Beyond the Analytic-Continental

Divide

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the
division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one
that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barri-
ers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than
rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems,
methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philo-
sophical work looks like in practice.
Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political phi-
losophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue
a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers and confront leading
problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology,
meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show
that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and
practice no longer determined either as “analytic” or as “continental,” but,
instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new
work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of
twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively
transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philoso-
phy today.

Jeffrey A. Bell is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana Univer-

sity, USA. He is the author of Deleuze’s Hume (2009) and Philosophy at the
Edge of Chaos (2006).

Andrew Cutrofello is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago,

USA. He is the author of Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Intro-
duction (2005).

Paul M. Livingston is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of

New Mexico, USA. His most recent book is The Politics of Logic: Badiou,
Wittgenstein and the Consequences of Formalism (2011).
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

37 Contemporary Feminist 44 Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty

Pragmatism of Evil
Edited by Maurice Hamington Derek Edyvane
and Celia Bardwell-Jones
45 Philosophy of Language and
38 Morality, Self Knowledge, and Webs of Information
Human Suffering Heimir Geirsson
An Essay on The Loss of
Confidence in the World 46 Disagreement and Skepticism
Josep Corbi Edited by Diego E. Machuca

39 Contrastivism in Philosophy 47 Philosophy in Schools

Edited by Martijn Blaauw An Introduction for Philosophers
and Teachers
40 Aesthetics After Metaphysics Edited by Sara Goering, Nicholas
From Mimesis to Metaphor J. Shudak, and Thomas E.
Miguel de Beistegui Wartenberg

41 Foundations of Freedom 48 A Philosophy of Material Culture

Welfare-Based Arguments against Action, Function, and Mind
Paternalism Beth Preston
Simon R. Clarke
49 A Philosophy of the Screenplay
42 Pittsburgh School of Ted Nannicelli
Philosophy
Sellars, McDowell, Brandom 50 Race, Philosophy, and Film
Chauncey Maher Edited by Mary K.
Bloodsworth-Lugo and Dan Flory
43 Reference and Structure
in the Philosophy of 51 Knowledge, Virtue, and Action
Language Essays on Putting Epistemic
A Defense of the Russellian Virtues to Work
Orthodoxy Edited by Tim Henning and David
Arthur Sullivan P. Schweikard
52 The Ontology of 61 Deleuze and Pragmatism
Psychology Edited by Sean Bowden, Simone
Questioning Foundations Bignall, and Paul Patton
in the Philosophy of Mind
Linda A.W. Brakel 62 Mind, Language and Subjectivity
Minimal Content and the Theory
53 Pragmatism, Law, and of Thought
Language Nicholas Georgalis
Edited by Graham Hubbs and
Douglas Lind 63 Believing Against the Evidence
Agency and the Ethics of Belief
54 Contemporary Dualism Miriam Schleifer McCormick
A Defense
Edited by Andrea Lavazza and 64 The Essence of the Self
Howard M. Robinson In Defense of the Simple View of
Personal Identity
55 Reframing the Intercultural Geoffrey Madell
Dialogue on Human
Rights 65 Personal Autonomy and Social
A Philosophical Approach Oppression
Jeffrey Flynn Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Marina A.L. Oshana
56 How History Matters to
Philosophy 66 Domination and Global Political
Reconsidering Philosophy’s Justice
Past After Positivism Conceptual, Historical, and
Robert C. Scharff Institutional Perspectives
Edited by Barbara Buckinx,
57 The Affordable Care Act Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, and
Decision Timothy Waligore
Philosophical and Legal
Implications 67 Hate Speech Law
Edited by Fritz Allhoff and A Philosophical Examination
Mark Hall Alexander Brown

58 Realism, Science, and 68 Music and Aesthetic Reality

Pragmatism Formalism and the Limits of
Edited by Kenneth R. Westphal Description
By Nick Zangwill
59 Evidentialism and Epistemic
Justification 69 Beyond the Analytic-Continental
Kevin McCain Divide
Pluralist Philosophy in the
60 Democracy in Twenty-First Century
Contemporary Confucian Edited by Jeffrey A. Bell,
Philosophy Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M.
David Elstein Livingston
This page intentionally left blank
Beyond the
Analytic-Continental Divide
Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First
Century

Edited by
Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello,
and Paul M. Livingston
First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond the analytic-continental divide : pluralist philosophy in the twenty-
first century / edited by Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M.
Livingston. — 1 [edition].
   pages cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 69)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Philosophy, Modern—21st century. 2. Analysis (Philosophy)
3. Continental philosophy. I. Bell, Jeffrey A, editor.
B805.B38 2015
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2015014644
ISBN: 978-1-138-78736-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76662-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
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Contents

1 Introduction: Contemporary Philosophy as Synthetic

Philosophy 1
JEFFREY A. BELL, ANDREW CUTROFELLO, AND PAUL M. LIVINGSTON

PART I
Methodologies

2 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition

as a Form of Philosophical Self-Consciousness 17
JAMES CONANT

3 Philosophy as Articulation: Austin and Deleuze on

Conceptual Analysis 59
RICHARD ELDRIDGE AND TAMSIN LORRAINE

4 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 75

CATARINA DUTILH NOVAES

PART II
Truth and Meaning

5 Truth and Epoché: The Semantic Conception of

Truth in Phenomenology 111
DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH

6 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 129

JEFFREY A. BELL
viii Contents
7 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History: Foucault’s
Criticism of Putnam’s Anti-Realism 151
LEE BRAVER

8 Metaphor without Meanings: Derrida and Davidson

as Complementary 172
SAMUEL C. WHEELER III

PART III
Metaphysics and Ontology

9 Why Is Time Different from Space? 193

JOHN MCCUMBER

10 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads

Wittgenstein: Thinking Language Bounding World 222
PAUL M. LIVINGSTON

11 The Answer to the Question of Being 249

GRAHAM PRIEST

PART IV
Values, Personhood, and Agency

12 Relativism and Recognition 261

CAROL ROVANE

13 Revolutionary Actions and Events 287

ANDREW CUTROFELLO

14 Varieties of Shared Intentionality: Tomasello

and Classical Phenomenology 305
DAN ZAHAVI AND GLENDA SATNE

List of Contributors 327

Index 329
1 Introduction
Contemporary Philosophy as
Synthetic Philosophy
Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and
Paul M. Livingston

The thirteen new essays collected here, written from diverse perspectives,
address many more or less interrelated topics of contemporary philosophi-
cal discussion and inquiry. What they most centrally share, though, is a
common orientation toward the contemporary reality of what might be
called synthetic philosophy: philosophical work that situates itself beyond
the problematic “divide” between the “analytic” and “continental” tradi-
tions, which still largely shapes and constrains philosophical work in the
English-speaking world.1,2
As students of academic philosophy learn, typically relatively early in
their careers, most of the work that goes on in many departments—at least
most of the time—remains recognizably “analytic,” in drawing on the work
of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and W.V.O. Quine.
This is work that—characteristically but not exclusively—privileges logic,
practices or responds to projects of linguistic or conceptual analysis, and
often (though again not invariably) models philosophical inquiry itself as
methodologically analogous to, or continuous with, empirical-scientific
inquiry into the natural world. As beginning students also quickly discover,
analytic philosophy in this sense is routinely contrasted, in the pedagogical
practices as well as sociological divisions of academic philosophers, with
what is called “continental” philosophy. This is—as a quick characteriza-
tion might run—philosophy that draws on the work of thinkers such as
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and
Jacques Derrida, and develops diverse projects and methods (such as dialec-
tics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, Marxism, critical theory,
and deconstruction). These projects and methods are, at least at first glance,
generally more or less distinct from those characteristic of the “analytic”
tradition.
The starkness and apparent exhaustiveness of the division as it exists and
is often maintained in academic philosophy today can present students on
their way to specialization with a difficult and problematic choice: either
to work in areas and pursue topics and questions to which they are not
naturally drawn, or to risk marginalization or dismissal by pursuing the
further development of the extant work that they see as most promising.
2 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
At the same time, students whose abilities or inclinations make them more
comfortable with “analytic” methods and concerns often undergo the frus-
trating experience of recognizing the relevance of texts and thinkers situ-
ated outside the analytic tradition, but lacking—due to the one-sidedness of
their training—the resources seriously to engage with them. More broadly,
though it is of relatively recent origin (coming to characterize academic phi-
losophy generally only as recently as the 1960s), the division between the
traditions has caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barri-
ers to the development of common concerns and problems among working
philosophers and so has significantly limited, in many cases, the range and
fruitfulness of philosophical discussions and debates.
The essays that comprise this volume attempt to move beyond this prob-
lematic situation by construing philosophy as a cosmopolitan endeavor that
should not be constrained by any a priori presumption of metaphilosophical
division. To this end, each of the essays draws centrally on problems, meth-
ods, and results of both traditions to produce new work across a variety of
areas. The contemporary possibility of such work and its concrete reality
today, as indicated and exemplified by the essays, also points toward a future
of philosophical thought in the twenty-first century, no longer determined as
“analytic” or “continental” but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of much
of what is best in the diverse legacy of twentieth-century approaches.
In drawing in this way on the best outcomes of these methodologi-
cally diverse twentieth-century traditions, the new work assembled here
thus shows how the characteristic problems, projects, and ambitions of
twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively
transformed today. Collectively, they thereby point toward a future of philo-
sophical thought and research that brings the best results and most signifi-
cant outcomes of both traditions to bear in synthetic fashion on problems
with which both have been deeply concerned. In so doing, they also indi-
cate some of the possible forms of a philosophical future of discussion and
inquiry that substantially inherits both traditions but is not limited to either
one, and so point toward, at least in broad outline, some of the distinctive
concerns and broad contours that might characterize much good philosoph-
ical work in general over the next several decades.3
The past twenty-five years have witnessed a large number of analyses of
the causes or origins of the analytic-continental divide, or of its persistence
in contemporary academic philosophy.4 Going back even further and con-
tinuing through the present, there have also been many attempts at what
may be understood as “bridge-building”: projects that seek to make figures,
themes, or topics identified with one or the other of the traditions available
and intelligible to those trained, and at home, in the other.5 We do not dis-
pute the usefulness and importance of either of these two kinds of projects,
but the approach of this volume is different from either of them. Rather than
attempting simply to comprehend the divide or place into dialogue two tra-
ditions still conceived as essentially distinct, the essays in this volume situate
 Introduction 3
themselves beyond the divide in that they operate in a context wherein the
divide is no longer assumed to determine or constrain philosophical thought
and inquiry. Here, the right metaphor is no longer, we think, that of building
bridges or routes of access between two distinct and (as it is often assumed)
mutually incommensurable traditions. Rather, a better picture would be
that of the confluence of two streams that, having a common origin and
trajectory for much of their course, have recently diverged and run roughly
in parallel for a while (although sometimes at significant distance from each
other), before converging once again.6
In thus situating themselves in the dynamic confluence of the two tradi-
tions and realizing this confluence as a reality of contemporary thought,
the essays of this volume also move beyond work that is simply “compara-
tive” in the sense of identifying static similarities and differences of doc-
trine, theory, or result across the two twentieth-century traditions. Instead,
in developing the implications of problems that are posed by the joint legacy
of the two traditions as sites for contemporary philosophical research and
thought, the essays in this volume pose and re-open longstanding philosoph-
ical questions and provide positive directives for future work on them in a
pluralist context beyond the limitations of the analytic-continental divide,
a context that is already—as the work collected here attests—recognizably
“ours” today.
Doing so also involves reflecting the reality of the rapidly changing situ-
ation of the institutions and forms of academic philosophy today, as new
technologies and media increasingly shape and modulate philosophical
discussion, both within and without academia itself. This volume has its
proximal origin in an online symposium that took place in 2013 on the
philosophy blog NewAPPS, devoted to the discussion of a paper by one
of the editors (Livingston) and including extensive critical commentary by
another editor (Bell) as well as one of the current contributors (Novaes).
The discussion of the paper—on connections between Derrida’s deconstruc-
tive notion of the “undecidable” and the classic formalization of that notion
in the context of the axiomatic theory of arithmetic by Kurt Gödel—drew in
comments by a wide variety of discussants, ranging from graduate students
to professional analytic as well as continental philosophers, and thereby
bearing witness to the actual possibility (though also some of the limitations
and inherent obstacles) of pluralist philosophical discussion on the web.
In the spirit of this discussion and its contemporary relevance—but also in
the belief that the more traditional media of essay and book still provide
the essential conditions for the development of philosophical problems and
questions—the essays collected here all draw together currents of recent
and contemporary philosophy usually held apart and illustrate some of the
genuine emerging possibilities for synthetic philosophy today.
In addition to drawing together themes, topics, and concrete problems
of recent philosophy on both sides of the divide, the issues developed in the
various essays that comprise this volume already point toward at least some
4 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
of the likely contours of philosophical discussions to come. In the remainder
of this introduction, we adumbrate briefly some of these contours, as they
are already evident in various and overlapping ways in the texts collected
here, and as they point toward problems and questions likely to be discussed
much more, in a pluralist context, over the next several decades. These con-
tours, as we shall see, pass through a wide variety of topical areas and also
crosscut the fourfold division of (rough) topic areas we have adopted for the
organization of the essays in the volume itself. Their eclectic traversal of the
various topic areas into which academic philosophical activity is tradition-
ally divided indexes, we think, not only the possibility but the contemporary
reality, evident in the approaches and arguments of the essays here included,
of new kinds of philosophical discussion and practice beyond the divide.7

1. SENSE BEYOND LANGUAGE: AFTER THE LINGUISTIC TURN

In 1967, Richard Rorty used the phrase “The Linguistic Turn” (adopted
from Gustav Bergmann) as the title for an anthology of papers by a vari-
ety of representatives of (what was then just becoming defined as) analytic
philosophy.8 The anthology comprised essays by, and about, representatives
of logical positivism and the “ordinary language” school of philosophi-
cal analysis, as well the newer project of applying insights from scientific
linguistics to philosophical and linguistic analysis. As Rorty suggested in
the volume’s introduction, these partisans of the turn to language might be
identified as those holding the view that “philosophical problems . . . may
be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understand-
ing more about the language we presently use,” and this view was (at the
time of Rorty’s writing) taken by many of those proponents as “the most
important philosophical discovery of our time.”9 Beyond giving unity and
shape to the “analytic” tradition for many—though by no means all—of
its practitioners, this kind of commitment to the revolutionary implications
of language and the analysis of its structure for traditional philosophical
problems has also played a decisive role for many (though again not all)
of the diverse projects grouped as “continental” philosophy in the twenti-
eth century. For structuralism, philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology,
critical theory, and many of the varieties of “post-structuralism” (to name
just a few), reflection on language and its structure has provided both a key
methodological resource and an essential thematic dimension, determining
or articulating projects and problems, as well as the prospects for their solu-
tion, resolution, or transformation.
Today, however, many philosophers on both sides of the divide have
come to see their projects as located, in important ways, beyond or after
the linguistic turn. This does not necessarily mean that they philosophize
as if the turn had never occurred, or that they repudiate or challenge the
important and varied results (for instance those about linguistic structure,
 Introduction 5
meaning, reference and sense) that have emerged from it. But it does mean
that, while philosophers continue to employ methods and presuppose
results drawn from the linguistic turn, there is a greater sense today of the
genuine depth of the questions that are inherently involved in the use of lan-
guage as a philosophical resource or the analysis of its structure as a means
of resolving philosophical problems.10 For instance, one is today likely to
see analyses of referential and other forms of meaning undertaken—on the
“analytic” side—as analyses of the structure of mental or cognitive, rather
than strictly linguistic, content.11 Likewise, one is today more likely to see
projects of analysis and critical reflection on the “continental” side taking
up in a renewed way the broader questions of the relationship of language
to being and the world, rather than simply assuming this application, as in
the forms of linguistic idealism or constructivism that have characterized
some such projects in the past.12
One way to receive the linguistic turn in this partially transformed con-
text is to see its methods and results as pointing toward the possibility of
a broader conception of the foundations of meaning, concepts, and their
analysis. This kind of conception draws on the implications and the results
of specifically linguistic analysis but generalizes them beyond language itself
or considers their broader bearing on questions of the basis of meaning or
sense, without prejudice to its linguistic foundation or determination. In the
current volume, David Woodruff Smith’s essay, “Truth and Epoché: The
Semantic Conception of Truth in Phenomenology,” might be considered
exemplary in this regard. In the essay, Smith shows how the “semantic”
conception of truth developed by Alfred Tarski on the basis of his formal
analysis of the definition and structure of truth-predicates for specific formal
languages can be generalized to provide a phenomenological analysis of the
phenomenon of truth as it occurs in experiencing consciousness, without
prejudice to its linguistic or non-linguistic status. Here, then, and for proj-
ects of this sort more broadly, it is not taken for granted either that the anal-
ysis of linguistic structure must be rigorously separated from the analysis of
phenomenological experience, or that one kind of analysis must serve as a
foundation for the other. Instead, the focus is on developing the forms and
structures that underlie linguistic meaning specifically alongside homolo-
gous or shared ones that plausibly underlie the phenomenon of meaning or
sense in broader or less language-specific terms.
Also along these lines, Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine’s essay,
“Philosophy as Articulation: Austin and Deleuze on Conceptual Analy-
sis,” suggests that the ordinary-language analyses of J.L. Austin might
be related to the more temporally fluid and less language-specific consid-
erations of sense proposed by Gilles Deleuze, for instance in his impor-
tant 1968 analysis of the logical and metaphysical preconditions for
structural meaning, The Logic of Sense.13 Jeffrey A. Bell’s essay, “From
Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back),” considers how problems
recently discussed by analytic philosophers about the form and nature of
6 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
“truthmakers”—whatever makes the propositions expressed in (linguis-
tic) sentences true—might be resolved by appealing to Deleuze’s idea of
a more basic and non-linguistic (as Bell suggests) underlying metaphysics
of differentiation or “difference-making.” Samuel C. Wheeler III’s essay,
“Metaphor without Meanings: Derrida and Davidson as Complementary,”
considers how the different versions of the analysis of language’s structure
pursued by Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida nevertheless lead the
two philosophers to complementary views about the relationship of meta-
phor to metaphysics. And Paul M. Livingston’s essay, “Wittgenstein Reads
Heidegger, Heidegger reads Wittgenstein: Thinking Language Bounding
World,” considers the relationship between two of the twentieth-century
philosophers who are often considered most central to the linguistic turn,
in its analytic and continental variants, respectively. The brief commentar-
ies of these two philosophers on each other, he argues, point to a broader
set of problems about the relationship of sense to the structure and totality
of the world as such. These problems, he argues, are not simply “about”
language as a historical phenomenon or human artifact, but just as much
about how the metaphysics of sense is related to the structure of finitude
and the infinite, a question that remains very much open today as one of the
(various) legacies of the linguistic turn.

2. REALISM(S) AND THEIR OTHERS

If, as has often been noted, the analytic tradition has at least one of its
origins in Russell and Moore’s realist rebellion against Hegel and the Brit-
ish forms of post-Hegelian idealism that then represented the dominant
philosophical approach at Cambridge, the subsequent analytic tradition
has also developed rigorous methods and formalizations for discussing the
implications of realism in various domains, as well as the various kinds
of positions opposed to it.14 There are, for example, many different rig-
orously formulated positions of realism, whether “naïve,” “metaphysi-
cal,” “scientific,” or “internal” (to name a few), and various positions of
“anti-realism,” ranging from verificationism and intuitionism to diverse
forms of pragmatism, “coherence” theories of truth and knowledge, lin-
guistic idealism, and other positions captured formally by what Michael
Dummett described broadly as “anti-realism” of one type or another. On
the “continental” side, twentieth-century projects have often—though by
no means invariably—conceived of language, truth, meaning, and value
as decisively constrained or determined by the forms and temporality of
human life. This has lent some of these projects a distinctively constructiv-
ist or “anti-realist” flavor, even where they do not simply replicate classical
forms of idealism or subjectivism.15 Recent years have witnessed, however,
a renewed discussion of realism and the positions opposed to it, alongside
a renewed and sharpened critique of many of the forms of subjectivism and
 Introduction 7
constructivism that characterized many twentieth-century continental posi-
tions and interpretations of continental philosophers.16
Many of the essays included here address the broad issue of the possibil-
ity and stakes of realism and anti-realism today. For example, Lee Braver’s
“Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History: Foucault’s Critique of Putnam’s
Anti-Realism” considers the relationship between Putnam’s “internal real-
ism” (actually a variety of anti-realism, according to Braver) and Foucault’s
project of historical genealogy. While the two positions have common roots
in Kant’s rejection of realism in favor of transcendental idealism, Braver
argues, Foucault’s position goes farther than Putnam’s in recognizing the
meta-ethical and normative problems posed by realist attitudes and posi-
tions insofar as they tend to naturalize or obscure asymmetric power rela-
tions, and thereby more clearly affirms the actual political and ethical stakes
of anti-realist projects. Other articles, by contrast, argue for realism about
sense, content, or truth: David Woodruff Smith’s essay, for example, indi-
cates how an attitude of realism about the basis of truth might be com-
bined with the classical methods of Husserlian phenomenology, despite this
project’s (oft-noted) “subjectivist” commitments and orientation. Jeffrey
A. Bell’s essay, in a partially similar vein, considers how the phenomenon
of truth might have realist but nevertheless pre-linguistic foundations in a
metaphysics of underlying difference, and Paul M. Livingston’s essay con-
siders the specific problem of realism about the world—understood as the
totality of all that exists—as such. Another essay that considers some of the
stakes and implications of realism about the world—this time in a more
explicitly ethical/political register—is Carol Rovane’s “Relativism and Rec-
ognition.” Here, Rovane considers the implications of commitment to the
existence of a single world in which all disputes over values and ethics take
place and have their consequences, as opposed to pictures on which there
are an irreducible multiplicity of worlds, and argues (against standard rejec-
tions of the ‘relativism’ apparently involved in them) that pictures of the lat-
ter sort provide distinctive and valuable resources for the logical, practical,
and metaphysical consideration of ethical issues and debates.

3. THE ‘RETURNS’ OF METAPHYSICS: CRITIQUE

OF THE CRITIQUE

Another characteristic feature of much twentieth-century philosophy, for

both analytic and continental philosophers, has been a renewed and linguis-
tically motivated pursuit of the critique of metaphysics originally inspired,
in many ways, by Kant. Both the forms of this critique and the specific
projects it has supported have been diverse, ranging from the Vienna Circle’s
attempt to “overcome” metaphysical thinking through the logical clarifi-
cation of language to Heidegger and Derrida’s discussions of the contem-
porary closure or exhaustion of the tradition of metaphysics begun with
8 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
the Greeks and the critical challenge posed by Adorno and other critical
theorists to “identity thinking.” Recent years, however, have witnessed a
variety of “returns” of metaphysical theorizing for both analytic and con-
tinental thinkers. On the analytic side, in the wake of developments of the
implications of modal logic and philosophical naturalism by writers such
as David Lewis and W.V.O. Quine, philosophers have recoiled against
the older attempt to eliminate metaphysics in favor of the philosophy of
language, and recent methodological discussions have taken up the ques-
tion of the relationship of linguistic reflection to metaphysical theory in a
renewed spirit. Meanwhile, contemporary continental philosophers such as
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, moving beyond the terms of the Kantian
critique, have emphasized the contemporary possibilities for a resurgence
of metaphysical thought about ontology and the subject, while those who
take up Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thinking of difference (in this volume
and elsewhere) expand upon the ideas of a contemporary philosopher who
always considered himself a “pure metaphysician.”17
Several of the essays in this volume bear witness to the varied forms of
this contemporary return of metaphysics. John McCumber’s essay “Why
is Time Different from Space?” takes up a classical problem of metaphysi-
cal theory—that of the nature and relationship of time and space—from
a perspective informed both by the outcomes of twentieth-century phe-
nomenological analyses and by “analytic” thinking about the problems of
tense, change, and becoming. The essays by Livingston and Bell (discussed
above) take up the question of the metaphysical structure of the world as
underlying the possibilities of sense and truth. Graham Priest’s essay “The
Answer to the Question of Being” argues that an answer to Heidegger’s sig-
nature question of the meaning and truth of being—in Priest’s formulation,
the question of what makes anything be—can be found by drawing on the
resources of non-classical (in particular paraconsistent) logic. Other papers
in the volume extend and develop the implications of the twentieth-century
critique of metaphysics in a contemporary pluralist context. Wheeler’s
paper on Derrida and Davidson, for instance, considers some of the ways in
which these two philosophers’ respective considerations of metaphor unites
them in the critique of the metaphysical assumption that Quine called the
“museum myth” of meanings—the assumption that meanings are substan-
tial entities individually correlative to words and open to an intellectual gaze
analogous to vision.18

4. TRUTH AND TIME

As has often been noted, one of the (many) ways in which typical practitio-
ners of analytic philosophy may often be distinguished from their “continen-
tal” peers is in terms of their differing attitudes toward the temporality and
historicity of knowledge and truth. While analytic philosophers, whether
 Introduction 9
they conceive their project as an analysis of logically structured concepts or
as continuous with empirical, natural-scientific inquiry, tend often to con-
ceive of the topics of their inquiry in static or ahistorical terms, continental
philosophers have often emphasized the inherent historicity of knowledge
claims and the temporal transformation of claims to truth across histori-
cal periods, languages, or changing conditions of power and culture. This
deep-cutting methodological distinction may be seen as having roots in, on
the one hand, Frege’s conception of propositional senses and logical laws
as atemporal idealities, independent in themselves of history, culture, or
temporal becoming, and, on the other, the emphasis placed by continen-
tal philosophers including Derrida, Deleuze, and (perhaps above all) Hei-
degger on what they see as the inherent connections among being, truth,
and temporal change and becoming. The question or problem indicated
here can also, of course, be taken up as an explicit and theoretical one: if
(as it seems) it is no longer tenable to construe the conceptual, semantic,
normative, or regulative truths in which philosophers are characteristi-
cally interested as existing (as Frege suggested) in a timeless “third realm”
separate from the realms of physical existence and lived experience, how
then should we construe their relationship to time, change, becoming, and
history?
Of course, as for virtually any claim about “the” difference between ana-
lytic and continental philosophy, there are exceptions to the rule that ana-
lytic thinkers treat truths as atemporal and continental thinkers treat them
as temporally situated.19 Nevertheless, as several of the essays in this vol-
ume suggest, the question of how we should understand the relationship of
truth to time, especially when considering philosophical modes of reflection
that are at least partly directed toward concepts and their nature and basis,
seems an appropriate and potentially fruitful one for the development of
new methods of philosophical inquiry and practice in a contemporary and
synthetic context. James Conant’s essay, “The Emergence of the Concept
of the Analytic Tradition as a Form of Philosophical Self-Consciousness,”
considers some of the ways that analytic philosophy has been, and is being,
defined and maintained today and argues for a continuation of the tradition
in a mode of more explicit self-awareness of its own traditional contours
and specific history. Along somewhat similar lines, in “Conceptual Geneal-
ogy for Analytic Philosophy,” Catarina Dutilh Novaes defines and defends
a methodology of historical and conceptual “genealogy” drawn partly from
Foucault, arguing in particular that such a methodology is well-suited for
conceptual analysis in an “analytic” mode, or for a future continuation
of that mode. Again somewhat similarly, Lorraine and Eldridge argue for
the compatibility of Deleuze’s explicitly temporal modes of analysis and
reflection on the basis of sense with the conceptual-analytic methodology of
J. L. Austin’s variety of “ordinary language” philosophy. Finally, both John
McCumber’s essay and Andrew Cutrofello’s “Revolutionary Actions and
Events” address the question of how we might understand time, change,
10 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
and becoming themselves in a context shaped by the joint reception of con-
temporary analytic and continental discussions.

5. NEW (PROBLEMATIC) FOUNDATIONS FOR

ACTION AND PRACTICE

If it is thus already possible today to envision a transformed philosophical

discussion that inherits both the analytic and continental traditions in their
twentieth-century developments, this discussion will inevitably suggest new
directions for critical and applied thought about the contemporary problems
of social, political, and ethical thought and action. Here, although there is
no single political program or axiological orientation to be discerned, it is
thus already possible to see some of the ways in which an explicitly pluralist
philosophical discussion might offer to contribute to the understanding and
resolution of the problems of collective practice that (arguably) matter most
today in the contemporary context of rapid globalization, multiculturalism,
the dominance of capitalist forms of economic production and activity, and
technologically mediated forms of life.
Several of the essays collected here explicitly take up these problems,
considering how they might be addressed within and by the pluralist philo-
sophical projects that are already being pursued today. Andrew Cutrofel-
lo’s essay, “Revolutionary Actions and Events,” for instance, draws on the
work of Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and David Lewis, among others,
to consider the structure of politically transformative events, those capa-
ble of bringing about fundamental structural changes in existing political
communities and regimes. Carol Rovane’s essay (discussed above) takes up
the problem of how to understand the possible rationality of genuine dis-
agreement on values between distinct cultures or traditions. Dan Zahavi
and Glenda Satne’s essay, “Varieties of Shared Intentionality: Tomasello
and Classical Phenomenology,” draws on both contemporary psychological
research and classical phenomenology to consider the foundations of the
collective intentionality at the basis of shared communities, values, projects,
and practices. The essays by Livingston and Braver, finally, offer suggestions
for the contemporary continuation of critical theory in its dialogue with,
and struggle against, prevalent contemporary forms of economic, political,
and social dominance and power.

NOTES

1 We do not attempt here to characterize in general terms the (large amount of)
high-quality recent and contemporary non-Anglophone philosophical work
that has not yet been translated into English. All of the essays in the cur-
rent volume are written originally in English, but this should not be taken
as implying any endorsement of the general predominance often accorded in
 Introduction 11
the institutions and practices of philosophy worldwide to English-speaking
philosophy today. To the contrary, we regret this predominance and hope for
a philosophical future that is more pluralistic, not only thematically and meth-
odologically, but also linguistically.
2 One of the editors—Livingston—first heard the term “synthetic philosophy”
used in roughly this sense (and as a partial contrast to “analytic philosophy”)
by Brent Kalar in the spring of 2008. Compare also the title and argument of
Thomson (2012).
3 In thus suggesting that the future in philosophy may turn in part on the de-
velopment of “synthetic” philosophy in the sense of philosophy that draws
on both of the two twentieth-century traditions considered here, we do not
intend to make any claim of exclusiveness of this inheritance. For instance,
philosophy in the twenty-first century appears likely to draw just as deeply,
and importantly, on various non-Western traditions, including the diverse tra-
ditions of Indian, Chinese, and other varieties of Asian philosophy (among
others). We do not mean to exclude these traditions from the broader discus-
sion envisioned here, but only to indicate the (necessarily but unfortunately)
limited scope of the present volume with respect to them.
4 See, e.g., Critchley (2001), Cutrofello (2005), Dummett (1993), Føllesdal
(1997), Friedman (2000), Glock (2008), Hacker (1997, 1998), Hylton (1990),
McCumber (2001, 2011), Ross (1998), Steinbock (2014), West (2010), and
the essays collected in Biletzki and Matar (1998), Glock (1997), Prado (2003)
and Reynolds et al. (2010).
5 See, e.g., Bell (1998), Brandom (2002), Dreyfus (1991); McDowell (1996),
Redding (2007), Rorty (1991), Tugendhat (1982).
6 For a related image, see Dummett (1993, p. 26). In particular, Dummett compares
the two movements of phenomenology and “analytical philosophy,” at their be-
ginning, to “the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another
and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different
directions and flow into different seas.” (Though we agree with this description
of the beginning of the divide, we think that the present moment in philosophy
witnesses rather the possibility of the two streams once more running together).
7 For another listing of contemporary aspects of philosophical discussion and
research that develops some partially parallel themes, see Leiter (2004).
8 Rorty (1967). For the attribution of the phrase to Bergmann, see Rorty’s
“Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language” in Rorty (1991).
For another discussion of the extent to which contemporary philosophy may
be said to be beyond the linguistic turn, also taking a cue from Rorty’s title and
introduction, see Williamson (2004).
9 Rorty (1967, p. 3).
10 For one consideration of some of these problems as they occur in the appeals
to language made by twentieth-century philosophers on both sides of the di-
vide, see Livingston (2008).
11 An early and influential example of this kind of analysis is Evans (1982). For
more recent examples, see e.g., McDowell (1996) and Chalmers (2002). For a
recent defense of the analysis of intentional content (as opposed to its linguis-
tic structure) that also establishes some connections to the phenomenological
tradition, see Crane (2014).
12 In Being and Event (Badiou 1988), for example, Alain Badiou develops an
elaborate consideration, based partly on set theory and model theory, of the
structure and limits of the language characteristic of a particular historical
situation, and the possibilities of its transformation by means of what he terms
an “event” (see Andrew Cutrofello’s essay in this volume for some discussion).
13 Deleuze (1968).
12 Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston
14 For the story of Moore and Russell’s rebellion against Hegel and idealism, see
Hylton (1990) and Glock (2008), among others.
15 For an analysis of the projects of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida (among
others) as anti-realist in this sense, see Braver (2007).
16 See, e.g., Badiou (1988, 2006), Meillassoux (2008), Hägglund (2008), and
many of the essays collected in Bryant, Srnicek and Harman (2011).
17 Villani (1999); cited in Smith and Protevi (2013).
18 Quine (1968), pp. 186–88.
19 In particular, Husserl and Badiou might both be considered exceptions to the
general “rule” that continental philosophers see truths as irreducibly tempo-
rally situated, insofar as both (in very different ways) adopt conceptions of (at
least some) truths according to which they are “ideal” in the sense of being
eternal or atemporal. And on the “analytic” side, philosophers such as Kuhn,
Rorty, and Brandom have treated truths as having an important and irreduc-
ible diachronic and historical dimension.

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Badiou, A. 2006. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2. London: Continuum, 2009.
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Biletzki, A. and Anat Matar, eds. 1998. The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and
Heroes. London: Routledge.
Brandom, R. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics
of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Braver, L. 2007. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism.
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losophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
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Crane, T. 2014. Aspects of Psychologism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.
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Cutrofello, A. 2005. Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. New
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Deleuze, G. 1968. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Dreyfus, H. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and
Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Ed. J. McDowell. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Føllesdal, D. 1997. Analytic Philosophy: What Is It and Why Should One Engage
in Tt? In H. J. Glock, ed., The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell,
1–16.
Friedman, M. 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. La
Salle, IL: Open Court.
Glock, H.-J., ed. 1997. The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Glock, H.-J. 2008. What Is Analytic Philosophy? New York: Cambridge University
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Hacker, P. M. S. 1997. The Rise of Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. In H. J.
Glock, ed., The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 51-76.
Hacker, P. M. S. 1998. Analytic Philosophy: What, Whence, and Whither? In A.
Biletzki and A. Matar, ed., The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes.
New York: Routledge, 3-34.
Hägglund, M. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Hylton, P. 1990. Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Ox-
ford University Press.
Leiter, B. 2004. Introduction. In B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy. Oxford
University Press, 1–23.
Livingston, P. 2008. Philosophy and the Vision of Language. New York: Routledge.
McCumber, J. 2001. Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy
Era. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
McCumber, J. 2011. Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought. New
York: Acumen.: McGill-Queens University Press.
McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
New York: Continuum.
Prado, C. G., ed. 2003. A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Phi-
losophy. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Quine, W. V. O. 1968. Ontological Relativity. The Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):
185–212.
Redding, P. 2007. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, Jack, James Chase, James Williams, and Edwin Mares, ed. 2010. Post-
analytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides. New York:
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Rorty, R. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others (Philosophical Papers, volume 2).
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Ross, J. 1998. Analytical philosophy as a matter of style. In A. Biletzki and A. Matar,
eds., The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes. New York: Routledge,
56-70
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition).http://plato.stan
ford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/deleuze.
Steinbock, A. J. 2014. “SPEP Co-Director’s Address: SPEP and the Continental Di-
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Thomson, I. 2012. “In the Future Philosophy Will be Neither Continental nor Ana-
lytic but Synthetic: Toward a Promiscuous Miscegenation of (all) Philosophical
Traditions and Styles.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50(2): 191–205.
Tugendhat, E. 1982. Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Phi-
losophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Villani, Arnaud, 1999. La guêpe et l’orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Belin.
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Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 106–128.
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Part I

Methodologies
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2 The Emergence of the Concept
of the Analytic Tradition
as a Form of Philosophical
Self-Consciousness
James Conant

1. ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ANALYTIC TRADITION IN

PHILOSOPHY

It is not uncommon for people to speak of something called “analytic phi-

losophy.” We will worry in a moment about what sort of philosophy this
label is supposed to single out. Let us begin just by noting one of the most
straightforward ways in which people will sometimes try to pick out ana-
lytic philosophy from other sorts of philosophy—perhaps the most superfi-
cial way of all of trying to do this—namely by trying to say something about
where on the planet analytic philosophy has and has not flourished. For
example, we are apt to be told that analytic philosophy has been compara-
tively dominant for much of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom
and, since the middle of that same century in the United States, as well as
in other English-speaking countries, and even in many of the Scandinavian
nations. Conversely, we are equally likely to be told that various forms of
non-analytic philosophy—sometimes termed “continental philosophy”—at
least until very recently, have been no less dominant in France, in most parts
of Germany, and in many of the remaining parts of Continental Europe.
Anyone who makes statements such as these must be relying upon some
principle other than a merely geographical one for distinguishing the two
sorts of philosophy at issue here.
Whatever that further principle is, in recent years many have taken
offense to the very idea of such a distinction. Through such ways of speak-
ing, we are told, countless diverse strands of the Western philosophical tra-
dition since Kant are shoehorned into a pair of intellectually uninformative
rubrics—one of them turning on the supposedly crucial “analytic” aspect
of the philosophical work in question, the other on the arguably even more
awkward geographical rubric of the supposedly “continental” feature of
the philosophy in question. Surely there is much to sympathize with in such
a complaint. A host of difficulties necessarily attend any effort to deploy a
pair of classificatory terms that are as orthogonal to one another as are the
categories “analytic” and “continental.” On the surface, this would appear
18 James Conant
to be no more promising a principle for classifying forms of philosophy into
two fundamentally different kinds than would be the suggestion that we
should go about classifying human beings into those that are vegetarian and
those that are Romanian.
There are other reasons to be suspicious of the classificatory categories
at work here. The employment of the term “continental philosophy” argu-
ably evolved historically in order for there to be some single thing to which
analytic philosophy as a whole could be opposed—while leaving unclari-
fied (and, without implicit reference to analytic philosophy, unclarifiable)
wherein the unity of the contrasting category of (“continental”) philosophy
is supposed to lie.1 As a matter of practice, this meant that the unity of “con-
tinental” philosophy was in fact construed by most analytic philosophers
through recourse to a via negativa: analytic philosophers specified for them-
selves what continental philosophy was, in effect, by thinking of it as an
enormous garbage bin into which any outwardly apparently non-analytic
form of post-Kantian philosophy was to be dumped. As with the contents
of any garbage can, so too with this one: after a great many items came to
be tossed into the can, it was no longer possible to discern what united them
all, without reference to something not to be found among the contents of
the can—namely, an appreciation of the aims and interests of those doing
the tossing.
Whatever original appearance of neatness and appropriateness may have
attached to the respective geographical locations of the two traditions has
largely dissipated over the past several decades. There are many philosophy
departments in the United States and the United Kingdom now specializ-
ing in so-called “continental” philosophy. Some of the leading academic
positions in the Francophone world are held today by French analytic phi-
losophers, and the German Society for Analytic Philosophy now attracts
a level of attendance at its conferences of which it can and does proudly
boast. These and other developments have rendered it increasingly difficult
to specify these two traditions via anything as superficial as a principle of
geographical location.2
For these and other reasons, it has come to seem clear to some that the
very idea of a distinctively analytic tradition in philosophy should be aban-
doned. This is not the conclusion that I shall wish to draw from the above
considerations. Nevertheless, it is a matter of some delicacy and difficulty to
say with any accuracy what is distinctive about the tradition in question—at
least if one wishes to do so in a manner that is both historically informed
and philosophically non-partisan.3 With these caveats in mind, I propose
to address the following question: what would it be to characterize what is
distinctive about the analytic mode of philosophy from within, rather than
from without? Specifically, what are analytic philosophy’s own answers to
the following two questions: (1) What is analytic philosophy? and (2) what
is an analytic philosopher? We shall call these our guiding questions. If we
wish to make progress with our guiding questions, we need to look at very
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 19
different sorts of statements from analytic philosophers regarding what phi-
losophy is—ones that are better suited to bringing out what is distinctively
analytic about the sort of philosophy in question. But there now is a fur-
ther difficulty we encounter here. Philosophers concerned to issue anything
resembling such a proclamation often also take the occasion to try to pre-
scribe what analytic philosophy should be, as they conceive it, as a matter
of philosophical doctrine. Consider the following three representative cases:

(1) At the outset of the tradition, the early Moore and Russell each
­understood what was distinctive in their new philosophical point of
departure to lie not just in their new method of analysis, but equally
in the power of that method to demonstrate that the philosophical
doctrines of holism and idealism, which they opposed, were false
and that philosophical doctrines of atomism and realism, which they
sought to champion, were true.
(2) In a second major phase of the tradition, Carnap thought that the
analytic philosophy of his day partly reached its maturity not only by
practicing a new method of philosophical elucidation, but by show-
ing, through its application, that a comparatively resolute form of
empiricism (according to which most truths were a posteriori) was
true, while also revealing that the empiricist must make one crucial
concession to the rationalist (namely, that the truths of logic and
mathematics were a priori, after all).
(3) In its most recent phase, many a representative of the analytic tradi-
tion today thinks that anyone who has appropriately internalized the
canons of rigor that analytic philosophy seeks to uphold ought to
concede (even if it requires one to issue a great many philosophical
promissory notes that we at the moment have no idea exactly how to
cash) that some form of scientific naturalism is the only intellectually
respectable position open to a serious analytic philosopher.

Despite the predominance of these very specific doctrinal commitments at

each of these three phases, at that very same moment in the history of the
analytic tradition there were other philosophers (whom we today regard as
belonging no less to that tradition) who were determined to contest these
very doctrines. Moreover, even if one restricts oneself to the three phases
of the tradition mentioned above, it is worth noticing how dramatically
different the supposed doctrinal upshot of a commitment to (something
nominally referred to at all three of these phases in the tradition as) “the
analytic method in philosophy” was taken to be. What this shows is that
doctrinal categories such as realism, empiricism, scientific naturalism, etc.,
are simply inadequate terms for specifying what unifies and distinguishes
the analytic tradition as a whole. The nature of analytic philosophy simply
cannot be captured in terms of a shared assent to anything having the form
of a philosophical “-ism.”4 What it is to be an analytic philosopher has more
20 James Conant
to do with a certain conception of how one ought to do philosophy than
it does with what one ought to conclude on the basis of so doing it—with
the character of the activity of philosophizing rather than with the body of
doctrine in which it issues.
Attempts by analytic philosophers to articulate their conceptions of what
is distinctive about analytic philosophy generally also express a particular
attitude toward the traditional questions of philosophy and which of them
are worth answering—thereby usually also furnishing clues regarding how
this particular analytic philosopher would go about answering some of these
questions and why she would reject others (or, in the case of certain figures,
why she is determined to unmask them all as based on either confusion or
nonsense). So in the cases of a great many authors, it would be artificial to
attempt to separate what they deem to be matters of method from matters
of doctrine. But even if these two aspects of what they consider analytic
philosophy to be are often inextricably intertwined, it remains possible to
select representative quotations that help to highlight what various of them
at their particular junctures in the tradition take to be distinctive about the
manner in which they think philosophy ought to be practiced.
Such statements tend to be produced under the felt pressure to ward off
some alternative conception of how philosophy ought to be practiced. Thus
they are akin to bulletins from the front—statements written in the heat
of a contest to determine what analytic philosophy is to be, in which each
contestant attempts to carry the day for what she is seeking to initiate, or
inherit, or redirect, in undertaking to do analytic philosophy in her own
distinctive way. Here are some characteristic statements of this sort:

A proposition is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of

concepts. . . . They are incapable of change; and the relation into which
they enter with the knowing subject implies no action or reaction. . . . It
seems necessary, then, to regard the world as formed of concepts. These
are the only objects of knowledge. . . . From our description of a judg-
ment, there must, then, disappear all reference either to our mind or to
the world. . . . The nature of the judgment is more ultimate than either,
and less ultimate only than the nature of its constituents—the nature of
the concept or logical idea. (G. E. Moore)5
Modern analytical empiricism [. . .] differs from that of Locke, Berke-
ley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its develop-
ment of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain
problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science
rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as compared with the
philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems
one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory
of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of sci-
ence. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is pos-
sible, it is by such methods that it must be sought. (Bertrand Russell)6
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 21
Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word “philoso-
phy” must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside
the natural sciences.) The object of philosophy is the logical clarification
of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophi-
cal work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy
is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make prop-
ositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the
thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred. (Early
Wittgenstein)7
In most cases future philosophers will have to be scientists because
it will be necessary for them to have a certain subject matter on which
to work—and they will find cases of confused or vague meaning par-
ticularly in the foundations of the sciences. . . . I am convinced that our
view of the nature of philosophy will be generally adopted in the future;
and the consequence will be that it will no longer be attempted to teach
philosophy as a system. We shall teach the special sciences and their
history in the true philosophical spirit of searching for clarity and, by
doing this, we shall develop the philosophical minds of future genera-
tions. (Schlick)8
Logic is the method for doing philosophy. [. . .] There is no such
thing as philosophy in the shape of a theory, i.e. a system of distinct
propositions separate from science. Doing philosophy means nothing
else but this: to clarify the concepts and propositions of science through
logical analysis. (Carnap)9
It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones.
It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that,
contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-
such’—whatever that may mean. . . . And we may not advance any
kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our consid-
erations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone
must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its
purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not
empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the work-
ings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize
those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The prob-
lems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what
we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of language. (Later Wittgenstein)10
This book offers what may with reservations be described as a theory
of the mind. But it does not give new information about minds. We pos-
sess already a wealth of information about minds, information which
is neither derived from, nor upset by, the arguments of philosophers.
The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended
not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical
geography of the knowledge which we already possess. (Gilbert Ryle)11
22 James Conant
In view of the prevalence of the slogan ‘ordinary language’, and of
such names as ‘linguistic’ or ‘analytic’ philosophy or ‘the analysis of
language’, one thing needs specially emphasizing to counter misunder-
standings. When we examine what we should say when, what words
we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at
words (or ‘meanings’, whatever they might be) but also at the realities
we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of
words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of,
the phenomena. For this reason I think it might be better to use for this
way of doing philosophy, some less misleading name than those given
above—for instance, ‘linguistic phenomenology’, only that is rather a
mouthful. (J. L. Austin)12
Metaphysics has been often revisionary, and less often descriptive.
Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of
our thought about the world. . . . How should it differ from what is
called philosophical, or logical, or conceptual analysis? It does not dif-
fer in kind of intention, but only in scope and generality. Aiming to lay
bare the most general features of our conceptual structure, it can take
far less for granted than a more limited and partial conceptual inquiry.
Hence, also, a certain difference in method. Up to a point, the reliance
upon a close examination of the actual use of words is the best, and
indeed the only sure, way in philosophy. But the discriminations we
can make, and the connections we can establish, in this way, are not
general enough and not far-reaching enough to meet the full metaphysi-
cal demand for understanding. For when we ask how we use this or
that expression, our answers, however revealing at a certain level, are
apt to assume, and not to expose, those general elements of structure
which the metaphysician wants revealed. The structure he seeks does
not readily display itself on the surface of language, but lies submerged.
(P. F. Strawson)13
I have . . . an unswerving belief in external things—people, nerve
endings, sticks, stones. . . . I believe also, if less firmly, in atoms and elec-
trons and in classes. How is all this robust realism to be reconciled with
the barren scene that I have just been depicting? The answer is natural-
ism: the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior
philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. (W. V. Quine)14

The first of these statements is from Moore’s aforementioned essay, “The

Nature of Judgment.” Though it expresses the essential conviction that
Moore took to distinguish his philosophical project from that of his prede-
cessors and it seeks to show how that conviction is to be secured through
a different approach to philosophical problems, it still retains much of the
flavor of traditional philosophy. The second quotation is one of the later
of Russell’s many attempts to define and call for the continuation of the
movement that he considered Moore, Frege, and himself (among others) to
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 23
be initiating. At the center of this conception of it is the idea that philoso-
phy should take the mathematical and natural sciences as a model. Rus-
sell’s original conception of the way in which this was to proceed took it
for granted that, even while doing so, philosophy would remain in some
respects importantly distinct from science. The third quotation is from Witt-
genstein’s Tractatus—the first of many influential works within the analytic
tradition concerned to take up a position toward the prior chapters of that
tradition akin to that which Kant had assumed with regard to the early
modern tradition. Like Kant, early Wittgenstein sought to show how the
entire collective enterprise had taken a wrong turn and hence why a new
beginning is now required. Here, as with Kant, an insistence on the sharp
difference between the character of the questions treated by the philosopher
and those treated by the natural sciences comes again to play a central role.
The fourth and fifth quotations—from Moritz Schlick and Rudolf
Carnap respectively—are representative of a number of the thinkers in
the succeeding generation who struggled to incorporate the critical edge
of Wittgenstein’s apparently devastating, tradition-exploding ideas into
an undertaking retaining the overall outline of Russell’s programmatic,
tradition-inaugurating ambitions—thereby introducing considerable inter-
nal tension into their conception of philosophy. They are eager to retain
Russell’s idea that philosophy has a special kinship with the natural sci-
ences, and yet also want to agree with Wittgenstein that the propositions
of philosophy must be sharply distinguished from those of the natural
sciences—and indeed from empirical propositions in general.
In the second half of the above collection of quotations, we have to do
with reactions to the first generations of analytic philosophy. The task at
that point had become one of redefining an ongoing tradition. In the sixth
quotation, we have a characteristic reflection on the nature of philosophy by
the later Wittgenstein. Here we encounter a thinker who is in equal measure
concerned, first, to repudiate the inheritance of his early work by Schlick
and Carnap (and thus to insist that philosophy must be conducted in a spirit
completely alien to that of the natural sciences); second, to move beyond
that work itself, on the grounds that it failed to live up to its aspiration to
fully break with the preceding tradition (and thus to repudiate that work
in a very different way from that of its most outspoken critics); and third,
to retain and extend the philosophical aspirations at the heart of that early
work (and thus to emphasize that the later work can be understood only
against the background of the earlier).
In the final four quotations, we encounter four alternative proposals for
alternative new beginnings for analytic philosophy—each of which seeks
to offer a new form of positive program for philosophy, and each of which
draws inspiration from sources that come from outside analytic philoso-
phy. The first three of these quotations (from Ryle, Austin, and Strawson)
share with the later Wittgenstein the idea that philosophy ought to do jus-
tice to the most fundamental aspects of our everyday understanding of
24 James Conant
ourselves, the world, and the medium-sized dry goods (as ordinary objects
were nicely referred to) and other persons we find there. Ryle harks back
to Frege and Wittgenstein; Austin especially to Moore. Both Ryle and Aus-
tin were trained as scholars of ancient philosophy and both strove, albeit
in very different ways, to reincorporate into the analytic tradition certain
neglected insights they find in Plato and Aristotle. Austin, Ryle, and Straw-
son all belonged to a generation of analytic philosophers who had begun
to become suspicious of an overreliance on technical tools in philosophy.
Paul Grice later offered a diagnosis of the waning enthusiasm among cer-
tain members of the postwar generation for inventing new forms of logical
notation (along with an increasing interest in ordinary language) in the
following terms:

I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style

was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too
often being squeezed out of operation by technology; to borrow words
from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to
combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism.15

Others, however, in that same postwar generation strongly dissented from

this burgeoning consensus and deplored the depreciation of formal logic
that had become so fashionable in the work of many of their contempo-
raries. Perhaps the most influential of these dissenters was W. V. O. Quine.
Carnap and others had viewed the tools of logic as providing the instru-
ments for an articulation of the aim of philosophy that would allow it to
continue to differentiate itself from natural science. Quine championed the
position that philosophy and science should be regarded as two aspects of
a single enterprise—intertwined partners caught up in a single form of pur-
suit: the pursuit of truth. While his contemporary Strawson looked back
especially to Kant for philosophical stratagems designed to vindicate our
ordinary conceptual scheme, Quine looked sideways to developments in
empirical psychology and physics to overturn that scheme. Whereas Straw-
son sought to recover the Kantian project of reconciliation in philosophy
(making room again for the idea that we can, without contradiction, con-
ceive of ourselves as both material bodies and free agents), Quine sought to
revivify the Humean project of debunking the ordinary man’s view of the
world (breathing new life into something akin to the very sorts of natural-
ism that Frege and the early Wittgenstein sought to exorcise from philoso-
phy). Indeed, much of postwar twentieth-century analytic philosophy can
be seen as involving a contest between this standard analytic conception of
what it is to be a Humean (debunking our ordinary view of the world in the
light of a properly naturalized understanding of what it can contain) and the
opposed standard analytic conception of what it is to be a Kantian (seeking
to respect both the natural-scientific understanding and our everyday under-
standing of the world).
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 25
Each of the ten statements on the list above was made by an impor-
tant analytic philosopher at a very particular point in his career. Each gives
expression to a conception of analytic philosophy that proved to be influ-
ential for a time, thereby affecting the trajectory of the analytic tradition as
a whole. When taken together, they bring out certain characteristic features
of the tradition. No one of them, however, suffices as a summary of what
“analytic philosophy” as such is. None of them articulates a conception
of philosophy—let alone of what makes a particular sort of philosophy
analytic—that they would have expected the other nine authors and most
of their contemporaries to endorse, at least not without considerable quali-
fication. Each is speaking for himself, attempting to give voice to his own
distinctive conception, at the time of writing—a conception that, in many of
their cases, underwent one or more dramatic shifts over the course of their
careers. Thus each statement offers a characterization of what philosophy
is that is simply far too distinctive, too idiosyncratic, and too historically
indexed to a particular moment in the unfolding of the analytic tradition to
serve as a blanket characterization of what makes analytic philosophy as a
whole something that might plausibly be considered a unitary intellectual
movement.
The statements above appear in roughly chronological order. With
respect to at least the first five of them, at the time of their writing, there
was not yet anything they were aware of (and to which they could have
thought of themselves as contributing) that could have been designated as
“the analytic tradition.” The very possibility of discerning anything of the
sort requires the attainment of some historical distance from its beginnings,
hence of a standpoint from which one is able to compare and contrast an
extended stretch of this development in philosophy with other philosophi-
cal traditions, such as those to which the early analytic philosophers were
reacting—such as German Neo-Kantianism, Austrian Realism, British Ide-
alism, and American Pragmatism.
The history of the relations between analytic philosophy and these
neighboring traditions is no less tangled than that of analytic philosophy
itself. Analytic philosophy arose partly as a reaction to these other forms
of philosophy—and, yet, as so often in the history of philosophy, it bears
deep traces of the very traditions it sought to resist and replace. No less
significantly, some later practitioners in the analytic tradition sought to rein-
corporate insights from those same traditions—insights they thought their
analytic predecessors had either unduly neglected or over-hastily rejected.
This subsequently gave rise to the emergence of developments in the analytic
tradition that would have astonished many of its earlier figures—bearing
such labels as Analytic Kantianism, Analytic Hegelianism, and Analytic
Pragmatism. Russell and Moore understood the tradition they were seeking
to inaugurate in philosophy to be a revolt against Idealism—and against
Kant, Hegel, and the British Idealists in particular. A half-century later, Sel-
lars and Strawson saw themselves as trying to recover insights from Kantian
26 James Conant
Idealism and to reincorporate them within the analytic tradition; while some
contemporary analytic philosophers, such as John McDowell and Robert
Brandom, in the generation thereafter, have become no less concerned to
recover and revive what they regard as philosophically valuable and vital in
Hegel. While Russell and Moore sought to distinguish themselves sharply
from American Pragmatists like William James and John Dewey, and while
the pragmatists of the next generation (such as C. I. Lewis) often tended to
distinguish themselves sharply from their analytic contemporaries (such as
Hans Reichenbach and Carnap), many recent analytic philosophers (nota-
bly Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty) see no essential tension between the
best insights of analytic philosophy and Pragmatism, and seek to develop
philosophical syntheses of elements drawn from each.
But these are all relatively recent developments, of which an early ana-
lytic philosopher could not have had any inkling. It is a historical truism to
say that the early analytic philosophers themselves did not yet have (because
they could not have had) a historical consciousness of their own work as
forming the first chapter in a more extended intellectual adventure—an
adventure that would eventually become what we now call “the analytic
tradition.” Thus they could hardly have reflected on that tradition, or com-
pared and contrasted it with other equally sustained philosophical tradi-
tions. Such a perspective on the significance of their own accomplishment
would have required of the early analytic philosophers that they be able to
step outside of their own moment in time and travel to a moment in the
philosophical future from which they could assess how their own chapter
in the history of philosophy formed the first chapter of something on the
order of a tradition. This important point, upon a moment’s reflection, is
an obvious one, but it is often overlooked or at least underappreciated: The
founding fathers of analytic philosophy did not take themselves, and could
not have taken themselves, to be founding what we today think of as the
analytic tradition. In thinking of them as analytic philosophers, we think of
them in a way that they could not have thought of themselves.
This is not to say that the authors of our first five quotations—G. E.
Moore, Bertrand Russell, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, Moritz Schlick,
Rudolf Carnap—had no interest in opening up a new chapter in the history
of philosophy. They each wanted to change philosophy in a way that would
affect how everyone after them who might venture to practice it would
(or at least should) do so. Each sought to transform philosophy, and each
ended up figuring in a cumulative development that, as a whole, did trans-
form philosophy—or at any rate philosophy as practiced in the Anglophone
mainstream of the discipline—into something new. So, in one sense, each
can be said to have contributed materially to a revolution in philosophy.
But, in another sense, none of them can simply be said to have authored that
revolution, not only because the transformation in question was a collective
effort to which they all contributed, but also because none of them would
have regarded most of what followed as realizing their original conception
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 27
of what they sought to initiate. The so-called “founders of analytic philoso-
phy”, in this sense, did not know what they were actually founding. They
could not have foreseen—nor, at least in some instances, would they even
have been willing to endorse—many subsequent developments within that
tradition. In some cases, they would have had difficulty even comprehend-
ing how what followed could be supposed to represent an inheritance and
continuation of their own endeavors.
The experience of being unable to comprehend a later stage in the devel-
opment of the tradition is something that a number of major figures expe-
rienced in a fashion that was devastatingly immediate and personal. The
sense of having been betrayed by a member of the next generation, or even
of one’s own, sometimes played out very painfully between pairs of indi-
viduals who were initially as intellectually close to one another as one can
imagine—sometimes standing to one another in the relation of teacher to
student, or that of master to disciple, or that of comrades in arms. Indeed,
a pattern of this sort, of initial intellectual proximity giving way to subse-
quently unbridgeable tradition-splintering differences, came to be a recur-
ring feature of the analytic tradition. Some of the most dramatic cases
included such pairs as Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Quine, Quine
and Donald Davidson, Austin and Paul Grice, and Putnam and X (where, to
mention only some of the important instances, X at different points equaled
Reichenbach, Quine, Fodor, and Rorty). Ideological statements about the
nature of analytic philosophy often seek to give the impression that philo-
sophical personality plays a much lesser role in the practice of this sort of
philosophy and that the respective temperaments of its practitioners are fully
subordinated to shared philosophical methods and canons of argument. In
point of fact, however, some of the most riveting moments in its history
have involved dramatic clashes of personality—between initially apparently
likeminded individuals, starting out with common sets of aims and concerns
and ending up gravely at odds with each other, at least philosophically and
sometimes even personally.
Some might contend that this historical fact is merely a bit of trivia hav-
ing no real significance for an understanding of the nature of the analytic
tradition in philosophy. Others might want to claim that it is an important
fact that reveals something fundamental about the nature of analytic phi-
losophy. We need not decide this question here. Its relevance to our pres-
ent purpose is simply that the early analytic philosophers themselves were
in no position to have a view about the matter, for in order to be able to
assess the possible significance of any such factual feature of a tradition, the
larger shape of that tradition must already be in view. None of the first five
philosophers cited above were in any position to assess how their own con-
tributions would bear on and be further subsumed by the efforts of the later
five authors quoted above—let alone to be able to apprehend the cumulative
efforts of these ten philosophers, each of whose work makes up only a single
stone in the overall mosaic of the analytic tradition.
28 James Conant
That overall image at least begins to come into view with the addition
of the contributions of the generation of mid-century thinkers who are the
authors of our five later quotations. They were writing at a time when some-
thing like our contemporary idea of this tradition was beginning to emerge.
There was at that point already a substantial tradition of some sort well
underway—one whose physiognomy could be discerned in any number of
overlapping yet divergent ways. Nevertheless, as in the case of the first five
quotations, we do not take these five later quotations, either individually
or collectively, to stand as or add up to a characterization of “analytic phi-
losophy as such” (whatever that might mean). Rather, we see them each and
all to be expressions of particular conceptions of philosophy, each of which
stands in some sort of significant continuity with some of the statements
presented in our first five quotations. That is a difference; for unlike the
first set of authors, these authors all see themselves as continuing something
inaugurated by at least some (though not necessarily all) of our five earlier
authors. Yet each such instance of significant continuity is folded within a
discontinuity, which each author takes to be potentially transformative for
the tradition that they all seek to continue.
None of the ten quotations can serve as an adequate or satisfactory
answer to our guiding questions. Yet this collection of partially overlapping,
crisscrossing, occasionally sharply diverging statements, taken together,
does begin to reveal some of the shape of the tradition. It certainly dis-
plays some of the most characteristic features of the tradition’s images of
itself—self-images that have vied with one another over the course of its
history. The sheer diversity of these statements, however, may still (rightly)
leave the reader feeling that we have yet to arrive at anything like a useful
(let alone succinct) answer to either of our guiding questions. Where else
might one look for such answers?

2. SOME ASPECTS OF THE IDEOLOGY OF ANALYTIC

PHILOSOPHY

There are countless philosophy textbooks and encyclopedias in which mem-

bers of the discipline deemed qualified to do so undertake to tell their reader
just what analytic philosophy is. These accounts are often written by the
sort of author one might call an ideologue of analytic philosophy. The sorts
of answers such texts provide are not without interest. They, too, in a rather
different way, tell us something about what analytic philosophy has been, or
is now, or at least is now declared to be and to have always been.
In the account of an ideologue of analytic philosophy, we typically are
confronted with the views of an author who is reasonably well acquainted
with analytic philosophy and has an interest in practicing it (according to
a certain understanding of what that means), but who on this occasion is
standing back from this practice and delivering a programmatic statement
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 29
regarding its nature. The sort of programmatic statement here in question
purports to provide a valid general description not simply of one individu-
al’s own ongoing practice of philosophy, but of something much broader,
namely, the conception of philosophy that animates an entire tradition.
Such programmatic statements of what analytic philosophy is tend to
take the form of persuasive definitions. On the one hand, they purport to
define what analytic philosophy is; on the other, they seek to recommend the
very way of doing philosophy that they purport to describe. In recent years,
a great many cases in point have appeared in print. If one seeks to take one’s
bearings from this array of ideological pronouncements made by analytic
philosophers on behalf of analytic philosophy regarding what analytic phi-
losophy really is, the first thing that ought to strike one is how profoundly
their pronouncements differ from one another.
One recurring theme is the idea that analytic philosophy bears a close
relation to the natural sciences, or should take the natural sciences as its
model, or perhaps even should come to regard itself as just one more—albeit
unusually self-reflective and abstract—branch of natural science. This aspect
of the ideology of analytic philosophy has had a number of very concrete
institutional effects that have, in turn, occasioned various sorts of heated
disagreement among analytic philosophers about the shape their own disci-
pline should strive to assume. As analytic philosophers have self-consciously
adopted methods of publication and other forms of institutionalization that
characterize the sciences, it has inevitably developed in the ways those forms
of publication and institutionalization promote. In particular, it has become
increasingly stratified into ever multiplying subdisciplines of philosophical
research (such as the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, the
philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of action). Each of these, in
turn, has spawned its own increasingly esoteric sub-literature of puzzle cases
and niche controversies, published in professional journals addressed to an
increasingly exclusive form of professional readership.
This has led to a situation in which, if someone wishes to claim pro-
fessional competence in a given “area” of philosophy, she has to wonder
whether this requires that she forfeit the better part of her philosophical life
to staying on top of the growing body of journal literature devoted to that
“area.” On a certain conception of what it is to have a suitably developed
professional conscience, such a narrowing of one’s philosophical focus has
come to appear to be a compulsory feature of what it now means to be a
serious analytic philosopher. This has significant consequences. The sheer
amount of time and energy required thus “to professionalize oneself” in one
of these sub-disciplines increasingly precludes the possibility of a single phi-
losopher contributing significantly to several areas of philosophy at once.
Yet the capacity to do just this was frequently held up, throughout much of
the history of the tradition, as one sign of a genuinely philosophical mind.
These forms of institutionalization and professionalization within ana-
lytic philosophy have provoked a variety of counter-reactions. They have
30 James Conant
led some major figures during their later years—perhaps most notably, Hil-
ary Putnam—to push back against this development and to press the argu-
ment that the very possibility of doing path-breaking work in philosophy
requires (what the Germans call) an Übersicht—a synoptic overview—of
the whole of the subject.16 Others have argued that this tendency towards an
ever-increasing speciation of sub-disciplines obscures from view something
essential to the very nature of the philosophical enterprise itself: its under-
lying unity. Paul Grice, in the last phase of his career, became a forceful
advocate for this point of view:

[I]t is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into
departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do
not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are
cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the
problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemologi-
cal classification of a priori knowledge. I mean (or hope I mean) some-
thing a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis
that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level pro-
ficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understand-
ing and proficiency in the others; to the extent that when I visit an
unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to,
‘Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy’ (or in ‘Nineteenth-century
continental philosophy’ or ‘Aesthetics’, as the case may be), I am imme-
diately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in
consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff.
Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is
only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them.17

We find ourselves increasingly in a situation today in which some analytic

philosophers view Grice’s remarks above as getting at something essential to
the very nature of the philosophical enterprise (something that is in danger
of being lost through its present form of institutionalization and profession-
alization), while others look upon them as vestigial traces of a vanishing
philosophical era (which we can leave behind without great intellectual cost
to anything in philosophy about which we should care). This disagreement
itself constitutes a significant crossroads at the heart of contemporary ana-
lytic philosophy, at which the very soul of analytic philosophy—what it is,
what it wants to be, and what it shall become—is itself at stake.
Some ideologues of analytic philosophy who have wished to be able to
sum up what analytic philosophy is in a slogan, while also doing justice to
the internal diversity of the tradition, have sought to do so by speaking of a
characteristically analytic style of philosophy—a single consistent style that
supposedly cuts across the many differences in analytic philosophers’ con-
ceptions of philosophical method. Here, again, the attempt to capture the
entire breadth of analytic philosophy in a single formula—in this case one
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 31
pertaining to its style—runs into problems not unlike those we have encoun-
tered above. This way of trying to get at the essence of analytic philosophy
is no less beset than the others by the twin dangers of total vacuity or inac-
curate partiality. A full unpacking of what any such a conception of the
supposed style of analytic philosophy comes to would require an in-depth
exposition of what the philosophers who extol the virtues of analytic philos-
ophy in the above ways are concerned to shy away from or shun—of what
it is of which they are afraid. This is a topic upon which some figures in the
analytic tradition have been moved to reflect (perhaps most notably, in their
somewhat different ways, the later Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, Bernard
Williams, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell). Those who have so much
as broached this topic thoughtfully and judiciously (rather than abruptly or
polemically), however, have been a distinct minority.

3. RITUALS OF EXCOMMUNICATION

The roots of the distinction between two kinds of philosophy—of which

the rigorous and respectable sort is of the analytic variety and the other
sort is one which bears the philosophical shortcomings characteristic of cer-
tain French or German thinkers—like so much else in the analytic tradition,
arguably can be traced back to Russell. His 1912 essay on “The Philosophy
of Bergson” represents possibly the earliest attempt within the tradition to
represent the contemporaneous intellectual landscape as presenting us with
a fundamental choice between the intellectual virtues and vices of these two
philosophical types. This, in turn, gives rise to an implicit conception of
the character of those who belong within the community of genuinely seri-
ous philosophers and those who should be excommunicated from any such
community. In that essay, we find passages such as the following:

There are in Bergson’s works many allusions to mathematics and sci-

ence, and to a careless reader these allusions may seem to strengthen his
philosophy greatly. As regards science, especially biology and physiol-
ogy, I am not competent to criticize his interpretations. But as regards
mathematics, he has deliberately preferred traditional errors in inter-
pretation to the more modern views which have prevailed among math-
ematicians for the last half century. In this matter, he has followed the
example of most philosophers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the infinitesimal calculus, though well developed as a method,
was supported, as regards its foundations, by many fallacies and much
confused thinking. Hegel and his followers seized upon these fallacies
and confusions, to support them in their attempt to prove all mathe-
matics self-contradictory. Thence the Hegelian account of these matters
passed into the current thought of philosophers, where it has remained
long after the mathematicians have removed all the difficulties upon
32 James Conant
which the philosophers rely. And so long as the main object of philoso-
phers is to show that nothing can be learned by patience and detailed
thinking, but that we ought rather to worship the prejudices of the igno-
rant under the title of “reason” if we are Hegelians, or of “intuition”
if we are Bergsonians, so long philosophers will take care to remain
ignorant of what mathematicians have done to remove the errors by
which Hegel profited.18

Characteristically for Russell, much is made to turn here on a proper

understanding of developments in mathematics and science—an under-
standing that he finds sorely lacking in Bergson. For our present purpose,
however, the more interesting theme present here is the idea of there being
a fundamental opposition—one that structures the terms of a choice forced
upon the contemporary reader: a choice between Russell and Bergson,
between mathematical thought and unreflective intuition, between logic
and mysticism, between reason and unreason. This opposition eventually
assumes an increasingly strident shape in Russell’s thinking. What Russell
is especially concerned to ward off in his later writings is that any undue
element of anthropocentrism be permitted to slip into our metaphysical
view of the nature of the universe and man’s place in it. We must be on
guard against any form of philosophy that fails to appreciate how very
puny we really are, when viewed from the perspective of the larger scheme
of things. Misguided forms of philosophy attempt to provide us with an
image of the very nature of reality in which the aims and purposes that
we happen to have at the present moment would appear to have a proper
place in the universe such as it is: “In this way they interfere with that
receptivity to fact which is the essence of the scientific attitude towards the
world” (Russell 1917). This sentence of Russell’s can still serve helpfully to
sum up a certain inchoate distinction between appropriately hard-headed
philosophers and comparatively soft-headed philosophers—a distinction
which has played a role both in shaping analytic philosophy’s understand-
ing of its other and in shaping certain controversies that have in recent
years increasingly come to dominate the internal discourse of analytic phi-
losophy itself.
Many analytic philosophers today might well be willing to admit that
they are in no position to specify the conditions that philosophical work
must satisfy in order to count as “analytic” or genuinely “hard-headed,”
while also being passionately concerned to retain their right to enter the
charge that the work of some particular author be deemed unworthy of an
analytic philosopher—as being insufficiently rigorous or overly soft in some
respect. On what basis is this sort of judgment made? Those who make it
are likely to insist that they simply can tell a work of analytic philosophy
when they see one. Conversely, they can just tell when someone is no longer
producing analytic philosophy, even if the work in question is authored by
someone who was previously considered (and still considers herself) to be
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 33
an analytic philosopher. That is, they can tell when a certain tipping point
has been reached: when too many of the virtues of such philosophy have
fallen away, or when too many of the vices characteristic of the writings of
French or German “Continental” luminaries obtrude themselves, or when
there is a bit of both. This can lead to impassioned denunciations—episodes
in which one analytic philosopher accuses another putative member of the
guild of having betrayed a communally shared conception of the philosophi-
cal calling.
Yet even when such intramural denunciations are made (and they are
no longer as infrequent as they once were), questions naturally arise about
whom the denouncer is speaking for and how the legitimacy of the charge is
to be adjudicated. Consider the following remarks by Crispin Wright, made
in the context of the closing remarks of a review of John McDowell’s Mind
and World:

If analytical philosophy demands self-consciousness about unexplained

or only partially explained terms of art, formality and explicitness in
setting out of argument, and the clearest possible sign-posting and
formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals, etc., then this is not
a work of analytical philosophy. . . . At its worst, indeed, McDow-
ell’s prose puts barriers of jargon, convolution and metaphor before the
reader hardly less formidable than those characteristically erected by
his German luminaries. . . . .[T]he stylistic extravagance of McDowell’s
book—more extreme than in any of his other writings to date—will
unquestionably color the influence it will exert . . . [T]he fear must be
that the book will encourage too many of the susceptible to swim out of
their depth in seas of rhetorical metaphysics. Wittgenstein complained
that, “The seed I am most likely to sow is a certain jargon.” One feels
that, if so, he had only himself to blame. McDowell is a strong swim-
mer, but his stroke is not to be imitated.19

Crispin Wright is one of the leading analytic philosophers of the present

day. John McDowell’s Mind and World is arguably one of the single most
influential works of analytic philosophy of the past quarter of a century. Or,
perhaps we should say, in order not to beg a question here: It is arguably one
of the single most influential works of the past quarter of a century written
by someone who, at least for most of his career, was deemed, by at least
most of his contemporaries, to be a practicing analytic philosopher. Perhaps,
with the publication of this book, John McDowell suddenly ceased to be an
analytic philosopher; perhaps Crispin Wright was the first to publicize the
fact of McDowell’s exodus from the community. Yet the relevant passages in
Wright’s text read less like a report of an astonishing discovery (news flash:
McDowell has emigrated to a different philosophical continent!) and more
like a plea for an edict of excommunication (proposed motion: respect due
to a member of our community no longer to be accorded to McDowell!).
34 James Conant
But on what grounds is such a charge entered and before which tribunal?
And how is its validity to be determined?
Wright need not have had a clear view of how such questions are to be
answered in order to feel that he is, nonetheless, in the right—and about
something important. He is evidently writing, even here in this part of
this review, as someone who is not without considerable admiration for
McDowell’s abilities as a philosopher. Yet he is also writing from a sense
that some line has been crossed in McDowell’s latest work, so that this
product of philosophy, by this erstwhile analytic philosopher, is one which
has gone too far. It is important to make clear that, once a work of phi-
losophy has reached the point where it looks and sounds like this, then (as
Wright bluntly puts it) “this is not a work of analytical philosophy.”
Notice that the fundamental ground of the criticism, at least in the above
passage, appears in the first instance not to lie in a charge directed against
either the character of the doctrines McDowell upholds or the method of
philosophy that he practices. The charge is quite explicitly directed at the
style of the work. Apparently a work that courts such a style may no longer
be counted as analytic philosophy. Some of the vices of style are linked by
Wright to features that analytic philosophers in the past have often regarded
as characteristic of “continental” efforts at philosophizing (fuzziness of
thought, liberal employment of metaphors, extravagance of expression).
Other aspects of the vicissitudes of McDowell’s style are linked by Wright
to more time-honored complaints—familiar already to Socrates—leveled
against forms of philosophy that are feared because of their potential to
win a following (to corrupt the youth, inspire imitation, and lead the next
generation astray).
This can readily lead to a situation in which two sets of readers, equally
familiar with the philosophical temperament of the reviewer, are drawn
to opposite conclusions: One set, upon reading such a review, concludes
that the work is one with which they need not bother further (given that it
permits itself such forms of stylistic license), whereas the other concludes,
against the reviewer’s own intentions, that the work might well be of philo-
sophical interest (just because the danger it appears to pose to this reviewer
is of this sort). It is a noteworthy feature of analytic philosophy in its most
recent Anglophone phase that increasing numbers of philosophers who
regard themselves as members of “the analytic tradition” have in this way
often become more concerned to differentiate themselves from certain oth-
ers who also so regard themselves than they are to differentiate themselves
from any current species of non-analytic philosopher. Just as in the after-
math of the Russian revolutions both Stalin and Trotsky were far more able
to tolerate a temporary truce with Churchill or Roosevelt than either was
to tolerate one between themselves, so, too, there are now subcommunities
of analytic philosophers who find it far easier to enter into non-aggression
pacts with those who are simply outsiders to their internecine quarrels than
they are to make peace with those within their community whom they view
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 35
as having placed themselves beyond the pale of respectability through the
character of their thought or writing.
The remarks in the preceding paragraphs about certain features of the
most recent phase of Anglo-American analytic philosophy are far less true of
the current dispensation of analytic philosophy on the European Continent.
On that side of the English Channel, where the position of analytic philoso-
phy as a dominant tradition of philosophizing has been far less secure, one
still encounters frequent attempts (undertaken by figures on either side of
the mutually contested terrain) to draw bright red battle-lines between the
analytic and non-analytic ways of doing things. A visiting Anglo-American
analytic philosopher suddenly finding herself amid a diverse gathering of
European philosophers may be left with the impression that she has stepped
into a time machine; the dominant ideological struggles (along with other
aspects of how the respective German, French, or Italian dispensations of
analytic philosophy currently define themselves) may strike her as a surreal
recapitulation of a whole series of episodes from the past of her own tradi-
tion, only now all compressed into a single episode.
One particular recent development within the Anglophone analytic tradi-
tion has therefore been greeted with particular dismay in such combatively
minded Continental European analytic circles: a minority of influential fig-
ures within the Anglo-American analytic community have become increas-
ingly vocal in their expressions of annoyance at efforts (by both proponents
and critics of the analytic tradition) to make too much of the idea that there
is a philosophically significant contrast to be drawn between analytic and
other kinds of philosophy. Bernard Williams is an example of a major fig-
ure in the analytic tradition whose later writings manifest a leaning in this
direction—and thus also a concern to deny that the differences in question
reflect anything philosophically deep. In a characteristic passage, he writes:

The contrast between ‘analytic’ philosophy and ‘continental’ phi-

losophy is not at all an opposition of content, of interest, or even of
style. Indeed, there are some differences, some of which are important,
between typical examples of philosophical writing to which these terms
could be applied, but these differences do not rest upon any significant
basic principles. It could even be said that these terms mark a difference
without a distinction.20

The terms “analytic” and “continental” mark a difference without a distinc-

tion, for Williams, if the purpose to which they are to be put is to provide a
philosophical account of how the very essence of the analytic way of doing
philosophy must of necessity differ from that of any other way of doing
philosophy if it is to retain its integrity qua analytic philosophy. If, however,
the point of using this terminology is merely to mark a difference between
the sorts of writing more typically found in one tradition than in another,
then he is perfectly willing to grant that the terms in question may helpfully
36 James Conant
be employed to indicate characteristic differences in forms of philosophical
prose. What he is most concerned to deny is that the differences thereby
indicated are in any way a function of a philosophically significant opposi-
tion between two fundamentally different kinds of philosophy.

4. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY’S RELATION TO THE HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

Analytic philosophers have differed markedly amongst themselves in their

attitudes with respect to the history of philosophy. Some major figures have
wanted to understand what is essential to analytic philosophy as requiring a
sharp break with the entire past of philosophy. For them, there is no longer
any need or reason for philosophers to occupy themselves with the writings
of figures belonging to the prehistory of analytic philosophy. Others have
spoken (only slightly less immodestly) of a form of philosophical inheritance
of the past in which our understanding of the very nature of the activity
undergoes radical transformation. Their view is that we may continue to be
concerned with the philosophical writings of the past, but in a sufficiently
novel manner that we will, in effect, introduce (as later Wittgenstein put
it) “a kink” in the history of philosophy. Yet others have seen their own
philosophical projects as directly inheriting those of the great figures in the
past. Our relation to them need not require any specifically historical form
of understanding of the past; it should involve nothing more than direct
philosophical engagement with the writings of these “mighty dead.” Ana-
lytic philosophers today, for a variety of reasons, are increasingly inclined
to regard the very idea of a department of philosophy lacking capable his-
torians of philosophy as existing in a condition of impoverishment. One set
of concerns that play a role here comes from those practitioners of analytic
philosophy (and there have always been some) who look upon their philo-
sophical questions as stemming directly from those of a broader philosophi-
cal tradition. They have good reason to regard those who seek to acquire a
broader and deeper understanding of that tradition as colleagues engaged in
a form of inquiry continuous with their own.
This sort of connection to the community, however, can still leave the
historian of philosophy (rightly) feeling that the reigning conception of
the distribution of labor presupposes a historically parochial perspective
on the philosophical bearing of the past on the present. For even among
analytic philosophers who have in this way been open to the philosophical
importance of cultivating such forms of familiarity with ancient, medieval,
or early modern texts, there sometimes still lingers a tendency to regard the
proper purview of the professional historian of philosophy as coming to an
end at that moment in the history of the subject when the analytic tradition
begins. On this way of looking at things, philosophers such as Frege, Rus-
sell, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Quine are to be regarded as forming a part
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 37
of “our” analytic-philosophical present in a way that no merely “historical”
figure could. One is thus thought to be doing a special sort of philosophi-
cal violence to such authors if one treats them as fit subjects of “historical”
inquiry.
Conversely, it has not been uncommon for those trained as professional
“historians of philosophy” to view the manner in which even their com-
paratively sympathetic analytic colleagues take up the ideas of the great fig-
ures of the past as evincing a peculiarly ahistorical relation to the history of
philosophy. This quarrel, which has been conducted throughout the history
of the analytic tradition, between card-carrying analytic philosophers and
their historically scrupulous professional colleagues, has involved a number
of different aspects. There is something to be said for and against each of
the parties in this quarrel.
Speaking first in defense of the analytic philosopher, it should be noted
that it is by no means evident that these tensions are to be traced solely to an
unusual degree of hostility on the part of analytic philosophers towards the
philosophical past. They may be a function of very different ways of engag-
ing with the past—among which the attitude of the typical analytic philoso-
pher towards prior tradition may in fact represent the more time-honored
alternative, far more closely resembling the ongoing philosophical activity
of past historical epochs than is generally conceded by the contemporary
working historian of philosophy. On this account of the matter, the source
of tension enters into the practice of philosophy not through what is strange
in the analytic philosopher’s attitude towards the history of philosophy, but
rather through what is in fact historically quite parochial in the attitude of
the contemporary historian towards the history of philosophy, namely, an
insistence on the cultivation and maintenance of a certain form of histori-
cal self-consciousness. The form of self-consciousness at issue here was first
introduced into the history of philosophy, now itself understood as a form
of philosophy, comparatively recently—arguably beginning with Hegel—in
any case not much over two centuries ago. Its arrival on the analytic scene
is a far more recent—and hence all the more unsettling—event. The irony
underlying this line of defense is that the source of the conflict is thus attrib-
uted to a respect in which analytic philosophy is actually more traditional
in its approach to philosophical problems (precisely in its not requiring the
cultivation of historical self-consciousness in order to get down to philo-
sophical business). Or, at any rate, it is far more traditional in its mode of
philosophizing than the contemporary historian of philosophy hostile to
analytic philosophy has usually been prepared to acknowledge.
There has been, and still is, a strongly cultivated tendency within ana-
lytic philosophy to approach the writings of the great figures of the past, as
nearly as possible, as if they were attempting to make direct contributions
to current debates and to treat “the mighty dead” not just as philosophi-
cal equals but as philosophical contemporaries. Grice famously remarked
that we “should treat great but dead philosophers as we treat great and
38 James Conant
living philosophers, as having something to say to us.” Such an approach
to the history of philosophy hardly constitutes an unprecedented form of
philosophical engagement with the past. In commenting on how best to
understand Plato’s concept of an Idea, Kant sums up a longstanding method
of engaging with the great figures of philosophy’s past—which he takes to
permeate the writings of his great predecessors, such as Aristotle (in his
relation to Plato), Aquinas (in his relation to Aristotle), and Leibniz (in his
relation to all three). Here is how Kant puts it:

I shall not engage here in any literary enquiry into the meaning of the
expression. I need only remark that it is by no means unusual, upon
comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to
his subject, whether in ordinary conversation or in writing, to find that
we understand him better than he understood himself. As he has not
sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken, or even
thought, in opposition to his own intention.21

The interpretive ideal here is to understand a philosophical author better

than he understood himself. On the modern historian’s conception of what
it is to grasp a philosophical author’s intention, the first order of business
is to overcome hindrances introduced by intervening episodes in the history
of philosophy—episodes that necessarily obstruct our view of the original
intention. On the traditional understanding of the interpretive ideal—to
which Kant here gives eloquent expression—the intervening history of phi-
losophy is an indispensable aid in fully determining the author’s concept.
(For that might well require forms of philosophical proficiency unknown
to the original author.) There is much in the contemporary analytic phi-
losopher’s way of inheriting this traditional ideal that might be irritating
to the working historian of philosophy. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
the prevalence among contemporary analytic philosophers of a version of
this mode of engagement with past philosophy cannot be attributed solely
to an unprecedented benightedness in analytic philosophy’s relation to the
philosophical past.
Williams puts the point well in the following passage, regarding the rela-
tion that almost all philosophy has had to at least certain portions of its
past—most notably, to Plato and Aristotle:

The involvement of Greek philosophy in the Western philosophical

tradition is not measured merely by the fact that ancient philosophy
originated so many fields of enquiry which continue to the present day.
It emerges also in the fact that in each age philosophers have looked
back to ancient philosophy—overwhelmingly, of course, to Plato and
Aristotle—in order to give authority to their own work, or to contrast
it, or by reinterpretation of the classical philosophers to come to under-
stand them, and themselves, in different ways. The Greek philosophers
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 39
have been not just the fathers, but the companions, of Western philoso-
phy. Different motives for this concern have predominated in different
ages. . . . But from whatever motive, these relations to the Greek past
are a particularly important expression of that involvement in its own
history which is characteristic of philosophy and not of the sciences. . . .
[W]e might say that the classical philosophers Plato and Aristotle are
classics in the sense that it has been impossible, at least up to now, for
philosophy not to want to make some living sense of these writers and
relate its positions to theirs, if only by showing why they have to be
rejected.22

Nevertheless, it is one thing to view certain philosophers as having the sta-

tus of living classics in this sense (so that it is impossible for the practicing
philosopher not to want to make some living sense of their writings). It is
another and much more problematic matter to insist that the terms in which
that task of making sense is to be achieved are fully specifiable prior to such
a philosophically sustained encounter with the past. Williams’s target here
is the attitude towards the history of philosophy famously summarized in
Ryle’s frequent injunction to treat something written by Plato as though it
had just come out in the most recent issue of Mind.23 The advocate for the
professional historian of philosophy might well be able to argue that the
attitude towards the past expressed in that injunction is at best naïve and at
worse historically obtuse.
One reason this quarrel is no longer quite as heated as it once was is
because there has recently been a surprising amount of fruitful intellectual
interchange between the original parties to the dispute. Some of the recent
attempts on the part of scholars trained within the analytic tradition to read
major figures of the philosophical past—and, in particular, to read them as
far more sympathetic to some particular contemporary analytic project than
one might have supposed possible—have occasioned fascinating and influ-
ential monographs. They have given rise to further historical scholarship on
these figures, which, in turn, has been shaped by these monographs—which,
in turn, have led these analytic philosophers to rethink aspects of their orig-
inal readings of these figures. Indeed, this tradition of analytic historical
writing is arguably as old as the analytic tradition. One might even argue
that it was initiated by Russell himself, in his lively book, The Philosophy of
Leibniz,24 and that the first fruitful instance of an interchange of the afore-
mentioned sort (between analytic philosophers and historians of philoso-
phy) was the one that occurred, immediately after the publication of this
work, between Russell and the distinguished French historian of philosophy
and Leibniz specialist Louis Couturat.
Many of these more recent analytically minded historical monographs
have sought to contest the roles in which prior tradition (including the
prior analytic tradition) has sought to cast various central personae drama-
tis in the stories that philosophers have kept repeating to themselves, their
40 James Conant
students, and each other. They have challenged the standard analytic con-
ception of what it is to be a Humean, for example, as well as the standard
analytic conception of what it is to be a Kantian. Whereas the Humean was
once understood by the analytic philosopher to be the figure who debunked
our ordinary view of the world in the light of a properly naturalized account
of what it might contain, some analytic historians now cast Hume as seek-
ing, by the end of The Treatise on Human Nature, to vindicate much of
what we are pre-theoretically disposed to believe in our everyday commerce
with the world. Whereas the Kantian was once understood by the analytic
philosopher to be the figure who sought to maintain a lasting peace between
our everyday and scientific images of the world, some analytic historians
now cast Kant as the precursor of modern cognitive science, seeking to show
how a properly reconceived form of philosophical psychology furnishes us
with a fully naturalized account of the human mind. This has had an effect
not only on how the history of philosophy is done, but also on how analytic
philosophy understands what it is doing. For many of the major figures in
the history of philosophy have become unmoored from the fixed positions
once assigned to them in analytic philosophy’s own narrative about how the
previous history of philosophy is supposed to have led up to its philosophi-
cal present.
These analytically informed revisionist readings and re-readings of the
history of philosophy have played a part in the analytic tradition’s gaining
an increasingly historically informed perspective on its own place within the
broader sweep of the history of philosophy. It is now more widely acknowl-
edged than it once was that the analytic tradition is in fact one philosophical
tradition among others—rather than a development that culminates and so
stands above and beyond the history of philosophy. Contemporary analytic
philosophers have begun to recognize that their tradition has nourished ste-
reotypes about its differently minded (non-analytic) neighbors that were as
uninformed as they were dismissive, regarding them as, for example, sloppy
and overwrought. Their disparaged counterparts have been only too ready
to return the disfavor, with equally uncomprehending and dismissive slurs
(of which “fussy” and “boring” have been among the more polite).
Encouraged by individual efforts at perestroika stemming from each side,
there are signs of a gradual thaw in this philosophical cold war. These ste-
reotypes have increasingly come to be regarded as equally prejudicial and
uncomprehending on both sides. There has, non-coincidentally, come to be
a surge of historical scholarship investigating the ways in which, through-
out the history of the analytic tradition, there have been important junc-
tures at which analytic philosophers sought to engage in fruitful dialogue
with interlocutors outside their tradition. (To name only three notable
examples that have attracted recent scholarly attention on both sides of
the Atlantic: Frege’s influential correspondence with Husserl, Ryle’s sympa-
thetic early review of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Rawls’s late dialogue
with Habermas.) The tendency to view such episodes as merely momentary
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 41
thaws in the cold war has now given way to an interest in the various ways
in which the two traditions may have repeatedly cross-fertilized one another
in the past—and (even more importantly) how they may continue to do so,
for as long as their philosophical identities remain sufficiently distinct to
permit such forms of intellectual commerce to be mutually enriching.
As the analytic tradition entered the last quarter of the twentieth century
and moved into the twenty-first, its resistance to the idea that it represents
only one continent in the larger world of philosophy (rather than a move-
ment with a rightful claim to dominate the whole of that world) began to
fade. This has helped to transform not only its attitude toward its neighbors
as a matter of contemporary philosophical practice, but also its attitude
toward itself. A correlative shift has taken place within analytic philosophy
in recent decades in the way in which the relation between its philosophical
past and its present is conceived. This shift has taken place along a number
of dimensions. One aspect of it is the present frequency with which analytic
philosophers now seek to enrich their own tradition, and contribute to its
further evolution, by working self-consciously to incorporate this or that
philosophical line of thought or intellectual strategy drawn from another
tradition—in some cases, a contemporaneous one, in others an early mod-
ern one, or one that goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle. The beginnings
of this development were already occurring in the 1950s (in the work of
figures such as Sellars, Strawson, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Peter Geach).
By the 1980s, it had become a commonplace to speak of movements and
strands within analytic philosophy, such as those of analytic Aristotelian-
ism, Thomism, Pragmatism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and even analytic
Marxism.
As we have noted, Bertrand Russell, writing in the middle of the twenti-
eth century, was happy to combine the terms “analytic” and “empiricism”
into the novel compound “analytic empiricism,” using the first term to des-
ignate what was new in the form of philosophy he was championing and
the second term to identify an older strand in the broader philosophical
tradition that he sought to inherit, transform, and carry forward. If one had
told him that soon there would be philosophers who purported to belong
to a tradition that was built in part upon his own early work, but who
would describe their philosophical outlook using compound expressions
such as those just mentioned, he would have been mystified—and, in some
cases, dismayed. For Aristotelianism, Thomism, and the rest were among
the very movements in philosophy he was vigorously fighting to displace
in favor of his own conception of philosophy as logical analysis. The early
Russell would have had difficulty comprehending how the term “analytic”
in these different compounds could have anything to do with what he had
originally meant by it, and so could amount to anything more than a mere
homonym in relation to his own use of it. He could not have foreseen the
development of a tradition that would both draw inspiration from the ana-
lytic philosophers of his generation and also seek to reincorporate so much
42 James Conant
that he himself was determined to eliminate. More generally, from that early
vantage point, it would have been impossible for anyone to make out how
a tradition might develop out of the work of Russell and the other early
analytic philosophers that would be robust and capacious enough to be able
to retain its distinctive identity, while reincorporating so many aspects of the
previous strands of philosophy that the founders had sought to vanquish.
Of the labels mentioned above, the most baffling to Russell himself would
have been “analytic Hegelianism.” If there was anything that Russell and
Moore in the early years of the twentieth century had been against, and that
the first phase of the tradition had succeeded in freezing out as a philosophi-
cally respectable option, then it was Hegelianism. This aspect of the thaw
was certainly very gradual in coming. Figures (such as Wilfrid Sellars) sym-
pathetic to German Idealism in the generation of analytic philosophers who
came of age after World War II, even when outspoken in their enthusiasm
for Kant, tended to remain circumspect and guarded in their expressions
of admiration for Hegel. It is a mark of how far the situation has evolved
since then that, in an omnibus review of five recent works of Anglophone
Hegel scholarship, all published in the year 2012, one finds a leading Hegel
scholar, Robert Pippin (himself once a student of Sellars’s), reflecting on a
robust ongoing tradition of analytic Hegelianism.25
These two forms of interest in the philosophical past—first, the long-
standing interest on the part of analytic philosophers in the classic authors
of the philosophical tradition (such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant), and sec-
ond, the far more recent resurgence of interest in figures previously excluded
from the canon (such as Hegel and Marx)—have been further nourished by,
as well as themselves, in turn, contributing to, the cultivation of yet a third
kind of interest in analytical philosophy’s relation to the past, more specifi-
cally a new kind of interest in its own past.

