each day.
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
