not so privileged—as an LGBTQ+ individual and somebody with lifelong mental health issues. That said, if the trainings I lead on implicit bias, stereotype threat, contractually oppressive ignorance, and so on have taught me anything, it is that I should expect that my privileged perspective has likely gotten the best of me. I hope readers will not hesitate to point those places out.²

Before we move forward, I need to make one last point. Much of this book will take an approach that is very cool and conciliatory. I want to make it clear that this is not meant as an implicit endorsement of moderate approaches to politics. I am a radical through and through. My goal in writing this book is to start pushing those in the discipline of a certain persuasion to move in a more radical direction. So that I am not mistaken, though, I want to end with as clear of an articulation of my goals as I can imagine—Fuck the patriarchy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck heteronormativity! Fuck ableism! Fuck all oppression (but these former manifestations of oppression are the only that I discuss here)!

NOTES

1. I will also try to do so in a way that keeps in mind the words of Cornel West:

When it comes to Black intellectuals, we have to, on the one hand, be very open to insights from wherever they come. On the other hand, we must filter it in such a way that we never lose sight of what some of the silences are in the work of White theorists, especially as those silences relate to issues of class, gender, race, and empire. Why? Because class, gender, race, and empire are fundamental categories which Black intellectuals must use in order to understand the predicament of Black people. So, there is, I would say, a selective significance of White intellectuals to the critical development of Black intellectuals. (hooks & West 1991, 35)

2. An example of how I would do this in my own work comes from my first journal article (Chick & LaVine 2014). There, we were trying to show that there were internal inconsistencies in a certain self-conception of analytic philosophy. In doing so, we allowed a Eurocentric framework to frame our own contribution. As a result, our own work was unwittingly Eurocentric. Similarly, “today, we may no longer teach students that the birth of spirit occurs with the Greeks, flowers in the modern period, and comes to fruition in contemporary times, but we might as well be—the structures of our departments, the programming of our curricula, and the presentation of our canon all work together to give precisely this effect” (Rivera Berruz & Kalmanson 2018, 2).