5. THE HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AS A NEW

FORM OF PHILOSOPHY

This new kind of interest fully matured with the gradual emergence of
something called “the history of analytic philosophy”—where the phrase in
question refers to an area of philosophical research in its own right within
the ongoing pursuit of contemporary analytic philosophy. The aforemen-
tioned quarrel between analytic philosophers and professional historians of
philosophy—epitomized in Gilbert Ryle’s notorious remark about how one
ought to go about approaching a text by Plato—is presently further altering
its shape, partly owing to pressures exerted on it by this new form of profes-
sional subspecialty within analytic philosophy. As this field has gradually
developed, so, too, has a new form of philosophical self-consciousness on
the part of many analytic philosophers with respect to the nature and extent
of that which is historically local in their own philosophical tradition. It
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 43
has given rise to the possibility—for practitioners and students of analytic
philosophy alike—of encountering aspects of analytic philosophy’s own his-
tory as something remote and even alien, so that a confrontation with that
history can itself become an occasion for philosophical reflection.26
The writings of the historian of analytic philosophy provide yet
another perspective upon our topic than those of its practitioners and
ideologues—one that may likewise serve as a resource in seeking answers
to our two guiding questions. In this case, it would be rather more difficult
to compile a comparably perspicuous list of statements representative of the
various outlooks harbored by practitioners of this newly emerging disci-
pline. For our purposes, it will suffice to remark briefly upon some of what
an examination of exemplary instances of their work would bring to light
that is relevant to our task here.
One thing it would quickly reveal is that a good historian of analytic
philosophy is not merely a historian of ideas. She is also a philosopher—and
necessarily so, for several reasons. First, the task of grasping the philo-
sophical power of a way of thinking that is occluded by our present pre-
conceptions is always a philosophical as well as a historical one. Second,
many a historian of analytic philosophy is moved in part by philosophical
motives—sometimes seeking to make something in the analytic past that
has become alien to many today an available resource for understanding
what analytic philosophy might or ought to be in the future, and sometimes
simply desiring to recover some bit of lost treasure from an earlier stratum
of the tradition.
When practiced with an eye to changing the present of philosophy, the
discipline of the history of analytic philosophy can become saddled with
difficulties that do not as obstinately beset scholarship on the history of
other philosophical traditions—at least not in the same way and to quite the
same degree. Correlatively, the pronouncements of the historian of analytic
philosophy can meet with visceral forms of resistance from contemporaries
in the discipline who are deeply invested in certain entrenched narratives
of how the tradition unfolded. A convincing unmasking of these narratives
requires the attainment of a form of self-understanding that is in equal parts
historical and philosophical.
The claim by a historian of analytic philosophy that the early Russell’s
or Frege’s conception of “logic” or “analysis” is quite different from the
manner in which these terms have come to be construed by contemporary
analytic philosophers, for example, may be received by some with bitterness
and resentment. This form of historical claim can seem to threaten certain
essential aspects of a contemporary analytic philosopher’s sense of her own
philosophical identity.
Analytic philosophy, throughout much of its history, has been extraor-
dinarily resistant to the very idea that it so much as has a history (in the
relevant sense of what it means to say that a tradition “has a history”). Of
course, no one denies that some authors lived before others and influenced
44 James Conant
successors who in turn lived and worked at some later point in time. In this
trivial sense of what it means to “have a history,” analytic philosophers are
happy to regard what they do as participating in an ongoing enterprise that
has a history. Indeed, they tend to be deeply committed to a certain tidy
account of what that history must have been—who the founding fathers
were, what the defining statements of the tradition were, which pieces of
writing count as paradigms of philosophical analysis, and the like. This pot-
ted account of the history of the tradition—now enshrined in numerous
introductory textbooks and encyclopedia articles—often plays a constitu-
tive role in various analytic practitioners’ respective understandings of the
very enterprise that they themselves seek to continue in doing (what they
themselves still want to call) “analytic philosophy.”
What analytic philosophers tend to resist is the far more unsettling idea
that the tools of the historian’s trade are relevant for getting at the truth about
those very philosophical episodes—those that play a tradition-defining role
in this internally propagated narrative. What is unsettling is the idea that
those tools might turn out to be essential for achieving a faithful under-
standing of what prior generations of analytic philosophers actually meant
when they employed terms that continue to circulate widely throughout the
writings of analytic philosophers today—terms such as “logical constant,”
“syntax,” “semantics,” “proposition,” “concept,” “meaning,” “reference,”
“language,” “judgment,” “inference,” “justification,” and the like. Analytic
philosophy has tended to want to imagine that it does not have a history
in just this sense; it has wanted to believe that its philosophical past is fully
transparent to its philosophical present.
For example, contemporary analytic philosophers have been prone to
assume that they can just pick up an early classic of the tradition (such
as Frege’s essay “On Sense and Reference” or Russell’s essay “On Denot-
ing”) and fully unpack its intended upshot simply by drawing on their
(present-day) understanding of the terminology used, without needing first
to examine how their assumptions about how philosophy ought to be done
relate to those of these earlier authors. They likewise tend to assume that
such a text may simply be placed into the hands of their students to be read
and understood by them, without any prior effort on their part to prop-
erly orient the students in relation to a way of thinking that may well be
philosophically foreign to them. The assumption that analytic philosophy’s
past must be transparent to its present goes together with the supposition
that there is no special need for analytic philosophers, when reading a text
from an earlier moment in their own tradition, to seek out the expertise of
the historian of analytic philosophy. There is no sense that forms of his-
torical sensitivity might be cultivated that would enable them to attain a
perspective on what is going on in that text, which, in turn, could open up a
further perspective on their own practice of philosophy—vastly expanding
their sense of the philosophical distance that separates analytic philosophy’s
present from its past.
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 45
The problem here is not only that a certain obliviousness tends to prevail
among analytic philosophers regarding what such a historically informed
perspective might disclose. It is that there often is a positive repression of the
possibility of such disclosure—for the very reason that many a potentially
liberating insight is repressed—namely because it threatens to unsettle our
fantasies regarding who we are and what we can do. When the analytic
philosopher confronts the historian of analytic philosophy’s way of read-
ing one of the tradition’s cherished classics, an enormous chasm can sud-
denly appear to open up between what the text has always officially been
held to have said and what it now actually seems to be concerned to say.
The text suddenly takes on the double-aspect of a duck-rabbit figure—with
two mutually occluding aspects. It can come into view under its familiar
and reassuring aspect, induced by the reading encouraged by a certain tidy
canonical account of how analytic philosophy’s past is related to its pres-
ent. Or an entirely new aspect can dawn, once the reader’s entire experi-
ence of the figure/ground relation in the text (between its sentences and the
thoughts they express) is framed in an entirely new way. One of the methods
historians of analytic philosophy have effectively employed to trigger such
gestalt-shifts is through revealing the extent of the gulf that looms between
what the key terms in the text once meant (when understood against the
background of the no longer easily visible philosophical assumptions of
the original author) and what they—or, in important instances, the Eng-
lish words used to translate them—are generally understood to mean today
(when read against the background of the often invisible and thus generally
unexamined philosophical assumptions of the present).
In order to be able to survey the overall topography of such a gulf, one
must also possess the particular philosophical capacities required to survey
the fine structure of both backgrounds: both its historically proximate edge
(such as the unexamined philosophical assumptions against which contem-
porary analytic philosophers approach their problems and those of their
interlocutors) and its historically distal one (such as the shifts in meaning
that a shared philosophical terminology may undergo over the course of
several intellectual generations). Such forms of recognition of what is intel-
lectually consequential in “what goes without saying” are forms of phil-
osophical achievement: they serve to render visible much that otherwise
remains invisible in contemporary analytic philosophical discussion, pre-
cisely because the discussants themselves are wont to regard those ways of
thinking that come most naturally to them as those that are philosophically
least problematic and most self-evident.
The vocation of the historian of analytic philosophy can appear to both
the contemporary analytic philosopher and the contemporary historian of
philosophy to fall between two stools. It can seem, on the one hand, to be
too committed to and involved in historical scholarship to count as genu-
inely analytic philosophy, and yet also to be too narrowly preoccupied by
the methods, concerns, and aims peculiar to the analytic tradition to count
46 James Conant
as serious history of philosophy. What the good historian of analytic phi-
losophy can do, however, is to demonstrate that this pursuit is an integrated
form of inquiry that requires the cultivation of the virtues and competences
of both a scrupulous historical-philosophical scholar and a sophisticated
participant in contemporary analytic philosophical practice. Good histori-
ans of analytic philosophy can show where and how the assumptions and
concerns of contemporary analytic philosophers are not those of their ana-
lytic forebears only if they have attained a fully integrated mastery of these
two forms of philosophical competence. Such a twofold fluency is essential,
if they are to be able to reveal how methods and aims (and, along with them,
the meanings of many a familiar piece of philosophical terminology) have
shifted over the course of the history of the analytic tradition, and to identify
and illuminate cases in which forms of philosophical statement employed by
contemporary analytic philosophers belong to frameworks of thought very
different from those that conferred meaning on the apparent linguistic twins
of those statements in the writings of their analytic predecessors.
As noted above, there are some respects in which the difficulties faced
by a historian of analytic philosophy resemble those that beset a historian
of science more than those typically encountered by the philosophically
minded scholar of other chapters of the history of philosophy. Correlatively,
the forms of resistance the historian of analytic philosophy faces can resem-
ble those encountered by, say, the historian of twentieth-century physics.
Contemporary physicists often find themselves disturbed by the accounts
of major revolutions in the history of physics—especially some involving
comparatively recent episodes (such as those that led to the theories of rel-
ativity and quantum mechanics)—advanced by historians of science. The
practicing physicist, like the practicing analytic philosopher, is wedded to a
narrative in which the achievements of figures such as Albert Einstein and
Niels Bohr are presented in a very particular way, namely, as responses to
challenges and difficulties that are describable in terms equally intelligible to
both the past and the present practitioner of the subject. It is this transpar-
ency of past physics to the present that a sensitive historian’s account often
threatens to undo—thus apparently depriving contemporary physicists of
their working understanding of the place their own contributions assume in
a single ongoing enterprise.
The historian of science seeks an entirely different order of intelligibility
in the past than that which is conferred on it by an official textbook-level
narrative of how the innovations of the mighty dead led to our contempo-
rary understanding of the topic under consideration. What the historian of
science wants to understand is not the reason that, with the hindsight of
later development, now seems to a contemporary physicist to be the obvi-
ous basis for adopting our contemporary understanding of what Einstein’s,
or Bohr’s, original conclusion must have been. The historian rather is con-
cerned to uncover and sort out the tangle of now forgotten, but back then
nagging (and—but only for those who had eyes to see—deeply significant)
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 47
puzzles and anomalies that moved an Einstein or a Bohr, at that particular
moment in the history of physics, to draw what could only seem to his
contemporaries to be an altogether surprising (and not at all easily intel-
ligible) conclusion. From the point of view of the historian, this requires
doing full justice to every nuance of the many large and small differences
between our present and (sometimes even only slightly) earlier ways of
thinking about physical reality—nuances that are all simultaneously erased
from view in Whiggish textbook accounts of the history of science. From
the point of view of the physicist, such a historically nuanced account—with
its seemingly myopic preoccupation with theoretically and experimentally
secondary considerations—is heedless of the substantial extent to which our
contemporary understanding of physical reality is able—indeed, must be
able—to encompass and comprehend the point of view of an Einstein or
a Bohr.
In the cases of both contemporary physics and contemporary analytic
philosophy, an investment in a similarly deeply entrenched and internally
institutionalized narrative plays a parallel role in the quarrel with the his-
torian. It is no accident that, in each case, this same narrative plays a peda-
gogical role in initiating students into the subject. And these are narratives
that the conscientious historians of both subjects may well feel they must
at least question and complicate (if not altogether subvert), if the actual
contours of the relation between the present and the past—recent as well as
more distant—are to come into view. These internally propagated disciplin-
ary narratives of how past achievements led up to the present—in both theo-
retical physics and analytic philosophy—tend to represent the terminology,
methods, and aims of the past as essentially homogeneous in intellectual
form and content with those of the contemporary practitioner. They pres-
ent the original problems, concerns, and aims of the founders as versions of
current ones in the disciplines.
To observe that the historical soundness and adequacy of such narra-
tives cannot simply be taken for granted is not to deny that they have any
legitimacy or usefulness. Indeed, they may have an essential role to play in
helping to articulate and promulgate a certain widely shared (albeit often
largely inchoate) understanding of the ongoing practice. We encountered
various versions of such understandings in the statements presented above
as representative of putatively authoritative stances taken by (those whom
we referred to as) ideologues of analytic philosophy. And we suggested that
collections of statements of that sort, when appropriately arranged and dis-
played, can serve to bring out significant features of analytic philosophy’s
own multifarious self-image. What we have seen now, however, is that the
history of analytic philosophy, if it is to perform its office as a serious branch
of the discipline of history, must call into question and be prepared to con-
test such disciplinary self-images and related proclamations. But, unlike the
case of the history of science, this is not its only office—nor is it anything
like the primary reason why analytic philosophers are generally moved to
48 James Conant
become serious historians of their own tradition (while usually also seeking
to remain analytic philosophers). Its most important function is arguably
to enhance, deepen, and further orient analytic philosophy’s own ongoing
philosophical understanding of itself—upon which its developing practice
depends.
What this suggests is that the history of analytic philosophy’s most impor-
tant function is not one that it shares—or even could share—with the history
of science. For there is an absolutely crucial difference between the history
of a science (like theoretical physics) and that of analytic philosophy—a
difference that is clearly visible in the very different ways in which these
two disciplines are generally practiced. Competent historians of physics are
not out to make (and do not see themselves as seeking to make) contribu-
tions to contemporary physics. They think of themselves as historians rather
than as physicists. As we have already noted, however, good historians of
analytic philosophy tend to be (and to want to be) practitioners of the very
discipline of which they also undertake to be historians. In non-analytic
philosophical circles, there is seldom any presumption that these two forms
of identity and inquiry (that of the historian and that of the philosopher)
must exclude each other (even though they may be recognized to stand in
a certain productive tension with each other, requiring careful negotiation),
whereas among analytic philosophers—as among physicists—there has,
until recently, often been such a presumption. Thus the capacity to fuse—or
otherwise juggle—these two forms of identity within the space of a single
philosophical life has until recently remained a comparatively rare achieve-
ment in the analytic tradition, exemplified in the work of only a handful of
figures. This is gradually beginning to change: leading figures in the tradition
now find themselves not only increasingly pushed but also naturally inclined
to articulate their own respective plausible readings of just what it was that
Carnap, Ryle, or Anscombe might originally have wanted to mean in this
or that frequently quoted (but previously seldom carefully read) remark,
article, or book.
While historians of physics have no stake in the outcome of ongoing
disputes in the current cutting-edge of theoretical physics, historians of
analytic philosophy generally do have such a stake in contemporary philo-
sophical disputes—not necessarily in their minutiae, but in larger questions
prompted by their ongoing conduct. These often involve questions such as
whether a current controversy is a repetition (albeit in a different guise) of
a prior one, or whether (its novelty notwithstanding) the present game is
worth the candle, or whether (in dominating the contemporary horizon) it
obscures from view promising avenues for philosophical reflection.
Motives such as these often enter into the historian of analytic philoso-
phy’s particular way of reframing and narrating a carefully selected episode
from the history of the tradition. The misunderstood or neglected aspects of
the philosophical past thereby displayed are therefore almost never selected
with the mere scholarly aim of setting the historical record straight, but
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 49
with a further specifically philosophical aim. That motive may be just to
display the sheer provinciality of the philosophical present, or the power of
a philosophical idea of the past, or the unwitting faithfulness with which
the present recapitulates the past due to ignorance of it—but, most likely,
it will be a combination of all three, along with yet others. The historian
of analytic philosophy’s motives are thus generally mixed, springing no less
from a desire to show how certain—often unduly neglected—aspects of the
past can still speak to us (thereby holding open the promise of enriching
the subject as we know it) than from a desire to show how certain—often
wrong-headedly celebrated—aspects of the past cannot any longer speak to
us (thereby allowing us to appreciate what is philosophically and histori-
cally specific to our present moment of philosophy).
Conscientious historians of analytic philosophy tend to be cautious
in approaching the central terms analytic philosophers have continually
employed over the course of the tradition to characterize their topics,
problems, or methods (including terms that have occurred frequently in
the preceding pages—such as “formal,” “logic,” and “analysis”). They
probe carefully to ascertain the extent to which these terms have or have
not retained their original significance across their successive occasions of
use. They are uniquely positioned—and needed—to bring out the char-
acter and structure of certain sorts of moments that occurred at signifi-
cant junctures in the development of the tradition—moments in which
two major figures inspired by the same philosophical texts and teachers,
apparently pursuing a common project within a shared framework of phil-
osophical endeavor, employing the same terms and declaring allegiance
to the same intellectual paradigms, nonetheless utterly fail to engage
one another philosophically—talking by or otherwise misunderstanding
one another—despite the appearance of their pursuing a single common
project and working within a single shared framework of philosophical
endeavor.
The good historian of analytic philosophy may bring out how two phi-
losophers who appear to agree on fundamentals are only apparently in
agreement with one another, as well as how two philosophers who appear
to disagree actually do not—either because they really agree when they take
themselves not to or because they are philosophically so far apart that their
positions are not even sufficiently aligned to permit of disagreement in the
first place. Finally, the good historian of analytic philosophy can reveal how
two figures in the history of philosophy—perhaps only one of whom is an
analytic philosopher—may actually have far more in common with one
another than either one of them would have been willing to allow or could
have been in a position to comprehend. This requires showing how the
underlying projects of these two philosophers, belonging to different move-
ments of thought (outwardly characterized by utterly different intellectual
styles and temperaments), are inwardly bound together by profound affini-
ties. In more extreme cases, the good historian of analytic philosophy may
50 James Conant
even be concerned to reveal how an entire episode of analytic philosophy is
to be seen as significantly related to some prior moment in philosophy’s past.
Gilbert Ryle has figured in some of our remarks above as typifying a
certain sort of somewhat dismissive analytic attitude towards the philo-
sophical past. Yet he, too, in his own way, was deeply concerned to make
contributions to this genre of analytically informed history of philosophy.
For example, we may see Ryle’s work on the relation between Plato and
logical atomism as animated by such a concern. This work was concerned
to reveal how six figures in the history of philosophy, four of whom (Moore,
Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein) were analytic philosophers and two
of whom (Plato and Meinong) were not, may have had more in common
with one another than at least several of them could possibly have been in
any position to comprehend. Ryle argues that Moore’s 1899 essay on “The
Nature of Judgment” provides an account of the distinction between propo-
sitions (in a non-linguistic sense of that term) and concepts (taken to be the
elements of propositions) that doesn’t work and that runs into essentially
the problem that is expressed in the Theaetetus (as how we can think that
which is not). He also argues that what we find in Meinong’s treatment
of “objectives” and Russell’s treatment of facts (especially in his Lectures
on Logical Atomism) are unsuccessful attempts to resolve this problem by
continuing to frame it in the manner in which Moore takes it up. He con-
trasts this with the approach to the problem we find first in Frege and then,
to an even clearer degree, in the Tractatus—one which in various respects
resembles that proposed by Socrates in the dialogue to a surprising degree.
Ryle then summarizes what he has shown thus far as follows:

I now urge that it is pretty clear that the issue that Socrates was dis-
cussing is the same as or at least overlaps with the issue that was being
discussed fifty to thirty years ago by, among others, Meinong, Moore,
Russell and Wittgenstein; and that Socrates at least adumbrated certain
ideas very much like those which were rendered necessary by some of
the inherent defects of the theories of objects or concepts originally put
forward by Meinong and Moore.27

To defend a claim of this form requires making clear the affinities between
the philosophical preoccupations of those who are traditionally counted as
analytic philosophers and those who are not. To the extent that one judges
Ryle’s attempt to do this to be successful, one must also concede that it
permits one to see the form of a widely shared philosophical problem more
clearly than one had before. Once affinities of this sort between the analytic
and the non-analytic past are brought sharply into view, this may enable
us to discern more clearly not only the historical landscape, but also the
philosophical landscape. For it can enable a clear apprehension of the very
form of a philosophical problem for the first time—allowing us to sepa-
rate the real form of the problem from the superficial guises through which
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 51
it simultaneously manifests itself in the work of apparently very different
thinkers. In this and other ways, the work of the good historian of analytic
philosophy—utterly unlike the work of the historian of science in its rela-
tion to contemporary science—can, indeed, contribute to the achievement
of new and surprising modes of philosophical progress.
The analogy between the history of physics and the history of analytic
philosophy breaks down in a further—equally instructive—way. The anal-
ogy, as framed above, encourages one to think that the primary misrepre-
sentation of the past the historian must seek to undo is one that arises from
an institutionalized tendency to represent the problems, concerns, and aims
of earlier heroes in the discipline as if they were immediately recognizable as
versions of contemporary ones. Yet some analytic philosophers have been
drawn to re-narrate episodes from the history of their tradition out of a
desire to correct a roughly opposite form of misrepresentation of the past.
Consider the following three texts—each of which marked at the time of
its publication a significant transformation in the tradition’s self-image: (1)
G. E. M. Anscombe’s 1959 book An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tracta-
tus, (2) James Griffin’s 1964 book Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism, and (3)
Peter Hylton’s comparatively recent 1990 book Russell, Idealism and the
Emergence of Analytic Philosophy.28 The internally propagated narratives
that these three authors aim to subvert, in their three remarkably different
books, stand in a different sort of relation to each of the then dominant
self-understandings of analytic philosophy.
Anscombe and Griffin aimed in different ways to subvert an account of
early Wittgenstein’s place in the history of analytic philosophy advanced in
numerous contemporaneous narratives—perhaps none more influential at
the time than J. O. Urmson’s 1956 book Philosophical Analysis: Its Devel-
opment between the Two World Wars.29 Like many others writing at that
moment, Urmson wanted to bring out the radical nature of a recent shift in
analytic philosophy (and hence to minimize its discernible continuity with
even the quite recent past). On Urmson’s telling of the story, the author of
the Tractatus fully shared his teacher Russell’s stridently empiricist, atom-
ist, and largely Humean philosophical orientation. Urmson (along with his
likeminded philosophical cohort) did not regard the common thread he dis-
cerned throughout the early analytic tradition (epitomized by Russell and
early Wittgenstein) to be anything like a version of his own generation’s
central philosophical concerns and aims. That was his whole point: we have
broken with even the very recent past of analytic philosophy. He spoke for
a generation eager to see themselves as beneficiaries of a mid-century philo-
sophical revolution that had effectively separated and liberated them from
the concerns and aims of their earlier analytic forebears.
The larger historiographical point here is that the shape of the target
of the historian of analytic philosophy is sometimes roughly the opposite
of that of the historian of science—Urmson’s account was to be exposed
as insufficiently, rather than excessively, Whiggish—as overstating, rather
52 James Conant
than understating, the seismic character of the revolution. His work sought
to disseminate an account of how very sharp the break with the past really
was—to make palpable the extent to which it had issued in forms of philo-
sophical practice unimaginable to the original founders of the analytic tra-
dition. Anscombe and Griffin, in their respective books, were challenging
an account of this form (though each took issue with very different aspects
of the then prevailing narrative). Their work thus offers an example a very
different kind of philosophical motive a historian of analytic philosophy
may have for seeking to overturn an institutionalized narrative. The concern
may be to show the depth of philosophical discontinuity where seamless
continuity is the prevailing assumption of the day, but it may equally well
be the reverse.
One of the many interlacing philosophical motives of Hylton’s superb
book on Russell bears a certain resemblance to an aim of Anscombe’s and
Griffin’s, namely, to shake us free of an account of the thought of a central
figure in the analytic tradition in which that figure is cast as a representa-
tive of a tradition of philosophy involved in a fairly direct inheritance of the
central assumptions of British empiricism. Whereas Anscombe and Griffin
were primarily concerned to overturn a Humean reading of early Wittgen-
stein, Hylton is concerned to complicate a reading of Russell’s philosophy
as developing too simply and too directly out of a set of philosophical com-
mitments he supposedly shares with a figure such as Hume.
Though such exercises in the history of analytic philosophy are driven by
philosophical motives, this does not necessarily mean that they come with
explicit methodological reflections on the forms of philosophical insight
that the history of analytic philosophy can afford. Neither Anscombe nor
Griffin in their aforementioned books offers anything like a self-conscious
statement of what the historian of analytic philosophy can or should do. In
this respect, they are typical of even the most philosophically original con-
tributors to the history of analytic philosophy prior to the 1980s. In this
respect, Hylton’s book is more representative of the best recent work, dis-
playing forms of self-reflexivity seldom found in earlier work in the genre. In
a particularly eloquent passage from the Introduction to the book, we find
the following set of remarks:

Philosophy cannot, as the natural sciences perhaps can, absorb what is

correct in its past and conclusively refute what is incorrect, for the dif-
ference is unsettled. There is as little finality in our views as to what is
correct in the philosophies of Plato or Hume or Kant or Russell as there
is in our views on the most contemporary issue. . . . Philosophy thus
always has the hope of learning neglected lessons from its past. It also,
and perhaps more characteristically, is always in a state of potential
rivalry with its past, defining itself against its past, and threatened by
it. It is for this reason that the history of philosophy often has an evalu-
ative and judgmental tone—precisely not the tone of one who has a
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 53
secure understanding of the matters at issue, but the tone of one whose
understanding is threatened. The deliberately ahistorical character of
much history of philosophy seems to me not accidental, but a prod-
uct of this insecure relationship between philosophy and its past. We
approach the past ahistorically in order to refute it—as if the past of
philosophy will not stay in the past, but constantly threatens to come
back to life. Our uncertainty over the history of philosophy—whether
it is history, whether it is philosophy, whether it can be both—seems to
correspond to the uneasiness of the relation between philosophy and
its past, and to our unease about the status of the subject as a whole.30

This is as thoughtful and penetrating a set of opening remarks regarding the

relation between philosophy and its past as one is likely to find at the outset
of any work on a topic in the history of philosophy. Or, to put the point
the other way around, it is thoroughly unrepresentative of what one finds,
throughout most of the history of analytic philosophy, in writing devoted
to furnishing a historical overview of some major period or figure or move-
ment within analytic philosophy.
The topic of Hylton’s own book (the development of Russell’s philoso-
phy, his early revolt against British Idealism, and his ongoing responses to
the resulting internal tensions in his thought) is a classic topic in the genre
of the history of analytic philosophy—as classic as you can get. Most of
the work done on this topic—and, indeed, in this whole genre—is written
in just the tone Hylton mentions above, and for the reason he gives. The
unacknowledged unease in the tradition’s relation to the past at issue here
is due in no small part precisely to a desire to have that relation be an easy
one—one of total continuity or sharp discontinuity—as long as it allows
analytic philosophers to look back upon their tradition simply with a view
to absorbing what is correct in it and conclusively refuting what is false in it.
The ensuing unease in the relation to the subject as a whole is therefore
nourished by a desire to rid our relation to the past of the very dimensions of
complexity and ambivalence that form constitutive aspects of philosophy’s
ongoing encounter with its past. Indeed, analytic philosophy’s ambition to
free itself from certain forms of preoccupation with history—an ambition
characteristic of so many of the founding projects of the tradition—is part
of what has given rise (at this much later stage in the history of the tradition)
to the present felt need for a particular sort of philosophically sensitive work
in the history of analytic philosophy—a specifically historical-philosophical
form of exercise in remembering, repeating, and working through—able
to undo specific forms of philosophical repression induced by the original
founding ambition.
Hylton’s official topic in the above quotation is the relation between phi-
losophy as such and the entirety of its past—not our present and narrower
topic, namely, analytic philosophy’s relation to that tiny chapter in the his-
tory of philosophy that is its own past. Yet what Hylton shows in his book
54 James Conant
bears directly on our topic. For the book brings out any number of ways
in which analytic philosophers have become invested in narrating the past
of their own tradition in ways that repress to an extraordinary degree any
consciousness of the forms of difficulty that (as the passage above suggests)
necessarily attend philosophy’s relation to its past. Viewed from this angle,
one of analytic philosophy’s most characteristic features would appear to be
one that failed to show up on our collection of statements above, namely,
the tradition’s sustained investment in trying to rid itself of the awareness
that it (like any other form of philosophy) is subject to the vicissitudes of
philosophy’s relation to its history. And it is no accident that it failed to
appear there—not only because it is a more subtle sort of feature than any
of those we have discussed. It is a sort of feature that can come properly
into view only once the tradition’s prior retrospective relation to itself is
viewed through the lens of the sort of philosophically sensitive work in the
history of analytic philosophy discussed in the previous paragraphs. This,
in turn, suggests that—as the history of analytic philosophy practiced as a
form of analytic philosophy itself comes to be an increasingly significant and
respectable subspecialty within the discipline—this characteristic feature of
the tradition (like so many others) must gradually mutate, eventually com-
ing to be an ever less definitive mark of the tradition as a whole.
That this particular subspecialty has come to be conducted with an eye
to transforming the shape of ongoing contemporary philosophical debate
is non-accidentally related to the way in which it has also gradually come
to be regarded as itself constituting a self-standing form of philosophically
inquiry in its own right. This is a genuine and significant development
within the analytic tradition. It involves the emergence of a philosophi-
cally self-conscious form of historical inquiry in the history of analytic
philosophy conducted by analytic philosophers writing primarily for an
audience of analytic philosophers. It is a form of historical inquiry not
subordinated to any particular philosophical agenda, but open to the
whole range of forms of understanding that may be afforded when ana-
lytic philosophy’s present is confronted with the sort of philosophically
informed selective focus on aspects of its past discussed above. Hylton’s
book, for example, seeks simultaneously to make some aspects of Russell’s
philosophy seem far stranger than they had been taken to be, while reveal-
ing other aspects to have far more bearing on the fundamental difficulties
that plague the present moment of analytic philosophy than might previ-
ously have seemed possible. Russell’s thinking is thus shown to be, in some
ways, far more surprising than the tradition’s self-image had been willing
to allow, while other supposed historical platitudes about the tradition
are shown to cover up the most interesting ways in which his concerns
are far more philosophically akin with our own than had previously been
recognized.
Good historians of analytic philosophy will by no means simply converge
upon some single alternative to the currently institutionalized account of the
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 55
history of analytic philosophy. Here, as elsewhere in the practice of history,
uncovering the historical past involves appreciating the revelatory powers
of different forms of account. But for all of their differences, they would
not be good historians if they were to take as their point of departure any
particular definition of what analytic philosophy or the analytic style as
such is—unless their purpose in doing so is to call it into question or employ
it to illustrate how misleading such blanket statements prove to be. They
will seek instead to characterize the historical episode of thought at issue
precisely as part of an ongoing and internally evolving tradition—with all
of the internal complexity and disagreement that is apt to characterize any
interesting historical tradition of thought, be it literary, mathematical, or
philosophical.
Thus the historian of analytic philosophy is far more likely than the ideo-
logue of analytic philosophy to see the history of analytic philosophy as con-
sisting in a series of successively mutating conceptions of philosophy, rather
than as the grand unfolding of a unitary something called “analytic philoso-
phy” that can be aptly summed up in the form of a definition or summary
statement of its aims, commitments, or style. But if that is true, then what
is the history of analytic philosophy a history of? What unifies the diverse,
evolving, and contested enterprise that the historian of analytic philosophy
seeks to display? To answer this question as well as it can be answered, we
must have recourse to the concept of a tradition.
The unity and identity of a tradition is not explicable in terms of a col-
lection of features each of its members fortuitously happens to instantiate.
It is explicable only through a form of understanding that seeks to grasp a
specific sort of historical development—one in which each moment is linked
to the others in a significant way. Reflection on the significance of each
such moment possesses the power to illuminate that of any other—but only
when they are collectively considered in the light of their partially overlap-
ping and mutually intertwining relations with one another. The concept of
a tradition shows its worth when, through concerted attempts to engage in
such reflection, we actually do find our appreciation of each of the elements
in a series of historical episodes coming to be deepened in this mutually
illuminating way. When such acts of reflection bear fruit in this manner,
what they uncover is revealed to be not merely a “series of historical epi-
sodes,” but, rather, the successive moments of the internal unfolding of a
tradition. The unity of analytic philosophy here at issue is to be sought not
at the level of the doctrines, or the conception of philosophy, or the style of
the writing of its practitioners, but rather in the manner in which it forms
a distinctive tradition of thought. Once the concept of the analytic tradi-
tion comes to function in this sort of way in shaping the self-understanding
of practicing philosophers seeking to inherit and develop the tradition in
question, it becomes—not merely the concept of a certain philosophical
ideology or sensibility, but rather—the concept of a form of philosophical
self-consciousness.31
56 James Conant
NOTES

1 For an illuminating discussion of this point, see Simon Glendinning’s pro-

vocative editor’s introduction to The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental
Philosophy (Glendenning 1999).
2 This is not to say that a merely geographical principle for distinguishing be-
tween the traditions of philosophy here at issue was ever of much merit. (Mi-
chael Dummett has pointed out its limitations as a way of distinguishing the
early history of the two traditions in question; see Dummett (1993). It is only
to say that the time has come when it is now a genuinely comical way of
distinguishing them.
3 It should be noted that, if my remarks below do go any way in illuminating
how the term “the analytic tradition in philosophy” might pick out something
with a certain sort of unity, this does not thereby show wherein the unity
might lie in something genuinely deserving of the name of a Continental tradi-
tion in philosophy.
4 This point is forcefully argued by Peter van Inwagen; see van Inwagen (2006).
5 Moore (1993).
6 Russell (1945), p. 834.
7 Wittgenstein (1922), §§4.111–2.
8 Schlick (1927), p. 223.
9 Carnap (1959), §§1 & 9.
10 Wittgenstein (1953), §§109.
11 Ryle (2002), p. 1.
12 Austin (1961), p. 182.
13 Strawson (1964), p. 9.
14 Quine (1981), p. 21
15 Grice (1986), p. 61.
16 One way to summarize the point here at issue is to say that Putnam holds,
along with Kant, that the Schulbegriff of philosophy must be brought into
equipoise with its Weltbegriff; for further discussion, see my editor’s intro-
duction to Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Conant 1990), pp.
xxiv–xxxii.
17 Grice (1986), p. 64.
18 Russell (1912), p. 345.
19 Wright (1996), p. 252.
20 These remarks form part of a text that Williams specially wrote for a fran-
cophone audience—namely, the Preface to L’éthique et les limites de la phi-
losophie (Williams 1990), the French translation of his Ethics and the Limits
of Philosophy. Related remarks, developing his thoughts on this subject at
greater length, can be found in English in his “What Might Philosophy Be-
come?” included in his collection Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Wil-
liams 2008).
21 Critique of Pure Reason, B 371–372.
22 Williams (2006a), p. 9.
23 In his “An Essay on Collingwood,” Williams (2006b) discusses the conception
of the history of philosophy he takes to be implicit in Ryle’s injunction; see
especially p. 344.
24 For a forerunner to the later fashionable distinction between two essentially
opposed ways of doing the history of philosophy—merely historically and
genuinely philosophically—see the opening pages of Russell’s Preface to the
First Edition of The Philosophy of Leibniz (Russell 1900). For further discus-
sion, see Ayers (1978) (see especially pp. 42–46).
 The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition 57
25 Pippin remarks: “Given the origins of analytic philosophy in anti-Hegelianism,
perhaps the most surprising new Hegel is the Anglophone Hegel . . . show[ing]
that Hegel could make a living contribution to contemporary debates in phi-
losophy, in the way that Anglophone philosophy has long done for philoso-
phers like Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.” (Review of Andrew Shanks, Hegel and
Religious Faith; Peter Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of
History in Theological Perspective; Sally Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant;
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism; Christopher Yeomans, Freedom and Re-
flection, in Times Literary Supplement, Spring 2013).
26 I am indebted to the discussion of this topic in Michael Kremer’s “What is
the Good of Philosophical History?” (Kremer 2013), as well as to Kremer’s
review of Scott Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century.
27 Ryle (1990), p. 42. This article was published posthumously.
28 Anscombe (1959), Griffin (1964); Hylton (1990)
29 Urmson (1956).
30 Hylton (1990), pp. 6–7.
31 The present essay was extracted from a longer manuscript and overlaps at
diverse points with material originally written for various sections of The Nor-
ton Anthology of Philosophy, Volume V. After Kant: The Analytic Tradition
(Conant and Elliott 2016). I am indebted to Cora Diamond, Jay Elliott, and
Richard Schacht for comments and suggestions on the original manuscript,
as well as to the assistance of Jeffrey Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul Liv-
ingston in helping me to trim the material down to its present comparatively
reasonable length.

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Anscombe, G. E. M. 1959. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London:

Hutchinson University Library.
Austin, J. L. 1961. Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Ayers, M. 1978. Analytical Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. In Philosophy
and Its Past. Sussex: Harvester Press, 42–66.
Carnap, R. 1959. The Old and the New Logic. In A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Postivism.
New York: The Free Press, 133–146.
Conant, J. 1990. Introduction. In Hilary Putnam, ed., Realism with a Human Face.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, xv– lxxiv.
Conant, J. and J. Elliott, eds. 2016. The Norton Anthology of Philosophy, Volume V.
After Kant: The Analytic Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Dummett, M. 1993. The Origins of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Glendinning, S. 1999. What Is Continental Philosophy? In S. Glendinning, ed., The
Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 3–20.
Grice, P. 1986. Reply to Richards. In Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, eds.,
Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 45–108.
Griffin, J. 1964. Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hodgson, P. 2012. Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of History in Theological
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hylton, P. 1990. Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press.
58 James Conant
Kremer, M. 2005. Review of Scott Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth
Century. (published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, available online at
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24868-book-1-philosophical-analysis-in-the-
twentieth-century-vol-1-the-dawn-of-analysis-book-2-philosophical-analysis-in-
the-twentieth-century-vol-2-the-age-of-meaning.)
Kremer, M. 2013. What Is the Good of Philosophical History? In E. Reck, ed., The
Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave MacMillan, 294–325.
Moore, G.E. 1899. “The Nature of Judgment,” Mind 8 (30):176-193.
Moore, G. E. 1993. The Nature of Judgment. In Thomas Baldwin, ed., G. E. Moore:
Selected Writings. London: Routledge, 1–19.
Pinkard, T. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford U. Press.
Pippin, R. 2013. Review of Andrew Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith. XXXX:
Times Literary Supplement.
Quine, W. V. O. 1981. Things and Their Place in Theories. In Theories and Things.
Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1–23.
Russell, B. 1900. The Philosophy of Leibniz. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Russell, B. 1912. The Philosophy of Bergson. The Monist 22: 321–347.
Russell, B. 1917. “Scientific Method in Philosophy,” in Mysticism and Logic: and
Other Essays,” London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 107.
Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ryle, G. 1990. Logical Atomism in Plato’s Theaetetus. Phronesis 35(1): 21–46.
Ryle, G. 2002. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schlick, M. 1927. The Future of Philosophy. In Henk L. Mulder and B.F.B. van
de Velde-Schlick, ed., Philosophical Papers, Volume II: 1925–1936. Dordrecht:
Reidel, 171–175.
Sedgwick, S. 2012. Hegel’s Critique of Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P. F. 1964. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. New York:
Methuen.
Urmson, J. O. 1956. Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two
World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Inwagen, P. 2006. What Is Naturalism? What Is Analytical Philosophy? In A.
Corradini, S. Galvan, E. J. Lowe, eds., Analytic Philosophy Without Naturalism.
London: Routledge, 74–78.
Williams, B. 1990. Preface to L’éthique et les limites de la philosophie. Paris:
Gallimard.
Williams, B. 2006a. The Legacy of Greek Philosophy. In M. F. Burnyeat, ed., The
Sense of the Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3–48.
Williams, B. 2006b. An Essay on Collingwood. In M. F. Burnyeat, ed., The Sense of
the Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 341–360.
Williams, B. 2008. What Might Philosophy Become? In A.W. Moore,, ed., Phi-
losophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
200–214.
Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C K. Ogden. Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Ox-
ford: Blackwell.
Wright, C. 1996. Human Nature? European Journal of Philosophy, 4:235–254.
3 Philosophy as Articulation
Austin and Deleuze on Conceptual
Analysis
Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine

Whether doing thought experiments from their armchairs, consulting

intuitions, or investigating possible worlds, contemporary philosophers
often describe what they do as conceptual analysis. This seems reasonable
enough, since philosophy is often concerned with highly general cognitive
claims and since the use of experimental and archival data is not as central
as it is in the natural and social sciences. The distinctive contribution of the
philosopher beyond the special sciences seems to involve an effort to make
plausible or compelling a way of looking at things that can be expressed in
a highly general, conceptual claim: the essence of matter is extension; the
right thing to do is whatever will produce the most net good consequences;
preferences are transitive; art is embodied meaning, and so on. Claims like
these are debated among philosophers, tested by reference to cases (often
imaginary ones), and revised, refined, and tested for coherence with other
claims, both general conceptual ones and more obviously empirical ones. If
one wants a name for these activities, conceptual analysis seems about as
good a candidate as there could be.
But are we clear either about what concepts are, about how they come
about, or about what, exactly, the activity of analyzing them is? In 1903,
near the dawn of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore first formulated a ver-
sion of what has come to be known as the paradox of analysis.1 Consider
a putative result of conceptual analysis expressed in a claim of the form
“Concept-word or phrase F is (essentially, necessarily) concept-word or
phrase G.” [ (x) (Fx ≡ Gx)]. Any object correctly characterized by concept-
word or phrase F is (essentially, necessarily) an object correctly characterized
by concept-word or phrase G. Alternatively, F and G are not synonymous;
in this latter case, the conceptual claim that all Fs are Gs seems, at best,
accidentally true or true as things happen to be, not necessarily true. As a
claim about necessary relations among concepts (or about relations between
essences) it seems false. Hence it seems difficult to formulate the results of
conceptual analysis in a way that is both informative and true.
60 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
One way to block this result is to appeal to Frege’s distinction between
sense and reference.2 Consider the expressions “the sum of 19 and 8” and
“the cube of 3.” These two expressions mean different things or have dif-
ferent sense.3 (A child who had learned to add but not to multiply might
fully understand the first but fail to understand the second.) Yet they have
the same referent—the number 27—and necessarily so. Perhaps, then, the
philosophical analysis of concepts might be comparable to the activity of
mathematical proof in yielding results (necessary truths about concepts)
involving same referent, different sense. By carefully inspecting, as it were,
the senses of two different concept words (an activity analogous to math-
ematical proof in its abstraction from particular data), the philosopher as
analyst of concepts might arrive at results that are all at once true, informa-
tive, and necessary.
Yet while this is an attractive suggestion, it also faces considerable dif-
ficulties. First, in mathematics there are clear, shared standards for count-
ing a sequence of mathematical statements as a proof. Mathematicians
know how to check for failures of valid argumentation, involving uncon-
sidered possibilities and the like. It is not clear that there are similar clear,
shared standards for successful conceptual analysis. Second, as Frege
frankly holds, thinking of mathematical truth as he does involves a com-
mitment to senses (and numbers) as Platonic entities, standing eternally
in relations to one another independently of human practice. This may
seem, on the face of it, plausible enough for numbers and shapes, say.
Hasn’t it always been true that 3 plus 8 = 11? But one may also wonder:
were there (always already) those relations among numbers as abstract
objects, over and above the fact that a certain pile of eleven acorns is
exactly eight acorns bigger than a pile with only three, and so on for
similar cases?4 We adopt “3 + 8 = 11” as a convenient norm of represen-
tation that applies to a very wide range of objective facts. But is there a
matter of eternal mathematical fact over and above the many empirical
facts (and norms of adding) that are thus representable? Third, even if we
accept a Platonist construal of mathematical objects, it seems yet more
strained to suppose that, say, in the Precambrian Era, four billion years
ago before there was any life on earth, the sense (of the concept-word)
squirrel was already necessarily both contained in that of mammal and
waiting around to refer to the furry nut-gatherers who haunt our temper-
ate parks and gardens. And then it seems yet more strained to hold that
something like this is true of the interesting concepts that stand in need
of philosophical analysis precisely insofar as they are essentially related
to various human practices: justice, courage, art, decency, belief, and
so on.5
These difficulties—lack of standards comparable to those in mathematics
for determining necessary truths, alternatives to mathematical Platonism,
and complex, non-natural kind concepts as the natural foci of philosophi-
cal analysis—likewise trouble more empiricist approaches to the analysis of
 Philosophy as Articulation 61
concepts as essentially psychological entities in the mind or brain. While this
latter approach is free of worries about the nature and existence of abstract
objects, it also faces difficulties in construing full-blooded necessity with
respect to interesting concepts, as well as worries about how to identify con-
cepts ‘in’ either the mind or brain, as entities that underlie and determine the
correct uses of concept-words. How could standards of correctness of use
and necessary relations of implication be established by merely empirically
existing entities with roles governed, at best, by empirical laws?6
Perhaps, then, rather than thinking of concepts as some sorts of fixed
entities (Platonistic or psychological) whose natures and relations are open
to some kind of ‘inspection,’ it would be apt and useful to consider concepts
as essentially the meanings of concept-words as those words have complex,
sometimes changing, and sometimes contested uses in practice. This would
amount to thinking of the nature of concepts as determined by practice
(which might well have its own forms of reasonableness, groundings, and
responsiveness to reality in some cases), rather than vice versa, and think-
ing of concepts in this way would yield a significantly different picture of
conceptual analysis as itself essentially practice-directed. What might con-
ceptual analysis then look like?

II

In this view of conceptual analysis, the increasingly blurry line between ana-
lyzing words as they have been used in practice and articulating new uses
of those words in the midst of living suggests that a notion of conceptual
articulation may be more appropriate. Plausibly, philosophers sensitive to
the difficulties we have just surveyed do not simply analyze how words are
used; they also put those words into use in ways they hope will affect our
perspectives and further thinking.
In fact, the idea that conceptual analysis is essentially practice-directed,
verging upon a practice of conceptual articulation and even conceptual cre-
ation, was significantly developed in the middle third of the twentieth cen-
tury, primarily by Austin, Wittgenstein, and Ryle, before the developments
of Quinean naturalism, Chomskyan psychologism, and Kripkean essential-
ism, and then again by Deleuze in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Within the Anglo-American tradition, however, the relevant understandings
of conceptual analysis as essentially practice-directed, together with the rea-
sons for them and the sorts of results such a practice might yield, have been
largely forgotten or ignored, largely under the pressures of naturalism, psy-
chologism, and essentialism. Likewise, under the pressures of historicism, it
is often not recognized within the Continental European tradition that the
notion of philosophy as an activity of conceptual creation put forward by
Deleuze is in some ways akin to conceptual analysis in the styles of Austin
and Wittgenstein. Hence, comparing and elaborating different developments
62 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
of conceptual analysis as essentially practice-directed not only can uncover
surprising affinities and points of significant internal debate within other-
wise suppressed traditions, but also can potentially reinvigorate conceptual
analysis itself and bring two otherwise distinct lines of development into
more intimate and productive relation to one another.

III

Among developers of conceptual analysis within the Anglo-American tradi-

tion, Austin has been particularly ignored, neglected not only in the wake
of the developments of essentialism and psychologism, but also in virtue
of falling under the shadow of Wittgenstein. Yet Austin’s arguments, while
in some respects parallel to Wittgenstein’s, are frequently compact, anti-
gnomic, and forward-looking toward results in ways that Wittgenstein’s
are not.
Austin’s earliest published essay, his 1939 “Are There A Priori Con-
cepts?” inaugurates both his attacks on concepts-as-entities and his
practice-oriented understandings of concepts and conceptual analysis.
Pointedly, Austin criticizes “the nonsense into which we are led through
the facile use of the word ‘concept,’ ” in particular the nonsense of treat-
ing a concept “as an article of property, a pretty straightforward piece of
goods, which comes into my ‘possession,’ if at all in some definite enough
manner and at some definite enough moment,” so that “whether I do pos-
sess it or not is, apparently, ascertained simply by making an inventory of
the ‘furniture’ of my mind.”7 The reasons why this is nonsense are, first,
that we possess no direct intellectual, intuitive, or introspective access to
concepts as entities (Platonic or psychological). The only thing that can
show whether anyone ‘possesses’ a concept is whether that person consis-
tently and reliably uses a concept-word within a roughly identifiable and
bounded practice of words-in-uses. Or as Austin puts it, “It seems clear,
then, that to ask ‘whether we possess a certain concept’ is the same as to ask
whether a certain word—or rather, sentences in which it occurs—has any
meaning,” which question is, Austin adds, “likely to be ambiguous” and
at least in some cases not to admit of a simple and straightforward yes/no
answer.8 Second, the sentences in question, the uses of which may establish
mastery of a concept word and thus possession of a concept, are themselves
sentences that are available and intelligible within an ordinary, roughly and
indefinitely bounded common linguistic practice. “‘Does he, or do they,
understand this word?’ . . . means, speaking roughly, [‘does he, or do they]
use [it] as we, or as most Englishmen, or as some other assignable persons
use [it?].’ ”9 Hence, trafficking in concepts, in the only sense we can give to
this notion, involves participating in a roughly and indefinitely bounded
practical life with other language users.
When we turn our attentions to actual uses of words, then what we
find is a range of phenomena that do not fall neatly under the model of
 Philosophy as Articulation 63
concept-as-entity together with an extension. First, there is the conceptual
priority of sentence meaning over word meaning, in the sense that one must
accomplish a range of entire linguistic acts—calling attention to, exclaim-
ing, asserting, laughing at, wondering whether, and so on—before one is
properly creditable with mastery of concept-words.10 Second, the fact that
all sentences are in some rough sense “about things” (in the broadest and
most indeterminate possible sense of “thing”) does not imply that every
individual word denotes a thing.11 Prepositions, adverbs, logical connec-
tives, and so on are best conceived of not as names at all (and so not names
of functions), but rather as words that have systematic roles in contribut-
ing to the meanings of the complete sentences in which they occur. Even
for words that are plausibly conceived of as (general) names—that is, for
one-place predicate expressions—it is a mistake to suppose that there is
for each one a single referent or extension, sharply bounded in the same
way from case to case. There is, Austin observes, “no reason whatever to
accept” the principle “unum nomen unum nominatum. . . . Why, if ‘one
identical’ word is used, must there be ‘one identical object’ which it denotes?
Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?
[Footnote: Many similar things, on a plausible view: but other views might
be held].”12
In fact, Austin goes on, in “The Meaning of a Word” (1940), to analyze
seven different varieties of “obvious cases where the reasons for ‘calling dif-
ferent sorts of things by the same name’ are not to be dismissed lightly as
‘similarity.’ ”13 These seven varieties of cases of uses, in which correct appli-
cations of concept words are not bounded by any single, obvious, simple,
and univocal rule, are:14

1. paronymous uses: e.g., “healthy body” (a “nuclear sense”) vs. “healthy

food” (productive of a healthy body) vs. “healthy glow” (resulting
from a healthy body); the body, food, and glow are not in any single,
obvious way alike.
2. analogous uses: e.g., “foot of a mountain,” “foot of a page.”
3. nontransitive uses: e.g., Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Mozart’s
Requiem are both profound, and so are Mozart’s Requiem and
Beethoven’s Sonata #8 (“Pathetique”), but the Bach and the Beethoven
are not in any obvious way like one another.
4. uses of terms with multiple, independent criteria: e.g., “fascism,”
“cynicism.”
5. determinates of determinables: e.g., “ultramarine blue” and “indigo
blue” are both blue, but otherwise quite different; more radically,
“pleasure in solving quadratic equations” and “pleasure in drinking
Belgian beer” are both pleasures but otherwise unlike.
6. quality/object ambiguities: “love” (“A’s love for B,” “my love”),
“youth” (“early in a developmental history” vs. “the youths”).
7. activity-related terms: “cricket bat,” “cricket umpire,” “cricket pitch”
(two senses), “cricket sweater.”
64 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
Given such varieties of uses of single terms, where no clear, single rule for
application is evident, it is reasonable to conclude, as Austin does, that “An
actual language has few, if any explicit conventions, no sharp limits to the
spheres of operations of rules, no rigid separation of what is syntactical and
what semantical.”15 About any particular use of any particular word in a
particular circumstance, it is possible to ask reasonably for clarification. Or,
as Austin puts it, we may ask, “What-is-the-meaning-of (the word) ‘rat’?”
either in this case (rodent vs. informer) or with a specific, more general
range of cases or field of comparisons in view. But it is nonsense to ask,
“What is the-meaning-of-the-word-‘rat’?” as though the expression con-
taining dashes were the name of a fixed, univocal, and normatively disposi-
tive substantive lying somehow behind our motley of uses.16
The consequences of this view about the multiplicity and context- and
comparison- sensitivity of criteria for the correct usage of many terms are
immediate and powerful. Conceptual analysis cannot be any sort of inspec-
tion (intellectual, intuitive, etc.) of a fixed ‘meaning-body’ behind or beyond
usage. We should instead pay attention to the complex criteria and com-
mitments by which our usages are normatively governed, in multiple ways,
within our courses of practical responsiveness to the objects and phenomena
of our world. Clarification of cloudy or uncertain uses of concept-words is
likely to be piecemeal and field-of-comparison specific. “If we rush up for a
demand with a definition in the simple manner of Plato or many other phi-
losophers, if we use the rigid dichotomy ‘same meaning, different meaning,’
or ‘What x means,’ as distinguished from ‘the things which are x,’ we shall
simply make hashes of things.”17
Despite, however, his arguments and warnings against a certain pic-
ture of conceptual analysis, Austin nonetheless himself clearly practices a
form of it. He devotes himself to “examining what we should say when,”18
including both actual and “imagined cases,”19 with the aim, for example,
of undoing significant confusions about freedom and responsibility.20 At the
same time, in practicing his form of conceptual analysis, Austin concedes
that sometimes “people’s usages do vary, and we do talk loosely, and we
do say different things apparently indifferently,”21 and that “it cannot be
expected that all examples will appeal equally to all hearers.”22 Moreover,
ordinary usage, even when it is relatively clear and shared, is not sacrosanct.
“It equally will not do, having discovered the facts about ‘ordinary usage’
to rest content with that, as though there were nothing more to be discussed
and discovered. There may be plenty which might happen and does happen
which would need new and better language to describe it.”23 Yet Austin
is practicing a form of conceptual analysis, not doing empirical linguistics
in the sense of simply tabulating (sometimes loose, sometimes divergent)
usages. What exactly then is Austin doing, when he is displaying cases in
which we would clearly call one thing an accident and another a mistake,
one thing a case of succumbing to temptation and another quite different
thing a case of losing control of oneself?24
 Philosophy as Articulation 65
This is not an easy question to answer. But one helpful suggestion, made
by Stanley Bates and Ted Cohen, following up on work by Stanley Cavell, is
that Austin, along with anyone who enters a claim about what we say when,
is speaking “with a universal voice,” in Kant’s sense of this phrase in The
Critique of the Power of Judgment.25 According to Kant, when someone
calls something beautiful, then that person does not postulate or predict the
agreement of others, but rather demands and ascribes it.26 Such judgments
are, Kant later adds, arguable by reference to reasons but not disputable by
means of proofs or other decisive evidence.27 One might say that the judg-
ment that something is beautiful expresses a sense of having experienced
something in a certain way, as a certain kind of achievement of distinctively
pleasurable intelligibility, coupled with a sense that it must be so experi-
enced, that others must experience it likewise (if they pay attention to it in
the right way).
Adapted, then, to the judgment of the ordinary language philosopher
about what we say when, the thought is that making such a claim is
both enabling others to hear and say likewise and demanding that they
do so.28 Such a claim can always fail, just as a critic’s claims directed at
the enabling of aesthetic experience can fail or be repudiated. (Perhaps
the critic has paid attention in the wrong way, or perhaps the work is
simply inaccessible to some others.) But such failures do not impugn the
reasonableness of the procedure, which sometimes leads to success in the
form, in the case of claims about what we say when, of felt satisfaction
and rightness in what one, along with others, clearly and confidently says
and means.
This picture of the possible achievement arrived at via claims about what
we say when thus implies that, prior to such achievements, one, along with
others, may have been judging and speaking in a kind of incoherence, in
a fugue state of half-meaning or not fully meaning what one had said or
thought, as though one were a living victim of cliché and inattentiveness.
Hence the claim of the ordinary language philosopher as analyzer of con-
cepts is directed at furthering a kind of awakening to one’s own judgments,
thoughts, and experiences, directed toward a kind of heightened, more flu-
ent and apt responsiveness to the things of one’s world. Both awakening
and heightened fluency and responsiveness can be shared with others with
whom one shares a language and world, and, in following the ordinary
language philosopher’s claim with their own ears and minds, its hearers or
readers may arrive at such shared fluency and responsiveness for themselves.
Or, of course, they may not. But what is at stake in the ordinary language
philosopher’s entering of a claim about what we say when is the achieve-
ment of a kind of heightened life as a responsive subject in relation to things,
under conditions in which, always, that life is liable to become sterile and
unthinking. Since such threats are permanent, philosophy is centrally less a
body of theory than it is centrally an ongoing critical activity in the service
of life.
66 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
IV

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze, with Guattari, approvingly states with

respect to Austin’s pragmatic approach to language that “the meaning and
syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the speech
acts they presuppose.”29 Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language will ulti-
mately challenge traditional notions of the speaking subject by considering
speech acts as effects of what they call “collective assemblages of enun-
ciation”—ways of meaning-making with implicit rules that change over
time—rather than of the particular subjects making the speech acts.30 Fur-
thermore, they characterize philosophy as a practice that, along with creat-
ing concepts, creates what they call “conceptual personae” in defiance of the
personal identities of embodied philosophers.31 Nevertheless, they, like Aus-
tin, consider philosophy to be a critical activity that can help us to achieve
a heightened response to life.32
According to Deleuze, thinking is part of life; a philosophy that would
freeze thinking into propositions that it proclaims to be timelessly true is
a philosophy that becomes increasingly out of step with the need to make
sense of the life in which we are immersed. Just as life cannot be reduced
to the forms we perceive at a given moment, so the wisdom philosophy
seeks cannot be reduced to propositions that fixate moments of thinking.
Life is always more than what is manifest to our conscious awareness—it
is also the intensities that are moving what is manifest into new forms, the
imperceptible forces insisting in the most fleeting moment that are even now
moving whatever is toward something else.
To counter the notion of a philosophical concept as a word or term with
a fixed meaning that can be cashed out in a set of propositions, Deleuze pos-
its it as an event.33 Like any word, a concept may be attributable to specific
states of affairs, but the sense of the concept is always in excess of any given
state of affairs; not only are there always other states of affairs to which
it may also apply, but the meanings of the concept will reverberate differ-
ently in keeping with shifts in the internal relations of its components and
its relations to other concepts. Deleuze characterizes concepts in a way that
not only attempts to shake us out of the ruts of conventional movements of
thought, but also conceives them as integrally related to and yet in excess of
the empirical movements of thinking that actualize them.
Deleuze’s conception of the time-image that appears in modern cinema
presents some aspects of what he thinks philosophical thinking can do.
While the perspective of the camera can be taken up by the spectator as a
gaze with which the spectator can identify, cinema is also capable of going
beyond any one gaze and, by virtue of deliberately playing with the “irra-
tional cuts” made possible by film, evoking a multiplicity of perspectives
that cannot be assimilated into one rational whole. Cinema is an art form
that can access what Deleuze calls the virtual—what we might here describe
as the transcendental field of virtual relations conditioning what actually
 Philosophy as Articulation 67
appears—by going beyond any one perspective in order to intimate a whole
of multiple perspectives that can no longer be contained within one totaliz-
able whole.34
While the cinematic time-image intimates the intensities that haunt the
specific moment in space and time rendered by the cinematic shot, phi-
losophy deliberately confronts the transcendental field of infinite meaning.
A philosopher creates a novel perspective from a plane of immanence—a
pre-philosophical plane constituting a problem to which thought responds
by breaking out of the constraints of common sense perception and opin-
ion.35 This perspective travels from the specific lived experiences of the phi-
losopher back up to a realm of meaning unfettered by the common and by
the good sense of a philosopher and her personal identity. The philosopher’s
concept, by virtue of its access to a stratigraphic time in which all words are
connected to all other words, taps resonances, echoes, and intensities that
can incite novel trajectories of meaning out of the transcendental field of
sense that conditions specific acts of meaning.
Working with sense—paying attention to the components of meaning
that make up a particular concept, playing with those components until the
concept attains a kind of fullness—a self-referential quality that stabilizes it
out of a sea of possible meanings—allows one to move away from a par-
ticular state of affairs in order to make generalizations that apply to more
than that one state of affairs without losing touch with the actual situation
out of which it emerged. A philosophical concept attempts to get at mean-
ings that can be applied to more than one situation, meanings haunted by
implicit trajectories that could unfold in more than one way. It is thus an
event rather than a representation of a state of affairs, a constellation of
meanings that actualize some rather than others of the virtual relations of a
transcendental field of sense. It entails tendencies toward further movements
of thought that may or may not actually unfold, and it is a configuration of
meaning that can be ascribed to multiple states of affairs.
A philosopher in doing philosophy breaks from her personal identity and
creates perspectives on a plane of immanence drawn from her pragmatic
situation—the situation she lives as an embodied individual immersed in the
life of a specific social field. The meaning of words plays out against a tran-
scendental field of sense where the meaning of particular sentences stabilizes
in the context of the referents and speakers of pragmatic situations. That
meaning, however, could always have played out otherwise with different
inflections, thus actualizing other nuances in connection with the discursive
and non-discursive practices informing the social field from which those
meanings emerge. A plane of immanence emerges with the creation of con-
cepts that condense components of thought and link up to other concepts.
The self-referential connections that form within and between concepts con-
stitute new forms of meaning that allow one to leave behind the constraints
of a conventional perspective on life and yet to stabilize meaning out of the
chaotic possibilities of sense.
68 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
If language can never completely capture truth in relation to life it is
because truth unfolds in time. And time entails the continual unfolding
of the new, as well as the repetition of patterns familiar to us due to our
experience with the past. If we consider the truth of this moment here and
now—this moment of life that I am living—we know that we can never do
it justice. Any articulation of this moment must fail because this moment is
always unfolding into the next and, even if we can detect patterns that we
can recognize as equally true of the past as of the present, those patterns can
never capture the truth of this moment.
According to Henri Bergson, who is an important influence in Deleuze’s
work, in order for conscious perception to be that of a living organism able
to act in ways that will ensure its survival, it must suppress the greater part
of the complicated enmeshment of material life in order to discern what is
of practical interest from the perspective of a particular organism with par-
ticular needs. In Matter and Memory, Bergson considers the relationship of
material objects to our perceptions of them; he conceives a material object
apart from our perception of that object as an image among a universe of
images, all of which are material points without perspective that implicate
and impact one another. He contrasts “the image which I call a material
object” to the represented image that is a conscious perception of that mate-
rial object: “That which distinguishes it as a present image, as an objective
reality, from a represented image is the necessity which obliges it to act
through every one of its points upon all the points of all other images, to
transmit the whole of what it receives, to oppose to every action an equal
and contrary reaction, to be, in short, merely a road by which pass, in every
direction, the modifications propagated throughout the immensity of the
universe.”36 As Alia Al-Saji puts it, such “an unperceived and unperceiving
point virtually implies the rest of the dynamic and interpenetrating universe
in its complexity and richness, with its infinite and incompossible relations.
Its vision is a non-selective and indifferent kind, which registers everything
but discerns nothing.”37 A conscious perspective requires “a process that
limits and diminishes the virtual whole. It is in this way that representation
and consciousness come about.”38
The futility of attempting to capture life with a static image is appar-
ent when one stares at a photograph of a loved one who has passed away.
Words likewise inevitably fail to capture the living presence of one who is
no longer with us. What “truth” about a loved one refuses distillation into a
form we can grasp even when she or he is gone? It is toward art that we may
look to capture something of the truth of concrete forms of life. Deleuze’s
books on Francis Bacon, Marcel Proust, and cinema develop an intriguing
understanding of this kind of aesthetic truth that is an illuminating coun-
terpart to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy as a thought form that entails
creating concepts.
If we consider Bergson’s comparison of a material image to the repre-
sented image of conscious perception, we can see that anything that we can
 Philosophy as Articulation 69
call a perspective is in a sense haunted by interpenetrating influences that
always exceed those that emerge in relation to the needs of a particular
organism. The force of these influences constitutes a kind of ontological
unconscious that is the virtual reality inflecting any actualized present.
In his book on the painter Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation, Deleuze distinguishes between sensation and perception; sensa-
tion refers to a kind of experience that is imperceptible, since it refers to
forces impinging on unreflective awareness (and also entailing our own
impingement on what’s around us) that affect how we experience the world
but that lie just beyond the edges of what we can pin down in perceptions
stable enough to describe.39 According to Deleuze, art composes monu-
ments of sensation that intimate a visceral becoming-other that haunts our
conscious awareness without becoming overtly manifest.40
In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze describes how Bacon talks about cap-
turing a likeness in a portrait that goes beyond appearance and evokes the
intensity of the real; instead of doing portraits that rest with the form of a
particular human being as she is present in appearance at a given point in
time, Bacon hints at the forces making up that human being—forces that
are always in the process of unfolding.41 Thus, Bacon moves beyond the
conventions of perception and through his paintings evokes sensation—an
experience of visceral affect inarticulable in words and eluding familiar
forms of perception and instead evoking a sense of discomfort and unfamil-
iarity that allows us to experience something about those human beings and
the human condition that we had not before.
By opening up an aesthetic articulation of the world of the novel through
an exploration into the depth of events, Proust similarly investigates the
virtual past of those events in a way that shows us the intensity of time.42
His series of novels evokes life in terms of a memory that exceeds any one
perspective or a multiplicity of perspectives that can be correlated into one
homogeneous whole and instead posits what Deleuze calls “fragments” that
cannot be put together and instead are put alongside one another.43 These
fragments evoke a past that may not have become explicit to consciousness,
but that insists itself in the present in terms of what would have to change in
the present, actualized situation in order for it to move over thresholds into
a different situation. These fragments cannot be assimilated into one whole
because they compose different fragments of duration that could unfold in
ways that are incompatible with other durations. Because how each frag-
ment unfolds with respect to other fragments exerts its own effects, there
is no way to organize them into a linear chain of cause and effect. Instead,
each fragment could set off a whole series of unfoldings, each of which
would interact with other series in unpredictable ways. To stay with the
appearance of what has already actually unfolded is thus for Deleuze to
overlook a crucial aspect of the real.
Philosophy, unlike art, does not look at the becoming of specific things—of
a specific human body or the portrait of an individual. But according to
70 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
Deleuze, it, like art, provides access to a chaotic world that defies contain-
ment of the world within categories that we have applied to past events.
Philosophy—like art and science—is a distinctive form of thought that
creatively grapples with life’s novelty. While art composes monuments of
sensation—percepts (perceptions that evoke becoming-other) and affects
(emotions that evoke becoming-other)—and science invents functions on a
plane of reference, philosophy creates concepts.44
It is a paradox that, even when philosophy is conceived as a set of time-
less truths waiting to be discovered, it is never satisfied with its answers;
philosophy is an open-ended process in which one must inevitably question
the truths one has arrived at and continue the process of thinking. Deleuze’s
conception of philosophy as a thought form that creates concepts entails the
notion of a concept as an event rather than a fixed truth. A concept as an
event of thought is a virtual multiplicity whose internal links among com-
ponents of meaning and external links to other concepts make up a plane
of immanence that evokes the restless movement of thinking as a generative
process. Our contemporary situation—one of rapid change and unprece-
dented problems of almost unthinkable scale—is perhaps one that demands
this Deleuzian conception. Only a philosophy that includes a temporal as
well as spatial dimension can speak to a thinking that arises from and keeps
pace with the accelerating speed of life’s movement.

Austin, by articulating a notion of concepts as practice-directed, turns our

attention from concepts as reified entities to which our conceptual activ-
ity refers (more or less well) to embodied practices in and through which
concepts evolve. Philosophical activity as conceptual analysis becomes a
practice-directed by immanent rules in which we attempt to become ever
more aware and more precise about how we articulate meanings we share.
Such activity demands attention to those rules in the living contexts in which
they are applied, rather than accepting past applications as automatically
transferable to present circumstances.
Austin’s particular style and point in cultivating this active attention are a
function of his sense that we are sometimes captivated by impossible images
of absolute control in thinking and judging that are associated with meta-
physical philosophy. We often enough fail to think clearly and have instead
rushed into a theoretical stance that counterfeits our interests by running
against the grain of ordinary life that is often meaningful enough. As Austin
puts it in “A Plea for Excuses,” “ordinary language is not the last word: in
principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and super-
seded. Only remember, it is the first word,” in virtue of embodying “the
inherited experience and acumen of many generations.”45
Deleuze, with his characterization of concepts as events, indicates some-
thing of the past of meaning-making as it informs its present evolution.
 Philosophy as Articulation 71
Philosophical activity, by attending to shifts in meaning according to a prin-
ciple of consistency, settles on some ways in which meaning in particular
times and places can unfold, given its past, in keeping with the problems life
poses.46 Conceptual analysis, in Deleuze’s view, becomes not just a philo-
sophical practice that attends to meaning in precise ways, but a practice
that deliberately unfolds some meanings rather than others from the chaotic
field of sense conditioning specific practices of meaning. Deleuze’s particular
style and point in this practice of unfolding are largely aimed at uncover-
ing new possibilities of practice against the grain of a common life that is
all too likely to be ossified or constrained by implicit rules that refuse life’s
experimentation with the new.
For both Austin and Deleuze, however, philosophical activity is a form of
practice in the articulation of concepts that can break with ritualized ways
of thinking by attending to the virtual echoes that inevitably emerge as we
articulate our responses to life. If Austin enacts a contemporary sense that
human life is both chaotically fragmented and over-intellectualized, Deleuze
enacts a contemporary sense of being frozen in one-sidedness and subject
to the sedimented patterns of the already said and done. Both senses strike
us as reasonable perceptions of threats posed to human flourishing in cur-
rent circumstances. Given the nature and difficulty of these partly opposed,
partly complementary threats, it is clear why, in the view of both Austin and
Deleuze, the practice of philosophy as conceptual articulation not only is
inevitably open-ended, but also plays a crucial role in the ongoing attune-
ments of humanity to life.

NOTES

1 See Moore (1903), p. 442. Moore’s stalking horse example is the Idealist
analysis of the concept yellow that is expressed in the claim (Moore calls it a
formula) “yellow is the sensation of yellow.”
2 Frege (1892). Following the opening discussion of the problem of cognitively
informative identity statements, the sense/reference distinction is introduced
on p. 200.
3 The sense of an expression is, roughly, its linguistic meaning plus any fur-
ther information that is relevant and available in virtue of its context of use.
Since the context of mathematics is (usually) completely general, contextual
specificities can normally be discounted there and sense can be identified with
linguistic meaning.
4 Thoughts like this might suggest a structuralist conception of mathematics: a
common pattern is instanced in various groups of acorns, pebbles, kernels of
corn, etc., and mathematics might be about such patterns, rather than about
independently existing, eternal abstract objects.
5 Similar points haunt a Kripkean approach, in the spirit of Frege, to empirically
knowable necessary truths. When does empirical inquiry yield strong, more
than pragmatic necessity with regard to natural kinds? And what about the
important, complex non-natural kind-concepts that are the traditional con-
cerns of philosophical analysis?
6 Frege’s criticisms of psychologism are to the point here, even if his own Pla-
tonist alternative is not free of problems of its own.
72 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
7 Austin (1939), p. 41.
8 Austin (1939), p. 43. Note the plural “sentences;” multiple compliant and
coherent uses, not a single use only, are necessary before we will credit anyone
with mastery of a concept-word as opposed to the issuing of a happenstantial
noise.
9 Austin (1939), p. 42.
10 See Austin (1939), p. 40 as well as Austin (1940), p. 56.
11 Austin (1939), p. 40.
12 Austin (1939), p. 38.
13 Austin (1940), p. 71.
14 The following seven points summarize Austin’s discussion in Austin (1940),
pp. 71–74.
15 Austin (1940), p. 67.
16 Austin (1940), p. 55.
17 Austin (1940), p. 74.
18 Austin (1957), p. 181.
19 Austin (1966), p. 274.
20 See the discussions of the importance of Aristotle in having recognized that
questions of who is responsible for what (and who may be excused for what)
are more natural than and prior to (artificial) ‘theoretical’ investigations of the
freedom of the will in Austin (1957), p. 180, and Austin (1966), p. 273.
21 Austin (1957), p. 183.
22 Austin (1940), p. 66.
23 Austin (1940), p. 69. Compare Austin (1957), p. 185.
24 These distinctions appear in Austin (1957), pp. 185n. and 198n.
25 Bates and Cohen (1972), p. 22. Kant introduces the idea of speaking with a
universal voice in §8 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment in order to cap-
ture the unique kind of claim that is made in calling anything beautiful. Kant
(2000), V: 216, p. 101.
26 The postulate/demand and predict/ascribe distinctions are laid out in Kant
(2000), §§7, 8, V: 212–13, 216; pp. 98. 101.
27 Kant (2000), §56, V: 338, p. 214.
28 Stanley Cavell develops the parallel between the judgments of the critic of the
arts and the claims of the ordinary language philosopher in “Aesthetic Prob-
lems of Modern Philosophy,” in Cavell (1969), pp. 88–96.
29 Deleuze and Guattari (1987), p. 77.
30 “It is the illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit presupposi-
tions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assemblages of
enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents of juridical acts, which, far from de-
pending on subjectification proceedings or assignations of subjects in language,
in fact determine their distribution,” (Deleuze and Guattari (1987), p. 78).
31 “The face and body of philosophers shelter these personae who often give
them a strange appearance, especially in the glance, as if someone else was
looking through their eyes.” Deleuze and Guattari (1994), p. 73. For more on
conceptual personae see chapter 3 of Deleuze and Guattari (1994), pp. 61–83.
32 Since the following discussion is framed through Deleuze’s work rather than
through that of Guattari, the references to A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze
and Guattari’s book, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) will
henceforth be referred to as Deleuze.
33 “Concepts are events” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994), p. 36. Deleuze and Guat-
tari also here characterize the concept as “speaking” or “knowing” the event
(pp. 21, 33) and philosophy as drawing concepts from states of affairs “in-
asmuch as it extracts the event from them” (p. 52). “The concept is neither
denotation of states of affairs nor signification of the lived; it is the event
as pure sense that immediately runs through its components” (p. 144). The
 Philosophy as Articulation 73
concept of the event is developed by Deleuze, and Deleuze with Guattari, in
multiple places. For some relevant examples see Deleuze and Guattari (1994),
pp. 156–178 and Deleuze (1990), pp. 12–22, 52–57, and 148–153.
34 Deleuze develops the concept of the time-image with respect to Henri Bergson’s
notions of the actual and the virtual in his book, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
(Deleuze 1989). See p. 74 and pp.105–11 for Deleuze’s characterization of
the images related to the mystery of Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” in Orson
Welle’s film Citizen Kane as an example of an early depiction of the direct
time-image in modern cinema.
35 See ch. 2, “The Plane of Immanence” in Deleuze and Guattari (1994),
pp. 35–60.
36 Bergson (1991), p. 34.
37 Al-Saji (2004), p. 220.
38 Al-Saji (2004), p. 220.
39 See Bogue (2003), pp. 116–121, for more on Deleuze’s distinction between
sensation and perception and its sources in the work of Henri Maldiney and
Erwin Straus.
40 “We attain to the percept and the affect only as to autonomous and sufficient
beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experi-
enced them: Combray [the town evoked by Proust’s madeleine] like it never
was, is or will be lived; Combray as cathedral or monument” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, p. 168).
41 “But in the end, it is a movement ‘in-place,’ a spasm, which reveals a com-
pletely different problem characteristic of Bacon: the action of invisible forces
on the body” (Deleuze 2003), p. 36.
42 The connection made here between the concept of sensation that Deleuze de-
velops in The Logic of Sensation and the concept of the fragment he develops
in Proust and Signs is indebted to Miguel de Beistegui’s lucid commentary
in chapter 6 of his book, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy (de Beistegui
2010), pp. 160–191.
43 “Even when the past is given back to us in essences . . . what is given us is
neither a totality nor an eternity, but ‘a bit of time in the pure state’, that is, a
fragment (Proust, À la Recherche du temps perdu, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
III, p. 705)” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 122). “By setting fragments into fragments,
Proust finds the means of making us contemplate them all, but without refer-
ence to a unity from which they might derive or which itself would derive from
them” (Deleuze (2000), p. 123).
44 Deleuze and Guattari (1994), p. 197.
45 Austin (1957), p. 185.
46 “[T]he concept in philosophy expresses an event that gives consistency to the
virtual on a plane of immanence in an ordered form” Deleuze and Guattari
(1994), p. 133.

WORKS CITED

Al-Saji, A. 2004. The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a New Theory
of Time. Continental Philosophy Review 37(2): 203–239.
Austin, J. L. 1939. Are There A Priori Concepts? In Philosophical Papers, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 32–54.
Austin, J. L. 1940. The Meaning of a Word. In Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 55–75.
Austin, J. L. 1957. A Plea for Excuses. In Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 175–204.
74 Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine
Austin, J. L. 1966. Three Ways of Spilling Ink. In Philosophical Papers, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 272–287.
Austin, J. L. 1970. Philosophical Papers. 2nd. ed. Eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. War-
nock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bates, S. and T. Cohen. 1972. More on What We Say. Metaphilosophy 3(1) (Janu-
ary): 1–24.
Bergson, H. 1991. Matter and Memory. Zone Books.
Bogue, R. 2003. Deleuze: On Music, Painting, and the Arts. London: Routledge.
Cavell, S. 1969. Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy. In S. Cavell, ed., Must
We Mean What We Say? New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 73–96.
De Beistegui, M. 2010. Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh, Scotland:
Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze, G. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1990. Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. 2000. Proust and Signs, The Complete Text. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Frege, G. 1892. Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philoso-
phische Kritik 100 (1892); reprinted as “On Sense and Nominatum,” trans. Her-
bert Feigl, in The Philosophy of Language, 4th ed., ed. A. P. Martinich (Oxford
University Press, 2001), 199–211.
Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mat-
thews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Proust, M. À la Recherche du temps perdu, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, III.
4 Conceptual Genealogy for
Analytic Philosophy
Catarina Dutilh Novaes

1. INTRODUCTION

The significance attributed to the history of philosophy for the systematic

investigation of philosophical issues divides the analytic and the continen-
tal philosophical traditions. Typically, the continental philosopher sees the
historical development of a given philosophical issue or concept as a sub-
stantial and perhaps even indispensable element for the analysis, whereas
the analytic philosopher tends to treat issues and concepts as if they were
ahistorical entities, thus not requiring such a historical contextualization to
be properly grasped.1
Influential ‘continental’ authors such as Nietzsche and Foucault have
placed historical analysis at the epicenter of their respective philosophical
methodologies, in particular with the concepts of ‘genealogy’ and ‘archaeol-
ogy.’ More recently, ‘analytic’ authors such as Ian Hacking, Edward Craig,
and Bernard Williams, among others, have pursued similar lines of inves-
tigation. For the most part, however, and despite some notable exceptions
(such as Crane 2015), analytic philosophers remain quite hostile to the idea
that the systematic analysis of a given concept or issue has something to
benefit from becoming historically informed.
In this paper, I discuss in detail a philosophical methodology that I call
‘conceptual genealogy.’ This methodology underpins much of my work in
the history and philosophy of logic to date (for example, my work on the
concept of logical form), which however falls squarely within the ‘analytic
tradition.’2 I argue that analytic philosophy in general has much to gain
from incorporating the historicist component of genealogical investigations.
Analytic philosophers too must take seriously the idea that philosophical
concepts may be historical products, rather than atemporal natural kinds or
essences, and that they bring along with them traces of their historical devel-
opment as well as of broader cultural contexts. Indeed, one of the key aspects
of typical genealogical approaches (as is clear, in particular, in Nietzsche) is
an emphasis on the contingent nature of (philosophical) concepts and phe-
nomena as products of long and winding historical developments. More-
over, conceptual genealogy produces narratives whose protagonists are
76 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
concepts, issues, and arguments, not authors; it operates predominantly on
philosophical texts, but textual authorship is not the main focus. It focuses
on how philosophical concepts are reinterpreted and transformed through
their historical developments, while maintaining traces of their previous
instantiations. Conceptual genealogy is thus a longue durée approach to the
history of philosophy.
Before we proceed, however, I must say something about the range and
scope of the considerations to follow. I focus almost exclusively on dis-
tinctively theoretical, philosophical concepts, such as, for example, the
concepts of logical form, truth, knowledge, etc. These concepts may be
related to extra-theoretical concepts and phenomena in interesting ways,
but here the focus is on the historical development of such concepts as reg-
istered in philosophical texts. Thus, projects of evolutionary genealogy, or
‘state of nature’ projects (i.e., quasi-mythological accounts of the ‘original,’
pre-societal stages of human existence, e.g., Rousseau’s account of the ori-
gins of inequality), for example, do not count as ‘conceptual genealogy’ in
the sense countenanced here.
Social and historical developments outside philosophy also fall outside
the scope of the present investigation3 though the historian of philosophy
does well to pay attention to the material and social backgrounds for the
emergence of philosophical theories and concepts.4 For example, Fou-
cault’s (1975, 1976) genealogical investigations of social phenomena such
as sexuality and punishment obviously included numerous elements out-
side the limited scope of the philosophical corpus, and this is not the kind
of (sociological) genealogy we will focus on here (though some elements
of Foucault’s framework will be in the background). In other words, the
genealogical projects to be discussed here pertain to the development of
certain key concepts specifically within philosophy, and predominantly as
registered in philosophical texts. There is still the question of how these
philosophical concepts are related to non-philosophical concepts (and the
line between what counts as a philosophical vs. a non-philosophical concept
is bound to be rather blurry and contentious), as well as to non-conceptual
phenomena, i.e., ‘reality’ as such. But for now, it is sufficient to clarify that
the scope of the present investigation is somewhat narrower than some
readers may expect, given the various other genealogical projects they may
be familiar with.

2. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE AHISTORICAL

CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY

Williams (2002) and Craig (2007) draw a useful distinction between gene-
alogies that seek to expose the reprehensible origins of something and
thereby decrease its value, and genealogies that seek to glorify their objects
by exposing their ‘noble’ origins. The former are described as ‘subversive,’
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 77
‘shameful,’ or ‘debunking,’ while the latter may be described as ‘vindica-
tory.’ (I will have much more to say on this distinction later on; I will also
discuss a third category.)5 Nietzsche’s famous genealogical analysis of moral-
ity is the archetypal subversive genealogy and has given rise to a formidable
tradition of deconstruction of concepts, values, views, beliefs, etc. by the
exposure of their pudenda origo, their shameful origins (Srinivasan 2011).
But naturally, the pull of (Nietzschean) genealogy was not felt to the same
extent elsewhere. In effect, so-called analytic philosophers remained by and
large resistant to genealogical enterprises (both subversive and vindicatory),
so much so that one’s stance towards genealogical projects can be seen as
one of the main differences between so-called continental and so-called ana-
lytic philosophers.6 What is more, some analytic philosophers seemed to
take what they saw as the shortcomings of genealogical projects to be a
sign that any kind of historical contextualization of concepts and beliefs in
the context of philosophical analysis would be misguided. Thus, analytic
philosophy embraced what could be described as a largely ahistorical (or
even anti-historical) conception of philosophy, whereas historical analysis
remains of crucial importance for continental philosophers (Mulligan et al.
2006).7
Naturally, these are general trends rather than absolute rules, and a
number of analytic philosophers have engaged in genealogical projects or,
more generally, ensured that their philosophical analyses be historically
informed.8 (I take genealogy to be one but not the only way to engage
in philosophically relevant historical analysis.) Hacking (for example, in
(Hacking 1995), among many other works) is perhaps the most prominent
example, along with Craig (1990) and Williams (2002). (Importantly, Wil-
liams and Hacking are overtly influenced by so-called continental authors
such as Nietzsche and Foucault, respectively). Still, mainstream analytic phi-
losophers tend to believe that the (philosophical) history of a given concept
or belief is not likely to be relevant for a philosophical understanding of the
concept, or likely to improve our knowledge of the phenomena in reality
that the concept in question is a concept of.9 Here is an apt description of
this phenomenon:10

Analytic philosophy has largely rejected historical modes of under-

standing. [. . .] This neglect, however, is not accidental: it is the result of
the general repudiation of the historical mode of understanding within
analytic philosophy. In particular, analytic philosophy seems to think
of itself as taking place within a single timeless moment. (Hylton 1990,
p. viii)

A number of explanations may be given to account for (or even justify) the
analytic philosopher’s rejection of historically informed philosophical anal-
ysis in general and genealogical approaches more specifically. Firstly, the
analytic philosopher may think that what is philosophically relevant is not
78 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
the context of discovery of a concept or belief, but rather its potential jus-
tification (to resort to the old but still useful Popperian distinction). In this
vein, the origins and historical development of a concept or belief are irrele-
vant for establishing its (presumably) objective and philosophically relevant
properties: What is the extension of the concept? What is the truth-value of
the belief? Is it justified? For instance, if the belief is true (and even better,
also justified), then the fact of having shameful origins will not make any
difference; conversely, if the belief is false, then having noble origins will
not change its falsity (Srinivasan ms.) (see section 4.3 for a discussion of the
genetic fallacy).
Moreover, a tacit (and sometimes explicit) commitment that seems to
underpin much analytic philosophy is the idea that the concepts the philoso-
pher studies (or the corresponding non-conceptual phenomena in reality)
are natural kinds, defined by immutable, atemporal essences. (See e.g., Korn-
blith 2011 for the claim that the concept of knowledge is a natural kind, and
a critique of Kornblith by Kusch 2013.) Indeed, Frege, Russell, and Moore
(arguably, the founders of analytic philosophy as we know it) were all con-
ceptual realists, i.e., they took concepts to have human-independent reality.
Now, if the concepts studied by philosophers correspond to (or are them-
selves) natural kinds, or more generally have a human-independent and
atemporal kind of existence, then the different ways in which philosophers
conceived of them through time are irrelevant. What matters is to formulate
them correctly, for example, by formulating the right necessary and suf-
ficient conditions for something to count as X.11 Assuming that there are
such conditions (objectively speaking), if philosophers of previous genera-
tions associated different conditions with X, then they were simply wrong,
and there is not much of philosophical significance to be gained from their
mistakes (except perhaps for avoiding making the same mistakes). Another
way to make the same point is to say that what philosophers do is to set out
to discover preexisting, possibly immutable, essences. Now, if this is what
they do indeed, then there is not much point in historically contextualizing
the quest for ahistorical essences.
My goal at this point is not to offer a definitive answer to the (largely
sociological, but also philosophically interesting) question of why analytic
philosophers tend not to be big fans of genealogical projects in general. For
now, it is sufficient to notice that this seems indeed to be the case (as also
noted by a number of authors before me, such as Hylton 1990 and Crane
2015). Moreover, the tentative explanations just offered also suggest a cer-
tain conception of philosophical concepts and of the nature of the philo-
sophical enterprise—discovering truths, be they about concepts or about
non-conceptual reality—that must be further discussed and, to some extent,
questioned, if genealogical projects are to be relevant at all for the investiga-
tion of systematic philosophical questions. Notice also that these consider-
ations may apply more broadly to historical analysis as a whole, not only
to the specific kind of historical analysis that is a (conceptual) genealogy.12
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 79
In the remainder of the paper, I defend the view that a suitable formula-
tion of the idea of conceptual genealogy does represent a fruitful method-
ological approach also for the analytic philosopher. The idea is not that it
should supplant other ‘traditional’ analytic methods, but rather that it may
be viewed as a valuable tool in the analytic philosopher’s toolbox, to be
combined with the traditional methods.

