Michael Beaney

Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction

Analytic philosophy has had an uneasy relationship with the discipline of history of philosophy1 throughout its life. Analytic philosophers often either scorn or simply ignore history of philosophy. Where interpretations have been offered of past philosophical works, in what we can call ‘analytic’ history of philosophy, they have tended to be ‘rational reconstructions’. In recent years, however, philosophers trained in the analytic tradition have begun to look at the history of analytic philosophy itself more seriously, and the debate about the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy has been brought closer to home. In this chapter, I consider some of the philosophical and historiographical presuppositions and implications of this debate, focusing on the idea of rational reconstruction. This idea developed alongside analytic philosophy itself and holds the key to understanding one central thread in the history of the relationship between analytic philosophy and history of philosophy.

Twenty Years of theBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy

The first issue of this twenty-first volume marks an important transition in the life of the BJHP. It contains the first articles that were submitted and accepted through the online system that was introduced in October 2010, which is when I took over as Acting Editor, succeeding John Rogers as Editor, officially, in March 2011. At that time, there was a backlog of papers, and the last of these were finally published in the sixth issue of last year. This means that John’s influence as Founding Editor has in fact extended through the whole of the first 20 volumes of the journal. I have asked John to report on his time as Editor, and this report will be published, I hope, later this year. In the meantime, this seems an appropriate moment to review the first two decades of the BJHP with its future in mind. Attached as an appendix to this editorial is an analysis of the contents of the first twenty volumes of the BJHP, which I hope readers of the journal as well as those interested in the development of history of philosophy (as a discipline) will find useful. Let me say something here about how the analysis was conducted and make a few comments on some of its implications. The articles might be divided into three main categories. The vast majority of articles have the work of one particular philosopher as their main focus, and the table that forms the appendix has therefore been ordered primarily by philosopher, chronologically by year of birth. A single such article has been taken as the unit, with discussions counting as half a unit – except in one case (vol. 12, no. 1), where the discussion was long. (Review articles, essay reviews, book reviews and all other pieces such as memoirs have been excluded.) So the ‘1’ in the tenth column of the first row, for example, indicates that one article was published on Plato in volume 10. In the second category, there are articles comparing two or more philosophers. Where two philosophers are discussed, ‘0.5’ has been recorded in the appropriate boxes (even if one philosopher receives more of the attention); where three philosophers are discussed, ‘0.33’; and so on. This is by no means an exact science, but is intended merely to indicate who is discussed, with some acknowledgement that the discussion is only partial. So the ‘0.5’ in the fifteenth column of the second row, for example, indicates that Aristotle is discussed in an article in volume 15 (together with Chrysippus, in fact). A ‘1’ in a box is thus ambiguous: it could mean that British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2013 21(1): 1–12, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2013.757945

Aspect Perception After Wittgenstein: Seeing-as and Novelty

Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ makes vivid that, when we encounter the world around us in all its concretion, that encounter is also saturated-or penetrated-by conceptual norms: when we see, we see-as. This is a realization that can provoke philosophical disquiet. It can suggest that the ways in which we deal with the world have been-in some way-already settled or prescribed. This, in turn, can provoke a sense of detachment from the world, a sense that we are not truly open to it, but only to a ‘pre-processed’, idealized version of it. A sense of its concretion as a kind of alienness-in its heterogeneous and as-yet-unanticipated ways-dawns in a recognition of what then seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that alienness: we have in some way abdicated a proper responsiveness to that world and, hence, a kind of responsibility for our actions in that world, by letting our responsiveness-and through it, our actions-be governed by norms, at whose credentials we now look askance. Do they merely represent the ways that my society, period, class, and so on understand the world? Is there some kind of unavoidable myopia imposed on us by the very need to think conceptually, to always see-as?Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ makes vivid that, when we encounter the world around us in all its concretion, that encounter is also saturated-or penetrated-by conceptual norms: when we see, we see-as. This is a realization that can provoke philosophical disquiet. It can suggest that the ways in which we deal with the world have been-in some way-already settled or prescribed. This, in turn, can provoke a sense of detachment from the world, a sense that we are not truly open to it, but only to a ‘pre-processed’, idealized version of it. A sense of its concretion as a kind of alienness-in its heterogeneous and as-yet-unanticipated ways-dawns in a recognition of what then seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that alienness: we have in some way abdicated a proper responsiveness to that world and, hence, a kind of responsibility for our actions in that world, by letting our responsiveness-and through it, our actions-be governed by norms, at whose credentials we now look askance. Do they merely represent the ways that my society, period, class, and so on understand the world? Is there some kind of unavoidable myopia imposed on us by the very need to think conceptually, to always see-as?