3. CONCEPTUAL GENEALOGY

3.1 Nietzschean Genealogy

The mundane, commonsensical sense of genealogy is typically related to the
idea of vindication, i.e., validation of one’s authority and standing through
the narrative of one’s origins. This is particularly conspicuous in historical
disputes for political power within traditional monarchic models: a con-
testant has a claim to the throne if she can prove to be a descendant of the
right people, namely previous monarchical power-holders. In such cases, a
genealogy is what Geuss (1994, p. 274) describes as ‘tracing a pedigree,’ a
practice as old as (Western?) civilization itself.13 The key idea is the idea of
transmission of value: a person with noble ancestry inherits this status from
her ancestors through their common bloodline.
But a genealogy may also have more ‘neutral’ implications: perhaps a
person’s ancestors are not particularly distinguished or noble, but she may
still wish to know where she ‘comes from.’ In the limit case, a genealogy
may also be of the shameful kind, e.g., if what transpires from genealogical
analysis is that a person’s ancestors had dubious social standing (e.g., they
were convicted thieves). In theory, none of it should matter for a person’s
individual worth, and yet in practice we tend to attach a great deal of impor-
tance to a person’s ancestry (e.g., the quasi-mythical status of the Mayflower
pilgrims and their descendants in the United States).
In this sense, a genealogy is a narrative with no gaps: a person’s gene-
alogy is a detailed account of her ancestry, which specifies every relevant
parent-offspring step in the chain. (Naturally, it will have to stop at some
point, usually at the person who is then viewed as the founder of the dynasty
in question—even though this person obviously had parents as well.) Typ-
ically, a genealogy may focus on the transmission of a family’s surname
through generations, thus indicating continuity (of positive value in par-
ticular, e.g., nobility).14 At the same time, a genealogy will always contain
an element of change as well, if for no other reason then because parents
and offspring are by definition different individuals. In effect, the interplay
between continuity and change is one of the fundamental aspects of the
concept of genealogy for the present purposes.
But naturally, this is not a study of genealogies of people; instead, we
are interested in genealogies of (philosophical) concepts, and thus in their
80 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
development through time. The idea that thought itself is a historical beast
rather than something immutable and atemporal can be traced back (at
least) to the German historicist tradition, which emerged in the eighteenth
century (Beiser 2011). Nietzsche’s genealogical approach falls squarely
within this tradition, even if his own interpretation of historicism in terms
of genealogy is arguably quite unique to him.
For the present purposes, it will prove instructive to compare Nietzsche’s
historicism to that of Hegel,15 who famously said:

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a

child of his time, thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended
in thoughts. (Hegel 1820/1991, p. 21)

It follows that different times/contexts will give rise to different instantia-

tions of philosophical concepts; thus, philosophical concepts themselves will
change over time, following more global changes. However, Hegel’s con-
ception of history in general, and of the history of concepts in particular,
is teleological: things could not have taken a different turn, as temporal
developments follow an inevitable path. And so, from this perspective, his-
torical analysis tracing the different steps in the evolution of a concept and
their mutual relations—a conceptual genealogy—will not have the effect
of decreasing the value of the concept in question to us; when there are no
other options, there is nothing to compare it to.
Despite the already established dominant historicist background in
nineteenth-century Germany, Nietzsche is usually seen as the inaugurator
of a new approach, namely what can be described as the subversive vari-
ant of historicist projects. In his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), he
famously offers a genealogy of Christian morality that is meant to expose its
‘shameful’ origins. Rather than comprising eternal, immutable moral pre-
cepts, Christian morality (and the human practices associated with it) is in
fact the product of contingent historical developments, more specifically a
conjunction of a number of diverse lines of events (Geuss 1994, p. 276)—
none of them particularly ‘honorable.’ Specifically, Christian morality arises
from the resentment of slaves directed against their masters, having thus
distinctively malevolent origins (while currently presenting itself as pure and
magnanimous).
Besides the idea of a confluence of multiple lines of development,
another crucial characteristic of Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity for
the present purposes is the idea of a superimposition of layers through
processes of reinterpretation of previously existing practices, giving rise
to new practices that nevertheless retain traces of their previous instan-
tiations. The first significant step in this succession of reinterpretations is
the influential conception of Christianity formulated by Saint Paul, which
represents, however, a drastic departure from the way of life exemplified
by Jesus himself.16
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 81
Paul’s ‘interpretation’ represents so drastic and crude a misinterpreta-
tion of Jesus’ way of life that even at a distance of 2000 years we can
see that wherever the Pauline reading gets the upper hand [. . .] it trans-
forms ‘Christianity’ [. . .] into what is the exact reverse of anything Jesus
himself would have practiced. (Geuss 1994, p. 280)

However, such processes of reinterpretation never manage to quash entirely

traces of the original practices:

Nietzsche thinks that such attempts to take over/reinterpret an existing

set of practices or way of life will not in general be so fully successful
that nothing of the original form of life remains, hence the continuing
tension in post-Pauline Christianity between forms of acting, feeling,
judging which still somehow eventually derive from aboriginal Christi-
anity and Paul’s theological dogmas. (Geuss 1994, p. 281)

Central to Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity is the idea of constant

‘power struggles’ between different ‘wills,’ attempting to impose their own
interpretations and meanings on the practices in question. But even when
a particular new meaning manages to impose itself, the old meaning(s) will
remain present, albeit in modified form, in the resulting complex. Later on,
we will see that this is very much what happens in the historical develop-
ment of philosophical concepts: they undergo modifications, but the super-
imposed layers of meaning typically retain traces of their previous stages
and instantiations even when acquiring a new meaning.
And so, Nietzschean genealogy is characterized by the crucial interplay
between continuity and change; indeed, how can we say that a genealogy is a
genealogy of X if there is nothing permanent at all in the phenomenon in ques-
tion through time? As Brian Leiter puts it, how do we fix the object? He says:

Genealogy, then, presupposes that its object has a stable or essential17

character—its Brauch—that permits us to individuate it intelligibly
over time. What the genealogist denies is that this stable element is to
be located in the object’s purpose or value or meaning (its Sinn); it is
precisely that feature which is discontinuous from point of origin to
present-day embodiment.18 (Leiter 2002/2014, p. 136)

Thus, change and continuity are crucial in a genealogy. And so, the com-
ponents of the Nietzschean conception of genealogy that are particularly
relevant for our present purposes are a particular historicist conception of
concepts and values; the emphasis on the contingency of the underlying his-
torical developments (i.e., contingentist historicism, different from Hegel’s
teleological historicism), usually involving multiple lines of influence; and
the superimposition of layers of meaning, resulting in both change (the
new meaning) and continuity (traces of the old meanings still present, and
82 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
continuity in the phenomenon as such).19 By contrast, Nietzsche’s focus on
shameful genealogy is best kept apart for the present purposes; it will be
argued later on that conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts can be
either vindicatory or subversive—as well as largely neutral, i.e., expository.

3.2 Canguilhem and the Historicity of Scientific Concepts

The thesis of the relevance of historical analysis for philosophical theorizing
rests crucially on a historicist conception of philosophical concepts, namely
that they are not (or do not correspond to) atemporal essences or natu-
ral kinds. However, ‘historicism’ can have different meanings (Beiser 2011,
Introduction), so I must spell out in more detail in what sense I defend a
historicist conception of philosophical concepts.
To this end, let us go back to the anti-historicism of analytic philosophy
discussed in section 2. This largely ahistorical conception of philosophy is at
least partially related to the close ties between philosophy and the (empiri-
cal and formal) sciences defended by key early figures such as Russell and
Carnap. Roughly speaking, just as scientists investigate (presumably) immu-
table, non-historical physical phenomena such as relativity or cell metabo-
lism, so do philosophers investigate (allegedly) immutable concepts: truth,
causation, knowledge, logical validity, etc.
However, the irony is that scientific concepts themselves have time and
again been shown to be everything but immutable and ahistorical (even if
the phenomena they describe might be so, in some sense or another). There
are vibrant, rich traditions within philosophy of science that operate pre-
cisely by means of thorough historical analyses of the emergence and trans-
formation of scientific concepts and theories. For instance, the increasingly
influential Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS) movement
defines itself in the following way:

The founding insight of the modern discipline of HPS is that history and
philosophy have a special affinity and one can effectively advance both
simultaneously. What gives HPS its distinctive character is the convic-
tion that the common goal of understanding of science can be pursued
by dual, interdependent means.20

Kuhn is of, course, one of the founding fathers of the historically informed
approach within philosophy of science, but there are other strands contrib-
uting to these developments. In particular, the French tradition of ‘histori-
cal epistemology,’ dating back to Bachelard and Canguilhem and including
Foucault, has influenced the work of authors such as Hacking and Kusch,
among others. Now, if a strong case can be made for the need to adopt a
historically informed approach to analyze scientific concepts (and the main
support for this claim is the visible success of these programs), why should
it be any different for philosophical concepts?
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 83
To clarify further what a genealogy of concepts might look like in philo-
sophical contexts, let us take a brief look at the work of Canguilhem, who
has made extensive use of this general idea in his work on the history of
medicine and biology—for example, in La formation du concept de réflexe
and the classic The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem 1978). As is
well known, he was a major influence on Foucault, who credits him with
promoting a ‘‘philosophy of the concept,’’ as opposed to a ‘‘philosophy
of the subject’’ (Méthot 2012, 114).21 Canguilhem distinguishes concepts
from theories and describes concepts as theoretically polyvalent (i.e., they
can appear, often taking on different meanings, in different theories).22 As
described by Méthot (2012, p. 114):

[A]n historic-philosophical approach à la Canguilhem consists pri-

marily in tracking scientific concepts over space and time, and across
disciplinary boundaries, in order to locate significant shifts regarding
meaning, reference, and domains of application.

For Canguilhem, a specific instantiation of a scientific concept at a given

point in time is closely linked to practices and available technologies;23
in turn, scientific concepts allow for the formulation of new theories and
hypotheses, which may provoke further changes in practices and technolo-
gies in a feedback loop. However, it would be a mistake to view Canguil-
hem as a full-blooded ‘social constructivist,’ even if he acknowledges the
contribution of social contexts and material conditions for the shaping of
scientific concepts. As he notes on the concept of ‘normal’ within medicine
and biology:

It is life itself and not medical judgment which makes the biological
normal a concept of value and not a concept of statistical reality. (Can-
guilhem 1978, p. 73).

The work of Canguilhem in the history and philosophy of medicine and

biology provides thus a fruitful point of departure for the method of con-
ceptual genealogy in the context of philosophical analysis, especially given
his focus on ‘significant shifts regarding meaning, reference, and domains of
application.’ However, one obstacle for the project of genealogical analysis
of philosophical concepts is the (still) influential author-centered conception
of the history of philosophy. Scholarly work on the history of philosophy
typically focuses on authors, in particular, the key figures of the philosophi-
cal canon: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Ockham, Des-
cartes, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche etc.
Now, this is not the place for an extensive discussion of the shortcom-
ings of the author-centered approach to the history of philosophy. For the
present purposes, it is sufficient to note that an alternative, concept-centered
approach is viable and has, in particular, been developed in detail by A. de
84 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Libera in his recent work (2007, 2008, 2014) presenting an ‘archaeology
of the subject.’ In an interview, he describes the enterprise in the following
terms:

The point for me was to construct a story whose protagonists would

not be people, but concepts, problems, rules and arguments.24

And so, there is prima facie no reason why the historian of philosophy or
the philosopher should necessarily focus on authors, rather than on con-
cepts or problems, much as the historian of science inspired by Canguilhem
and others chooses to do.

3.3 The Historicity of Philosophical Concepts

We are now in a better position to describe in more detail what I take
to be the five main characteristics of the historicist conception of philo-
sophical concepts that I defend here, borrowing elements from Nietzsche’s
conception of genealogy25 and Canguilhem’s concept-centered historical
approach.26 These are:

1. Historical change
2. Superimposition of layers of meaning
3. Contingency
4. Multiple lines of influence
5. Connected to (extra- or intra-philosophical) practices and goals

1. Historical change. This is probably the least controversial aspect of

the historicist conception of philosophical concepts that I wish to articulate
here. Few to none would deny that, as a matter of fact, philosophical con-
cepts do change over time. But the question then becomes how philosophi-
cally relevant is it (as opposed to ‘merely historically’ relevant) to track these
changes over time? As described in section 2 above, one possible response
(and one that is often either explicitly given or presupposed) is that the tem-
poral development of a philosophical concept X is not relevant for the deter-
mination of the ‘essence’ of X, i.e., the necessary and sufficient conditions
for something to count as X. If past philosophers differed from us in their
conceptualization of X, then either they were wrong or we are wrong (most
likely they were wrong). We’d learn nothing of philosophical significance
about X by examining mistaken past conceptions of X (though some defend
the relevance of such ‘mistakes’ in the sense of telling us which mistakes not
to repeat; see Crane 2015 for a critique of this argument.)
According to the present approach, however, most (if not all) philosophi-
cal concepts are by and large theoretical constructs, even if they latch on in
important ways to a concept-independent reality (just as Canguilhem’s con-
cept of the ‘normal’ is closely related to the biological phenomenon of life,
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 85
even if it undergoes modifications through time qua concept). Moreover, as
they maintain traces of their previous instantiations throughout their devel-
opment over time (as will be argued shortly), in particular in the form of
presuppositions that then become uncritically accepted, to understand the
current instantiation of a particular concept, it becomes crucial to examine
how it was construed over time. And thus, the historical development of
philosophical concepts is not only a factual observation; it is also a philo-
sophically relevant aspect for the analysis.
2. Superimposition of layers of meaning. The relevance of the philosoph-
ical history of a concept for the analysis of its current instantiations relies
crucially on the idea of the ‘superimposition of layers of meaning,’ which
we encountered when discussing Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy. An
alternative conception would amount to, for example, viewing the temporal
changes of a concept as corresponding to ‘radical revolutions,’ after which
nothing of their previous instantiations stays in place. If this were the case,
then the analysis of past instantiations of a philosophical concept with the
goal of improving our understanding of its current version(s) would be idle
at best, but in fact also potentially distracting and misleading.
That the ‘superimposition of layers of meaning’ model offers a more
accurate account of the development of philosophical concepts than the
alternative ‘radical revolutions’ account is perhaps best argued for by means
of concrete examples. So, let me offer a brief example to illustrate the point:
the philosophical concept of substance received a number of formulations
starting in ancient Greek philosophy, including, in particular, Aristotle’s
influential conception. Through the centuries, it received a number of dif-
ferent instantiations, many of which radically different from the Aristotelian
conception (e.g., Descartes’ notion of substance), while at the same time
retaining some key Aristotelian components such as the idea that there are
basic ontological units that are the building blocks for all that exists in real-
ity (Robinson 2014).
The main reason why it is of the utmost importance for the philosopher
to be aware of the stratified nature of philosophical concepts is the fact that
neglecting this dimension leads to the uncritical assimilation of presupposi-
tions and substantive theoretical choices made along the way in the shaping
of a concept, which then come to be viewed as truisms. These are often
described as one’s absolute ‘intuitions’ about concept X, when in fact they
are the products of theoretical choices made (by others) along the way. It
is by exposing and investigating these different layers of meaning that the
philosopher is able to isolate the theoretical choices that led to the particular
shaping of a given philosophical concept over time.
Notice also that the ‘superimposition of layers’ model, coupled with the
idea of some sort of stable core that fixes the object of the genealogy, sits
well with Canguilhem’s idea of the polyvalence and plasticity of a (fruit-
ful) philosophical concept, amenable to receiving a number of theoretical
interpretations. Arguably, each of these interpretations will impose a new
86 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
meaning on the concept in question, but traces of previous interpretations
will remain.
3. Contingency. The process of superimposition of layers of meaning
may be understood in at least two radically different ways: either in teleo-
logical or in contingent terms. On the teleological conception, each new
instantiation of a concept is necessitated by its past instantiations: there is
one unique path for the temporal development of a concept (roughly, in the
spirit of Hegelian teleology).

On the contingentist conception, in contrast, each new meaning is one of

the many new layers that a given concept is capable of acquiring at any given
time and a result of contingent events pertaining to the ‘struggle’ among the
different ‘contenders’ (to resort again to Nietzschean ideas). In other words,
the historical development of a concept branches to the future:

And thus, there will most likely be possible theoretical paths that do
not become actualized or instantiated for a given concept.27 Which path
does become instantiated (at the expense of other possibilities) is typically
a matter of substantive theoretical choices (and possibly of contingent
extra-philosophical factors). However, once the choice is made, its substan-
tive content often becomes viewed as a constitutive component of the con-
cept as such, as if it had been there all along, and necessarily so. (In other
words, something like a teleological conception is often tacitly endorsed.)
But of course, on the contingentist conception, this is a mistake: the histori-
cal development of concept X could have taken a rather different turn at
some point or another. If this had been the case, then its current instantia-
tions might have become something quite different.28
One of the claims associated with (but not necessitated by)29 the contin-
gentist conception is thus that philosophical concepts are by and large theo-
retical constructs: they do not track necessary essences that exist in reality
(though they do latch on to phenomena in reality in somewhat complicated
ways), but rather unfold through time by means of the process of superim-
positions of layers of meaning described above.
4. Multiple lines of influence. The contingency aspect just discussed
ensures that the developmental path of a concept branches to the future.
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 87
But what about the past? Well, as mentioned when discussing Nietzsche’s
conception of genealogy, the instantiation of a concept or practice at a given
point in time is typically the result of a confluence of multiple lines of events
and ideas, each having influenced the current status quo in different ways.
And thus, the historical development of a concept branches to the past as
well, not only to the future:

Both Leiter and Geuss note that, in this respect, Nietzschean genealogy
differs from genealogy as pedigree, in that the latter features only one
non-branching line of ancestry leading to a given person: each person
has one unique father. However, this is the case only if the sole lineage
that matters in a genealogy is the male lineage. If the female lineages
are included, then a person’s genealogical tree is composed of mul-
tiple lines of influence, namely the multiple branches and lineages that
come together in one and the same person. Viewed from the perspec-
tive of multiple lines of influence, the genealogy of a person is not that
different from the genealogy of a concept or practice, as described by
Nietzsche.
More concretely, this means that a philosophical concept will often be
shaped by a number of lines of influence. One example is the concept
of ‘logical form’; it emerged from the confluence of Aristotelian meta-
physical hylomorphism with developments in logic, in particular syllogis-
tic (Dutilh Novaes 2012a). As noted by MacFarlane (2000), Aristotle is
both the father of hylomorphism and the father of logic, but he is not the
father of logical hylomorphism: he himself never brought the two concepts
together. This happened only later, in the tradition of the ancient commen-
tators. (See section 4.2 for further details.)
5. Connected to (extra- or intra-philosophical) practices and goals.
The final component of the specific historicist conception of philosophical
concepts presented here is the commitment to a view of such concepts not
as disembodied constructions, floating above and beyond all human real-
ity and practices. Instead, philosophical concepts are typically embedded
in (philosophical as well as non-philosophical) practices and goals and are
formulated as responses to specific theoretical (and possibly practical) needs
and circumstances of a given intellectual community.
The claim is not that philosophical concepts emerge only in response to
material conditions and material needs, as the crude Marxist might claim
88 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
(though these factors too are more significant than most philosophers tend
to recognize). Rather, the idea is that philosophical concepts, theories, and
techniques typically emerge or receive new interpretations in response to
theoretical or even practical needs, or against the background of preexist-
ing practices. For example, Aristotelian logic is best understood against the
background of the practices of ancient dialectic (Kapp 1975; Castelnerac
and Marion 2009), which we presume were pervasive in the early Academy
(judging from, e.g., Plato’s dialogues). Ignoring the dialectical background
gives rise to much confusion concerning otherwise puzzling aspects of Aris-
totle’s syllogistic such as irreflexivity (Duncombe 2014).
Another example might be medieval logical theories. When they began
to be investigated more systematically in the mid-twentieth century, schol-
ars tended to look at these theories only from the point of view of modern
logic and modern concerns. Thus, Geach (1962) went on to claim that
theories of supposition (a very important group of semantic theories in
Latin medieval logic) were theories of reference—and, what is more, that
they were very deficient theories of reference—without raising the ques-
tion of whether theories of supposition might be theories of something else
altogether. In my own work on theories of supposition, by contrast, the
starting point was the question: Why did the medieval authors themselves
need something like a theory of supposition? What did they need these
theories for? My answer to this question is that a semantic theory provid-
ing the tools for textual interpretation was much needed in a tradition in
which textual commentary and interpretation played such a crucial role.
And so, I claimed that medieval theories of supposition are best under-
stood as theories of sentential meaning, rather than as theories of reference
(Dutilh Novaes 2008).
An example closer to home is the emergence of modern symbolic logic in
the late nineteenth century. It is absolutely imperative to keep in mind the
broader context for these developments, namely the projects of axiomatiza-
tion of portions of mathematics: axiomatizing mathematics was the primary
goal and function of the logical systems designed by Frege, Russell, Hilbert,
etc. Understanding this background clarifies a number of still pervasive fea-
tures in the practices of logicians, such as the prominent role of complete-
ness proofs (Awodey and Reck 2002).
Thus the theoretical function of a concept, broadly speaking, is typically
an important element in how a philosophical concept is shaped and inter-
preted at a given time. But this of course poses a serious problem for the his-
torian/interpreter, who must resist the temptation to project her own ideas
regarding the function(s) of a given concept— which presumably will reflect
her own Zeitgeist—into past instantiations of the concept (as Geach seems
to have done for supposition/reference). This is a point that Nietzsche was
acutely aware of in his genealogical project, and he criticized his predeces-
sors for failing to take it into account: one must avoid projecting current
uses and meanings into the past.
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 89
On this point, Nietzsche follows Darwin, who cautioned against “the
mistake of inferring current function or meaning from ancestral func-
tion or meaning.” (Leiter 2002/2014, p. 135)

In fact, misprojection of meaning and function can take place in both direc-
tions: it is a mistake to infer past function or meaning from current ones,
but it is also a mistake to infer current meaning and function from past
ones. (Notice that this is a potential pitfall for ‘state-of-nature’ genealogi-
cal projects such as Craig’s 1990, 2007.) This is so because purpose and
function are precisely elements of change and discontinuity in the historical
development of a concept—given that theoretical needs, circumstances, and
available techniques themselves change over time.30 And thus, the fact that a
given concept has had a certain meaning in the past does not mean that the
same meaning is the one that we, current philosophers, should attribute to
it (see discussion of the genetic fallacy below).
However, the point is that traces of these previous meanings (related to past
purposes and functions) may still be present in the current embodiment(s)
of a concept, which may in fact not necessarily sit well with the current
functions and purposes of a concept—and yet are uncritically accepted by
current practitioners. Exposing such tensions is indeed one of the goals of
conceptual genealogy, just as it is a goal for Nietzschean genealogy.

3.4 Archaeology and Genealogy—Foucault

I hope to have argued more or less convincingly by now that, given the
specific historicist conception of philosophical concepts I’ve just sketched,
genealogy is a particularly suitable method for historically informed philo-
sophical analysis. However, and as mentioned above, I take genealogy to be
one among other such historical methods, so there are options. Why is gene-
alogy a better option than the alternatives? In order to address this question,
in this section I pitch genealogy against one of its main ‘competitors’ as a
method for historical analysis: its close cousin archaeology. Naturally, this
confrontation leads me directly to Foucault.
As is well known, early in his career, Foucault developed and applied the
archaeological method in a number of works, which then received a more
explicit methodological reflection in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).

An “archaeology of knowledge” is an investigation that examines arti-

facts unearthed in an excavation, but the kind of artifact is not bone,
pottery, or metalwork, it is what people said and wrote in the past:
their “statements” (in French, énoncé: what has been enunciated or
expressed). (Packer 2010, p. 345)

The ‘real’ archaeologist digs out material traces of past practices and forms
of life, which are then laid out for synchronic analysis (though, of course,
90 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
layers of sediments typically convey information about sequences of events).
The conceptual archaeologist does something similar with documented dis-
course, digging deeper towards levels of unconsciousness.31

The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought

and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s ter-
minology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic,
that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define
a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of
thought in a given domain and period. So, for example, History of Mad-
ness should, Foucault maintained, be read as an intellectual excavation
of the radically different discursive formations that governed talk and
thought about madness from the 17th through the 19th centuries. (Gut-
ting 2013, section 4.3)

The key word here is ‘excavation’: Foucault took (conceptual) archaeology

to allow for the unearthing of what is hidden and unconscious. “It allowed
the historian of thought to operate at an unconscious level that displaced
the primacy of the subject found in both phenomenology and in traditional
historiography” (Gutting 2013, section 4.3). (Recall Foucault’s endorse-
ment of Canguilhem’s rejection of a ‘philosophy of the subject’ in favor of a
‘philosophy of the concept.’)
Now, just as the ‘real’ archaeologist does not necessarily seek to establish
historical and causal connections between different segments of time, the
Foucaultian conceptual archaeologist is not interested in establishing how
one way of thinking transitions into another; she mostly looks at different
temporal points in isolation. She is, of course, able to notice differences and
similarities between different times and ways of thinking, but not much will
be said about how such changes come about and how specific modifications
to one mode of thinking resulted in a new mode of thinking. Indeed, Fou-
caultian archaeology is predominantly interested in rupture and discontinu-
ity (Koopman 2008; Packer 2010, chap. 14).
In his later work, however, Foucault came to see the essentially synchronic
nature of archaeology as a limiting feature of the method, in particular when
it comes to stressing the contingency of modes of thinking (Gutting 2013, sec-
tion 4.3; Koopman 2008). This is when he turned to Nietzschean genealogy
(Foucault 1971) in order to fill this lacuna in the archaeological method.32
The shift from archaeology to genealogy (which should, however, be viewed
as an addition rather than as a replacement; archaeology remains in the theo-
rist’s toolbox) is a much-debated topic among scholars, and so any brief treat-
ment of it is bound to be superficial. But this seems like an apt description:

The much-debated question of why Foucault shifted from archaeology

to genealogy can be answered in this way: whereas archaeology offers a
static analysis of practices synchronically pulled from the past, geneal-
ogy offers a dynamic analysis whereby these practices can be viewed
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 91
diachronically as historical processes themselves. Genealogy enabled
Foucault to explain historical change and continuity. In this way, gene-
alogy was an expansion of archaeology rather than a refutation of it—of
course genealogy refutes a few assumptions made by archaeology, but
on the whole it refutes these assumptions by reinterpreting the key ele-
ments of the earlier approach. (Koopman 2007; emphasis added)33

I submit that the very reasons that led Foucault to supplement (and to some
extent revise) his archaeological method with genealogical elements (as sug-
gested in this passage) are also compelling reasons to prefer the genealogical
approach over the archaeological one for the kind of historically informed
analysis of philosophical concepts that I propose.34 What is needed is a dia-
chronic framework offering the resources to explain not only each particu-
lar stage in the history of a philosophical concept, but also the transitions
between stages. Nietzschean genealogy, as also developed by Foucault, offers
precisely this insofar as it brings to the fore the interplay between continu-
ity and change by means of the key notion of superimposition of layers of
meaning. In a slogan, genealogy is about emergence, whereas archaeology is
about existence (Foucault 1971; Koopman 2013, 40).
Another valuable component of Foucaultian genealogy for the present
enterprise (which it shares with Foucaultian archaeology) is its focus on dis-
course. Recall that the main object of analysis for the theorist engaged in the
kind of conceptual genealogy that I propose here are philosophical texts.35
I take it to be of paramount importance that the analysis be firmly grounded
in existing documentation—in this case, primarily, but not exclusively, phil-
osophical texts36—rather than being merely speculative. (I worry about the
risk of producing philosophical ‘just-so stories.’37 Nietzsche himself already
stressed that genealogy is about “that which can be documented, which
can actually be confirmed, and has actually existed” (On the Genealogy of
Morality, Preface, 7).)38
The focus on texts and documentation naturally still leaves margin for
the emergence of selection biases; which texts the theorist will include in her
analyses will significantly influence the results, hence the need to be inclu-
sive and to consider a large number of sources (which will of course still
typically be a selection). Indeed, a judicious choice of the textual material
to work with is one of the main methodological challenges for a concep-
tual genealogy of philosophical concepts; in particular, it is important to
resist the temptation to focus exclusively on a few canonical texts by canoni-
cal authors. (In this sense, my proposal differs somewhat from Foucault’s
archaeology, which tends to focus on “pronouncements made by figures of
authority in positions of power” [Packer 2010, p. 345].)
Finally, another commitment that Foucault and Nietzsche seem to share,
namely a focus on practices and ‘forms of life’ (to use a Wittgensteinian
terminology), represents a useful reminder for the (analytic) philosopher.
Analytic philosophers tend to view philosophical theories as ‘disembodied
and dis-embedded,’ as if the broader material, social, and cultural contexts
92 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
in which they emerge were unimportant (Akehurst 2010). Now, while
conceptual genealogy is not the same thing as ‘history of ideas,’ it does
recommend that elements outside the purely textual sources be taken into
account—including (but not restricted to) facts about circulation and dis-
semination of texts, such as availability of translations, number of extant
copies (in the case of manuscripts), etc. Moreover, the dynamics of how a
particular instantiation of a concept becomes influential at the expense of
others will often be related to, among other factors, institutional facts per-
taining to curriculum and structure of education.39 Such elements (which
both the Nietzschean and the Foucaultian would probably be happy to
describe as ‘power relationships’) should also be taken into account.
Summing up: in the context of the methodological proposal being articu-
lated here, a genealogical approach is to be preferred over its close cousin
archaeology for a number of reasons, but most importantly because geneal-
ogy is largely diachronic, while archaeology is largely synchronic. Foucault
correctly identified this limitation in his earlier archaeological method, and
his turn towards Nietzschean genealogy provided the required remedy.

4. APPLICATIONS OF GENEALOGY

In the spirit of the functionalist, goal-oriented approach adopted here, a

pressing question now becomes: What’s the point of a genealogy? What
kind of results do we obtain from performing a genealogical analysis of
philosophical concepts? I’ve already mentioned vindication and subversion/
debunking en passant along the way, but now it is time to discuss applica-
tions of genealogy in a more systematic way.40

4.1 Genealogy as Vindicatory or as Subversive

By now, it should be clear that genealogy is a rather plastic concept, which
can be (and has been) instantiated in a number of different ways. Craig
offers a helpful description of the range of options:

[Genealogies] can be subversive, or vindicatory, of the doctrines or

practices whose origins (factual, imaginary, and conjectural) they claim
to describe. They may at the same time be explanatory, accounting for
the existence of whatever it is that they vindicate or subvert. In theory,
at least, they may be merely explanatory, evaluatively neutral (although
as I shall shortly argue it is no accident that convincing examples are
hard to find). They can remind us of the contingency of our institutions
and standards, communicating a sense of how easily they might have
been different, and of how different they might have been. Or they can
have the opposite tendency, implying a kind of necessity: given a few
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 93
basic facts about human nature and our conditions of life, this was the
only way things could have turned out. (Craig 2007, p. 182)

In this section, we are primarily interested in the goals associated with

genealogies, in particular the distinction between vindicating and subver-
sive genealogies (the third option raised by Craig, ‘neutral’ genealogies, will
be the focus of the next section). However, before discussing these goals
more specifically, let us pause for a minute on the kinds of origins that may
become the object of genealogical analysis, according to Craig: “factual,
imaginary, and conjectural.” We can accordingly distinguish three kinds of
genealogical projects. Factual genealogies focus on developments actually
having taken place in time and space, as documented in extant sources such
as texts, but also other kinds of material evidence. Imaginary genealogies
are like foundational myths, which may not be believed to the letter by prac-
titioners (not even as possibilities), but which help them explain and make
sense of current practices and beliefs. Conjectural genealogies are differ-
ent from purely imaginary ones in that things could at least in theory have
unfolded as described conjecturally, but these descriptions do not require
the kind of evidential documentation involved in factual genealogies.
Imaginary genealogies are arguably not particularly prominent within
philosophy, but there are a few interesting examples, such as Aristophanes’s
myth of the origin of love as described in Plato’s Symposium. Conjectural
genealogies, in turn, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy quite some popu-
larity among philosophers. For example, recent uses of evolutionary argu-
ments in ethics—in their majority of the debunking, subversive kind (Kahane
2011)—are typically of the conjectural kind, not necessarily grounded in
material documentation or empirical evidence (though there seem to be
some exceptions). State-of-nature genealogical enterprises such as the ones
by Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, and more recently by Craig (1990, 2007)
and Williams (2002), are overtly conjectural. (Williams in fact describes his
genealogy as ‘fictional’ and ‘imaginary,’ but it seems to me to come closer to
being a conjectural genealogy.)
As such, conjectural genealogies do not seem to offer a fruitful van-
tage point for the kind of conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts
articulated in this paper; indeed, histories of philosophical concepts based
on speculation and conjecture are not going to be very illuminating. In
this sense, the philosopher engaged in this enterprise must be more like a
‘proper historian,’ dealing extensively with documented sources.41 And so,
the relevant kind of genealogy for our purposes is what can be described
as ‘factual genealogy’ (as already suggested elsewhere in this paper). The
model here would be that of the French school of historical epistemology
as represented by Canguilhem and Foucault, as well as more recent work in
the HPS tradition, with emphasis on grounding the analyses in sources and
documentation.
94 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
And now let us turn specifically to the purposes of engaging in a geneal-
ogy. As suggested in the passage by Craig above, on the received view, gene-
alogy involves the idea of passing a judgment of value on a given practice,
doctrine or idea by means of a genealogical analysis; genealogies are often
used to show that something is good, or else that something is bad. Koop-
man (2013, p. 62) describes these projects as ‘normatively ambitious’ (and
goes on to contrast them with the ‘normatively modest’ genealogical method
of Foucault, which he embraces). Craig seems to think that this value com-
ponent is inherent to any genealogical project, and thus that evaluatively
neutral genealogies are in a sense conceptually unviable (or else hopelessly
uninteresting—see below).
As noted above, vindicatory genealogies are closer in spirit to the com-
monsensical notion of genealogy, whereby tracing a person’s pedigree serves
to legitimate and/or increase her social and political standing. Subversive
genealogies, in contrast, turn the commonsensical notion of genealogy
upside down; they seek to decrease or question the legitimacy of a given
practice or concept by exposing its ‘shameful origins.’ As examples of vin-
dicatory genealogies, Koopman (2013, p. 59) cites the ‘new British gene-
alogists’ Williams, Craig, and Skinner, possibly inspired by the ‘old British
genealogist’ Hobbes. Nietzsche is, of course, the quintessential example of
a subversive genealogist, but Koopman also mentions a few precursors,
such as Darwin42 and Hume. More recently, evolutionary debunking argu-
ments (in ethics (Kahane 2011; Street 2006) as well as elsewhere) can also
be viewed as examples of subversive genealogies. (Koopman 2013 focuses
specifically on Williams and Nietzsche as representatives of vindicatory and
subversive genealogies, respectively.)
To further discuss these two kinds of genealogy in general terms, we
can continue to follow Craig (2007). He distinguishes genealogies that are
intrinsically vindicatory/ subversive from genealogies that are merely acci-
dentally so and then goes on to describe the four categories. He starts with
intrinsically subversive genealogies:

In the intrinsic type we have an account of the history of certain atti-

tudes, beliefs or practices that their proponent cannot accept without
damage to his esteem for, and certitude in, the attitudes, beliefs or prac-
tices themselves. For one thing, it may in some cases actually be a part
of the belief-system that the belief-system itself had a quite different
kind of origin—most religions are like this, perhaps all. (Craig 2007,
p. 182)

He then goes on to describe how Hume’s account of the origins of monothe-

istic belief as related to processes that have no apparent connection to truth
(some of which are based on motivations that are ‘positively disreputable’)
will surely negatively affect the faith of the believer who takes Hume’s
story onboard. Similarly for Nietzsche’s account of Christian morality as
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 95
a self-deceptive expression of ‘hatred, resentment, and bewilderment.’ (His
example of an accidental subversive genealogy is Darwinism.) Vindicatory
genealogies are described in the following terms:

Some genealogies, by contrast, are vindicatory: the story they tell is in

one way or another a recommendation of whatever it is they tell us the
story of. [. . .] The genealogies—by which I mean the causal stories—of
many of our beliefs are intrinsically justificatory in a very strong sense:
they give an essential place to the very facts believed in, so if that is
how they came about they must be true. Or a genealogy may vindicate
a practice, exhibiting it as arising out of the need to find a solution to
a problem; and we may then regard it as intrinsically vindicatory if the
problem is one that any human society [. . .] will want to solve. [. . .]
A genealogy is accidentally vindicatory, on the other hand, when the
increased prestige it confers on its object is due to features that are rela-
tively local, or of limited timespan. (Craig 2007, p. 183)

Unlike subversive genealogies, vindicatory genealogies show us that we

have good reasons to hold the beliefs and practices that we hold, either
because the belief-forming process was reliable and truth-conducive, or else
because the beliefs and practices present themselves as solutions to inher-
ently important problems. Though this need not always be the case, vindica-
tory genealogies will typically confer a certain necessity and inevitability to
their objects (‘they must be true’). By contrast, subversive genealogies will
typically highlight the contingency of the beliefs and practices in question.43
(Recall Craig’s quote at the beginning of this section, distinguishing genealo-
gies emphasizing contingency from genealogies emphasizing necessity.)
How does the distinction between these two kinds of genealogy fare
when applied to the conceptual genealogies of philosophical concepts that
are the object of the present analysis? Here too, it seems that this is a use-
ful distinction. A conceptual genealogy of this kind may be vindicatory if it
shows that a given philosophical concept or doctrine has a ‘venerable pedi-
gree,’ for example that it was developed and/or maintained by some of the
great figures of our philosophical canon. One example that springs to mind
is the enthusiasm with which proponents of the ‘Language of Thought’
hypothesis (e.g., Fodor) received historical analysis showing that this gen-
eral idea had antecedents in Latin medieval philosophy, Ockham in particu-
lar (Panaccio 2004). In contrast, a conceptual genealogy may be subversive
if it shows that the historical (and conceptual) grounds for a given notion
or doctrine are either confused, shaky philosophical ideas, or else philo-
sophical theses and doctrines to which we no longer want to commit. One
example of the latter would be feminist critiques of logic (Plumwood 1993),
among others.
We have seen that, while he considers the possibility of a third, evalu-
atively neutral kind of genealogy, Craig then goes on to dismiss it (I will
96 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
discuss his reasons for doing so shortly). If he is right, then any genealogy
has an intrinsic evaluative component, and thus the vindicatory vs. subver-
sive distinction will be exhaustive. However, in the next section I argue that
this third category is not only viable; it is also quite promising, in particular
from the point of view of the method of conceptual genealogy that I am
sketching here. I will use the term ‘explanatory’ for my own characteriza-
tion of evaluatively neutral genealogies of this kind. (Koopman 2013 also
defends a third option, which he describes as ‘problematization’ and attri-
butes it to Foucault.)

4.2 Genealogy as Explanatory

Craig does consider the possibility of evaluatively neutral genealogies, which
he describes in the following (rather dismissive) terms:

There may also be neutral genealogies, which give us a history of X with-

out either impugning or enhancing the standing of X. I doubt whether
there can be such a thing as an intrinsically neutral genealogy [. . .]. But
I also doubt whether this is a very interesting class for philosophy, and
don’t propose to spend time or energy on it. (Craig 2007, p. 184)

In other words, even if there can be such a thing as a neutral genealogy,

it will not constitute an interesting enterprise, in any case not for the phi-
losopher. Craig’s argument in support of this claim is based on functionalist
considerations:

[V]ery many genealogies work by ascribing functions to their objects,

telling us what they are for. If the function is of some importance to us
and the object performs it well, we have to that degree a recommenda-
tion, if we find the function in some way disreputable, then a critique. If
the function really is one to which we are indifferent it becomes unclear
what the genealogist can be aiming for. (Craig 2007, p. 184)

The underlying assumption seems to be that what determines the value of

a genealogy is the importance we attach to the function(s) attributed to the
object by means of the genealogical analysis. It seems thus that the value of
the function as such is not put under scrutiny; we’ve already assumed that it
is valuable, or we are only interested in it because it is valuable for us.
In response to Craig, firstly we may point out that a genealogy may lead
precisely to a critical evaluation of the very function(s) we attribute to its
object: from valuable to invaluable, from neutral to valuable, from invalu-
able to neutral, etc. A genealogy of monotheistic religion along Humean
lines may uncover that the traditional, presumed function of religion, that
of revealing truths about God, is not well-served by these practices, but it
may nonetheless unearth other desirable functions performed by religious
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 97
practices, such as social cohesion. So even the theorist who does not value
the goal of obtaining divine truths may still view a genealogy of religion as a
worthwhile enterprise if it reveals other (desirable) consequences and func-
tions of religious practices. (Of course, the Nietzschean/Marxist genealo-
gist will, by contrast, emphasize the undesirable consequences of religious
practices.) Moreover, in the spirit of the broadly Nietzschean conception of
genealogy adopted here, changes of functions and meanings through time
are precisely one of the things that a genealogy aims at capturing.
Secondly, and more importantly, Craig seems not to appreciate suffi-
ciently the purely epistemic dimension of a genealogy, which emerges inde-
pendently of whatever evaluative judgment one may wish to pass. As well
put by Allen (2013) in her review of (Koopman 2013),

[T]he point of genealogy is not only to demonstrate that our practices

or concepts or norms or forms of life are contingent and therefore could
be otherwise; genealogy also aims to show how those practices, con-
cepts, norms, and forms of life have been composed through complex
practices.

Indeed, it is at least conceivable that one and the same genealogical narra-
tive may be subversive for some and at the same time vindicatory for others,
while both agree on the details of the narrative. (A genealogy of religion
showing that it does not perform the function of revealing divine truths
successfully, while also revealing other desirable social functions of religious
practices, may be subversive for the revelation-seeker and yet vindicatory
for the social theorist.) What this suggests is that the epistemic, explanatory
component is not intrinsically tied to the evaluative component, and thus
that a genealogy can also fulfill a purely explanatory function.
Koopman (2013) defends what he describes as a ‘normatively modest’
conception of genealogy (as opposed to the ‘normatively ambitious’ concep-
tion of Nietzsche and Williams), which he refers to as ‘problematization,’
following Foucault. He emphasizes the Kantian, critical nature of Foucault’s
project:

Foucault’s transformative appropriation of Kant’s critical project is best

understood as deploying critical inquiry for the purposes of the prob-
lematization of our historical present. Kant’s and Foucault’s projects are
both properly critical in that they are inquiries into the conditions of the
possibility forming the limits of our human ways of being. (Koopman
2013, p. 17)

The key Kantian terms here are ‘conditions of possibility’ and ‘limits.’ Fou-
cault’s main transformation consists in ‘historicizing’ the Kantian critical
project; a problematizing genealogy consists in a history of the present, in a
narrative of the historical conditions of possibility for things to be as they
98 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
are in the present—how they came about. The challenge for Koopman is to
equate the kind of transcendental necessity involved in the Kantian idea of
‘conditions of possibility’ with the emphasis on contingency that the histori-
cist approach brings in. At any rate, it seems to me that the crux of Koop-
man’s claim to being ‘normatively modest’ in his conception of genealogy44
is the emphasis on the explanatory nature of genealogy thus understood. It
seeks to make the present comprehensible, intelligible—to explain how the
present came about—which subsequently may or may not lead to efforts of
revision and transformation.
My conception of the genealogy of philosophical concepts as essentially
explanatory (thus also intended to be ‘normatively modest,’ if not outright
‘normatively neutral’) is related to the Foucault/Koopman approach in a
number of ways, in particular given the common emphasis on the epistemic
dimension of elucidating how things came about as preceding evaluative
judgment. However, while Koopman emphasizes ‘conditions of possibility,’
I emphasize ‘underlying assumptions,’ in the sense of the idea of superimpo-
sition of layers of meaning detailed in section 3.3 above. The thought is that
the history of a philosophical concept is marked by a number of branching
moments in which theoretical choices are (tacitly or explicitly) made, and
these choices constitute underlying assumptions which we do well to iso-
late (but not necessarily reject). By isolating them, we may conclude that
these are assumptions we should continue to endorse, but with the benefit
of having exposed them and made them explicit thanks to the genealogical
process. (To be sure, there may well be non-genealogical ways to uncover
assumptions as well.) Or we may conclude that these assumptions, which
presumably seemed reasonable to philosophers at one point in time, are no
longer plausible to us; in this case, the genealogy may lead to a subversive
critique of the concept in question.
Perhaps an example may be required to illustrate the point, so here
follows a condensed version of the genealogy of the concept of logical
form that I developed in a number of articles (Dutilh Novaes 2011, 2012a,
b). The concept originates in Aristotle’s metaphysical (not logical) hylo-
morphism, which encompasses three tenets: uniqueness of form (each
substance has only one substantive form, which is the principle of unity
that keeps its parts together);45 a non-mereological understanding of the
form-matter composite (form is not a part of the whole; rather, it is the
principle of unity that keeps the parts together); and a sharp, principled
distinction between what is form and what is matter (though they are
intrinsically intertwined in substances). Aristotle, however, does not apply
the form-matter distinction to logical objects such as arguments in any
systematic way.
The next step in the development of the concept of logical form occurs
with the ancient commentators (second to sixth century A.D.), who went
on to apply the form-matter distinction systematically to logical objects,
in particular syllogistic arguments. They maintained the tenets mentioned
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 99
above (uniqueness, non-mereologicality, principled distinction) by identify-
ing the figure of a syllogism as its form. Early medieval authors then went on
to identify two senses of form with respect to syllogistic arguments, namely
figure and mood, thus modifying the uniqueness condition. In later authors,
however, such as the fourteenth-century author John Buridan, the form of
a syllogism is understood exclusively as its mood, and we thus arrive at a
mereological understanding of logical form according to which the form of
an argument—its logical, syncategorematic terms—is a proper part of the
argument as a whole. But then we also return to the idea of uniqueness of
form: each argument has exactly one, unique logical form.
Thus, a genealogy of the concept of logical form unveils the deeply meta-
physical presuppositions still underlying what I described as ‘logical hylo-
morphism as we know it’; these are presuppositions tied to a particular
metaphysical theory of the nature of substances (Aristotle’s hylomorphism).
At the same time, we observe that one of the components of the original
matrix, the non-mereological understanding of the hylomorphic compound,
is now lost. Having exposed these presuppositions, the theorist is now in a
better position to evaluate them critically, but not necessarily to supplant or
revise them.
True enough, this kind of genealogy is not entirely neutral insofar as it
shows that certain components of the concept of logical form, which might
be viewed as necessary, constitutive features of the concept, are in fact some-
what contingent. For example, one may wonder what a non-mereological
logical hylomorphism might look like, and whether it might be more com-
pelling than its mereological counterpart, which we now by and large accept
uncritically. But at this point, the analysis is largely evaluatively neutral in
that it does now adjudicate between the different options. Similarly, the
presupposition of uniqueness of form, which makes perfect sense within
Aristotle’s framework and is essentially maintained in modern logical hylo-
morphism, could in theory be questioned: Why can’t an argument have
a plurality of logical forms? The space of theoretical possibilities is thus
enlarged once assumptions are isolated and it becomes clear that different
positions with respect to each of them are viable.46 In a similar vein, a num-
ber of ‘intuitions’ pertaining to this concept can be explained as products
of contingent, historical processes of ‘superimposed layers of meaning,’ and
can thus be put under critical scrutiny rather than taken as unquestionable
‘hard data’ for philosophical analysis.
In sum, the kind of conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts that
I defend is, as such, neither subversive nor vindicatory, though it can be used
for both ends. In first instance, however, it seeks to produce a narrative that
is above all explanatory by describing the theoretical turning points in the
historical shaping of a philosophical concept through time (in the spirit of
Canguilhem’s ‘shifts of meaning’). In doing so, it reveals assumptions under-
lying the concept in question that are often tacitly and uncritically accepted,
thereby widening the space of theoretical possibilities.47
100 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
4.3 The Genetic Fallacy
What remains to be discussed now is the most prominent objection put for-
ward against genealogical explanations, namely the charge that they commit
the so-called ‘genetic fallacy.’ The term itself is credited to Cohen and Nagel
in their 1934 textbook Logic and Scientific Method (Honderich 2005). Gen-
erally speaking, it consists in the fallacy of confusing the causal origins of a
belief with its justification: “any attempt to support or to discredit a belief,
statement, position or argument based upon its causal or historical genesis,
or more broadly, the way in which it was formed” (Klement 2002, quoted in
Koopman 2013, p. 62). In other words, the genetic fallacy would amount to
a conflation of the descriptive level of how something came about with the
normative level of its justification (again, the good old Popperian distinc-
tion between context of discovery and context of justification). One reason
to think that such explanations are indeed fallacious is the observation that
past instantiations of a given phenomenon may be so fundamentally differ-
ent from its current instantiations that reference to the former can in no way
serve as justification for the latter.
However, it has been argued that genetic reasoning is not always falla-
cious (Klement 2002). Koopman (2013) takes his response to the genetic
fallacy to be precisely what distinguishes his Foucaultian conception of
genealogy from vindicatory or subversive genealogies. Indeed, if a genealogy
does not have the normative goal of justifying, supporting, or discrediting
a belief or practice, it cannot be said to be confusing the normative level of
justification with the descriptive level of origins. A genealogical analysis that
takes itself to be essentially descriptive and explanatory makes no strong
normative claims to start with. At the same time, if the ‘layers of meaning’
conception of philosophical concepts is correct, then retracing the historical
development of a concept will tell us something important about its current
instantiations as well.
The same holds for the notion of conceptual genealogy of philosophical
concepts presented here. Going back to the example of the genealogy of the
concept of logical form, by retracing the Aristotelian, metaphysical origins
of some of the components of current versions of logical hylomorphism, one
neither justifies nor debunks these underlying assumptions. The fact that the
form-matter distinction has venerable metaphysical origins does not mean
that its application to logical entities is automatically justified; nor does it
mean that it is unjustified, given that conceptual distinctions can be fruit-
fully transferred from one realm of investigation to another. But once these
components have been isolated, the general normative question becomes:
can these metaphysical principles, which seem at least prima facie plausible
in metaphysical contexts, be transposed (mutatis mutandis) to the realm of
logic? Are logical entities such as arguments the kinds of things to which
we can attribute form and matter? On which version of the form-matter
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 101
distinction? But it is precisely thanks to the genealogical analysis that these
normative, systematic questions can be asked.
There is another sense in which the broadly Nietzschean conception of
genealogy endorsed here does not fall prey to the genetic fallacy: in the
sense that the synchronic analysis of ‘superimposition of layers of mean-
ing’ outlines precisely the changes in function and meaning in the practices
and concepts being analyzed. Hence, from the start we have the recognition
that past instantiations of the phenomenon in question may be fundamen-
tally different from its current instantiations, so much so that reference to
past instantiations may do no justificatory work. In other words, even if
something started out as ‘good’ (or ‘bad’), this does not mean that its cur-
rent instantiations will necessarily also be ‘good’ (or ‘bad’), as goodness
(or badness) are not necessarily preserved and transmitted through shifts of
meaning. (See section 3.3 for Nietzsche’s critique of the practice of project-
ing current meanings to past instantiations, and vice versa.)
And yet, examining these shifts of meaning, and identifying traces of pre-
vious instantiations as well as the theoretical choices that led to the changes,
greatly contributes to our understanding of the current instantiations of
some of our beloved philosophical concepts. And thus, I conclude that the
methodology of conceptual genealogy as formulated here does not fall prey
to the genetic fallacy.

5. CONCLUSION

In this paper, I’ve drawn inspiration from a number of authors to formulate

the methodology of conceptual genealogy, which I claim is relevant for any
kind of philosophical analysis (even those that view themselves as purely
systematic and normative). The main inspiration comes from Nietzsche,
but Foucault and Canguilhem have also contributed important ingredients.
These are so-called continental authors, and yet I claim that historically
informed analysis is just as important for analytic philosophers. The goal of
this paper was to provide a more explicit articulation of the method, in its
ins and outs, and perhaps convince others of its viability, fruitfulness, and
relevance.
But ultimately, the proof is in the pudding, i.e., the fruitfulness and rel-
evance of the ‘conceptual genealogy’ approach can only be established by
means of successful applications of the method: philosophical analyses that
succeed in illuminating aspects of philosophically important concepts that
remain otherwise difficult to account for. Some of my previous work on the
history and philosophy of logic may serve as illustration for the method
in action, but I take it that others have been relying on something simi-
lar to this approach in their own work. And, of course, I hope yet oth-
ers will feel inclined to adopt some of these ideas in their own work, such
102 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
that discussions within analytic philosophy may become more thoroughly
informed by the history of philosophy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper is living proof of the power of the Internet to foster collaborative
work. Most of it was published in installments in the form of blog posts at
NewAPPS, and I’ve greatly benefited from feedback from readers there. The
whole project has also benefited from extensive discussions on Facebook
with fellow philosophers. And thus, many people have contributed to the
project in important ways, but I would like to thank in particular Leon
Geerdink, Matthew Duncombe, Peter Tarras, and Colin Koopman.

NOTES

 1 “Habermas (2003) suggests that continental philosophy, following G.W.F.

Hegel, continually reflects upon, and brings up into its manifest content, its
own sociohistorical situation (79–80). Thus, unlike analytic philosophy, con-
tinental philosophy has never turned away from culture, tradition, literature,
psychodynamics, and political economy in the course of thinking about lan-
guage and meaning. By contrast, analytic philosophy—especially in the wake
of the so-called linguistic turn—has tended to think about language in abstrac-
tion from such matters” (Sachs 2011, p. 303). (I am quoting Sachs’ paraphrase
instead of Habermas’s own text because—perhaps unsurprisingly—the para-
phrase is much clearer and to-the-point than the original.) See also (Williamson
2014) for analytic philosophy as a “somewhat anti-historical tradition.”
2 References to my previous work will often be made to illustrate the points
being made. This does not mean that I am the only (analytic) philosopher re-
sorting to the method of conceptual genealogy, but obviously I know my own
work better than the work of others.
3 More generally, the paper will only very selectively discuss the incredibly vast
philosophical literature on genealogy. In effect, a comprehensive overview of
this literature would require a book-length treatment, and so a number of per-
tinent works will have to be left out. In other words, this paper should not be
seen as a systematic discussion of the concept of genealogy as such, but rather
perhaps as a ‘methodological manifesto’.
4 As noted by Haslanger (2005), “our concepts and our social practices are
deeply intertwined. Concepts not only enable us to describe but help structure
social practices, and our evolving practices affect our concepts.” The main
reason to restrict the method of conceptual genealogy as described here to
philosophical sources and materials is essentially methodological; attention to
other kinds of sources would require a kind of training and expertise that the
philosopher (or even the historian of philosophy) typically does not receive/
possess. However, the philosopher engaged in conceptual genealogy can and
should engage with a broader range of information, for example historical
analyses of educational institutions, as studied by those with proper expertise
such as historians.
5 See also (Koopman 2013) for a similar tripartite taxonomy of genealogies.
6 See (Westphal 2010) and (Sachs 2011).
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 103
7 Carnap seems to have been a key figure in the movement away from history
within analytic philosophy (Sachs 2011). Indeed, his fallout with Heidegger
has been described as one of the seminal events in the schism between analytic
and continental philosophy (Friedman 2002).
8 Sellars would be another example of an analytic philosopher who regularly
engages with the history of philosophy in his analyses, to some extent from a
‘genealogical’ perspective. The same applies to those influenced by him, e.g.,
Robert Brandom. But perhaps the analytic philosopher having engaged most
extensively with the history of philosophy for systematic analysis in recent
years is Rorty, especially in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
9 It is also interesting to notice that most of the genealogical projects in the
analytic tradition tend to be of the vindicatory kind, whereas the continental
projects tend to stick closely to the Nietzschean subversive spirit. The excep-
tion is again Hacking, who is, in any case, in a league of his own.
10 See also (Akehurst 2010, Introduction).
11 Haslanger (2005) helpfully distinguishes three kinds of analysis of X (say, of
knowledge): conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative. The first pertains to our
concept of X; the second pertains to X as such, as a phenomenon in reality; the
third pertains to the function of concept X. The genealogical approach to be
described here focuses on conceptual analysis, since we are interested in how
conceptions of X evolved over time among philosophers, but also on ameliora-
tive analysis, as the functional role of concepts (possibly connected to social,
cultural factors outside the practice of philosophy) will also be of paramount
importances. (More generally, much of what Haslanger has to say on geneal-
ogy in her paper is eminently relevant for the present discussion. Unfortunately,
I only became aware of these connections once the present paper was already
in press, at which point substantive modifications were no longer possible.)
12 See also (Srinivasan ms.) on reasons why even the staunch analytic philoso-
pher should not dismiss the genealogical perspective completely.
13 In what follows, I mostly rely on Geuss’s reading of Nietzschean genealogy,
as it contains all the elements needed for the argumentation to be developed
later on.
14 See (Geuss 1994, p. 275) for the five main characteristics of pedigree tracing.
15 Notice that Beiser (2011, p. 9) does not include Hegel among the historicists,
chiefly because Hegel’s project was to turn history into a kind of science, with
necessary laws not different from the laws of the natural world (hence his
teleological conception of history). For this he (and Marx) was severely criti-
cized by other nineteenth-century historicists.
16 Geuss (1994) details subsequent transformative steps in the development of
Christianity, but the ‘Pauline step’ is perhaps the most illustrative one.
17 It seems to me that the term ‘essential’ is not the most appropriate to capture
the stable component in a genealogy, but the general point still stands.
18 Leiter provides the following passage by Nietzsche in support: “We have to
distinguish between two of its aspects: one is its relative permanence, a tra-
ditional practice [Brauch], a fixed form of action, a ‘drama’, a certain strict
sequence of procedures, the other is its fluidity, its meaning [Sinn], purpose
and expectation, which is linked to the carrying out of such procedures (GM
II: 13).”
19 This idea bears some resemblance to the famous ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’
triad, typically—but wrongly—attributed to Hegel, minus the teleological
component.
20 HPS manifesto, available at http://www.pitt.edu/~pittcntr/Events/All/Confer-
ences/others/other_conf_2007–08/andHPS/andHPS_manifesto.htm
21 Canguilhem vehemently criticized what he described as ‘the virus of the pre-
cursor’ (Gutting 1989, p. 39), that is, the preoccupation with establishing who
104 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
said what first. What matters for the historian and philosopher of science
from Canguilhem’s perspective are not so much the actors, but the concepts
produced and developed.
22 One rough way in which the distinction between concepts and theories can be
cashed out is that concepts describe or interpret phenomena, whereas theories
attempt to explain them. See (Gutting 1989, pp. 32–55). This kind of theo-
retical plasticity is also present in philosophical concepts, as we will see when
discussing specific examples.
23 “[T]he determination of the concept of ‘‘normal’,’ especially in physiology
and clinical medicine, is linked to specific laboratory equipments and sets of
practices; in other words, that there is no absolute concept of the ‘‘normal’’
state in medicine or physiology.” (Méthot 2012, p. 119)
24 “Il s’agissait donc pour moi de construire une intrigue dont les protagonistes
seraient non des personnes, mais des concepts, des problèmes, des règles et
des arguments.” Interview for Actu Philosophia, available at http://www.
actu-philosophia.com/spip.php?article77. The starting point for this move-
ment towards ‘anonymization’ is de Libera’s own work on medieval logical
texts, in particular the sophismata literature of the end of the twelfth century
and the thirteenth century. As he describes it, 75% of the relevant texts have
no clear authorship, and so obviously an author-centered approach would
have been eminently unsuitable for the analysis of this material. Notice also
that De Libera focuses on the concept of ‘archaeology’, not that of ‘geneal-
ogy’; we discuss this distinction later on.
25 It may be argued that the analogy does not hold water because Nietzschean ge-
nealogy is genealogy of practices, of real ‘forms of life’, while the kind of concep-
tual genealogy I am proposing is not. However, precisely because my notion of
philosophical concepts is closely tied to practices and applications itself, the gulf
between the two enterprises will be much less large than it might seem at first.
26 What follows is a description of each of these aspects; I don’t exactly offer
arguments to support this account of philosophical concepts (as opposed to
ahistorical, realist/essentialist conceptions). Indeed, what could count as an
argument here? I take it that the explanatory success of analyses based on this
conception (i.e., their ability to explain aspects and features of given philo-
sophical concepts better than alternative approaches) is the ultimate ‘test,’ and
so I do not expect an opponent of this approach to be thoroughly convinced
solely on the basis of this description; instead, she is invited to examine case
studies and applications of this methodology.
27 In fact, different philosophical traditions may emerge precisely if two or more
groups take different paths with respect to core philosophical concepts. So, at
a given point in time, it may well happen that more than one path is instanti-
ated, but by different groups/traditions. This can be observed for example in
the different interpretations given to some core Aristotelian concepts in the
Latin and Arabic medieval traditions, respectively.
28 This is a Wittgensteinian idea: “One of my most important methods is to imagine
a historical development of our ideas different from what has actually occurred.
If we do that the problem shows us a quite new side.” (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 45)
29 I owe this caveat to Jacob Archambault.
30 A similar point holds of Canguilhem’s conception of the genealogy of con-
cepts, which (on Méthot’s interpretation at least) is very much attuned to
practical aspects such as the development of material techniques. According
to Méthot, Canguilhem’s is an ‘embodied-embedded’ conception of concepts,
contrary to what some critics have said.
31 See (Kusch 1991, Part I, chap. 2) for further comparison between what a
‘real’ archaeologist does and the Foucaultian archaeologist, as well as for the
influence of psychoanalytic concepts. Kusch also documents the pervasive-
ness of the concept of archaeology among Foucault’s teachers and intellectual
 Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy 105
predecessors—in other words, the idea of archaeology for conceptual analysis
is not a Foucaultian novelty.
32 Koopman (2013) emphasizes Foucault’s indebtedness to Kant, interpreting his
genealogical method as first and foremost a critical project, concerned with
the limits and conditions of possibility for “our human ways of being” (Koop-
man 2013, p. 17). (More on this point below.)
33 See (Koopman 2008) and (Koopman 2013, Chap. 1) for more detailed elabo-
ration of these ideas.
34 A small autobiographical note: I also started thinking of this approach in
terms of archaeology, but gradually came to realize that what is really required
is the genealogical perspective.
35 Crane (2015) also emphasizes the importance of focusing on a tradition of
philosophical texts, but introduces the idea of how these texts are read as
equally tradition-defining.
36 I do make a plea for taking into account the larger historical and cultural
contexts for the production of philosophical texts, in particular in connection
with the embedding of the philosophical theories into broader institutional
and social practices. In this sense, documentation going beyond purely philo-
sophical texts is also relevant for the analysis.
37 This concern is what makes me less enthusiastic about ‘state-of-nature’ genea-
logical projects, such as those described in (Craig 2007).
38 Leiter (2002/2014, 134) reads this passage as suggesting that the Nietzschean
genealogist is interested in essences, real things. I abstain from getting in-
volved in a debate with Leiter’s essentialist reading of Nietzsche, but in any
case I very much share Nietzsche’s concern for proper documentation and a
rejection of ‘English hypothesis-mongering.’ I take it that Foucault’s focus on
discourse is also in the spirit of concern for proper grounding and documenta-
tion. Indeed, as suggested by Koopman (2013, p. 61), despite his criticism of
hypothesis-mongering, Nietzsche himself indulges in a fair amount of specu-
lation when engaged in genealogy, while Foucault displays a much greater
degree of archival breadth and attention for documentation.
39 The importance of these factors is also pointed out by authors such as Bruno
Latour, Annemarie Mol, and Ian Hacking, among others.
40 Koopman (2013, Chap. 2) offers an in-depth examination of this question,
and so will serve as the main source for the present discussion, along with
Craig (2007).
41 To be honest, I am suspicious of conjectural genealogies in general, which
seem to me to be detrimental to progress in a number of different disciplines
by producing ‘just-so stories.’ But this is not the place for an extensive discus-
sion of my reservations.
42 The connections between Nietzsche and Darwin have received much attention
from scholars, a recent example being Johnson (2013).
43 However, I do not want to maintain that contingency is inherent to subversive
genealogies, while necessity is inherent to vindicatory genealogies. It seems to
me that subversive genealogies emphasizing necessity as well as vindicatory
genealogies emphasizing contingency are both at least conceptual possibilities.
44 Notice though that he does not claim to be ‘normatively neutral,’ as a geneal-
ogy as problematization carries the potential for intervention: “if genealogy
helps us to see how our present was made, it also thereby equips us with some
of the tools we would need for beginning the labor of remaking our future
differently.” (Koopman 2013, p. 130)
45 Medieval theories of the form-matter compound will later make room for a
plurality of substantive forms, thus parting ways with Aristotle’s own version
of hylomorphism.
46 Crane (2015) makes a similar point with respect to the philosophical questions
we take to be central: “The second moral is that an awareness of the history
106 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
of the question one is pursuing can make one sensitive to the contingency of
the question, in the sense of the contingency of the philosophical concerns that
give rise to it. For example, the formulation of the doctrine of materialism/
physicalism in analytic philosophy took a very specific form in the twentieth
century—in terms of all truths being expressed in physical language—because
of very specific ideas deriving from logical positivism about what philosophy
can and cannot do. Reflection on these ideas and their effects can help us see
that they are detachable from the core of doctrines like materialism; and dis-
pensing with these assumptions can help us to see the questions in a new light.
In some cases, it may help us move away from the questions altogether, and to
pose new questions which make more sense to us today.” (Emphasis added.)
47 As for Craig’s charge that an evaluatively neutral genealogy will not be
philosophically interesting, I refer the reader to my defense of descriptive
metaphilosophy (a term introduced by Rescher, in opposition to prescrip-
tive metaphilosophy) as philosophy: “Inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault,
I call the enterprise of tracing the history of a given philosophical concept
conceptual genealogy. It now seems to me that what I’ve been arguing for
all along, in Rescher’s terms, is for the importance of descriptive metaphi-
losophy for the enterprise of prescriptive metaphilosophy, and thus for the
claim that historically-informed descriptive metaphilosophy is indeed part
of philosophy tout court, just as prescriptive metaphilosophy. More to the
point, I’ve been claiming that prescriptive metaphilosophy desperately
needs descriptive metaphilosophy.” ‘A plea for descriptive metaphilosophy
as philosophy’, http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/03/a-plea-for-descriptive-
metaphilosophy-as-philosophy.html

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Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
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Wittgenstein, L. 1998. Culture and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Part II

Truth and Meaning

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5 Truth and Epoché
The Semantic Conception of Truth in
Phenomenology
David Woodruff Smith

In the present essay, I explore a model of truth in intentional experience.

I work within a broadly Husserlian model of intentionality, central to Hus-
serl’s conception of phenomenology, while drawing in a broadly Tarskian
model of truth, central to Tarski’s conception of semantics in logical the-
ory. In this synthetic model, an experience is veridical, its content true, if
and only if appropriate conditions in the world actually obtain. (We may
consider, as well, truth conditions in alternative possible worlds.) In this
way, we synthesize the patterns of semantic structure appraised by Tarski
and Husserl, looking toward the foundations of phenomenology from a
“semantic” point of view.
Husserl’s method of epoché, integral to his conception of transcen-
dental phenomenology, can then be seen as a practice of semantic ascent.
Thus, we ascend from the intended object in the world—assuming veridi-
cal intentionality—to the semantic or noematic content through which the
object is intended in consciousness. This practice involves moving in and
out of lived conscious experience, moving from everyday experience into
phenomenological—phenomeno-logical—reflection on the intentionality of
that form of experience.
This approach to the theory of truth in phenomenology offers a fresh per-
spective on truth itself. Is there a bona fide higher-order perspective on truth,
or is the title “true” a redundant way of positing reality from within experi-
ence, as “deflationist” views would hold? And this approach to phenome-
nology via truth-theory offers a fresh perspective on the elusive methodology
of epoché. We emphasize the role of ideal meaning in intentional acts of
consciousness. And so we consider epoché as a “semantic” movement from
experience in object-level consciousness to phenomenological reflection in
meta-level consciousness, thereby abstracting meaning from experience.

1. TRUTH AND PHENOMENOLOGY: FROM HUSSERL

TO TARSKI AND ONWARD

How does truth play in phenomenology? It may seem obvious that truth per
se is “bracketed” in the practice of phenomenological reflection via epoché.
112 David Woodruff Smith
For, if the world is in brackets, truth itself is bracketed, as we turn from
the external world to our consciousness as if of things in that world. How-
ever, that view is misleading, and for interesting reasons we’ll explore here.
Indeed, the problem of truth weaves its way through the foundations of
phenomenology, apparent in the historical development of the discipline.
In 1933, the logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski developed a
mathematical model of truth for a formalized symbolic language (Tarski
1933/1936). In 1944, in a more intuitive philosophical mode, Tarski pub-
lished an article titled “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Founda-
tions of Semantics” (Tarski 1944/2001). Tarski’s work in model theory led
the development of what is now called semantics in logical theory. Gottlob
Frege’s early logic of Begriffsschrift remained a syntactic system, though
supplemented later by his theory of Sinn and Bedeutung (as observed in
Hintikka and Hintikka 1986). Tarski’s style of semantics defined the truth of
a sentence in a model, where a model (for the truth of a sentence in a speci-
fied language) is a set-theoretic structure consisting of a domain of entities
and a range of relations or properties defined on that domain. By the 1960s,
models were seen as an abstraction of possible worlds (notably in Hin-
tikka 1962, 1969), adding more philosophical substance to model-theoretic
semantics. On this approach, a sentence is true in a world if and only if the
world is as the sentence specifies, and the sense or meaning of the sentence
is explicated in terms of its truth conditions, the condition(s) or situation or
state of affairs that make it true in a given world. Thus did Tarski’s work
lead inter alia into contemporary semantic theory. In a parallel vein, Donald
Davidson argued (in Davidson 1967) that a Tarskian truth-definition (sans
possible worlds, sans facts or states of affairs, and sans Fregean Sinn) yields
all we need for a theory of meaning. And today it is a commonplace in phi-
losophy of mind and perception that the content (or meaning) in a thought
or perception is defined by appropriate truth or satisfaction conditions.
Tarski was familiar with Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations of
1900–01 (Husserl 1900–01, revised 1920). Husserl’s prior work was in
mathematics (the calculus of variations) and philosophy of arithmetic, but
in the Investigations, Husserl developed the foundations of phenomenology,
built around his theory of intentionality. In the Prolegomena to the Inves-
tigations, Husserl sketched a vision of logic that correlated three levels of
categories: categories of thought or experience, categories of ideal meaning
(Sinn), and categories of objects in the world (including states of affairs,
Sachverhalten). On Husserl’s theory, language expresses thought or experi-
ence, which carries ideal meaning, which directs the experience toward an
appropriate object in the world. And logic defines the correlations among
those three levels of categories, that is, categories of thought or experience,
meaning or content, and objects “intended.” Husserl’s model of these logical
correlations—mathematical in spirit but expressed in philosophical prose
rather than set-theoretical formulations—framed his conception of phenom-
enology. Thus, an experience with a certain form has a meaning-content of a
 Truth and Epoché 113
certain form that directs the experience toward an object of a certain form:
this structure defines the intentionality of the experience. And the theory
of intentionality was central to Husserl’s conception of the new discipline
of phenomenology. (The present perspective on Husserl’s progression from
logic into phenomenology is detailed in Chapters Two and Three of Smith
2007 and in the 2nd ed., 2013.)
In Ideas I (Husserl 1913/1981), Husserl amplified his conception of phe-
nomenology as the “science of the essence of consciousness,” i.e., conscious-
ness as experienced from the first-person perspective (see §§27–33). There,
Husserl approached phenomenology via his famous method of epoché or
“bracketing.” In order to focus on my consciousness of a given object, I am
to suspend or bracket my assumption of the existence of that “intended”
object in the surrounding world. In reflection, I then analyze the structure
of that conscious experience and its intentionality, regardless of whether its
“intended” object exists. There, in the experience, I find its ideal “noematic
content,” or “noema,” a form of ideal sense (Sinn, the same term Frege used
for the sense of an expression in a logically defined language). Husserl’s
logical theory of intentionality is amplified as his mature phenomenological
theory of consciousness centered on intentionality. (In Smith 2007, 2013
I have elaborated the ways in which Ideas I follows the path set out in the
Logical Investigations.)
Truth appears in Husserlian phenomenology, then, as the question of
whether an act of consciousness is successfully directed via its noematic
content toward an appropriate object or state of affairs in the world. And
that question, I am saying, is brought to the fore through epoché. With a
Tarskian twist, we may say, truth is articulated by the conditions under
which the act’s content would be true: whether or not the appropriate object
or state affairs actually exists—hence within the space of epoché.

2. TRUTH AND INTENTIONALITY

With intentionality in hand, I propose, we thus should see truth as consist-

ing in a successful intentional relation, thus in the veracity of an intentional
experience. An experience is intentionally directed, by virtue of its content
or sense, toward an appropriate object in the world; and if successful, or
veridical, it is intentionally related to that object. Characteristically, the par-
adigm of truth concerns the veracity of a thought or belief in representing
something in the world, especially a state of affairs. An act of thinking that
p is intentionally directed toward a state of affairs that p, and the thought
that p is true if and only if the state of affairs that p actually exists.
Let us note in passing how truth applies to other forms of intentionality.
First, a belief that p, we should specify, is not an occurring act of conscious-
ness, but rather an enduring subconscious state: a propositional attitude
that grounds the disposition to consciously think that p. As an overt act of
114 David Woodruff Smith
thinking may be intentionally related to an existing state of affairs, which
renders the thought true, so the belief that p may be intentionally related
to an existing state of affairs that p, which renders the belief true. Second,
we note that visual perception is Husserl’s familiar paradigm. We may say
a visual experience is veridical, or “true” to the world, if its content suc-
cessfully or veridically “intends” an existing object or situation, whence
the experience is in a successful intentional relation to that object, by virtue
of the content in the experience. We’ll focus on the truth of an experience
of thinking, but it is helpful to bear in mind the parallel case of veracity in
perception.
I shall assume that the content of an act of thinking that p is a proposi-
tion or propositional sense <p>. An act of thinking that p, then, has the
content <p>: a propositional sense or Sinn in Husserl’s idiom, a thought or
Gedanke in Frege’s idiom. In a Husserlian model, the “noematic” sense or
content <p>, in an act of thinking that p, “intends” the (putative) state of
affairs [p]. Alternatively, by virtue of its content the act “intends” that state
of affairs, that is, in the world beyond consciousness per se.
Some philosophers collapse “propositions” into putative states of affairs.
But I’ll assume a sharp distinction between propositions and sates of
affairs. Then:

The proposition <p> is true if and only if

the state of affairs [p] exists,
i.e., there exists a corresponding state of affairs [p].

And accordingly:

An act of thinking that p is true if and only if

its content <p> is true,
whence the act is intentionally related to
an existing state of affairs [p].

In this model, what makes the act of thinking that p true, and what makes
its content <p> true, is the way in which the state of affairs [p] satisfies the
truth or veracity conditions formulated in the above biconditionals—that is,
the satisfaction of the content <p> in the act by the existing state of affairs
[p] “intended” by the proposition <p> where entertained in the act of think-
ing that p.
Given this intentionalist perspective on truth, I propose, we should see the
practice of epoché as pulling back from the mundane assumption of verac-
ity, in order to focus on the structure of the experience of thinking—and
thus to consider its truth conditions. To assess the veracity, the truth, of an
experience of thinking, we must then reverse the bracketing of the question
of the existence of the posited state of affairs. And so we determine, by
whatever means we have, whether such a state of affairs actually exists or
obtains. I’ll elaborate on this view of epoché as we move along.
 Truth and Epoché 115
(On relevant details that I draw from Husserl, compare Smith 2013, 2nd
edition, amplifying the 1st edition of 2007. On current approaches to truth,
see Lynch 2001. On the intentionalist approach to truth, linking Husserlian
and Tarskian frameworks, see Smith 2005.)

3. CONDITIONS OF TRUTH

A logical theory of truth in a Tarskian formulation is designed to articulate

truth conditions for a sentence in a specified language. In Tarski’s famous
constraint on a theory of truth, called Convention T:

(T) The sentence “p” in a language L is true in L if and only if p,

i.e., it is the case that p.

This condition is a schematic convention that Tarski proposed as a condi-

tion of the adequacy of a formal definition of truth for the given language
L. On Tarski’s theory, the formulation (T) for a given sentence “p” is itself
a sentence in a metalanguage M about the object language L. Thus, “ ‘p’
is true in L” is a sentence in M, and not a sentence in L. Separating the
metalanguage from the base object language helps Tarski solve the prob-
lem of the liar paradox (“This sentence is false”). Here we simply note the
two levels of language, in Tarski’s model. The details of Tarski’s theory of
truth—historically innovative details in logical theory—involve specific con-
ditions on the several basic forms of expression in a formally defined lan-
guage L, notably his treatment of variables and quantifiers in a first-order
quantified language. Those details lie beyond our current project.
Tarski himself assumed an ontology of individuals and sets, a nominalist
framework, avoiding the complications of “facts” (in Russell’s ontology) or
“states of affairs” (in Husserl’s ontology). A traditional “correspondence”
theory of truth might say the sentence “p” is true if and only if it represents
or corresponds to and so is made true by the existing state of affairs that p.
Tarski’s formulation of truth conditions avoided appeal to states of affairs
or such a “correspondence.” At any rate, our study here goes beyond gospel
Tarski as we draw in aspects of intentionality, and in due course we’ll allow
a role for states of affairs as noted.
Tarski offered his theory of truth as a foundation for formal semantics.
As noted earlier, the title of his 1944 essay was “The Semantic Concep-
tion of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics.” In the 1930s, logical
theory worked largely with syntax, as in Rudolf Carnap’s conception of
“logical syntax,” but after the work of Tarski—and David Hilbert and
Kurt Gödel—logic embraced semantics per se, mapping the ways in which
expressions relate to things in the world. In fact, the terms “syntax” and
“semantics” (and “pragmatics”) were not used in logical theory until the
years after Tarski’s work, taking firm root in the 1940s, and leading through
model theory into possible-worlds semantics by the 1960s.
116 David Woodruff Smith
Whence, in modern-day possible-worlds semantics, conditions of truth
for a sentence are defined relative to an appropriate type of possible world,
i.e., an alternative situation or state of affairs, relevantly alternative to the
actual world. Thus:

(TW) The sentence “p” in a language L is true in L in a world W

if and only if in W it is the case that p.

Truth simpliciter is then defined as truth in the actual world.

Today the “semantic” conception of intentionality looks to the intentional
relations of experience to things in the world. Without the idiom of “seman-
tics,” however, in his Logical Investigations Husserl clearly envisioned a
mapping of forms of experience and forms of “sense” onto forms of things
in the world. Without the name “semantics,” Husserl launches the Inves-
tigations with a vision of the logical theory of how expressions and mean-
ings signify things in the world, and from there Husserl launches his theory
of intentionality, a theory of how experiences and their meaning-contents
intend things in the world. (See Smith 2007, 2013 on this interpretation of
Husserl’s development of phenomenology. See Smith and McIntyre 1982
on details of the correlation between logical semantics and intentionality
theory, drawing on Jaakko Hintikka’s style of possible-worlds semantics for
a language of perception or belief, especially in Hintikka 1969.)
We’ll look to a model of truth for an act of thinking, as opposed to truth
for specified forms of sentence in a given language. If you will, we turn
to the “language” of intentional consciousness, i.e., the structure of inten-
tional experiences bearing structured meaning-contents. Thus, I propose,
we may consider the significance of a neo-Tarskian theory of truth condi-
tions for an experience of thinking, assuming a broadly Husserlian theory
of intentionality.

4. TRUTH CONDITIONS FOR THINKING

Looking to Tarski’s condition (T), assuming Husserl’s basic theory of inten-

tionality, we formulate a similar neo-Husserlian condition (T*) on the struc-
ture of intentionality in thinking:

(T*) An act of thinking that p, with the noematic sense <p>,

is true if and only if p,
i.e., where the sense <p> designates the state of affairs [p].

A full theory of intentionality would appraise various forms of content or

sense, and the patterns of intentional relation to appropriate things in the
world, where such things actually exist. For our purposes, however, we
 Truth and Epoché 117
focus on a simple form of thinking, say, where (in the first person) I think
that “Husserl was Moravian.”
For this act of thinking, then, the condition (T*) defines the form of truth
conditions for this simple thought:

My act of thinking that Husserl was Moravian,

with the content <Husserl was Moravian>, is true if and only if
Husserl was Moravian.

The full analysis of truth-conditional structure would take its place in a

wider theory of intentionality, encompassing a rich variety of forms of
intentional experience. For our purposes, however, we focus on the form of
this simple act of thought, its content or sense, and the intentional relation
of the act, by virtue of its sense, to an appropriate structure in the world,
namely, a state of affairs consisting of the individual Husserl instantiating
the property of being Moravian.
A possible-worlds variation on (T*) brings out the intentional force of an
act’s content (adapting the style of Hintikka 1969). Thus:

My act of thinking that Husserl was Moravian,

with the content <Husserl was Moravian>, is true in a world W
if and only if in W Husserl was Moravian.

This style of truth-conditional analysis homes in on the noematic content

of my act of thinking (see Smith and McIntyre 1982). For the case of truth
simpliciter, however, we stay with truth in the actual world.
Following this neo-Tarskian-Husserlian theory of truth, then, the struc-
ture of truth for this act of thinking is depicted in Figure 5.1.
For the record, Husserl explicitly used quotation marks to abstract
the noematic sense in an act of consciousness (see Ideas I, §89). As we
refocus on the expression “Husserl was Moravian” and therewith on the
sense <Husserl was Moravian>, we ascend from the intended object of my
thought to the content of my thought: that is, from the state of affairs [Hus-
serl was Moravian] to the sense <Husserl was Moravian>. This form of
semantic ascent lays the foundation for the assimilation of Husserl’s theory
of intentionality to semantic theory, including his own style in the Logical
Investigations. (That assimilation is a running theme in Smith 2007, 2013.)
When we look only to the Tarskian condition (T) or to the neo-Husserlian
condition (T*), the statement of truth conditions looks utterly trivial. And,
indeed, in a way it is. For in a simple case of presumably veridical thought,
well, the thought simply “intends” and reaches out to the obvious candi-
date. Thus, my thinking that Husserl was Moravian truly reaches out to the
situation or state of affairs that Husserl was indeed Moravian. What could
be simpler? What more is there to say about truth?
118 David Woodruff Smith
Proposition represents
< Husserl was Moravian > [Husserl was Moravian]
state of affairs

TRUTH

< Husser l was Mor avian>

noema [Husserl was Moravian]

act

WORLD

Figure 5.1 The Structure of Truth as a Successful Intentional Relation

5. TRUTH AND THE PROBLEM OF REDUNDANCY

Tarski’s convention (T) has led to an interesting opposition. On one view,

the predicate “true” is simply redundant, as (T) purportedly shows. On
that “deflationist” view, there is nothing more to be said: further questions,
say, about the ontology of meanings and objects like “facts” or states of
affairs—well, these issues are simply otiose. For the predicate “true” is sim-
ply redundant, on a basic deflationist view: to say “ ‘p’ is true” is just to
say “p,” that is, with assertoric force. On another view, however, the predi-
cate “true” is constrained by (T) in such a way that we may then expand
our purview into ontology and, in the current enterprise, into phenome-
nology. “Semantics” in logic then appraises the relations among sentences
and things in the world—and ideal meanings, if we go with the likes of
Husserl and Frege. And the “semantic” model of intentionality, following
Husserl in basic outlines, appraises the intentional relation between acts of
 Truth and Epoché 119
consciousness and their appropriate objects in the world—with ideal mean-
ings playing the role of designating said objects.
Now, the intentionalist convention (T*) raises a problem parallel to the
redundancy problem just noted about the truth conditions for a sentence.
What is the difference between my thinking, assertively, that Husserl was
Moravian and my thinking, reflectively, that my thought is true, i.e., that
indeed Husserl was Moravian? Here we turn to the practice of epoché. In
the mundane attitude, I think assertively that Husserl was Moravian, and in
fact (I take it) he was. In a deflationist spirit, that is all there is to “truth”:
as articulated in the truth conditions specified above for my act of so think-
ing. However, in the transcendental attitude, achieved by epoché, I reflec-
tively observe that my act of so thinking “intends” the state of affairs that
Husserl was Moravian, and so, bracketing the question of the existence of
the “intended” state of affairs, I analyze the noematic sense <Husserl was
Moravian> (looking to its role in my experience, drawing on a horizon of
background meaning). In this transcendental spirit, I move from the sur-
rounding world into my consciousness directed toward the worldly state of
affairs that Husserl was in fact Moravian.
Here is the problem of truth and epoché: the movement, in reflection,
between experience and the world experienced.
(On the parallel between Tarskian and Husserlian views, see Smith 2005,
2013, pp. 261–262. On the role and status of ideal meaning in Husserl’s
phenomenology, see Smith 2013, pp. 414–433.)

1. The Experience of Truth

As we look into this neo-Tarskian, neo-Husserlian conception of truth con-
ditions à la (T*) for intentional acts of thinking, I should like to cast a wider
net, considering the form of truth for other forms of experience.
When I judge that p, when I think that p with an assertive positing
character, I have an experience of truth—from the first-person perspective.
When I say “p,” in assertoric mode, I assert or posit that it is the case
that p. And so far as my speech act goes, my assertion reaches out to the
world and, from my first-person perspective, veridically represents the state
of affairs that p. Similarly, in the absence of speech, when I think assertively
that p, my thought-that-p intends the state of affairs that p. And so far as
my thought goes, my consciousness reaches out to the world and, from
my first-person perspective, intends the posited state of affairs—presumably
veridically. At this level of positing reality, skeptical considerations do not
arise. Of course, I may be wrong, but in the milieu of everyday evidence,
I posit and so experience the state of affairs that p. So far as my intentional
activity is concerned, from the first-person perspective, I experience truth,
the veracity of my thought or judgment (or assertion).
Husserl famously emphasized the sense of evidence, called “intuitive full-
ness,” thus “intuition” (Anschauung), that we may experience in perception
120 David Woodruff Smith
and judgment. That first-person sense of evidence is part of the assertoric
force of a typical visual experience or an assertive thought or judgment.
To be clear, I am assuming that the successful intentional relation does not
reduce to the intuitive or evidential character in experience. That is, truth
does not reduce to the phenomenological character of seeming-veracity.
Now, at a different level of intentionality, I step outside my thought or
judgment that p, and in a higher-order thought I judge that my thought-that-
p is true. In the spirit of Tarskian theory, my meta-judgment then explicitly
posits the truth of my initial thought. Thus, in a basic experience of thinking,

I think that p,

and in a separate act of reflection,

I think that my thought-that-p is true.

This meta-thought I execute in reflection upon my original thought. Here is

an explicit experience of truth: positing the success of the intentional rela-
tion between my thought-that-p and its intended object, the state of affairs
that p. This reflective higher-order thought enters the realm of phenomeno-
logical reflection. We might say this reflective thought is executed from a
higher-order first-person perspective, that is, where:

I think that (the act wherein I think that p is true).

The first “I think” in this structure is at a higher level than the second
“I think,” rather as if I am observing myself from a meta-first-personal per-
spective. That new perspective is not properly a third-person perspective, as
it is still “I” at work, but my new, phenomenological perspective is a per-
spective now outside the basic experience wherein I think that p.
That phenomenological perspective we’ll explore further as we proceed.
At this point I want to emphasize that truth can be experienced also in a
more direct way: in my positing the existence of the state of affairs that p,
when I think assertively that p—in a circumstance of appropriate evidence
with the presumption of knowledge.
From a logical point of view in Tarski’s wake, we do not usually say
we represent (or “experience”) truth until we ascend from the object lan-
guage (saying “p”) to the metalanguage (saying “the sentence ‘p’ is true”).
That is the Tarskian meta-logical perspective. Similarly, from a phenom-
enological point of view, we do not usually say we “intend” truth per se
until we ascend from mundane experience to phenomenological reflection
on everyday experience. That is the Husserlian “transcendental” perspec-
tive. From that reflective perspective, we can assess the evidence supporting
my thought (or judgment) that p. This perspective is central in Husserl’s
phenomenological theory of knowledge, in which a thought or judgment is
 Truth and Epoché 121
supported or “fulfilled” through appropriate patterns of evidence (in per-
ception, background beliefs, intersubjective confirmation, etc.). And if we
bring in external circumstances, as in today’s externalist models of knowl-
edge, well, then we move back and forth between internal and external sup-
port for a claim to the truth of my thought that p and, further, a claim to my
having knowledge that p. (Our present concerns are with truth as opposed
to knowledge; knowledge requires, in addition, appropriate evidence, cir-
cumstance, intersubjective collaboration, etc.)
But now consider perception, in contrast with thought or judgment. In
an everyday case of visual perception, I see that the sun is shining over the
Pacific. Skeptical considerations do not apply; I simply look out at the ocean
and see that the sun is shining. In this way, from my first-person perspective,
I directly experience the sun’s shining: visually. In my experience of seeing
that the sun is shining, I directly experience or “intend” the state of affairs
that the sun is shining. So far as my experience goes, I thus experience the
veridicality of my perception. We might even say I “feel” my perception’s
successfully intending that state of affairs. In Husserl’s idiom, my visual
experience is a fusion of visual sensation and meaningful interpretation (a
fusion of sensory hyle and intentional morphe), and so my visual experience
is a direct “intuition” of what I see. In visual intuition, then, I directly expe-
rience the veracity or “truthiness” of my visual experience of the sunshine
over the Pacific. (For future generations: the term “truthiness” was coined
by the American television artist Stephen Colbert. Truthiness does not itself
guarantee truth, the latter-day Husserl notes.)
In Husserl’s wake, seeking a new account of “transcendence” toward
beings in the world, Heidegger characterized truth (Wahrheit, in German)
as “unconcealment,” or “uncovering” what appears. Drawing on the ety-
mology of the Greek aletheia, Heidegger sought a more primordial sense
of truth than that of the correspondence of a proposition with a state of
the world. On one level, Heidegger was seeking the basic ways in which
we experience and deal with things in the world, prior to anything like the
logician’s model of truth as correspondence or representation. The notion
of truth as disclosedness comes alive, I believe, when we consider everyday
perception. Heidegger himself did not emphasize the direct sense of reality
in perception per se, as his focus was on the sense of things around us in,
for example, hammering a nail. But hammering a nail is a complex activity
of seeing and hammering the nail, using one’s hand to wield the hammer.
In such an activity we are in direct contact with hammer and nail, directly
experiencing that part of the world in which we dwell and perceive and act.
(Cf. Wrathall 2011 on Heidegger’s conception of truth as “unconcealment”:
see pp. 40–56 on how truth conditions play in a Heideggerian framework.
I thank Paul Livingston for noting, in discussion, that direct perception
could be understood as a form of unconcealment à la Heidegger.)
As we noted, Husserl characterized perception as “intuition” (Anschau-
ung): that is, a direct experience of something. A simple visual experience
122 David Woodruff Smith
thus presents me immediately with the reality of (say) the nail I am hammer-
ing. In that way, I experience an immediate intentional relation to the nail
and my hammering the nail. The success or veridicality of my visual and tac-
tile and sensory-motor “intention” of the nail is not something I experience
only as I step back and form the higher-order judgment that my perception
is veridical (and my hammering successful). Rather, in the flow of everyday
life, I immediately experience the veridicality of my perception of the nail
(and the success of my hammering it). That is to say, the phenomenology
of everyday perception is such that I experience truth—in the normal case
where there is no real question of hallucination or systematic illusion. The
structure of my perceptual experience is such that, to the best of my eviden-
tial situation, in my perception I am in a veridical intentional relation to
what I perceive.
The point of this excursus into the experience of truth is to draw us
from the Tarskian logical model of truth to the Husserlian phenomeno-
logical model of truth. That is: assuming that “truthiness”—veridicality of
intentionality—is a feature of our everyday experience, already familiar in
a simple visual or tactile experience prior to reflection thereon. Again, in
a neo-Husserlian vein, we may say that we experience truth—notably in
“direct” perception—from a first-personal perspective. But we may also say,
in that vein, that we experience truth in a further way—in phenomenologi-
cal reflection—from a meta-first-personal perspective as we consider truth
conditions per se. And then we may return to the world in search of further
evidence for the satisfaction of an experience’s truth conditions.

2. Meaning and Truth from a Phenomenological Point of View

Turning explicitly to epoché, I should like to sharpen the outlines of the way
in which the theory of intentionality shapes the “semantic” approach to
truth in experience. As Tarski assumed a semantic approach to logic in devel-
oping model theory per se, so Husserl had assumed a semantic approach
to intentionality theory, an approach crucial to Husserl’s ever-widening
conception of phenomenology. And in the “Prolegomena” to the Logi-
cal Investigations, Husserl explicitly outlined a vision of what became
model-theoretic metalogic in Tarskian form. Thus, as noted earlier, Husserl
outlined a system correlating categories of thought or experience, meaning,
and objects—assuming the content or meaning of a thought is expressible in
language. I hasten to remind us that the term “semantics” did not enter the
vocabulary of contemporary logic (launched by Frege) until Tarski’s work.
So we are tracing in hindsight the development of an approach to logic and
to phenomenology that we today may call “semantic”—precisely because
we are appraising meaning in experience.
The fundamentals of Husserl’s theory of intentionality are laid out in
his Logical Investigations, distinguishing act, content, and object of inten-
tional experience. By the time of Ideas I, Husserl had found the method of
 Truth and Epoché 123
bracketing, or epoché. There is much to be said about Husserl’s theory and
practice of epoché, along neo-Kantian lines concerned with whether we ever
reach a world beyond the “phenomena,” or things as they appear, things as
they are “intended” in our consciousness. The key point I want to stress,
however, is the way that epoché fits into Husserl’s theory of intentionality.
Only within that theory do we explain what epoché does.
By “bracketing” the question of the existence of the surrounding world,
I turn my focus from the objects of my experience to my experiences them-
selves and, in particular, to the noematic contents or meanings entertained in
my experiences. (Husserl introduces the method of bracketing, or epoché, in
Ideas I, §§27–33; he details the turn to noematic contents then in §§89–91.)
Husserl’s paradigm is an act of visual perception, but for present purposes
we focus on an act of thinking.
Suppose I think that Husserl was Moravian. In the practice of epoché
I now bracket the question of the existence of what my thinking posits, i.e.,
the fact that Husserl was Moravian, the existing state of affairs that Hus-
serl was Moravian. Where do I now stand, as it were? I have suspended
the standpoint of the natural attitude, as Husserl put it. And that leaves me
living in my act of thinking that Husserl was Moravian—but in abeyance of
the actual fact of Husserl’s origins. As I reflect on my so thinking, I appre-
ciate the content of my thinking, viz., the sense <Husserl was Moravian>.
I understand that meaning, that propositional sense, and so in reflection
I may formulate the conditions under which that proposition and so my
thinking would be true.
Following the convention (T*) as above, I say in transcendental phenom-
enological reflection:

My act of thinking that Husserl was Moravian,

with the content <Husserl was Moravian>, is true if and only if
Husserl was Moravian—i.e., in fact, in the actual world.

This observation I make in the attitude of epoché. As the ancient skeptics

said, I withhold judgment, but, Husserl says, I thereby reflect on my experi-
ence of so thinking. And the truth conditions above show the force of the
content of my thinking.
(Around 1907, Husserl took his “transcendental turn,” incorporating
neo-Kantian terminology à la transcendental idealism and moving toward
the methodology of epoché. See Mohanty 2008, 2011; Moran 2005; Smith
2007, 2013. Scholars are divided over whether this “turn” is a radical break
with his prior realism. I see continuity in Husserl’s development.)

3. The World in and out of Brackets

According to a common interpretation of Husserl’s practice of epoché, the
technique of bracketing leads us into the “phenomena” of consciousness
124 David Woodruff Smith
as we leave behind the “mundane” world. In a Kantian twist, we come to
understand how the objects of our experience are shaped by the noematic
meanings that inform our consciousness. And we thus enter a transcenden-
tally enlightened sphere of consciousness, as we leave the noumenal world
behind and concern ourselves only with the phenomenal world. Phenom-
enology is the science of consciousness, and with phenomenology we tran-
scend familiar forms of naturalism (the world is but particles in the void)
and historicism (the world is but a cultural artifact), coming to understand
consciousness itself and its role in our dealings with “the world” qua phe-
nomenon. Accordingly, in this view, the world is transformed into phenom-
ena of consciousness, and a strong form of idealism fits naturally with that
perspective.
Still, a more nuanced version of the “phenomenal” reading of Husserlian
epoché is possible.
On my account, the practice of phenomenology via epoché presupposes
certain ontological structures (e.g., parts-in-wholes, essences, manifolds,
etc.). Alternatively, John Drummond holds, all of ontology is “reinscribed”
in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. On this approach, the world
enters phenomenological brackets, and we come to understand that the
world—in all its ontological structure—just is the world as perceived and
thought and dealt with. Importantly, this “reinscription” view of transcen-
dental phenomenology is not committed to any form of subjective idealism.
For, if I may put it so, things in the world are constituted partly by the
properties they present in our consciousness of them, and those things are
perfectly real—our consciousness does not bring them into existence. (See
Smith 2013, Chapter 9 on discussion of this theme of reinscription.)
Now, the semantic conception of intentionality—on the present
construction—takes a different view of the significance of epoché. Bracket-
ing the object of consciousness is a technique for turning attention to the
act of consciousness and its content. On this view, epoché effects an ascent
from the object of consciousness to the content of consciousness, that is,
to the noematic sense or meaning entertained in consciousness. The truth
conditions for an act of thinking, in accord with convention (T*), correlate
the act’s content—an ideal noematic meaning—with the act’s “intended”
object. That correlation, on this view, presupposes appropriate ontologi-
cal structures: from the object intended to the ideal meaning to the act of
consciousness within the stream of consciousness—and on to the successful
intentional relation of veridicality, in which the intended object exists and
satisfies the ideal content according to specified truth conditions.
Husserl himself, we noted, emphasizes the “quotation” of noe-
matic meaning. And he occasionally speaks of a zig-zag methology. The
neo-Husserlian convention (T*) allows that with epoché we move from
object back to the meaning through which we experience the object, and
then, noting the truth conditions, we move back to the object. In our run-
ning example, following (T*), we note the relation between the proposition
 Truth and Epoché 125
<Husserl was Moravian>—the noematic sense of my thinking that Husserl
was Moravian—and the “intended” and existing state of affairs [Husserl
was Moravian].
In the practice of phenomenology, on this “semantic” approach, we
move back and forth between everyday experience and phenomenological
reflection. In the attitude of everyday experience, we posit the existence of
various things in the world around us, in “the surrounding world of every-
day life,” or “the life-world.” In the attitude of phenomenological reflec-
tion, we bracket the question of the existence of the things we typically posit
in everyday experience, and thereby we come to reflect on the structure of
our experience. In the practice of transcendental phenomenology, on this
view, we move back and forth between the level of everyday “positing”
experience and the level of “transcendental” reflection on the structure of
everyday experience. We do not leave the surrounding world behind, enter-
ing into a realm of pure consciousness where the “real” world comes to
appear as mere illusion. Rather, we step back from the concerns of everyday
life, we step out of the attitude of everyday life, and now we reflect on the
structure of everyday experiences of perception, thought, action, etc. And in
this “transcendental” attitude we analyze the structure of intentionality, and
in reflection, in analysis, we find that every intentional experience involves
an appropriate noematic content or sense.
Here we appraise consciousness and the range of meaning or sense char-
acteristic of different types of experience of worldly things, as in seeing a
sailboat gliding on the calm waters of the Pacific or thinking that Husserl
was Moravian. Hence, in the practice of epoché, we come to adopt two
related attitudes. We normally live in familiar types of experience; Hus-
serl called this the “natural attitude.” In phenomenological reflection,
however, we live in experiences directed toward the modes of everyday
consciousness and their ranges of meaning or sense; Husserl called this the
“transcendental-phenomenological attitude.” When we understand these
two levels of experience, we may move back and forth between these levels,
as we do in considering (T*) style truth conditions!

4. From Epoché to “Semantic” Levels of Consciousness

Husserl felt that the method of epoché was his greatest achievement. But,
from today’s perspective, what’s the big deal? What was so revolutionary?
If we follow the “semantic” approach to intentionality in phenomenology,
can we see what was so stunning to Husserl in his day?
Mathematical logic began with Frege, Cantor, et al., but formal semantics
did not take shape until Tarski. With an eye to semantics, Jaakko Hintikka
has contrasted two views of logic and of language, drawing on a distinction
articulated by Jean van Heejinoort. One view of logic assumes that modern
symbolic logic (viz., first-order quantifier logic) is a universal medium, in
which all theories can be formulated with due precision. The other view
126 David Woodruff Smith
assumes that logic is a calculus, where one formal language can be inter-
preted within another. Frege held the first view as he put forth his Begriffss-
chrift. Tarski assumed the second view, where a given object language is
interpreted within truth conditions formulated in a metalanguage.
Hintikka generalized the opposition from logic to language in general.
In one view, language is a universal medium: what I can express in lan-
guage I can express in (especially) my mother tongue. Ludwig Wittgenstein
became the champion of this sort of view, following Frege and Bertrand
Russell in logic. (W. V. Quine held a similar view, where ordinary language
is best “regimented” in accord with first-order quantifier logic.) In an alter-
native view, language is a “calculus”: what is expressible in one language
can be expressed in another language, and one language can specify what
another language says. This view of language inhabits the metalanguage
style assumed by Tarski. And the model-theoretic style Tarski initiated
evolved into the possible-worlds style of semantics developed by Hintikka
and others.
The philosophical significance of this opposition between language as
universal medium and language as calculus is detailed by Merrill B. Hin-
tikka and Jaakko Hintikka in their Investigating Wittgenstein (1986; see
pp. 1–29). Logicians assuming the universalist stance were “semanticists
without semantics,” as the Hintikkas put it. For these theorists, meaning
is captured implicitly in “logical syntax” (Rudolf Carnap’s term) or philo-
sophical “grammar” (Wittgenstein’s term).
Following the Hintikkas’ lead, Martin Kusch took the universal/calculus
opposition into phenomenology (in Kusch 1989). Kusch explicitly relates
Husserl’s phenomenology with the meta-logical, model-theoretic tradition:

Following [mathematician David] Hilbert, Husserl accepts early on

the idea of metalogical proof. Central to his whole enterprise is the
notion of acts that relate to one another as object- and meta-acts. . . .
Husserl argues for the possibility of a transcendental language as a
true metalanguage with respect to natural ordinary language. To safe-
guard this distinction, he makes use of a special quotation convention,
noema-quotation, and he speaks of Sinne of different order. (Kusch
1989, p. 133, summarizing a lengthy analysis in pp. 11–134)

Kusch argues at length that Husserl thus assumes a conception of language

as a “calculus,” whereas Heidegger assumed a conception of language as a
“universal medium.” In the calculus view, we can move from one language
to another, where one language interprets another language, just as Tarski
uses a metalanguage to specify truth conditions for an object-language. By
contrast, in the universalist view, we are always working within our home
language. That language is the only place where we understand meaning.
For Heidegger, we know, “Language is the house of being,” and phenom-
enology’s concern is “the meaning of being.”
 Truth and Epoché 127
Now I should like to move from logic to language to consciousness per
se. On one view, consciousness is itself a universal medium of meaning. Per-
haps Kant already assumed such a view, insofar as reason itself Kant held
to be informed by a universal scheme of conceptual categories of the under-
standing, without which cognition would not be possible. By contrast, as
modern logic was taking shape in Husserl’s day, the logical calculus scheme
was coming into view. One domain of cognition or (better) consciousness
features our everyday dealing with the world, in perception and thought and
action. But in phenomenological reflection, another domain of cognition or
consciousness takes shape. With the practice of epoché, we pull back from
our mundane experience of the world in thought and perception and action,
and we focus on the structure of those forms of everyday consciousness.
And then, as we return to our everyday roles in the world, we appreciate the
role of meaning in our experience.
Now bring in the semantic perspective on consciousness itself. In reflec-
tion we practice “meta”-consciousness, reflecting on our own level of
everyday consciousness, the “object”-level consciousness toward which our
meta-level consciousness is directed.
If logic requires a revolutionary model of metalanguage, envisioned by
Tarski, then transcendental phenomenology requires a revolutionary model
of meta-consciousness, envisioned by Husserl. Tarski’s truth-convention
(T) divided formal languages into object-language and metalanguage
in the formulation of truth conditions. And, in retrospect, Husserl’s the-
ory of intentionality divided the domain of phenomenology—the field
of consciousness—into the everyday object level and the transcenden-
tal noematic-meaning level. With epoché, the experience of meaning and
truth—expressible in truth conditions—became apparent in consciousness
itself. Thus, Husserl’s semantic conception of intentionality, by any other
name, defined Husserl’s conception of phenomenology. And, accordingly,
the neo-Husserlian convention (T*) articulates the semantic conception of
truth as veridical intentionality.

POSTSCRIPT

The technical virtues of Tarski’s formulation of truth conditions include

his treatment of the satisfaction of open sentences (with variables) and the
recursive formation of conditions of truth for logically complex sentences,
including occurrences of quantifiers (‘for some x,’ ‘for all x’) and connec-
tives (‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘not,’ ‘if . . . then’). We have focused here only on a simple
predicative sentence such as ‘Husserl was Moravian,’ which would express
the content <Husserl was Moravian> in an act of thinking that Husserl was
Moravian. How logically complex propositional contents are satisfied by
appropriate entities in the world is a complex problem, with many propos-
als in the literature. I leave those issues aside here, in order to focus on a
128 David Woodruff Smith
simple experience of thinking and its conditions of truth. In Smith (2005)
I considered a radical proposal that might be drawn from Husserl, in which
a complex structure called a “manifold’ might serve to make true a complex
proposition expressible in a logically complex sentence. Enough said, here.

WORKS CITED

Davidson, D. 1967. Truth and Meaning. In M. P. Lynch, ed., The Nature of Truth:
Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally
published in Synthese 17: 304–323 (1967).
Hintikka, J. 1962. Knowledge and Belief: an Introdution to the Logic of the Two
Notions. Cornell U. Press.
Hintikka, J. 1969. Models for Modalities. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hintikka, M. B. and J. Hintikka. 1986. Investigating Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Husserl, E. 1913 [1981]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phe-
nomenological Philosophy: First Book. F. Kersten (trans.) Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Originally published in German as Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologishen Philosophie, I. Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine
Phänomenologie. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913).
Kusch, M. 1989. Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium: A Study
in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer. Dordrecht: Springer.
Lynch, M. P., ed. 2001. The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspec-
tives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mohanty, J. N. 2008. The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Develop-
ment. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mohanty, J. N. 2011. Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Moran, D. 2005. Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press.
Smith, D. W. 2005. “Truth and Experience: Tarski vis-à-vis Husserl”. In M. E.
Reicher and J. C. Marek, ed., Experience and Analysis. Erfahrung und Analyse.
The Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Vienna: öbv
a hpt, 270–284.
Smith, D.W. 2007. Husserl. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, D. W. 2013. Husserl. 2nd ed. (revised). London: Routledge. First edition, 2007.
Smith, D.W. and R. McIntyre 1982. Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind,
Meaning, and Language (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1982).
Tarski, A. 1933/1936, “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in A. Tar-
ski (ed.), Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. Oxford University Press. 152--278
(1936)
Tarski, A. 1944/2001. The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of
Semantics. In M. P. Lynch, ed., The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary
Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 331–364. First published in Philoso-
phy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944).
Wrathall, M. 2011. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History:
Philosophical Essays Volume 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6 From Difference-Maker to
­Truthmaker (and Back)
Jeffrey A. Bell

Metaphysical questions have increasingly become the focus of a number of

philosophical debates among both analytic and continental philosophers.
Among the theories that have given rise to metaphysical questions and
debates is truthmaker theory. The following essay will explore the meta-
physical implications of truthmaker theory and show how Deleuze’s meta-
physical project provides for the realism that truthmaker theory calls for.
This shift towards metaphysical questions as are found in truthmaker theory
is somewhat surprising, given the dominance of the post-Kantian approach
to philosophy one finds in both analytic and continental traditions and its
attendant concern with deducing the conditions that constitute legitimate
claims to know. This effort, to paint with a rather broad brush, is performed
without concern for the nature of the reality that is known, or for the real
that is independent of the conditions whereby the real comes to be known.
Reality serves, as Peirce argued, as the object represented by the opinion
we are all fated to agree upon at the end of the road of inquiry,1 a point
Hilary Putnam reaffirms when he argues against “metaphysical realism.”
Metaphysical realism becomes “incoherent,” Putnam claims, “at a particu-
lar point,” namely, “just at the point at which it claims to be distinguishable
from Peircean realism.”2 In other words, to speak of reality as it is in itself
will entail the best scientific theories and opinions we have settled on so far.
To appeal to metaphysical realism and a reality distinct from that posited by
Peircean realism, however, involves appealing to a reality independent of the
opinions inquiring minds have settled upon, and thus it is incapable of being
known or expressed in a way others may grasp or understand. Metaphysical
realism is therefore incoherent.
Within the continental tradition in philosophy one finds a similar ten-
dency to dismiss the efforts of those who would investigate the nature of
reality as it is in itself and independent of those who would come to know
it. This approach also dates to the post-Kantian tradition and one can trace
its lineage from Husserl through Heidegger to Derrida, and to the many
other philosophers we have come to associate with continental phenom-
enology and post-structuralism. Despite Husserl’s claim to return to the
things themselves, the real as it is in itself is for Husserl simply the correlate
130 Jeffrey A. Bell
of the intentionality of consciousness itself, and the reality these intentional
objects may correspond to is bracketed and set aside in what he calls an
époche. Heidegger and Derrida will each, in their separate ways, continue in
much this same vein and adopt a largely anti-realist stance that leaves aside
metaphysical questions regarding the nature of reality.3
The recent turn to metaphysical questions regarding the nature of reality
is subsequently a rather stark departure from the approach to philosophy
that has been mainstream for decades, and it is a departure one finds in
the work of both analytic and continental philosophers. Among analytic
philosophers, for instance, David Lewis is unquestionably the most influ-
ential philosopher to approach traditional metaphysical questions, and his
arguments regarding the reality of possible worlds gets applied to tradi-
tional metaphysical problems and arguments such as the problem of the
one and the many, the ontological argument, and truthmaker theory.4 With
respect to the latter, for instance, Lewis argues that “the most promising, if
not the most prominent, among the grand theories of truth are the theories
that somehow require what’s true to depend on the way the world of exist-
ing things is, or on the way some part of that world is.”5 The theory of
truthmakers, therefore, opens the door for pursuing a metaphysics of the
nature of these truthmakers, as Lewis does by arguing for them in terms of
a possible worlds analysis.6 Hilary Putnam is skeptical of the truthmaker
approach, and for reasons already mentioned—namely, it presupposes a
reality that is “distinguishable from Peircean realism.”7 Other philosophers,
as we will see, have accepted the challenge that truthmaker theory presents
and have pursued the metaphysical questions regarding the nature of the
truthmakers themselves.
In continental philosophy, there has also been a return to metaphysics.
After decades of pursuing a post-Kantian styled anti-realism, as found most
notably in the Heideggerean and post-structuralist critique of the metaphysi-
cal project, metaphysical problems have come to be seen as legitimate, if not
outright essential to the ongoing work of a number of contemporary phi-
losophers. Quentin Meillassoux, for example, has argued that what should
be of pressing concern to philosophers today is, among other things, to
address the problem of correlationism, by which he means the view whereby
it is understood that the nature of reality is always correlated with some-
thing else, whether this be a human subject (transcendental ego, Dasein,
etc.) or a linguistic, textual, and vitalist reality. In each case, the real never
appears as it is in itself but only as correlated with this other reality. Meil-
lassoux’s problem, therefore, is metaphysical in that he sets out to determine
whether and how one can come to know the absolute, that is, the real as
it is in itself and independent of any correlation. Gilles Deleuze is similarly
concerned with metaphysical questions. As Deleuze puts it in an interview
shortly after he published his book on Leibniz, for him “[p]hilosophy is
always a matter of inventing concepts. I’ve never been worried about going
beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy.”8 For Deleuze in particular,
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 131
his concern was to invent concepts that enable us to think the real as dif-
ference in itself, or as difference-makers as we will discuss it here, and this
serves as the principle of sufficient reason for the determinate realities that
are the truthmakers that truthmaker theory calls for. Deleuze’s project is
thus fundamentally metaphysical in nature, and it bears in important ways
on truthmaker theory, as we will see.
In the first section of this essay, we will turn to the arguments of Mul-
ligan, Simons, and Smith in their now classic 1984 essay, “Truth-Makers.”
We will focus more precisely on what is argued to be a key advantage of
adopting a truthmaker theory—namely, the separation between ontology
and logic that truthmaker theory presupposes. It is this separation that will
provide the explanatory gap that is thought necessary to provide the con-
straints for our knowledge claims about the world, for without such a gap
between propositions and the ontology that makes them true, we cannot
say, so truthmaker theory argues, that our explanations extend to anything
but other explanations rather than to the reality that is being explained.
Moreover, we will extend Michael Morris’s argument that if this gap is to
be up to the task and show how a truthmaker can provide proper con-
straints for the truth of propositions, then it must be a non-propositional
reality. To motivate this move to a non-propositional reality, we will turn in
the second section to discussing David Armstrong’s truthmaker theory. By
arguing for states of affairs as the fundamental truthmakers of propositions,
Armstrong believes he has provided a counter to the charge that truthmaker
theory runs afoul of the Humean challenge that there should be no unex-
plained necessary connections. In the third section, we will show that Arm-
strong’s approach, if it is to be successful in avoiding the Humean challenge,
must adopt what Jonathan Schaffer and Ross Cameron have called priority
monism. The fundamental truthmaker, on this approach, is the “one total-
ity fact.”9 This approach, however, does not provide sufficient restraint, for
it too continues within the vein of the propositional model, and thus in the
fourth section, following the lead of Jessica Wilson’s arguments for fun-
damental determinables, we will argue that Deleuze’s metaphysics of mul-
tiplicity offers us a non-propositional reality that successfully avoids the
concerns of the Humean challenge and Putnam’s critique of metaphysical
realism, concerns that will have been highlighted in this essay.

Early in their essay “Truth-Makers,” Mulligan, Simons, and Smith refer

to Russell, Wittgenstein, and Husserl, in recognition that the truthmaker
theory they are about to set forth can trace its roots to seminal figures in
both analytic and continental traditions. What motivates their move to
truthmaker theory, and what they find most enticing about it, is that while
Tarksi’s work may have provided an important theory of truth, Tarski
132 Jeffrey A. Bell
and subsequent defenders of Tarksi’s theory have largely abandoned “the
complex and bewildering difficulties of the relations between language
and the real world, turning instead to the investigation of more tractable
set-theoretic surrogates.”10 In doing this, however, they have largely left the
relationship between truth, language (or propositions), and the real world
unexplained.11 Rather than attempt to grapple with issues such as the corre-
spondence between propositions and any reality that may make such propo-
sitions true, the tendency instead, Mulligan et. al. argue, is to rephrase the
problem in terms of set-theoretic language (à la Quine), with the result-
ing problem being a matter of establishing relations of quantification that
are internal to the language itself, ignoring the sticky question of whether
the language actually corresponds to the real world. It is at this point that
appeal is made to the Peircean claim that reality is simply the object repre-
sented by the final opinion we come to settle upon. Truthmaker theory, by
contrast, is thus seen by Mulligan et. al. as an effort to return to and address
the sticky question regarding truth and reality, and they do so by taking on
“a philosophically non-neutral correspondence theory” of truth (288-89).
In short, in contrast to Tarksi’s approach, where

“ ‘This cube is white’ is true iff this cube is white,”

Mulligan et. al. will argue instead that

If ‘This cube is white’ is true, then it is true in virtue of the being white
(the whiteness) of this cube, and if no such whiteness exists, then ‘This
cube is white’ is false.12

In other words, Mulligan et. al. will not account for truth in terms of a
relationship between a metalanguage and an object language, as Tarski
does, but will embrace a correspondence theory that calls upon something
in reality—“the being white of this cube”—in virtue of which the proposi-
tions is made true. Key to this approach for Mulligan et. al., is the accep-
tance of a gap between the ontological and the logical. By calling for such
a gap, Mulligan et. al. admit that they “are consciously departing from a
dogma that has characterized much of analytic philosophy since its incep-
tion: the dogma of logical form.”13 What they are departing from, in short,
is the notion that there is “a perfect parallelism of logical and ontological
complexity,” such that “ontologically complex objects (those having proper
parts)” must also in some way be “logically complex.”14 This is exemplified
in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus when Wittgenstein argues that when we picture
reality, our ability to do so presupposes that the picture itself, “of what-
ever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict
it—correctly or incorrectly—in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form
of reality.”15 Whenever we say something that is true, the truth of our propo-
sition is true, for Wittgenstein, because the proposition successfully mirrors
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 133
the logical form of reality itself.16 It is this mirroring that Mulligan et. al.
deny, and hence they propose to “uphold the independence of ontological
from logical complexity.”17 For example, Mulligan et. al. argue for the role
of moments as truthmakers and argue that, given this theory, one may see
Dick kick Harry, where such a kick is simply “their somewhat unusual way
of greeting each other,”18 and account for the fact that the same ontological
reality—that is, moment—may be false according to one logical form (that
is, given one extensional relationship between the terms) and true given
another. The only way to do this under traditional assumptions, they argue,
would be by “creating a new extensional position for a term designating
something (i.e., some moment) that is both a kick and a greeting, and this
is to concede defeat,” for this move presupposes the independence of the
moment as an ontological reality distinct from their logical descriptions and
in virtue of which these descriptions are made true.
Mulligan et. al.’s arguments, however, are unpersuasive, for they do not
account for the explanatory gap between ontological moments and the logi-
cal structure of propositions that represent these moments, but rather they
simply assume this gap. In his recent work, Michael Morris has addressed
this issue and has extended Mulligan et. al.’s truthmaker strategy and has
offered an argument that accounts for the gap between the ontological and
the logical. For Morris, what this entails is that the truthmaker must be
non-propositional, for with this move we have the explanatory gap between
the ontological (non-propositional) and the logical (propositional) and we
have the beginnings of an account of how the non-propositional makes
propositions true. Guiding Morris’s account is what he sees as the chal-
lenge philosophers such as John McDowell raise in their attempt to detail
that which serves as the rational constraint upon our experience so that our
conceptual accounts of the world do not become a “frictionless spinning in
a void.” As McDowell states the problem,

We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity [of conceptual under-

standing] as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain of
representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a
void. The Given seems to supply that external control.19

The given, however, is not sufficient to provide the necessary friction, since
McDowell accepts and extends Wilfrid Sellars’s “Myth of the Given” argu-
ment, which concludes, through Sellars’s “inconsistent triad” argument,
that there is no such thing as non-conceptual content.20 What, then, is to
provide for the rational constraint upon the conceptual formulations of our
experience? This is the problem that Morris takes on board from McDow-
ell, and for Morris the problem, as he puts it, is “to describe how the world,
which is not in itself propositional, can constrain description, which is prop-
ositional.”21 In making this move, however, is Morris not simply resurrect-
ing the Myth of the Given that McDowell, Sellars, and others had sought to
134 Jeffrey A. Bell
avoid? For Morris, this will depend upon how the explanatory gap he calls
for is understood. McDowell, however, cannot take the route of arguing
that the world itself is a non-propositional constraint on experience because
McDowell, Morris argues, is forced to concede that “there is no explana-
tory gap between conceptual world and conceptual experience,” and hence
there is nothing other for our conceptual formulations to do than further
detail the conceptual form of the world through our conceptual, propo-
sitional accounts. As McDowell has argued more recently, all our expe-
riences, including our perceptual experiences, are “world-disclosing,” and
what this entails is that “any aspect of its content hangs together with other
aspects of its content in a unity of the sort Kant identifies as categorical.”22
In line with the analytic tradition, therefore, there is a parallel between our
propositions and the “world-disclosing” experience that serves as the con-
straint that assures that our propositions will all hang together. The world
and our propositions share the same logical form.
In extending Mulligan et. al.’s arguments, Morris sets out to argue that,
if there is to be an explanatory gap between our concepts and proposi-
tions and the reality that makes these propositions true, then this reality
is non-propositional. The subsequent challenge for Morris will then be to
address McDowell’s likely charge that he is left with an ineffable point-
ing, since how else can one describe the non-propositional except through
propositions?! The reason for the difficulty people such as McDowell have
with pursuing the line of thought, Morris proposes, is precisely the fact
that they embrace the parallelism of logical and ontological form. Follow-
ing Mulligan et. al., Morris drops this assumption, or what he calls the iso-
morphism thesis, whereby it is assumed that “sentences and facts have the
same kind of structure (propositional structure).”23 Morris rejects this thesis
and argues that in doing so one is not left with an ineffable pointing. To the
contrary, Morris readily admits that a cup, for example, “can correctly be
described as an object [but] describing it as an object is not describing it as
it is in itself.”24 This claim appears to be contradictory, Morris argues, only
when we confuse a metalinguistic claim with the nature of the world as it is
in itself. In other words, within language a singular term refers to an indi-
vidual or an object, and “for something to be an object,” Morris adds, “a
property, a fact, or any of the rest, is always a (partially) linguistic matter.”25
It is simply a claim about language itself, or a metalinguistic claim, to say
that the terms and words of a language refer to the objects, properties, and
facts of the world, but for Morris this does not entail that the world itself
consists of objects, properties, and facts. Far from it—for Morris the world
is non-propositional, and any frustration we may have regarding Morris’s
thesis is simply the result, he claims, of our “hope for a system of representa-
tion which is not a system of representation.”26
What Morris has not given us, however, is an account of how the
non-propositional reality serves as the constraint in virtue of which our
propositions become true propositions. He has shown that the call for a
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 135
non-propositional world is not incoherent, but not how it relates to the
truth of propositions. As we will see in section 4, Deleuze does provide such
an account. To anticipate these arguments, as well as prepare for our discus-
sion of David Armstrong’s truthmaker theory, we can say for the moment
that what is critical to Deleuze’s account is his critique of representation.
Despite Morris’s reaffirmation of Mulligan et. al’s break with the tendency
among traditional analytic philosophy to accept a parallelism between the
logical structure of our propositions and the ontological structure of the
world as it is in itself, Morris continues to embrace a parallelism of iden-
tity between our descriptions and representations and that which is rep-
resented. To see what this entails for Morris, we can turn to the example
he offers at the conclusion of his essay. In referring to a painting as an
example of a non-propositional representation, Morris argues that: “Since
painting does not use propositional structure, it does not represent things in
terms of the traditional ontological categories.” The implication, however,
is that the painting nonetheless accurately represents the non-propositional
nature of the world, and it is precisely this process of representation that
Deleuze rejects, for it presupposes the identity of that which is presented
and given and then represented in the painting—namely, the identifiable
objects with their extensive properties and qualities—and it is this identity
that allows for the possibility of re-presentation. Identity, however, is for
Deleuze what needs to be explained rather than presupposed, and it is the
non-propositional nature of reality that provides this account. Before turn-
ing to Deleuze’s account, however, and in order to motivate it, let us turn
first to Armstrong’s truthmaker theory.

II

Leaving aside for the moment the difficulties associated with explaining
the relationship between a non-propositional truthmaking world and the
propositions that describe this world, we can begin this section by noting
that a central premise of truthmaker theory is that the truthmaker neces-
sitates the truth of the proposition. Mulligan et. al. state this premise as the
“first principle of truth-making”; namely, the principle that “what is made
true is true.”27 Armstrong endorses this “first principle of truth-making,”
and in response to questions he poses as to whether “truthmakers actually
necessitate their truths, or is the relation weaker than that,” and whether
“all truths have truthmakers,” Armstrong says yes to the first—“the relation
is necessitation, absolute necessitation”—and yes to the second as well—
“every truth has a truthmaker.”28 Armstrong will refer to these aspects of
truthmaker theory as Truthmaker Necessitarianism and Truthmaker Maxi-
malism. But it is at this point that problems quickly begin to emerge, for,
as Armstrong admits, the truthmakers in virtue of which propositions are
true are not always propostions themselves, and hence the problem is to
136 Jeffrey A. Bell
explain how the truthmaker necessitates the truth of the proposition if the
truthmaker is at least in part non-propositional.29 This brings us to a ver-
sion of the problem we discussed in the previous section—how does the
non-propositional world constrain and serve as truthmaker for descriptions
of the world (propositions)? For Armstrong, the solution to this problem
entails arguing for an “internal relation” between propositions and the
truthmakers that make these propositions true, and by internal relation
Armstrong means that “given just the terms of the relation, the relation
between them is necessitated.”30 An internal relation is to be contrasted with
an external relation, or a relation of supervenience whereby the relation is
external to the terms.31 A further advantage of this approach, as we will see,
is that by arguing for internal relations, Armstrong is able to avoid Hume’s
skepticism concerning necessary relations. As Hume famously argued, there
are no necessary connections between distinct elements but only a regularity
of constant conjunctions.
What carries the weight of Armstrong’s argument for the necessity of inter-
nal relations between truthmakers and the propositions these truthmakers
make true are states of affairs. A state of affairs, such as “John is funny,” for
instance, entails a relationship between a subject and a predicate, or involves
a relation between a property and that which bears this property. The prop-
erty of being funny, for example, is something we can truthfully say about
John, and thus in describing a world that is non-propositional, to continue
with Morris’s argument from the previous section, we are saying something
about the world, attributing properties, objects, etc. to this world that, as
we saw Morris argue, is in itself not a property, object, etc. What makes
this possible? For Armstrong, it is the nature of a state of affair to entail a
relation between a property and that which bears this property, including
that which is non-propositional; consequently, it is a state of affairs, John’s
being funny, that is the truthmaker for the proposition that John is funny.
Central to this argument is Armstrong’s acknowledged break with Quine’s
extensional approach, and with Quine’s claim that talk of predicates “gives
us ‘ideology’ rather than ontology.”32 Armstrong, by contrast, argues that a
“great advantage, as I see it, of the search for truthmakers is that it focuses
not merely on the metaphysical implications of the subject terms of proposi-
tions but also on their predicates.”33 In other words, rather than follow the
Quinean path of accepting only extensional relations between a quantifier
and the range and scope of objects that fall under this quantifier, Armstrong
adopts, with his use of states of affairs, an intensional relationship between
a subject and its predicate. Armstrong is forthright on this point: “States of
affairs have constituents (particulars, properties and relations) that seem to
be parts of states of affairs, but not to be mereological parts.”34 That is, the
constituents of a state of affair such as “a’s being F [e.g., John’s being funny]
and a’s having R to b,” are not proper parts—they are not mereological
(i.e., extensional) parts—even though they can, as Armstrong admits, “be
truthmakers on their own just as much as the states of affairs that contain
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 137
them.”35 John, for instance, can also be tall, handsome, and smart, and
other people may also be funny. In serving as a truthmaker, however, the
constituents of a state of affairs—a’s (John’s) being F (funny)—are in an
internal relation with each other and are not extrinsically related. It is in this
way, Armstrong believes, that he is able to circumvent Humean skepticism,
for states of affairs do not presuppose the extrinsic relation between distinct
elements that gets the Humean arguments off the ground.
Is Armstrong’s strategy successful? Armstrong’s approach has some
noteworthy skeptics. David Lewis, for instance, finds the whole notion of
“ ‘unmereological composition’ profoundly mysterious,” and, even if one
grants it, Lewis finds it incapable of explaining the idea of necessary con-
nection.36 We can begin to understand Lewis’s reasons for doubting Arm-
strong’s approach to truthmakers by turning to one of Armstrong’s own
examples—to wit, methane. As a mereological composition, we can say that
methane, following Lewis, consists of four suitably bonded carbon atoms
and one hydrogen atom. As Armstrong points out, however, the existence
of these five atoms, suitably bonded, does not necessarily yield a methane
molecule, for there is “the possibility of a larger molecule containing as a
proper part the atoms that make up a methane molecule bonded just as they
are within the methane molecule.”37 The butane molecule, for example, is
composed of the same proper parts as the methane molecule, but it consists
of more carbon and hydrogen atoms. How, then, do we differentiate the
butane molecule from the methane molecule if we do not do so by way of a
mereological composition of proper parts? Armstrong’s solution is to pro-
pose adding a totality fact to the composition that individuates methane and
hence distinguishes it from butane. As Armstrong puts it, “a totality state of
affairs is included in the concept of methane”; that is, a methane molecule
“must contain five suitable atoms, four hydrogen and one carbon suitably
bonded, and, furthermore, that must be all the atoms that it contains.”38
We can now make sense of Lewis’s complaint that Armstrong’s use
of states of affairs has “in no way explained or excused”39 the necessary
connection that characterizes the truthmaker relation. By incorporating a
“totality state of affairs” into a’s (suitably bonded molecules) being F (meth-
ane), Armstrong has not overcome Hume’s skepticism regarding necessary
relations between distinct, extensional terms; to the contrary, Armstrong
has simply incorporated extensionality into the nature of states of affairs
without explaining or excusing the necessary relation between the parts that
make a “totality state of affairs” unique—e.g., methane rather than butane.
In short, Armstrong is unable to account for the difference between states
of affairs without incorporating the notion of a limit or totality fact into the
very nature of these states of affairs. With this move, however, the Humean
skepticism regarding the necessity of extensional relations resurfaces, for as
states of affairs become incorporated into ever larger states of affairs, we
end up presupposing, rather than explaining, the necessary relation between
extensional terms as we continue to incorporate ever larger totality facts.
138 Jeffrey A. Bell
At this point, I would argue that there are two paths one could take to
address the concerns that have arisen thus far. The one path is to bite the
bullet and argue that all states of affairs presuppose, and necessarily pre-
suppose, a fundamental totality fact, or what Ross Cameron calls the “one
totality fact.”40 In short, if one is to uphold truthmaker theory and avoid
the Humean challenge, then one must embrace a form of priority monism
whereby all distinct facts and states of affairs presuppose, as a logically
prior precondition, the “one totality fact” that is logically prior. As we will
see in the next section, however, priority monism may resolve the issues
we have seen concerning Armstrong’s understanding of states of affairs as
truthmakers, but it does not resolve our earlier problem concerning the
effort to explain how a non-propositional truthmaker can make proposi-
tions true. Moreover, rather than accounting for or explaining the manner
in which propositions represent and describe the non-propositional, it pre-
supposes the identity of that which is described and given, an identity that
allows for the possibility of re-presentation. For this reason, we will argue
for a Deleuzean philosophy of difference and the metaphysics of an abso-
lute, infinite substance that it presupposes, in order to provide the account
of identity that will, in the end, explain how propositions are made true by
a non-propositional reality. To further motivate this move, let us first turn
to the arguments in favor of priority monism.

III

The person most associated with arguing for priority monism is Jonathan
Schaffer. In a series of articles, Schaffer makes the case for accepting a
neo-Aristotelian metaphysics in order to address a number of philosophi-
cal debates, and in his essay “The Least Discerning and Most Promiscuous
Truthmaker,” he argues that if one is going to accept truthmaker theory,
then one will be led, if one is to avoid Humean skepticism among other
problems, to embrace priority monism. As Schaffer understands monism, it
consists of there being one fundamental substance that is logically prior to
distinct facts and states of affairs that are logically posterior to, and onto-
logically dependent upon, this one substance.41 “The substances,” or the
one substance, as Schaffer will argue, “are the ground of being.”42 Schaffer
is therefore not arguing for the existence of one thing, which is a “crazy
view,”43 according to Schaffer, but rather he is arguing that the one sub-
stance is in a grounding relation to the beings that are posterior and hence
“derivative, dependent, explicable, reducible, abundant, and secondary”44
to this substance. The truthmaking relation is an example of such a ground-
ing relation “between substance and truth.”45
By developing this line of argument, Schaffer is able to employ prior-
ity monism to handle a number of problems that had plagued truthmaker
theory, such as the truth of negative existentials. The problem with negative
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 139
existentials is to account for what it is in the world that makes it the case
that the negative existential is true—what is it that makes the proposition
“there are no unicorns” true? If we adopt priority monism, however, Schaf-
fer argues that we can do “without any negative facts at all”46 if we take
the world as a whole, the one substance, as that upon which our truths are
ontologically dependent. As a result, what makes it true that there are no
unicorns is precisely the fact that the world, in its entirety, lacks unicorns.
It is this one world, the one “fundament” as Schaffer puts it, that thus pro-
vides the ground for the truths of our propositions, including the truth of
negative existentials, and the world also serves as the constraint (as Schaffer
admits47) that allows us to avoid the frictionless spinning in the void. This
does not mean that we may not be mistaken, or that a healthy Humean
skepticism may not lead us to rethink the truth of our propositions, or even
rethink what may or may not exist. For Schaffer, however, whatever propo-
sitions are taken to be true or false are made so by the final arbiter which is
the one world, the one “totality fact.” But is this one world not simply the
same world Peirce claimed is the ultimate cause of our all having the same
opinions at the end of the road of enquiry? For Schaffer, it appears that it is,
for as he concludes his essay he argues that “priority monism allows for the
existence of you and me, tables and chairs, and pebbles and planets, inter
alia . . . Priority monism only says that all these partialia are fragments of
the cosmos, shards of an integrated whole.”48 Whatever claims we make
along our way on the road of enquiry, therefore, are claims about the par-
tialia of the world, and the truth of these claims depends, in the end, on the
one real substance, the one “integrated whole.”
But has priority monism helped us along our way to develop a meta-
physical realism? With Schaffer’s arguments regarding the one “integrated
whole” are we not simply back at a version of Putnam’s internal realism,
with the difference between our propositions and the reality that makes
these propositions true elided in favor of the former rather than the lat-
ter? One of the benefits of truthmaker theory, as we saw Mulligan et. al.
argue, was that it calls for a gap between the ontological and the logical, or
between the propositional and the non-propositional, as Morris developed
this argument. With priority monism, it appears that we have lost sight
of this gap, and although the reality of the one substance may be presup-
posed as a necessary condition for the dependent posteriors that are the
primary subject of our propositions, it is nonetheless the priority relation
of the world itself as a determinate totality fact to the determinate, indi-
viduated facts that serves as the truthmaker for our propositions, and hence
the parallelism between the determinate ontological and logical continues
to be maintained. Perhaps this is as it should be and Putnam is right that
metaphysical realism is incoherent. We will argue that Putnam is not right,
but first let us return to the overarching motivation for the turn to priority
monism—namely, it sought to address Hume’s skeptical challenge regarding
necessary relations between distinct terms.
140 Jeffrey A. Bell
As we have seen, a basic premise of truthmaker theory is the necessitat-
ing relation between truthmakers and the propositions these truthmakers
make true. If the relationship between components of truthmaker as state
of affairs and that proposition that represents this state of affairs is under-
stood, as Armstrong does, then the relationship between the components is
necessary and intensional, and in this way we circumvent Humean skepti-
cism regarding necessary extensional relations between distinct terms. Arm-
strong’s approach, we saw, was in the end unsuccessful unless one accepts
priority monism. Ross Cameron makes the move to priority monism and
does so precisely to address the Humean problem. The solution Cameron
proposes to resolve the Humean problem is to rely on a benign form of
necessary relation; otherwise, as Cameron puts it, “if the truth of a proposi-
tion necessitates the existence of a thing distinct from that truthmaker, as it
will in the case of contingent intrinsic predications, then we have a neces-
sary connection between distinct contingent existents,”49 and with this the
Humean challenge becomes relevant. If we are going to say that the truth of
the proposition that the ball is blue necessitates the existence of a blue ball,
then this case of contingent intrinsic predication is necessitating that the
relationship between distinct existents for the ball could have been green,
red, etc., and there are other things that can be blue. As Kris McDaniel
puts it, “Humeans love recombination. Provided that x and y are distinct
contingent beings, x could exist in a world without y and vice versa.”50 The
ball could exist in the world without being blue and there could be blue
things without there being balls, but if the proposition “the ball is blue” is
true then we have a necessary connection between these apparently distinct
contingent existents. By arguing in favor of states of affairs as truthmak-
ers, the correct insight Armstrong was developing, Cameron argues, was to
make the necessary relation between distinct terms a case of benign neces-
sity. Cameron gives the following example of a benign necessary relation:
“For all possible things x, Necessarily, x exists if and only if the singleton of
x exists.”51 That is, within the context of ZF set theory, no set is an element
of itself and thus the element x and the unit set or singleton of x—{x}—are
distinct; however, the relationship between them is necessary, as Cameron
points out. This necessity is benign, moreover, and thus if the singleton {x}
exists, then necessarily x exists, and this is precisely how Cameron under-
stands truthmaker necessity:

It’s just part of the meaning of talk about sets that we don’t let anything
deserve the name ‘the singleton of x’ unless it has x as its sole member,
and it’s part of the theory of truthmaking under offer that this can’t be
the case unless x makes it true that that set exists.52

From here, Cameron follows the path to priority monism that we have
sketched above—namely, to avoid incorporating extensional relations
between distinct terms into states of affairs, what becomes necessary
is that what serves as the truthmaker for propositions is one total state
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 141
of affairs, the world or “the big totality fact,”53 as Cameron puts it. It is
this “totality fact” that is the higher-order reality upon which the truth of
propositions depends. The problem, however, as Cameron sees it, is that
“a higher-order truthmaker must, of course, necessitate the existence of
each of the first-order truthmakers, otherwise it’s not doing the job it was
introduced to do.”54 If the higher-order truthmaker did not necessitate the
existence of the lower-order or ontologically dependent truthmakers, then
we would end up with unexplained necessary connections whenever there
was a contingent claim made (e.g., the ball is blue) that did not depend
upon the higher-order truthmaker. It is to avoid this consequence that one
must accept priority monism. Cameron is explicit on this point: “So if No
Unexplained Necessary Connections is true, the first-order truthmakers
had better all exist in virtue of the higher-order truthmaker. But that’s to
say that the first-order truthmakers are all ontologically dependent on the
higher-order truthmaker; which is to say that there’s only one fundamental
existent: the higher-order truthmaker.”55
The reliance of Cameron and Schaffer upon a notion of ontological
dependence whereby the higher-order totality fact grounds the lower-order
truthmakers is a view that is not without its critics. Jessica Wilson, for
instance, argues that the grounding relation, “like supervenience, is too
coarse-grained to do the work of appropriately characterizing metaphysi-
cal dependence on its own, failing to distinguish importantly different
(eliminativist, reductionist, non-reductionist, emergentist) accounts of such
dependence . . . ”56 It is too coarse-grained, for instance, to tell us how
normative facts and states depend upon naturalistic facts and states, but
it is precisely this relation that naturalists attempt to explain.57 In Wil-
son’s own account, she will argue for a mutual grounding of fundamental
determinables—what Wilson calls the powers-based subset strategy58—that
provides a better account of metaphysical dependence. Due to constraints
of space, we cannot detail Wilson’s arguments, but what is relevant for our
purposes here is Wilson’s claim that what is most problematic about most
of the accounts that rely on the grounding relation is that what is taken to
be fundamental is a determinate fact, the totality fact, for instance, whereas
Wilson argues that what is fundamental are determinables.59 The advantage
of this approach, Wilson claims, is that it provides an adequate account of
the modal fact that a determinable may be multiply realized—for instance,
the determinable red may be realized in the determinates scarlet, crimson,
etc.—and this modal fact regarding multiply realizable determinables can-
not be accounted for if we attempt to ground it on the basis of determi-
nate facts, including the “big totality fact.” The problem with this latter
approach, as Wilson states it, is that “grounding determinable modal facts
in determinate facts [ultimately] requires appeal to a comparatively unnatu-
ral entity, presumably involving a higher conjunctive ‘world property’ cor-
responding to the global pattern at issue. By way of contrast, grounding the
determinable modal facts in the determinable itself has the advantages of
simplicity and naturalness.”60
142 Jeffrey A. Bell
But has the move to fundamental determinables helped us with the
Humean concern regarding necessary relations between distinct existents?
While Wilson is not moved by the concerns other philosophers have for
Hume’s skepticism regarding necessary connections between distinct
existents,61 we do find the effort to account for the relation between the
non-propositional truthmaking reality and the propositions this reality
makes true to be an effort worth pursuing. Moreover, Armstrong, Schaffer,
and Cameron find the effort worth pursuing as well, but each, in the end,
departs from this effort when they call for a determinate totality fact or state
of affairs to be the ground and fundament for the lower-order truthmakers
and the determinate propositions they make true. With Wilson’s move to
fundamental determinables, the determinates come to be accounted for in
terms of determinables rather than determinables being grounded in deter-
minate facts. This provides an opening for metaphysical indeterminacy, as
Wilson herself admits,62 and yet the determinables themselves are meta-
physically indeterminate only insofar as they are multiply realizable—that
is, they are indeterminate precisely in that it is indeterminate which deter-
minates the determinable provides the ground for. Indeterminacy is thus
understood not as the ground or sufficient reason for identity itself but
rather it is indeterminate precisely for the reason that there is a multiply
realizable relation between the determinate entities and their determinable
grounds.63 Yet as we have argued, it is precisely the nature of identity itself
that needs to be accounted for if we are to explain the relationship between
a non-propositional reality and the propositions this reality makes true.
With his theory of difference-makers, as we will call them, Deleuze provides
the account we are looking for. It is to this that we now turn.

IV

Central to Deleuze’s philosophical project is the claim that the extensive

properties and qualities of things presuppose an intensive difference that
the extensive properties and qualities mask or hide in what Deleuze calls
a “true cover up.”64 Stated differently, the extensive properties and quali-
ties that allow us to differentiate between distinct elements presuppose a
difference-maker that is irreducible to these properties and qualities. As
Deleuze puts it,

It is not surprising that, strictly speaking, difference should be ‘inexpli-

cable’. Difference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be
cancelled . . . It [difference, or the difference-maker] is cancelled in so
far as it is drawn outside itself, in extensity and in the quality which fills
that extensity. However, difference creates both this extensity and this
quality.65
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 143
If we take the proposition “this ball is blue,” the truthmaker for this propo-
sition is assumed, as we have seen, to be a determinate part of reality, even if
a non-propositional part, that necessitates the truth of this proposition. For
Deleuze, what accounts for the relationship between reality and the proposi-
tion this reality makes true is not the set of extensive relations and qualities
shared by reality and the proposition that describes and is made true by
this reality, but rather it is the difference-maker that creates the extensity
and quality that individuates the reality and hence allows for the possibility
of describing and representing this individuated reality by way of proposi-
tions. With Deleuze’s theory of difference-makers, therefore, we have a true
gap between the ontological and the logical in that the difference-maker
provides the sufficient reason for the individuated and distinct elements that
become the subject of logical propositions, while the difference-maker itself,
or difference-in-itself as Deleuze also puts it, is not to be confused with that
which is described and represented by propositions. The difference-maker
is “cancelled” and hidden, in a “true cover up,” by the individuated and
determinate properties propositions represent. With Deleuze’s philosophy,
as we will see, we have an argument for metaphysical indeterminacy that
claims that the indeterminate is metaphysically fundamental and, moreover,
fundamental in a way that does not subordinate the difference-maker to the
individuated, determinate identities—that is, truthmakers—for which the
difference-maker is the sufficient reason.
The key move in Deleuze’s argument is the concept of multiplicity, mul-
tiplicity being understood by Deleuze to be a substance that is irreducible
to extensive, determinate properties and qualities. By taking this move,
Deleuze’s metaphysics is also able to avoid the Humean challenge against
necessary relations between distinct existents, for such existents are not pri-
mary but presuppose the indeterminate substance or multiplicity as their
sufficient reason. So, how does Deleuze arrive at the concept of a multi-
plicity? The first step is to set up an infinite series. For example, in Differ-
ence and Repetition Deleuze argues that “Every phenomenon refers to an
inequality by which it is conditioned.”66 Every determinate phenomenon, in
other words, or all that is given as sensible phenomena and then described
and represented by way of propositions, is a composite or multiplicity,
Deleuze claims, for it involves “a system [that] is constituted or bounded
by at least two heterogeneous series . . . [of which] each is itself composed
of heterogeneous terms, subtended by heterogeneous series which form so
many sub-phenomena.”67 Deleuze refers to this process as intensity (i.e.,
difference-making) and intensity, Deleuze claims, “is the form of difference
in so far as this is the reason of the sensible.” In clarifying this claim, he adds:

Every intensity is differential, by itself a difference. Every intensity is

E—E’, where E itself refers to an e—e’, and e to ε—ε’ etc.: each inten-
sity is already a coupling (in which each element of the couple refers
144 Jeffrey A. Bell
in turn to couples of elements of another order), thereby revealing the
properly qualitative content of quantity. We call this state of infinitely
doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity—in
other words, difference or intensity (difference of intensity)—is the suf-
ficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears.68

Deleuze returns to this point twenty-five years later in his book on Leibniz.
Here Deleuze finds an ally in Leibniz’s philosophy as he reaffirms his claim
that every determinate phenomenon presupposes an infinite series—an
infinitesimal differential relation. For example, with “the color green,”
Deleuze argues, “yellow and blue can surely be perceived, but if their per-
ception vanishes by dint of progressive diminution, they enter into a differ-
ential relation (db/dy).”69 The color green, in other words, presupposes the
differential relation of blue and yellow, db/dy, and yet, as Deleuze contin-
ues, “nothing impedes either yellow or blue, each on its own account, from
being already determined by the differential relation of the two colors that
we cannot detect.”70 And so on in infinitum.
We can also turn to the trailblazing work of Jose Benardete, especially
his use of what he calls the Zeno procedure, for further clarification of
Deleuze’s argument.71 Benardete, moreover, draws upon the Zeno proce-
dure in order to do much of what Deleuze sets out to do with his concept
of multiplicity—that is, to set forth an infinite series or multiplicity that is
neither reducible to an extensive point or atom from which other extensive
properties and qualities are derived, nor is an extensive infinite series or
substance.72 As Benardete sets up the Zeno procedure, he offers the example
of a cylindrically shaped stick of wood with a Z written on the right-hand
end of the stick. The Zeno procedure consists of dividing the stick in half
infinitely—in other words, it consists of revealing the disparity that is “the
sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears.”
Benardete presents it as follows:

Is it at all possible to sever the infinitesimal tail from the rest of the stick?
The answer is, yes. Let us first cut the stick in half and inscribe the num-
ber 1 on the right-hand end of the butt-end of the left-hand piece. Now
let us throw the left-hand piece into a box, leaving the right-hand piece
on the table. Next, we shall cut this latter piece again in half, inscribing
the number 2 on the right-hand butt-end of the new left-hand piece . . .
Once more we shall cut the Z piece in half, &c. ad infinitum. At the
end of the minute we shall have an infinite number of pieces in the box,
each being of some rational length, and lying on the table there will be a
single infinitesimal chip with the Z plainly marked on one side.73

Most significantly for our purposes, Benardete adds that, while we have the
infinitesimal lying on the table, “there was no specifiable cut which severed
the infinitesimal chip from the rest of the stick.”74 In other words, Benardete
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 145
is arguing that “there is no actual point of separation (be it rational or irra-
tional) between the infinitesimal tail [that is, the Z chip] of any closed con-
tinuum and the main body,” and yet, as his example is intended to show, we
nonetheless have a separable infinitesimal. The conclusion to draw, accord-
ing to Benardete, and Deleuze draws the same conclusion, I argue, is that
the infinitesimal or difference-maker is not to be confused with the processes
and procedures we identify with extensive magnitudes—e.g., with specifi-
able cuts and points of separation, or with extensive properties and quali-
ties. The way to understand infinitesimals and difference-makers, therefore,
is as the intensive magnitudes that are real but are not the extensive mag-
nitudes of the stick or the specifiable, determinate cuts of the stick. It is
this infinitesimal or difference-maker that offers us the alternative Deleuze
himself seeks,75 and what we have sought as well in our effort to detail the
relationship between a non-propositional reality and the propositions that
are ultimately made true by this reality. We arrive at this alternative, for
the infinitesimal is not a minimal extensive magnitude, an irreducible and
determinate point that brings an infinite regress to an end (it is what is left
over after an infinite regress and not the end point that is included within the
regress itself); and the infinitesimal is obviously not an extensive continuum
or totality of infinite steps, for the infinitesimal (the Z chip) is precisely what
is eliminable from the stick after an infinite totality of cuts! Moreover, it is
this infinitesimal difference-maker that is the non-propositional reality that
is the sufficient reason for all determinate, identifiable existents that are the
truthmakers of propositions.
What Deleuze offers us with his theory of difference-makers is, I would
argue, a way to give full weight to the gap between the ontological and the
logical and to account for the necessity of the truthmaking relation without
being reducible to the terms of that relation. A Deleuzean metaphysics of mul-
tiplicity and difference also offers an account of the restraint our conceptual
formations require. In contrast to McDowell, Schaffer, and Cameron, how-
ever, this restraint is not a “big totality fact” or a “world-disclosing” experi-
ence; to the contrary, Deleuze offers a non-propositional restraint in the form
of the difference-maker. The difference-maker serves as the restraint for our
conceptual formations and propositions not by being the already constituted
terms, qualities, and properties that delineate in advance what propositions
will or will not be true in the end. For Deleuze, difference-makers provide
the non-propositional restraint in that they are the conditions presupposed
by the Peircean ideal theory, the very theory Putnam argued was the only
coherent form of realism one could accept. The problem with metaphysical
realism, as we saw Putnam argue, was that one cannot coherently argue
for a “real” that is independent of and outside any logical, propositional
description, for we can only know the real by way of such descriptions.
Deleuze would agree. The difference-maker cannot be known outside a logi-
cal, propositional description and theory, nor is it known by such a theory,
but it is the reality or process of heterogenesis (difference-making) that all
146 Jeffrey A. Bell
individuated identities and phenomena presuppose—it is the “sufficient rea-
son of all phenomena”—and hence the theories and descriptions that repre-
sent these phenomena and are made true by them.
The difference-maker also guarantees the transformation of such iden-
tities and the emergence of new truthmakers and truths. The reason for
this is that the difference-maker is multiply realizable, and thus is meta-
physically indeterminate in the sense Wilson argued for, but this indeter-
minacy is not a matter of the determinate not yet being actualized, or not
yet knowing which of the indeterminate ways it grounds the determinate;
rather, the difference-maker is the indeterminate condition for all determi-
nate phenomena, and for the process of further differentiation and transfor-
mation of phenomena. We thus move from metaphysically indeterminate
difference-maker to determinate truthmaker in a process that covers up and
cancels the difference-maker, and yet the difference-maker is inseparable
from the truthmaker and, for this reason, we return, inevitably and neces-
sarily, to the difference-maker again and again. There is no final, determi-
nate point upon which all our truths will settle. There is no determinate fact
or world that will, in the end, make for the final list of true propositions.
There is, as Benardete has shown, only an intensive, infinitesimal difference;
or, as Deleuze argues, there is only a series of intensive, infinitesimal differ-
ences, an infinitely doubled difference and disparity. It is difference all the
way down.

NOTES

1 See Peirce (1955), p. 38: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object repre-
sented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.”
2 Putnam (1977), p. 489.
3 Heidegger, for instance, will, in his theory of Dasein, remain true to the Kan-
tian theme of the limits of human knowledge, implying therefore that access to
reality as it is in itself is always mediated by and through Dasein. Similarly for
Derrida, his famous claim that “There is nothing outside of the text” ([il n’y
a pas de hors-texte] in Derrida (1976, p. 158) in turn leads one to the natural
conclusion that we are incapable of accessing reality as it is in itself but are
fated to a textual mediation of reality. For more on the anti-realist legacy in
continental philosophy, see Braver (2007).
4 For Lewis on the problem of the one and the many, see Lewis (1993); for the
ontological argument, Lewis (1983), and for truthmaker theory, see Lewis
(2003).
5 Lewis (2003), p. 603.
6 David Armstrong will argue that truthmaker theory provides an excellent win-
dow onto the metaphysics of a philosopher for it entails pointing to that which
one takes to be the reality that makes our propositions true. See Armstrong
(2004), p. 23.
7 As Putnam (1977) puts it, “If one cannot say how THE WORLD is
theory-independently, then talk of all these theories as descriptions of THE
WORLD is empty,” p. 492. In other words, if one cannot say anything about
the truthmaker that makes a theory true independent of a theory, then the
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 147
theory begs the question regarding the nature of reality in itself and is thus
empty.
8 Deleuze (1977), p. 136.
9 Cameron (2010), p. 195.
10 Mulligan et. al. (1985), p. 288.
11 Mulligan et al. (1985), pp. 288–89: “Putnam has argued that Tarski’s theory
of truth, through its very innocuousness, its eschewal of ‘undesirable’ notions,
fails to determine the concept it was intended to capture.”
12 Ibid., p. 297.
13 Ibid., p. 298.
14 Ibid.
15 Wittgenstein (1998), 2.18.
16 Richard Rorty (1979) will also criticize this mirroring of the logical and onto-
logical in his famous book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
17 Mulligan et al. (1985), p. 298.
18 Ibid., p. 308.
19 McDowell (1996), p. 11.
20 Due to constraints of space, we cannot address the critique of the Myth of the
Given here. For those unfamiliar with the arguments, the canonical reference
is Wilfrid Sellars’s (1997) Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind. For Sellars’s
“inconsistent triad” argument, see pp. 21–22.
21 Morris (2005), p. 61.
22 McDowell (2007), p. 346.
23 Morris (2005), p. 51.
24 Ibid., p. 63.
25 Ibid., p. 64.
26 Ibid., p. 65.
27 Mulligan et al. (1985), p. 313.
28 Armstrong (2004), p. 5.
29 As Armstrong (2004), pp. 5–6 recognizes, the principle of Truthmaker Ne-
cessitarianism cannot involve necessity in the logical sense of an entailment
relation for “an entailment relation,” Armstrong argues, “must be [between]
propositions, but the truthmaking term of the truthmaking relation is a por-
tion of reality, and, in general at least, portions of reality are not propositions.”
30 Ibid., p. 9.
31 Armstrong correctly notes that this is Lewis’s approach. Lewis is a regularity
theorist when it comes to causal relations, and this is due to the fact that he
argues, along Humean lines, that causal relations are not real in themselves
but are to be accounted for in terms of the regularities of distinct phenomena.
It is the regularity and patterned relations of distinct phenomena upon which
causal relations supervene. Armstrong, by contrast, argues for intrinsic causal
relations, or states of affairs.
32 Ibid., p. 23.
33 Ibid. Armstrong is referring to Quine’s passage from Ways of Paradox (Quine
1976), p. 232, where Quine argues not for an ontology of predicates but rather
for a relationship of quantification over sets of extrinsic objects: “quantifiers
may be said to have been interpreted and understood only insofar as we have
settled the range of their variables.”
34 Armstrong (2004), p. 19.
35 Ibid., p. 18.
36 Lewis (1991), p. 57. Lewis will later admit to understanding “unmereological
composition” but adds the latter criticism in Lewis (2003), p. 613: “Some-
how, this state of affairs is said to be constructed—neither mereologically
nor set-theoretically—from its ‘constituents’ F and A. I used to complain that
I didn’t know what this unmereological composition was. But now I think
148 Jeffrey A. Bell
I understand it well enough, because I can define it in terms of necessary
connections . . . My only remaining complaint is that this necessary connec-
tion between seemingly distinct existences has been in no way explained or
excused.”
37 Armstrong (2004), p. 61.
38 Ibid., pp. 61–62.
39 Lewis (2003), p. 613.
40 Cameron (2010), p. 195.
41 Schaffer (2010), p. 309: “To begin with, I work within a neo-Aristotelian
framework, which posits substances and posteriors related by ontological
dependence.”
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., p. 324.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., p. 310.
46 Ibid., p. 313.
47 Ibid., p. 315: “So I do agree that constraints are needed, but am offering a
rival account of these constraints: do no require minimality, instead require
only the world.”
48 Ibid., p. 324.
49 Cameron (2010), p. 180.
50 McDaniel (2009), pp. 252–253.
51 Cameron (2010), p. 184.
52 Ibid., p. 186.
53 Ibid., p. 195.
54 Ibid., p. 191.
55 Ibid., p. 192.
56 Wilson (2014), p. 6.
57 Ibid., p. 12: “Hence it is that naturalists almost never rest with the bare
grounding claim, typically schematically expressed using the ‘nothing over
and above’ locution, but rather go on to stake out different positions con-
cerning how, exactly, the normative goings-on metaphysically depend on the
naturalistic ones.”
58 See Wilson (2011).
59 See Wilson (2012).
60 Wilson (2012), p. 14.
61 Admittedly, for Wilson this is not a problem that warrants the concern it has
received. See Wilson (forthcoming), where she argues that “Hume’s dictum,”
as she puts it—to wit, the claim that “There are no metaphysically necessary
connections between distinct, intrinsically typed entities” (p. 150)—is one of
the three dogmas that unjustifiably guides metaphysical methodology today.
Wilson claims that she has been “looking for good reasons to believe HD
(Hume’s dictum), on the assumption that you aren’t Hume. So far, I haven’t
found any.” (p. 152) In the next section we will provide a Deleuzean argument
that does address the Humean problem but in a way that embraces Wilson’s
call for a metaphysical indeterminacy.
62 See Wilson (2013).
63 This is especially clear in Barnes and Williams (2011). In this essay Barnes and
Williams argue that “Naturally, if the actual world doesn’t contain any inde-
terminacy, then there will only be one world in the space of precisifications,”
but they argue for metaphysical indeterminacy and this entails embracing the
claim that something, p, “is indeterminate if some worlds in the space of pre-
cisifications represent that p and some represent that ¬p” (p.112). In other
words, they argue that “When matters are metaphysically indeterminate, it is
 From Difference-Maker to Truthmaker (and Back) 149
indeterminate which world is actualized,” (ibid.) and hence which world de-
terminately is; and yet the determinate itself, identity, is presupposed and left
unaccounted for. We continue to find the mirroring of the ontological and the
logical.
64 Deleuze (1994), p. 166.
65 Ibid., p. 228
66 Ibid., p. 222.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Deleuze (1992), p. 88.
70 Ibid.
71 See Benardete (1964), whose work anticipates the more recent and widely
shared moves by analytic philosophers to pursue metaphysical problems.
72 In Smith (2012), Smith argues for the claim that Deleuze adopts Spinoza’s
view that “simple bodies are actually infinite,” and he does so for, “On the one
hand, it says that there are indeed ultimate or final terms that can no longer
be divided—thus it is against the indefinite; but on the other hand, it says that
these ultimate terms go to infinity—thus they are not atoms but rather terms
that are ‘infinitely small’, or as Newton would say ‘vanishing terms’ ” (p. 249).
Similarly for Benardete, his use of the Zeno procedure is to avoid what he sees
as the false metaphysical dilemma of there either being fundamental minima
or atoms or a continuum of infinite regress. See Benardete (1964), p. 202.
73 Ibid, p. 272–274. John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson (Hawthorne and
Weatherson 2004) have recently addressed Benardete’s arguments as they re-
late to this example. In the context of discussing the supertask of cutting gunk
to infinity, the problem they uncover is one that arises if we attempt to marry
a theory of gunk (that is, an infinitely divisible substance) to the supertask of
cutting a piece of matter that always occupies an extended volume of space.
If the infinitesimal does not occupy an extended, specifiable volume, as Bena-
rdete argues, or if it is an intensive difference and differential as Deleuze will
argue, then gunk is compatible with Benardete’s arguments. As they argue: “If
we are allowed parts that lack finite extent, then it will be consistent to adopt
Benardete’s picture of the outcome.” (Hawthorne and Weatherson 2004,
p. 342, emphasis mine). I argue elsewhere that the Deleuzean interpretation of
Benardete offered here ultimately rejects gunk. See Bell (forthcoming).
74 Ibid, p. 274.
75 Benardete will see his own argument as an effort to find a third alternative
between the view of reality as constituted of basic minim that are irreducible
extensive points and a continuum that is infinitely divisible (i.e., gunk).

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Barnes, E. and J. R. G. Williams. 2011. A Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy.
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Bell, J. A. Forthcoming. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Benardete, J. A. 1964. Infinity: An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Braver, L. 2007. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism.
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Cameron, R. 2010. From Humean Truthmaker Theory to Priority Monism. Noûs
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Deleuze, G. 1992. The Fold. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Co-
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kins University Press.
Hawthorne, J. and B. Weatherson. 2004. Chopping Up Gunk. The Monist 87 (3):
339–350.
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Oxford University Press, 21–25.
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on the Philosophy of D.M. Armstrong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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7 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and
History
Foucault’s Criticism of Putnam’s
Anti-Realism
Lee Braver

Although Michel Foucault and Hilary Putnam may seem an unlikely pair
with which to begin a dialogue between continental and analytic philoso-
phy, they actually stake out startlingly similar positions. This confluence
seems more natural once we note their parallel intellectual influences. Both
locate the starting point of modern thought, including their own work, in
Kant’s rejection of realism, i.e., the view that the world possesses an inherent,
defined essence with the concomitant definition of knowledge as the mind
passively copying this structure.1 This rejection shifts the topic of epistemol-
ogy and metaphysics from the intrinsic organization of mind-independent
reality to the organizing principles of experience and knowledge, thus
founding what has become known in analytic circles as anti-realism.2 Fou-
cault and Putnam inherit and modify this Kantian move in similar ways, the
former under the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the structuralists;
the latter under that of Quine, the later Wittgenstein, and the pragmatists.
Although it would be absurd to suggest that these lines of development
have no significant differences, their criticisms of and alterations to Kant’s
thought run in parallel lines, as I will explain.
Their shared origin in Kant is unsurprising given the fact that, as observed
by Putnam’s former student and later editor James Conant,

Kant is the most recent common figure to whom these two tradi-
tions [analytic and continental—LB] can trace themselves back. He
represents the crossroads at which the history of Western philosophy
branches. . . . One of Putnam’s motivations for returning to Kant, and
for taking his philosophical bearings from Kant’s formulations of the
traditional problems, would appear to be to heal this rift: to find a piece
of nonaligned ground, somewhere within earshot of both sides.3

Kant’s position relative to the divide is unique; Anat Biletzki puts it nicely
in “Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide”: “in the beginning there was
Kant.”4 As I have done on a larger scale in my first book, A Thing of This
World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, we can use Kant’s work to
“commensurate” Putnam and Foucault’s divergent terms and methods since
152 Lee Braver
his influence bequeathed both traditions the same, or at least overlapping,
issues. Demonstrating that they are working on similar topics can enable
dialogue and show how desirable such interactions would be, since each
tradition can employ the distinctive insights and strengths they have devel-
oped to criticize and contribute to the other on topics both are interested in.5
I will show in the first part of my paper that when examined in this light,
Putnam’s internal realism and Foucault’s genealogy turn out to be remark-
ably similar. Once commensurated, I will begin the exchange between the
two in the second part of my paper, showing in particular how Foucault’s
work offers a powerful criticism of Putnam’s thought.

1. KANTIAN COMMENSURATION

Putnam describes his middle period—in which he holds the view he calls
“internal realism”—as a “demythologized Kantianism,”6 i.e., Kant’s impor-
tantly correct insights purified of his unfortunate mistakes. Here is his diag-
nosis of Kant’s thought in a nutshell:

even though Kant’s recognition that [1] our description of the world
is shaped by our own conceptual choices, which are in turn shaped by
our nature and interests, is marred and flawed—marred, on the one
hand, by [2] the notion of the Ding an sich, and, on the other, by [3] the
notion that our conceptual choices are fixed once and for all by some
kind of thick transcendent structure of reason—it does seem to me that
Kant made a decisive advance over all previous philosophers in [4] giv-
ing up the idea that any description of the world can be simply a copy
of the world.7

Putnam applauds Kant’s [4] rejection of the correspondence theory of truth

because it cannot survive the anti-realist insight that [1] our descriptions,
thoughts, and experiences are always mediated by concepts. The fact that
our concepts shape our experience of the world means that we can never
simply reflect the world as it is, or compare our thoughts with the unadul-
terated original. But he rejects Kant’s commitment to [2] noumena and [3]
a single conceptual scheme embedded in a “thick transcendent structure of
reason,” two ideas that he considers incompatible with Kant’s other views.
Internal realism is Putnam’s attempt to understand Kant better than he
understood himself by preserving his essential insights while cutting away
his errors.8
According to Putnam, a consistent Critical philosophy would never
have accepted [2] noumena in the first place. By dispensing with that illicit
notion, internal realism is the system that Kant should have had, similar to
the way Hegel thought of his own idealism as an internal development and
correction of Kant’s.
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 153
What we can know—and this is the idea that Kant himself regarded as
a kind of Copernican Revolution in philosophy—is never the thing in
itself, but always the thing as represented. And [4] the representation
is never a mere copy; [1] it always is a joint product of our interaction
with the external world and the active powers of the mind. The world
as we know it bears the stamp of our own conceptual activity. If this
is right, then the question immediately arises: [~2] what sense does it
make to talk of “things in themselves” at all? A world of unknowable
“things in themselves” seems a world well lost. And thus most philoso-
phy that has followed Kant in insisting on [1] our own conceptual con-
tribution to constituting what we call “the world” has refused to follow
Kant in [~2] postulating a world of Things in Themselves.9

Putnam raises two objections to noumena: first, his pragmatic intuitions

lead him to doubt the meaningfulness of any belief in an entity that is in
principle inaccessible. The second objection is more Wittgensteinian,10 view-
ing the significance of concepts as dependent on their role in our practices. It
is these practices that determine what meaning concepts have—even, para-
doxically, the concept of “things as they exist independently of our thoughts
and practices.” Putnam writes, “we don’t have notions of the ‘existence’ of
things or of the ‘truth’ of statements that are independent of . . . the pro-
cedures and practices that give sense to talk of ‘existence’ and ‘truth.’ ”11
A claim like “noumena exist” tries to break free of the realm of human
thought to describe wholly extra-experiential reality, but it cannot escape
the gravitational field of our practices without completely losing meaning.
It is we who fix the meaning of “exist,” and who determine where and how
to apply it, making it relative to our thoughts and practices.
Kant accepts [4] correspondence when applied to phenomena, and Put-
nam’s internal realism allows a similar “trivial” correspondence once a con-
ceptual scheme has constituted the relevant realm of objects and set up the
way that signs relate to them.

Signs do not intrinsically correspond to objects, independently of how

those signs are employed and by whom. But a sign that is actually
employed in a particular way by a particular community of users can
correspond to particular objects within the conceptual scheme of those
users. ‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We
cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme
of description. Since the objects and the signs are alike internal to the
scheme of description, it is possible to say what matches what.12

Although Putnam considers his view to be a kind of realism in that he fully

allows that objects exist, this is an internal realism because reality is always
viewed from within or as organized by a particular conceptual scheme.13
Even the most basic concepts like “real” or “thing” are relative to specific
154 Lee Braver
schemes, rendering all levels of reality phenomenally real but transcenden-
tally ideal in Kantian terminology. The implications for truth are that “the
metaphysical realist insists that a mysterious relation of ‘correspondence’ is
what makes reference and truth possible; the internal realist, by contrast,
is willing to think of reference as internal to ‘texts’ (or theories), provided
we recognize that there are better and worse ‘texts.’ ‘Better’ and ‘worse’
may themselves depend on our historical situation and our purposes; there
is no notion of a God’s-Eye View of Truth Here.”14 Despite his frequent
ridiculing of Derrida,15 Putnam’s position actually agrees with Derrida’s
(in)famous assertion that “there is nothing outside of the text.”16 In Put-
nam’s terms, this says that we cannot intelligibly discuss reality indepen-
dently of conceptual schemes.17
Putnam rejects Kant’s [3] insistence on a single permanent set of
experience-organizing concepts.18 Instead of seeking the one necessary set
of concepts that would apply the same way everywhere at all times, Putnam
embraces conceptual relativism: “the logical primitives themselves, and in
particular the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of different
uses rather than one absolute ‘meaning.’ ”19 A unique and necessary set of
concepts is no longer tenable once the transcendental subjectivity Kant used
to shelter his concepts from the flux of time has been dissolved into history
by the loss of the noumenal realm. We must take the changing history of
science seriously in the wake of Kuhn (Hegel performed a similar service for
continentals).

Our notions of rationality and of rational revisability are not fixed by

some immutable book of rules, nor are they written into our transcen-
dental natures, as Kant thought, for the very good reason that the whole
idea of a transcendental nature, a nature that we have noumenally,
apart from any way in which we can conceive of ourselves historically
or biologically, is nonsensical. Since our notions of rationality and of
rational revisability are the product of our all too limited experience
and all too fallible biology, it is to be expected that even principles we
regard as ‘a priori’, or ‘conceptual’, or whatever, will from time to time
turn out to need revision.20

Following Quine, Putnam takes a pragmatic view of inquiry in which our

goals and interests decide which conceptual scheme to employ in a particu-
lar situation, since they also determine what we would accept as a satisfying,
relevant answer.21
With neither transcendental nor transcendent harbors to protect our con-
cepts, they become as subject to change as everything else. Putnam takes
the idea of the “contextually a priori”22 from Quine to describe this new
conception. The contextually a priori is the set of theories that organize
experience and knowledge, and which would require extraordinary counter-
evidence to be overthrown. These central views undergo transformations at
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 155
irregular intervals in history, creating revolutions that introduce incommen-
surable concepts and modes of justification, as Kuhn shows. Sounding a bit
like Deleuze, Putnam writes that, “an essential part of the ‘language games’
that we play in science, in morals, and in the law is the invention of new
concepts; . . . new concepts carry in their wake the possibility of formulat-
ing new truths.”23 Putnam’s favorite example24 of this is the extraordinarily
successful but deeply strange quantum mechanics, which shows “how with
the development of knowledge our idea of what counts as even a possible
knowledge claim, our idea of what counts as even a possible object, and our
idea of what counts as even a possible property are all subject to change.”25
The concepts that, constituting experience, were themselves impregnable to
revision by empirical data for Kant can now be re-formed by experience; a
one-way determination has become a feedback loop.
Turning to Foucault, it turns out that he too takes Kant’s rejection of real-
ism as the essential starting point of modern philosophy.26 He writes of his
own contentious relationship to philosophy that if he “is indeed perfectly
at home in the philosophical tradition, it is within the critical tradition of
Kant.”27 He means by this that he follows Kant’s rejection of knowledge
as [4] discovering or copying independent reality, since “we should not
imagine that the world presents us with a legible face, leaving us merely
to decipher it.”28 Instead of naively trying to examine mind-independent
reality, Foucault’s work pursues the anti-realist analysis of the [1] concepts
that constitute objects. “What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with
‘things’. . . . To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to
discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.”29
In a phrase reminiscent of Putnam’s contextual a priori, Foucault calls
the fundamental concepts of a particular period its “historical a priori”30
in his early work. Like Kant’s forms of intuition and concepts of the under-
standing, they structure a specific “epistemological field”31 within which
certain kinds of entities can appear and be known in certain ways, thereby
forming the condition for the possibility of positive sciences.

This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experi-

ence a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that
appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoreti-
cal powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a dis-
course about things that is recognized to be true.32

Although prior to mundane experience and knowledge of entities because

they are constitutive of them, Foucault agrees with Putnam against Kant in
claiming that this a priori changes profoundly over the course of time: “it is,
from beginning to end, historical.”33 He neatly summarizes his relationship
to Kant here: “if the critical question is knowing ‘the general conditions
for the subject to possess truth,’ the question I would like to pose is, rather,
‘to what specific and historically definable transformations has the subject
156 Lee Braver
had to submit for there to be an injunction to speak the truth about the
subject?’ ”34 Whereas Putnam generally remains at a fairly abstract level,
only briefly discussing specific concepts embedded in historical events such
as the advent of quantum mechanics, Foucault’s work is consumed with
detailed analyses of the causes and effects of just these kinds of changes in
the conceptions of what counts as reason, as knowledge, as normal, as ill,
etc. at those points of transition when they are “stirring under our feet.”35
Similar to Putnam’s reaction, Foucault denounces

the crisis in which we have been involved for so long, and which is
constantly growing more serious: a crisis that concerns that transcen-
dental reflexion with which philosophy since Kant has identified itself
. . . which concerns an anthropological thought that orders all these
questions around the question of man’s being, and allows us to avoid
an analysis of practice . . . which, above all, concerns the status of the
subject.36

Kant opened up the space for these questions by [1] denying realism and
focusing instead on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge,37 but he
immediately compromised it by [3] insisting on a unique conceptual scheme
embedded in a permanent human nature.38 Although Kant may have awo-
ken from a dogmatic slumber, Foucault says that he put modern thought
into an “anthropological sleep,”39 which must now be broken.
Foucault’s denial of transcendental subjectivity takes the form of declar-
ing the “death of man”—a considerably more dramatic rhetorical style than
Putnam’s (he is French, after all), but basically the same idea. He proclaims
generally that “all my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities
in human existence.”40 In a specific criticism of Kant’s Table of Categories,
Foucault writes that his own work does not “enable us to draw up a table
of our distinctive features, and . . . sketch out in advance the face that we
will have in the future. . . . It deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that
temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish
to exorcise the discontinuities of history.”41 Eliminating this commitment to
an unchanging human nature lets philosophy study how concepts respond
to empirical events, which constitutes the necessary step beyond Kant: “the
void left by man’s disappearance . . . is nothing more, and nothing less, than
the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”42
Kant’s single set of forms of intuition and concepts of the understanding
anchored in the transcendental subject melts into a proliferating succession
of concepts we can only discover by studying their actual historical employ-
ment. Once noumena have been eliminated, reality can only be the phe-
nomena,43 and these get constituted differently by the various concepts that
form at different points in history. Without a noumenal remainder preserv-
ing an identity in the face of empirical fluctuation, Foucault is committed
to claiming that reality itself fundamentally alters at those points of epochal
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 157
conceptual revolution, when “everything that had been presented to view,
now takes on a new mode of being.”44 The Order of Things—the book in
which he first works out the implications of this view—analyzes the changes
in the historical a priori of what we blithely call economics, biology, and
philology over the last few centuries. Without the assumption of constant
entities beneath our studies and experiences of them, alterations in the his-
torical a priori amount to “mutations that suddenly decide that things are
no longer perceived, describe[d], expressed, characterized, classified, and
known in the same way, and that it is no longer wealth, living beings, and
discourse that are presented to knowledge in the interstices of words or
through their transparency, but beings radically different from them.”45
The subjects of the sciences of language, life, and nature fundamentally
change with the concepts, which explains some of the shocking claims he is
famous for, such as:

before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist—any more
than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical den-
sity of language. He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of
knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years
ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to
imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness
for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.46

Each of these words—man, life, labour, and language—is being used here as
a technical term for a specific epochal instantiation of what we usually think
of as an unchanging cross-epochal object. Foucault’s claim is that they fun-
damentally change with each new episteme, so much so that it is misleading
to speak of the same object’s persistence across epistemic shifts. Although
the objects we find in our present episteme seem mind-independent and per-
manent, this very appearance depends on an episteme: “it is only in the
blank space of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already
there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.”47 Metaphysics
as the study of the unchanging constituents of reality gives way to what
Foucault calls “historical ontology,” which examines the phenomena that
change along with the historical concepts. “The history of the ‘objectifica-
tion’ of those elements which historians consider as objectively given (if
I dare put it thus: of the objectification of objectivities), this is the sort of
circle I want to try and investigate.”48 Thus, on both the side of the subject
and object (to use a distinction he wants to undermine), Foucault believes
that his “essential task was to free the history of thought from its subjection
to transcendence.”49
In his middle or genealogical period, Foucault expands his analyses to
show how constitutive concepts are structured and maintained by com-
plex webs of power relations, institutions, and practices in addition to the
discourses that had been the focus of his earlier archaeological work. He
158 Lee Braver
sometimes uses the term “apparatus” to refer to this web of words, prac-
tices, and relations that “crystallize into institutions, . . . inform individual
behaviour, . . . act as grids for the perception and evaluation of things.”50
Lacking transcendental protection, concepts are permeated by the forces
of the world like everything else; without a metaphysical realm to provide
the invidious comparison, the entities formed by these shifting concepts are
simply reality itself, a view he inherited from Heidegger’s phenomenological
ontology.51

2. INTERNAL CRITICISMS ACROSS THE DIVIDE

We are now in a position to see how these thinkers are engaged in similar
projects. Both start from the rejection of what Putnam famously calls the
God’s-eye view of reality. The very idea of a world in-itself wholly inde-
pendent of our experience and organizing concepts is either incoherent or
wholly irrelevant to our epistemology and metaphysics. More than just use-
less for practical purposes, claims about such a realm cannot connect with
the practices that are the source of all sense; both thinkers would agree with
Wittgenstein’s dictum that “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else
moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.”52 I want to argue in this part
of the paper that, while both accept this far-reaching idea, Foucault works
out its implications more thoroughly and more consistently than Putnam.
Instead of forming an external criticism that can be shrugged off, my fram-
ing of the issue presents Foucault’s insights as internal criticisms of Putnam:
these are problems that Putnam ought to acknowledge by his own lights,
making the engagement far more interesting and important.
If all vestiges of noumena have been eliminated, then, on the one hand,
reality is exhausted by what we can in principle experience and, on the other
hand, truth can only be about this reality. There is no other world and no
other truth. This is what Foucault means by his epigrammatic statement,
“truth is a thing of this world,” and Putnam strongly endorses this view, at
least during the time period we are examining, by making truth epistemic.53
This means that truth is explicated entirely in terms of ideas and processes
that are at least in principle within our reach.
Now, if truth can only be about those entities constituted by the con-
textual or historical concepts formed within empirical existence, Foucault
draws the conclusion that whatever affects the formation of these concepts
and justificatory practices plays a role in determining reality and truth, and
so has a rightful place in ontology and epistemology. In particular, what
he calls power influences the formation of concepts—“the processes of
objectification originate in the very tactics of power and of the arrangement
of its exercise”54—and so must be acknowledged and analyzed instead of
ignored or castigated because it shouldn’t wield any influence. Losing the
God’s-eye view means that we can no longer take up the position, claimed
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 159
by thinkers from Plato to Habermas, that would allow us to sift through
actual epistemic practices from the outside, calling some (those we like)
free, truth-producing, or ideal, while dismissing others (those we don’t like)
as distortive, coercive, or falsifying. We have lost the external position from
which we can make this distinction, since all sorting takes place within, and
is affected by, this ever-changing process.
In other words, Foucault’s claim isn’t just that truth is about this world
but that it itself is an occurrence within this world, and thus cannot escape
the “profusion of entangled events” that make up history.55 We have no
access to a truth that would transcend this all-too-human realm; all we
have are the shifting claims and practices embedded in institutions that are
formed by, among other things, power effects. “Truth itself forms part of
the history of discourse and is like an effect internal to a discourse or a prac-
tice.”56 Instead of seeking ideal de jure truth or epistemological practice,
Foucault uncompromisingly insists on empirically analyzing the de facto.