Twenty-five years of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Last year saw the publication of the twenty-fifth volume of the BJHP. After the publication of the twentieth volume, I carried out an analysis of the contents of the first twenty volumes on which I reported in my Editorial at the beginning of 2013 (21.1). I also outlined our aims in taking the journal forward. So let me take this opportunity to update that earlier account with an analysis of the last five volumes of the BJHP to assess the extent to which we have succeeded in our aims and to indicate our current vision for the future of the journal. Before doing so, however, let me first express my gratitude to all those who have contributed to the successful running of the journal last year: to Katie Johnson, our excellent Production Editor at Taylor and Francis, to Katharine O’Reilly and Chen Long for all their work as our Editorial Assistants, and to the Associate Editors and Board Members of the BJHP and all the many referees whose reports are the foundation stone of our rigorous peer review system. Particular thanks go to Federico Boccaccini and Anna Marmodoro, who co-edited the special issue on ‘Mental Powers in Early Modern Philosophy’ (25.3), and Sarah Hutton, who edited the special issue on ‘Cambridge Platonism’ (25.5). Submissions last year, at just over 330, were around the same level as in 2016, and we published fifty-one articles, three discussion notes and three review articles. Excluding the special issues, the acceptance rate has thus stayed constant at around 12%. Other key statistics are also more or less the same: the average length of time between submission and first decision has been just over 50 days, between submission and final decision just over 60 days, and over 95% of first decisions were made within three months. Articles continue to be pre-published online within two months of acceptance and appear in print within six to twelve months, depending on the scheduling of the special issues. In effect, there is no backlog, since we regard six to twelve months as enabling the ideal balance between a careful production process and timely publication. This year we have special issues in the pipeline on British Idealism, edited by Colin Tyler and James Connelly, and on experimental philosophy, edited by Alberto Vanzo. Work is also under way on future special issues on early modern women philosophers, French spiritualism, Kant’s method and its reception, and historiography. Let me turn, then, to the analysis of the contents of the BJHP, with particular reference to the last five years. The analysis appears as an Appendix to this

Susan Stebbing and the Early Reception of Logical Empiricism in Britain

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) played a central role in the development of the analytic tradition in the 1930s, publishing the first textbook of analytic philosophy in 1930. She was also responsible for introducing logical empiricism into Britain. In two papers written in the early 1930s, she critically compared logical empiricism with Cambridge philosophy, thereby bringing into dialogue the two main schools of philosophy that came to form the analytic tradition. In this paper I offer an account of Stebbing’s work and her place in the history of analytic philosophy.

Historiography, Philosophy of History and the Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy

This article has three main interconnected aims. First, I illustrate the historiographical conceptions of three early analytic philosophers: Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Second, I consider some of the historiographical debates that have been generated by the recent historical turn in analytic philosophy, looking at the work of Scott Soames and Hans-Johann Glock, in particular. Third, I discuss Arthur Danto’s Analytic Philosophy of History, published 50 years ago, and argue for a reinvigorated analytic philosophy of history.

The Rise and Fall of German Philosophy

This book (hereafter CHP) is the latest volume in The Cambridge History of Philosophy series. The first volume, The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, came out in 1967, but it was not until 1988, more than two decades later, that the next two volumes appeared, on later medieval philosophy, and Renaissance philosophy. A further decade later saw the publication of the two-volume Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy (1998). Two more volumes, on eighteenth-century philosophy and nineteenth-century philosophy, are forthcoming. It might seem natural, then, to have expected a volume on twentieth-century philosophy, especially now that the twentieth century has come to an end. But if it is true that it takes at least fifty years to gain the requisite distance to write about philosophy historically, with enough of the implications sufficiently clear to be usefully assessed, then it makes sense to consider only the first half of the twentieth century – and 1945 is the obvious place to stop. In any case, the first half of the twentieth century saw more than enough major developments to warrant a volume to itself. Indeed, in the bigger picture of the history of philosophy, the early twentieth century rivals even the early seventeenth century in the scale and significance of the intellectual changes that took place. But the present volume does not, in fact, take 1900 as its official startingpoint; 1870 has been chosen instead. This makes good sense too, though. Much happened around the turn of the twentieth century, and one needs to go back two or three decades to understand the changes that occurred. Both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, which dominate western philosophy today, have their origins in the work of philosophers writing at the end of the nineteenth century. Frege’s Begriffsschrift was published in 1879, and Moore’s and Russell’s rebellion against British idealism began in the late 1890s, both significant events in the development of analytic philosophy. Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt was published in 1874, and Husserl’s first major work was his Philosophie der British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13(3) 2005: 543 – 562