What I mean by the term [historical a priori] is an a priori that is not a

condition of validity for judgements, but a condition of reality for state-
ments. It is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an
assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements . . .
the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually
said. . . . It has to take account of the fact that discourse has not only
a meaning or a truth, but a history, and a specific history that does not
refer it back to the laws of an alien development.57

Foucault studies what has actually been written in order to discover the
pattern that has been followed without appealing to what should have been
said or done. Nothing that actually influences the formation of concepts can
be alien to the true practices of knowledge. If it forms a part of the process,
then it’s as legitimate as any other part.
These views are summed up in Foucault’s famous phrase, “power/knowl-
edge.” The conjunction does not mean that the two are identical; if that’s all
he meant, he would hardly need entire books to express it. Nor does it mean
that power corrupts knowledge, since corruption requires a pure knowledge
that then got sullied. Thinking of power as corruptive or repressive presup-
poses a realist conception of things’ innocent preexistence, “the idea that
underneath power with its acts of violence and its artifice we should be able
to recuperate things themselves in their primitive vivacity.”58 Without the
God’s-eye view positing things independent of the unclean process of every-
day existence, power-events infuse everything from start to finish.
“Power/knowledge” indicates that the two cannot be extricated from
one another.59 In two interrelated moves, Foucault reconceives power as
productive rather than repressive and knowledge as an effect of empirical
events that always include power-effects: “we must cease once and for all to
describe the effects of power in negative terms. . . . In fact, power produces;
160 Lee Braver
it produces reality; it produces domains of objects.”60 Without a pure truth
to provide an invidious comparison, the involvement of power in the pro-
duction of truth does not invalidate it; it is only a Platonic hangover that
renders us suspicious. The fact that a person’s perspective and social posi-
tion influence the epistemological status of their utterances “does not mean
that what the person says is not true, which is what most people believe.
When you tell people that there may be a relationship between truth and
power, they say: ‘So it isn’t truth after all!’ ”61 If truth is not correspondence
to mind-independent reality but instead is epistemic, then we have no sense
of “really” true that is fully extricated from what is accepted as true, and
this is inevitably implicated in the play of power.
My argument is that this position is the logical consequence of the elimi-
nation of noumena. Without a transcendental safe-house, power partially
determines concepts, which then constitute the objects that get known,
since, as a good anti-realist, Foucault does not believe that objects simply
exist on their own, pre-sorted into knowable sets: “knowledge follows the
advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the sur-
faces on which power is exercised.”62 If we have given up the realm of ideal,
pure reality and, in David Wiggins’s term, “self-identifying objects,” we
cannot call this power-infused world corrupt or false or fallen; it is the place
where truth resides. By taking these power effects into account, Foucault’s
epistemology more consistently applies the rejection of noumena and the
God’s-eye view than Putnam, who still seeks the good and right epistemo-
logical processes.
It is important to Putnam to preserve the “realist intuition”63 that truth
is incorrigible; he wants to escape relativism and any view of truth that
makes it temporal and changing, though without resorting to realism’s
linking beliefs to an extra-experiential reality. His solution is to distinguish
between, on the one hand, “justified” claims that are indexed to a particular
time and conceptual system and that can be overturned and “true” claims,
on the other hand, which are justified under ideal epistemological condi-
tions and thus eternally correct.64 This distinction allows him to maintain
that truth is epistemic or conceptually bound to human justificatory prac-
tices but not to any particular practice, so that we can always say that “p is
justified now, but it may still turn out to be false.”65
Like others, I find this compromise unsatisfactory on both counts. On
the side of preserving the epistemic status of truth, it ends up shrinking the
connection that truth bears to our actual justificatory conditions down to an
idealized future point about which Putnam can only offer unhelpful plati-
tudes;66 this constitutes an attenuation to a virtually noumenal point. If this
ideal state cannot have any effect on, and possesses no knowable relationship
to, how we know things here and now, then the same pragmatic intuitions
that lead Putnam to reject noumena should also eliminate these. Further-
more, as he realizes in his 1994 Dewey Lectures, this conception of truth as
what is true under idealized or “sufficiently good epistemic circumstances”
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 161
does not actually avoid a realist reliance on mind-independent reality; it sim-
ply pushes its role back one step from “reality directly determining whether
p is true” to “reality determining whether the conditions are good enough
for me to know whether p is true.” As he states, “the world was allowed to
determine whether I actually am in a sufficiently good epistemic situation
or whether I only seem to myself to be in one—thus retaining an important
idea from common-sense realism.”67
As for the other side of Putnam’s balancing act, the encounter with
Foucaultian anti-realism raises a glaring question: why work so hard to
retain this “realist intuition” about a timeless truth in the first place? John
McCumber has defined the central disagreement between analytic and con-
tinental philosophers in terms of their attitudes towards time: continentals
embrace it and consider its effects ubiquitous, while analytics seem, one
could almost say, allergic to it.68 In many cases, this distinction amounts to
a neutral description or at most an external criticism of analytic philosophy,
but if Putnam has given up the God’s-eye view and made truth epistemic,
if it’s just us humans down here endlessly squabbling, then how can truth
be exempt from time and history?69 Continental philosophers generally
deny deeply temporal beings like us the right to anything eternal, even one
eternally deferred like Putnam’s idealized truth conditions. I’m arguing that
Foucault’s epistemology is more consistent in holding that without noumena
or the God’s-eye view, truth cannot but be temporal and worldly through
and through. I think he would read Putnam’s commitment to this “realist
intuition” in terms of Nietzsche’s diagnosis: “God is dead; but given the way
of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow
will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow.”70 On this
reading, Putnam is still fighting with the shadows of the God’s-eye view.
Instead of looking for ideal conditions, Foucault studies the de facto
historical justificatory practices that have actually occurred, believing that
truth cannot be located anywhere else than within actual knowledges or
scientific practices.

One isn’t assessing things in terms of an absolute against which they

could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect forms of ratio-
nality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe them-
selves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play
within them. . . . I would like, in short, to resituate the production of
true and false at the heart of historical analysis and political critique.71

This shows how Putnam misunderstands Foucault when he accuses him of

treating earlier periods and practices as irrational.72 ­Foucault describes this
kind of reaction when he says that “one has often tried to ­blackmail all criti­
cism of reason and every critical test of the history of r­ ationality so that one
either recognizes reason or casts it into irrationalism.”73 His purpose is to
show that there have been many different rationalities in history—an idea
162 Lee Braver
Putnam is committed to, as we saw above—but evaluation of them would
require a single authoritative form of reason. There is no position outside of
them from which to render a final, decisive verdict.
Throughout, Foucault tries to show that practices that look irrational to
our eyes are actually operating according to a thoroughly organized “logic”
of their own that he does not hesitate to call reason, or rather, a reason. To
say once and for all what is rational and what is not requires the position
of a perfect reason that escapes history and power to judge all other ways
of thinking from the God’s-eye perspective. Foucault’s analyses appear to
expose irrationality only if one is operating with a conception of what con-
stitutes true and proper reason that is defined once and for all. He himself
accepts all of these instantiations as forms of reason:

I am trying to analyze the forms of rationality: various proofs, various

formulations, various modifications by which rationalities educe each
other, contradict one another, chase each other away, without one there-
fore being able to designate a moment in which reason would have lost
its basic design or changed from rationalism to irrationalism.74

Given Putnam’s own claims that advances in science alter “our idea of what
counts as even a possible knowledge,” that “new concepts carry in their
wake the possibility of formulating new truths,” that “talk of ‘existence’
and ‘truth’ [can only have meaning] within” a conceptual scheme, and “that
our notions of rationality evolve in history,” Foucault’s position can be con-
sidered a demythologized Putnam, i.e., a more consistent version of Put-
nam’s own views.
Furthermore, expanding epistemology to include power effects gives
Foucault’s epistemology greater explanatory power than Putnam’s. Fou-
cault’s works analyze the ways in which the conjunction of historical
forces and events at particular times account for the emergence of new
concepts and practices, using such mundane facts as the invention of the
rifle or new methods of investing capital to explain facts traditionally
considered transcendent and eternal, such as “the history of the modern
soul.”75 Despite caricatures as an irrationalist, Foucault’s method allows
him to claim that history “is intelligible and should be susceptible to anal-
ysis down to the smallest detail—but this in accordance with the intelligi-
bility of struggles, of strategies and tactics.”76 Putnam is aware that “(to
use Kantian language) one thing physics cannot do is account for its own
possibility,”77 since it requires conceptual and semantic facts that admit
of no physical explanation. Furthermore, it is a common view in analytic
philosophy, upheld by such figures as Quine, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein,
that reality or sensory data radically underdetermine our concepts and so
cannot account for the specific ones that we have. But Foucault, unlike
Putnam, has an alternate account of how these conceptual schemes come
about.78
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 163
Another point that the two agree on is that epistemology and ethics are
deeply connected. Putnam believes that values and ethical ideals such as
human flourishing necessarily play a role in our supposedly disinterested
search for truth, and he employs a Deweyan argument to generate ethical
criteria out of the inquiry itself, criteria he identifies roughly with Haber-
mas’s values of communicative ethics.79 Foucault’s genealogical works also
consider the notions of human normalcy and health—modern scientific
versions of flourishing—central to knowledge claims and justificatory prac-
tices, but he adds an important element to this analysis. Genealogical works
like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality show in detail how
easily these kinds of ideals and values can be manufactured and how often
they mask oppression.
This leads to the ethical implications of anti-realism, a topic Foucault
explored in great detail but that has played virtually no role in analytic dis-
cussions of the subject.80 For instance, Michael Dummett gives a well-known
reading of Wittgenstein that places him fairly close to Foucault as calling it
“vain and presumptuous to attempt to see reality through God’s eyes: all we
can do is to describe our own practices as we can view them through our
own eyes. . . . We cannot intelligibly talk about what is true independently
of what we recognize as true.”81 Dummett goes on to show how this posi-
tion amounts to a kind of idealism that merges with realism since, without
the contrast of reality in-itself, the world we experience simply is the world.
He concludes that “if realism and idealism, or, as I am here preferring to
say, externalism and internalism, coincide, there can be no harm in being an
externalist. The externalist has an advantage over the internalist, in that, of
certain things that we say, it is our practice to claim that they represent how
things are in themselves, independently of how we apprehend them.”82 In
other words, if the literal content of the two positions converges, then there
is no real difference between them, and realism enjoys the tie-breaker of
having common sense on its side.
Foucault, on the other hand, would follow J. L. Austin here in claiming
that, since we are analyzing actual instances of sentences rather than ideal-
ized abstractions such as “The cat is on the mat,” we must look beyond
their mere content to their actual effect: “once we realize that what we have
to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situ-
ation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating
is performing an act.”83 And the actions committed by claims of expertise,
according to Foucault, are a form of oppression and enforced conformity.
In general, the power that experts like psychologists wield in our society is
underwritten by our faith in their knowledge of a realist self. This is neatly
summarized in Plato’s argument that, since philosophers are the ones who
know the Forms of humanity and the city, they ought to rule, and any-
one with enlightened self-interest wants to be ruled by the knowledgeable.
Power ought to follow knowledge, even if it seldom does. It is the psycholo-
gists’ claim to know the mind’s true essence that induces us to obey them for
164 Lee Braver
our own good, in the courtroom, the classroom, and the bedroom. In turn,
part of normal behavior will be to obey the law, pay taxes, and continue
going to analysis.84
These knowledge claims, which are maintained and legitimated by real-
ism, have far-reaching and often devastating effects.

The large, ill-defined, and confused family of “abnormal individuals,”

the fear of which haunts the end of the nineteenth century, does not
merely mark a phase of uncertainty or a somewhat unfortunate episode
in the history of psychopathology. It was formed in correlation with a
set of institutions of control and a series of mechanisms of surveillance
and distribution, and . . . it gives rise to laughable theoretical construc-
tions that nonetheless have harshly real effects.85

Obviously the category of abnormality is parasitic on the category of nor-

mality, which itself is simply a form of the true nature of humanity that we
all want to achieve and are in need of expert guidance in order to do so; the
whole structure is grounded on realism. Although Putnam is right to see that
ideals like human flourishing play an important role in the ways humans
pursue knowledge, his pragmatic attempt to base epistemological criteria
on them treats this concept much too casually. The response to Dummett’s
equanimity about the choice between realism and anti-realism is that real-
ist claims to know mental illnesses and human nature are what empower
experts in the human sciences to lock people up. At the very least, many
grow up convinced that they are horribly abnormal.86
This is the harm done by realism that Foucault’s studies try to expose and
so disarm; if there is no human nature, then actions taken on its basis lose
their justification. Foucault’s descriptions of the vast diversity of conceptual
schemes that science has employed throughout its history, combined with
the anti-realist elimination of a true reality that could determine which one
is right, have the effect of undermining our faith in these authorities: “his-
torical analysis is a way of avoiding the sacralization of theory: it allows
one to erase the threshold of scientific untouchability.”87 Without the legiti-
mation of independent reality, incommensurable views—such as whether
someone is insane or a seer, homosexual or deviant—lack a neutral means
of conclusive adjudication. The victory of one view over the other is nei-
ther the discovery of independent reality nor the outcome of free rational
discussion, given that a common rationality is lacking. This is why many
postmodernists believe that the reconciliation of incommensurable ways of
thinking entails violence,88 a violence that Foucault’s anti-realist analyses
try to reveal.89
While this view might initially appear to be the kind of melodramatic
leftism typical of continentals, we can find at least partial counterparts in
analytic philosophy. Besides Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigms that are
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 165
influenced by such forces as the internal politics of physics departments or
the relative longevity of the proponents of different theories, Wittgenstein
agrees that heterogeneous language-games cannot be resolved rationally,
since rationality exists only within particular language-games. He calls
the process that changes the way someone thinks a kind of “conversion”
brought about by “persuasion” rather than autonomous, rational discourse.
While freely admitting that reasons would be given, he asks, “but how far
do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens
when missionaries convert natives).”90 The point is that for them to count
as reasons, the interlocutor must already share a form of rationality or argu-
ment language-game, which in turn cannot be imparted by reasoning on
pain of infinite regress. Wittgenstein even employs violent imagery to make
the point: “is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—
If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from
which to combat theirs?”91,92

NOTES

1 I am confining my discussion here to Putnam’s twenty-year internal realist pe-

riod. Before 1976, Putnam was a realist, while in the mid-nineties he began to
distance himself from internal realism (Clark and Hale 1994, p. 242; Putnam
1994a, p. 456).
2 As is often noted, there are many forms of anti-realism; see Braver 2007 for
more. I will be focusing on Putnam’s version rather than, say, Dummett’s,
which defines it in terms of the bivalence of truth.
3 Putnam (1990), p. xxxiii. It is because Putnam traces his lineage so directly
to Kant as the common source of both branches of contemporary philosophy
that he describes himself as “think[ing] about questions which are thought to
be more the province of ‘continental philosophy’ than of ‘analytic philoso-
phy’, for instance, . . . the fact that our notions of rationality evolve in history”
(Putnam 1983, p. vii). Compare this last issue with Foucault’s description of
his own work near the end of his life: “how is it that thought, insofar as it
has a relationship with the truth, can also have a history? That is the question
posed” (Foucault 1989, p. 456).
4 Biletzki (2001), p. 291.
5 For a Gadamerian analysis of this kind of dialogue, see my “Davidson’s Read-
ing of Gadamer: Triangulation, Conversation, and the Analytic-Continental
Divide” in Malpas (2011).
6 Putnam (1978), p. 6.
7 Putnam (1995), pp. 29–30, bracketed numbers added; see also 1990, p. 41.
8 See, e.g., Putnam (1981), p. x. Many commentators have noted and discussed
Putnam’s attempts to place himself directly in Kant’s line of descent: Norris
(2002), p. 15, Moran (2000), pp. 65–7; Van Kirk (1984), p. 13, Abela (1996),
p. 47, Brown (1988), p. 145, Allais (2003), p. 375.
9 Putnam (1990), p. 261, bracketed numbers added; see also 1987, p. 33; 2002,
p. 109.
10 On the influence of Wittgenstein’s later work, see Putnam (1990), pp. xxxiv,
xl–xli.
166 Lee Braver
11 Putnam (1983), p. 230; see also 1994a, p. 513.
12 Putnam (1981), p. 52; see also Putnam (1988), p. 114, (1983), pp. 206, 272,
(1987), pp. 17, 32–33, 35–36, 40, (1990), p. 28, (1992), p. 120, Clark and
Hale (1994), p. 253, Quine (1969), pp. 48–49, (1980), pp. 10, 16.
13 Putnam actually claims that he introduced “internal realism” to refer to his
earlier scientific realism, which he was abandoning, but readers confusedly
used it to refer to his new position, and he acquiesced to this usage (Putnam
1994a, p. 461, n.36). It seems perfectly appropriate to this middle period posi-
tion to me.
14 Putnam (1990), p. 114; see also p. 121.
15 See Putnam (1990), p. 113, (1992), pp. 72; 109, (1995), p. 75, (2002), p. 180.
16 Derrida (1976), p. 158.
17 There are other elements to Derrida’s idea here, including the relation of writ-
ing to thought, but this “internal realist” claim seems prominent. For more on
the connection of Derrida to analytic philosophy, see Samuel C. Wheeler III’s
excellent Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2000).
18 Securing the complete set of forms of intuition and concepts of understanding
is very important to Kant, however (see Kant 1965, Axx, Bxxiii–xxiv, Bxxx-
viii, Axiv, B23, A13/B27, A64/B90, B79, A83/B109, A148/B187–8, A338/
B396, A403, A462/B490, A591/B619, A676/B704, A805/B833, A847/B875).
19 Putnam (1987), p. 19, in bold in the original; see also Clark and Hale (1994),
p. 246.
20 Putnam (1981), p. 83; see also 1978, p. 138; 1981, pp. x, 73, 79; 1983, pp. 95,
179, 206, 230–1; 1987, pp. 17–19, 35–36; 1988, p. 112; 1992, p. 120; 1994a,
p. 448; 1995, p. 17.
21 See Clark and Hale 1994, p. 291, n.20; Putnam 1983, pp. 128, 201, 215;
1990, p. 29. Here is Quine’s version of the substitution of pragmatic stan-
dards for correspondence once realism has been shown to be incoherent: “it
is meaningless, I suggest, to inquire into the absolute correctness of a concep-
tual scheme as a mirror of nature. Our standard for appraising basic changes
of conceptual scheme must be, not a realistic standard of correspondence to
reality, but a pragmatic standard” (Quine 1980, p. 79). In his famous “Two
Dogmas” paper, he spells out this pragmatic standard by which we evaluate
conceptual schemes as “the degree to which they expedite our dealings with
sense experiences” (ibid., p. 45). Quine, in turn, got this idea from Carnap’s
distinction between internal and external questions which concern entities
within a conceptual framework and the framework itself, respectively.
22 Putnam (1983), p. 95. Presumably these would be the beliefs towards the
center of Quine’s “web of belief” or those in Wittgenstein’s river-bed rather
than river (Wittgenstein 1969, §96–99). Goodman posits a similar idea in his
scheme or system which lets us “decide whether things are alike. . . a network
of labels that organizes, sorts, or classifies items in terms of the types of di-
versity to be recognized” (Goodman and Elgin 1988, p. 8; see also Goodman
1978, pp. 8, 13).
23 Putnam (2002), p. 109.
24 Another frequent example of this conceptual relativism is mereology, the Pol-
ish mathematical-logical system that counts objects in a fundamentally differ-
ent way than traditional math, logic, and common sense do. See, e.g., Putnam
(1987), pp. 18–21.
25 Putnam (1994a), p. 451.
26 See Foucault (1970, pp. 340–1; 1977, p. 38). For more on Foucault’s relation-
ship to Kant, see Braver (2007), pp. 344–8.
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 167
27 In Gutting (1994), p. 314.
28 Foucault (1972), p. 229.
29 Foucault (1972), p. 47.
30 Foucault (1970), p. xxii. He also calls it an episteme.
31 Foucault (1970), p. xxii.
32 Foucault (1972), p. 117; see also 1970, pp. 158, xix, 74, 208, 217.
33 Foucault (1970), p. xxii; cf. pp. 22; 119. See Todd May’s comment: “Fou-
cault’s writings have as one of their central purposes to show how concepts,
principles, assumptions, and methods that we take for granted as the giv-
ens for all thought are themselves subject to a history that can be described”
(May 1993, p. 31).
34 Foucault (2005), p. 253 note.
35 Foucault (1970), p. xxiv.
36 Foucault (1972), p. 204.
37 And by his attempt to understand his own period, as described in “What is
Enlightenment?”
38 See Foucault (1977), p. 38.
39 Foucault (1970), p. 340.
40 Martin, Gutman, and Hutton (1988), p. 11.
41 Foucault (1972), p. 131; cf. pp. 156; 183; Rabinow (1984), pp. 87; 118.
42 Foucault (1970), p. 342; see also pp. xiii–xiv; 200; 275; 345.
43 See Foucault (1972), pp. 45, 72
44 Foucault (1970), p. 264.
45 Foucault (1970), p. 217.
46 Foucault (1970), p. 308; see also pp. 72; 128.
47 Foucault (1970), p. xx, italics added; see also p. 322; Veyne in Davidson
(1997), p. 160.
48 Rabinow (1984), p. 46; see also Foucault (1989), p. 286.
49 Foucault (1972), p. 203; see also Rabinow (1984), p. 93.
50 Foucault (1989), p. 282; see also 1980, pp. 196–197.
51 See Braver (2007), pp. 181–98, 266–73, 348–360.
52 Wittgenstein (2001), §271.
53 Rabinow (1984), p. 72; see also Putnam 1978, pp. xxx, 126; 1988, p. 115;
2002, pp. 180, 110. I say “most of his career” because he did not hold this
view in his early work. He is still committed to it at least through 2002.
54 Foucault (1995), p. 102; see also 1978, pp. 72, 94.
55 Rabinow (1984), p. 89; see also pp. 72–73; 1989, p. 280.
56 Faubion (2000), pp. 253–254.
57 Foucault (1972), p. 127; see also pp. 74; 117.
58 Foucault (1989), p. 221; see also pp. 198; 201; 1972, p. 68; 1980, pp. 108,
118–119.
59 See Foucault (1989), p. 462.
60 Foucault (1977), p. 194.
61 Foucult (1989), p. 446.
62 Foucault (1978), p. 204; see also p. 23; 1989, pp. 157, 285; 1995, pp. 27, 102.
63 Putnam (1981), p. x.
64 See Putnam (1981), pp. 55–5; 1983, pp. xvii, 84; 1988, p. 115; 1990,
pp. 41, 115.
65 See Putnam (1983), p. 86.
66 See e.g. Clark and Hale 1994, p. 291, n.26; Putnam 1983, p. xvii; 1988,
p. 115.
67 Putnam 1994a, p. 462; see also Rorty 1998, pp. 51–4 and Dummett in Clark
and Hale 1994, p. 63 for excellent objections to Putnam on this point. Note
168 Lee Braver
that Putnam seems to view this as a strength, since his recent position main-
tains this common-sense realism. As far as I can tell, however, he is simply
sidestepping the problems realism has always had—for himself as well—rather
than disarming them.
68 See McCumber (2003, 2005). Peter Hylton describes a “general repudiation
of the historical mode of understanding within analytic philosophy. In particu-
lar, analytic philosophy seems to think of itself as taking place within a single
timeless moment” (Hylton 1990, p. vii; cf. 4, 16).
69 Rorty is right to point out the “cautionary” use of truth in the sense that we
might later come to reject what we now hold to be true, but what is gained by
saying “p is justified but not true because it might later turn out to be false”
instead of “p is now true but might later be false?” (Rorty 1998, p. 60; see also
1991, pp. 27, 128).
70 Nietzsche (1974), §108.
71 Foucault (1989), p. 280.
72 See Putnam (1981), pp. 156, 162, 167.
73 Foucault (1989), p. 353.
74 Foucault (1989), p. 355; see also pp. 276; 280; Faubion (2000), p. 225; Fau-
bion (1998), p. 324.
75 Foucault (1995), p. 23; see also pp. 87; 163; 1989, pp. 276–277.
76 Rabinow (1984), p. 56. In this way, Foucault’s genealogical expansion of his
earlier focus on discourse in his archaeological phase replays Marx’s criti-
cism of Hegel’s emphasis on Geist, i.e. the cultural or intellectual features of
a society. “Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented which de-
prives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole
form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical
fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee, which have proved their
world-historical importance in the nineteenth century by the fact that the lack
of these products, occasioned by the Napoleonic Continental System, caused
the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the
glorious Wars of Liberation of 1913. From this it follows that this transfor-
mation of history into world history is by no means a mere abstract act on
the part of ‘self-consciousness’, the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical
spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act” (Marx 1998, p. 58–59,
see also Marx 1992, p. 80–81).
77 Putnam (2002), p. 106.
78 Given Foucault’s epistemology, of course, he cannot claim ultimate correspon-
dence truth for his views, but they can possess the empirical truth discussed
above, as well as strategic utility.
79 See Putnam 1981, pp. 128; 134–137; 201; 2002, pp. 142, 104–105.
80 Of course, the issue of moral realism has received a great deal of attention ever
since Moore, but the ethical implications of epistemological or ontological
anti-realism have not, as far as I am aware.
81 Clark and Hale (1994), p. 55–57.
82 Ibid.
83 Austin (1975), p. 139. Todd May puts this point well: “the emergence of a
discourse is treated as an ‘event’. . . something to be investigated not in the
depths of its reference, but in the horizonality of its relations with surrounding
discourses and practices” (May 1993, p. 27).
84 See Foucault (1980, p. 121; 1989, p. 235).
85 Foucault (2003, p. 323), italics added. Note the tone of barely suppressed
outrage when he discusses these subjects: “the repressive role of the asylum
is well known: people are locked up and subjected to treatment—chemical
 Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History 169
or psychological—over which they have no control; or they are subjected
to the nontreatment of a straitjacket. But the influence of psychiatry ex-
tends beyond this to the activity of social workers, professional guidance
counselors, school psychologists, and doctors who dispense psychiatric ad-
vice to their patients—all the psychiatric components of everyday life which
form something like a third order of repression and policing.” Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F.
Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1977, pp. 228–229.
86 For a fascinating account of this phenomenon in conjunction with a good
analysis of Foucault, see Ladelle McWhorter’s Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault
and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.
87 Foucault (1989), p. 198.
88 See, e.g., Lyotard 1988; Levinas 1969, pp. 72–73; 1996, p. 23; Derrida 1976,
p. 127.
89 Of course, this line of argumentation also seems to rob Foucault of positive
norms, including any that he might need for his own criticisms. This forms one
of the most common and important criticisms of his work, the classic state-
ments of which appear in Fraser (1981); Habermas in Hoy (1986), Habermas
(1987, p. 286), and Taylor in Hoy (1986). Although I believe that he has the
resources to say a great deal more than this, within the confines of this paper
I must leave it at Foucault’s negative point that without realist justifications,
“it is good, for ethical and political reasons, that the authority that exercises
the right to punish should always be uneasy about that strange power and
never feel too sure of itself” (Faubion 2000, p. 461).
90 Wittgenstein (1969), §612.
91 Wittgenstein 1969, §609, italics in original; see also §92; §217; §233; §262.
For more on this, see Braver 2012, Chapter 4.
92 I would like to thank Ken Alpern, Colin Anderson, and John Koritansky for
their helpful comments and criticisms of this paper.

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8 Metaphor without Meanings
Derrida and Davidson as
Complementary
Samuel C. Wheeler III

A metaphor ascribes to an object a property it does not really have. How

are metaphors meaningful and informative, if what they say is not literally
true? The very word “metaphor,” “transport across,” obviously is itself a
metaphor for a way of using language that departs from the model of ascrib-
ing properties to objects that have them. “Trope” is likewise a metaphor, of
a word turning. Various accounts explain how a meaning fitting one object
can be carried across to another object to which it does not properly apply.
For instance, perhaps there is a systematic way meanings are transformed
into metaphorical meanings when they are applied to different categories of
objects. Such accounts of metaphor posit meanings that attach to words and
apply properly to some objects and improperly to others.
Derrida and Davidson are both anti-metaphysical. They reject meanings
as entities that could be transferred and solve or reject the issues such a view
fosters. Neither holds that term- or sentence-meanings match properties or
that facts to yield truth. What they have to say about metaphor is therefore
quite different from accounts that view meanings as trans-linguistic entities.
Derrida’s (1971) “White Mythology” and Davidson’s (1978) “What Meta-
phors Mean” are the best works on metaphor I know of. While the issues
about metaphor these essays discuss are quite different, these essays agree
on some fundamental theses about language and meaning. Furthermore, as
I will argue, the arguments of each philosopher supplement and strengthen
the arguments of the other. While almost certainly neither philosopher ever
read anything the other wrote, these essays from mutually alienated tradi-
tions complement one another.
The first section of this essay is a discussion of some aspects of the argument
in “White Mythology.” “White Mythology” is a complex, 62-page essay with
many strands, and I omit discussion of many of those strands. My discussion
focuses on topics that connect Derrida’s discussion with Davidson’s. Derrida’s
primary concern is with metaphor as it shapes metaphysical concepts.
The second section summarizes Davidson’s discussion of metaphor.
Davidson is interested primarily in how metaphors comport with his con-
ception of meaning as truth-conditions.
 Metaphor without Meanings 173
The third section discusses how Derrida’s discussion of the origin and
basis of philosophical concepts could be incorporated into Davidson’s think-
ing. This section examines how Davidson’s understanding of metaphor and
his anti-metaphysical stance might be enriched by this particular treatment
of exactly these metaphors.
The fourth section examines how Derrida’s discussion of metaphor can
be supplemented with Davidson’s account of what metaphor is, and how
metaphors convey meaning. Briefly, Davidson can supply non-metaphysical
theories of phenomena that Derrida needs to have some account of.

1. “WHITE MYTHOLOGY: METAPHOR IN THE TEXT

OF PHILOSOPHY”

Derrida’s thesis, very roughly, is that philosophy is founded on a metaphor,

that of the intellectual light, with a network of related metaphors such as
clarity, properly applied meanings, and meanings that are before the mind
in this light. But this very founding is problematic, because the concept of
metaphor itself depends on the notion that words carry meanings, which
meanings are intellectual attachments to material signs. Metaphor is the
borrowing of a meaning proper to one thing or kind and the transfer of that
meaning to another. But the idea of meanings as distinct from their material
bearers has been developed on the basis of the metaphor of the light of the
intellect as like regular photon-constituted light. So, the very remark that
philosophy is founded on a metaphor is a remark that presupposes philo-
sophical concepts.
Derrida regards metaphysics as a pervasive set of notions that dominate
our thought on almost every topic. So, the task of philosophical critique is
quite subtle for Derrida. Every critique will presuppose the applicability of,
by employing, exactly the notions and suppositions that are being attacked.1

A) Exergue
The text suggests an account of metaphor and its function in shaping phi-
losophy. However, all such projects are going to turn out to be subtly mis-
conceived. If metaphor is in the text of philosophy, then a philosophical
account of metaphor will include an explanation of itself. So, the account
will explain the very terms that it uses. Derrida develops the problematic
consequences of this consideration at length.
A theme in many discussions of philosophy has been the claim that philo-
sophical concepts are abstractions from the sensory. A particular version
of this theme is that philosophical concepts are metaphors that have lost
their literal meaning and have come to mean the philosophical concept.
Hegel supposed that this removal of sensory meaning and its recovery and
174 Samuel C. Wheeler III
transformation into another meaning was an advance to a higher plane,
an Aufhebung. The sensory literal meaning is a necessary ladder to the
philosophical meaning. Anatole France has a less flattering account of phi-
losophy’s relation to metaphor. The removal of the sensory meaning, once
enlivened by sensory content, is now erased and devoid of real, sensory
meaning, rather than being a higher sublime replacement.
Nietzsche, whom Derrida quotes,2 reflects another part of the philosophi-
cal attitude toward metaphor, that metaphor is inferior to speech that actu-
ally presents reality. Nietzsche, in saying that truth is merely an army of
figures, himself accepts the idea that real truth would be expressed in terms
that reflect reality.
Derrida’s relation to these theses about metaphor and philosophy is com-
plex. On the one hand, he thinks the thesis that philosophy, in particular
metaphysics, is metaphor is sort of right. On the other hand, the relation
of metaphor to metaphysics is more complex. Both Hegel’s idea of recov-
ery in a higher plane and France’s critique that philosophy is washed out
sensory ideas presuppose a system of philosophical concepts established by
metaphors. To anticipate: If the figural connections of predicate to predicate
and application to application are not governed by “natural” and therefore
governed resemblances but by dissemination,3 then metaphysical notions
are suspect as scientific or appropriate descriptions of anything. “Dissemi-
nation” pictures linguistic connections as determined by words as words,
rather than conceptual connections. “Dissemination” applies both to predi-
cates connecting with other predicates and to application of predicates. Nei-
ther process is controlled by language-transcendent meanings.
“Metaphor in the text of philosophy,”4 as a list of programmatic ques-
tions, is exactly what Derrida’s kind of analysis transcends. Exactly how
“metaphor seems to involve the usage of philosophical language in its
entirety”5 is what “White Mythology” spends many pages explaining.
Derrida substitutes “usure” for “usage” and takes the economic and
physical senses of “usure” to be related, a characteristic move following
from taking words as marks to be basic.6 “Usure” as losing and regaining
with a profit corresponds to Hegel’s notions on the topic, while “usure” as
wearing away corresponds to France’s. An important thesis of the essay is
encapsulated in the claim, “Usure does not overtake a tropic energy other-
wise destined to remain intact.”7 Derrida denies meanings as trans-linguistic
signifiers, but the treatment of metaphor as “usure” supposes that there are
such meanings that get dissipated and perhaps recovered in a higher form.
If dissemination, un-rule-governed drift, is what actually happens in
linguistic connection among predicates and application of predicates, the
founding conceptions of philosophy are figural uses of terms of ordinary
language unsupported by fit with the phenomena. So there is no literal
explanation of their significance. Metaphysics is constituted out of a series
of developments of this “forced” metaphor.
 Metaphor without Meanings 175
B) Plus de Metaphore
The core thesis of the entire essay is in the long and dense paragraph that
begins this section:8
“The exergue effaced, how are we to decipher figures of speech, and sin-
gularly metaphor, in the philosophic text?” This paragraph tries to show
the “condition for the impossibility of this project” by some intricate
considerations:

a) . . . Metaphor remains, in all its essential characteristics, a classi-

cal philosopheme, a metaphysical concept. It is therefore enveloped in
the field that a general metaphorology of philosophy would seek to
dominate.

The metaphor of “domination” corresponds roughly to the analytic

metaphors of “reduction” and to the common philosophical metaphors
of “priority.” A subject matter or discourse is dominated by another if it
can be accounted for by that other, without loss. So, for instance, physics
would dominate biology if all biological phenomena could be expressed and
explained in physical terms. Biology would then presuppose physics, so that
an explanation of physical phenomena in biological terms would be presup-
posing what is to be explained.
Is this presupposition really a problem? The phenomenological notion
of analysis assumes that it is. But Quine’s (1960) thesis is that we start
from where we are. We think there are physical objects, so those can be
the basis of our theorizing. Even though it may be the case that all our
evidence for physical objects is sensory, physical explanations of sensory
experience are legitimate. Quine rejects the phenomenological project
of constructing an epistemological foundation for our knowledge of the
world.
Derrida’s project, though, is not that of examining attempts to ground
knowledge of something clearly legitimate, such as our knowledge of the
external world. Metaphysics, as he conceives it, is a system of notions with
pretensions to being a science that allows the mind to master the world, to
get it right. Those notions and the field they constitute are not obviously
legitimate. I have argued9 that Davidson dissolves metaphysical problems by
rejecting exactly the central metaphysical concepts that Derrida is attacking.
So, Derrida is presenting an argument that these concepts are not ratio-
nally legitimate. If the analytical concepts of metaphysics are themselves
founded on metaphors without natural propriety, that is, on catachreses,
then metaphysics cannot give an account of metaphor that actually explains
metaphor, in the sense of giving a straight explication of what a metaphor
is and how it works. In particular, if the central metaphysical idea of mean-
ings as logoi inspectable by the mind’s eye is an unfounded metaphor, then
176 Samuel C. Wheeler III
explaining metaphor using such meanings cannot be a genuine explanation.
Derrida continues this argument:

b) Metaphor has been issued from a network of philosophemes which

themselves correspond to tropes or to figures, and these philosophemes
are contemporaneous to or in systematic solidarity with these tropes
or figures. This stratum of ‘tutelary’ tropes, the layer of ‘primary’ phi-
losophemes (assuming that the quotation marks will serve as a suffi-
cient precaution here), cannot be dominated. It cannot dominate itself,
cannot be dominated by what it itself has engendered, has made to
grow on its own soil, supported on its own base. Therefore, it gets
‘carried away’ each time that one of its products—here, the concept of
metaphor—attempts in vain to include under its own law the totality of
the field to which the product belongs.10

Philosophy cannot be understood as a special case of effaced, erased

metaphors, or in any other reduction to “metaphorology.” In brief, philo-
sophical explanatory concepts are themselves figures. Philosophical terms
are non-literal. If a term is defined in terms that essentially involve itself,
then the definition is circular, and so no grounding has been supplied. But
why can’t there be an account of the role of metaphor in philosophy in phil-
osophical terms just because metaphor itself is a concept that springs from
philosophical terms? What is wrong with a concept “dominating itself?”
The next two sentences clarify the problem:

c) If one wished to conceive and to class all the metaphorical possi-

bilities of philosophy, one metaphor, at least, always would remain
excluded, outside the system: the metaphor, at the very least, without
which the concept of metaphor could not be constructed, or, to syn-
copate an entire chain of reasoning, the metaphor of metaphor. This
extra metaphor, remaining outside the field that it allows to be circum-
scribed, extracts or abstracts itself from this field, thus subtracting itself
as a metaphor less.11 “Metaphor” is itself a metaphor, and so cannot
be accounted for by an account of metaphor in philosophy. What is
the “so” here? Why cannot the metaphor without which the concept
of metaphor cannot be constructed be included in this account of how
metaphor functions in philosophy?

Metaphysics, if it is a theory that masters reality, uses terms whose defini-

tions are precise. “In the order of concepts [that is, in metaphysical theo-
rizing] . . . when a distinction cannot be rigorous or precise, it is not a
distinction at all.”12 Derrida’s critiques show that metaphysical distinctions
cannot be made precise, and so do not meet metaphysical standards. An
account of the functioning of metaphor within philosophy would be a literal
 Metaphor without Meanings 177
philosophical explanation, using rigorous and precise concepts, of how figu-
ration figures in the concepts of philosophy. It would use the concept of
metaphor, and explain it.
The rest of the essay shows why a philosophical account of metaphor is
impossible. The next several paragraphs give a short version of the argument.
First, an account of the functioning of metaphor ought to be a straight and
literal account, since the functioning of metaphor is going to be explained
scientifically. If it is explained, it covers the whole functioning of metaphor
within the field of philosophy. But the very concept of metaphor is itself (as
Derrida will argue) established by metaphors and, by the theory of metaphor,
established in a way that does not permit literal paraphrase. The catachreses
(unfounded, unnatural metaphorical application of terms) that establish the
concepts of metaphysics and that set up the very notion of meanings, the
logoi that permit the idea of the transfer of meaning, must be covered in
this account of the way metaphor functions in philosophy. But this means
that the account being given is not literal, not “straight,” since the very
term “metaphor” is itself a metaphor, and so accounts using it are them-
selves metaphorical. That is, without the logoi that are established by the
theory developed from the light-of-the-intellect metaphor, the notion of the
transfer of logoi cannot be understood.
So, suppose we take the metaphorical, figural account and say what it
means literally. That is, the metaphor of “metaphor” “transferring” or
“bearing across” can just be replaced by a literal account of what is going
on with meaning in this kind of figure. But if meaning, logoi, and so literal-
ness are all founded only on catachreses, metaphors with no natural, literal
equivalents, then there is no straight account available. If the philosophi-
cal notions in terms of which metaphorical figuration is to be explained
are metaphors that cannot be rationally explained, then there is no straight
philosophical account of things. So, the metaphors that are philosophical
concepts are metaphors left out of the account. The fundamental such meta-
phors are those related to the light of reason. Establishing that these meta-
phors are catachreses according to the classical accounts of metaphor is the
project of two later sections, “The Ellipsis of the Sun” and “The Flowers of
Rhetoric,” discussed below.
Derrida summarizes what he will argue: A philosophical account of met-
aphor would organize itself along oppositions (proper/improper; sensible/
intelligible, but to use these distinctions “one would have to posit that the
sense aimed at through these figures is an essence rigorously independent of
that which transports it, which is an already philosophical thesis, . . . the the-
sis which constitutes the concept of metaphor, the opposition of the proper
and the improper, of essence and accident, . . . of thought and language, of
the intelligible and the sensible.”13 Derrida’s thesis is that in fact all of these
distinctions are founded on a philosophical metaphor, the one that takes
“light” in an intellectual sense, thereby inventing the intellect, intelligibility,
178 Samuel C. Wheeler III
the thinkable sameness that links two particulars. This “founding meta-
phor” of philosophy is not built into the nature of things.
Derrida returns to the contrast between Hegel and France on “usure.”14
Hegel and France take the sensory to have a purely transparent present
meaning. France thinks of the reduction of sensory meaning as wearing
away and washing out, while Hegel thinks of it as an increase in value.
Hegel regards this loss and recovery as Aufhebung, sublimation. A sen-
sory term takes on a metaphorical usage (i.e., is displaced from its proper
domain) and thereby acquires a spiritual meaning (a higher value), which
then becomes the literal meaning of the term, which has thus come back to
its proper home (literal use) but now is worth more. Both views incorporate
the metaphors of philosophy.
Derrida argues against these proposals in the next two sections. First, the
sensory cannot be an original meaning-supplier. Second, non-meaning-regu-
lated dissemination is a better model of philosophical concept-construction,
rather than either Hegel’s conception of the recovery and transformation of
meaning that creates philosophical meanings for terms or France’s concep-
tion of wearing-away of given sensory meaning.
The next sections of the essay complete Derrida’s argument. I will
address two central topics: First, a straight account is impossible. Second,
accounting for metaphorical figuration of the very terms in which meta-
phor is explained is impossible, since the explaining terms are themselves
metaphorical.

C) The Ellipsis of the Sun: Enigmatic, Incomprehensible,

Ungraspable
This section and the next develop Aristotle’s account of metaphor, which
Derrida analyzes as a work on metaphor whose “entire surface is worked by
a metaphorics.”15 Derrida shows this by a detailed exhibition of that surface
being worked. These metaphors construct the subject matter of proper and
improper, terms which presuppose logoi and which constitute the theory
that allows metaphor to be distinguished from extending a predicate prop-
erly to a new case of its extension.
Derrida explores the relation of this account to the sensory, discussing
Aristotle’s example of the sun sowing rays as seeds. There is nothing clearly
in the real world that makes the relation between the rays of the sun more
analogous to the sowing of seeds than to an anus, as in Bataille (1927).
“Where has it ever been seen that there is the same relation between the sun
and its rays as between sowing and seeds?”16 This metaphor is effective, as
Davidson will put it, but not accurate in any literal sense.
Because they result from derived meaning, such metaphors require
a proper term to be the non-metaphorical meaning-supplier from which
derived meanings get derived. We drift along linking analogy to analogy, as
“wipe out” goes from erasure to killing a military unit to winning a football
 Metaphor without Meanings 179
game and getting very drunk. What is the proper here? If “all the terms in
an analogical relation already are caught up, one by one, in a metaphorical
relation,”17 then what supplies meaning?
Neither the sun itself nor the sense-impression of the sun can supply
a meaning, according to Aristotle’s own views. The sun itself is a term,
not a proper meaning, one which would designate the sun and only the
sun, by its very meaning. So the sun is not a proper meaning-supplier.18
More generally, sensory items, whether sense-data or their sources, are
not meanings.19 So, neither Hegel’s nor France’s conception of “usure”
can be right.

D) The Flowers of Rhetoric: The Heliotrope

The demonstration that Aristotle’s classic account of metaphor is a work
on metaphor whose “entire surface is worked by a metaphorics” continues.
Derrida discusses “the proper” and notes a difficulty raised by Aristotle’s
distinguishing “good” metaphors from bad ones. The good ones have to get
something right. So, good metaphors have to convey a property the object
has, even though that property does not define the object.

1) “Properness,” as in “proper name,” is there being a single name for

a single thing. Generalized to predicates, on the metaphysical model,
words can have several meanings, but those meanings must be finite
so that, in principle, the one word-one meaning model would be
preserved. Derrida refers to Aristotle’s discussion of contradiction
in Metaphysics Γ 4 and following, where Aristotle demands that a
speaker mean exactly one thing. Dissemination, as unlimited drift of
meaning, would count as not meaning at all, and would be sophistry.
2) The proper is different from the essence. A property that only one kind
of animal always has, for instance, is proper to that kind of animal,
but may not be its essence, what it is to be that animal. Good meta-
phors convey such properties. In this kind of case, these properties are
repeatable and can be expressed by meanings.
3) Now Derrida returns to the sun and notes that, as a sensory object,
not only can the sun not have a repeatable meaning designating itself
as entity, as Aristotle notes in Metaphysics Z15, but it cannot even
have a property, in Aristotle’s sense of something that is special to it.
For Aristotle, “properties” are ontological attachments, albeit of a de-
pendent sort. So, “being a fiery object above the Earth in the daytime”
does not qualify as a property.

So, by Aristotle’s own lights, sun metaphors are always imperfect meta-
phors, metaphors that do not present a property of the object. Furthermore,
the sun itself is not properly meant in discourse, but only in an imperfect
metaphor. So by the classical account of metaphor, we do not get at meanings
180 Samuel C. Wheeler III
by starting from sensation, as Hegel’s and France’s accounts supposed. See-
ing delivers particulars, which cannot be reduced to predicates, that is, gen-
eral terms having meanings. So, the idea that metaphorical meaning could
derive from sensory meaning is an illusion.
Leaving out much detail, Derrida’s conclusion is that “everything in the
discourse on metaphor, that passes through the sign eidos, with its entire
system, is articulated with the analogy between vision of the nous and sen-
sory vision, between the intelligible sun and the visible sun. The determina-
tion of the truth of Being in presence passes through the tropic system.”20
So “intellectual vision” is a metaphor with only metaphorical founda-
tion, which metaphor is required in order to have Being as presence. That is,
without the intellectual light, we could not have essences “before the mind,”
by analogy with having something before the eyes. So, (254) “Philosophy, as
theory of metaphor, will first have been a metaphor of theory.”
Derrida’s first works were discussions of Husserl, who conceived of
meanings as items that were present to the mind. Following Dagfinn Følles-
dal (1958), and noting that Husserl and Frege were both working on the
project of refuting psychologism in logic and mathematics, I think of Hus-
serlian essences as like Fregean senses—non-linguistic items that the mind
apprehends, which are the meanings of linguistic expressions. Derrida takes
Husserl’s careful analyses to be the most sophisticated versions of logoi, and
takes the problems he finds in Husserl’s analysis to be a reason to take the
presence before the mind of such meanings to be an illusion.
“White Mythology” is a further argument that “presence,” as meanings
are supposed to be “present before the mind,” is unsupportable. There are
no such meanings. Derrida’s later discussions are examinations of the con-
sequences he sees of there being no transcendental signifiers, meanings that
can be transferred and expressed in a variety of linguistic systems. They
are also demonstrations by particular cases of the un-logos-controlled “dis-
semination” that actually occurs when words are connected to other words
without trans-linguistic meanings to restrict their connections to the actu-
ally valid ones.

E) La Metaphysique—Releve de la Metaphore
For Hegel, as Derrida discussed above, sensory concepts are sublimated,
erased, and recovered in a higher form, that is, aufgehoben, to become phil-
osophical concepts. From Derrida’s point of view, given his analysis of meta-
phor, what happens is not sublimation but “taking off” in dissemination.21
Dissemination is not constrained by logoi. It links terms to terms with logi-
cal support.22 Since there are no natural resemblances between the eye of
vision and the “eye” of the mind, the sublimation of the intake of photons
is not a scientifically or rationally supported move. So, Derrida says, what
happens with metaphors that become philosophical concepts is a “releve” in
the sense of “taking off” rather than recovery in sublimation.23
 Metaphor without Meanings 181
Derrida shows how Plato and Descartes, for all the differences in their
particular metaphors, have essentially the same metaphysical conception of
meanings as ideas before the mind illuminated by the light of reason. He
then concludes with several paragraphs that summarize the discussions of
the previous sections. “Metaphor, therefore, is determined by philosophy as
a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable
damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights set
on, and within the horizon of, the circular re-appropriation of literal, proper
meaning. This is why the philosophical evaluation of metaphor always has
been ambiguous: metaphor is dangerous and foreign as concerns intuition
(vision or contact) concept (the grasping of proper contact of the signified,)
and consciousness (proximity or self-presence); but it is in complicity with
what it endangers, is necessary to it in the extent to which the de-tour is a
re-turn guided by the function of resemblance (mimesis or homoiosis) under
the law of the same. . . . The teleology of meaning, which constructs the
concept of metaphor, coordinates metaphor with the manifestation of truth
. . . as presence without veil . . . with the appropriation of a full language . . .
with the vocation of a full nomination.”24
Derrida takes metaphysics to be a would-be science based on a metaphor
that has no basis in nature. There is no reason to model understanding on
seeing and no reason to take metaphysics seriously.

2. “WHAT METAPHORS MEAN”

Davidson’s essay25 “What Metaphors Mean” has more limited goals.

Davidson has a prima facie difficulty with what metaphors mean because he
treats meaning as truth-conditions. Truth-conditional semantics, as David-
son conceives it,26 gives the meaning of a sentence by using a sentence in the
interpreter’s language. So, in the Tarskian27 formula “ ‘Snow is white’ is true
if and only if snow is white,” the first clause applies the predicate “true”
to a mentioned object, a sentence, and the second clause says what has to
be the case for that predicate to apply to that object. Analogous formulas
describe true-of conditions of predicates: “ ‘White’ is true of an object a if
and only if a is white.” The sentence explains what “white” means by say-
ing what a thing has to be for that adjective to apply. A theory of meaning
for a language is an empirically established counterfactual-supporting set of
generalizations about terms in the language that says what the world has
to be like for each sentence in the language to be true. Such a theory shows
how the truth-conditions or satisfaction-conditions of complex expressions
depend on those of component expressions. For each simple predicate, there
is a clause, such as “ ‘Flies’ is true of an object θ if and only if θ flies.” For
every compounding device, there is a clause such as the one for “and”: “For
all sentences X and Y, X concatenated with “and” concatenated with Y is
true if and only if X and Y are true. There is nothing about “fit” of meanings
182 Samuel C. Wheeler III
to anything beyond trivialities such as that “Joe is a frog” fits the world
just in case Joe is a frog.28 A theory of meaning, for Davidson, is a recursive
theory about a person at a time such that, for every sentence of the person’s
language, there is an account of what the world is like when that sentence
is true.
Like Derrida, Davidson does not think that there are meanings as
self-interpreting items that attach to signs. He argues that meanings as enti-
ties are useless in a theory of meaning. There are meaningful expressions,
but that cannot be understood as expressions that are full of meaning.
The difficulty posed by metaphors for Davidson is that they are mean-
ingful, but their meaning cannot be understood as their truth-conditions.
Davidson examines a number of suggestions—that metaphors are com-
pressed similes, that there is some kind of context-dependent transforma-
tion of meanings that generate the meaning of a metaphor, and so forth. He
argues that they all are incorrect. “The central mistake I shall be inveighing
against is the idea that a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or
meaning, another sense or meaning.”29
This is in accord with Derrida’s view that metaphors are not governed by
any kind of meaning-transforming logic. The difference, which turns outs to
be only on the surface, as I argue below, is that Davidson assigns meanings
to sentences. As we will see, this is only a surface difference.
Davidson’s positive account of metaphor is rhetorical.30 A central thesis
of his philosophy of language is that semantics, that is, truth-conditions,
should be sharply separated from what speakers are doing with sentences.
Sentences are presented with their truth-conditions for an unlimited variety
of purposes. Interpretation of speech acts is a special case of interpretation
of actions. For rather Derridean reasons, Davidson thinks it is impossible
to get a systematic semantics by starting from speech-act potentials and
deriving meanings from these. There is an unlimited and non-rule-governed
variety of things that could be done with a sentence.
Metaphors differ from literal speech, not in their truth-conditions, but
in their force, in the purpose for which they are presented.31 “I think meta-
phor belongs exclusively to the domain of use.” Most metaphors are in fact
false sentences. The Earth is not really a floor, even though Dante says it
is. The literal meaning is the only meaning the sentence has. A metaphor
achieves its objective by using its literal meaning. Since a reasonable inter-
preter knows the sentence is false, the interpreter will interpret the speaker
as having something else in mind in uttering it. Davidson imagines that a
Saturnian is learning English by being shown examples of the extension
of “floor.” For the Saturnian to appreciate that calling the Earth a floor
is metaphorical, he has to know that the Earth is not just another kind of
floor.32 The Earth is not actually a floor.
Metaphors, when they are effective, lead the hearer to see what they
are applied to differently. “How many facts or propositions are conveyed
by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad
 Metaphor without Meanings 183
question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number.
Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.”33 There is no
“literal” paraphrase of what the metaphor conveys. Davidson denies “the
thesis that associated with a metaphor is a definite cognitive content that its
author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get
the message.”34 Davidson thus would agree with Derrida’s characterization
of the metaphors he discusses as “catachreses.” Since there is no literal para-
phrase, there is nothing that can be put in general terms, that is, expressed
in predicates, that makes the metaphor correct or appropriate. Metaphors
are presented to produce effects. Metaphors can be effective or not, and the
effects can be good or bad, but the evaluation of metaphorical inscriptions
as true or false is not appropriate.
The apparent difference between Davidson’s and Derrida’s thinking about
metaphor is that they have different conceptions of truth. Derrida assumes
that “truth” would be the correspondence of a meaning expressed by a sign
to reality. Derrida had argued before35 on phenomenological grounds that
there are no such meanings. Such meanings, or logoi, have been part of every
metaphysical system. “White Mythology” is part of his continuing attack
on metaphysical notions, such as Truth, which rest on meanings. Derrida
concludes that there is no such thing as Truth as metaphysics conceives of it.
Davidson likewise rejects meanings as they have come down in his tra-
dition. He agrees with Quine that there is no empirical justification for
logoi and observes that they are useless for semantics anyway.36 Davidson,
though, also rejects the classical correspondence account of truth. On Fre-
gean grounds, all true sentences can only refer to the same thing, if they refer
at all. There are no entities corresponding to sentences as facts are supposed
to. For Davidson, this does not mean that there are no true sentences. He
takes truth to be a primitive concept intimately tied to our understanding
of ourselves and the world, whose structure is illuminated by the Tarski37
truth definition.38 A truth-definition, though, does not give the meaning of
a sentence in any more illuminating terms than the interpreter’s language.
One way to express what is in common to Davidson and Derrida is to say
that language is as explicit as meaning gets. All there is to meaning is human
applications of language in the world. Derrida holds that this does not
deliver correspondence truth. Davidson agrees. So, on the issue of whether
there is truth, then, there is no clear disagreement between Davidson and
Derrida.

3. DERRIDA SUPPLEMENTING DAVIDSON

Derrida thinks of words in terms of their connections with other words,

which connections cannot be systematically divided into the logical and the
rhetorical, given the absence of logoi. The discussion of the significance of
philosophical terms by tracing their origins is a topic in Hegel that continues
184 Samuel C. Wheeler III
in the discussion quoted in the Exergue section of “White Mythology.” Der-
rida, following Hegel and Heidegger, thinks of the origins of concepts as
continuing to be relevant as those concepts are used historically.
Davidson is not primarily interested in particular predicates. His project
is understanding how language, as an infinite capacity to understand new
sentences, it possible. By and large, since the understanding of predicates
is by clauses such as “ ‘Flies’ is true of Theaetetus if and only if Theaetetus
flies,” particular predicates are not generally a topic.
On a few occasions, Davidson did discuss particular predicates. In
Davidson (1991), on James Joyce, Davidson describes something like dis-
semination. However, the dissemination of particular words, and the fact
that we can interpret such dissemination, was not a major interest. David-
son’s understanding of interpretation has affinities with Derrida. Davidso-
nian interpretation interprets the other in a way that maximizes the degree
to which the other is a “believer in the true and lover of the good.”39 Such
maximization will often yield more than one optimum, so that interpreta-
tion is sometimes indeterminate. As Davidson (1986) argues, there is no
algorithm for interpretation. No rules tell us how to understand someone
who says he has prostrate difficulties.
More thinking about word-connections would have given Davidson
more arguments for indeterminacy of interpretation. Davidson never dis-
cussed the fact that many terms are metaphors or other figures that became
“literal” in the sense that most users of the language have no idea that the
word has that figural origin. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere,40 this phe-
nomenon, since it takes place gradually, creates an indeterminacy in which
truth-definition characterizes the person’s language. That is, if it is indeter-
minate whether “crush” is literal or metaphorical in a sentence like “The
Seahawks crushed the Broncos in the 2014 Superbowl,” then it is indetermi-
nate whether the truth-definition of the speaker has one clause correspond-
ing to the word “crush,” so that the utterance is a metaphor, or more than
one, so that the utterance is literal.
Davidson characterized metaphors as analogous to pictures—getting us
to conceive of things in a certain way. Davidson did not discuss the pos-
sibility that some metaphors yield deceptive or misleading pictures and did
not discuss the possibility of interlocking networks of metaphors. Derrida’s
argument in “White Mythology” shows that the picture of meaning and
language that dominates metaphysical thinking is a network of terms orga-
nized by vision metaphors—meanings are “before the mind,” we’re enlight-
ened by clear explanations, and so forth. Derrida points out how the proper
meaning of terms, which is required for the notion of metaphor to have
purchase, is itself supported by logoi.41
Given his view that metaphors present pictures, Davidson could accept
that the interlocking network of metaphors that Derrida shows to be the
core of metaphysics is a complex picture of a thinking and meaning. The
complex picture does not decode into any list of propositions, and so is
 Metaphor without Meanings 185
not strictly speaking a theory. The picture nevertheless shapes the way peo-
ple think about thinking and meaning, just as the network of metaphors
in pastoral poetry shapes a false and perhaps anti-feminist conception of
romantic love.
Although Davidson’s use of rhetorical categories is focused on differences
of force with which sentences with truth-conditions are presented, Davidson
should also be open to the idea of non-logical, “rhetorical” connections
among predicates. Davidson, in denying meanings and the analytic-synthetic
distinction, also denies a sharp line between logical and rhetorical connec-
tions among primitive predicates, as argued in Wheeler (1986) in the case of
Quine. Davidson should recognize that, even though in his terms it is true
that an explanation clarifies an argument, the connection between this clar-
ity and light strongly suggest the mistaken but natural-seeming theories that
have dominated philosophical thinking.
Davidson, that is, could adopt Derrida’s explanation for the attrac-
tion of metaphysics. Davidson could interpret Derrida’s discussion in
“White Mythology” as an account of why it is that philosophers and
non-philosophers are intuitively drawn to accounts of language use, trans-
lation, and communication that appeal to language-transcendent entities.
Derrida’s analysis of the metaphorics of light, sight, seeing, and thinking can
supplement Davidson’s explanations of how humans communicate without
such entities.
Derrida’s genealogy of the conception of meanings as entities shows that
something that appears natural and obvious is neither.42 Davidson could
endorse this genealogy and explain philosophers’ resistance to the idea that
there are no meanings and so no analytic truths that depend on meanings.
The alternative explanations of language use and understanding he pro-
poses would be given negative support.

4. DAVIDSON SUPPLEMENTING DERRIDA

Deconstruction is popularly characterized as a kind of relativism holding

that ordinary life and communication is impossible. In fact, Derrida thought
that people could communicate and that “France is roughly hexagonal” is
right in a way that “France is roughly triangular” is not.43 But he supplies
no account of how language actually manages to communicate, how people
get things right, and what it is for people to mean things.
Derrida’s rejection of metaphysical notions argues that those notions
are not equipped to master the world. Derrida did not think that. Rather,
he thought that the metaphysical picture by which meanings control real
connection and distinguish logical connection from rhetorical connection
is incoherent. The theory of logoi was to guarantee determinacy and so
intellectual mastery, but depends on theory-apt distinctions. Dissemina-
tion is another, less misleading, picture. Dissemination, though, is not an
186 Samuel C. Wheeler III
explanatory theory of how we can, for instance, write essays that people
understand.
Davidson has such an account. Davidson’s approach to philosophical
issues is different. The uselessness of meanings in semantics leads him to
do semantics differently, in order to explain why, without such meanings,
we can understand one another and understand new utterances without
language-transcendent meanings. Davidson offers a replacement for the
metaphysical picture that accommodates the failure of determinacy and
the fact that we get along pretty well in the world and understand novel
communications.
Davidson recognizes that language use, despite not having
language-transcendent meanings, still requires theory. A person with a lan-
guage has an unlimited ability to understand new sentences. So there must
be a recursive structure that a language-learner acquires. This is entirely
compatible with the dissemination of every primitive predicate in the lan-
guage, which Davidson (1991) suggests. A person can understand that
“wiped out” is true of an entity if and only if it is wiped out, even on first
hearing the term applied to a surfing outcome. As an interpreter, she will
understand what is meant, without having a rule by which this new applica-
tion is determined.
Derrida could adopt Davidson’s accounts of truth and meaning, as well
as his account of what metaphors mean. Derrida agrees with Davidson
that there are no meanings as entities. Davidson agrees with Derrida that,
given that there are no meanings as logoi, some indeterminacy is inevitable.
Davidson’s analyses of this indeterminacy could be supplemented by some
of Derrida’s considerations.
Derrida could remain a correspondence theorist about Truth, one who
says that correspondence is required for Truth, but that Truth does not
exist, while recognizing that there is something else, truth, which has the
centrality to the intentional sphere Davidson ascribes to it. Derrida should
not object that it is sometimes indeterminate whether an utterance is true.
Davidson’s is not a metaphysical theory. Some distinctions that cannot be
made sharp in other terms are acceptable for human discussions, if not for
theorizing.
Derrida recognizes that there are value distinctions, but such distinctions
are not suitable for metaphysics as a mastering theory. “What philosopher . . .
ever renounced this axiom: that in the order of concepts (for we are speaking
here of concepts and not of the colors of clouds or the taste of certain chewing
gums) when a distinction cannot be rigorous or precise, it is not a distinction at
all.”44 Davidson’s account of truth, his account of interpretation as maximiza-
tion of agreement rather than capturing meanings, and the probabilistic way
the terms of the intentional scheme are connected via truth place the outputs
of his theory, but not the theory itself, in the cloud-and-chewing gum category.
For instance, truth-definitions are precise and determinate. What is indetermi-
nate is which truth-definition characterizes a particular speaker at a time.
 Metaphor without Meanings 187
There is also no reason that Derrida, given that he accepts that David-
sonian interpretation permits an understanding of metaphor that accounts
for ordinary speakers’ intuitions, could not accept Davidson’s account of
what metaphors are. That is, given that “literal” expressions have the fea-
ture Davidson calls “truth,” which Derrida also accepts as characterizing
something, Derrida can accept that metaphors are false in Davidson’s sense.
Derrida and Davidson could agree.

5. CONCLUSION

Derrida and Davidson follow distinct but complementary anti-metaphysical

strategies in these essays and in other works. Derrida argues that the central
metaphysical concepts are conceptually ungrounded. His intricate discus-
sion portrays metaphysics as misleading metaphors engendering concepts
that cannot be made precise. Davidson argues that the important topics
metaphysical notions are supposed to deal with are better dealt with in other
ways, which he provides. Metaphysical apparatus is not needed. Davidson
shows especially that truth, meaning, and predication need no metaphysical
aid. It is too bad that there is yet no attack on the pseudoscience of meta-
physics combining the textual traditions and arguments of both thinkers.

NOTES

1 The difficulty is akin to that of liberation discourses having to speak in the

language of the oppressor. Derrida has to use such terms “under erasure.”
2 Derrida (1971), p. 217.
3 Derrida (1981) elaborates this notion.
4 Derrida (1971), p. 209.
5 Derrida (1971), p. 209.
6 “Taking words as marks to be basic” is a topic of Derrida (1976).
7 Derrida (1971), p. 209, third paragraph.
8 Derrida (1971), p. 219.
9 I argue this in detail in Wheeler (2014).
10 Derrida (1971), p. 219.
11 Derrida (1971), pp. 219–220.
12 Derrida (1988), p. 123.
13 Derrida (1971), pp. 228–229.
14 Derrida (1971), p. 225.
15 Derrida (1971), pp. 231–232.
16 Derrida (1971), pp. 242–243.
17 Derrida (1971), p. 243.
18 There are two considerations Aristotle gives showing that sensory objects can-
not be known by definition. The first, from the Topics V, 3, 131b20–30 depends
on observing that sensory objects can pass out of sight and so out of certain
existence. This same argument is repeated in Metaphysics Z 1040a2–8. The
second consideration, in Metaphysics Z 15 1040a28-b5, is that the sun can-
not be defined as the unique bearer of its attributes because it could continue
188 Samuel C. Wheeler III
to exist without those attributes. Also, another entity could have had them. If
truth and meaning consist of matching a meaning to an object, there cannot
be a meaning, in the sense of a repeatable iterable nature that entities instance,
which is the meaning of a name. If sensory items are referred to by names,
the only way they could refer by having a meaning fitting an object would be
if their meaning were a definite description. Precisely the same point, with a
similar argument, much elaborated, is made by Kripke (1980). Aristotle and
Kripke agree that names are not definite descriptions—that names do not have
meanings that could be transferred. Derrida does not mention this stronger
consideration by which Aristotle undermines his own account of metaphor.
19 Thus Derrida shows that Aristotle agrees with Sellars (1963).
20 Derrida (1971), pp. 253–254.
21 Alan Bass, the translator, notes that “releve” means both “aufheben” and
“taking off.”
22 Thus Derrida rejects the distinction between logic and rhetoric, as Wheeler
(1986) argues that Quine should, given his rejection of the analytic-synthetic
distinction.
23 I omit discussion of the next part of the section, which investigates the possi-
bility of a metaphilosophical account of metaphor, a kind of description from
the outside of how metaphors work.
24 Derrida (1971), p. 270.
25 I have discussed this essay in Wheeler (1989, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013).
26 The classic exposition is Davidson (1967)
27 Tarski (1956).
28 A more thorough exposition and defense of this conception of semantics is
given in Chapter 1 of Wheeler (2014).
29 Davidson (1978), p. 246
30 Davidson’s account is thus akin to de Man’s discussion of Rousseau in de Man
(1979). Davidson, given his view that most of what most people believe is
true, regards “normal” applications of predicates to entities as true, whereas
de Man’s Rousseau treats predication of, say, “frog,” to another frog as a
figure. See Wheeler (1989).
31 Davidson (1978), p. 247.
32 Davidson (1978), p. 252.
33 Davidson (1978), p. 263.
34 Davidson (1978), p. 262.
35 In Derrida (1973).
36 Davidson (1967), p. 21. “Postulating meanings has netted nothing.”
37 Although Tarski (1956), p. 155, note 2, characterizes his definition of truth as
agreeing with Aristotle’s, Tarski’s is a correspondence theory only in a trivial
sense. A true sentence is satisfied by all sequences, which does not distinguish
more than one “truth maker” for all true sentences. The only entity corre-
sponding to a true sentence is the set of all sequences.
38 See Davidson (1967, 2000).
39 Davidson (1970), p. 222.
40 Wheeler (2011), for instance.
41 The metaphysical metaphor of the light of the intellect that enables “clear”
thinking is more than just a philosopher’s invention. Plato is not inventing
the metaphor of the Sun. Rather, Indo-European languages encapsulate such
metaphors. In Greek, the normal way to talk about knowing is the “have
seen.” In English, “wit” and “wisdom” are cognate with “video.” Perhaps
the metaphysical idea is natural to humans—we naturally think of thinking as
like seeing, so that the meanings of our words are “before the mind” as ob-
jects are before our eyes. If that conjecture is true, however, it does not show
 Metaphor without Meanings 189
much. Cultures that have been separated for tens of thousands of years share
a conception of nature as populated by gods who control natural phenomena.
Likewise, the belief in a soul that persists after death occurs to many human
groups that have had no contact. The naturalness in the sense of “natural for
humans” is not a compelling argument that some number of gods exist and
that there is an afterlife.
42 A suspect genealogy, of course, does not show that a notion is wrong. The
discovery of the structure of benzene, after all, was due to a dream. But the
ring structure was an accurate model of the benzene molecule.
43 I talked with him on many occasions in the mid-eighties. He was an ami-
able, reasonable guy, eager to talk to an analytic philosopher who appreciated
his work.
44 Derrida (1988), p. 123.

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. 1966. Metaphysics. Trans. H. G. Apostle. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-

versity Press.
Bataille, G. 1927/1985. The Solar Anus. In Alan Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess. Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 5–9.
Davidson, D. 1967. Truth and Meaning. In D. Davidson (1984), 17–36.
Davidson, D. 1970. Mental Events. In D. Davidson (1984), 207–224.
Davidson, D. 1978. What Metaphors Mean. In D. Davidson (1984), 245–264.
Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Davidson, D. 1986. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. In Richard Grandy and Rich-
ard Warner, eds., Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories,
Ends. Oxford: Clarenden Press, 157–174.
Davidson, D. 1991. James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty. Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy 16: 1–12.
De Man, P. 1979. Allegories of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Derrida, J. 1971. White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. In J. Der-
rida (1982), 208–271.
Derrida, J. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Phenom-
enology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Føllesdal, D. 1958. Husserl und Frege: ein Beitrag zur Beleuchtung der Entste-
hung der phanomenologischen Philosophie. Avhandlinger utgitt av det Norske
videnskaps-akademi i Oslo. 2:Hist.-filos. klasse, 1958, no. 2. Oslo: I kommisjon
hos Aschehoug.
Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Plato. 1974. Plato’s Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Quine, W. V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sellars, W. 1963. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In W. Sellars, ed., Science,
Perception, and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 127–196.
Tarski, A. 1956. The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. In Logic, Seman-
tics, Metamathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 152–278.
Wheeler, S. C. III. 1986. The Extension of Deconstruction. The Monist 69 (1) (Janu-
ary): 3–21. In S. Wheeler (2000), 36–55.
190 Samuel C. Wheeler III
Wheeler, S. C. III. 1989. Metaphor in Davidson and DeMan. In Reed Way Dasen-
brock, ed., Redrawing the Lines. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 116–139.
Wheeler, S. C. III. 2007. Wahrheit, Metapher und Unbestimmheit. In F. J. Czernin
and T. Eder, eds., Zur Metapher. Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Wheeler, S. C. III. 2011. Davidson, Derrida and Difference. In J. Malpas, ed., Dia-
logues with Davidson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 29–42.
Wheeler, S. C. III. 2013. Davidson and Literary Theory. In E. Lepore and K. Ludwig,
eds., Companion to Donald Davidson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 371–391.
Wheeler, S. 2014. Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics: From the True to the Good. New
York: Routledge.
Part III

Metaphysics and Ontology

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9 Why Is Time Different from Space?
John McCumber

It is often held that a proper Aufhebung of the analytical/continental split

would apply the clarity and rigor of analytical philosophy to the kind of
urgently relevant issues favored by continental philosophers. Both rigor and
relevance are necessary for good philosophy, but the following observations
suggest that there are limits to the Aufhebung model:

(1)   That time and space differ from one another is perfectly obvious.
(2)   Just how they differ is somewhat harder to state.
(3)   And why they differ is a question so bizarre as to look misshapen.

Observations (2) and (3) above comment on questions that I will call “2’ ”
and “3” respectively. As my title indicates, I am concerned with 3; but it
is hardly a standard problem for continental philosophers, let alone their
analytical confrères. This means that while I will seek to draw on both tradi-
tions, the result will resemble the “neither-nor” of demarcation more than
the “both-and” of Aufhebung (see McCumber 2013, pp. 121, 208–210).
But is 3 really ill formed? If so, I should end here. If not, why does it look
that way? Exploring this issue will be useful because one reason 3 looks
so strange is that it is embedded within a thicket of other questions, and
indeed paradoxes, in such a way that how we understand it depends on
how we answer and disarm them. I will begin by sketching some of these
other issues.

1. PLACING THE QUESTION

One of them is suggested by 2: it would seem that how space differs from
time needs to be settled before we can ask why. For the former is clearly a
matter of description, while the latter is one of explanation, i.e., of giving
causes, and it seems only obvious that you must know what something is
before you can identify what causes it. Whether this is always the case is
dubious, for the wrong explanation of something can skew its description;
if I think a spell has made my uncle sick, I will likely describe his symptoms
194 John McCumber
in highly misleading terms. In any case, looking at some of the features that
have been claimed to distinguish space from time can yield a sense of the
further entanglements among the preliminary issues. Kant, to begin with,
claims that time and space are “forms” of our faculty of intuition, abstract
principles of order that contrast with each other in two ways:

(a)   Space is the form of outer representations, while time is the form of

all representations.
(b)   Space is the ordering of compatibles, while time is the ordering of
incompatibles. (Kant 1996, pp. 76–77, 87)

(a), it should be noted, does not mean that the content of external repre-
sentations is temporally ordered: the representation of a set of stationary
objects—of a “state of affairs”—does not exhibit temporal order, because
all its contents are simultaneous. What is ordered in time is our appre-
hension of that content. Such apprehension is an act of the mind—of the
Kantian “subject”—and as such occurs before and after other acts of that
subject; Kant moves, we may say, from the representation to the represent-
ing. At least four other obvious differences between time and space have
been obvious enough to be noted by philosophers:

(c)    Time seems to flows; space does not. (Prior 1967, 1996; Oaklander
1994, pp. 281)
(d)    The future is far less knowable than the past and present, but the
three dimensions of space are in principle equally knowable (Hor-
wich 1987, pp. 77–90).
(e)    We always act for the sake of the future. It is obvious that we do not
always act for any spatial dimension (Horwich 1987, pp. 177–198).
(f)     Time gives rise to an A-series, while space does not: time can be or-
dered not only by earlier-than, but also in terms of past, present, and
future; space cannot. It has been argued, often and in many ways,
that this is not the case: that the A-series is somehow reducible to the
B-series, or even that it is an illusion.1 Even if it is, (3) remains: why
does time give rise to that illusion, while space does not?

These considerations raise two more preliminary issues. (c), (d), and (e) con-
cern experiential differences between space and time, and if we adopt the
“illusory” account of the A-series, (f) does as well. What, then, is the rela-
tionship between how space and time appear to us and how they really are?
Are space and time really different from each other or do they just look that
way? In either case, question (3) remains: if space and time only seem to be
distinct, perhaps because of some neurological feature or cultural presup-
position, then we have to explain why those features and presuppositions
are there.
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 195
The final preliminary issue is raised by all six differences: what kinds of
difference distinguish space from time? Kant’s account assumes that their
distinction is relatively simple, in that space and time contrast with one
another on only two axes: inner/outer and compatible/incompatible. C. D.
Broad makes do with one.2 But what if there are more? What if space and
time differ not merely in six, but in a hundred or a thousand ways? Would
those differences be organized so that some (even, perhaps, Kant’s two) are
basic to the rest? Or would they constitute merely a disconnected string of
contrasts? This issue has methodological bearing: if we try to formulate the
distinctions, can we classify or must we list? In order not to beg the ques-
tions of complexity and organization, I will refer to the set of differences
between space and time as the “distinction” between them.
We need not pursue these preliminary matters yet, because the present
point is merely that the issue of how, and so that of why, space differs from
time is embedded in a variety of other, and deep, issues. Understanding why
space and time are different may require tackling such other preliminaries as
whether their distinction is apparent or real, why representations are sorted
into inner and outer ones, why space and time can or must be ordered seri-
ally, what action is, and what it means for components of space and time to
be compatible and incompatible with each other.
In addition to these issues (and there are probably more of them), com-
mon sense tells us that a distinction between two things cannot exist unless
those two things do, and contemporary physics tells us that space and time
did not exist before the Big Bang. Space, time, and so the distinction between
them, have therefore all come to be. What comes to be, presumably, does
so in time. But how can time itself come to be in time? Here we confront a
dilemma. If we say that time did not come to be, then the Big Bang theory is
wrong. If we say that it did, then it did so in time, and time already existed.
One horn of our dilemma is an empirical falsehood, while the other is a
paradox.
This dilemma is not tied to Big Bang theory, however. I have elsewhere
identified the view that things must be treated as if they came-to-be as a
counsel of philosophical prudence (McCumber 2011, pp. 390–391). It is
therefore philosophical prudence, not the arcane mathematics and delicate
observations of physics, that suggests we choose the paradoxical horn of
the dilemma.

2. DISARMING THE PARADOX

This quick tour of the thicket of questions and paradoxes in which the ques-
tion of why time differs from space is embedded shows us, I think, why that
question looks so bizarre. The first step [in answering it is to disarm the par-
adox. This can be done in a couple of ways, for non-temporal explanations
196 John McCumber
of temporal phenomena are possible. If we look back to Aristotle, for
example, and in particular to Metaphysics XII.7, we find that the prime
mover is wholly outside of time—wholly eternal and so unchanging—yet
causes the order in the universe, which takes it for its telos. Aristotelian
final causes can thus operate as causes without being in time. If we can say
that the difference between time and space has a final cause, then perhaps
we can explain why time arose as f and became differentiated from space
in terms of some atemporal order of finality. This way of disarming the
paradox does not presuppose the existence of time, but runs up, to be sure,
against a discrepancy between our modern views and Aristotle’s ancient
one. Aristotle located final causes within nature (physis) and thereby dis-
sociated them from consciousness, but modernity has restricted them to the
conscious operations of minds. If the difference between time and space
has a final cause, it seems, some being must consciously have taken that
distinction as its purpose. What kind of a being could do that? What sort of
purpose might it have? Our disarmament verges on theology.
We can also disarm the paradox by claiming that time has come to be,
not from something wholly atemporal, but from a “situation” (to use the
vaguest, and so least committal, term) that, without being fully temporal,
is sufficiently time-like to contain comings-to-be. One of these comings-to-
be, we could argue, produced what we know as time. I will accept this and
argue that it produced space as well, though differently, and so is respon-
sible for their distinction. In characterizing this situation, I will take as a
clue the general truth that Plato called “antapodosis”: nothing comes to be
from itself, for if it did, it already existed when it supposedly came to be (see
Phaedo 70e-71e). This applies elegantly to our paradox and suggests that
the distinctness of time and space must have been preceded by a situation
in which they were indistinct. Let is call this situation of indistinctness “α.”
The question now is how to characterize α.

3. INTO THE (PHENOMENOLOGICAL) CENTER

OF THE THICKET

As a second clue to he nature of α, I will take it that we have experiences of

space and time.3 They are not, to be sure, sensory objects the way lions and
doorknobs are; that is why Kant could designate them as “forms,” rather
than objects or contents. But they are, somehow, aspects of how lions, door-
knobs, and other such objects (or contents) are perceptually arranged. This
means, as it did for Kant, that even though space and time are not objects
of experience in any straightforward way, we know some things about them
through experience. We can check our statements about them as we check
our ordinary experiences of sensory objects: by testing what we say against
our experience. If experience can teach me that a working doorknob cannot
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 197
be sixty feet across, it can also teach me that if item A in my visual field is
horizontally smaller than item B and to its left, it cannot also be to B’s right
in my visual field.4
Space and time are thus known, or known about, empirically. But what
about α? Is it something that is given in our experience, like space and time
(and doorknobs)? If so, we would have α as a kind of experience in which
space and time are not distinct; they would fall out of α under certain cir-
cumstances, which the explanation would have to specify. If not, then α, if
it is to be known at all, must be something that we infer from experience. In
that case, α would be like the subatomic world, in that it would be a region
that we cannot experience, but which is necessary to account for what we
do experience. This possibility can never be ruled out; new empirical prop-
erties of space and time can always be discovered that require appeal to
non-empirical entities to account for them. But we should begin empirically,
for only so can we formulate the distinction clearly and check our explana-
tion of it. I will, then, look first to see whether an empirical account can be
given of α. Is there a way of experiencing things in which space and time
are indistinct?
This explanatory strategy, note, does not commit us to viewing space and
time as subjective phenomena. It says only that we must begin understand-
ing their distinction from our experiences of them. Even if we succeed in
explaining that distinction without appeal to anything beyond experience,
it will remain open whether space and time, as “subjectively” experienced,
correspond to features of an “objective” world. “Objective” space and time
are not denied but bracketed, and this brings us to phenomenology—not the
eidetic transcendentalism of the classic Husserl, but to a humbler approach
in which we try to describe α, i.e., try to describe what it is like to experi-
ence things without experiencing them in terms of space and time. This
approach itself has a unique temporality that is often misunderstood: the
crucial descriptions are not the ones I give here, but the ones readers (if
any) will give when they apply the concepts I introduce below to their own
experience. The humble phenomenologist (as opposed to the transcendental
kind) does not describe, but suggests, concepts for future descriptions; those
descriptions come later, with the readers.
This humble approach uncovers the shoulders of some giants, for the
phenomenological tradition, beginning with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,
has in fact explored such a way of experiencing. Heidegger treats it as what
he calls “concernful circumspection” (umsichtig Besorgen, Heidegger 1962,
pp. 98, 135–148), and Merleau-Ponty in terms of what he calls “motility”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945, pp. 324–344). But Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
need not become chief occupations, for Edward S. Casey has carefully and
critically appropriated the lessons of their work. I will therefore be chiefly
occupied with his investigations of what he calls “place” (Casey 2009,
hereinafter GBP).
198 John McCumber
4. THE UNITY OF PLACE

As Michael Treisman has pointed out, our ordinary experience of space and
time is not Newtonian:

We do not experience ourselves as phenomenologically located at a

point in an infinite homogenous space extending equally in all direc-
tions. Rather, we perceive ourselves as contained in a bubble of space
whose extent is delimited by our viewpoint and the reach of our senses,
and which moves and adjusts itself with us as we peregrinate through
our personal worlds. (Treisman 1999, p. 220)

Place, this moving and adjusting bubble, has, at this point, the status of
a candidate for α. If it is a successful candidate, α will be an experienced
realm, as opposed to an inferred one, in which space and time are some-
how indistinct and out of which they can be shown to fall under specifiable
circumstances. I will argue here that Casey’s more detailed phenomenologi-
cal account of place, with some modifications, meets these criteria and so
coincides with α. One of Casey’s central points is that place, insofar as it is
experienced by us, is experienced through our bodies (GBP 26, 48). And,
as Casey pursues the embodied experience of place to its phenomenologi-
cal roots, it becomes obvious that the body’s relation to place is not that
of a passive observer: we experience place through our body’s active and
complex “emplacement” of us. The body does this, Casey shows, through
a variety of binaries, which are in turn derived from the binary structure of
our bodies: front and back, left and right (GBP 48).
We may put the matter this way: because I have eyes and ears on both
sides of my body, sensory messages reach me twice: what my right ear hears
and my right eye sees differs from what my left ear and left eye respectively
sense. The small differences between when a sound hits my left ear and
when it hits my right ear tell me whether it comes from my right, my left, or
from directly in front or back of me. The ocular unification of the slightly
different messages delivered by my left and right eyes gives me depth per-
ception.5 This sort of unification places objects in a particular region with
respect to my body: it “localizes” them.
Localization as just described does not suffice for emplacement, however,
for these diverse localized sensory messages do not establish me within a
unified place. It is one thing to say that the door is to my left and the couch
is to my right, and another to say that I am here between the door and the
couch. For emplacement to happen, the multiple sensory messages already
localized must somehow be combined into a single surrounding environ-
ment. Neurological details of how this happens need not concern us; we are
looking for the principle by which unified places recurrently come about.
There must be such a principle, it seems, for a random set of unifications
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 199
could not lead to any sort of enduring unity, and places are relatively stable.
Moreover, since the difference between a unified place and a mere set of
localized messages is itself perceived, this principle must be an empirically
evident one. Casey’s account of it is stunningly original. The place we occupy
contains things at varying distances from us, and, as Casey argues, the basic
formula for such distance is Here and There (GBP 55). The concrete infor-
mation I receive about what is in front of me and what is behind, what is to
my left and right, is thus brought together into a unified sense of place, not
by a single principle that applies to all messages (such as relative distance
from my body), but by a binary that cuts across them and so applies to all.

5. HERE/THERE AS A UNIFYING BINARY

What distinguishes an enduring place from a mere congeries of sensory mes-

sages is the here/there dyad, and to do this, that dyad must for Casey have a
number of characteristics. It must be absolute, in the sense that hereness and
thereness are ultimate and so cannot be increased (as Casey notes, there are
no comparatives in English for “here” and “there:” GBP 57); exclusive, in
that that nothing can be both here and there; and exhaustive, in that every-
thing I perceive is either here or there:

The sectors of here and there, taken together, are coextensive with the
experiential field as a whole, leaving no remainder. Everything in the
field, even the minutest details, is designatable either as “here” or as
“there.” (GBP 55)

Here/there is thus not in fact a mere “dyad” but what I will call a “binary.”
It governs its field by dividing that field exhaustively and exclusively; and
because it is absolute, it cannot be deconstructed or otherwise gotten
beyond. The characteristics of absoluteness, exhaustiveness, and exclusiv-
ity are not adventitious. Exhaustiveness and exclusivity are both required
for the unification of various perceptual messages into a unified place to be
totalistic. If here /there were not exhaustive, there would be perceptions that
did not come under its rubric at all, that were neither here nor there. They
would not be integrated with the rest of the perceptual field, and so it would
not be wholly unified. Similarly, if it were not exclusive, there would be per-
ceptions that were somehow both here and there. They would then belong
to the perceptual field in virtue of some other characteristic than of being
sorted by the binary, which in that case would not be doing its unifying job.
Finally, if the binary were not absolute, we could make heres here-er, and
theres there-er. Here and there would not be basic to place: some deeper
principle or activity, the one that sets their degrees, would govern the bina-
ry’s differing deployments.
200 John McCumber
6. PROBLEMS WITH THE HERE/THERE BINARY

The here/there binary thus seems to function, as Casey points out (GBP
58), as a sort of corporeally grounded version of a Kantian transcendental.
Like Kantian categories such as cause and effect, here and there can apply
to anything whatsoever that I perceive, and applying them is necessary to
my perceiving of anything whatsoever. But Casey’s binary, unlike Kant’s, is
not rooted in the necessary structures of the mind, or “faculties”; rather, it
grows from the constitution of the body. This is a salutary emendation to
the great German, for his treatment of the faculties has long been recog-
nized, beginning with Friedrich Schiller in 1801, as one of the most prob-
lematic parts of his philosophy (see Schiller 1967). But does it work? Can
appeal to the body show the origin of here/there?
In fact, I suggest, Casey’s own analysis shows that it cannot. First, as he
points out, the body itself cannot be stabilized as either here or there. As he
puts it:

Wherever the exact center of the here may be, when localized in this
discrete way it is capable of being opposed to another part of my body
taken as there: say, my feet. (GBP 52)

If my feet can become there, so can the rest of me: even the area behind my
eyes, where I usually “locate” myself (GBP 52), can become a there—when
I have a headache, for example. But how a something that can become there
found an absolute here? Moreover, anything experienced must, in virtue of
exclusivity, be either here or there. Since the body is both, it cannot be a
“thing”; it must somehow be fragmented, and indeed constantly fragment-
ing and refragmenting as body parts that are here (such as my headache)
become there and vice versa. What is here and what is here is thus a shifting
matter:

The more I try to pin down the here—to grasp it as a this here—the
more I find it dissolving between my philosophical fingers. . . . My body
and it here alike—even my body taken as an “absolute here”—are des-
ignated by “shifters” that, despite their univocal meaning, are empty in
their semantic cores. (GBP 70).

The body’s role in sustaining the unity of place via its status as the absolute
“here” also undergoes, Casey notes, a number of other breakdowns (GBP
51). Some of these are unusual states of consciousness: mystical experiences,
disorientation, euphoria, fugue, emotional stress. Some are pathological:
Korsakoff’s syndrome, temporal lobe epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease. Others
are not so unusual, such as distraction, to which I will return, or the situ-
ation of “low tension” between here and there in which they seem to be
continuous with each other (as when I automatically go to the shelf, where
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 201
I know a book I need is waiting: GBP 56). Still other failures of corpo-
real emplacement are standing features of it, which means that they are not
“breakdowns” at all. Following Whitehead, Casey argues that the body has
a non-simple location, in that it is never wholly within one specifiable locus;
it is always already on the way to somewhere else and is “a moving locus
that relates in a constantly changing way to its various theres” (GBP 65–66).
The here constituted by the body is thus always already impeached, and
the body is

Not a simple source but an origo that is always already split between
taking its own stance as definitive for orientation and taking its cues
from the environing world. (GBP 87–88)

The body, I suggest, is too fractured to be responsible for the absolute,

exhaustive, and exclusive binary of here/there binary. But if the absolute
hereness and thereness that unify place thus cannot be due to my body,
where might they come from?
In Casey’s account, the body constitutes place as the agent of the ego.
Casey speaks, throughout his discussion, of the body as where I am—“It
is by my body—my lived body—that I am here” (51; see also the opening
paragraphs of the discussion on p. 50). And as Casey treats it, this ego, while
embodied, remains distinct from the body: in Stephen Erickson’s words, it
is in but not of the body (Erickson 1999). Their separateness is evident, for
example, when Casey takes up Husserl’s doctrine that I cannot have knowl-
edge of the mental lives of others: that the egos of other people are, cogni-
tively speaking, “actively resistant” to mine (GBP 53–54). If people’s bodies
as we observe them tell us, in principle, nothing about what their minds are
doing, then, as far as we can know, the mental and physical happenings in a
given individual have nothing to do with one another. Each domain can then
be explained only out of itself, and the ego in particular becomes a sovereign
realm in which things happen without affecting, or being affected by, the
body (as for Husserl; see McCumber 2011, pp. 141–143). I take it that after
Heidegger (and Ryle: see Ryle 1949), such a view of the ego is phenomeno-
logically suspect.6 But if the self-contained ego goes, the exhaustiveness and
exclusivity of the here/there binary go as well. For it is the ego, not the body,
that contributes them.

7. NEAR/FAR AS A UNIFYING BINARY

The contribution is unneeded, for there is in fact no warrant to describe

place in terms of a here/there binary that is asserted to be absolute, exhaus-
tive, and exclusive. The description can start from another binary that
Casey also discusses: that of near and far. Strictly speaking, near and far is
not even a dyad, much less a binary, but a continuum; unlike here and there,
202 John McCumber
near and far are matters of degree (GBP 57). Nor is it exclusive: the same
thing can be both near and far. An example of this is depth, “the indetermi-
nate envelopment of nearness by farness and of farness by nearness” (GBP
69). An example of depth, in turn, is a pathway: its beginning with respect
to us is near, while its end is far (GBP 60). It makes no sense, then, to view
pathways as “primarily spatial”; what matters in them is the amount of
stretching or reaching one has to do to traverse them, and this is a matter
of space and time indifferently: the grocery store is both half a mile and a
10-minute walk away.
Depth itself, the mutual enveloping of near and far occurs “in accor-
dance with the bodily actions that bring one into the vicinity of the other”
(GBP 69). What makes a bodily movement into an action is, traditionally,
the presence of an intention or purpose, so what is near and what is far, as
subject to depth, are defined in terms of my actions and purposes. The near
in general is just what I can reach (GBP 57) and what I want to reach (GBP
60)—it is a function of my body as desirous (GBP 59), where what I desire
defines the project I am currently engaged in. Projects and desires, moreover,
are culturally and historically inflected (for which see GBP 64)—very few
people, a hundred years ago, had either the desire or the project of learn-
ing how to drive a car. The near and the far, as culturally determined, are
not imposed by my individual body in any quasi-Kantian “transcendental”
way. They differ not only from moment to moment but historically and
culturally; they are what Casey calls “shifters,” but without the overarching
formal matrix of here and there. These constant changes mean that what
is near is constantly becoming far and what is far is constantly becoming
near. Motion toward and away from me—approach and retreat—is thus a
fundamental feature of place.

8. THE DYNAMISM OF NEAR AND FAR

It does not have that status on Casey’s account, where the exclusivity of here
and there means (as we saw) that anything I perceive must be either here
or there and cannot be both. Though here and there cannot, as we saw, be
defined by their content, they serve as formal loci for that content—all of
it: given exclusivity, anything in my perceptual field must have, we saw, first
and foremost a stable location either within the here or within the there.
There is thus a strange temptation to say that what is there cannot become
here, and what is here cannot become there. Casey does not succumb to
this temptation, but Husserl, whom he quotes in a footnote, skirts it when
he phenomenologically envisages motion as, first and foremost, rotation
around a stationary embodied ego:

All worldly things here for me continue to appear to me to be oriented

around my phenomenally stationary, resting organism. That is, they are
oriented with respect to here and there, right and left, etc., whereby a
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 203
firm zero of orientation persists, so to speak, as absolute here. (GBP
387–388n26)

Or, as Husserl puts it in Cartesian Meditations:

[Nature for me] is constituted as an identical unity of my manifold

modes of givenness—an identical unity in changing orientation around
my animal organism (the zero body, the body of the absolute Here).
(Husserl 1960, p. 123, also quoted at GBP 387–388n26.)

The here/there binary thus applies, in the first instance, to things that are
not moving toward or away from me. The most basic kind of motion they
appear to have is rotation around my body, as the “body of the absolute
here.” Approach and retreat are derivatives of this. This means that, from
the point of view of the here/there binary, things are classified by their endur-
ing location: they are primarily spatial and not temporal. This amounts to a
privileging, by the here/there binary itself, of space over time: as Casey puts
it, the here/there binary is “primarily spatial” (GBP 58). It is wise, however,
if we are seeking a situation where space and time are indistinct, not to
privilege either of them from the start.
When approach and retreat become basic to near and far, motion ceases
to be derivative. Rather, it becomes basic; what is derivative is perceiving
something as being at a fixed distance from me, whether because it is sta-
tionary or because it is rotating around me (i.e., moving across my visual
field). I find phenomenological warrant for this reversal of priority in the
fact that we find our attention drawn automatically to things approach-
ing or receding from us, while we have to fix our attention to see station-
ary objects.7 The priority of approach and retreat is presumably associated
with their connection to the most basic phenomena of life itself: pursuit and
avoidance.
We could thus say that place is, in the first instance, a dynamic set of
approaches and retreats that are determined as such with respect to a sen-
tient body. But approach and retreat, as well as pursuit and avoidance, are
not appropriate terms for what I am after, for they all denote actions. All
four thus imply a distribution of active and passive such that one set of enti-
ties is doing the approaching/retreating/pursuing/avoiding, while another
set is undergoing them. A full account of why this is wrong will have to
await my discussion of what I call “co-occupancy” below; but wrong it
is, and so I introduce the terms “nearing” and “faring.” To say something
“nears” me leaves it open whether I am moving toward it, it toward me,
or both. In a case of nearing, the distance separating a number of bodies
decreases, whether one of those bodies, some of the others, or all of them
are doing the moving. Similarly for “faring.”
Nearing and faring so defined have, if we reflect on them, both spatial
and temporal dimensions: to “near” is to approach in space over time; to
“far” is to recede in space over time. But in nearing and faring, space and
204 John McCumber
time are indistinct, in that neither can be experienced without the other. If
they were given as distinct, place would be given as some sort of compound
of space and time—a compound that could not become place, as defined
here, until we had also, and mysteriously, introduced motion. Rather, by
taking motion, in the forms of nearing and faring, as empirically basic, we
will be able to show how and why space and time fall out of them. Place,
characterized as a set of nearings and farings, rather than as a moving “bub-
ble” or as a compound of here and there, reveals itself to be the α we have
been seeking.

9. NEARING/FARING VS. HERE/THERE

Not everything, to be sure, is nearing and faring—some things are indeed

experienced as rotating around me, and others as stationary. And something
can both near and far at once—as when I perceive how long a pathway is as
I step onto it. Unlike here/there, nearing/faring is thus neither exclusivistic
nor exhaustive. But absoluteness of a sort is preserved, in a way that shows
us how here and there derive from nearing and faring: what is “here” is just
what is at the end point of a nearing, and what is “there” is at the end point
of a faring. What is here cannot get any nearer, simply because it is at the
end point of its nearing; similarly, what is there is at the end point of a far-
ing and cannot get any farer. The here itself, as a distinct region, is then the
end point of all nearings. Because it is the end point of all nearings, it is not
given empirically—but neither need we bestow on it the status of a Kantian
a priori. We can say, more humbly, that it is “imagined.” The there is, corre-
spondingly, the imagined end point of all farings. The unity of place, insofar
as it is dependent on the here/there binary, is then imagined as well. It is, of
itself, not enduring but intermittent, existing only when it is imagined; not
all places, in other words, are enduringly unified. What occasions this imag-
ining is (as we will see) a certain sort of convergence among the nearing and
farings that constitute my place. The unity of place, when it appears, is thus
grounded in nearings and farings.
We thus do not have to accept here and there as “transcendentally” basic,
or as grounded in some foundational Husserlian ego, but can give an empiri-
cal, phenomenological account of their origins. Place, considered as the set of
nearings and farings relative to a given body, provides the experiential basis
both for overcoming the here/there binary’s privileging of space over time and
for avoiding its suspect appeals to Husserlian “transcendental” egos. Whether
my account actually captures our experiences is humbly left to the reader.

10. CO-OCCUPANCY

The question of why time differs from space can now be phrased as: how
is it that nearing and faring give rise to the two distinct forms of space
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 205
and time? To begin answering this, we can note that there is one aspect
of place that is not considered by Casey (or, for that matter, by Heidegger
or Merleau-Ponty in the places cited): that any given place is normally
co-occupied, i.e., shared with others. Something “co-occupies” a place with
me when I experience a number of nearings as converging on it. This was
not the case on Casey’s account: because I am always here, and because the
here/there binary is exhaustive and exclusive, there can be only one basic
here in my perceptual field, the one where I am; the heres of others, as we
saw, are opaque and, in Casey’s words, I necessarily “rely on my body as the
primary agent in the landscape” (GBP 17). But near and far do not have that
kind of absoluteness. Objects in my perceptual field can be seen to near a
given thing without that other thing having to be conceived as invested with
an ego that is like mine but opaque to it. When I see ants converging on a
fallen cookie, for example, I do not have to attribute an ego to the cookie
in order to understand what is going on. But the cookie is, nonetheless, a
“co-occupant” of my place.
If places are co-occupied, I am not the “primary agent” in them, partly
because I am not primarily an agent at all: as suggested above, things near
and far me as much as I near and far them. The situation, we may say, is
Einsteinian: if nearings and farings are the basic constituents of place, all
that matters is whether the distance between bodies is increasing or decreas-
ing. The cookie nears the ants as much as the ants near the cookie. To say
that one body is at rest while the others move is a step beyond, requiring the
imposition of an absolute metric based on the Husserlian “absolute here.”
In a co-occupied place, nearings and farings are with respect to multiple
centers, none of which is privileged. Agency in the place belongs equally to
others, who are the centers of their own nearings and farings. I am not the
single center of a co-occupied place.
Co-occupancy is normal for humans. In an absolutely private space, as
in a private language, I would be solitary at the center; all nearings and far-
ing would be relative to me. Not only is that usually not the case, but even
approximating it—as does solitary confinement—is so unnatural as to be
immediately threatening to sanity.8

11. A LITERARY EXAMPLE OF CO-OCCUPANCY

As an example of co-occupancy and how it works, let us consider a pas-

sage from Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (Greene 1973). Doctor
Eduardo Plarr, a South American physician in early middle age, is visiting
a brothel with his novelist friend, Doctor Saavedra. I quote the passage at
length:

An airy patio about the size of a tennis court was surrounded by small
cells. . . . Two open doors faced him, when he had taken a seat . . .
Each possessed a little shrine with a lighted candle which gave to the
206 John McCumber
tidy interiors the atmosphere of a home rather than of a place of busi-
ness. A group of girls sat at a table apart, while two talked with young
men, leaning against the pillars of the verandah which surrounded the
patio. . . . One man sat alone over a glass, and another, dressed like a
peón, stood by a pillar, watching the girls with an unhappy, envious
expression, (perhaps he hadn’t the means to buy even a drink).
A girl named Teresa came immediately to take the novelist’s order
(“Whiskey, he advised, “the brandy is not to be trusted”), and after-
ward sat down with them unasked. ”Teresa comes from Salta,” Doc-
tor Saavedra explained, leaving his hand in her care like a glove in a
cloakroom. She turned it this way and that as though she were looking
for holes. “I am thinking of setting my next novel in Salta. . . . For the
first time,” Doctor Saavedra said, “I am proposing to write a political
novel.”
“Political?” Doctor Plarr asked with some surprise.
A cell door opened and a man came out. He lit a cigarette, went to a
table, and drank from an unfinished glass. In the glow of the light, below
the saint’s shrine, Doctor Plarr could see a thin girl who was straighten-
ing the bed. She arranged the coverlet with care before she came out and
joined her companions at their communal table. An unfinished glass
of orange juice awaited her. The peón by the bar watched her with his
hungry envy . . .
“I was telling you about my political novel.” Doctor Saavedra spoke
with irritation.n(Greene 1973, pp. 55–57)

No fewer than eleven people, their locations, and their movements, are
described here with extreme precision. By contrast, no mental contents—no
thoughts, beliefs, emotions, desires, or the like—are even mentioned with the
single exception, in the last line, of Dr. Saavedra’s irritation. But even that is
presented as heard, rather than inferred; it does not lie behind his words, in
some egological realm, but accompanies them (“with irritation”). The posi-
tions and movements of the bodies tell us directly what the minds are doing.
It is not necessary to say that Dr. Saavedra’s hand, “in the care [of Teresa]
like a glove in a cloakroom,” manifests his negligence and her perfunctory
concern; it is part of those. Similarly, the stillness of the peón, together with
his fixated gaze, constitutes his impotent desire; all that remains is to specu-
late on is the causes of his impotence. Contra Husserl and Casey, then, there
is no intrinsic opacity of one mind to another.

12. SCRIPTS AND THE OPACITY OF OTHERS

This is not intended to deny that other people are, occasionally, mysteri-
ous to us. There is a lot we don’t know about the physiology that makes
ants converge on a cookie, but we would hardly call their convergence
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 207
mysterious. The fact that some convergences are mysterious suggests that
more is going on with nearing and farings than mere change of location.
We can explore this by looking at one mysterious person in the passage
from Greene: Clara, the thin girl. She comes out of her cell, which in terms
of place constitutes a nearing to the seated Eduardo: the distance between
their bodies decreases. But this nearing exists only for Eduardo: Clara goes
back to her companions and her orange juice without even noticing him (she
will not recognize him when they meet again: Greene 1973, p. 69). From her
point of view, Clara has no more neared Eduardo than she neared the pillars
of the verandah. So there must be something to nearing (and faring) over
and above physical movements of bodies. What might this be, if not a Hus-
serlian ego? Clara’s actions, from making her bed to returning to her orange
juice and her friends, are routinized: she is following what we may call a
“script.” A “script” in this sense is a familiar sequence of actions and events.
It is because they are familiar that scripts allow us to read the significance of
a person’s (or an ant’s) actions directly from those actions themselves. Thus,
because we know the scripts that concern gloves and cloakrooms, we can
tell that Dr. Saavedra’s leaving his hand in Teresa’s “like a glove in a cloak-
room” is part of his negligence of her.
A script may be followed mindlessly, merely from habit, such as mak-
ing a bed and walking back to your orange juice. Or it may be followed as
a conscious project, as with Eduardo’s conversation and girl-watching. In
both cases, scripts come under what Heidegger calls “contexts of involve-
ment” and embed in the overarching teleology of world (see McCumber
1999, pp. 227–229). As is already clear, I eschew such wider embedding,
and have elsewhere referred to scripts as “parameters” (McCumber 2005,
pp. 145–153).
Each script, moreover, has its own nearings and farings. “Display your-
self” nears the clients; “rejoin your companions” nears the girls at the table;
and “return to your orange juice” nears the glass on it. But not all scripts
need involve an overall change of bodily location; Teresa, examining the
hand of Dr. Saavedra, nears it in accordance with a script that requires
her to demonstrate solicitude for him—but its distance from her does not
decrease. The peon, too, does not move, and no one approaches him; but
his facial expression as he watches the girls shows that he is nearing them
in a very intense way.
What makes Clara mysterious is that she is following two, or perhaps
three, scripts at once. First and most obviously, she is following the script
“rejoin your companions,” which includes various rules for walking over
to them and resuming her conversation. We may also want to say that she
is following a second script, “get back to your orange juice,” depending on
whether she views drinking the orange juice as merely part of being with
her companions or as a separate activity; we do not know which is the case.
And third, she is a prostitute and her job is get potential clients to notice
her (indeed, she will go back to her cell with the peón). She is—whether
208 John McCumber
she wants to or not—therefore following the script “display yourself for
potential clients.” Part of the fascination her movements arouse, not least in
Eduardo, is that this last script seems no more important to Clara than the
other two: her potential clients matter no more to her than her orange juice.
Eduardo, too, is following a plurality of scripts, specifically two: “convers-
ing with a friend” and “watching a young woman.” The fascination here,
for the reader, is that he does not appear to be following the most obvious
script: “deciding which woman to take to bed.”

13. SCRIPTS, EGOS, AND THE UNITY OF PLACE

In the situation as Greene has described it, there is thus something more
than bodies and their movements and, indeed, something more than bodies
and the scripts they are following. This “something more” is not a mysteri-
ous set of minds or egos, however, but resides in the fact that any given body
may be following more than one script at the same time. The opacity of oth-
ers thus does not require the postulation of an ego over and above their bod-
ies; all it requires is that the movements of a given body be compatible with
a variety of scripts. When we do not know what relative priorities a par-
ticular body gives to its various scripts, that body becomes mysterious. The
open evidence of bodies following scripts then replaces Husserl’s problem-
atically opaque ego. The scripts in which all of the characters in this scene
except Clara and Eduardo are engaged are so evident from the descriptions
of their bodies that the characters are, we might say, one with their bodies.
Clara too is one with her body, and so is Eduardo, but their movements are
ambiguous in that they are consonant with more than one script. In Clara’s
case, we cannot see which is more important. It is because of this that we
must speculate about what is in Clara’s mind; she will remain mysterious to
Eduardo even after he has fallen in love with her and gotten her pregnant.
Eduardo, for his part, is following two scripts when he ought to be follow-
ing a third. Only they, then, are mysterious enough to have “minds.”9
We see that the nearings and farings that constitute a given place are func-
tions, not only of corporeal location and movement but also of the scripts
in play. Indeed, we may say that more basic to scripts than the nearings and
farings of physical movement is the nearing/faring immanent to the script
itself: as we work through it we approach its last line and distance ourselves
from its first. Every script has an archê, which elicits the first motion made
when a person engages in it. And it has a last line, a telos to which it moves
step by step; a script thus has the basic structure of what Kant would call
“internal teleology” (Kant 1987, pp. 244–247).
If a place is determined by its nearings and farings, and if these in turn are
provoked by the scripts in play, then for two people to be in the same place
they must be engaged in the same script (though they may be playing dif-
ferent roles in it). Eduardo and Saavedra are both engaged in “conversation
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 209
with a friend,” and to that extent they are in the same place. But Eduardo
is also engaged in a different script, that of watching a girl, and to that
extent his place is different from Dr. Saavedra’s. With Eduardo and Clara,
the situation is more complex: they are both engaged in the same script of
“choosing a woman,” insofar as she is displaying herself to him. But she
is engaged, and perhaps solely engaged, in “rejoin your companions” and
“return to your orange juice,” and to that extent she and Eduardo are not
in the same place at all. Place, as a set of nearings and farings, does not have
the kind of enduring unity that the here/there binary claims to give it. My
overall “place” is a function of the various nearings and farings that are
going on around me, and these in turn are functions of the various scripts
I am following

14. HOW SPACE IS DIFFERENT FROM TIME

When we drop the oddly “transcendental” here/there binary from our

account of place, we can conceive of it as fundamentally co-occupied.
Co-occupancy entails that place contains two sorts of nearing: those that
are nearing me (“egocentric” nearings) and those that are not. Time, I will
argue, emerges from the former of these, space from the latter.
At least in one sense they do. For the birth of space and time from place
is, we will see, a two-step process, resulting in two different kinds of each.
In the first, minimal step, space and time become distinct, but do not leave
place behind: they are identified as distinct empirical aspects of place. These
first versions of space and time will provide, in turn, the materials for the
“imaginative” construction of the space and time in the senses given them
by Kant (and so many others), which “purifies” them by separating them
from each other and so from place itself.
The first version of space, empirical space, arises from nearing. Any script
I follow, I noted above, is a case of nearing. What it nears most basically
is its own last line, which is a state of my being—the state of having com-
pleted that script. It is in this sense that Heidegger says that every context of
involvement ends in a Seinsmöglichkeit, a “possibility of Being,” of Dasein
(Heidegger 1962, p. 116). Sometimes, however, the nearing of a script is
averted. I may, for example, become aware of a body moving according to
a script that, when consummated, actualizes a possibility, not of my being,
but of someone else’s. Such averted nearings can be called “allocentric.”
Clara’s pursuit of her orange juice, as observed by Eduardo, is an example;
its consummation has nothing to do with him. Allocentricity plays a role in
one way that space “falls out” of place.10
Greene gives an example of how this can work. When Eduardo notices
Clara, we expect him to be following a script. That script (“choose a woman
to take to bed”) is a common one in a brothel. It begins with Eduardo
nearing Clara by noticing her; this (according to the script) is the first step
210 John McCumber
towards physical intimacy. She, however, is not following Eduardo’s script;
her script is allocentric to his, as she shows by going directly to her orange
juice and her colleagues. She remains over there, at a distance, and Eduardo
is pulled back into his conversation with Doctor Saavedra. It is in ways like
this that allocentric nearings give birth to space, to the experience of things
being at a distance. We may characterize such space, indeed, as absolute
distance—not in the sense of infinite distance, but in that of distance that
cannot be overcome because nearing is averted. When an overall place con-
tains nearings that are not converging on me, space “falls out” of place.
This, of course, is the usual case: since space is normally co-occupied, some
things are usually nearing me, while others are nearing other people.
If space arises from allocentric nearings, then time, as its empirical coun-
terpart, arises from nearings that are not averted, which means that they are
consummated: the object that is nearing me actually reaches me. When such
a nearing is scripted, it also reaches me in the sense that it reaches the inter-
nal telos of that script, as what we have seen Heidegger call a “possibility
of my being.” We may characterize the first version of time, empirical time,
as the process of consummation itself, by which nearings coincide with me
physically.

15. SPACE, TIME, AND SUBJECTIVITY

So considered, time and space are both purposive—but not theologically

so. Time is, in Kant’s sense, intrinsically purposive because it presents the
achievement of a telos—of the possibility of my being, which is the inter-
nal telos of a script. Space, by contrast, is extrinsically purposive: things
are presented spatially, not because it is their inherent nature to be so, but
because it is useful for us to become aware of the aversions around us at
any moment. The sensory messages that strike my left and right ears or
eyes exhibit such external purposiveness. In and of themselves, they are just
waves propagating somewhere; it is my sensory organs that make use of
them and give them a purpose. Empirical time and space are thus explained
in terms of purposes, as suggested above, but the purposes involved are not
theological. Nor are they part of a timeless order, as is the humanity under
the moral law that Kant seeks to instate as the purpose of nature (Kant
1987, pp. 312–323). They are human. But they are not subjective, for they
generate the “subject” itself. We can see this by returning to Kant’s formula-
tion of the contrasts between them:

(a)   Space is the form of outer representations, while time is the form of

all representations.
(b)   Space is the ordering of compatibles, while time is the ordering of


incompatibles.
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 211
Kant draws both contrasts, I suggest, with an absoluteness that verges on
dogmatism: representation for Kant is either inner or outer (or as Casey
might say, here or there), without degrees. This absoluteness is hardly
unique to Kant: it is very much in the spirit of Aristotle’s definition of
“limit” (peras) as

the first point beyond which it is not possible to find any part, and the
first within which every part is. (Metaphysics V.17, 1022a4–6)

Limits, including the limits of the mind investigated in Kantian critique

(Kant 1996, p. 8), are thus what I call exclusivistic. Applying this view of
limits to space and time is to view them as the sides of a dichotomy, rather
than as the terminal points of a continuum. In such a view of time, nearing is
abstracted away, and the result is a second sort of time—a “pure” time that
contains only the final state of consummation. This is a time without space,
and so in itself a disembodied, or as I will say an “imagined,” phenomenon.
Space in the Kantian sense is then the complement of this: an imaginary
domain in which all nearings (and so all farings) are allocentric—a realm
in which nothing nears or fars anything and so, at the limit, an external
domain of stationary objects.
“Imaginary” here has a special meaning. Where we actually live is place,
the experienced set of nearings and farings where aversion and consum-
mation, and so space and time, are both present to various degrees. It is
possible for us to be, certainly for short periods, in a place where nothing
is nearing, or where all nearings are egocentrically consummated. But to
take such exceptional circumstances as basic is to picture something beyond
experience, to imagine something exceptional to be the standard case.
Since pure time is a set of consummations, and since consummation is
the coinciding of a nearing with me, such time is, as Husserl recognized,
the dynamic substrate of the “subject” itself (Husserl 1960, pp. 73–80).
Since nearing (and farings) have been cut out, it is wholly without the pos-
sibility of co-occupancy; subjective mind is absolutely private, opaque, and
“actively resistant” to the consciousness of others. But, as we saw above,
it is also imaginary, because place—and so time—is basically co-occupied.
The absolute denial of space to the mind, however congenial to Kant, is
subject to the aporias and inconsistencies that Derrida finds in Husserl:
“the temporalization of sense [meaning] is, from the outset, a ‘spacing’ ”
(Derrida 1973, p. 86). Thus, just as for Wittgenstein there cannot be
a private language, in the sense of one for which I make up all the rules
(Wittgenstein 1958, pp. 88–96), so there cannot be an absolutely private
place—one in which all nearings and farings occur with respect to me.
Mind itself can be said to be “spatial” in that the moment thoughts are
expressed in language—the moment they become thoughts—they are given
over to an externality that I cannot wholly control.11 We submit them to a
212 John McCumber
community: they near the others who hear them, and even our private
thoughts are allocentrically co-occupied. We would do well, then, to do
to Kant what we did with Casey: to replace his “inner” and “outer” with
nearing and faring. The more something nears us, the more temporal (and
so subjective) it becomes.12 The less something nears us, the more spatial
and objective it remains.
When we see space and time as termini of a continuum of nearings and far-
ings, rather than as sides of a dichotomy, the four other differences between
space and time discussed above can be explained. Because pure time is a suc-
cession of consummations that are states of a single subject, they constitute
not a set but a single series: they are linearly ordered. When time is defined
as a series of consummations, nothing between any two consummations
counts as temporal: the flow appears to be continuous. When we see the
points in a time series as consummations of processes of nearing and faring,
and when those nearings are scripted, we get an A series: the present is the
line I am currently executing, the past is the lines I have already executed,
and the future is the lines I have yet to execute. The A-series thus does not
arise from the B-series; rather, the B-series, Kantan time, is what is left when
nearing (and faring) are abstracted from.
The pure future is less knowable than the past or present in pure time
because when a script is complete, nothing follows on it—except the activa-
tion of some other script. The empirical future is not less known than the
empirical past because, as I have argued elsewhere, there is always a plural-
ity of paths by which the present may have come to be (McCumber 2005,
pp. 35–36; 2013, pp. 203–207); contra Horwich, who suggests that “the
past is fixed” but does not argue the point (Horwich 1987, p. 778), there is
no one way the past, as far as we can know it, has to be.
Finally, we always act for the future because actions have purposes, and
purposes are determined by scripts. Actions are script-based, and we act so
as to move from the present line to a future one. But if we always act for a
future, not all futures are acted for: when a script is complete, the future is
unknown, and so we cannot act for it. Thus, in pure time there is no action

16. WHY SPACE DIFFERS FROM TIME

Time differs from space because place, their common origin, contains not
only nearings that are consummated, but others that are allocentric. Allo-
centric nearings give rise to empirical space as their common feature, and
consummated ones similarly give rise to empirical time. It is only when aver-
sion and consummation are absolutized, so that one or another of them is
all there is, that we come to have pure space and pure time as Kant and oth-
ers have characterized them. Space differs from time because not everything
converges on me.
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 213
APPENDIX: ANALYTICAL AND CONTINENTAL
APPROACHES TO TIME

Viewing time and space as originating in place, and place itself as a dynamic
set of nearings and farings, does more than allow us to discuss a single
odd-looking question. It provides insights into both literatures, insights that
can highlight important features of analytical and continental thought taken
more widely. The issues come out more clearly in the case of time than in
that of space, so these concluding remarks will focus on that.
One striking difference between the analytical and continental litera-
tures on time is the respective weight they give to our experiences of time.
Analytical philosophers, inspired presumably by physics, tend to downplay
the issue of time as we experience it.13 They begin from various “puzzles”
about time and seek, in solving them, to understand time as physicists do: in
terms that are mind-independent or “objective.” They are concerned with
the issue of whether the results of their endeavors are objective, subjective,
or, as Clifford Williams has argued, both at once (Williams 1994a, p. 358).
This does not mean, however, that analytical philosophers of time entirely
abandon issues of how we experience it. Arthur Prior, who was an analyst,
claims that J.M.E. McTaggart, who was not, paid acute attention to “what
might be broadly called the phenomenology of time” and that this was one
of his singular merits (Prior 1967, p. 1). Evidently Prior, to whom we owe
tense logic, thought that understanding our experience of time was impor-
tant to understanding time itself. Other analytical philosophers confronting
the issue of how we experience time rely on the work of their continental
colleagues, as when Paul Horwich presents our experience of time by simply
repeating Husserl as expounded by Izchak Miller (Horwich 1987, p. 33); and
many rely on what are taken to be relatively uncontroversial presuppositions
about our experiences of time, two of which will be important here: that we
experience time primarily as observers, and that time passes or “flows.”14
These two commonplaces may be connected in a suspicious way: the river
I observe may exhibit a smooth flow, but when I jump into in it I find myself
buffeted by a congeries of eddies and currents. These appeals to subjective
experience on the part of philosophers who aim for objective accounts of
time and its puzzles presumably derive from the fact that it is much easier for
a philosopher to claim that the propositions she puts forward are about time
if those propositions bear some more or less obvious relation to time as we
experience it. Absent such a relation, philosophical accounts of time stand to
be no more about time than string theory is about strings.
The continentals, inspired presumably by phenomenology, tend to begin
from our experiences of time. With exceptions such as Hans Meyerhoff
(Meyerhoff 1955), they do not so much seek subjectivity as reject the issue
of objectivity vs. subjectivity altogether. They seem to view “objective” and
“subjective,” not as a conceptually exclusive dichotomy, but as termini of a
214 John McCumber
continuum, between which stand any number of intermediate states rang-
ing from sheer idiosyncrasy to universal consensus. This view is related to
the peculiar temporality of phenomenological discourse noted above: prop-
ositions in such discourse are validated, not when they are propounded,
but later, when hearers or readers verify those propositions in their own
experience. The more of them do so, the more universal, and so the more
“quasi-objective,” the propositions become. Phenomenological statements
thus make a sort of epistemic ascent from subjective idiosyncrasy to uni-
versal consensus.15 This pull to objectivity presumably derives from the fact
that abandoning consensus even as a goal would allow subjective insight full
rein; accounts of time would become entirely arbitrary.
Both the analytical and approaches thus occupy an uneasy middle ground
between giving wholly subjective accounts, which would simply convey
one’s personal experiences of time, and giving wholly objective ones that
eschew discussion of those experiences altogether and are couched solely
in mind-independent terms. While analytical approaches seek objectivity
as mind-independence, they cannot wholly abandon appeals to our experi-
ences. While phenomenological approaches can never reach the full objec-
tivity of mind-independent truth, it certainly seeks to come as close to it as
its starting point in individual experiences allows.
Both, I suggest, run into problems. If analytical approaches are not going
to abandon experience altogether it seems that they should pay close atten-
tion to the ways in which we experience time and, in particular, to the two
presuppositions I noted above. If the continentals or phenomenologists, for
their part, want to make their accounts of time as objective as possible, they
need to deal with a problem they have long avoided: If a theory of time is
more desirable the more human beings assent to it, it should be still more
desirable to go beyond human consciousness, to explain how non-human
entities are in time. A theory that can be validated only by consensus will
have trouble explaining how it can extend to pre-human entities such as
those preserved in fossils, and indeed non-conscious beings in general.16 The
“idealistic” strain in continental philosophy surfaces here as a refusal to
consider such extensions other than as afterthoughts, at least as cursory as
analytical accounts of our experience of time. It has been challenged only
recently by Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and other “speculative
realists” (Meillassoux 2010, pp. 16–27).
Classificatory schemes usually have exceptions—and this one is no
exception. There are analytical philosophers, such as Williams, who offer
careful construals of our experiences of time, and continentals, such as Hus-
serl, who accept the two presuppositions I have adduced. But if what I have
presented here is merely a couple of strands within the analytical and con-
tinental literatures, rather than the entirety of those literatures, they are
major, indeed classic, strands; and they have not yet, as far as I can see, been
coherently challenged.
Both analytical and continental literatures have their problems, then; but
they also have their uses. To see this, we must understand them in ways that
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 215
they are not usually understood. The continental or phenomenological liter-
ature does not establish truths about time, but merely suggests them. Their
validity does not extend beyond the set of human beings who verify them in
their own experience, and we must either complete the phenomenological
ascent by another path or leave the fossils themselves.
Analytical philosophy, for its part, is often understood, not as producing
actual solutions to the puzzles it discusses, but as illuminating possible solu-
tions; for theories are advanced as solutions to problems, and only observa-
tion can tell us which of a variety of theories is actually correct. Philosophy
being largely bereft of empirical data, it cannot help us decide among compet-
ing theories. We should not look to the philosophical literature on time travel,
for example, to tell us whether it is possible, because the final decision on that
will require a lot of experimentation; but we can look to it to tell us whether
a given account of time travel is logically consistent or not, and to clarify
the implications and commitments of those that pass this test. Such clarifica-
tion, operating on an entirely logical level, does not require any empirical
data; it treats, as David Lewis suggests, of possible worlds—not the actual
one (Lewis).
This relatively standard view should be replaced by one that takes
account of the fact that many analytical philosophers of time are not, in
fact, doing purely logical analysis, but rely on accounts of our experi-
ence of time that have certain presuppositions. This makes it important to
see where those presuppositions come from. A helpful turn here is to the
pre-analytical source of much contemporary analytical thinking about time:
J.M.E. McTaggart.
McTaggart’s view of our experience of time—of “time as it appears to
us prima facie” (McTaggart 1993, p. 95)—is that it contains different posi-
tions, which appear to be orderable in two ways: by before and after (the
“B-series”) and by past, present, and future (the “A-series”). McTaggart
wishes to reject the latter ordering and to retain the former, while denying
that it is truly temporal because positions in it never change (if event x is
earlier than event y in the B-series, it will stay that way forever: McTaggart
1993, pp. 96–97). Since these are the only options, there is no such thing
as a truly temporal ordering of experience; hence McTaggart’s title: “The
Unreality of Time.”
McTaggart’s motivation for this is not merely to correct various views
of Bertrand Russell, as Prior’s treatment suggests (Prior 1967, p. 3). It is,
ultimately, to vindicate a mysterious someone whom McTaggart thinks is
Hegel.17 For the B-series, or what Prior calls time as tapestry, is nothing
other than time as it would appear to God (Prior 1967, p. 48)—or to the
Hegelian Absolute. McTaggart’s argument is thus advanced, not in the sci-
entific spirit of the analysts who would appropriate it, but in the service of
a monistic ontology according to which:

(1)   Reality (the Absolute) never changes in any way.

(2)   Therefore the parts of the Absolute do not change.
216 John McCumber
(3)   But everything is a part of the Absolute.
(4)   Therefore nothing ever changes, and time is unreal.

Paul Horwich has argued that McTaggart stacks the deck by formulating the
A-series in such a way as to facilitate his refutation of it. His crucial move is
to claim that the movement of an event from future to present to past con-
stitutes a “genuine change,” i.e., the acquisition and loss of non-relational
properties of futureness, presentness, and pastness; in Horwich’s words,
“this claim is implausible and never really substantiated” (Horwich 1987,
p. 25; also see pp. 19–21). What I want to suggest is that McTaggart’s char-
acterization of the B-series is also in the service of his “Hegelian” monism,
for the B-series, we have seen, is time as it would look to the Absolute or to
God time sub specie aeternitatis. All events are ordered by before and after
(McTaggart, p. 95) and so positioned along a single line so that any event is
earlier than, later than, or simultaneous with any earlier one. Time is thus
a totality of events knowable all at once, which is how an “absolute” mind
would know it.
The two main presuppositions of analytical accounts of time that I iden-
tified above thus turn out to have origins in a deeply suspect metaphys-
ics. The idea that we know time through observation correlates with the
B-series, in which nothing ever changes and all objects are fixed. The idea
that time flows applies to the A-series, which sees that flow as universal and,
therefore, homogeneous.
The present account is designed to eliminate these metaphysical pre-
suppositions by (a) paying closer attention to our experience than do the
analysts I have adduced, and (b) locating those experiences in a wider,
non-human realm. The crucial move in this is to see that nearing and far-
ing need not be with respect to us; they can be motions of non-human, and
indeed non-sentient, bodies. It turns out that time is not known through
observation but through activity. Not always, to be sure, our activity: it is
movements in place, nearing and faring, that introduce us to what becomes
time when we absolutize it in various imaginative ways. Nearings and far-
ings also do not flow, for the set of them is not unified into a single series.
Some, to be sure, are related to each other as earlier, later, and simultane-
ous; but others are not. (What non-imaginary sense does it make, we might
ask with the Einsteinians, to say that Clara’s return to her orange juice is
earlier than, later than, or simultaneous with a solar flare on Betelgeuse?)
Our experiences of time and space are not ignored, but are argued to arise
as the results of a particular, sentient way of coping with nearing and faring.
***
One final remark can bring out the full importance of the analytical litera-
ture. The relatively thin experiential base we find in much of it probably
debars it, I have suggested, from actually solving the puzzles it discusses.
Doing so would require choosing among a set of logically consistent com-
peting solutions of those puzzles (tensed accounts of time vs. non-tensed;
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 217
presentism vs. growing universe, etc.); and that would require the kinds of
robust matters of fact that are foreign to philosophy in general, not merely
its analytical varieties. But science, from which this approach takes its inspi-
ration, is supposed to solve problems, not merely state or clarify them.
What, one may ask, is the use of discussing issues that cannot be decided?
This, I suggest, is what strikes so many outsiders as alienating about much
analytical literature. Professor Y writes an article defending theory T by
complicating T so as to take account of objections raised by Professor X,
an adherent of theory T’. X then writes a rejoinder that complicates T’ so
that Y’s emendation of T is unsuccessful. The result is a series of theories
of increasing subtlety and complexity, but no actual decision as to which of
them is, finally, to be accepted.
Such escalation of nuance can be taken as an end in itself; but it is much
more than that. If analytical philosophers have relatively little to proffer in
the way of accepted theories that scientists like, they can provide a great
deal of illumination to their fellow philosophers—the ones who are trying
to understand, not how things are independently of us, but how they are
when we are around. This illumination, however, is sidelong: it is not of
the issues that analysts themselves actually discuss, but of other ones. When
analysts reason about the implication of the distinction between the A-series
and the B-series, they are, if my account of McTaggart is right, asking about
what distinguishes God from man—an important question even for atheists.
When they attempt to relate the perceived direction of time to thermody-
namics, they are asking about how we experience death—what resonances
does the coming heat death of the universe have in our vanishingly local
lives? When they ask whether time travel is logically coherent, they are rais-
ing the question of why we are unable to move in time as we do in space.
In illuminating these questions, analytical philosophers show us the widest
implications—the logical ones—of their possible answers. In this way, they
shed important light on the only thing philosophy can illuminate: the lives
we lead as temporary denizens of a universe knowable only through science.

NOTES

1 For a collection of some of these ways, see Oaklander and Smith (1994). The
question is most vigorously pursued in that anthology by Clifford Williams
(1994b).
2 Broad’s formulation of the distinction, 150 years after Kant’s, can be viewed
as specifying (b): “In the temporal series of experiences, which constitutes a
person’s mental history, there is a genuine dyadic relation which is intrinsic to
the series and involves no reference to any term outside the latter. This is the
term “earlier than.” In the linear spatial series there is no intrinsic direction
(Broad 1938, pp. 267–268).” The specification lies in the fact that being “ear-
lier than” something is one way of being incompatible with it. Broad’s formu-
lation here does not address Kant’s point that space is restricted to “outer”
218 John McCumber
representations, while time is not; indeed, it does not follow from it that space
and time are overall “forms” of anything.
3 For a discussion of this issue, see Treisman 1999, pp. 218–219.
4 I may not, of course, need experience to teach me this; it could be some sort
of a priori truth, like the law that every event has a cause. But experience also
teaches me that. That events have causes is inculcated, we may say, by our or-
dinary experiences of things. We do not leave the lessons of experience behind,
as Kant argued, until we say that all events have causes (see Kant 1996, B3–4).
5 If the intervals between the arrival of two auditory messages, or the discrepan-
cies between the arrangements my two eyes see, had to be understood tempo-
rally and spatially, we would encounter some obvious problems of circularity.
But I see no reason why this should be the case. If space and time are kinds of
order—on which point I will agree with Kant—then intervals and discrepan-
cies are what is most basically ordered. Other principles of order are possible
for them, as we will see, and in any case the road is long from the mutual inter-
relations of auditory intervals and visual discrepancies to overall conceptions
of space and time.
6 Gilles Deleuze’s grounding of time in a “contemplative,” “passive synthe-
sis” indicates that in addition to the Bergsonian provenance of his account,
which is often emphasized, there is a Husserlian one as well—or rather
counter-Husserlian: for we may say that while Husserl arrives at the transcen-
dental by bracketing everything outside the ego, Deleuze does so by bracket-
ing, precisely, the ego (Deleuze 1994, pp. 74, 76).
7 If my attention is drawn to something moving across my visual field, like a
dog running on a lawn, it is presumably because it has the potential of veering
from its present course and approaching or receding from me.
8 Co-occupancy can, however, be hidden. In Lee Daniels’s The Butler, the pro-
tagonist, a White House butler, is told: “When you are in a room, the room
should look empty.” When someone can make the others in a room disappear,
or can cause them to make themselves disappear, that person becomes the sole
ordering force in a fixed location, thus assuming what I call “ousiodic domi-
nance” over that bounded place (see McCumber 1999). The co-occupancy of
place thus has political valences, to be explored elsewhere.
9 What is not in play here is the possibility advanced by Heidegger in “The
Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger 1971): that someone may appear to be
following a script with which we are unfamiliar. That a script of some sort is
there is clear; but what that script is remains even more mysterious than is the
case here.
10 Another way is when a nearing is “stymied:” when it is not allocentric but
ends before it actualizes a possibility of my being, thus failing to reach its in-
ternal telos. Discussion of this here would unduly lengthen my investigation;
Heidegger has given a useful account at Heidegger 1962, pp. 102–107.
11 Hegel also emphasized this. See Hegel 1979, p. 187.
12 If the here is the end point of all nearings, as I suggested above, then absolute
hereness, which we can only imagine, would be time itself as absolute subjec-
tive innerness. But this is not to be confused with time as experienced, which
is an aspect not of the subject but of place.
13 Thus, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats the experience of time in
a separate article from the one on the philosophy of time (Le Poidevin 2009;
Markosian 2014).
14 L. Nathan Oaklander characterizes the view that time flows as “an impression
[i.e., experience] deeply felt by all of us (Oaklander 1994, p. 289); this, of
course, has nothing to do with its truth. Further cases of these presuppositions
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 219
are too numerous even to begin to document, but for salient examples of the
first, see Godfrey-Smith 1979 passim; Skow 2009; Williams 1994b, p. 372; of
the second see Mellor 1998, pp. 1, 66–67; Prior 1996, p. 45. For what it is
worth, I accept both of these as true of time, but not of place. A third common
presupposition is that we can change the future but not the past. As Arthur
Prior puts it:
One of the big differences between the past and the future is that once something
has become past it is as it were, out of our reach‑once a thing has happened,
nothing we can do can make it not to have happened. But the future is to some
extent, even though it is only to a very small extent, something we can make
for ourselves. (Prior 1996, p. 48)
This view structures Prior’s account of time, for it is in order to salvage what
he calls “real freedom” that he rejects tenseless (B-series) views of time
(ibid.).
15 This view has origins in Kant’s account, in the Prolegomena, of the distinction
between judgments of perception, which claim validity only for the person
uttering them at the time of the utterance, and judgments of experience which
claim objective validity because they are formed through the categories, which
are the same for all humans:
All our judgments are at first merely judgments of perception . . . Judgments of
experience take their objective validity not from the immediate knowledge
of the object (which is impossible) but from the condition of universal validity
of empirical judgments. (AA IV: 298–299)
16 Indeed, as Quentin Meillassoux points out (Meillassoux 2010, pp. 16–27), it
has trouble explaining how such beings could even have existed, let alone how
they did so in time.
17 McTaggart simply asserts that Hegel treats time as unreal (McTaggart 1991,
p. 94). For Hegel’s real view see McCumber 2011, pp. 31–56.

WORKS CITED

Broad, C. D. 1938. An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy. Volume II. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Casey, Edward S. 2009. Getting Back into Place. 2nd ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s
Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Erickson Stephan A. 1999.The (Coming) Age of Thresholding. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Godfrey-Smith, W. 1979. “Special Relativity and the Present,” Philosophical Studies
36 (3): 233–244.
Greene, Graham. 1973. The Honorary Consul. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Marginal pagination.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. The Origin of the Work of Art. In M. Heidegger, ed., Po-
etry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row,
15–88.
220 John McCumber
Horwich, Paul. 1987. Asymmetries in Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. India-
napolis, IN: Hackett.
Le Poidevin, Robin. 2009. The Experience and Perception of Time. Substantively
revised article. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011 ed. http://plato.
stanford.edu/cgi-.in/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=time-experience. Accessed
February 3, 2015.
Markosian, Ned. 2014. Time. Substantively revised article, Stanford Encyclope-
dia of Philosophy. 2014 ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/. Accessed
February 3, 2015.
McCumber, John. 1999. Metaphysics and Oppression. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
McCumber, John. 2005. Reshaping Reason. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
McCumber, John. 2011. Time and Philosophy. Durham: Acumen.
McCumber, John. 2012. The Baffling ‘Nature’ of Time. Parrhesia 15: 14–23.
McCumber, John. 2013. On Philosophy: Notes from a Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press.
McTaggart, John Ellis.1993. The Unreality of Time.”In J. Westphal and C. Levin-
son, eds., Time. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 94–111 (origi-
nally published 1908).
Meillassoux, Quentin. 2010. After Finitude. Trans. Ray Brassier. London:
Continuum.
Mellor, D. H. 1998. Real Time II. New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Meyerhoff, Hans. 1955. Time and Literature. Berkeley: University of California
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Oaklander, L. Nathan. 1994. Introduction: The Problem of Our Experience of Time.
In L. N. Oaklander and Q. Smith, eds., The New Theory of Time. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 289–292.
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New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Prior, A. 1967. Past, Present, and Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
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Schiller, Friedrich. 1967. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters.
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publication in 1801).
Skow, B. 2009. “Relativity and the Moving Spotlight,” Journal of Philosophy 106
(12): 666-678.
Treisman, Michael. 1999. The Perception of Time: Philosophical Views and Psy-
chological Evidence. In Jeremy Butterfield, ed., The Arguments of Time. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 217–246.
Westphal, Jonathan and Carl Levenson, eds. 1993. Time. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company.
 Why Is Time Different from Space? 221
Williams, Clifford. 1994a. The Phenomenology of A-Time. In L. Nathan Oaklander
and Quentine Smith, eds., The New Theory of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 351–359.
Williams, Clifford 1994b. The Phenomenology of B-Time. In L. Nathan Oaklander
and Quentine Smith, eds., The New Theory of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 360–372.
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Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.
10 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger,
Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein
Thinking Language Bounding World
Paul M. Livingston

This is a tale of two readings, and of a non-encounter: the missed encounter

between two philosophers whose legacy, as has been noted, might jointly
define the scope of problems and questions left open for philosophy today.
In particular, I will discuss two remarks, one by Wittgenstein on Heidegger,
and the other by Heidegger on Wittgenstein. The first is one of only two (as
far as I know) recorded remarks by Wittgenstein about Heidegger, and the
second is one of only two (again, as far as I know) by Heidegger about Witt-
genstein.1 As readings, both remarks that I shall discuss are, at best, partial,
elliptical, and glancing. Interestingly, as I shall argue, each is actually a sug-
gestive misreading of the one philosopher by the other. By considering the
two misreadings, I shall argue, we can understand better the relationship
between the two great twentieth-century investigators of the still obscure
linkages among being, language, and truth. And we can gain some insight
into some of the many questions still left open by the many failed encoun-
ters of twentieth-century philosophy, including what might be considered
the most definitive encounter that is still routinely missed, miscarried, or
misunderstood, the encounter between the “traditions” of “analytic” and
“continental” philosophy, which are still widely supposed to be disjoint.

I begin with the remark by Wittgenstein on Heidegger. It comes in the

course of a series of discussions between Wittgenstein and members of the
Vienna Circle held in the homes of Friedrich Waismann and Moritz Schlick
and later collected under the title Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. The
remark dated December 30, 1929, reads:

On Heidegger:
I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst.
Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think,
for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists [das etwas existi-
ert]. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question,
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 223
and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only, a priori,
be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of lan-
guage. Kierkegaard also saw this running-up and similarly pointed it
out (as running up against the paradox). This running up against the
boundaries of language is Ethics. I hold it certainly to be very important
that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics—whether there
can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values [ob es Werte gebe],
whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics one always makes the
attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns
the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain: whatever one may give
as a definition of the Good—it is always only a misunderstanding to
suppose that the expression corresponds to what one actually means
(Moore). But the tendency to run up against shows something. The holy
Augustine already knew this when he said: “What, you scoundrel, you
would speak no nonsense? Go ahead and speak nonsense—it doesn’t
matter!”2

The remark was first published in the January 1965 issue of the Philosophi-
cal Review, both in the original German and in an English translation by
Max Black. In that version, in both the German and English texts, Wais-
mann’s title, the first sentence, and the last sentence were there omitted, so
that the remark as a whole appeared to make no reference either to Hei-
degger or to Augustine.3
Whatever this might indicate about the analytic/continental divide at
the time of that publication, the remark itself shows that Wittgenstein had
at least some knowledge of the contents of Being and Time (which had
appeared just two years before he made it) and that he held its author at
least in some esteem. The comparison with Kierkegaard, whom Wittgen-
stein also greatly respected, shows that he recognized and approved of the
marked “existentialist” undertone of Being and Time and understood the
deep Kierkegaardian influence on Heidegger’s conception there of Angst, or
anxiety, as essentially linked to the possibility of a disclosure of the world
as such. Indeed, in Being and Time, Heidegger describes Angst as a “distinc-
tive way in which Dasein is disclosed” and as essentially connected to the
revealing of the structure of being-in-the-world, which is, in turn, one of the
most essential structures of Dasein. Thus, for Heidegger, it is Angst that first
discloses the joint structure of Dasein and being-in-the-world as such.4 Since
Angst is not fear before an individual or individuals, but a kind of discom-
fort toward the world as a whole, “the world as such is that in the face of
which one has Angst,” according to Heidegger, and this is evidently, thus,
close to the experience that Wittgenstein calls “astonishment that anything
exists.”
It is an index of the extraordinary diversity of Wittgenstein’s philosoph-
ical influences (as well as evidence against the often-heard claim that he
either did not read the history of philosophy or did not care about it) that
224 Paul M. Livingston
he manages in this very compressed remark, to mention approvingly, in
addition to Heidegger and Kierkegaard, two philosophers whose historical
contexts and philosophical methods could hardly be more different: G. E.
Moore and St. Augustine. The concern that links Augustine, Kierkegaard,
Moore, and Heidegger across centuries of philosophical history and despite
obviously deep differences is something that Wittgenstein does not hesitate
to call “Ethics,” although his own elliptical discussions of the status of eth-
ics and its theory are certainly anything but traditional. Some years earlier,
in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had described “ethics” very briefly and ellip-
tically as “transcendental,” holding that “it is impossible for there to be
propositions of ethics” and that “ ethics cannot be put into words.”5
The position expressed in this brief passage is further spelled out, though,
in the brief “Lecture on Ethics” that Wittgenstein had delivered to the “Her-
etics Society” in Cambridge on November 17, 1929, six weeks before the
remark on Heidegger.6 In the “Lecture,” Wittgenstein considers the status
of what he calls, partially following Moore, “absolute judgments of value,”
judgments that something simply is valuable, obligatory, or good in itself,
without reference to anything else that it is valuable for. His thesis is that
“no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.”7
This is because all facts are, in themselves, on the same level, and no fact
is inherently more valuable than any other (cf. TLP 6.4). In a book writ-
ten by an omniscient author and containing descriptions of all bodies and
their movements as well as all human states of mind and thus containing
“the whole description of the world,” there would nevertheless be no ethi-
cal judgments, or anything implying one, for even statements of relative
value or descriptions of human states of mind would themselves simply be
descriptions of facts. It follows that there can be no science of Ethics, for
“nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.”8
Nevertheless there remains a temptation to use expressions such as
“absolute value” and “absolute good.”9 What, then, is at the root of this
inherent temptation, and what does it actually express? Speaking now in the
first person, Wittgenstein describes “the idea of one particular experience”
that “presents itself” to him when he is tempted to use these expressions.
This experience is, Wittgenstein says, his experience “par excellence” asso-
ciated with the attempt to fix the mind on the meaning of absolute value:

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it

I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use
such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how
extraordinary that the world should exist.’10

A paradigmatic experience of ethics for Wittgenstein is thus the experience

that one might attempt to express by saying that one wonders at the exis-
tence of the world; nevertheless, as Wittgenstein immediately points out,
the expression necessarily fails in that it yields only nonsense. For although
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 225
it makes sense to wonder about something’s being the case that might not
have been, or might have been otherwise, it makes no sense to wonder about
the world’s existing at all. It is thus excluded at the outset that what one is
tempted to describe as the “experience” of such wonder can be meaning-
fully expressed, and it is a kind of paradox that any factual or psychologi-
cal experience should even so much as seem to have this significance. And
if someone were to object that the existence of an experience of absolute
value might indeed be just a fact among others, for which we have as yet
not found the proper analysis, Wittgenstein suggests that it would be pos-
sible to see “as it were in a flash of light,” that every possible attempt to
describe absolute value would yield only nonsense, rooted in the desire “to
go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language.”11
What is nevertheless expressed in metaphors such as these—metaphors
such as that of the vast structural correspondence of language and world,
the coming into existence or creation of the world itself, or (as Wittgenstein
also suggests in the “Lecture”), the “great and elaborate allegory” that rep-
resents God as seeing everything, but also as “a human being of great power
whose grace we try to win”?12 As Wittgenstein notes in the “Lecture,” the
curious peculiarity of metaphors of this type is that, while metaphors more
generally are metaphors for something, these cannot be replaced with the
“literal” description of the facts they are metaphors for, since there are no
such facts.13 That they nevertheless arise at the point of the temptation that
also yields the incoherent attempt to mark the place of absolute value might
then be thought to indicate that their attempt is also the one that thought
makes in trying to touch a point of the absolute, the real corresponding to
the totality of the world or its grasping as a whole from a point beyond it, the
point at which the value of the world—if it has value—could be assayed.14
The price of this attempt, however, is the admission of its necessary failure,
the impossibility of anchoring thought at such a point of the real without
contradiction, paradox, or the nonsense of metaphors that cannot be cashed
in for their literal meaning, since what they stand for is, literally, nothing.
Returning to the remark of December 30, Wittgenstein’s suggestion here
is, then, that all of the philosophers he mentions (Moore, Augustine, and
Kierkegaard as much as Heidegger) can in fact be read, in different ways,
as having understood this impossibility for ethics or ethical propositions
to come to expression. The theory of ethics is futile, in that the attempt to
establish ethics as a positive knowledge or science, to determine the exis-
tence and nature of values, or even, as Moore had suggested, to define the
Good itself, can yield only the “chatter” of a continually renewed nonsense
that perennially fails to recognize itself as such. At the same time, however,
it is in this essential failure to be expressed or expressible that Wittgen-
stein suggests (echoing the central distinction of the Tractatus between all
that can be said and what, beyond the boundaries of language, can only be
shown) the real yield of all attempts at ethical thought might ultimately be
found. This is because of the link between the “tendency to run up against
226 Paul M. Livingston
the boundaries of language” and what we should like to call the radical
experiences of our relation to the world as such, including even the feeling
that we may express as our astonishment that anything exists at all.
Something very similar is indeed suggested by Heidegger’s notorious dis-
cussion of being and nothingness in the Freiburg inaugural lecture “What
is Metaphysics?” delivered on July 24, 1929.15 Here, the experience of “the
Nothing” [das Nichts] by means of which it is first possible for us to “find
ourselves among beings as a whole” thereby allows “beings as a whole” to
be revealed, even if “comprehending the whole of beings in themselves” is
nevertheless “impossible in principle.”16 In the moods or attunements of
boredom and anxiety, we are brought “face to face with beings as a whole”
and the very unease we feel in these moods towards being as a whole also
brings us a “fundamental attunement” that is “also the basic occurrence
of our Dasein,” as exhibited in an experience of Nothing and nihilating
in which “Dasein is all that is still there.”17 This experience also gestures
toward a kind of dysfunction of speech and logos: “Anxiety robs us of
speech” and “in the face of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent.”18
And, notoriously, Heidegger holds that in the encounter with “the nothing,”
logical thinking itself must give way to a more fundamental experience:

If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and
into Being is thus shattered, then the destiny of the reign of ‘logic’ in
philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in
the turbulence of a more original questioning.19

It would thus not be amiss to see Wittgenstein’s invocation of this sense of

wonder at existence, in both the remark on Heidegger and in the “Lecture
on Ethics,” as suggesting significant parallels to the thought of the philoso-
pher whose signature is the question of being and the disclosure of its funda-
mental structures, including the basic “experiences,” such as that of Angst,
in which the being of the world as such—here, the totality of beings—may
be disclosed. Yet as a reading of Heidegger’s actual position in Being and
Time, the main suggestion of the passage—that these experiences are to be
found by “running up against” the boundaries of language—is nevertheless
essentially a misreading. For Being and Time contains no detailed or even
very explicit theory of language as such, let alone the possibility of running
up against its boundaries or limits. And insofar as Being and Time discusses
language (die Sprache), the discussion is almost wholly subordinated to the
discussion of Rede or concretely practiced discourse, something that does
not obviously have boundaries at all.20
In Being and Time, Heidegger’s brief and elliptical discussion of lan-
guage emphasizes its secondary, derivative status as founded in discourse
and the fundamental ontological possibility of a transformation from one
to the other. Thus, “The existential-ontological foundation of language is
discourse [die Rede].”21 Language is “the way discourse gets expressed.”22
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 227
Discourse is itself the “articulation of intelligibility” and, as such an artic-
ulation, is always separable into isolated “significations” or “meanings”
[Bedeutungen].23 Nevertheless the “worldly” character of discourse as
an “articulation of the intelligibility of the ‘there’ ” means that it yields a
“totality-of-significations” [Bedeutungsganze], which can then be “put into
words” or can “come to word” (kommt zu Wort).24 Language can then be
defined as a totality of (spoken or written) words; in this totality “discourse
has a ‘worldly’ Being of its own.”25 It thus may subsequently happen that
language, the totality of words, becomes something in the world that we can
“come across as ready-to-hand” [Zuhanden] or indeed break up analyti-
cally into objectively present “world-things which are present-at-hand.”26
Language’s specific way of manifesting being-in-the-world, or of disclosing
the worldly character of the beings that we ourselves are, is to appear in
the world as a totality of words ambiguously experienced as tools of use
or objective “word-things.” Discourse itself, Heidegger goes on to say, sup-
ports the ever-present possibilities of “hearing” or “keeping silent.”27 These
possibilities, as possibilities of discursive speech, disclose “for the first time”
“the constitutive function of discourse for the existentiality of existence.”28
But they are not in any direct way connected to the ontological structure of
language itself, which must, Heidegger says, still be worked out.29
Whatever else it may be, the story of the existential significance of words
in Being and Time is not, therefore, the document of an inherent human ten-
dency to “run up against the boundaries of language” that ultimately, even
in being frustrated, can yield a transformative indication of the limits of the
world as such. The worldly character of language is, here, not a matter of
its actual or possible correlation to the totality of facts or situations in the
world, but rather of its tendency to appear within the world as an objec-
tively present totality of signs or of “word-things,” abstracted and broken
up with respect to the original sources of their meaning in the lived fluidity
of discourse.
This is not a subjective “running-up against the boundaries of language”
but something more like a falling of meaning into the world in the form of
its capture by objective presence. There are, to be sure, distinctive dangers
here. Heidegger will go on to suggest that it is in this tendency to inter-
pret language as an objectively present being that the traditional and still
dominant conception of logos remains rooted, a conception that yields an
insufficiently radical understanding of meaning and truth, one that the pres-
ent, more penetrating, existential analytic must deconstruct. But there is no
suggestion that any part of this analysis involves recognizing the boundaries
of language as such, or considering how the tendency to speak beyond them
issues in nonsense. Moreover, although the possibility of keeping silent does
indeed bear, for Heidegger, a primary disclosive significance, what it tends
to disclose is not the limits of the world beyond which it is impossible to
speak, but rather, quite to the contrary, the inherent positive structure of
Dasein’s capability to make the world articulate and intelligible. This is not
228 Paul M. Livingston
the obligatory silence, which concludes the Tractatus, beyond the bounds of
language where nothing can be said, but rather the contingent silence that
results from a “reticence” of which Dasein is always capable, and which
is indeed at the root of Dasein’s strictly correlative capability of “having
something to say.”30
Heidegger’s remarks on the Nothing and anxiety in “What is Metaphys-
ics?” were famously the basis for Carnap’s dismissive rejection, in the 1932
article “The Overcoming of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of
Language” of Heidegger’s whole project as “metaphysical” and as violat-
ing the very conditions for the meaningfulness of any possible language.31
Part of what motivated Carnap in his ire may have been Heidegger’s visible
contempt for the attempt to structure language logically; in the inaugural
address, as we have seen, he describes the experience of the Nothing as
leading to a “disintegration” of logic, and the remarks on language in Being
and Time are dedicated to a “task of liberating grammar from logic.”32
From the perspective of Carnap’s logical empiricist project, which was dedi-
cated to the elimination of dangerous and idle metaphysics by means of a
clarification of the underlying logical structure of meaningful language as
such, these suggestions could only seem to represent the most misleading
kind of obscurantism. Yet as recent scholarship has emphasized, it would
be a mistake simply to identify Wittgenstein’s conception of logical struc-
ture with that of Carnap, for whom Wittgenstein also had little sympathy.
For whereas the point of identifying the bounds of language for Carnap is
consolidation of science and objectivity by means of the identification and
elimination of the “pseudo-sentences” that lie beyond them, the point is
for Wittgenstein just about directly the opposite. As Wittgenstein famously
wrote later, the whole point of the Tractatus was “ethical,” presumably in
the sense that it was to bring us to a self-conscious experience of those limits
beyond which we cannot speak: here was not, then, the excessive “beyond”
of meaninglessness grounded in the violation of fixed logical rules but the
very possibility of a “mystical” or “aesthetic” vision of the world, the vision
sub specie aeterni of the world “as a limited whole.”33
So although it would certainly be wrong to say that the problem of the
limits of language stands or falls with the rigid, deterministic conception of
the structure of language that Carnap imposed in his critical remarks on
Heidegger, there is, it seems, between Wittgenstein and Heidegger a signifi-
cantly broader and more general question of the relationship of language
and world that remains open, and probably remains with us even today.
This can be put as the question: What does the very existence of language
have to do with the nature of the world it seems to bound? And what does it
mean that the structure of language, which seems to set the very boundaries
of the possibilities for speaking of facts and objects and hence to determine
what we can understand as the world, can again be thought (whether logi-
cally, grammatically, or historically) and even experienced within the world
thus bounded? Without overstatement, it would be possible to say that this
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 229
is the question that links twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, in its spec-
ificity, to all that has formerly been thought under the heading of transcen-
dence and the transcendental. And since it is not obvious where solutions
may lie, it seems that this question remains very much with us today.

II

Heidegger’s remark on Wittgenstein comes almost forty years later, in one of

Heidegger’s very last seminars, the last of three seminars the aging philoso-
pher held in Le Thor, France.34 The seminar as a whole is ostensibly directed
to the elucidatory discussion of Kant’s pre-critical work “The Sole Possible
Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God,” and more specifically
to its first chapter, on “existence as a whole” (Vom Dasein Überhaupt),
though there is actually little explicit discussion of Kant anywhere in the
seminar.35 The mention of Wittgenstein, however, comes early in the course
of the first seminar session, on September 2, 1969:

So we pose the question: what does the ‘question of being’ mean? [was
besagt “Frage nach dem Sein”?] For, as a question, the question of being
already offers numerous possibilities for misunderstanding—something
confirmed by the continual failure to understand the book Being and
Time.
What does ‘the question of being’ mean? If one says ‘being’, from
the outset one understands the word metaphysically, i.e. from out of
metaphysics. However, in metaphysics and its tradition, ‘being’ means:
that which determines a being insofar as it is a being [was das Seiende
bestimmt, sofern es Seiendes ist]. As a result, metaphysically the ques-
tion of being means: the question concerning the being as a being, or
otherwise put: the question concerning the ground of a being [die Frage
nach dem Grund des Seienden].
To this question, the history of metaphysics has given a series of
answers. As an example: energeia. Here reference is made to the Aris-
totelian answer to the question, “What is the being as a being?” [“Was
ist das Seiende als Seiendes?”]—an answer which runs energeia, and
not some hypokeimenon. For its part, the hypokeimenon is an inter-
pretation of beings and by no means an interpretation of being [die
Auslegung des Seienden und keineswegs des Seins]. In the most concrete
terms, hypokeimenon is the presencing [das Anwesen] of an island or
of a mountain, and when one is in Greece such a presencing leaps into
view. Hypokeimenon is in fact the being as it lets itself be seen [das
Seiende in seiner Lage, so wie es sich sehen läβt], and this means: that
which is there before the eyes, as it brings itself forth from itself [das,
was da ist, vor den Augen, wie es da von sich selbst her sich hinzieht].
Thus the mountain lies on land and the island in the sea.
230 Paul M. Livingston
Such is the Greek experience of beings.
For us, being as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]—ta onta—is only
an empty word. For us, there is no longer that experience of beings
in the Greek sense. On the contrary, as in Wittgenstein, “The real is
what is the case” [bei Wittgenstein heiβt es: “Wirklich ist, was der Fall
ist”] (which means: that which falls under a determination, lets itself
be established, the determinable), actually an eerie [gespenstischer]
statement.
For the Greeks, on the contrary, this experience of beings is so rich,
so concrete and touches the Greeks to such an extent that there are
significant synonyms (Aristotle, Metaphysics A): ta phainomena, ta ale-
thea. For this reason, it gets us nowhere to translate ta onta literally as
“the beings” [das Seiende]. In so doing, there is no understanding of
what is being for the Greeks [hat man kein Verständnis für das eröffnet,
was für den Griechen das Seiende ist]. It is authentically: ta alethea,
what is revealed in unconcealment [das Offenbare in der Unverborgen-
heit], what postpones concealment for a time; it is ta phainomena, what
here shows itself from itself [was sich von sich selbst her zeigt].36

As he often does at this late stage in his career, Heidegger couches his remarks
as a kind of retrospective of his own work, giving a prominent place to the
“question of Being” raised by Being and Time while complaining, as he
often did, of that book’s failure ultimately to communicate the sense and
significance of this question. In fact, though, as Heidegger clarifies, the rel-
evant “question of Being” here is not simply the one formulated in Being
and Time, which concerns the “meaning” or “sense” of Being, but rather
(by way of a decisive shift) the question of the “ground of Being,” of what it
means to think the various bases that determine, in each of the various con-
ceptions or epochs that comprise the history of metaphysics, beings as such
and as a whole.37 The problem, as Heidegger explains elsewhere, is now
one of thinking what variously determines the historical ways—now in the
plural—that beings as such and as a whole can be thought and experienced,
and thinking this determining instance now, no longer itself in terms of
beings but only in terms of being itself. This is the question of the historical
truth of being, or of how being itself gives or grants itself in or as its event of
Ereignis, by grounding—in various and historically variable ways—the pos-
sibility of conceiving of and experiencing beings in their totality. From the
initial Platonic understanding of beings as determined by the “being-ness”
of the idea, through the Medieval conception of God as the summa ens and
the modern metaphysics of subjectivity and up to the contemporary regime
of dominant technology, this question of grounding, according to Heidegger,
receives a series of different answers in the metaphysical tradition.38 But all
of these answers are ways of determining the character of beings as a whole
by opening or projecting their sense.
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 231
How, though, does Heidegger here understand sense? The conception
of sense as a projective grounding of entities as a whole is continuous with
Being and Time’s definition, and consideration, of sense as projective com-
portment toward entities on the ground of possibilities.39 In Being and Time,
this projective comportment is itself intimately related to Dasein’s capac-
ity or structure of world-disclosure and to the way in which this structure
allows entities to appear as unconcealed or in truth.40 With the “turn” from
Being and Time’s analytic of Dasein to the later, “being-historical” project,
truth, world-disclosure, and projective sense are no longer grounded sim-
ply or exclusively in Dasein, but rather in the prior structure of an “open”
or “clearing” [Lichtung] that is itself a precondition for Dasein as well.41
The structure of this clearing, and its relation to Being itself—now under-
stood primarily not as “the being of beings” but rather in independence
of entities—allows for the clearing and grounding relation that multiply
determines, over the course of the epochal determinations of metaphysical
thought and practice, the character of beings as a whole.
In particular (returning to the 1969 passage), whereas Aristotle thinks
of the ultimate ground of beings as a whole as energeia, or as active, actual
occurrence, a being or entity itself is here thought of as hypokeimenon, or as
substance. The experience of the hypokeimenon, as it is thought and under-
gone by the Greeks, is one of the being of a being in its “let[ting] itself be
seen,” its basic presencing and being revealed in truth. This “experience of
beings in the Greek sense” permits and is permitted by, Heidegger suggests,
an experience of “what . . . being is” for the Greeks, namely presencing and
disclosure, the truth of what shows itself from itself as it itself is. Such an
experience of beings not only remains faithful to their underlying character
as it shows itself but is also, Heidegger says, “so rich” and “so concrete”
that its synonyms in Greek connect it to the underlying meanings of truth
(aletheia, or unconcealment) and indeed to the very meaning of what it is to
be a phenomenon at all.
At the same time, however, understanding the individual being or entity
as hypokeimenon already essentially involves understanding it in relation
to the structure of a logos: in particular, the hypokeimenon is something
about which we speak, what is named in the grammatical subject of a sen-
tence. For Aristotle and the Greeks more generally, the definitive character
of individual entities is thus understood on the logical basis of the structure
of the assertoric sentence, the legein ti kata tinos (i.e., a saying of something
about something). This understanding already portrays the character of
the being—here, the substantial bearer of the reference of the grammatical
subject—as that which is logically or linguistically determinable by means
of a predicative sentence that ascribes to it properties or determinations.
This is the occasion for Heidegger’s reference to the contemporary concep-
tion that he attributes to Wittgenstein, according to which all that exists
is the real in the sense of the logically and predicatively “determinable” or
232 Paul M. Livingston
“determined,” and there is, he suggests, accordingly no possibility any lon-
ger of anything like a comparable insight into the character of the ta onta,
what opens or grounds beings as a whole.
However this may be, Heidegger’s reading of Wittgenstein is neverthe-
less a misreading, in an even more direct way than is Wittgenstein’s earlier
reading of Heidegger. For the sentence that Heidegger here attributes to
Wittgenstein is a direct misquotation. The first sentence of the Tractatus
reads, “The world is all that is the case” [Die Welt ist Alles, was der Fall ist.]
Heidegger misquotes this as “The real is what is the case” [Wirklich ist, was
der Fall ist]. And this is, in fact, no innocuous substitution. We can begin
to see why by considering the gloss that Heidegger immediately gives on
what he takes the position that he attributes to Wittgenstein to imply. That
all and only what is real (Wirklich) for Wittgenstein is all and only what “is
the case” means, according to Heidegger’s gloss, that all that is the case, all
that exists as an actual fact or real state of affairs, is what “falls under a
determination, lets itself be established” or is “determinable.” This gloss is
almost certainly Heidegger’s interpretation of the very next proposition of
the Tractatus, 1.1, which holds that “The world is the totality of facts, not
of things.” In its context, this proposition has the effect of denying that it is
possible to consider the world as a whole simply as a collection or totality
(however vast) of individual things or (in the Heideggerian jargon) beings
(or entities), without the further structure given by their logical articulation
and formation into facts and states of affairs. For, according to Wittgen-
stein, “the world divides” not into things or beings but into “facts” (1.2)
and “the facts in logical space are the world.” (1.13). Facts, moreover, are
not individual objects but “combinations” thereof, essentially structured in
such a way that they are apt to be expressed by full assertoric sentences
rather than individual names.42
Synthesizing all of this, then, it is clear that Heidegger takes it that, for
Wittgenstein, for anything to be real at all is for it to be determined or
determinable as a fact, to “stand under a determination” or to “let itself
be established” as the case. This is the “determination” of a subject by a
predicate, an individual by a “universal,” or an object by a concept, which
is (variously thought) the underlying grammatical basis of the possibility of
any assertoric sentence. To say that something is the case is then, according
to Wittgenstein as Heidegger reads him, quite simply to say that an object or
entity allows itself to be determined in such a way, to have the characteristic
asserted to hold of it by a true proposition, or to allow such a proposition
to be established and asserted as the truth.
What, though, is involved in this determination or determinability, or in
the submission of the nature of entities in general to their ability to serve
as substrates or objects for predication in an assertoric sentence? Heidegger
here echoes a critique of the assumption of the primacy of the assertion that
has deep roots in his own thought, extending back the historical investiga-
tions into the original constitution and meaning of sentential logic that he
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 233
undertook already in the series of lecture courses immediately preceding the
writing and publication of Being and Time:

Here it is important to make a fundamental distinction in regard to

speaking, namely to distinguish pure naming (onomazein) from the
assertion [Aussage] (legein ti kata tinos).
In simple nomination, I let what is present [das Anwesende] be what
is. Without a doubt nomination includes the one who names—but what
is proper to nomination is precisely that the one who names intervenes
only to step into the background before the being. The being then is
pure phenomenon.
With the assertion, on the contrary, the one asserting takes part in
that he inserts himself into it—and he inserts himself into it as the one
who ranges over the being in order to speak about it. As soon as that
occurs, the being can now only be understood as hypokeimenon and the
name only as a residue of the apophansis.
Today, when all language is from the outset understood from out of
the assertion [von der Aussage her], it is very difficult for us to experi-
ence naming as pure nomination, outside of all kataphasis and in such a
way that it lets the being presence as pure phenomenon.43

As Heidegger goes on to suggest, the determination of the being or

phenomenon—what it is for something to appear in presence—in terms of
the assertion and its logical structure of “saying something about some-
thing” is already on the way to the representational distinction between
subject and object that is introduced explicitly by Descartes and reaches
the highest point of its development in Kant and Hegel. Whereas, for the
Greeks, “things appear,” for Kant, “things appear to me;” this is the ulti-
mate consequence of Descartes’ identification of an absolute ground in sub-
jective consciousness and his placement of the human “in his position as
representer.”44 After Kant, Hegel then furthers the articulation of the dis-
tinction between subject and object by insisting on the subjective as media-
tion and thus as the essential dialectical “core” of objectivity. The whole
development involves an ever-greater distancing from the original “Greek
experience of being as phenomenon,” insofar as it means that the subject of
consciousness is, in an ever more thorough way, placed at the basis of the
representative presentation of objects, and the simple experience of beings
presencing of themselves is thereby rendered more and more inaccessible.
But the ultimate historical basis for this is to be found in the original concep-
tion whereby the beings are, as such, thought as determinable on the basis
of the logical structure of the assertoric sentence itself, which is, on the early
Wittgenstein’s telling, by stark contrast, formally the very basis for any con-
ceivable possibility of meaning and truth.
What, though, about the substitution that makes Heidegger’s quota-
tion a misquotation of the Tractatus, the substitution of “the real” for “the
234 Paul M. Livingston
world”? Coming as it does right in the midst of a passage devoted to dis-
cussing the historical possibilities for taking into account the nature of the
whole—ta onta or everything that is, in Heidegger’s terms, “beings as a
whole”—this substitution is far from philosophically innocuous. Indeed, it
bears directly on the question of totality that is at issue in a different way,
as we saw above, between Wittgenstein and Heidegger already in 1929. The
German word “Wirklich” that Heidegger substitutes for “Welt” (world)
here indeed means “real” and “actual,” but also has important connota-
tions of effectivity and efficiency; what is “Wirklich” is not only what is
real or is in being in the sense of simply existing, but also what is produc-
tive, energetic, or pro-active.45 Elsewhere, Heidegger had read the progres-
sive historical determination of the nature of beings in terms of a series of
transitions in the interpretation of the nature of beings as such, beginning
with the ancient Greeks and culminating in modern times. The last stage in
this progression, which Heidegger identifies with Nietzsche’s metaphysics
of the will to power and absolute, self-positing subjectivity, indeed culmi-
nates, according to Heidegger, with the determination of beings in general as
“real” in the sense of Wirklichkeit and effectiveness, a kind of technological
regime of general, leveled effectiveness that treats all beings only in terms
of their general calculability and their capacity instrumentally to cause and
bring about determinate effects.46
This is nothing other, of course, than the universal reign of the thought
and practice arising from the dominance of what he calls Gestell or enfram-
ing, the essence of modern technology. Within this dominance, it is no longer
possible, Heidegger goes on to assert, to experience the “overabundance”
or “excess” of what presences that the Greeks saw in the “coming-forth-
out-of-concealment” characteristic for them of physis and definitive of the
phenomenal character of the phenomenon. Rather, “In extreme opposition
to this [Greek overabundance], one can say that when the astronauts set
foot on the moon, the moon as moon disappeared. It no longer rose or set.
It is now only a calculable parameter for the technological enterprise of
humans.”47
However, is Wittgenstein’s understanding of the way the structure and
form of the world is determined by the logical structure of the sentence—the
Tractatus conception of the world as the totality of articulate facts—really
an example of an “enframing” attitude in this sense, a positioning of the
subject or its will as the ultimate agency of effective representational con-
trol, calculation, and production? There are many reasons to doubt it. To
begin with, Wittgenstein’s concern in the Tractatus is not primarily with the
assertion [Aussage] in the sense of the subjective or agentive act of asserting
something about something, but rather with the structure of the “asser-
toric” sentence [Satz], which itself and independently of any specific agent
says that something is the case. Sentences are connected to the worldly states
of affairs they describe not by means of any kind of subjective act of assert-
ing, positing, or the like, but by their correspondence in logical form with
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 235
the possible situations they describe. The possibilities of this correspondence
or non-correspondence, though they are not dependent in any obvious way
on subjective decision, activity, or willful determination, nevertheless give
the sentence its sense (4.2). “The subject” enters as such only very differ-
ently from this, as the transcendental “limit of the world” (5.632) and as
what is manifest in the fact that “the world is my world” and “the limits
of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of
my world” (5.62). In this sense, “There is no such thing as the subject that
thinks or entertains ideas.” (5.631). Moreover, since all facts are contingen-
cies and there is thus no logical necessity to the determination of the result
of a willed action, the attempt to produce the good by controlling and calcu-
lating effective outcomes must be futile as well: “The world is independent
of my will.” (6.373).
For all of these reasons, Heidegger’s suggestion that Wittgenstein’s con-
ception of sentential articulation involves a criterion or structure of deter-
mination that itself is one of subjective agency appears misplaced, and
his seeming assimilation of Wittgenstein’s logical conception of truth and
meaning to the outcome of what is, for Heidegger, a vast and complex his-
torical process of logical and technological enframing and determination is,
accordingly, misleading. What, though, of the contrast that Heidegger draws
between the articulate structure of the sentence or assertion—the structure
of the legein ti kata tinos or the “saying of something about something”—
and the simple and direct naming, which by contrast (for Heidegger) “lets
the being be” in its direct and immediate presence? One might certainly see
parallels between Heidegger’s underscoring of the distinction and the two
levels of connection between language and the world that the Tractatus’s
official theory of truth and reference maintains: those of names, on the one
hand, and descriptive sentences, on the other. Here, in particular, it is neces-
sary for the sense of the sentence, and especially for its ability in general to
be true or false, that it be ultimately composed of simple names that are,
by contrast, directly correlated to objects and that these objects accordingly
must exist in order for sense to be possible at all.48 Both accounts then would
seem to bear problematic witness to the possibility of a level of appearance
or manifestation, beyond all facts and beings, that gives rise to the very
sense with which all facts and worldly beings are endowed. Nevertheless,
the Tractatus’s posing of the requirement for the objects correspondent to
simple names or namings, far from simply “letting beings be,” immediately
raises the question of the basis for the institution of the names of things.
This is the problem of logical form as the ground of the necessity of their
presence, what appears in the Tractatus as the basis of the very substance
of the world.49
This is, however, one of the central problems that is taken up in a renewed
fashion, alongside the critical interrogation of the necessitating force of
logic and of the efficacy of rules in the determination of their instances,
in the Philosophical Investigations. Here, the later Wittgenstein’s critique
236 Paul M. Livingston
of the metaphysical picture of the Tractatus takes the initial form of an
interrogation of the assumption of what “has” to exist on the level of the
bearers of simple names, and a correspondent investigation of the idea that
the speaking or understanding of a language consists in the operation of a
calculus according to definite rules.50 The two skeins of critical interroga-
tion that define the main argumentative movement of the Investigations, the
so-called “private language argument” and the “rule-following consider-
ations,” develop these lines of inquiry in a more general and broadly indica-
tive way, critically investigating and raising deep problems, respectively, for
the assumption of a privileged site for the naming of being in the subjective
presence of self to self, and that of a guarantee of the unitary sense of a
word in the effective repeatability of the rule as a self-identical structure
unto infinity. If the critical investigation of these problems necessarily dis-
places the theoretical tendency to assume in advance that there must be only
one essence of language or one way of characterizing or understanding the
structure of the determination of sense in the instances of our lives, it is nev-
ertheless possible to see both lines of critique as embodying complementary
challenges to the unitary configuration of assumptions broadly characteris-
tic of a form of life that is, today, recognizably “ours.” This is the configura-
tion of, on the one hand, the capable subject of lived experience that makes
the possibility of representational experiencing the criterion for the actuality
of any object and, on the other, the effectiveness of regular and rule-defined
processes of calculation, regulation, modification, and control in handling,
producing, and economizing beings.51
What, then, finally is the force and effectivity of logic in relation to the
relevant actions and events of this life? This problem is not only the one
that led Frege somewhat problematically to introduce into his strictly logi-
cal vocabulary for the expression of inferential relations among contents a
distinct symbolism for the separate operation of (assertoric) force or judg-
ment.52 More broadly and in terms of the significance that both Heidegger
and Wittgenstein ultimately see it as having, it is also the problem of the
effectivity of systematic, mechanical, formal, or calculative rules in general
in determining the totality of their instances and ensuring the smooth func-
tioning of the techniques, institutions, practices, and systems governed by
them. Correspondent to this figure of the effective functioning of rules on
the level of the subject is the figure of the human speaker of language as
their capable agent. But if the role of practices in our life were to be thought
beyond the figure of human capacity—if, in other words, the possibilities of
our world or life, as we meet them in the language that we speak and grasp
them in the kind of being that we are, were determined otherwise than on
the basis of the subjective capacities of an effective human agent, to what
kind of domain for reflective consideration might this lead?
In closing the seminar session of September 2, 1969, Heidegger again
looks back at the problematic of Being and Time. In that book, Heidegger
says, the question of being is already posed primarily not as the question
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 237
“What is a being?” but rather as “What is this ‘is’ ”? The question, thus
posed, immediately runs into the “difficulty” that “if the ‘is’ is, then it is a
being”; whereas if it is not, then it appears to be “bare and empty,” even
perhaps (Heidegger suggests) to be nothing more than the “empty copula
of a judgment.” It was in order to “come out of this aporia,” Heidegger
suggests, that Being and Time posed the question of the “is” “from the
perspective of the sense of Being,” understanding “sense” specifically as a
“project” of “understanding.” But this way of formulating the question
was, Heidegger now says, “inappropriate” in that it made it “all too possi-
ble to understand the ‘project’ as a human performance” and as a “structure
of subjectivity”—this is indeed specifically, Heidegger suggests, how Sartre
understands it in his own philosophy, which bases itself (he suggests), in this
respect, upon Descartes. Nevertheless, beyond or before the assumption of
such a constitutive subject of sense, it is possible, Heidegger suggests, to take
up the problem of the “is” rather as a problem of truth, here understood
as the pre- or non-subjective structural basis for opening and grounding
disclosure of being:

In order to counter this mistaken conception [of the “project” as

subjective-PL] and to retain the meaning of “project” as it is to be taken
(that of the opening disclosure), the thinking after Being and Time
replaced the expression “meaning of being” with “truth of being.”
And in order to avoid any falsification of the sense of truth, in order
to exclude its being understood as correctness, “truth of being” was
explained by “location of being” [Ortschaft]—truth as locality [Örtlich-
keit] of being. This already presupposes, however, an understanding
of the place-being of place. Hence the expression topology of be-ing
[Topologie des Seyns].

The problematic of the topology of being to which Heidegger here gestures

is, then, nothing other than the consideration of the structure through which
being grants the sense and truth of beings, or (in other terms) how it grants
the possibility of a world.

III

I have suggested that the missed encounter between Wittgenstein and Hei-
degger conceals foundational problems about logic, sense, meaning, and the
totality of the world that are still substantially unsolved today. One of these
is the ancient problem of the nature and force of the logos, which subsumes
both the more local twentieth-century philosophical inquiry into language
and the methods of formal and symbolic logic that have simultaneously
defined many twentieth-century approaches. Here, as we have seen, there
is co-implied a broad problem of force: what is the basis and status of the
238 Paul M. Livingston
force of logical rules and laws, or of their actual effectiveness in relation to
the activities, techniques, and practices that increasingly characterize life on
the planet today? Another, closely related problem, as we have repeatedly
seen, is the problem of the totality: the problem of our relation (if such there
be) to the totality of the world or the being of all that is, or to whatever sets
its limits or determines its extent. Without diminishing the difficulty of the
issues involved in the formulation, both of these problems might also be put,
it seems, as problems of finitude: that is, as problems about how a properly
finite being has whatever problematic relationship it can have, whether in
thought or in action, to what we might understand as the “infinite” dimen-
sion of sense, up to and including the sense of the world.53
Seen in this way, the problematic of the logic and sense of the world is,
to begin with, a problem of limits. How is a being in the world nevertheless
capable of grasping something of the world as a whole in which it exists, if
it is capable of doing so at all? That both Heidegger and Wittgenstein see
the question of the totality of the world as one that is linked to the ques-
tion of the expressive or descriptive powers of language suggests, as we
have seen, that it is to be addressed only by means of a renewed reflection
on language’s forms, and on the historical and contemporary structures in
which they allow themselves to be thought or presented. But that both also
mark the problem as one in which language positively confronts its own
limits in the necessary inexpressibility of whatever lies beyond the world
suggests that we may draw from both philosophers the indication of a nec-
essary complication, inherent to the problematic of sense, in the topology or
limitology that is thereby invoked. In particular, that “being itself is not a
being,” and that “whereof we cannot speak, there we must be silent” might
then be the problematic claims through which, if it follows the suggestions
made by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, a future inquiry might pursue
the question of the ultimate dispensation of sense as we meet with it in the
forms of our lives.
But is there a world, for us, today? If, as I have suggested, both Wittgen-
stein and Heidegger point to the question of the force of logos and logic in
relation to the totality of the world, then the single question that is formu-
lated by both may be put as the question of realism about the world as such
a totality. This question bears close connections to the broader questions
of realism and anti-realism that many contemporary and recent analytic
and continental figures have discussed from different perspectives, and using
various definitions of the terms. But because its topic is the world as a whole,
it is distinct from the question of realism about any kind of entity or entities
in any of their aspects (even “as they are in themselves”) or in general. It is
also not primarily to be posed as the question of how or whether specific
entities are conditioned by our epistemic “access” to them or (as we have
seen) as that of the dependence of being or truth on our specifically human
constitution or capacities (unless this just means the capacities that can be
possessed by a being that can speak and understand language, and hence
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 239
grasp sense, at all). In particular, if the twentieth-century linguistic turn, in
both its “analytic” and “continental” variants, already witnesses a decisive
turn away from the idea of epistemology as “first” philosophy and toward a
variety of practices of philosophical analysis and reflection grounded in the
consideration of linguistic structure and sense, then it is plausibly no longer
adequate in its wake to pose the question of realism about the world as
one of the limits of our knowledge or epistemic access, or about the condi-
tions under which a “subject” can have knowledge of “objects.” Rather, the
question here to be formulated is, precisely, about sense: about if and how
the world is meaningfully “given” as an intelligible whole to understanding
or reasoning, or about whether the idea of such a whole, as what provides
the broadest and most possible condition for the sense of things, is even so
much as coherent.54
Posed this way, the question asks in “linguistic mode” whether there is a
thinkable totality of all that is that is also, in some “logical” sense, a unity:
a one whose composition or structure is itself intelligible on the basis of a
formal consideration of it.
In fact, this question was already central to discussion “between” recog-
nizable ancestors of the analytic and continental traditions, long before the
linguistic turn itself. The negative answer to it given by Kant in the argument
of the “Antinomies” section of the Critique of Pure Reason, for instance,
points to the broadly logical paradoxes that he took to be involved in any
conception of the world as a completed totality of phenomena, while one
of Hegel’s main goals in the Science of Logic was to overcome this Kantian
antinomic reasoning by means of a speculative picture of the ultimate recon-
ciliation of the paradoxes of the whole at the level of the Absolute.55 Whereas
Husserl, in his later phenomenology, treated the world (in one of its senses)
as the indeterminate but always-expansible horizon of possible experience,
his analysis of meaning and sense also pointed to what he saw as its basis
in the pre- or proto-rational foundation of the everyday “lifeworld.” In the
early decades of what would become the “analytic” tradition, the ques-
tion already posed by Kant received a more rigorous kind of formulation
through Cantor’s set theory and the paradoxes of totality—most decisively,
Russell’s paradox of the set of all sets not members of themselves—that
appeared to show the impossibility of maintaining without contradiction
the existence of a total set or set of all sets.56
Today, differing answers to the question of the world also situate and
articulate key contemporary projects of both “analytic” and “continental”
philosophers. On the one hand, recent prominent projects in “analytic”
metaphysics, such as David Chalmers’s Constructing the World and Ted Sid-
er’s Reading the Book of the World, have essentially presupposed or relied
upon the coherence of the idea of the world in their strongly constructivist
or naturalist projects of analyzing its structure.57 On the other hand, recent
positions of a more directly continental lineage set out, by contrast, from
a radical denial of the existence of a totality of all that is. For example,
240 Paul M. Livingston
early in his 1988 Being and Event, Alain Badiou declares as a fundamental
motivating basis for his project of set-theoretical ontology that “the one is
not,” or more specifically that there is no total domain of entities, objects,
facts or phenomena.58 This claim of radical non-totality is in one sense an
axiomatic decision, but Badiou also seeks to motivate it on the level of onto-
logical reflection by considering the implications of Russell’s paradox of
the set of all sets that are not elements of themselves.59 Here, therefore, the
world is understood as radically incomplete, or as fundamentally incapable
of being gathered into a single totality, on pain of irreducible contradiction
or paradox.60
From this perspective, the requirement to maintain the consistency of
the language in which beings and phenomena are presented itself requires
the non-existence of the world as a whole and in the singular; this posi-
tion is extended, but not fundamentally modified, in Badiou’s 2006 sequel,
Logics of Worlds, which posits an irreducible plurality of worlds as indi-
vidually structured domains of presentation, each with its own (generally
non-classical but consistent) logic. But another possibility, very much within
the matrix of the same problems but suggesting a radically different answer
to them, is the one explored by Graham Priest in a series of works: to explore
the structure of the paradoxes that arise necessarily on the assumption of
the existence of a totality of all that can be thought, or all that is linguisti-
cally expressible, or the “One” of all that is, accommodating them within
a paraconsistent logic (one that does not assume the principle of ex falso
quodlibet, according to which anything at all can be inferred from a con-
tradiction) and maintaining the existence of actually true contradictions.61
These various contemporary projects are thus united in giving a presup-
positional or foundational status to one or another assumption about the
way in which formal and logical reasoning captures, or indicates the limits
of, a consideration of the world as a whole. Accordingly, it appears possible
to pose the question that divides them, that of the way in which formalism,
at its limits, itself articulates the logical or meta-logical structure of the world
as such. This is not, importantly, a question about the powers or limits of
specific natural/historical languages, such as they might be thought to show
up in the problems of mutual translation or in the question of the “incom-
mensurability” of various languages with one another. It is, rather, essential
to its posing—and, as I have argued, urgent in receiving the contemporary
legacy of Wittgenstein and Heidegger—to understand it as a question about
the structure and limits of language in the singular, or of language as such.
It is true that twentieth-century and contemporary inheritors of the
linguistic turn, even and perhaps especially in light of interpretations of
Wittgenstein or Heidegger or both, have often denied the existence of any
such thing, declaring rather the moral of an irreducible contingency and
irremediable plurality. On this kind of position, there are indeed worlds
in the plural, correspondent to the variety of cultures, languages, or prac-
tices, but there is no one world as the totality of all that is or all that can
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 241
be said or meant.62 The index and proof of this radical non-existence of the
world-in-the-singular is often, here, the presumptive incommensurability of
languages and cultures, the salutary differences that allow for the inscrip-
tion in every communication and practical relationship the ineffable reserve
of the “untranslatable” or the irreducibility of the individual, situated, or
radically embodied. But if, as I have argued, the dynamics of the contempo-
rary global regime of capital, technology, and information force us to con-
sider in a renewed way the possibility of a critical reflection on the unity of
the world, then it is relevant to consider the ways that both Heidegger and
Wittgenstein (both early and late), through their considerations of language,
meaning, and sense, themselves undertake this reflection and point toward
its further development.
What form might such a further development of the problematic of the
relationship of the structure of language to the possibility of the world take,
today? On the one hand, it would involve a renewed inquiry into the pos-
sible sense of the One of what is as it gives itself to be thought. This would
be a contemporary repetition of the problem posed by Parmenides about
the logical sense of being, to whose response Plato devoted the considerable
resources of his late argumentation in dialogues such as the Parmenides, the
Sophist, and the Philebus. On the other, and just as importantly, it would
involve displacing this inquiry onto the transformed ground of contempo-
rary logic and formal knowledge. To pursue the inquiry would then be (in
the Heideggerian jargon) to grasp the very basis of linguistic sense as resting,
not in factual institutions or given situations, but in the underlying or deeper
structure of the granting of presence, the opening of the possibility of sense
or the meaning of a life on the ultimate ground of what is. Or it would be to
take up in a renewed way the inquiry into the essential and unitary dimen-
sion of form that arguably articulates, beyond or before empirical instances,
the key concepts of “both” Wittgensteins, those of logical form and forms
of life.63
And given both philosophers’ arguments, this would be something like
the problem of the origin of sense in the abeyance of any source of sense
in any subject, object, entity, fact, or situation. Because it is not possible
to determine the sense of the world without contradiction from a position
within it, and there is at the same time no position outside the world from
which to determine it either, this inquiry would have to take up in a deep-
ened way the critical question of what sets or establishes the limit of the
world and its description, and how this setting itself complicates the easy
topological distinction between a simple “inside” and a simple “outside.”
The consideration of how possibilities and structures of sense arise, at or
in the problematization of the boundaries of whatever is, and do so quite
independently of any kind of human intentionality, activity, capacity, or
purpose, might then also define a fitting topic for critical reflection within
a philosophical praxis to come. Thus distinguished from the characteristic
twentieth-century pathos of the human agentive subject of meaning and the
242 Paul M. Livingston
constitutive anxiety of its nullification within a senselessly plural being, one
task of twenty-first-century philosophy might then be to locate forms and
structures of sense, in their original givenness, at the problematic limit of
the world itself.64

NOTES

1 As Lee Braver has pointed out to me, in addition to the remark from Heidegger’s
Le Thor seminar of 1969 that I will discuss below, Heidegger makes a brief
mention of an analogy that he attributes to Wittgenstein in the seminar on Her-
aclitus (held jointly with Eugen Fink) of 1966–1967. See Heidegger and Fink
(1967), p. 17. Gabriel Citron has pointed out to me one other remark attributed
to Wittgenstein about Heidegger (in addition to the one discussed below): in a
1963 letter to Brian McGuinness, Rush Rhees relates that when he (Rhees) men-
tioned Heidegger to Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein “remarked that a man might be
obscure and still have something important to say; but he added: ‘But I don’t
trust Heidegger’.” See Wittgenstein, Rhees, and Citron (2015), p. 48.
2 Wittgenstein (1930), p. 68.
3 Murray (1974). The originally published text is Waismann (1965). Murray also
discusses possible connections between Wittgenstein’s remarks and his “Lecture
on Ethics,” as well as to Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” lecture.
4 Heidegger (1927) (henceforth: S&Z), p. 186.
5 Wittgenstein (1921) (henceforth: TLP), 6.41–6.42.
6 Wittgenstein (1929), pp. 36–44.
7 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 39.
8 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 40.
9 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 40.
10 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 41.
11 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 44.
12 Wittgenstein (1929), p. 42.
13 Wittgenstein (1929), pp. 42–43.
14 Cf. TLP 6.41.
15 Heidegger (1929). As Murray (1974) suggests, it is certainly possible that Witt-
genstein in late 1929 had some knowledge of the content of Heidegger’s lecture.
16 Heidegger (1929), pp. 99–100.
17 Heidegger (1929), p. 101.
18 Heidegger (1929), p. 101.
19 Heidegger (1929), p. 105.
20 S&Z, section 34.
21 S&Z, p. 160.
22 S&Z, p. 161.
23 S&Z, p. 161.
24 S&Z, p. 161.
25 S&Z, p. 161.
26 S&Z, p. 161.
27 S&Z, pp. 163–64.
28 S&Z, p. 161.
29 S&Z, p. 166.
30 “Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To
be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must
have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case
one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 243
with ‘idle talk’ [“Gerede”]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence Articulates
the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to
a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another
which is transparent.” (S&Z, p. 165)
31 Carnap (1932). A number of recent commentators have explored the back-
ground of the famous controversy between Carnap and Heidegger, including
the implications of Carnap’s attendance at the 1929 disputation in Davos be-
tween Heidegger and Cassirer: see, e.g., Friedman (2000) and Stone (2006).
James Conant (2001) relates Heidegger’s position in “What is Metaphysics?”
explicitly to Wittgenstein’s conception of sense and nonsense in the Tractatus,
arguing that this provides a basis for resisting Carnap’s dismissal of it.
32 S&Z, p. 165.
33 TLP 6.421; 6.45. Partisans of the so-called “resolute” interpretation of the Trac-
tatus typically oppose the claim that there is a substantive vision of the world
that is mentioned or gestured at here, holding rather that the ethical sense of
these remarks is exhausted by their use in exposing to critique our temptations
to attempt to speak “metaphysically” of the world as a whole from beyond its
boundaries. I do not take a position in the dispute between “resolute” and other
more traditional interpretations here (but for some discussion of the issues, see
e.g., Livingston (2008), chapter 3 and Livingston (2012), chapter 5).
34 Heidegger (1969). The original text is a protocol written in French which was
read out in Heidegger’s presence at the seminar.
35 Kant (1763).
36 Heidegger (1969), pp. 35–36.
37 Cf., e.g., Heidegger’s opening discussion of the transition from the “guiding
question” of the being of beings to the “grounding question” of the truth of
being in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Heidegger 1938, pp. 6–8). For the lan-
guage of “beings as such and as a whole,” see, e.g., (Heidegger 1969b, p. 67.)
38 In the 1957 lecture “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,”
Heidegger discusses the “historical stampings” [geschicklichen Prägungen] of
being as “phusis, logos, hen, idea, energeia, substantiality [Substanzialität],
objectivity, subjectivity, will, will to power, will to will.” (Heidegger 1969b,
p. 134). For a helpful discussion, see also Thomson (2005), esp. chapter 1.
39 S&Z, p. 151.
40 S&Z, sect. 44.
41 E.g. Heidegger (1938), pp. 75–77.
42 The misquotation appears, in German, already in the original French protocol.
In the French text, the gloss on it that immediately follows reads: “(est réel ce
qui est le cas; ce qui veut dire: ce qui tombe sous une détermination, le fixable,
le déterminable)” (p. 260). At TLP 2.063, Wittgenstein identifies the world
with “Die gesamte Wirklichkeit” or the “sum-total of reality,” and at 2.06 he
says that “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality” (“Das
Bestehen und Nichtbestehen von Sachverhalten ist die Wirklichkeit”); along
similar lines, TLP 2.04 identifies the world with the “totality of existing states
of affairs” (Die Gesamtheit der Bestehenden Sachverhalte). It is thus possible
(though not seemingly likely, from the context) that Heidegger’s substitution
of “Wirklich” for “Die Welt” in his attribution to Wittgenstein is intended
as, at least in part, a gloss on these later remarks (or a combination of one
or both of them with remarks 1 and/or 1.1). Even if this is so, however, there
remains an important gap between the claim that the world, in the sense of all
that is the case (or of the obtaining and non-obtaining of states of affairs, as in
2.06), is identifiable with “reality” (Wirklichkeit) as a whole and the different
claim, which Heidegger effectively attributes to Wittgenstein, that the crite-
rion for something’s being real (Wirklich) is its being determinable as a fact.
I am indebted to Conrad Baetzel for pointing out the possible relevance of the
244 Paul M. Livingston
remarks at TLP 2.04, 2.06, 2.063 to Heidegger’s reading of Wittgenstein here.
The English translators of Heidegger’s seminar also note the misquotation and
suggest the possibility of reading it in terms of TLP 2.063 (p. 107).
43 Heidegger (1969), p. 36 (translation slightly modified).
44 Heidegger (1969), pp. 36–37.
45 As Andrew Cutrofello has pointed out, the relationship that Heidegger draws
between “Wirklichkeit” in the sense of the “real” and the sense of the ra-
tionally calculable “effective” can also be related to Hegel’s famous “iden-
tification” of the real and the rational in the Elements of the Philosophy of
Right: ““Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist
vernünftig.”
46 See, e.g., Heidegger (1941, p. 445 (transl. slightly modified)): “The precedence
of what is real [der Vorrang des Wirklichen] furthers the oblivion of Being
[betreibt die Vergessenheit des Seins]. Through this precedence, the essential
relation to Being which is to be sought in properly conceived thinking is bur-
ied. In being claimed by beings, man takes on the role of the authoritative
[maβgebende] being. As the relation to beings, that knowing suffices which,
according to the essential manner of beings [Wensensart des Seienden] in the
sense of the planned and secured real [des planbar gesicherten Wirklichen]
must issue into objectification and thus to calculation. The sign of the deg-
radation of thinking [Herabsetzung des Denkens] is the elevation of logistics
[Hinaufsetzung der Logistik] to the rank of the true logic. Logistics is the
calculable [rechenhafte] organization of the unconditional lack of knowledge
about the essence of thinking, provided that thinking, essentially thought,
is that projecting knowledge which issues from Being in the preservation of
truth’s essence [das in der Bewahrung des Wesens der Wahrheit aus dem Sein
aufgeht].”
47 Heidegger (1969), p. 38.
48 TLP 2.02–2.0212; 3.142; 3.203–3.23.
49 TLP 2.021, 2.026.
50 Wittgenstein (1953), sect. 50, 81.
51 Cf. Livingston (2003).
52 See, e.g., Frege (1915) for the problem of the separation of assertoric force
from content.
53 At TLP 6.41, Wittgenstein uses the phrase “the sense of the world,” saying
specifically that it “must lie outside the world.” What does he mean by it? The
paragraph goes on to deny that there is value (“Wert”) in the world, since “in
the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen,”
and moreover “all that happens and is the case is accidental.” In terms of the
Tractatus’s structure of logical importance, the remark is moreover directly
subordinate to 6.4, which states simply that “All propositions are of equal
value.” [Alle Sätze sind gleichwertig.] Sense, value, and the non-accidental are,
here, all closely aligned with one another, and jointly opposed to the totality of
the world, understood as the totality of what can be described in (contingent)
propositions. The “sense of the world” is thus, it is reasonable to assume,
connected with the source of whatever value the world has, and it may not
be amiss to understand this source as the “metaphysical subject” that “does
not belong to the world” but is rather “a limit of the world” (5.632) and is
thus to be sharply distinguished from the “subject that thinks or entertains
ideas”[das denkende, Vorstellende, Subjekt] (which itself, according to 5.631,
does not exist) (On the other hand, it may also not be incorrect to under-
stand “the sense of the world” in terms of the characterization of “sense”
suggested (e.g.) at 3.11–3.12, according to which a proposition is a sign “in
its projective relation to the world” and the “method of projection” is “to
 Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein 245
think of” the proposition’s sense. Synthesizing all of this, then, the “sense of
the world” might be taken to be what is (as it were) projected in a thinking of
the sense of the totality of propositions—or of propositions as such—from the
“perspective” of the “metaphysical subject.” But this would again be sharply
distinguished from anything that is or could be thought or represented by the
(actually non-existent) innerworldly “subject that thinks” or represents.
54 It is here we can see the specific limitation, with respect to the current problem-
atic, of Quentin Meillassoux’s recent realist challenge to what he calls “cor-
relationism,” understood as a broad label for any position that holds that “we
can only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and
never to either term considered apart from the other” and hence that (as he
puts it) it is impossible “to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity
independently of one another” (Meillassoux (2008), p. 5). This is reasonable
as a characterization of some Kantian and post-Kantian idealist philosophy,
but when Meillassoux goes on to attribute such a “correlationism” to both
Heidegger and Wittgenstein (pp. 41–42), he misses the essential way in which
the question of sense articulates both of their projects differently than any that
accords a central role to questions of (epistemic) “access,” subjectivity, and
objectivity. As a result, the critique fails to meet its target and many of the
positions based on it largely miss the significance for the question of realism
of the twentieth-century linguistic turn itself (see Livingston (2013) for a more
detailed development of this point).
55 See Hegel (1812), especially pp. 157–65.
56 For connections and parallels between Kant’s cosmological antinomies and
set-theoretical paradox, see, e.g., Hallett (1986), pp. 223–234; Moore (1990),
pp. 149–51; and Priest (2002), pp. 87–102.
57 This is not to say, of course, that contemporary representatives of the “analytic”
tradition are univocal in considering the idea of the totality of the world to be
intelligible. An important strand of contemporary argumentation, inherited ul-
timately from the later Carnap’s idea of a plurality of language frameworks (see
Carnap 1950) and perhaps passing through Putnam’s “internal realism,” chal-
lenges the idea of a unitary world by maintaining that any description of facts
or phenomena is irreducibly situated within one or another theory, domain of
discourse, or set of logical operators. This strand of argumentation is also by
no means limited to projects that continue to see themselves as situated within
the “linguistic turn” itself, but is just as often today articulated in terms of
“metaphysical” or “metametaphysical” claims about the scope and structure
of logic quite irrespective of considerations about natural languages (as recent
discussions about “quantifier variance,” for example, witness.)
58 Badiou (1988), pp. 23–25.
59 Badiou (1988), p. 31; pp. 38–48.
60 For a closely related recent argument for the non-existence of the world in this
sense, made from a partly Schellingian perspective, see Gabriel (2013).
61 See, e.g., Priest (2002, 2014, 2015). For a formally based framework that
situates the differing positions outlined here in terms of the orientations of
thought they represent, see Livingston (2012), chapter 1.
62 Cf. the conclusion that Richard Rorty draws from a consideration of the posi-
tions and development of the early and late Wittgenstein as well as the early
and late Heidegger in his 1989 article “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Rei-
fication of Language.” In the article, Rorty opposes the tendency to “reify”
or “hypostatize” language to his own “pragmatist” inclinations, which in-
volve emphasizing instead the contingency of all languages and their thor-
ough embedding in historically situated practices. This opposition produces
a reading according to which Wittgenstein and Heidegger “passed each other
246 Paul M. Livingston
in mid-career, going in opposite directions.” (Rorty 1989, p. 52), the former
“advancing” in the direction of pragmatism and the rejection of the very idea
of philosophy as positive theory, while the latter regressed from the social
pragmatism formulated (on Rorty’s reading) in Being and Time to the later
mysticism marked by the grand being-historical narrative of the totality and
closure of “Western metaphysics,” a narrative of which Rorty himself is sus-
picious. Both Rorty’s characterization of the developments of the two phi-
losophers and his critique of the tendency to “reify” language are, however,
consequences of his own presumptive dismissal of the problematic of language
and world that we have considered here: according to Rorty, for example, it
is essential in avoiding the “reification” that he inveighs against “that we not
think either of language in general or a particular language (say, English or
German) as something which has edges, something which forms a bounded
whole and can thus become a distinct object of study or of philosophical theo-
rizing.” Insofar as Rorty cites here a basis for this dismissal, it is the moral
he draws from Donald Davidson’s project of semantic analysis and its “natu-
ralized” approach. However, it is certainly possible to read the implications
of Davidson’s project differently, as suggesting both the positive possibility
of a “transcendental” or quasi-transcendental analysis of the positive condi-
tions of linguistic truth and meaning that itself develops the problematic of the
structure of language and world considered here (cf., e.g., Wrathall, Okrent,
Livingston 2014).
63 Although Wittgenstein himself uses “form of life” both in the plural or with
an indefinite article (as in, e.g., PI sections 19 and 23) and in the singular
(as, e.g., in PI 241, where he speaks of agreement “in language” as “agree-
ment . . . in form of life”), it is more or less standard in many contempo-
rary interpretations to read “forms of life” as irreducibly a plural concept
of varying cultures or lifestyles. However, Giorgio Agamben has insightfully
and partially independently developed “form-of-life” as an essentially unitary
concept capturing the “linguistic being” or “belonging in language” that for-
mally characterizes a linguistic life. See, e.g., Agamben (1996), p. 11: “Intel-
lectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and
social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power
that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life.” See also Agamben’s
recent investigation of the relationship between form-of-life and rule in the
development and practice of Western monasticism (Agamben 2011) and Liv-
ingston (2012), chapter 1.
64 I would like to thank Lee Braver and Iain Thomson for providing helpful com-
ments on an earlier version of this article.

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versations with Rush Rhees (1939–50): From the Notes of Rush Rhees. Mind
124 (493) (January): 1–71.
11 The Answer to the Question of
Being
Graham Priest

1. INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger famously asked the question
of being: what is it to be?1 The question was to exercise him, in one way or
another, for the rest of his philosophical life. He came to the conclusion that,
because of a certain aporia, the question could not, in fact, be answered.
One cannot say what being is. Being shows itself, that is, beings show their
being, and the job of the thinker is to open people’s eyes to see this showing.2
Heidegger notwithstanding, I think that the question of being can be
answered, and the point of this essay is to do so. In the process we will
also investigate the ground of Heidegger’s aporia and its implications. These
matters will involve a certain construction concerning unity and its possibil-
ity, in the shape of gluon theory.
In the next section, we will look at Heidegger and his predicament more
closely. I will then explain enough of the theory of gluons to make what
follows intelligible. After that, we will be in a position to answer the ques-
tion of being. In the final section will see how the theory of gluons explains
Heidegger’s aporia.

2. HEIDEGGER

To start with, Heidegger.3 Heidegger poses the question of being as follows:4

What is asked about in the question to be elaborated is being, that

which determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings have
always been understood no matter how they are discussed.

The being of a being, then, is what it is which makes it be.5 And one thing
that Heidegger is clear about from the very beginning is that being is not
itself another being. As he puts it:6

The being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being. The first philosophical step
in understanding the problem of being consists in avoiding telling the
250 Graham Priest
mython tina diegeisthai, in not ‘telling a story’, that is, not determin-
ing beings as beings by tracing them back in their origins to another
being—as if being had the character of a possible being.

He takes this to be so obvious that he does not give an argument for it in

what follows. Indeed, it is actually hard to find arguments for the claim in
the Heideggerian corpus. But one might essay a couple: one metaphysical,
one grammatical.
The metaphysical one is Neo-Platonist. Being is the ground of beings.
As such, it is not the kind of thing that can be a being. It can function as
the ground only if it, itself, is beyond being, and so not a being.7 The gram-
matical argument is somewhat different. We say, for example: Heidegger is.
‘Heidegger’ refers to an object, a being. If ‘is’ referred to a being then the
italicized phrase would simply be a list of two objects: Heidegger and being.
But it is clearly not a simple list. In an obvious sense, it has a unity that a
pair of objects lacks. One can hear both of these arguments in the following
passage:8

If we painstakingly attend to the language in which we articulate what

the principle of reason [Satz vom Grund] says as a principle of being,
then it becomes clear we speak of being in an odd manner that is, in
truth, inadmissible. We say: being and ground/reason [Grund] ‘are’ the
same. Being ‘is’ the abyss [Ab-grund]. When we say something ‘is’ and
‘is such and so’, then that something is, in such an utterance, repre-
sented as a being. Only a being ‘is’; the ‘is’ itself—being—‘is’ not. The
wall in front of you and behind me is. It immediately shows itself to us
as something present. But where is its ‘is’? Where should we seek the
presencing of the wall? Probably these questions already run awry.

Whatever the reason, though, if being is not itself a being, we have a

problem. If one is to answer the question of being one must say something of
the form: being is such and such. This uses ‘being’ as a noun phrase, and
so treats its referent as an object. It follows that one cannot answer the
question of being. I take this insight to be what drives much of Heidegger’s
later thought (though, again, I am aware of nowhere he says this explic-
itly).9 Being cannot be said; it can only be shown. If one has the eyes to see
it, beings show their being. One’s eyes can be opened by art, poetry, lan-
guage—before it becomes a dead metaphor. As he says in “On the Origins
of the Work of Art”:10

The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening
up, i.e., this revealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In
the art work, the truth of beings has set itself to work. Art is truth set-
ting itself to work.
 The Answer to the Question of Being 251
A solution to the question of being can, therefore, consist only in helping to
open people’s eyes in this way.
But discerning eyes will also perceive an aporia here. Never mind answer-
ing the question of being; if one cannot refer to being with a noun phrase,
one cannot even ask it. (‘What is being?’) Indeed, for exactly this reason,
one can say nothing at all of being. Yet, Heidegger’s own works are replete
with statements about being. (Just look at the quotes above.) To bend a
comment from Russell’s introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—which
finds itself with a similar aporia:11 Everything involved in talking of being
cannot, grammatically, be said. What may give some hesitation about this
fact is that, despite his arguments to the contrary, Mr. Heidegger manages
to say a good deal about what cannot be said.
Heidegger was, of course, well aware of the problem, and he wrestled
with various ways to avoid it. Thus, for example, he tried the technique of
writing under erasure:12

a thoughtful glance ahead into the realm of ‘Being’ can only write it as
Being. The crossed lines at first only repel, especially the almost ineradi-
cable habit of conceiving ‘Being’ as something standing by itself . . .
Nothingness would have to be written, and that means thought of, just
like Being.

The failure of this strategy is manifest, though. Heidegger has to talk about
being in order to explain what it is that the erasure shows is not to be taken
as standing by itself.
As far as I know, Heidegger never solved this problem. Maybe, having
no cure, he learned to live with the disease. Or maybe, once he figured out
that the action was in opening people’s eyes in a certain way, it became irrel-
evant to explain what it is that is seen. As Zhangzi says (in a quite different
context):13

A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you’ve caught the fish, you can for-
get about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you’ve
caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catch-
ing ideas; once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words.

3. UNITY AND GLUON THEORY

So much for the Heideggerian background. Before we turn to the answer to

the question of being, I need to explain the background theory that informs
it. This concerns unity and what makes it possible. I shall not attempt to jus-
tify the theory here, or to show its technical coherence. I do that elsewhere.14
I wish merely to explain the essence of the view in question.
252 Graham Priest
Take an object with parts. What makes them into a single thing? There
must be something in virtue of which they form a unity. Quite possibly, this
thing depends on the unity in question. If the unity is a house, its parts are
bricks, and maybe what makes them into a unity is their geometric con-
figuration. If the unity is a symphony, its parts are notes, and maybe what
makes them into a unity is their arrangement. But whatever the binding
agent is, there must be one. Let us call it, neutrally, the gluon of the unity.
It does not take a lot of thought to see that gluons are very strange things:
they appear to have contradictory properties. A gluon is an object: we can
think about it, quantify over it, refer to it. But it is not an object: if it were,
the totality comprising it and the other parts would be just as much a conge-
ries as the parts themselves, and we would want for an explanation of how
the unity is achieved. Think of Bradley’s regress at this point. If the gluon
were just another object, there would need to be a ‘hypergluon,’ holding the
gluon and the other parts together. And so on . . . We are off on a vicious
regress.
So the gluon is an object and not an object. But how is it that it holds all
the parts (including itself) together? If it were distinct from the other parts,
Bradley’s regress would strike. It must, therefore, be identical with each of
the other parts. How to make sense of this idea? We may define identity in
the standard fashion, deploying Leibniz’ identity of indiscernibles: x = y is
∀Z(Zx ≡ Zy), where the quantifier is second-order, and the connective is
the material biconditional. Note, however, that we are dealing with objects
some of which have contradictory properties. Hence this must be the mate-
rial biconditional of some paraconsistent logic (a logic that tolerates contra-
dictions without blowing up).15
So suppose that we have a unity; let its gluon be g, and let a, b, c, and d
be its (other) parts. Then g = a, g = b, g = c, and g = d:

d
=

a=g=c
=

This will happen if g has all the properties of a, b, c, and d. Naturally, since
the parts are liable to have a variety of disparate properties, g is liable to be
an inconsistent object—but we knew that already. Note, also, that in virtu-
ally all paraconsistent logics, the material biconditional is not transitive: A ≡
B, B ≡ C, A ≡ C. So the fact that a = g and g = b does not entail that a = b.
⊥

The various parts are not, generally speaking, identical.

For a very simple illustration of how all this works, suppose that the
parts are just a, b, and g, and that there is only one property at issue, P. Sup-
pose that (consistently) Pa, ¬Pb, but that Pg ∧ ¬Pg. Then Pa≡ Pg and Pg≡
 The Answer to the Question of Being 253
Pb, but it is not the case that Pa≡ Pb. Hence (since P is the only property at
issue), a = g, g = b, but it is not the case that a = b. Note, also that since Pg
∧¬Pg, it follows that ¬(Pg ≡Pg), and so ∃X¬(Xg ≡ Xg), and ¬∀X(Xg ≡ Xg).
That is, g ≠ g: g is not self-identical.
Finally, and importantly for what follows, gluons are and are not objects/
beings.16 To say that something is an object is to say that it is something: ∃y
y = x. This follows from the logical truth that x = x. So every x is an object.
Everything is a being, gluons included. But as we have just seen, if g is a
gluon, then g ≠ g. But if g ≠ g then, for any y, y ≠ g. For either y = g or y ≠
g. And in the first case, the result follows by the substitutivity of identicals.
(Substitute y for g in the first occurrence of g ≠ g.) Hence, ∀y¬y = g. That is,
¬∃y y = g; that is, g is not an object.

4. THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

We are now in a position to answer the question of being.17 But first, we

need to be clear about the sense of being involved. To be a being for Hei-
degger is simply to be an object; that is, to be anything that one can think
of, predicate something of, refer to. As Heidegger says:18

Everything we talk about, mean, and are related to is in being in one

way or another. What and how we ourselves are is also a being. Being is
found in thatness and whatness, reality, the objective presence of things
[Vorhandenheit], subsistence, validity, existence [Da-sein], and in the
‘there is’ [es gibt].

And:19

Being is used in all knowledge and all predicating, in every relation to

beings and in every relation to oneself, and the expression is under-
standable without ‘further ado.’ Everyone understands ‘The sky is
blue,’ ‘I am happy,’ and similar statements.

That is, to be a being/object, is, in Meinongian terms, to have Sosein.20

Given this understanding of being, it is clear that being and unity come
to the same thing. If something is an object, it is one thing; and if it is one
thing, it is certainly an object. The thought is, in fact, as old as Aristotle. As
he puts it (Met. 1003b 23–31):21

being and unity are the same and are one thing in the sense that they
are implied by one another as principle and cause are . . . ; for one man
and a man are the same thing and [man who is] and a man are the same
thing, and the doubling of the words in ‘one man’ and ‘one [man who
254 Graham Priest
is]’ does not give any new meaning . . . ; and similarly with ‘one’, so that
it is obvious that the addition in these cases means the same thing, and
unity is nothing other than being.

And again (Met. 1054a13–19):

And that in a sense unity means the same as being is clear from the
fact that it follows the categories in as many ways, and is not com-
prised within any category, e.g. neither in substance nor in quality, but
is related to them just as being is; and from the fact that in ‘one man’
nothing more is predicated than in ‘man’, just as being is nothing apart
from substance or quality or quantity; and to be one is just to be a par-
ticular thing.

The thought is expressed—in more pellucid terms—by Plotinus, at the

beginning of Ennead VI, 9:22

It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.

This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all
those that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could
exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be
what it is called: no army unless a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one
thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity
gone, neither remains; thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist
without inherent unity; break them apart and their very being is altered
in the measure of the breach of unity.
Take plant and animal; the material form stands a unity; fallen from
that into a litter of fragments, the things have lost their being; what was
is no longer there; it is replaced by quite other things—as many others,
precisely, as possess unity.

To be, then, is exactly to be one.

One might object. It would seem that we have plural forms of reference.
Thus, we can say, for example, that Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia
Mathematica, and that they were in Cambridge together at the time. The
conjunctive noun phrase and pronoun appear to refer to objects that are
inherently plural. Similarly, one can say that something is a square; but
one also can say that some things have the same shape as each other. The
italicized quantifier is plural, and refers to a plurality.23 There are, then,
objects that are, but are not one, being a plurality. Russell and Whitehead,
for example is (an object), but it is not one object.
The reply is simple, however. The machinery does not allow us to refer
to objects that are plural, but to a plurality of objects. Thus, when we say
that Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia, we are not referring to some
strange object, Russell and Whitehead; we are referring to Russell and to
 The Answer to the Question of Being 255
Whitehead. (One cannot say: ‘Russell and Whitehead wrote Principia, and
it was in Cambridge at the time.) Similarly, if we use plural pronouns and
quantification we are referring to multiple objects. If something is, it is one,
a unity; and if some things are, they are ones, unities. The machinery of
plural reference does indeed enable one to refer to a plurality of objects, but
each is one. So to be is still to be one.
Let us now put all these thoughts together. The being of something is that
in virtue of which it is. To be is to be one. So the being of something is that in
virtue of which it is one. And what is it in virtue of which something is one?
By definition, its gluon, g. The being of something is therefore its gluon. We
have answered Heidegger’s question as to the nature of being.24 (To be clear
about the exact form of this argument used here: We have established that
the conditions ‘x is one thing’ and ‘x is’ are necessarily equivalent. Hence,
the inference: ‘g makes it the case that x is one thing; hence g makes it the
case that x is’ is an application of the substitutivity of such equivalents.)

5. HEIDEGGER’S APORIA

We are not finished yet. We still have to deal with Heidegger’s aporia. He is
forced to talk about what cannot be talked about. How so? We are now in
a position to see how.
The being of any object/being, x, is its gluon. A gluon both is and is not
an object/being. Since it is an object, it can have a name ‘α’ (‘the being of x’)
Hence, one can talk about it by saying things like ‘α is not a being.’
But it is not an object/being as well. Since it is not an object, it cannot
have a name. And if it cannot have a name, one cannot refer to it, and so
one can say nothing about it. That, of course, is a contradiction. But that is
exactly the terrain we are in.25
We can, in fact, make the matter quite precise. The intuitively correct
principle governing truth is the T-schema. For every sentence, A:

• ‘A’ is true iff (if and only if) A

Thus, ‘Socrates was human’ is true iff Socrates was indeed human. Anal-
ogously, the intuitively correct principle governing denotation is the
D-schema. For every name, ‘n’:

• ‘n’ denotes x iff n = x

Thus, ‘Socrates’ denotes Plato’s teacher iff Socrates is Plato’s teacher.

Now, since is not α an object, ¬∃x x = α That is ∀x x ≠ α. So in particular,
if ‘n’ is any name, n ≠ α. So by the D-schema (and contraposition), ‘n’ does
not denote α. α has no name. Hence, one can say nothing about it, for to say
something about it, one has to have some name to refer to it.
256 Graham Priest
Heidegger was right, then, in his conclusion that one cannot say anything
about the being of an object (even though one can)! And in case one thinks
this is some peculiarity of Heideggerian philosophy, it is worth noting that
the very same situation occurs in some paradoxes of self-reference.
Thus, take König’s Paradox.26 This concerns ordinals. Ordinals are num-
bers that extend the familiar counting numbers, 0, 1, 2, . . . beyond the
finite. Thus, after all the finite numbers there is a next, ω, and then a next,
ω + 1, and so on. Crucially, ordinal numbers preserve the property of the
counting numbers that any non-empty collection of them has a least mem-
ber. How far, exactly, the ordinals go is a somewhat vexed question, both
mathematically and philosophically, but it is not contentious that there are
many more ordinals than can be referred to by names of a language with a
finite vocabulary, such as English. This can be shown by a perfectly rigor-
ous mathematical proof. Now, if there are ordinals that cannot be referred
to in this way, then, by the properties of the ordinals, there must be a least.
Consider the phrase ‘the least ordinal that cannot be referred to.’ This obvi-
ously refers to the number in question, and one can use it to say things about
it, such as that it is the least ordinal that cannot be referred to. Yet, since it
cannot be referred to, one can say nothing of it. In this regard, it is just like
a gluon, and in particular, the being of an object.

6. AND SO . . .

We have answered Heidegger’s Seinsfrage. The being of a being is its gluon.

Heidegger was just wrong to give up trying to answer the question. (Of course,
the fact that being can be said does not—Wittgenstein ­notwithstanding—
mean that it cannot be shown. I can tell you what a cricket bat is and show
you one.) The answer, it must be admitted, uses the techniques of modern
mathematical logic, and in particular paraconsistent logic, something that
Heidegger could have known little about, since he died just about the time
that this was being invented. The answer is none the worse for that.
Nonetheless, Heidegger was right in insisting that the being of a being
is not itself an object/being, and in concluding that one could therefore say
nothing about it. The answer to the question of being requires us to talk of
the ineffable. Being is indeed a strange beast.

NOTES

1 Some who translate Heidegger into English use a capital ‘B’ for being, and a
lower case ‘b’ for beings. Though this has a certain point, it is entirely artifac-
tual. In German, both words, being nouns, begin with capitals (Sein, Seindes).
So I will not follow this practice, though I have not changed quotations that
do so.
2 This is spelled out in a number of later essays, such as “The Origin of the
Work of Art” and “What Calls for Thinking?” (Krell 1977, chs. 3 and 9).
 The Answer to the Question of Being 257
3 For a more detailed discussion of some of the following matters, see Priest
(2002a), ch. 15.
4 Stambaugh (1996), p. 4f.
5 Heidegger is clear that being is always the being of a being. He was, as it were,
an Aristotelian about this universal. Thus we have (Stambaugh 2002, p. 61):
‘If we think of the matter just a bit more rigorously, if we take more heed of
what is in contest in the matter, we see that Being means always and every-
where: the Being of beings.’
6 Stambaugh (1996), p. 5.
7 Heidegger’s discussion of being as ground can be found in “The Essence of
Ground” (McNeill 1998, pp. 97–135) and The Principle of Reason (Lilly
1991). See also the relevant discussions in Caputo (1986) and Braver (2012).
8 Lilly (1991), p. 51f.
9 For some relevant discussion of the need for silence, see Sections 37 and 38
of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu
2012).
10 Krell (1977), p. 166.
11 Pears and McGuiness (1961), p. xxi.
12 Kluback and Wilde (1959), p. 81.
13 Mair (1994), p. 277.
14 Priest (2014a), chs. 1, 2.
15 For a very non-technical introduction to paraconsistent logic, see Priest
(1998); for a somewhat more technical account, see Priest (2008), ch. 7; for a
very technical account, see Priest (2002b).
16 Strictly speaking, this is guaranteed only for objects with multiple parts. As
far as Heidegger goes, I think we can simply assume that all objects have
parts. What to say about objects with no parts, simpleces, is discussed in Priest
(2014a), ch. 4.
17 The matter is discussed at greater length in Priest (2014a), ch. 4.
18 Stambaugh (1996), p. 5.
19 Stambaugh (1996), p. 5
20 See Priest (2014b).
21 The translation is from Barnes (1984), except that ‘man who is’ is my render-
ing of the text’s ‘existent man.’ This, I think, is more accurate.
22 Translation from MacKenna (1991), pp. 535–536.
23 See, e.g., Yi (2005).
24 And if a Heideggerian wants to object that the being of a being is not a unity,
the reply is: Of course: it is not an object! But it is both an object and a one for
all that. (You can, after all, speak of it.) That is the aporia.
25 Priest (2002a), ch. 15, argues that Heidegger should have been a dialetheist.
In his forthcoming Ph.D. thesis (University of St. Andrews) Filippo Casati,
drawing on some of Heidegger’s later writings that have been translated only
recently into English, argues that he actually became one—at least in private.
26 See, e.g., Priest (2002a), pp. 131–134.

WORKS CITED

Barnes, J., ed. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Braver, L. 2012. Groundless Grounds: A Study of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Caputo, J. 1986. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought. New York, NY:
Fordham University Press.
258 Graham Priest
Kluback, W., and J. T. Wilde, trans. 1959. The Question of Being. Harrisonburg,
VA: Vision.
Krell, D. F., ed. 1977. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York, NY: Harper
and Row.
Lilly, R., trans. 1991. The Principle of Reason. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
MacKenna, S., trans. 1991. The Enneads of Plotinus. London: Penguin Books.
Mair, V., trans. 1994. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of
Chuang Tzu. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
McNeill, W., trans. 1998. Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pears, D. F., and B. F. McGuinness, trans. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Priest, G. 1998. What’s So Bad about Contradictions? Journal of Philosophy 95:
410–426; reprinted as ch. 1 of G. Priest, J. C. Beall and B. Armour-Garb (eds.),
The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Priest, G. 2002a. Beyond the Limits of Thought., 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Priest, G. 2002b. Paraconsistent Logic, vol. 6 of D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, eds.,
Handbook of Philosophical Logic. 2nd ed. Dordrecht: Reidel, 287–393.
Priest, G. 2008. Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Priest, G. 2014a. One. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Priest, G. 2014b. Sein Language. Monist 97: 430–442.
Rojcewicz, R., and D. Vallega-Neu, trans. 2012. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to
Philosophy (of the Event). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Stambaugh, J., trans. 1996. Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press.
Stambaugh, J., trans. 2002. Identity and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Yi, B. 2005. The Logic and Meaning of Plurals, Part I. Journal of Philosophical
Logic 34: 459–506.
Part IV

Values, Personhood, and

Agency
12 Relativism and Recognition
Carol Rovane

INTRODUCTION

I have a three-part agenda in this paper. All three parts are related, and their
cumulative effect will, I hope, be to improve our philosophical understand-
ing of what is most fundamentally, and interestingly, at issue in philosophical
debates about relativism, and especially in debates about moral relativism.
Before I present these three related pieces of the overall argument, I want to
start by describing all three parts in somewhat greater detail than one would
normally find in a mere introduction, so as to give some advance sense of the
sort of improved understanding I hope to achieve.
Relativism, Objectivity, and Universality. In the rhetoric of philosophers
in the English-speaking world, the term “relativism” is often used as a term
of opprobrium, something to be said of a philosophical position that falls
short or afoul of a much lauded ideal of ‘objectivity’ that is supposed to fol-
low upon a robust metaphysical realism. Richard Rorty responded to this
rhetoric by urging that analytic philosophers should simply set aside the
realist ideal of objectivity and embrace relativism. But of course his response
did not unsettle the longstanding presumption that philosophical debates
about relativism are centrally concerned with whether or not it is possible
to retain that ideal.1 The presumption has fueled significant anxiety among
analytic philosophers, who tend to worry that if relativism is true then there
are no real normative constraints on belief—or, as the most well-worn, if
imprecise and airy, cliché has it, anything goes. Although Rorty didn’t think
such anxiety was warranted, he didn’t do very much to soothe it. He also
didn’t do very much to clarify what relativism is exactly, except to empha-
size that his embrace of it went hand in hand with a rejection of the realist
ideal of objectivity.
The same could equally be said of the other participants in the main
twentieth-century debates about relativism within the analytic tradition—they
too didn’t sufficiently clarify what relativism is. They did introduce a term
through which they intended to capture a positive commitment of relativism
over and above its presumed opposition to objectivity, namely, “alternative-
ness.” But the meaning of that term was left disturbingly vague. It shouldn’t
262 Carol Rovane
be surprising, then, that when Donald Davidson set out to refute relativism,
his first step was to offer a provisional definition of it—he defined what he
called “alternative conceptual schemes” as languages that are true but not
translatable.2 Since his aim was refutation, it also shouldn’t be surprising
that he ended up concluding that there cannot be alternatives in the sense
he defined. That was one main thrust of his argument against the very idea
of a conceptual scheme. Rorty admired Davidson’s argument very much
and pronounced it “the transcendental argument to end all transcendental
arguments.”3 There is some irony there, because the argument not only left
the relativist’s position insufficiently clarified, but also left an impression
that there is no coherent way to formulate it. In a more recent literature,
analytic philosophers have tried somewhat harder to formulate relativism
by introducing the idea of a certain kind of irresoluble disagreement. While
at first sight this may appear to be a departure from the older idea of alter-
nativeness, closer examination reveals that the recent literature—almost
unbeknownst to itself—is really a collective attempt to make sense of the
older idea. As it happens, the attempt fails. Yet it is well worth thinking
through why it fails, for doing so brings to light a significant point of con-
vergence throughout the main analytic contributions to the topic of relativ-
ism, including the earlier ones from which Rorty’s own position descended
as well as the more recent ones—a convergence that has not been sufficiently
noticed due to the distracting and not entirely well placed concern about the
realist ideal of objectivity. The convergence is on the matter of universality.
All parties have agreed that relativists aim to challenge the idea that truth
is universal—the idea that if something is true then it is true for everyone.
My main thesis in the first section of the paper is that there is good reason
to construe the debate about relativism directly and solely in terms of the
question of whether truth is universal, while bracketing the issues of realism
and objectivity. When we do so, the relativist’s position emerges as having
a distinctive significance that is at once logical, metaphysical, and practical.
To encapsulate the debate in two words—and I do not intend them
metaphorically—relativists hold a “many-worlds” view, or Multimundial-
ism, while their opponents hold a “one-world” view, or Unimundialism.4
The Analytic-Continental Divide. It will be useful to lay bare some ideo-
logical terms that have shaped many philosophers’ understanding of the
significance of these issues. Rorty portrayed analytic philosophers as locked
into a Cartesian model of philosophical reflection, which is an inside-out
reflection that starts from direct knowledge of one’s self and one’s thoughts
and then must confront skeptical problems about how we can know any-
thing beyond them—skeptical problems that presuppose the ideal of objec-
tivity that follows upon realism. Rorty portrayed continental philosophers,
by contrast, as having thrown over the Cartesian problematic for a project
that he wished to recommend to analytic philosophers, namely, politically
engaged cultural criticism. He also portrayed them as appreciating that all
of our concepts, including even our normative concepts, are historically
situated. Since this point about the historical situatedness of our concepts is
 Relativism and Recognition 263
what drove his own commitment to relativism, he naturally viewed conti-
nental philosophers as fellow travellers on the path to relativism. However,
in taking this view he overlooked various tendencies of thought within the
continental tradition that pointed away from relativism. These tendencies
were not animated by a desire to retain the realist ideal of objectivity that
Rorty thought analytic philosophers should give up, but rather by more
directly moral and political concerns. For example, many continental phi-
losophers agreed with Hegel and Marx that history will ultimately issue in a
kind of moral and political progress that is not compatible with relativism;
and Jürgen Habermas explicitly argued that public debate within demo-
cratic societies requires a framework of universal rationality that is likewise
incompatible with relativism.5 One of my larger aims in this paper is to
show that we can better understand the moral sources of resistance to rela-
tivism on both sides of Rorty’s analytic-continental divide if we formulate it
as I propose to do, as a challenge to the universality of truth, while letting
go of his presumption that relativists must also be aiming to challenge the
realist ideal of objectivity.
Another more specific aim of the paper, which will occupy me in Sec-
tion 2, is to show that the most important considerations that speak in favor
of moral relativism have been perfectly visible for a long while from the ana-
lytic side of the divide, most notably (though not exclusively) in the work
of Bernard Williams.6 Williams, too, made the usual mistake of presuming
that relativism is something we are left with if we give up the realist ideal of
objectivity; and he thought we must give it up in the moral domain. Yet if
we look closely at the terms in which he tried to clarify the moral relativist’s
position—such as his idea of a “merely notional confrontation,” and his
distinction between “thick” and “thin” moral concepts, and his claim that
“convergence” means something different in morals than in science—then
we shall see that his concerns about objectivity recede to the background
and cede to other more directly moral concerns—concerns that turn on the
question that I claim really divides moral relativists from their opponents,
concerning whether moral truths are universal.
I will close the section by identifying what I see as a moral division over
moral relativism, which I doubt can be resolved by appealing to underlying
metaphysical issues. When we construe relativism as Multimundialism, it
follows from the moral relativist’s position that certain forms of engagement
are foreclosed, because to encounter others whose moral beliefs are alter-
natives to one’s own is to encounter a normative boundary across which
moral argument cannot reach. Unimundialist opponents of moral relativism
condemn this Multimundial stance of non-engagement on the ground that it
would lead to alienation from others and a loss of potential community with
them, and in its stead they adopt a Unimundial stance, which recognizes a
moral imperative to universal engagement with all others. But in their turn,
Multimundialists see some serious moral mistakes in the Unimundialists’
determination to universal engagement—namely, the mistake supposing
that the moral values by which we live have a normative force that reaches
264 Carol Rovane
beyond the particular circumstances in which we are able to meaningfully
live by them, and the correlative mistake of supposing that others cannot
be right to live by their moral values if we are not willing to adopt them for
ourselves.
Moral Relativism and Recognition. In general, philosophers do not attach
very much importance to the distinction between universality and objectiv-
ity, and in the context of moral philosophy the distinction itself nearly van-
ishes from view. For it is commonly assumed by moral philosophers that
if we can show that moral truths are universal then we will thereby have
shown them to be objective and, conversely, that if we can show that moral
truths are objective then we will thereby have shown them to be universal.
One influential method by which moral philosophers have tried to establish
such a conflated objectivity-cum-universality is by invoking a conception of
the person as a reflective rational being who is a being capable of conceiv-
ing itself as a member of a kind that includes all and only reflective rational
beings. The conception seems to guarantee the possibility of a universal and
mutual recognition among all persons of their shared status as persons. It is
hard to see how this could fail to be a shared moral status; and insofar as
that is so, the conception would appear to be in some tension with moral
relativism. For this reason, when Axel Honneth proposed to make recogni-
tion the fundamental relation in morals and politics, he identified it as a seri-
ous challenge to reconcile his position with his commitment to relativism—a
commitment that he, along with virtually every moral philosopher, assumed
would simultaneously challenge both the objectivity and the universality of
morality.7 In Section 3 I will explain that relativism actually presupposes this
universal conception of the person, because relativism involves adopting a
stance that only a person can adopt, and only towards another person. So
moral relativism would not involve a failure of mutual recognition among
persons; it would involve rather a positive recognition among persons that
we do not all face the same moral problems, and as a result, we do not all
require the same moral truths to live by.
I will close Section 3 with a proposal about how we should proceed in the
face of doubts about how to resolve the debate about moral relativism, once
it is construed as a debate about whether to adopt the Multimundial or the
Unimundial stance in the moral domain. We shall see that such doubts are
natural and reasonable because, on the one hand, we are not in a position
to settle this debate on purely metaphysical grounds, and, on the other, we
can see that there are important moral considerations that speak for and
against both sides.

1. RELATIVISM, OBJECTIVITY, AND UNIVERSALITY

Within the analytic tradition, there has been a presumption not only
that relativism and realism are mutually opposed doctrines, but also that
 Relativism and Recognition 265
arguments for relativism should proceed in a roughly neo-Kantian way.
Kant argued that we must give up a certain ideal of objectivity that is asso-
ciated with what he called “transcendental realism,” on which we would
aspire to know things as they are in themselves, and that we must put in
its stead a “transcendental idealist” metaphysical orientation on which we
cannot know things as they are in themselves, but only as they can appear
to us given our particular forms of sensibility and understanding. Insofar
as what we then come to know is a world, it seems to follow that there
can in principle be more than one world, indeed as many worlds as there
are kinds of minds with different cognitive constitutions. All of the various
projects and movements in early twentieth-century analytic philosophy that
seemed to have relativist implications followed roughly the same Kantian
pattern of argument, and the main differences among them concerned how
they proposed to conceive the subjective conditions in which things can be
known. Whether the context was cultural anthropology, logical positivism,
philosophy of language, philosophy of science, or pragmatism, arguments
for relativism tended to proceed by first casting aside a realist aspiration to
know things as they are in themselves and then taking on something like
Kant’s transcendental idealism—a vision of the world as mind-dependent—
and then concluding that there can be as many worlds as there can be kinds
of minds to know a world. The main candidates for subjective conditions on
which worlds might thus depend included linguistic frameworks, theoreti-
cal paradigms, and social practices, all of which Davidson lumped together
under the heading “conceptual schemes.”
During that period, there was an oft-repeated knee-jerk reaction against
relativism with three main components: The first was to insist upon the
realist ideal of objectivity; the second was to protest that there is no coher-
ent way to formulate the relativist’s position anyway, and the third was to
back up that protest with the following series of queries, which I have often
personally witnessed in philosophical discussion: What makes these differ-
ent conceptual schemes competitors? Are they inconsistent? If so, isn’t that
just a case of ordinary disagreement? If not, how can the schemes possibly
exclude one another?
I claimed in my introductory remarks that the relativists’ position was
never given an adequate formulation in the early analytic debates. This was
mainly due to the fact that the one idea that was most closely associated
with the position—alternativeness—was never elucidated in a fully satisfac-
tory way. Intuitively, alternatives were supposed to be truths that cannot
be embraced together. And one thing that convinces me that the idea of
alternativeness lay at the heart of the main twentieth-century debates about
relativism within the analytic tradition is that the protest I just rehearsed
was so often made. For the protest is really directed against the very idea of
alternativeness in this intuitive sense. Let me now give that knee-jerk resis-
tance some philosophical clarity, in the form of a Dilemma for Alternative-
ness. According to the dilemma, every pair of truth-value-bearers is either
266 Carol Rovane
consistent or inconsistent; if they are consistent then they can both be true
but they can also be embraced together; if they are inconsistent then they
cannot be embraced together but they also cannot both be true; in neither
case do we have what is intuitively required for alternativeness, which is
that both are true and yet they cannot be embraced together.
I also noted in my introductory remarks that the more recent analytic
literature on relativism has focused on another idea that appears to be quite
different from the idea of alternativeness, namely, the idea of a certain kind
of disagreement that is alleged to be relativism-inducing because it is irre-
soluble.8 Minimally, we can say that disagreements are irresoluble when
neither party can convince the other to her side. But the question arises, why
can’t they convince one another? In ordinary cases the reason why is that
the parties do not agree on background issues like standards of evidence, or
some basic beliefs about the world, and as a result, the reasons that move
each to adopt her own view fail to move the other. But in such ordinary
cases, the parties would still agree that one of them must be in error—and
so the irresolubility of their disagreement poses an epistemological difficulty
concerning which, if either of them, is really right. If this is a kind of rela-
tivism, it is mere epistemic relativism. In contrast, when it is alleged in the
recent literature that some disagreements are relativism-inducing, they are
claimed to be irresoluble in a different and, I would say, metaphysical sense.
The claim is that there may be domains in which anti-realism holds, and in
these domains there is no more to the truth than what an ideally informed
subject would be warranted in asserting, and, furthermore, there is no logi-
cal bar to there being two sets of standards for warranted assertibility such
that a given claim might count as true according to one while its negation
counts as true according to the other. On the assumption of anti-realism,
if two parties were to embrace such contradictory claims, and thereby dis-
agree with each other, there wouldn’t be any further facts in the light of
which either of them could be mistaken—and it is for this reason that I say
that their disagreement would be metaphysically irresoluble. One much dis-
cussed example of such a relativism-inducing disagreement is: I say, truly,
that those snails are delicious while Crispin Wright says, equally truly, that
those snails are not delicious.9
Analytic philosophers who propose to formulate relativism in terms of
the idea of a metaphysically irresoluble disagreement do not present their
proposal as an effort to make sense of the idea of alternativeness. All the
same, their proposal does provide for a kind of alternativeness and, more-
over, in a way that actually provides a direct response to the dilemma that
seems to stand in the way of making sense of it. For these philosophers are
claiming that some truths cannot be embraced together—and such truths
would qualify as alternatives in the intuitive sense I have identified; and these
philosophers are claiming that these truths cannot be embraced together for
the specific reason that they are contradictory—and this is a flat rejection
of the dilemma’s second horn, which insists that inconsistent claims cannot
 Relativism and Recognition 267
both be true. However, we should not attempt to portray alternativeness
along these lines, because doing so would saddle the relativist with having to
allow that there can be violations of what is arguably the most fundamental
law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. If this is the best we can do in our
efforts to formulate relativism in a coherent way, then I think we should side
with the dilemma and conclude that it cannot be done.
One main goal of the recent analytic literature has been to show that this
can be done, by portraying the truths at issue in metaphysically irresoluble
disagreements as relative to different standards of warranted assertibility.
This formal move promises two advantages: it removes the appearance of
any outright violation of the law of non-contradiction, and it affords an
intuitive sense of why metaphysically irresoluble disagreements are situa-
tions of relativism—it is because these situations now emerge as ones in
which truth is relative. Going back to the example above, the proposal is:
if I say snails are delicious, while Wright says they are not delicious, the
reason we can both be right is that our claims are true relative to different
standards for warranted assertions about deliciousness.
But note that there really is no need to portray me and Wright as affirm-
ing and denying the same proposition. We can just as easily suppose that he
and I don’t really mean the same thing by the term “delicious”—that what
I am claiming is that snails are delicious-according-to-Rovane’s-gustatory-
standards, while what he is claiming that they are not delicious-according-
to-Wright’s-gustatory-standards. The reason why this latter interpretation
tends not to be favored is that it fails to preserve an appearance of disagree-
ment between me and Wright. But we would do well to bear in mind that
the usual normative point of registering a disagreement is missing in this
sort of case anyway. The usual normative point of portraying two parties as
being in disagreement to draw attention to the fact that there is something
to be resolved between them, namely, which (if either) of them is right. But
if the parties are both right, then there is no longer anything to be resolved,
and so it is highly misleading to describe their situation as an irresoluble
disagreement or, for that matter, as a disagreement at all. It would be far
less misleading to interpret the parties’ respective claims so that there is no
logical obstacle to their both being right, which we can always do by dis-
ambiguating terms in the way I have just done, to clarify that they are not
making contradictory claims.
I am not suggesting that the sort of situation that contemporary rela-
tivists have in mind should not be thought of as relativism-inducing. I am
suggesting that we should try to understand what is going on in them differ-
ently. We should not posit a disagreement when the normative point of pos-
iting one is missing, but instead, we should explore how and why it might
be the case that the claims made in such situations cannot be embraced
together even though they are not in strict contradiction. If we can work
this out, then we shall have worked out the very notion of alternativeness
that was introduced in the main analytic debates about relativism in the
268 Carol Rovane
twentieth century. It was never claimed then—or at any rate, it was rarely
claimed, and never coherently claimed—that alternative conceptual schemes
are in conflict. What was claimed was that they do not share meanings at
all—and obviously, if this is true then it is impossible for parties who hold
different schemes to affirm and deny the same thing. My suggestion still
leaves us with the task of finding a way out of the original Dilemma for
Alternativeness. The burden of my discussion so far is that we cannot hope
to do this by denying either horn: consistent claims can always be embraced
together when they are both true, and inconsistent claims cannot both be
true. Clearly, the only way out is to find a third possibility that the dilemma
overlooks, and there is exactly one possibility to consider, namely, that some
claims are neither consistent nor inconsistent.
I cannot reproduce here the many detailed arguments that I have given
elsewhere for construing the idea of alternativeness along these lines.10 All
I can do is explain very briefly what alternativeness amounts to on this
construal. To say that claims are neither consistent nor inconsistent is to
say that they do not stand in any logical relations—they are, as I shall put
it, normatively insulated from one another. Thus, to oppose relativism is
to say that there are no alternatives in this logical sense; equivalently, it is
to say that logical relations run everywhere among all truth-value-bearers,
and that all of the true ones can therefore be embraced together (at least in
principle). Metaphysically speaking, it is to say, with the early Wittgenstein,
that the world is all that is the case; equivalently, it is to say that there is just
one world, i.e., Unimundialism. Practically speaking, it is to adopt a stance
of epistemic engagement towards all others. Whenever I encounter someone
who believes something I do not believe, as a Unimundialist I must accept
that their belief is either consistent or inconsistent with my beliefs, and that
if it is consistent then it is a candidate for belief by me to be embraced
together with the rest of what I believe, and that if it is inconsistent then
either I must reject it as false, or I must give up my own beliefs that are
inconsistent with it (this may involve actually rejecting certain of my own
beliefs as false in order to consistently take on the other party’s belief, or
it may involve going into a state of doubt concerning which of us is really
right). To affirm relativism is to say that there are alternatives in this logical
sense, which means that logical relations do not run everywhere among all
truth-value-bearers but only among some of them (those that figure within
a single conceptual scheme). Metaphysically speaking, it is to say that there
are many incomplete bodies of truths that cannot be embraced together,
and that they constitute separate worlds, i.e., Multimundialism. Practically
speaking, it is to adopt a stance of epistemic indifference towards others
who do not occupy the same world. This may seem like a very unappealing
stance to take. But it should seem less unappealing once we see that it would
be the only appropriate way to respond to normative insularity. If I were to
encounter someone whose beliefs are normatively insulated from mine, her
beliefs would not be candidates for belief by me, and yet it would not be
 Relativism and Recognition 269
because her beliefs were inconsistent with mine and hence ruled out as false,
but rather because her beliefs were not consistent with mine and so not
conjoinable with them. Thus to encounter normative insularity would be
to encounter an epistemic barrier—the truths on the other side of it would
not be truths-for-me even though they would be truths-for-others. I need
not be indifferent in every way towards those who live on the other side
of that barrier—for example, I can want to learn about their beliefs. But in
learning about them I would not be embracing them myself—that, at any
rate, is what it means to suppose that they are alternatives in the sense that
was at issue in the main twentieth-century debates about relativism. So the
epistemic indifference amounts to a recognition that if they are truths, they
are not truths-for-me.
This account of how we may formulate relativism, as Multimundialism,
has been relentlessly abstract, and it may not yet be clear how it would apply
to the one example I have introduced so far. Before clarifying that, let me
issue a caveat about the use of illustrative examples in connection with rela-
tivism: it is impossible to establish any interesting claim about relativism just
by appealing to an example. Even if it is possible to interpret what is going
on in a given example in such a way as to accord with a given formulation of
relativism, it is also always possible to interpret it in such a way as to accord
with a different formulation as well, and for that matter, in such a way that
it does not illustrate any recognizably relativist position. Thus we might say
in connection with the example about gustatory attitudes towards snails,
that Wright and I are just having an ordinary disagreement about whether
snails are delicious in which we are making contradictory claims that cannot
both be right. We might also say, as Wright himself suggests, that there is
no more to the truth about whether snails are delicious than what a subject
would be warranted in asserting on the basis of having tasted them, and so,
if he and I, both having tasted them, go on to make contradictory claims,
then we are both right. I have recommended against this interpretation on
the ground that it asks us to accept that there can be violations of the law
of non-contradiction. I have also argued that if contemporary relativists try
to avoid outright contradiction by portraying the truth of Wright’s and my
claims as relative to different contexts, in which different standards of war-
ranted assertibility apply, they will remove the appearance of disagreement
as well as contradiction. After all, it would allow Wright and me to agree on
two related points: first, we can both be right, and, so, second, there is noth-
ing to be resolved between us; and once we get this far in our understanding
of our situation, we may as well remove the appearance of disagreement
altogether by reinterpreting our claims in such a way that we are not actually
affirming and denying the same proposition, in the way I already suggested
above—so that what I am affirming is that snails are delicious-according-
to-Rovane’s-gustatory-standards, while what Wright is denying is that snails
delicious-according-to-Wright’s-gustatory-standards. The question then is,
how can this situation be of the sort that the relativist intuitively has in
270 Carol Rovane
mind, once the appearance of disagreement has been entirely removed? My
answer is that we must look for a reason why Wright’s and my claims can-
not be embraced together, even though they are not inconsistent. The reason
I have offered is that they are not consistent either, but are normatively
insulated from one another—that is, they are alternatives. Logically speak-
ing, this means that, while Wright’s and my claims do not logically rule each
other out in the way that they would if they were inconsistent, they also
cannot be logically conjoined in the way they could if they were consistent.
Metaphysically speaking, it means that he and I inhabit separate gustatory
worlds. Practically speaking, it means that he and I should adopt an attitude
of epistemic indifference toward one another, in the following sense: neither
of us can regard the other as possessing a truth about the gustatory proper-
ties of snails that we can take on together with the rest of our beliefs, and
yet neither of us has any normative basis on which to correct the other’s
belief either—in short, we have nothing to learn from each another con-
cerning the gustatory properties of snails. It may well seem to readers who
have anti-relativist instincts that it is of course possible for Wright and me
to embrace both of our beliefs together—each of us can perfectly well claim
both that snails are delicious-according-to-Rovane’s-gustatory-standards
and that they are not delicious-according-to-Wright’s-gustatory-standards.
But all the same, if we want to try to understand the relativist’s position as
sympathetically as we can, at least for the sake of formulating the issue that
seems to be in dispute between relativists and their opponents, then this
is how we should try to envisage the situation: although Wright and I can
learn about one another’s gustatory attitudes—that is, he and I can come
to understand one another’s gustatory attitudes and appreciate the sense in
which we are both right—there is nevertheless a sense in which neither of us
can adopt the other’s attitudes together with our own, which has to do with
the fact that neither of us can adopt the other’s attitudes as a basis for our
own gustatory judgments and responses.11
In the next sections, I will turn to the more serious and important case
of morality, and I will try to say more about what is involved in regarding
another’s moral attitudes in the way that would embody the Multimundi-
alist’s stance of epistemic indifference—and why it is not necessarily the
case that the Unimundialist’s stance of universal epistemic engagement is
always to be preferred. But I want to conclude this section with some initial
remarks concerning the distinction between universality and objectivity, and
why it makes sense to see the relativist as directly challenging the former
rather than the latter.
The universality of truth is the social meaning of the Unimundialist’s
commitment to the oneness of the world, on which there is just one compre-
hensive body of truths. In a way, I have already explained this social mean-
ing of Unimundialism under the heading of its practical meaning. I noted
that Unimundialism brings in train a stance of universal epistemic engage-
ment. As a Unimundialist, I must suppose that the beliefs of others are
 Relativism and Recognition 271
always either consistent or inconsistent with mine and that, if their beliefs
are consistent with mine, they can be embraced together with mine, and if
they are inconsistent with mine, then either I must reject them as false or
I must revise my beliefs in order to accommodate their truth (or perhaps
suspend belief on the matters at issue). This means that we can always learn
from one another—we can always acquire the truths that others possess,
and vice versa. To suppose that the same truths are thus available for us all
is the same thing as to suppose that they are universal—that if they are true
for anyone then they are true for everyone. It does not follow that we must
all be interested in the same truths; what follows is that all of the truths
are candidates for belief by all of us, should we become interested in them.
This is precisely what the Multimundialist denies when she denies that logi-
cal relations run everywhere among all truth-value-bearers. The barriers of
normative insularity that arise when logical relations are missing effectively
separate inquirers into separate worlds; those who inhabit different worlds
are not in a position to inquire into the same truths, but only into the truths
that hold within their own worlds; the truths they learn are not true for
everyone but only for those who inhabit the same world; thus, according to
the Multimundialist, truth is not universal but local.
Now that I have clarified why the logical issue that divides Unimun-
dialists and Multimundialists—concerning whether there is one world or
many—has to do with the universality of truth, let us consider how and why
it is different from the issue that divides realists from their opponents, con-
cerning whether reality is mind-independent. Realism does seem to provide
for a sense in which reality is one, for the realist may say that there is a single
totality of all that there is. This single totality might be conceived as some-
thing like a giant set that includes every single mind-independent thing that
there is within it. But note that there are no normative or logical constraints
on the relations that can hold among the members of this all-inclusive set
(except, of course, that it cannot contain itself). In other words, the members
of a set can be consistent, they can be inconsistent, they can be normatively
insulated from one another, and they can be without logical significance
at all (if it is possible that anything can be without logical significance).
Thus it seems to me that Kant was right: when we define things as radically
mind-independent, we thereby deprive ourselves of the right to infer any-
thing about their nature from the conditions of our own subjectivity—that
is, we cannot suppose that they must have the sort of logical significance
that they would have to have in order to be intelligible to us. This shows
that the oneness of reality that follows upon realism is not the same thing at
all as the oneness that the Unimundialist posits, which is an expressly logi-
cal conception of oneness. Another understanding of the difference between
these two conceptions of oneness is afforded by Thomas Nagel’s character-
ization of the ideal of objectivity that goes together with realism. This ideal
says that we should aspire to know things as they really are—as Kant would
say in themselves; and Nagel pointed out that this aspiration drives us to try
272 Carol Rovane
to transcend the limits of our own subjective viewpoints, so as to achieve a
View from Nowhere.12 In contrast, the Unimundialist holds that all of the
truths can in principle be embraced together; and what this vision of truth
requires is not a View from Nowhere but a View from Everywhere—that is,
a point of view from which every truth that can be apprehended from every
other point of view can be embraced together. I hope it is now clear how and
why there is at least a conceptual distinction between the sort of objectivity
to which realists characteristically aspire and the universality of truth that
follows upon Unimundialism.
The history of debate about relativism might seem to indicate that this
conceptual distinction holds little or no significance. For even if I am right
that analytic arguments for relativism in the twentieth century generally
did deliver a Multimundial conclusion—that people who employ alternative
conceptual schemes inhabit different worlds—I have also made clear that
they generally employed a neo-Kantian strategy whose first step was to deny
the mind-independence of reality, and so whatever challenge they posed for
the universality of truth went together with a challenge for objectivity too.
Indeed, it may seem hard to see how there could be any other way to chal-
lenge the universality of truth than by challenging its objectivity; and if there
is no other way, then perhaps moral philosophers are not really mistaken
after all when they assume that universality and objectivity must go hand
in hand.
Nevertheless, I do want to insist that the conceptual distinction between
universality and objectivity is important, and, furthermore, it is not just an
abstract point that deserves registering for the sake of conceptual clarity. It
is a point that can and should affect the task of assessing what reasons there
may be to affirm Multimundialism. On the one hand, it reminds us that not
every challenge to the realist ideal of objectivity will carry Multimundial
implications—for such a challenge might lead to a variety of idealism or
skepticism that does not call into question whether logical relations run
everywhere among all truth-value-bearers. On the other hand, it should also
make us wonder why every argument for Multimundialism should have
to start by challenging the realist ideal of objectivity—especially since, as
I just explained above, the realist conception of mind-independence does
not so much as speak to the logical issue that divides Multimundialists from
Unimundialists.

2. THE ANALYTIC-CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

Rorty gave us a picture of an analytic-continental divide in which he and

continental philosophers stand united against analytic philosophy and in
favor of relativism. He also gave us a picture of relativism that in a way
lines up with the main twentieth-century analytic debates about it, insofar
as he shared the presumption that I have just called into question but which
 Relativism and Recognition 273
was never questioned in those debates, that relativism and realism are mutu-
ally opposed doctrines—from which it would appear to follow that any
argument for relativism would have to employ a neo-Kantian strategy that
calls the mind-independence of reality into question. There was, however,
a real difference between Rorty and the other participants in those debates,
which he regarded as all-important. When he rejected the realist ideal of
objectivity, he did not did not take up a position within metaphysics that
stands opposed to realism—such as Berkeley’s idealism, Kant’s transcen-
dental idealism, the logical positivists’ radical empiricism, or contemporary
anti-realism. Rather, he proposed to set aside the issue of realism. He was
perfectly right in thinking that his own position came much closer to that
of the American pragmatists, who tended to agree with him that there is
no philosophical problem about the mind-world relation that needs to be
solved either by vindicating the realist ideal of objectivity, or by retreat-
ing to some variety of idealism. Yet all the same, it is still fair to say that
his position was a direct response to an alleged problem about objectivity
that had continued to be central for analytic philosophers, and, moreover,
he did a great deal to help entrench their presumption that giving up on
the realist ideal of objectivity—for whatever reason—is a first step on the
path to relativism. In contrast, the continental turn away from the ‘prob-
lem’ of objectivity was not a turn towards relativism, but, on the contrary,
was accompanied by significant resistance to it, especially in the domains of
morals and politics.
Rorty’s rejection of the realist ideal of objectivity was part of a wider
polemic against the Cartesian model of philosophical reflection, which is an
inside-out reflection that takes for granted our knowledge of our own states
of consciousness and then finds difficulties standing in the way of knowing
anything beyond them. Rorty responded to the Cartesian skeptical prob-
lematic by invoking a social account of normativity that is very close to the
account that Kripke arrived at through his engagement with Wittgenstein
on rule following. Here are the bones of that account: we cannot think with-
out concepts; we cannot apply concepts without bearing in mind that there
is a normative distinction between the correct vs. incorrect application of a
concept; the only way to ground this distinction is by equating the correct
application of a concept with what a community agrees is the correct appli-
cation. Obviously, if this social account of normativity is correct, then the
Cartesian skeptical problematic simply cannot get going—a reflective sub-
ject can never be locked inside her own consciousness, because it is a condi-
tion of her very ability to think at all that she be in epistemic touch with a
whole social world. The sort of relativism that Rorty took to follow is an
across-the-board relativism that would hold in any and all domains—for it
was his view that, in general, all there is to truth is what is warranted by
the lights of a given community agreement. Predictably, many analytic phi-
losophers responded to his arguments with the clichéd knee-jerk response
that I identified at the outset—they saw in his brand of across-the-board
274 Carol Rovane
relativism a threat that anything goes. Rorty’s counter-response was simply
to enjoy their discomfort. My own complaint is somewhat different—not
that his relativism poses a threat to objectivity, but that it is not clear what
he took relativism to be. If this seems an unfair complaint, just consider
what we learned in the last section about how much more precise it is pos-
sible to be in our formulations of it.
Continental philosophers had found a route out of the Cartesian prob-
lematic well before Rorty’s post-Wittgensteinian social account of norma-
tivity came on to the philosophical scene, through a line of argument that
was pioneered by Rousseau and later developed by Hegel (and by George
Herbert Mead in North America). According to this line of argument, first
person reflection on my own thoughts cannot proceed in the inside-out way
that Descartes supposed, but must rather proceed from the outside-in. The
reason why is that my attention is always naturally directed outwards on the
objects of my consciousness, and the only occasions when my attention is
directed inwards on myself and my own subjectivity are occasions when that
is required in order to apprehend and cope with other objects of my con-
sciousness. These would be social occasions in which I encounter another
subject for whom I am an object, where I cannot know this object-who-is-a-
social-subject without coming to know what it knows about me. It should
be clear that this account of self-consciousness as emerging through social
interaction rules out the Cartesian skeptical problematic just as effectively
as Rorty’s social account of normativity. Both accounts guarantee that a
self-conscious subject will not be locked inside her own consciousness, cut
off from epistemic relations to things outside it.
Yet the social interaction account of self-consciousness does not speak
directly to the issue of relativism, and this is something that it is easy to
miss in the wake of Davidson’s influential discussion of relativism. At
the end of his argument against it in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual
Scheme,” he declared that the so-called scheme-content distinction is a third
dogma of empiricism that we should give up along with the other two dog-
mas that Quine had identified, and once we give it up we can “reestablish
unmediated epistemic touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our
sentences and opinions true and false.”13 Davidson didn’t make fully clear
what he meant by those last words about “unmediated epistemic touch”
until much later, when he offered his own version of the social interaction
account of self-consciousness. This was his “triangulation argument,” in
which he aimed to show that thought itself is a social achievement.14 Since
he took thought to be essentially self-conscious, the triangulation argument
was about both thought and self-consciousness at once. For the purposes
of the argument, he construed thought as involving an epistemic relation
to objects, and his main premise was that we cannot be conscious of our
thoughts as thoughts without seeing ourselves as standing in epistemic rela-
tions to objects. He then reasoned that the only way in which we can come to
see ourselves as standing in epistemic relations to objects is by apprehending
 Relativism and Recognition 275
another subject’s point of view on those same objects, where that point
of view is also a point of view from which our own epistemic relations to
those objects are visible. So when that other point of view comes into view
for us, we finally gain through it a vantage point from which to see our
own epistemic relations to objects—where, to see ourselves from their van-
tage point is precisely to see ourselves as enjoying unmediated touch with
objects. Davidson was much more explicit about the anti-Cartesian thrust
of his argument than was generally so in the parallel continental discus-
sions of the social nature of self-consciousness, for he underscored that the
philosophical mistake that Descartes and others have made when they took
skepticism seriously was precisely to see our epistemic relations to objects
as mediated by something subjective. In Descartes’ case, that something was
consciousness, and Davidson claimed to see a similar mistake at work in the
relativist’s position, insofar as the relativist sees our epistemic relations to
things as mediated by some sort of conceptual scheme.
If Davidson himself connected his two arguments so closely—for the social
character of thought and against the scheme-content distinction—why do
I insist that the former argument does not really speak to the issue of relativ-
ism? The reason is similar to the one I offered earlier when I explained that
the realist’s conception of reality as mind-independent does not really speak
to the issue of relativism—at least not when we formulate relativism as Mul-
timundialism and frame the issue that divides relativists from their opponents
in terms of whether logical relations run everywhere, among all truth-value-
bearers. The social interaction account of self-consciousness does not really
speak to that logical issue either, because the claim that self-consciousness is
achieved through social interaction with others does not settle whether all
social subjects must inhabit a single world. I think even Davidson himself
could have been brought to see this point had it been put to him, and I say
this in spite of the fact that he clearly did believe that skepticism and relativ-
ism rest on a common mistake, which is to see our knowledge of objects as
mediated by something subjective. For in his anti-conceptual schemes argu-
ment he offered quite specific considerations against relativism that did not
enter into his triangulation argument at all—considerations that had to do
with how, in his view, all languages are inter-translatable and therefore have
the same expressive power.15
We should not expect that the specific line of resistance to relativism
that Davidson offered in his anti-conceptual schemes argument would be
widely shared among twentieth-century continental philosophers. On the
whole, they were much more historically minded, and therefore much more
willing to concede the starting point that set Rorty on his path to relativ-
ism, which is the claim that concepts are always historically situated, and
so not all of them are available to all people in all times and places—and it
is that very starting point that Davidson aimed to cut off with his argument
against the very idea of a conceptual scheme. So the question arises, what
form did resistance to relativism take among the more historically oriented
276 Carol Rovane
philosophers of the continent? I claimed in the introduction that their resis-
tance was largely moral. Now, this is hardly the place, and I am hardly the
person, to attempt a serious historical defense of this general claim. But
I do want to make a few observations about why Hegel and Marx should
be counted as Unimundialists, which I think should apply virtually any-
where in the continental tradition where their influence has reached. Then
I’ll briefly note the reasons why it is obvious that Habermas should also be
counted as a Unimundialist.
Although Hegel and Marx both held that there are truths concerning
what is the best form of life for human beings—a life in the right kind
of community with others—it is not immediately obvious that this suffices
to make them Unimundialists, given that they also held that it will not be
possible for human beings to live by those truths until the right historical
conditions obtain and that throughout the rest of human history, before
sufficient progress has occurred, it has not been possible for human beings
to live by those truths. For it seems to follow from this historical point that
it would not be wrong for human beings who live in different times and
places to live in different ways, and it is tempting to infer a Multimundial
conclusion—that when they live in these different ways they are living by
different truths, ones that hold in their different historical conditions. But
this Multimundial conclusion would follow only if there was a complete
absence of logical relations with respect to moral matters across different
historical contexts, and such an absence would rule out a kind of com-
parative evaluation to which Hegel and Marx were both clearly committed,
according to which the best form of life that will ultimately be available to
human beings will also be better than the forms of life that had gone before.
To be committed to making such comparative judgments is to be committed
to a kind of universal engagement with all others concerning moral mat-
ters. There are two further signs that progressivist interpretations of his-
tory conceive moral truths as universal. First, if history is a moral progress,
then whatever human beings have taken to be true in their actual historical
conditions will either survive the process of history or not—that is, it will
either emerge at the end of history as part of the truth about what the best
form of life is or it won’t—and if it does, then it will emerge as universally
true, and if it does not, then it will emerge as having in some real sense been
false, even though it was not optional for human beings to avoid taking it
to be true. Second, when we arrive at the time when it is possible to live the
best form of life and look back, we must view the human beings who lived
in times when that life was not available as lacking, both in moral develop-
ment and in moral knowledge—and the very idea of such moral deprivation
incorporates the sense in which the moral truths that will be known at the
end of history really are universal, for they provide the critical standard in
the light of which such moral deprivation can be conceived. This leaves us
only to consider how human beings can or should engage with one another
in the midst of history while is still unfolding. The Hegelian view definitely
 Relativism and Recognition 277
requires the Unimundial stance—for on the Hegelian view, it is precisely by
engaging with the ideas of others that the mistakes of history will get identi-
fied and corrected and left behind. The case of Marx is somewhat less clear,
because he took history to be a material process rather than a development
of Spirit. Yet the Unimundial stance is appropriate on the material interpre-
tation so long as the following holds: if, at times of historical change when
human beings find themselves in new historical conditions, it is appropriate
for them to regard their new conditions as an improvement over the old—if,
in other words, it is appropriate for them to adopt a critical attitude towards
earlier times in history. I simply do not see how this could fail to be appro-
priate if history is truly a progress.
Habermas’s view is, as I’ve said, explicitly committed to Unimundial-
ism. He recommended that in the public sphere of democratic debate, and
in communication more broadly, we should be maximally inclusive in our
conception of who our audience is—our aim should be to make claims that
could be accepted by a universal audience, provided of course that they are
reasonable and rational. This recommendation would be utterly incoherent
if he didn’t conceive truths as truths for everyone. It would be equally inco-
herent to embrace that conception while denying the Unimundial corollary
that there is a single, comprehensive body of truths that could in principle be
embraced together—for if there were any truths that could not be embraced
together from the same point of view, they would be truths for some and not
others, which is to say, they would not be universal after all.
I want to reiterate that the resistance to relativism that comes with these
three views—the Hegelian, the Marxian, and the Habermasian—is a moral
resistance, by which I mean, it is not driven by purely metaphysical consid-
erations. I do see, of course, that there are such things as Hegelian, Marx-
ian, and Habermasian metaphysics, and that these metaphysics have been
offered in support of correlative moral points of view—or at least as harmo-
nizing accompaniments. But I also see in these views a direct moral impera-
tive to moral engagement, the full force of which will be easier to appreciate
by contrast with the avowedly relativist attitude of Bernard Williams.
Williams did share the analytic philosopher’s characteristic preoccupa-
tion with the ‘problem’ of objectivity, and, like many, he regarded scientific
realism as an adequate response to that ‘problem’ in the domain of natural
facts that are the appropriate targets of scientific investigation. So when he
suggested that we should take moral relativism seriously, his official reason
was that there is a ‘problem’ about moral objectivity that cannot be solved
on the model of scientific realism. At the same time, he did much more than
other analytic philosophers to try to formulate relativism in such a way as
to bring out its practical and normative and ultimately moral significance.
I won’t be able to give a complete account of the many strands that made up
his overall view, but only a quick summary of the main strands that matter
for the contrast I want to draw here between his sympathy for moral relativ-
ism and continental resistance to it.
278 Carol Rovane
Williams proposed to formulate relativism in terms of the idea of a
merely notional confrontation between two systems of belief, which he dis-
tinguished from a real confrontation. The latter is really an ordinary dis-
agreement in the sense I described in the last section: the holders of one
system find a logical conflict between their system of beliefs and another
system held by others, and all parties agree that they cannot all be right;
so it is in principle possible for the holders of the first system to go over to
the second, if they come to believe that they are the mistaken parties and
that they can correct their mistake by adopting the second system in place
of their own. In contrast, in a merely notional confrontation, the holders
of one system find that they cannot go over to the other. Williams didn’t
say nearly enough about why they cannot go over, and the main reason
he gave sounds singularly unphilosophical: he said that they would lose
their grip on reality. One slightly more philosophical sounding thing he
said was that any effort to rationally appraise the other system would be
pointless—but again, he didn’t say enough about why such appraisal would
be pointless. I have argued at length elsewhere that, with his notion of a
merely notional confrontation, Williams was struggling to make sense of
the notion of alternativeness that had figured centrally in all of the main
twentieth century-debates about relativism, and that the shortcomings of
his account of that notion can easily be rectified by bringing in the idea of
normative insularity. If we construe a notional confrontation as an counter
with normative insularity, then it makes literal sense to say, as Williams did,
that one could not go over to the other side of it without losing one’s grip
on reality, for one would literally be leaving one world for another; and we
can also see why it would be pointless to try to rationally appraise the other
system of beliefs—it is because those beliefs would not stand in any logical
relations to one’s own beliefs.
I turn next to Williams’s reasons for taking relativism—now construed
as Multimundialism—seriously in the domain of morals. Because he was
much better informed than the average analytic philosopher about the vari-
ety of historical circumstances that human beings have faced, he was highly
critical of the universalist tendency in Western moral theorizing, which has
led philosophers to focus on what he called thin moral values like ‘right’
and ‘wrong,’ as opposed to thick moral values like ‘honor’ and ‘modesty.’
The former are too underdescribed to give real guidance to us in any real
choice situation, and it is only in conjunction with the latter that their
action-guiding content can be determined. Take, for example, the value we
all attach to well being, in the light of which it seems we can all agree that it
is wrong to deliberately harm someone. What we have here is a thin moral
value, which seems to support a universal moral principle. Yet we cannot
possibly take this allegedly universal moral principle as a guide in our moral
deliberations and actions unless we know how, concretely, our actions may
harm others, and this is something we cannot generally know without
bringing in thick moral values that speak to the specific ways in which life
around us is organized—the specific relationships and roles and institutions
 Relativism and Recognition 279
we find ourselves in, where all of these are precisely not a universal con-
dition. In historical conditions in which honor and modesty count for a
great deal, impugning them will count as a great harm, even though simi-
lar actions would not be harmful everywhere; likewise, in historical condi-
tions in which individual self-determination and privacy matter a great deal,
intruding in the lives of others in certain ways may count as great harms,
even though they wouldn’t qualify as harms elsewhere. To portray us all as
being bound by a single and universal principle “To harm is wrong” would
therefore be misleading—the portrayal would fail to register the many more
specific prohibitions by which people actually live in their different histori-
cal conditions—prohibitions against insulting honor, offending modesty,
engaging in paternalistic interference, violating someone’s right to privacy,
etc. But if the thick moral values by which we actually live have only local
application, then we ought to adopt the Multimundial stance towards oth-
ers who live in different contexts from our own and allow that we are sepa-
rated by barriers of normative insularity. Having recognized those barriers,
we may hold our own moral beliefs to be true without having to infer that
others who do not embrace them must be either mistaken or ignorant; and
we may find ourselves unable to adopt others’ moral beliefs together with
our own without having to infer that those others must be mistaken to hold
them. In short, we may find it appropriate to retreat from epistemic engage-
ment about putatively common moral matters to a stance of epistemic indif-
ference about moral matters that arise in circumstances not our own. This
doesn’t mean that we can’t be curious about others’ moral outlooks, or the
circumstances in which they arise. It means that all we can expect to gain
from our curiosity is sociological insight, as opposed to moral insight that
we might carry into our own lives—so the epistemic indifference reflects an
apprehension that we can neither give nor receive specifically moral instruc-
tion across a barrier of normative insularity in the moral domain.
Having argued that we do not and cannot all live by the same thick moral
values, Williams went on to consider: What should we make of the fact, if
it emerges to be a fact, that our varied moral outlooks end up converging
over the course of history? He did not take this question lightly, because he
thought that there has been a similar convergence in the history of science,
which invites a scientific realist explanation. According to this explanation,
scientific methods are designed in such a way as to let the mind-independent
facts tell us when our theories are failing to get them right, and so when our
theories converge, this can be explained by the hypothesis that we are suc-
ceeding in getting them right. But Williams did not see scope for a parallel
realist explanation of convergence in morals. He thought that if we find that
moral beliefs that incorporate certain thick moral values tend to disappear
over the course of history while others remain, and, moreover, if we find
that those that remain are ever more widely shared, this will not signify
that we have finally discovered certain moral truths that had somehow been
there all along, like natural facts out there waiting to be discovered; it would
signify rather that history had produced a homogeneous culture in which
280 Carol Rovane
different people no longer face substantially different moral problems, but
rather similar ones—ones that can appropriately be navigated by employing
the very same thick moral values. When we see the significance of moral
convergence in this way, we must turn our backs on the progressivist inter-
pretations of history given by Hegel and Marx. We will not view the form
of life that ultimately emerges from history as the best form of life; nor will
we view earlier forms of life as somehow less good. Rather than engaging
in such comparative evaluation, we will retreat to the disengaged stance of
the Multimundialist, who is prepared to countenance many distinct moral
worlds in which human beings have lived by moral truths that hold only
there, where they live.
We can accept Williams’s non-progressivist vision of history without
going so far as to agree with him that the moral relativist must relinquish the
realist ideal of objectivity in the moral domain. Let us suppose that it is not
possible for human beings to navigate the actual options they face except
by recourse to thick moral values that actually speak to those options. The
question then arises, is there any sense in which any of the courses of action
that are open to those human beings can actually be correct? I think the
answer Williams should give is yes. What would be correct is for them to
live in the best way that is actually feasible, given the actual options they
face, and given the best guidance they may draw from the thick moral values
that speak specifically to those options. Insofar as this is the correct way for
them to act, then they will be living by moral beliefs that are actually true.
And it does not matter that such moral truths are not universal—all that
matters is that such truths are a correct basis for living a life where they
apply. Thus, there is no loss of, or threat to, objectivity on this relativist
view, but only a loss of universality.
Williams made a regrettable move when he reasoned that the relativist
must give up on moral objectivity. The move led him to suppose that moral
relativism lands us with a new kind of uncomfortable and distinctly modern
moral challenge, which concerns how to maintain confidence in our own
moral outlook once we have given up on its objectivity. The reason why
Williams saw it as a new kind of challenge was that he thought the rise of
science has placed a new kind of pressure on moral philosophers, to try to
make sense of moral objectivity on the model of scientific objectivity. If he
was right, then the only way in which we could retain confidence in our
moral outlook is by scientizing it. He of course would never have recom-
mended that we do that, since he understood very well that the enterprise
of morality is wholly different from the enterprise of science. In this section,
I have been recommending that we can and should view morality as capable
of a kind of objectivity that is completely unlike the objectivity of science.
If I am right about that, then we shouldn’t have to suffer any crisis of con-
fidence in our own moral outlooks, even if we accept a historically based
argument for moral relativism. All that such an argument would show is
that the normative force of moral values cannot be universal, given that they
must speak to the options that human beings actually face, and given that
 Relativism and Recognition 281
these options are not the same in all times and places. When the normative
force of moral values is thus local rather than universal, they hold only in
some moral worlds and not others. But this does not mean that there are no
objective truths concerning how it is best for human beings to live; it only
means that these truths are not timeless and universal—unlike in the case
of science.
It is important not to confuse the Multimundial view of moral relativism
with the “When in Rome” view of morality. The Multimundialist does not
think we are free to move from world to world and take on whatever moral
outlook prevails there. We can, however, encounter worlds not our own,
and really experience them in that way—as not our own. (This is why Wil-
liams’s phrase “notional confrontation” is apt.) Such an experience is bound
to be somewhat alienating, and this brings me, finally, to why I see the
main resistance to moral relativism in the continental tradition as a moral
resistance. Hegel and Marx did view certain social conditions as unavoid-
ably alienating. But they thought the right response to alienation is always
to strive to overcome it, through the right kind of community with others.
And of course, when we explicitly embrace an ideal of universal commu-
nity, as Habermas did, we are recognizing a normative demand to overcome
alienation from others wherever and whenever it arises. So a common view
emerges from these parts of the continental tradition that we should never
permit ourselves to respond to others in the disengaged manner of the Mul-
timundialist, because doing so would close off a possibility of community,
which would be an essentially alienating thing to do and, as such, it would
work against human flourishing.16
This is a perfectly understandable moral concern about what it would
mean to live moral relativism. But there is a perfectly reasonable response
on behalf of moral relativism, which is equally moral in its orientation.
While the Unimundialist may put up moral resistance against adopting the
Multimundial stance on the ground that it accepts the possibility of a kind of
alienation from others that would be insuperable, the Multimundialist may
in turn put up moral resistance against adopting the Unimundial stance on
the ground that it refuses to acknowledge the genuine differences that there
are in human situations and the implication that one’s own moral values
may have only local normative force—the moral concern here is that refus-
ing to recognize this can be a moral mistake, a mistake that has arguably
been repeated throughout the long human history of conquest and coloniza-
tion, in which conquerors and colonizers wrongly assumed that any moral
differences they encountered must be instances of ignorance and error.
Many philosophers would automatically suppose that whatever moral
divisions there may be over moral relativism, we should still seek to find
a purely metaphysical basis on which to resolve them. If we are persuaded
by Williams that people require thick moral values by which to live, then
we will not find this metaphysical basis in the standard moral theories that
employ only thin moral concepts. And if we are persuaded by arguments
that I have given in this section, then we will not find this metaphysical basis
282 Carol Rovane
in arguments for and against moral objectivity—for it is the universality of
moral truths that is at issue in debates about moral relativism, which is a
quite different thing. As I see it, then, the only remaining metaphysical issue
that could possibly be relevant is whether history is indeed a progress in the
way that Hegel, Marx, and some others have claimed—for that would settle
the issue about moral relativism in favor of Unimundialism.
I am frankly skeptical that we can settle the question of history in a
value-neutral way. So I do not find myself in step with philosophers who
expect to resolve the issue of moral relativism on purely metaphysical
grounds. I think moral grounds may well have to be brought in. But note
that, in any case, the moral considerations I have raised here, both for and
against moral relativism, would still remain to be addressed even if we
were to eschew metaphysics altogether, as Rorty recommended. He may
have thought that we can go ahead and embrace moral relativism without
addressing the specifically moral sources of resistance to it, on the basis of
his social account of normativity and the across-the-board relativism that he
took to follow. But those of us who think there may be more to normativity
than communal consensus cannot settle the issue in Rorty’s way.

3. MORAL RELATIVISM AND RECOGNITION

All that has gone before may be regarded as set-up for what can now be a
relatively short discussion of how we can reconcile moral relativism with
Honneth’s proposal to base morality in recognition.
I want to begin by canvassing some powerful considerations that seem
to speak against such a reconciliation. If we accept the social interaction
account of self-consciousness, then to exist at all as a self-conscious being
is to stand in social relations with others with whom one stands in rela-
tions of mutual recognition. If we have rational capacities, then we will be
capable of specifically moral reflection, through which we can recognize
a certain kind of parity among all points of view—we can recognize that,
just as things matter from our own points of view, they likewise matter
from other points of view as well. And then we can also recognize that it
matters to us all to be recognized by others. For not only is it a fact that
being so recognized is a condition of our very existence as self-conscious
beings, but it is also a fact that when such beings undertake moral reflec-
tion, and consider how they should act given that there are other points of
view from which things matter, it will matter to them that others who are
also capable of moral reflection will duly take into account what matters to
them—which is to say, it will matter to them to be recognized as objects of
moral consideration as well as subjects who can extend such consideration.
Kant wrought out of these facts a highly unified account of what mutual
recognition among self-conscious rational beings might deliver by way of
moral insight: such beings will recognize a moral law whose normative force
is universal, in the sense that it is binding on all of them; they will recognize
 Relativism and Recognition 283
that this universally binding law is also universal in scope, in the sense that
it takes them all equally into account; they will recognize their common
rational nature; they will recognize themselves as forming a single moral
kind that includes all and only rational beings like them, who are all capable
of mutual recognition; thus, they will all mutually recognize one another as
members of a single kind who all recognize that they all fall under and are
bound by a single moral law.
Even if we agree that differently situated people will face different mor-
ally significant options and choices, which they cannot navigate without
the aid of thick moral values that are not universal, we must also concede
that the forms of mutual recognition that Kant exploited in his account
of morality are available to them all. In conceding this, we are really con-
ceding that there is a universal concept of a person, where to be a person
is to stand in relations of mutual recognition to all other persons. When
we frame the Kantian view in terms of personhood, we neatly sum up one
way in which it matters to us all to be recognized by others: we want to be
recognized as persons by all other persons, and if any person should with-
hold this recognition from us we shall experience that as a wrong of some
kind. This way in which recognition clearly matters to all persons has obvi-
ously been central in political movements for civil rights, in which various
human beings have claimed that it was unjust that they (and other members
of their ‘groups’) were not recognized as meriting equal status as persons
under the law. But to a historically minded philosopher, this rights-based
way of thinking about the importance of personhood does not track time-
less moral truths to be framed in terms of thin moral values; it is a way of
thinking that makes sense only when certain political institutions and sup-
porting social practices are in place, which afford life in accordance with a
whole slate of liberal values thickly construed. The progressivist interpreta-
tion of the moral significance of the emergence of these values, or other
values that a Hegel or a Marx would expect to come later, seems optional,
at least to those of us who suspect that Williams’s suggestion may have been
right—that any convergence that now seems to be emerging in our moral
outlooks may simply reflect a process of cultural homogenization, which is
not guaranteed to issue in better forms of life, but simply new ones. I think
the argument that Williams offered against the progressivist view of history
has even deeper relativist implications than I have so far managed to trace.
So far I have merely emphasized that history isn’t necessarily issuing in ever
better forms of life. But let me now add a related point about history that
strengthens the case for moral relativism, which is that history is not a pro-
cess that can be brought directly under our intentional control. Insofar as
that is so, then it simply isn’t appropriate to attempt any comparative moral
evaluation of different forms of life. Why should this not be appropriate?
Because moral evaluation is pointless if it cannot be action-guiding. Thus,
comparative moral evaluation of whole forms of life would be pointful only
if we could make and unmake them at will—and to suppose that we could
would be to suppose that history is indeed under our intentional control.
284 Carol Rovane
However, although this feature of history—that it cannot be brought
under our direct intentional control—does strengthen the case for moral
relativism, it doesn’t decisively settle it. For we can still raise the question,
should we not always strive to overcome alienation from others and, in
doing so, strive to realize whatever potential there is for life in community
with them? Should we not always morally prefer that way of relating to
others? This is another way of getting at why Honneth may feel that there
is philosophical work to do in order to reconcile a morality of recognition
with moral relativism. Can we really be giving others due recognition when
we adopt the Multimundial stance of the relativist—that is, when we do
not strive to overcome the form of alienation that goes together with that
stance?
Here I think it is crucial to acknowledge that we cannot so much as con-
sider the possibility of adopting the Multimundial stance towards others
unless we already recognize them as persons in the sense I just described
above, that we associate so closely with Kantian morality and theories of
liberal rights. This recognition is sometimes only implicit, because it is not
always accompanied by the language of personhood. But all the same, there
is a clear distinction between those whom we might engage because they
are the sorts of beings who can be engaged by someone and those, such as
our pets, whom we can’t engage because they are not the sorts of things
that can be engaged by anyone. That is the distinction between persons and
non-persons. So I’m saying that if we could ever appropriately adopt the
Multimundial stance, it would have to be towards a person; indeed, it is
precisely because persons are the sorts of beings who can be engaged that
it is an issue of such significance whether to approach our dealings with
them in the Unimundial way that presumes that we should and must always
attempt engagement, or in the Multimundial way that allows that it may be
appropriate to refrain from such attempts in certain conditions.
Like Williams and virtually all others, Honneth presumes that to give
up on the idea that morals are necessarily universal is to give up on their
objectivity. I’ve already said what I have to say about why that is a regret-
table philosophical error. It muddies the waters as we take up the important
moral issue about whether universal engagement with all others is or is not
appropriate, by fanning the flames of anxiety that talk of relativism so often
produces in philosophers, who worry that if there is no objectivity then
anything goes. But to recognize that there has been a diversity of historical
conditions with which people have had to cope is to recognize perfectly
objective reasons why they might appropriately bring to bear different thick
moral values that speak to the moral options and choices that they confront.
The crux of the matter concerning the issue of moral relativism, then, is to
figure out whether that is the human situation. It would be nothing like a
failure of recognition to learn that it is. On the contrary, it would be to fully
recognize the persons we encounter, in a way that fully appreciates the con-
crete historical conditions in which they must live their moral lives.
 Relativism and Recognition 285
How should we proceed if we are not sure who is really right in the
debate about moral relativism—if we are not sure whether history really is a
progress, or if there will ever be any meaningful scope for ideals of universal
human community? Some moralists might think the best way to respond
to such doubts is by acting as if the Unimundial view is true—for then we
can be sure that if there is any real prospect for historical progress towards
universal ideals, we will not have missed the opportunity to realize them.
But note that if we take that tack, then if we ever find that we are unable
to take on the moral beliefs of others together with our own, we shall be
forced to reject them as false; and in being so forced, we may fail to see that
their beliefs speak to moral options and choices that we do not ourselves
face and that they are good and true guides for those who face those options
and choices. It may be the better tack, therefore, when we encounter oth-
ers whose moral beliefs differ from our own, to investigate with some care
whether we and they really do face common moral problems or different
ones. As we investigate this, we leave open the possibility that we may have
nothing to learn from them or to teach them about the proper moral bases
of our respective moral choices—not because there are no moral truths at
stake, but because we need different moral truths to live by. There is no
danger that such an open-minded investigation would foreclose possibilities
of engagement and community with others or stop the progress of history,
if that is what history is. If we do face common moral problems, for which
we need recourse to the same moral truths, this will surely emerge from the
investigation. But we will not have arrived at this outcome while refusing
to recognize the specificity of human circumstances and the possibility that
they have thrown up many moral worlds and not just one. If that possibil-
ity is our actual situation, I reiterate that we shall not fail in any morally
important form of recognition when we recognize that it is so.

NOTES

1 I will be discussing Rorty’s overall position in a very general way throughout

this paper, but not discussing any of his texts in close detail. My discussion
will be guided by my understanding of his most relevant works, including
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press 1979), Con-
sequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press 1981), Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press 1989), and Objectivity, Rel-
ativism and Truth (Cambridge University Press 1991).
2 See his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (Proceedings and Ad-
dresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 47, 1973–1974).
3 See his “Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism,” in
Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Beri, Rolf-P. Horstmann,
and Lorenz Kruger (Reidel Publishing, 1979).
4 See my The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism (Harvard University Press
2014) for a full defense of this formulation of the relativist’s position, as well
as some initial attempts to evaluate what reasons there are for and against it
once it is formulated along these lines.
286 Carol Rovane
5 For a mature working out of his position, see his Between Facts and Norms
(MIT Press 1995) and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (MIT
Press 1999).
6 Among his many works on this topic, the most important are “The Truth
in Relativism” (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series Vol. 75,
1974–1975) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana Press 1985).
7 Honneth’s book, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts (Polity Press 1995) contains his basic account of recognition; for
a brief statement of his position on relativism and recognition, see “Social
Critique between Anthropology and Reconstruction: An Interview with Axel
Honneth” (Norsk Filosofisk Tiddskrift 2010 No. 3).
8 The Blackwell Companion to Relativism, ed. S. Hales (Blackwell 2011) gives
a good sense of the current state of that literature.
9 Wright argued for this alleged connection between relativism and anti-realism
in a series of papers, of which perhaps the most representative is “Intuition,
Relativism, Realism and Rhubarb” in Truth and Realism, ed. P. Greenough
and M. Lynch (Oxford University Press 2006).
10 See The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism, op. cit.
11 There are some common confusions that arise in connection with what it
means to “share” attitudes, especially in the case of evaluative attitudes. It
does not suffice for two people to share the very same evaluative attitudes
that they agree about what their respective evaluative attitudes are—they
must each hold that attitude, and what is required in order to hold an evalu-
ative attitude is that one be committed to taking that attitude as a basis for
one’s own deliberations and actions. In the example under discussion, even
though Wright and I come to agree about what our respective evaluative at-
titudes are toward the gustatory properties of snails, neither of us thereby
comes to hold the other’s attitude, in the sense of taking it as a basis for
our own deliberations and actions—thus in particular, the fact that snails are
delicious-according-to-Wright’s-gustatory-standards is not supposed to be a
basis on which I should try to work out whether they are worth eating.
12 See his book of that title, The View From Nowhere (Oxford University Press
1986).
13 See Davidson, op. cit.
14 He pursues this line of argument in a series of papers that are all reprinted in
the third volume of his collective papers, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
(Oxford University Press 2001)—see in particular, “Rational Animals,” “The
Second Person,” and “The Emergence of Thought.”
15 See my “The Philosophical Significance of Holism” in Companion to David-
son, ed. E. Lepore and K. Ludwig (Wiley-Blackwell 2013) for an account of
how, unlike arguments against relativism from realism, the overall account of
meaning and belief that drives Davidson’s anti-conceptual schemes argument
most definitely does address the logical issue that divides Multimundialists
from their Unimundialist opponents—in favor of the Unimunidal conclusion
that logical relations do indeed run everywhere among all truth-value-bearers.
16 For a recent argument for this conclusion by a philosopher of analytic train-
ing, see Akeel Bilgrami, “Secularism, Liberalism and Relativism” in A Com-
panion to Relativism, ed. S. Hales (Blackwell 2011).
13 Revolutionary Actions and
Events
Andrew Cutrofello

For most analytic philosophers, events are ubiquitous. Whether identified

with property exemplifications (Kim 1996), causes and effects (Davidson
1969), repeatable states of affairs (Chisholm 1970), or entities of some
other sort, “analytic” events pervade worlds. By contrast, for many con-
tinental philosophers, events are comparatively rare. Instead of pervading
worlds, “continental” events unexpectedly disclose (Heidegger 1989), actu-
alize (Deleuze 1969), or radically transform (Badiou 1988) worlds. Gener-
ally speaking, analytic events are ordinary or normal, continental events
extraordinary or revolutionary.
Likewise with actions. For most analytic philosophers, an action is a nor-
mal event with the right sort of intentional structure. For many continental
philosophers, an action is a revolutionary event with a correspondingly more
demanding intentional structure. Generalizing again, “analytic” actions are
ordinary or normal, “continental” actions extraordinary or revolutionary.
In this paper, I will discuss revolutionary actions and events using a theo-
retical framework more commonly used to think about normal actions and
events, namely, John McTaggart’s distinction between A series and B series
representations of time. I will focus on Hannah Arendt’s conception of revo-
lutionary actions and Alain Badiou’s conception of revolutionary events.
I will represent Arendt as a kind of A series theorist and Badiou as a kind of
B series theorist. After contrasting their positions, including their respective
interpretations of the French Revolution, I will briefly consider the signifi-
cance of revolutionary actions and events for theories of possible worlds.
Drawing on David Lewis’s distinction between modal realism and the ersatz
form of modal realism he calls linguistic ersatzism, I will distinguish four
different types of possible worlds, two of which permit, and two of which
preclude, revolutionary actions and events.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes three different
types of intentional activity: labor, work, and action.1 Each is character-
ized by a distinctive type of temporality. Labor consists in the maintenance
and reproduction of life. Its temporality is cyclical, like that of the natural
needs it seeks to satisfy. Work (poiesis) interrupts cyclical nature by setting,
and aiming at, a future end. Its temporality is linear and historical. Finally,
288 Andrew Cutrofello
action (praxis) interrupts history by beginning something new in the pres-
ent. Its temporality is “natal,” or emergent. All three—cyclical labor, teleo-
logical work, and emergent action—are essential to human existence, but
action is the noblest and most distinctively human of the three.
Each of these activities has its own proper sphere: family life (labor),
civil society (work), and the polis (action). The polis, or public sphere, is
the proper space for action because action is inherently political. It is also
inherently revolutionary. If the polis were the fruit of labor, it would be
something to be consumed. If it were a finished product, such as a table or
a work of art, it would be something to be used or admired, occasionally
repaired but not continually transformed. Because it is constituted through
action, it must be reconstituted, again and again. All action has this recon-
stituting, or revolutionary, dimension: it gives birth not only to itself, but to
the political space within which it appears. At the same time, it has a conser-
vative dimension, for it must sustain the conditions necessary for continual
political renewal. One of the most fundamental problems of politics is to
reconcile these two aspects of revolutionary action.
Arendt discusses this problem in On Revolution, her comparative analysis
of the American and French revolutions. In her view, both revolutions failed
in the long run, but for completely different reasons. The French Revolution
began with the Third Estate’s declaration of itself as the National Assembly.
Its first order of business was to give France a revolutionary constitution,
one that could sustain the revolution itself. Despite numerous efforts, this
task was never satisfactorily completed. The first republican constitution
(the second of three constitutions adopted between 1791 and 1795) was
suspended by the dictatorial government that made terror the order of the
day. Arendt identifies several causes of the revolutionaries’ failure to make
action the order of the day. These included their lack of prior participatory
political experience, their Rousseau-inspired belief in the non-divisibility of
political power, and the overwhelming needs of the poor, whose appearance
on the revolutionary stage made it impossible to disentangle social problems
from political problems (Arendt 1963, pp. 50, 66ff., 157).
The American revolutionaries faced none of these obstacles. They had
prior participatory political experience; they rejected Rousseau’s ideal of
an undivided general will in favor of Montesquieu’s model of a division
of power; and, in the absence of either a strong abolitionist movement or
a slave rebellion, they faced no comparable problem of economic misery
(Arendt 1963, pp. 58–62, 141, 167–170). For these reasons, they were
able to adopt a republican constitution with comparative ease. However,
despite making long-term provisions for future constitutional amendments,
the American revolutionaries failed to incorporate into their constitution
the conditions necessary to sustain revolutionary action. They took it for
granted that the qualitative superiority of “public happiness” over “private
welfare” would not be forgotten (Arendt 1963, pp. 117–119). Jefferson soon
perceived the danger of growing political quietism. At first he believed that
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 289
only periodic rebellions could keep the American revolutionary spirit alive
(Arendt 1963, p. 225). Eventually, he advocated a more stable institutional
remedy, proposing that state counties be divided into wards so that every
citizen would have the opportunity to directly participate in the day-to-day
business of government (Arendt 1963, p. 241). Without such an opportu-
nity, he warned, Americans would gradually cease to think of themselves as
citizens, i.e., as political agents. Arendt argues that this is exactly what hap-
pened. Within a generation, Americans were by and large more interested
in a negative right to be protected from government interference than in a
positive right to participate in politics. They had forgotten the pleasures of
revolutionary action and had come to think of themselves primarily as pri-
vate laborers and workers. The revolutionary ideal of action in the presence
of others had been reduced to a limited right to cast an occasional ballot in
a semi-private voting booth.
Jefferson’s idealized wards hearkened back not only to the town hall
meetings of the American Revolution, but also to the clubs and societ-
ies that flourished during the first years of the French Revolution. When
Robespierre was just another member of the Jacobin Club, he defended the
rights of citizens to directly participate in the political life of the nation.
Later, as a member of the ruling Committee of Public Safety, he criticized
the clubs and societies for fragmenting the general will (Arendt 1963,
p. 232). It was enough, he now maintained, for citizens to be represented
by the revolutionary government instead of presenting themselves in public
forums. Former members of peremptorily disbanded clubs and societies
suddenly found themselves disempowered. Ironically, so did the members
of the Committee of Public Safety (and the Committee of General Secu-
rity), for despite possessing a (precarious) monopoly on the means of vio-
lence, they lacked genuine political power, which for Arendt can only be
generated through the joint actions of citizens. Stripped of power, even
enterprises of as great pith and moment as the French Revolution lose the
name of action.
From the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth,
comparable instances of sustained revolutionary action were relatively few
and far between. Writing in 1963, Arendt’s primary examples include the
Paris Commune of 1871 and the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that spon-
taneously appeared in Russia in 1905, in Germany in 1918, and in Budapest
during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (Arendt 1963,pp. 249, 254).2
Unfortunately, each of these revolutionary forms of self-government was
quickly destroyed or incorporated into a ruling party. By 1963, the party
system had become nearly universal. Modern systems of government differ
from one another insofar as they involve single, dual, or multiple party rule
(Arendt 1963, pp. 259–261). Some governments are more stable than oth-
ers, and some guarantee a wider range of civil and even political rights. But
even the best of representing parties is no substitute for self-presentation in
public.
290 Andrew Cutrofello
The difference between the party system and the council system can be
modeled set-theoretically. Parties, whatever their number, partition a set
into non-overlapping subsets. Party members are represented by the party
itself. Councils, by contrast, are vehicles for self-presentation. Spontane-
ously generated local councils group themselves together to form a larger
set of which they become subsets. Members of first-order subsets are repre-
sented in higher-order subsets by having one of their members belong to the
latter. Thus the council system includes a representational dimension. But
unlike representation in a party, which relieves the majority of citizens of
any self-presentation, representation in a higher-order council presupposes
widespread, if not universal, self-presentation at the first-order level.
In principle, a council system could allow for greater complexity. Citizens
could belong to more than one first-order subset—for instance, by being
a member of a neighborhood council, a workplace council, a chatroom
council, etc. Likewise, there could be multiple membership and overlap-
ping subsets at higher levels. At the ideal, if somewhat fanciful and cer-
tainly impractical, limit, a complete Arendtian council system would have
the structure of a power set, i.e., the set of all subsets of the body politic
(including, therefore, singleton sets, the empty set, and the set consisting
of the body politic as a whole). The term “power set” felicitously captures
Arendt’s idea that power is generated through acts of collective constitution.
The revolutionary power of the power set, or republic, would be conserved
by a generic political subset (a revolutionary “élite”) whose authority would
rest not on any non-political property shared by its members (such as intel-
ligence, wealth, etc.), but on its fidelity to the constitutional conditions nec-
essary for sustained revolutionary action.3
Representing Arendt’s council system in set theoretic terms makes it
easier to compare her conception of revolutionary actions to Badiou’s con-
ception of revolutionary events.4 Like Arendt, Badiou advocates a “politics
without party,” but he doesn’t support her alternative model of a coun-
cil system (Badiou 2005 [1998], p. 120). Instead of identifying revolution-
ary action with the self-presentation of citizens, Badiou focuses on the
self-presentation of an “event.” An event, in his technical sense of the term,
is a member of a set, or “situation,” that is indiscernible in that situation
prior to its self-presentation. For an event to appear, it must be borne wit-
ness to by a collective “militant” subject that functions at the margins of the
state, or power set, rather than as a governing “elite” (Badiou 1988, p. xvi).
A Badiouian event requires an “evental site,” a presented subset of a
situation none of whose members are presented in that situation (Badiou
1988, p. 183). An event takes place by presenting some of the site’s elements
while simultaneously self-presenting, or naming, itself. Whether or not an
event takes place is always a contestable matter. Badiou’s primary example
of a possible event is the French Revolution, one of whose (contested) ele-
ments is or was the name “the French Revolution” (Badiou 1988, p. 189).
It is impossible to prove that the French Revolution, or any other supposed
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 291
event, is or was a genuine event. (I will explain in a minute why I keep
hesitating between the tenseless “is” and the tensed “was.”) Because Badiou
identifies ZFC set theory with ontology, and because ZFC set theory prohib-
its self-membership, events are ontologically impossible or “illegal” (Badiou
1988, p. 216). According to Badiou, however, they are trans-ontologically
possible, for reasons having to do with the independence of the continuum
hypothesis, and thus with an entirely different interpretation of the politi-
cal significance of power sets than the one I have somewhat speculatively
attributed to Arendt.
For Badiou, situations are infinite in a specifically Cantorian sense. If
the cardinality of a situation is transfinite, then the cardinality of its power
set must be of a higher order of infinity. Were the continuum hypothesis
provable for ZFC set theory, the cardinality of the power set of an infinite
set would necessarily be that of the next infinity in the hierarchy of trans-
finite numbers. In such a case, it would be impossible to produce the type
of “generic” set that Badiou identifies with the infinite truth of an event.
In the absence of such an infinite truth, there could be no violation of the
ontological prohibition of events. There could only be veridical statements
about ordinary happenings, whether these be construed as property exem-
plifications, causes and effects, repeatable states of affairs, etc. To avoid this
implication, Badiou appeals to the independence of the continuum hypoth-
esis. Kurt Gödel demonstrated that the continuum hypothesis is compatible
with ZFC set theory, but Paul Cohen later showed that it isn’t provable in
ZFC theory. Specifically, Cohen showed that from any countably infinite set
it is possible to extract, or “force,” a “generic” subset that isn’t a member
of the original set. Adding this generic subset to the original set makes it
possible to identify the cardinality of the power set of the original set with
the cardinality of any of an indefinite number of higher order sets. Badiou’s
interpretive strategy is to identify the generic subset with the infinite truth
of an event.5
Armed with this interpretation of Cohen’s “generic procedure,” Badiou
can justify his own fidelity to the French Revolution, that is, his subjec-
tive conviction that the French Revolution counts as a genuine event. Fidel-
ity to an event can only be a matter of subjective conviction because it is
always “too soon to tell” if the purported event will have taken place.6 This
temporal constraint is not merely epistemic but ontological, because the
infinite procedure by which it will have been determined whether or not
an event has taken place is itself temporal. Only retroactively will an event
have taken place by having been connected in the right way to subsequent
event-generating “interventions” and event-discerning acts of fidelity. Thus
truths of events are “produced” in time. Yet despite his evident commitment
to the openness of the future, Badiou characterizes truths of events as eter-
nal or timelessly true.
This paradoxical position has A series and B series aspects. For McTag-
gart, A series events belong, successively, to the future, the present, and the
292 Andrew Cutrofello
past. Statements about their temporal relations to one another are irreduc-
ibly tensed. By contrast, B series events are spread out on a temporal contin-
uum. They are ordered by relations of succession and simultaneity, but they
are not divided into future, present, and past. Hence statements about their
temporal relations to one another are essentially tenseless. Badiouian events
exhibit both sets of characteristics. From the standpoint of faithful subjects,
events can be divided into those that have occurred, those that are occur-
ring, and those that may occur in the future. But from the standpoint of the
infinite truths associated with them, events form an eternal series. In Logics
of Worlds, as we will see in a minute, Badiou attempts to do justice to the
A series aspects of this two-fold picture. In Being and Event, he emphasizes
the B series aspects. Faithful subjects project themselves into the standpoint
of eternity by dating events, that is, by locating them on revolutionary cal-
endars whose temporal relations are tenseless (hence Badiou’s recourse to
phrases such as “five years after the October Revolution,” “France between
1789 and, let’s say, 1794,” etc. [BE 114, 189]). Without an A series indexi-
cal, calendrical relations between events can be specified only in the B series
terms of “before e,” “after e,” and “simultaneous with e,” for various val-
ues of e. A faithful subject may say that an event has taken place, is taking
place, or will take place, but such a statement can have no determinate truth
value until it can be dated. (Nor can it have a “veridicality” value, for in
Badiou’s sense of the term veridicalities are finite rather than infinite.)
Unlike Badiou, Arendt has an A series conception of revolutionary
actions. Earlier I called attention to her view that revolutionary actions
create the space in which they appear. They also create the time of their
appearance, namely, the present. Arendt conceives the present as a “hiatus,”
or “gap,” “between past and future” (Arendt 1968). Revolutionary action
interrupts the flow of historical time, the time measured by clocks and calen-
dars. Hence revolutions cannot be dated in the way that ordinary activities
and events can:

If one dated the revolution, it was as though one had done the impos-
sible, namely, one had dated the hiatus in time in terms of chronology,
that is, of historical time.
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure
of complete arbitrariness. . . . it is as though it came out of nowhere in
either time or space. For a moment, the moment of beginning, it is as
though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself,
or as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its
continuity. (Arendt 1963, p. 198)

Slavoj Žižek has characterized Arendt’s “suspension of temporality” as fun-

damentally “Badiouian” in character, but there is a fundamental difference
between Arendt’s and Badiou’s conceptions of the way in which an action
or event suspends temporality (Žižek 2009, p. 122). For Badiou, an event
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 293
suspends temporality by producing an eternal truth.7 For Arendt, an action
suspends temporality by disclosing the present. The apparent impossibility
of dating a revolution is due to the fact that there is no absolute B series
sequence in which the present can be inserted. We can situate present actions
with respect to the past and the future, but these are relative rather than
absolute designations. Relative to the present, we characterize past actions
as past, present actions as present, and future actions as future. These are
the tenses, respectively, of historical, political, and speculative discourse.
History tells us what has happened, politics what is happening, and specula-
tion what might happen. As a resolute A series theorist, Arendt emphasizes
the non-reducibility of these three tensed discourses. To date a revolution
is to reduce political discourse about the present to historical and/or specu-
lative discourse about the past and future. Arendt thinks that Hegel’s and
Marx’s dialectical discourse reduces politics to history and/or speculation in
just this way. Dialectical statements treat the present as if it fulfilled a past
future and/or anticipated a future past (Arendt 1982, pp. 4–5, 57). By rein-
serting the undatable present into an absolute B series calendar, they reduce
revolutionary actions to objects of historical and speculative reflection.
Leaving aside the merits of Arendt’s interpretation and critique of Hegel
and Marx, Badiou’s discourse is not reductively dialectical in this sense.
While retaining the B series standpoint of eternity, he situates it with respect
to the A series perspective of faithful subjects.8 In Logics of Worlds, he
distinguishes three subjective attitudes toward events: those of “faithful,”
“reactive,” and “obscure” subjects (Badiou 2006, p. 47ff.). Faithful sub-
jects affirm the present reality of an event, reactive subjects deny the present
reality of an event, and obscure subjects occlude the present reality of an
event. These intentional stances are essentially tensed. However, despite this
new emphasis on the present, Badiou’s conception of evental truth retains a
tenseless dimension. An event still has the character of a participation-like
procedure through which an eternal truth is produced. Instead of distin-
guishing between historical, political, and speculative statements about
an event, Badiou distinguishes the discourses of the reactive, obscure, and
faithful subjects. Reactive subjects deny that the French Revolution will
ever take place, obscure subjects mask its taking place, and faithful subjects
affirm its having taken place. Yet despite the tensed language that I have just
used, and that Badiou’s quarreling subjects may use as well, it is in fact only
superficially tensed. Its deeper metaphysical structure is that of a B series
debate in which the reactive subject insists on beforeness (nothing succeeds
the Ancien Régime), the faithful subject on afterness (the French Revolution
succeeds the Ancien Régime), and the obscure subject on non-simultaneity
(the French Revolution doesn’t co-occur with the ordinary happenings
that occur between 1789 and 1794). What Logics of Worlds has added to
Being and Event is a phenomenological description of the ways in which
these intentional attitudes appear to time-bound subjects. They appear in
the guise of subjective convictions for which Badiou’s faithful, reactive, and
294 Andrew Cutrofello
obscure subjects can only purport universality. This gives the discursive con-
flict between them the appearance of a Kantian quarrel between competing
judgments of taste.
Up until now I have ignored the fact that Arendt treats revolutions as
series of actions, while Badiou treats them as series of events. According
to Arendt, there is a fundamental difference between the engaged stand-
point of an agent and the disengaged standpoint of a spectator who observes
and judges events. Given Badiou’s characterization of revolutions as events
rather than actions, his theory of generic truth procedures might seem to
have a fundamentally spectatorial character. This impression is reinforced
by the resemblance of the act of a faithful subject—the bearing witness to
an event—to a Kantian judgment of taste. However, Badiou’s faithful sub-
jects don’t simply judge events from afar; on the contrary, they intervene in
situations by bearing witness to events. According to Badiou, moreover, it
is this active dimension of his generic truth procedures that is missing from
Arendt’s political philosophy. As he rightly points out, it is she rather than
he who explicitly models political discourse on Kantian judgments of taste.
Such judgments, he contends, are anything but truth procedures (Badiou
1998, pp. 12–13; cf. Arendt 1982, passim). Likewise, he accuses Arendt of
sharing Kant’s moral horror at the actual revolutionary deeds performed by
the French revolutionaries.
In “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Pro-
gressing?” Kant argues that human history is inexorably progressing toward
the republican ideal that the French revolutionaries sought to actualize. He
bases this prediction not on the actions of the revolutionaries, but on the
enthusiasm felt by those who witnessed them (Kant 1798, p. 302). Instead
of endorsing a militant politics, Kant advocates a merely discursive politics
(as in his famous formula “Argue as much as you will and about what-
ever you will, but obey!” [Kant 1784, p. 18]). Badiou suggests that the
same holds for Arendt. On her conception of the council system, political
action consists in nothing more than the voicing of opinions. Moreover, the
“power set” model that I have speculatively attributed to her seems to pre-
clude the possibility of revolutionary events by limiting the “excess” of the
power set over the situation it governs. In the language of Being and Event,
Arendt seems to give us a “constructivist” rather than a “generic” politics,
one that, again, can yield no truth procedure.
There are, however, several problems with this critique. First, Arendt
doesn’t actually condemn revolutionary action. On the contrary, she fully
embraces its self-justifying character. Her primary objection to the deeds of
the Jacobin populists is that they conflated political freedom with liberation
from economic necessity. In this respect, Badiou is right to characterize her
politics as anti-Jacobin. Arendt believed, as did Condorcet and the Bris-
sotins, that there could be no successful revolution, in France or anywhere
else, without the appearance of laboring (or simply starving) citizens in the
public sphere. Anyone restricted to a life of labor is, as it were, “not yet”
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 295
in the present insofar as she hasn’t appeared in the polis. Conversely, any-
one lucky enough to work toward self-conceived ends is directed toward
the future and so, in this sense, “no longer” in the present. Revolution-
ary action requires collective self-constitution in the present. What Arendt
objected to in Jacobin populism was its subversion of this process of collec-
tive self-constitution. In claiming a monopoly of power, the militant Jaco-
bins acted as if they wanted “a revolution without a revolution”—to turn
Robespierre’s famous phrase against Robespierre himself (Robespierre 2007
[1792], p. 43).
A second problem with the Badiouian critique is that the function
of Arendt’s council system isn’t to limit excess by reducing presenta-
tion to representation—that, as we have seen, is the function of political
parties—but to enable newcomers to appear and act. Likewise, Arendt
doesn’t restrict political intervention to speech acts in constituted assem-
blies. Instead, she endorses acts of civil disobedience that are themselves
inherently revolutionary (Arendt 1972). Finally, the reason she compares
political opinions to Kantian judgments of taste isn’t to distinguish them
from truth procedures per se, but to contrast them with dogmatic truth
procedures, a point to which I will return. Together, these aspects of her pic-
ture of revolutionary action suggest that her alternative to Badiou’s generic
politics isn’t a constructivist politics that would preclude the possibility of
revolutionary events. Rather, it is a political application of an orientation of
thought that Badiou overlooks: what Paul Livingston has characterized as
the “paradoxico-critical” orientation (Livingston 2012, pp. 11, 56ff.).
As Livingston points out, Badiou’s generic orientation rests on a choice
that ZFC set theory leaves undetermined. The choice, first articulated
by Gödel, is between completeness and consistency for formal systems.
Badiou’s generic orientation sacrifices completeness for the sake of preserv-
ing consistency. The paradoxico-critical orientation preserves complete-
ness at the cost of accepting inconsistencies. These two “post-Cantorian”
orientations can both be opposed to two others: the “constructivist” and
the “onto-theological.”9 The constructivist orientation limits excess (and
so prohibits revolutionary events) by restricting the hierarchy of transfi-
nite sets to those that can be constructed on the basis of predicates avail-
able in lower-order sets. The onto-theological orientation (which Badiou
calls “transcendent”) circumvents Gödel’s dilemma by positing a complete
and consistent totality that transcends the axiomatic constraints of formal
systems.
Each of these four orientations can be associated with a different type
of politics. Badiou’s generic politics is based on an affirmation of multiplic-
ity and repudiation of every claim to totality. Arendt, despite or because
of her critical engagement with totalitarianism, seems to accept the ideal
of a political totality on condition that its inherent inconsistencies be
acknowledged and embraced (Arendt 1951). Inconsistency in politics takes
the form of incompatible truth procedures, a discursive predicament that
296 Andrew Cutrofello
she represents as the clash of political opinions.10 Political opinions aren’t
ordinary beliefs about veridicalities. If they were, then in the language
of Kant they would be determining judgments subject to the principle
of non-contradiction (Kant 1790, p. 67). Neither are they non-cognitive
expressions of preference. If they were, they would be equivalent to Kan-
tian judgments about the agreeable and so wouldn’t logically conflict at
all (Kant 1790, p. 91). Instead, they are cognitively reflective judgments
about singular cases (e.g., “This is beautiful,” or, for Arendt [though not
for Kant], “This is good” or “This is just”). Unlike logically reflective judg-
ments that seek universals under which to subsume particulars, political
opinions resemble aesthetically reflective judgments in that they concern
the singular, i.e., unique, forms of particulars. Such judgments purport sub-
jective universality, and as such they can and do contradict each other (e.g.,
“This is just” vs. “This is not just”). For Kant, aesthetic arguments aim at a
consensus the possibility of which is grounded in the idea of a transcendent
object (what he calls, in the case of judgments of taste, the “supersensible
substratum of humanity” [Kant 2000, p. 216]). For Arendt, who rejects
Kant’s transcendent orientation in favor of what I am characterizing, with
Livingston, as a paradoxico-critical orientation, there is nothing transcen-
dent to guarantee that political consensus will ever be reached, strive for
it though we may. The reason she compares political opinions to Kantian
judgments of taste is not to privilege judgment over action (pace Badiou),
but to model the discursive inconsistencies that a paradoxico-critical poli-
tics must affirm.
Badiou’s generic orientation yields a politics of consistent truth proce-
dures. It doesn’t preclude political contestation, but it does preclude incon-
sistent truths. Badiou’s faithful, reactive, and obscure subjects may each
purport subjective universality for their respective points of view, but there
is only a single, infinite truth about which they disagree. That truth, as we
have seen, transcends the finite A series order of political contestation. It is,
as it were, a date on a calendar, giving the series of revolutionary events its
B series character. By contrast, Arendt’s paradoxico-critical orientation pre-
cludes any reference to eternal truths that could reconcile inconsistent truth
procedures. This explains, from another point of view, the sense in which,
for her, it is impossible to date revolutions.
Each of the other two orientations of thought—the constructivist and
onto-theological—can also be associated with a particular type of politics.
For our purposes, what matters is that they both preclude the possibility of
revolutionary actions and events. The constructivist orientation does so in
the way indicated by Badiou, namely, by restricting the universe of infinite
sets to those that can be constructed on the basis of predicates available in
lower-order sets. So restricted, a constructed set or world can contain only
ordinary actions and events. Within each set or world, the series of actions
and events has the form of a consistent A series for subjects situated within
it. (We will see how in a minute.)
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 297
The onto-theological orientation precludes the possibility of revolution-
ary actions and events in a different way, namely, by positing a complete and
consistent totality that isn’t subject to the axiomatic constraints of set the-
ory. Once again we are left with only ordinary actions and events, conceived
now not in situ but sub specie aeternitas. In transcending discourse, the
onto-theological orientation has transcended time as well. Hence its series
of actions and events has the character of a B series—or, rather, a C series.
This is McTaggart’s original position. McTaggart began with the par-
adox that all events (including actions) have the seemingly incompatible
properties of being future, present, and past. Clearly, he thought, no event
can be “at once” future, present, and past. However, we cannot avoid the
paradox by dropping the “at once” in favor of “successively,” for that sim-
ply pushes the problem to a meta-level and thence to an infinite regress.
It does so because we must explain in A series terms what it means for
events to have the A series properties “successively.” To avoid this paradox,
McTaggart’s B series theorist posits mere ordering relations. But the B series
doesn’t allow for change, and so doesn’t count as a temporal series at all.
McTaggart concludes that time is unreal. However, he doesn’t deny the real-
ity of the elements of the B series or the order that they constitute. Instead
he identifies the elements—what we misperceive as temporal events—with
sets, and he identifies the order that these sets constitute with that of an
“Inclusion Series” (McTaggart 1927, p. 247). On this picture, “earlier”
events are simply proper parts of “later” events. Because we misperceive the
Inclusion Series—or “C series”—as a temporal series, it seems meaningful
to us to characterize inclusion relations as B series relations. But this is an
illusion. Were there such a thing as temporal change, only the A series could
adequately model it. B series thinking arises from inserting the atemporal C
series into the A series. To arrive at an adequate picture of reality, we must
subtract the C series from the A series setting that gives it the appearance
of a B series.
Like McTaggart, Badiou models the series of ordinary happenings as an
inclusion series (Badiou 1988, p. 143). Unlike McTaggart, Badiou goes on
to distinguish the series of ordinary happenings (“nature”) from the series
of genuine (revolutionary) events (“history”) (Badiou 1988, pp. 197–198).
Since natural sequences of ordinary happenings are ahistorical, they can
be regarded as comprising a fully atemporal C series. If nothing else hap-
pened but what happens in nature there would be no such thing as a true
event, for events involve genuine change (on this point Badiou is in com-
plete agreement with McTaggart). Badiou’s theory of generic truth proce-
dures can be understood as an account of what would happen if a genuinely
temporal entity appeared within McTaggart’s fully atemporal C series. An
event doesn’t just interrupt the sequence of ordinary happenings; it intro-
duces temporality itself into an otherwise atemporal reality. By allowing for
the possibility of change, Badiou justifies his representation of the series of
events as a B series.
298 Andrew Cutrofello
Arendt’s paradoxico-critical orientation offers us another way of
responding to McTaggart’s paradox. In a word, we can accept it. When
we say that an event will take place, we are speculating. When we say that
it is taking place, we express a political opinion. When we say that it has
taken place, we are making an historical judgment. Thus to say that events
are successively future, present, and past is to say that they are the objects,
successively, of speculative, political, and historical discourse. The challenge
raised by McTaggart is to say whether “successively” should be construed
as a speculative, political, or historical term, or, instead, as a neutral B series
term. As a paradoxico-critic, Arendt could reply that her use of “succes-
sively” cannot be reduced to speculative, political, or historical terms. It
is, in fact, a B series term. She could say this, however, without abandon-
ing her commitment to the A series picture, for her concession would sim-
ply amount to accepting the paradox: an option uniquely available to a
paradoxico-critic.
Perhaps we can make sense of this picture by reconsidering the way in
which the present is situated between past and future. In The Life of the
Mind, Arendt suggests that, in the absence of thinking subjects, “there would
be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change”
(Arendt 1978, p. 208). I take this to mean that, in the absence of thinking
subjects, time would in fact have a B series structure. When we observe our-
selves from this asubjective point of view, we are not so much adopting the
standpoint of eternity as counterfactually representing the world we inhabit
without us in it. When we do this, we lose our temporal bearings because
in subtracting ourselves we subtract the present with respect to which past
and future can be distinguished. There is something inherently paradoxical
in the B series picture that emerges when we perform this thought experi-
ment, for we can make sense of change only from our usual A series vantage
point, namely, the present. There is something similarly disorienting about
McTaggart’s invitation to consider what we mean when we say that events
are successively future, present, and past. The paradox is that we both can
and cannot transcend our A series perspective.
For Arendt, the present isn’t simply the junction between future and past,
the place through which future events must pass to become past events. For
thinking subjects, the present is the gap where two opposing vectors meet:
the vector of an infinite past and the vector of an infinite future. Situated
in this gap, we are doubly burdened: with “the dead weight of the past”
and dread of the unborn future. We seek refuge from the past in hope for
the future, and refuge from the future in “nostalgia” for the past (Arendt
1978, p. 205). One way of dealing with this unstable oscillation is to seek
to transcend time itself, to take refuge in the thought of eternity. Another is,
simply, to think. Arendt suggests that thinking is a way of responding to the
fact that time past and time future are both bearing down on (without being
quite present in) time present.11 When we think, we move from the pres-
ent “toward an undetermined end,” but without transcending time (Arendt
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 299
1978, p. 209). Likewise, when we act we respond to the past and future
by opening up the gap between them. In this respect, revolutionary actions
take regard of ancestors and descendants. But it is always with respect to
a privileged moment in time—now—that the present past is past and the
present future is future.
Analytic responses to McTaggart’s paradox have typically taken one of
two lines: either to defend the A series picture of time against the alleged
paradox or else to defend the B series picture of time. Many, if not all,
A series theorists are constructivists. On their view, time genuinely passes
and there are only ordinary actions and events. Conversely, most B series
theorists adopt a modified version of McTaggart’s onto-theological or tran-
scendent orientation. Instead of interpreting the B series as a C series—i.e.,
as an inclusion series of sets—they characterize it as a temporal series, albeit
one that doesn’t allow for genuine change. In support of their view, B series
theorists often appeal to the “space-like” representation of time in general
relativity. They are comfortable with the idea that four-dimensional objects
have “temporal parts” as well as “spatial parts.”
Just as the four orientations can be associated with four different con-
ceptions of time, so they can be associated with four different conceptions
of possible worlds. Two of the four are instanced in David Lewis’s modal
realism and the constructivist position that he calls “linguistic ersatzism”
(Lewis 1986a, p. 142ff.). Lewis’s modal realism is onto-theological—or it
would be if he retained the theistic ground of Leibniz’s modal realism; as
is, we can simply call it transcendent. On this view, logical space is com-
plete. It is divided into distinct possible worlds, each of which is fully deter-
minate. Each world is united by its own spatiotemporal relations or some
analogue thereof (Lewis 1986a, pp. 74–75). Within each world, everything
that exists is compossible, so there are no ontological inconsistencies in the
sense of impossible worlds (Lewis 1986a, p. 7n.). All worlds have the same
ontological status, so the one we call actual has no special privilege (Lewis
1986a, pp. 92–93). Likewise for every part of each world’s spacetime: what-
ever portion of ours we call the present has no special privilege. Lewis is a
B series theorist. He regards events as properties of regions of spacetime
(Lewis 1986b). Collectively, events comprise an entire world’s history, but
it is a history not in Badiou’s sense, for Lewisian events are all normal. In
effect, all time is eternally present, making all time “unredeemable.”12
Linguistic ersatzers, or constructivists, deny the trans-linguistic reality
of Lewis’s logical space. They take possible worlds to be set theoretic rep-
resentations of the actual world, the only world there is. Only one such
representation is accurate. The others are false. Constructivists, then, are
actualists.13 They are typically also presentists, for just as they take the
actual world to be the only real world, so they take the present to be the
only real part of time. Worldly objects aren’t spread out in time in the way
that they are spread out in space; if they exist for more than an instant they
“endure” rather than “perdure” (Lewis 1986a, p. 202). Constructivists can,
300 Andrew Cutrofello
though they need not, accept the openness of the future, but their theoreti-
cal framework precludes the possibility of revolutionary events. Even if it
isn’t determined now whether or not a sea battle will occur tomorrow, its
eventual occurring or not occurring won’t involve a radical transformation
of the existing ontological order. In Lewis’s terminology, it won’t involve the
instantiation of a hitherto alien property, a property not previously present
in the world.14 Whatever can happen in the constructivist’s world is already
present as possible; things change, but possibilities don’t. Constructivists are
A series thinkers, but not paradoxico-critical A series thinkers. Instead of
accepting McTaggart’s paradox, they must respond to it in some way. One
extreme way is to deny that past and future have any reality at all: if events
are only real in the present, they don’t successively have the properties of
being future, present, and past.
Finally, Arendt and Badiou offer paradoxico-critical and generic repre-
sentations of possible worlds. Arendtian worlds—or perhaps we should say
Arendt’s world, for she may be an actualist of some sort—are (or is) com-
plete but inconsistent. Conversely, Badiou’s worlds—here we must speak of
an incomplete infinity—are consistent but incomplete. A crucial feature of
each of these models is the way in which it incorporates irreducibly de se
attitudes. For Badiou, every event requires a faithful subject for whom it is
an event. This requirement is connected to the A series setting that makes his
series of events a B series rather than a C series. Likewise, for Arendt, revo-
lutionary actions and events are objects of irreducibly de se attitudes. As we
have seen, these attitudes may conflict, whether as clashing intentions (incon-
sistent actions) or as clashing opinions (inconsistent truth procedures).15
A paradoxico-critic need not (and probably should not) posit inconsistencies
everywhere. She need only posit them at the limits of the world.16 That way,
the worlds in question will still be possible and not impossible.
Badiou’s generic orientation requires that events be essentially rare: an
event must stand out against a normal background; that is, it must appear
to faithful subjects as an exception, albeit one that attests to a universal
truth about an entire situation. Nevertheless, we might wonder whether
there are worlds in which every happening is revolutionary for some subject.
All we would need, it seems, is enough faith or fidelity to go around. There
couldn’t be a plenum of events from any (let alone every) available perspec-
tive, but we could theoretically have enough perspectives (those of monads,
for example) to fill out the whole. In such a world, analytic debates about
the nature of ordinary actions and events would take on new significance.
If ordinary events are property exemplifications, then every event would
exemplify a hitherto alien property for some subject. If, instead, ordinary
events are causes and effects, then every event would interrupt the causal
nexus for some subject. If events are repeatable states of affairs, then every
event would repeat something unrepeatable.17
Finally, and most importantly, we may ask whether our world con-
tains revolutionary actions and events, and how we should think about
designated revolutions such as the French Revolution. If the four types of
 Revolutionary Actions and Events 301
worlds—transcendent, constructivist, generic, and paradoxico-critical—
partition logical space into regions, then the answer to this question will
depend on where our world lies in logical space. But if the four types of
worlds are taken instead to represent alternative models of worlds in gen-
eral, then the answer will depend on the nature of logical space itself: an
issue that may, in the end, be determinable not by ontological prose but by
a kind of metaphysical poetry.18

NOTES

1 Together, these three activities comprise the “vita activa,” in contrast to the
“vita contemplativa.” See Arendt (1958), especially Chapters III, IV, and V.
2 Arendt (1963), pp 249, 254. Schell (2006) argues that the Hungarian Revo-
lution was the first of a “wave” of subsequent “democratic revolutions” of
which Arendt would have approved (Arendt 1963, p. xxi). This may be so, but
it should be noted that Arendt’s revolutionary ideal was far more republican
(in the eighteenth-century sense) than democratic (in the modern sense).
3 Arendt makes clear her ambivalence about the word “élite,” which she herself
always puts it in scare-quotes: “My quarrel with the ‘élite’ is that the term
implies an oligarchic form of government, the domination of the many by the
rule of a few. . . . The ‘élite sprung from the people’ [a phrase used by Maurice
Duverger] has replaced the pre-modern élites of birth and wealth; it has no-
where enabled the people qua people to make their entrance into political life
and to become participators in public affairs. . . . Of course the men who sat
in the councils were also an élite, they were even the only political élite, of the
people and sprung from the people, the modern world has ever seen, but they
were not nominated from above and not supported from below. With respect
to the elementary councils that sprang up wherever people lived or worked
together, one is tempted to say that they had selected themselves; those who
organized themselves were those who cared and those who took the initiative;
they were the political élite of the people brought into the open by the revolu-
tion” (Arendt 1963, pp. 268–270).
4 I do not mean to give the impression that all Badiouian events are revolu-
tionary in the conventional political sense. Besides political events, Badiou
recognizes amatory, artistic, and scientific events, speaking, for example, of
“the Galilean revolution” (Badiou 1988, p. 76), “Eudoxas’ [sic] geometriz-
ing revolution” (Badiou 1988, p. 167), “the conceptual revolution of Evariste
Galois” (Badiou 1988, p. 214), etc.
5 Badiou’s Cantorian account of the trans-ontological possibility of ontologi-
cally prohibited events resembles Kant’s account of the noumenal possibility
of phenomenally impossible acts of freedom (acts of freedom being phenom-
enally “illegal” in the sense of violating deterministic laws of nature). Ba-
diouian events are exceptions in the sequence of ordinary happenings, just
as Kantian acts of freedom are exceptions in the sequence of heteronomous
performances. To every Badiouian event there corresponds a transcendental
subject whose faithful action attests to an infinite truth associated with it, just
as for Kant a dutiful subject acts as if it were giving a new law to nature.
6 Here I allude to the famous (and famously inscrutable) remark of Zhou Enlai,
the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, who is reported to have told
Henry Kissinger in 1972 that it was “too soon to tell” what the significance
of the French Revolution was. For context and contrasting interpretations see
William Doyle’s and Krishan Kumar’s successive letters to the editor in The
302 Andrew Cutrofello
Times Literary Supplement, 8 November 2013 (“Tocqueville in China”) and
15 November 2013 (“Which Revolution?”). For Badiou, I am suggesting, it is
always “too soon to tell” whether a purported event has taken place, despite
the confident asseverations of faithful subjects.
7 This is why it can seem, as it does to James Williams, that “Badiou denies
time” (Williams 2012, p. 115).
8 This is arguably true of Hegel and Marx as well. Their shared appreciation
of the distinctive character of the present as the proper time (and place) for
action can be seen in their respective appropriations of Aesop’s fable of the
braggart who claimed to have jumped further than anyone else had—but else-
where (at Rhodes), and in the past. To this he was challenged “Hic Rhodus,
hic saltus” (“Here’s Rhodes; the jump should take place here [and now]”).
Hegel draws the moral that “each individual is . . . a child of his time” (Hegel
1820, p. 21). Marx ups the ante by changing the noun “saltus” (jump) to
the imperative “salta” (dance!) (Marx 1852, p. 35). Badiou repeats Marx’s
version just before introducing his conception of an event (Badiou 1988,
p. 188).
9 Livingston (2012), pp. 54, 67ff. Cf. Badiou (1988), p. 298.
10 Or what Jean-François Lyotard (1983) calls differends, unresolvable conflicts
between incompatible idioms.
11 Here I allude to the language of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Eliot (1944),
p. 3.
12 Once again I allude to Eliot: “If all time is eternally present / All time is
­unredeemable” (Eliot 1944, p. 3). Badiou finds a similar point expressed in
Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dès”: “nothing will have taken place but [the] place
[rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu].” Cited in Badiou (1988), p. 204. Or in the
words of Pete Townsend: “There’s nothing in the street / Looks any different
to me.”
13 For Lewis’s characterization of this position, see Lewis (1986a), pp. 142–165.
Pictorial ersatzism may be another instance of a constructivist approach
to modality. Magical ersatzism is another instance of the ontological (or
onto-theological) approach.
14 Lewis (1986a), p. 159. I do not mean to imply that for Lewis it would make
sense for an alien property to be instantiated at any point of a world’s his-
tory, for then it wouldn’t be alien to that world. The point I am making about
“hitherto alien” properties applies only within the A series framework that the
constructivist shares with the paradoxico-critic.
15 Carol Rovane’s multimundialism, which posits a plurality of actual worlds,
could perhaps be construed as another paradoxico-critical model. See Rovane
(2013) and “Relativism and Recognition,” Chapter 12 of this volume.
16 See Livingston (2012, p. 36) and (cited there) Priest (2002).
17 This is how Deleuze characterizes “festive” events: “This is the apparent para-
dox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’ ” Deleuze (1968), p. 1.
18 For helpful input on this chapter I thank my co-editors, Jeffrey Bell and Paul
Livingston, as well as Sara Beardsworth and Maria Alexandra Keller.

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14 Varieties of Shared Intentionality
Tomasello and Classical
Phenomenology
Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne

1. INTRODUCTION

There are many things we do together: we enjoy listening to Beethoven’s

Ninth Symphony, we paint a house, we discuss a proof of Fermat’s last
theorem together. We also share a tradition with our ancestors, the world of
nature with people from distant countries we have never met and responsi-
bility with our co-workers for the outcome of a given task. There are many
ways in which we can be together, have joint goals, share intentions, emo-
tions and experiences. However, current accounts tend to explain these
different ways of being-together in terms of one single form of collective
intentionality. In doing so, they endorse three main assumptions:
First, most theories that purport to give an account of collective inten-
tionality assume, even if many times implicitly, a “uniformity thesis,” i.e.,
they are committed to the idea that all forms of collective intentionality ulti-
mately reduce to one. Some understand it as a form of mutual commitment
(Gilbert 2013), others as a state entertained by an irreducible plural subject
(Schmid 2009). Some have thought it to be construed out of the individual’s
mental states, either as states with an irreducible we-mode (Searle 1995) or
as states that, suitably combined, provide the basis for a shared state (Brat-
man 1992).
Second, the literature on collective intentionality has focused primarily
on intentional action, asking questions such as when an action can be said
to be collective, when an intention can be said to be shared, or when we are
assuming collective responsibility for a given action or the practical reason-
ing behind it.
Third, most accounts of collective intentionality analyze it in abstraction
from the various specific forms that social relationships assume in actual
and historical contexts. In this way, they ignore the possibility that collec-
tive intentionality might assume different forms according to specific social
types and relations, with respect to the dimensions of past and future, and
in connection with different communal practices and institutional settings.
In this contribution, we want to explore the topic of shared intentional-
ity and ultimately criticize all three assumptions. We shall (i) investigate
306 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
how the debate on the nature of collective intentionality might be enriched
by not accepting the uniformity thesis. We will take our point of depar-
ture in the idea that we can participate in collective endeavors in different
ways and defend the idea that we need to operate with a richer framework,
if we are to understand the features of these different forms of collective
intentionality. Furthermore, we will (ii) discuss different concrete forms of
collective intentionality, widening the spectrum of the analysis, and include
not only joint or collective action, but also shared emotions, shared norms,
and forms of intentionality that underlie communal life as exhibited in shar-
ing institutions, social types, a common history, and our capacity to think
and reason about states of affairs. In pursuing (i) and (ii) we will show how
classical phenomenology offers important resources for these tasks. We will
conclude by showing how collective intentionality can be a topic around
which some strands in analytic philosophy of mind and language and clas-
sical phenomenology can profitably work together.

2. JOINT AND COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY

Most accounts of collective intentionality assume, though often tacitly, that

in thinking of collective intentionality we need to draw a line between indi-
vidual forms of intentionality, including thinking, feeling, and acting, and
collective forms, in which a number of different subjects come together in
the performance of such activities. What has been less explored, and often
neglected, is the possibility that shared intentionality may come in many
forms and, importantly, in forms that in significant ways differ from each
other. In the recent literature about the topic, there is nevertheless a note-
worthy exception: Michael Tomasello’s most recent book A Natural History
of Human Thinking (Tomasello 2014). This book draws on previous work
that Tomasello and others have been carrying out over the last decade or so
and defends the idea that in order to make sense of both the ontogeny and
phylogeny of human thinking, we need to distinguish two different forms
of shared intentionality (Tomasello 2014, p. 31). Even if Tomasello’s inves-
tigation of shared intentionality is indebted to the contribution of various
philosophers of action, including Bratman, Searle, and Gilbert, his distinc-
tion between these two forms of shared intentionality is original and not to
be found in the work of these authors. The two forms in question are the
following:

1.  A form of shared intentionality that involves small-scale collaboration

and joint attention. Tomasello calls this joint intentionality since it in-
volves a short-lived relation between ad hoc pairs of individuals in the
here and now. He also speaks of it in terms of a second-personal joint
intentionality, or as a we-intentionality with a particular other (2014,
p. 33). This second-personal social engagement between ‘I’ and ‘you’
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 307
has two minimal characteristics: (i) rather than observing the social
interaction from the outside, the individual is directly participating in
it; and (ii) the interaction does not take place with some general indefi-
nite group, but with a specific individual with whom there is a dyadic
relationship (2014, p. 48).
2. A form of shared intentionality that refers to large-scale forms of col-
laboration (and competition), that is, forms that go beyond the here
and now and involve the construction of a common cultural ground
(involving conventions, norms, and institutions) as well as in-group/
out-group differentiations (2014, p. 5–6). This is what Tomasello calls
collective intentionality.1

Some further specifications concerning Tomasello’s account of shared

intentionality are necessary. First, in his discussion of joint intentionality,
Tomasello is adamant that it requires both sharedness and individuality.
These requirements are not unlike those that must be met in the case of
joint attention. Just as joint attention doesn’t involve a fusion of perspec-
tives, but an awareness of the fact that different perspectives are brought
to bear on the same target—in the case of a young child, the whole point
of proto-declaratives is to bring someone else’s focus of attention in line
with her own—joint intentionality requires that each partner plays her own
interdependent role.
Second, Tomasello links the distinction between joint and collective
intentionality to issues of validity and objectivity. When two people are
aware that they are both attending to the same thing simultaneously, an
understanding of different perspectives might arise (2014, p. 45). In the
case of joint intentionality, the individual could encounter another distinct
perspective that he or she could contrast with her own. However, although
we already can have several perspectives in play at this stage—when dealing
with small-scale I-thou relations—we are still far from having attained real
objectivity in the sense of universal validity. A significant further step takes
place the moment individuals become group-directed or group-minded,
i.e., the moment they move from a restricted second-person dyadic interac-
tion and adopt a group identity, i.e., start to identify not only with coexist-
ing strangers belonging to the same in-group, but also with ancestors and
descendants. From being dyadic, the we transforms into something more
akin to an enduring culture, where we do things in a certain way, and where
we identify with others who share this common ground, even if we don’t
know them personally as individuals (2014, pp. 83–84). For an individual
born into a culture with an already existing structured inventory of concep-
tualizations and norms, those standards will seem natural and readymade.
This process of group-identification allows for a new level of generality. It
is not simply a question of adding more perspectives to the two already in
play, but a move to the level of any perspective whatsoever, i.e., a view from
everywhere (and nowhere) (2014, p. 122).
308 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
Third, Tomasello introduces a corresponding distinction between
second-person and group-level normative pressure. In the former case, I am
sensitive to how another individual evaluates me and might regulate my
actions accordingly. In the latter case, a more objective or agent-neutral
standard is at play. Even if the group norm is enforced by a particular indi-
vidual, she is, so to speak, doing so as an emissary of the group as a whole
(2014, p. 88).
Tomasello rightly, in our view, rejects the idea that language is the alpha
and omega of sociality. Obviously, language does play a crucial role for the
development of human thinking, but it plays that role only at a relatively
late stage in the process. It is, as Tomasello puts it, “the capstone of uniquely
human cognition and thinking, not its foundation” (2014, p. 127). In fact,
language could not get off the ground, nor make its decisive contribution,
if it was not because of an already existing social infrastructure (2014,
p. 128). However, in explaining how this process unfolds and what this
awareness of perspective differences present in joint intentionality amounts
to, Tomasello takes on board without further ado a number of assump-
tions found in the traditional theory-of-mind literature on social cognition.
He highlights the need for recursive inferences, simulations, and ongoing
self-monitoring and metarepresentations (2014, pp. 5, 9, 143) and speaks of
how communication requires me to simulate my partner’s abductive infer-
ences ahead of time, in order to anticipate how I might be comprehended or
interpreted by him (2014, p. 94).2 Tomasello is in part following Bratman
here (1992), whose conception of joint intentionality also requires the satis-
faction of a common knowledge clause that involves metarepresentations of
other people’s mental states.
Despite Bratman’s influence, Tomasello must still be recognized for enrich-
ing the standard proposal by emphasizing the importance of integrating an
account of social cognition and an understanding of face-to-face encounters
into a proper model of joint action. Having said that, much of what Toma-
sello writes about social cognition and the dyadic encounter comes across
as somewhat problematic.3 Tomasello simply assumes that an account of
social cognition must start from the observation of mere behaviour and then
explain how we come to infer the existence of an underlying inner mind.
Whereas Tomasello has earlier spoken out in favor of a simulation theory
of mind (1999, p. 70), according to which individuals understand others in
analogy with themselves, he now appears to opt for a model that integrates
elements from both simulation theory (ST) and theory-theory (TT) of mind.
He is thereby following the consensus view, which has shifted from consid-
ering ST and TT as mutually exclusive theoretical paradigms to recognizing
the need for a hybrid account that draws on both theories (cf. Nichols and
Stich 2003, p. 132). What Tomasello overlooks in this move, however, is
the possibility that some of the assumptions shared by both ST and TT are
mistaken and ultimately impede a correct understanding of central forms of
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 309
social cognition, including basic face-to-face engagement. This possibility,
which remains unexplored by Tomasello, is one that has been energetically
pursued in recent years. Many of the arguments heralded in support of what
might amount to an alternative third option have a distinct phenomenologi-
cal heritage (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi 2012; Zahavi 2014).
What is the main objection to the ST and TT framework? Although there
are noticeable exceptions (e.g., Currie 2011; Lavelle 2012), many promi-
nent defenders of both ST and TT have routinely assumed that other minds
are characterized by a fundamental invisibility. They remain concealed and
hidden, and it is precisely because we lack a direct experiential access to
the mental states of others—which are frequently described as “inherently
unobservable constructs” (Mitchell 2008)—that we need to rely on and
employ either theoretical inferences or internal simulations. Thus TT and
ST often share a fundamental background assumption, namely the view
that the minds of others are hidden, which is why they have considered one
of the main challenges facing a theory of social cognition to be the question
of how and why we start ascribing such hidden mental entities or processes
to certain publicly observable bodies. But is this assumption really sound?
Is it really true that mental states (be it all of them or only those belonging
to others) are invisible constructs and that our engagement with others as
minded creatures is initially (or even exclusively) a question of attributing
such hidden states to them? Is it really the case that when faced with a weep-
ing person, I first perceive drops of liquid rolling from her eyes, distortions
of her facial muscles, and broken sounds, and only then in a subsequent
move come to realize that the person is grieving? This is a view that many
phenomenologists have called into question. Consider, for instance, the fol-
lowing quote by Merleau-Ponty:

Imagine that I am in the presence of someone who, for one reason or

another, is extremely annoyed with me. My interlocutor gets angry and
I notice that he is expressing his anger by speaking aggressively, by ges-
ticulating and shouting. But where is this anger? People will say that it is
in the mind of my interlocutor. What this means is not entirely clear. For
I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my oppo-
nent’s looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this
takes place in some otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond
the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part
of the room, that the anger breaks forth. It is in the space between him
and me that it unfolds. I would accept that the sense in which the place
of my opponent’s anger is on his face is not the same as that in which,
in a moment, tears may come streaming from his eyes or a grimace may
harden on his mouth. Yet anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the
surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes and wheezing
voice. (Merleau-Ponty 2004, pp. 83–84)
310 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
As argued by many phenomenologists, rather than attempting to
bridge the gap between a visible but mindless behavior and an invisible
but disembodied mentality, it might be more promising to simply take
the embodied and embedded mind seriously and to locate the foundation
of interpersonal understanding in a fundamental sensitivity to animacy,
agency, and emotional expressivity rather than in a capacity for detached
belief-ascriptions. As Merleau-Ponty also puts it, the problem of know-
ing how I can come to understand the other is far less difficult to solve,
if the other is understood primarily as a way of intending and grasping
the world that surrounds us, than if she is understood as a radically alien
psyche (1964, p. 117).
More generally speaking, and this an idea found in Husserl, Stein,
Merleau-Ponty, and others, the face-to-face encounter might allow for a
form of quasi-perceptual empathic understanding of others that is more
direct and immediate than any mindreading involving theoretical inference
or imaginative perspective taking (cf. Zahavi 2014). Furthermore, this sort
of social understanding is one than can primarily (though not exclusively)
be found in second personal exchanges, in which both subjects are aware of
being directed to one another in a relationship of mutual address. It is not
hard to connect such ideas to findings in developmental psychology. There
is currently ample evidence that children have some understanding of other
people’s perceptions, attentions, desires, intentions, and emotions long
before they are able to understand (false) beliefs. Indeed, long before the
child starts to wonder about your specific belief-content, it has interacted
with and treated you as a social partner. As Rochat and Striano conclude
in an article surveying and summarizing research on the social-cognitive
development in infancy: (1) infants manifest an essentially innate sensitiv-
ity to social stimuli, (2) there is already an early form of intersubjectivity at
play from around two month of age, where the infant has a sense of shared
experience and reciprocity with others, and (3) the “echoing of affects, feel-
ings and emotions that takes place in reciprocal interaction between young
infants and their caretakers” is a “necessary element to the development
of more advanced social cognition, including theory of mind” (Rochat &
Striano 1999, p. 8). Excepting some forms of pathology, there is no initial
phase in which the infant is confronted with meaningless behavior; rather
the infant comes equipped with an innate, automatic, and prereflective abil-
ity to tune in and respond to the expressive behavior of others.
The ideas just outlined suggest that there are other ways of charac-
terizing our basic social cognitive abilities than the proposals offered by
Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory and that it is possible to problema-
tize Tomasello’s claim that dyadic interaction and basic joint intentionality
presuppose a number of fairly sophisticated processes (including recursive
inferences, self-monitoring, simulations, and metarepresentations).
Furthermore, even if by distinguishing two forms of shared intention-
ality, Tomasello has gone beyond the uniformity thesis, he still remains
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 311
committed to the second assumption insofar as he continues to analyze
joint intentionality exclusively in terms of joint action. What we want to
explore in the following sections is whether a consideration of other forms
of shared intentionality might provide us with an enriched understanding
of we-intentionality. We have already said that Tomasello sees the evolution
of culture as the milestone of the human species. But what does it mean
to belong to a culture? What is it to be part of a temporally and spatially
extended we, a we that spans both time and space?

3. VARIETIES OF WE

The question concerning how we become part of a we has been a crucial

worry for classical phenomenology. Paradigmatically, one of the central
questions raised by Gerda Walther in her dissertation Zur Ontologie der
Sozialen Gemeinschaften from 1919 concerns the nature of a social com-
munity. What must be in place in order for a plurality of individuals to
form a community? What is required in order for an individual to employ
the first-person plural and articulate an experience, an action, or a belief as
ours, as something we experience, do, or believe? It is neither sufficient nor
necessary for the individuals in question to have the same kind of intentional
states with the same kind of object. Not only could such similarity obtain by
mere happenstance in situations in which the individuals had no awareness
or knowledge of each other, but there are obviously also communities whose
members pursue very different goals while nevertheless remaining part of
one and the same community. To make headway, Walther introduces a more
nuanced distinction between different kinds of communities than the one we
find in Tomasello.
If we start with a case where a number of individuals are aware of and
interacting with each other with the same goal in mind, would this be
enough to constitute a community? Walther’s reply is negative. Consider,
for instance, a situation in which a number of workers who otherwise know
nothing about each other are brought together to finish a construction. They
interact in order to accomplish the same goal. To some extent they work
together, but in the case in question they all consider each other with suspi-
cion or at best indifference (Walther 1923, p. 31). Seen from without, they
might be indistinguishable from a community, but they only constitute an
instrumental partnership. For the former to obtain, something remains miss-
ing. What more is needed? According to Walther, the missing element is an
inner bond or connection (innere Verbundenheit), a feeling of togetherness
(Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit). Only when the latter is present, does a
social formation, on her account, become a community (1923, p. 33):

We are standing here on the same ground of those theorists [. . .] that

consider the essential element of the community to be a ‘feeling of
312 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
togetherness’, or an inner unification [innere Einigung]. Every social
configuration that exhibits such an inner unification, and only those
configurations are, in our opinion, communities. Only in communi-
ties can one strictly speak about communal experiences, actions, goals,
aspirations, desires, etc. (in contrast to experiences, actions, etc. that
may be the same or similar, and that can be present in societal rela-
tions). (Walther 1923, p. 33).

According to Walther, the direct awareness of and interaction with oth-

ers allows for a special kind of community, one that Walther labels purely
personal communities or life communities (rein personale Gemeinschaften
or Lebensgemeinschaften). Some of these communities are not regulated by
a shared external object or goal. This holds true, for instance, for friend-
ships, families, and marriages. Even in these cases, the common life is pen-
etrated by a shared meaning or goal, but the goal is the flourishing of the
community itself. Walther calls these forms of communities “reflexive com-
munities” (1923, p. 67). But communal life is not restricted to these forms
since it cannot be a necessary feature of every community that all its mem-
bers engage in reciprocal interaction (1923, pp. 66, 68). In fact, people can
experience themselves as members of a community, can identify with other
members of the same community, and can have group experiences even if
they do not live temporally and spatially together. In such cases, shared
objects, goals, rituals, conventions, norms, etc. play a crucial role. It is as a
result of being attached to such external objects, factors, and features that
individuals might come to identify with other individuals whom they might
never have met in person, but who are also members of the same commu-
nity (1923, pp. 49–50). The more the unification of the members is condi-
tioned by the unification with external objects (rather than directly bound to
immediate interpersonal contact) the greater the spatiotemporal separation
of the members can be (1923, p. 82), and the more replaceable the indi-
vidual members will be. Walther labels such (institutionalized) communities
“objectual communities” (gegenständliche Gemeinschaften) (1923, p. 50).
Walther next explores the question of whether members of a community
must necessarily realize or recognize this membership. As she points out,
there is a difference between identifying with and being united with certain
other people, and knowing that one belongs to a particular community. It
often happens that one lives together with others in a reciprocal unity with-
out reflecting on this relation. But this can change, for instance, because of
intergroup conflict. Thus, as Walther remarks, war can often make people
aware of themselves as members of a special community (1923, p. 96). From
that moment on, one’s interaction with out-group members might also be
explicitly framed and influenced by one’s own group identity. In other cases,
however, knowledge about the group precedes knowledge about the indi-
vidual members. Consider, for instance, someone who converts to a new
religion or acquires a new citizenship. Here one might identify with the new
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 313
community before one starts to identify with particular individuals, and
one’s relation to these individuals might at first be only as representative
group-members rather than as unique individuals (1923, p. 99–100).4
Finally, Walther also discusses the case in which a community is recog-
nized as such not only by its own members, but also by members belonging
to another community. When that happens, and especially if the out-group
members in question are representatives of, and act in the name of, their
own community, one might talk of a higher-order interaction between com-
munities. Walther suggests that the community through this kind of external
recognition acquires a new and more objective status (1923, p. 121).
So far we have identified a strand in classical phenomenology that, while
keeping in mind the important distinction between face-to-face interaction
and communal intentionality, goes beyond a simple bipartition of shared
intentionality into two kinds and offers a more refined discrimination of the
different ways in which individuals can relate to each other. This analysis
provides useful tools for thinking about some constitutive features of collec-
tive intentionality, namely, inner unification and the feeling of togetherness,
as well as about mediated forms of shared intentionality that allow com-
munities to extend in time and space. In order to enrich the analysis even
further, let us next consider how others are given to me in the social world,
as present or absent, as past or contemporary, as personal or anonymous,
and mediated by social functions and roles.
We find such an account in the work of Alfred Schutz. In The Phenom-
enology of the Social World, Schutz faults Weber for failing to offer a proper
account of the constitution of social meaning and, more generally, for being
indifferent to more fundamental questions in epistemology and theory of
meaning. It is this lacuna that Schutz then seeks to overcome by combining
Weber’s interpretive sociology with reflections drawn from Husserl’s phe-
nomenology. According to Schutz, one of the more specific shortcomings of
Weber’s theory is that it fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the social
world. He then directly targets what we previously identified as the third
weakness in current debates on collective intentionality, namely the ten-
dency to discuss social relations at only a very high degree of abstraction. As
Schutz writes, “Far from being homogeneous, the social world is structured
in a complex way, and the other subject is given to the social agent (and
each of them to an external observer) in different degrees of anonymity,
experiential immediacy, and fulfilment” (1967, p. 8; modified translation).
More specifically, Schutz (1967, p. 14) distinguishes four different spheres
within the social world: the sphere of the “directly experienced social real-
ity” (soziale Umwelt) (1967, p. 142), the “social world of contemporaries”
(soziale Mitwelt) (1967, p. 142), the “social world of predecessors” (soziale
Vorwelt) (1967, p. 143), and the “social world of successors” (soziale Fol-
gewelt) (1967, p. 143).
The realm of directly experienced social reality or, to put it differently,
the social surrounding world, is the one in which the social world is open
314 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
for direct experience, and within which others are presented as fellow men
(Mitmenschen). It would be wrong, however, to restrict social reality to this
specific dimension. According to Schutz, we must recognize that there is also
a social world of contemporaries (Nebenmenschen) that coexists with the
subject and is simultaneous with his duration, although the lack of spatial
proximity prevents other subjects’ experiences from being grasped as origi-
nally and directly as is possible in the social surrounding world. Further-
more, a subject can also be directed to a world of predecessors (Vorfahren)
that existed at some point but does not exist anymore and to a forthcoming
world of successors (Nachfahren) that can be apprehended only in a vague
and indeterminate manner.
According to Schutz, the face-to-face encounter characteristic of the social
surrounding world provides for the most fundamental type of interpersonal
understanding (Schutz 1967, p. 162). It is at the basis of what he terms the
“we-relationship” or “living social relationship,” which is the central con-
cept in his account of experiential sharing (cf. Zahavi 2015). But despite its
central importance, we shouldn’t forget that I am also able to understand
those whom I have previously encountered face-to-face, but who now live
abroad, or those of whose existence I know, not as concrete individuals, but
as points in the social space defined by certain roles and functions, say, tax
officials or train conductors.
In contrast to the situation in which I am directly aware of the living
presence of the other’s consciousness as it is manifested in expressive move-
ments or expressive acts, my understanding of my contemporaries is always
general in form, is always shaped and framed by structures of typicality
(Schutz 1967, pp. 181, 184). When I understand a contemporary, I do not
consider him as a unique person. Rather, I conceive of him as an instan-
tiation of a type and leave individual characteristics and changes out of
my consideration. Consider, for instance, the kind of social understand-
ing that occurs when I mail a letter. When doing so, my action is guided
by assumptions I make regarding some of my contemporaries, namely the
mail carriers. I assume that they will read the address and send the let-
ter to its recipient. I do not know them personally and I do not think of
them as particular individuals, but by behaving the way I do, I relate to
them as ideal types, as bearers of certain functions. As Schutz puts it, when
I am they-oriented I have ‘types’ for partners (Schutz 1967, p. 185). And
of course, for this social process to work, the mail carriers have to relate to
me as well, not as a particular individual, but as a typical customer (Schutz
1967, p. 202). Typification (and stereotyping) consequently facilitates
everyday predictability.
In ordinary life, we move between Umwelt and Mitwelt constantly and,
as Schutz points out, the change from one to the other presents no problem.
This is so because we always interpret our own behavior and that of the
other within contexts of meaning that transcend the here and now. In that
sense, a narrow concern with the question of whether our relationship is
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 315
direct or indirect is a somewhat academic exercise (Schutz 1967, p. 178).
This is even more so given that the use of ideal types is not limited to the
world of contemporaries (or the world of our predecessors or successors).
The ideal types we acquire become part of our stock of knowledge and start
to influence our face-to-face interactions as well, that is, they come to serve
as interpretive schemes even in the world of direct social experience (Schutz
1967, p. 185).

4. UNIVERSALITY AND OBJECTIVITY

Schutz complements Walther’s analysis of we-intentionality by ascribing

a central role to the process of typification.5 Nevertheless, the description
given so far still seems incomplete insofar as it fails to account for a more
universal conception of membership, one that spans temporal, spatial, and
cultural differences. Apart from being able to relate to others distant in time
and place or pertaining to different cultures, we are also able to engage with
one another as members of a universal class: the class of rational beings.
This possibility is exhibited in some of our joint activities, such as theoreti-
cal endeavors. More general speaking, we have a capacity to take judgments
to be true from a view from nowhere, i.e., according to how things are inde-
pendently of what anyone thinks of them (McDowell 1994; Satne 2015).
As we explained above, one of Tomasello’s central claims is the idea that
the human capacity to go beyond the here and now of face-to-face interac-
tions and acquire a conception of ourselves as members of a universal class
is at the basis of the uniquely human capacity for objective thinking. This
is an idea that in turn can be traced back to Donald Davidson’s and Robert
Brandom’s accounts of the social origin of objective meaning. Let us in the
following pursue this philosophical link further. Doing so will allow us to
unearth a nexus of convergence between classical phenomenology and con-
temporary analytic philosophy.
Davidson and Brandom both think that having a notion of perspective
goes hand in hand with the very possibility of objective thinking and that it
ultimately amounts to the same capacity. For Davidson, objective thinking
is tied to the capacity to conceive of a different perspective that refers to the
same world. The notion of objective truth is consequently available only to
beings that can grasp that others, similar to themselves, are perceiving the
same world from a different perspective. For Davidson, objectivity might be
said to be constituted in a triangle, where one apex is oneself, the second
apex another creature similar to oneself, and the third an object located in
what becomes a common space (2001, p. 121). Being part of such a triangle
allows one, at least implicitly, to grasp the difference between belief and
objective truth, i.e., to acquire the concept of belief. The notion of belief
entails that my take on things can be incorrect and thus false with respect to
how things stand in the world. Importantly,
316 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
The only way of knowing that the second apex of the triangle—the
second creature or person—is reacting to the same object as oneself is
to know that the other person has the same object in mind. But then the
second person must also know that the first person constitutes an apex
of the same triangle another apex of which the second person occupies.
For two people to know of each other that they are so related, that their
thoughts are so related, requires that they be in communication. Each
of them must speak to the other and be understood by the other. They
don’t [. . .] have to mean the same things by the same words, but they
must be interpreters of each other (2001, p. 121).

Only in the context of communication between two interpreters and a com-

mon world are language and objective thought possible. Importantly, under-
standing the other and grasping the world as an objective common realm
go hand in hand. It is worth noticing that triangulation does not purport to
provide a history of the emergence of social cognition or of the evolution of
the capacity for objective thinking, but that it is a transcendental picture of
the mutual dependence between interaction, meaning and objectivity.6
Understanding, according to Davidson, is not dependent on “the exis-
tence of any form of preexistent, determined, ‘internalised’ agreement”
(Malpas 2011, p. 261) whether in the form of a common language, shared
conventions, or implicit norms. Rather, the possibility of objective thought
presupposes a relation of mutual address in which each participant is an
interpreter of the other and both know this to be so. Hence, the very capac-
ity to think depends on the capacity to engage in an interpretative relation
with someone else.7 Interpretation is to be understood as a hermeneutical
holistic process by means of which an utterance or action is located within a
wider context. Such a context includes the situation in which interpreter and
interpretee are mutually engaged, as well as an interpretative background
constituted by an attributed set of other interrelated intentional states
(including beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on) as well as rational prin-
ciples that govern the relations among them and serve to explain and predict
the other’s behavior. Interpretation is thus not mainly directed to linguistic
utterances but rather to the behavior of another as a whole.
If interpretation does not depend on any shared common ground, there
is no difference between understanding a fellow of the same community
and understanding an alien community (see Brandom 2010, pp. 33–34):
they both employ the same fundamental tools. This is why Davidson
speaks of “radical interpretation,” echoing Quine’s “radical translation”
(Quine 1960). This means that interpretation works across cultures and is
not dependent on the interpreter and the interpretee being acculturated or
belonging to the same linguistic and cultural group. Rather, interpretation
requires an understanding of the other as a member of the community of
rational beings. It is only because I take the other to be as rational as I am
that I can make sense of her conduct in the same terms I would make sense
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 317
of mine and anybody else’s under the same conditions. Hence, the very pos-
sibility of interpretation entails an understanding of the other and of myself
as members of a universal class, the class of rational beings.8
Brandom, following Davidson, claims that providing an elucidation of
objective thinking requires adopting the point of view of an interpreter
(Brandom 2010, pp. 33–34): we cannot make sense of objective meanings
without acknowledging the perspectival character of meaning-attribution
within the social practices of human beings. This is what Brandom (1994,
pp. 37–42, esp. 39) calls the I-Thou relation, a dyadic relation of interpreta-
tion that holds between communicating subjects.
In fleshing out the idea of interpretation, Brandom gives a further char-
acterization of what it means to be a member of a particular community.
When understanding others as members of particular communities, say Hin-
dus, Chinese, or Europeans, we are adopting a particular interpretational
stance. Any concrete cultural or linguistic community is thus to be under-
stood through the lens of the interpretation we can provide of its members’
attitudes and behavior. Whether one sees oneself as a member or an outsider
of these particular communities is also a matter of the interpretations we
can provide of ourselves and others.
Furthermore, it is only within the context of these interpretations that the
notion of objective truth can get a grip on our thinking. Against this inter-
pretative background, the very notion of correction is historically relativ-
ized. Whether or not an interpretation is correct is not a matter of a simple
correspondence between the interpretation and the world, but depends on
how the interpretation fits the historical context and the wider interpreta-
tional framework. The question of whether a certain claim is correct then
becomes a question of whether it coheres with other interpretations given
by other interpreters throughout the history of the use of a given concept.
This can be illustrated by concepts like “weight,” the meaning of which
has progressively changed, from the Aristotelian theory of natural loci to
contemporary physics. This, however, is not supposed to imply a relapse
into some form of genealogical reduction of norms to purely factual and
hence contingent descriptions of particular customs, dissolving the norma-
tive force of true claims to non-normative social facts about how people
interpret meanings. The objective meaning of a concept is not just a mat-
ter of what the community takes it to be. Precisely to overcome this peril,
Brandom (2013) invokes what he calls, following Hegel, a hermeneutics of
magnanimity—a hermeneutic based on trust for what previous interpreta-
tions have put forward as our tradition and forgiveness for what they may
have missed. The hermeneutics of magnanimity conceives of the contingent
historical practices as the way in which a community progressively deter-
mines and shapes the content of rational norms (Brandom, 2013, p. 15). In
our prior example, for instance, the contingent history in which different
theories of the physics of the bodies developed is understood as the way in
which the quest for truth is carried on. Interpretation is then the indefinite
318 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
historical process of conceiving the content of norms in terms of more and
more determined and integrated wholes in the pursuit of truth. While differ-
ence and relativism amongst diverse communities is acknowledged, the very
concept of interpretation pushes our thinking in the direction of an always
more inclusive and encompassing community of interpreters. The need to
reach an encompassing and widely acknowledged interpretation is the way
in which objectivity governs the process.
While Davidson’s account of interpretation goes hand in hand with a
notion of universal community (Davidson 1984, p. 183ff; 2001, p. 137ff),
this concept, much in line with the third assumption listed at the outset,
remains very abstract and Davidson offers no analysis of its concrete emer-
gence or development. Brandom complements this analysis by conceiving
of the universal we as a historical and concrete community of interpreters
that evolves and develops through time. What seems to be missing from his
account, however, is an analysis of how one comes to be conscious of one-
self as a member of such a universal we. How does one come to see oneself
as one among others, as a mere somebody, i.e., as part of and included in
the notion of everybody? Such an analysis, however, is at the very center of
Husserl’s account of the link between intersubjectivity and objectivity.9
Husserl agrees with Brandom and Davidson that objectivity in the sense
of ‘valid for everybody’ requires an analysis of intersubjectivity (Husserl
1974, p. 243). More specifically, Husserl argues that my apprehension of
objects as real and objective is mediated by and depends upon my encounter
with other world-related subjects. Much like Davidson, Husserl claims that
it is by experiencing that others experience the same objects as I do that
I come to experience objects as being more than merely objects-for-me. Ulti-
mately, Husserl isn’t simply claiming that the sense and validity of the cat-
egories objective and real are intersubjectively constituted. On his account,
the same holds true for the categories subjective and appearance.10 When
I realize that the intentional object of my apprehension can also be experi-
enced by others, I come to understand that the same object can appear for
different subjects (Husserl 1973a, p. 9) and that there is a difference between
the object as such and the way it appears to me. It consequently only makes
sense to designate something as a mere appearance, as merely subjective, the
moment I have experienced other subjects and through them acquired the
concept of intersubjective validity (Husserl 1962, p. 453, 1973a, pp. 382,
388–389, 420–421).
Davidson’s and Brandom’s accounts of triangulation conceive of it as
the very condition of possibility of objective thought. Husserl agrees, but
complements such analysis by exploring in greater detail the self-other rela-
tion that is at stake in the process. In his description of the different ways
in which I relate to others, Husserl highlights the importance of a special
kind of other-experience, namely the one where I experience the other as
experiencing myself. My experience of being an object-for-another, my
other-mediated self-apprehension, is on his view of decisive importance for
the constitution of objectivity. When I realize that I can be an alter ego for
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 319
the other, just as she can be one for me, when I realize that the other con-
ceives of me as an other, just as I conceive of her as a self,

The difference between oneself and the foreign I vanishes; the other
apprehends me as foreign, just as I grasp him as foreign for me, and
he himself is a “self,” etc. Parity thus ensues: a multiplicity of feeling,
willing I’s that are alike in kind and each independent in the same sense.
(Husserl 1973a, pp. 243–244; cf. Husserl 1973c, p. 635)

Some differences between Davidson and Brandom’s views, on the one

hand, and Husserl’s on the other, remain. Both Davidson and Brandom
conceive of triangulation as a process involving communication and hence
linguistic capacities. Husserl, by contrast, focuses on pre-linguistic forms of
intersubjectivity. As we pointed out in section 2, this is also the approach
that Tomasello (along with most developmental psychologists) adopts.11
Furthermore, for Davidson and Brandom, it is the universal applicabil-
ity of the notion of interpretation that allows us to move from a particular
encounter with another to a universal concept of truth. This notion remains
somewhat abstract even in Brandom’s account, since no description of the
concrete experience of being part of a we is given. Husserl’s account, by
contrast, can be seen as providing precisely such an analysis. According to
Husserl, it is through the encounter with another that I come to realize that
I am only one among many, and that my perspective on the world is only
one among several (Husserl 1974, p. 245, 1973c, p. 645, 1950, p. 157).
It is when I discover myself to be one among others that I can come to
apprehend myself as “a member of a community of I’s in the sense of a ‘we’-
community” (Husserl 1973b, p. 468). As Husserl formulates it in Ideen II:

In my own case, I arrive at the apprehension of man (in the Sense of

spirit) by way of a comprehension of others, i.e., insofar as I compre-
hend them as centers not only for the rest of the surrounding world
but also for my Body, which is for them an Object of the surrounding
world. It is precisely thereby that I comprehend them as apprehending
me similar to the way I apprehend them, thus as apprehending me as a
social man [. . .]. The comprehensive representation others have, or can
have, of me is of service to me as regards the apprehension of myself as
a social ‘man,’ hence the apprehension of myself totally different from
the way I grasp myself in direct inspection. By means of this apprehen-
sion, with its complicated structure, I fit myself into the family of man,
or, rather, I create the constitutive possibility for the unity of this ‘fam-
ily.’ It is only now that I am, in the proper sense, an Ego over against an
other and can then say ‘we.’ (Husserl 1952, p. 242)

Another striking similarity between Husserl’s, Brandom’s, and David-

son’s views is the emphasis on the importance of disagreement between
world‑experiencing subjects in the grounding of objectivity. As we saw, the
320 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
notion of disagreement and perspective difference plays a key role in both
Davidson’s and Brandom’s analyses of the conditions of emergence of objec-
tive thought. Nevertheless, as with the universal we, their analyses remain
abstract: they emphasize the need for perspective differences but do not
provide any account of how such differences are experienced by individuals
nor of how the notion of disagreement itself is affected by such perspective
differences. Husserl takes an extra step towards concreteness in his analysis
of the role of normality.
Already in Ideen II, Husserl pointed to the fact that there, next to the
tendencies originating from other persons, also exist indeterminate general
demands made by custom and tradition: ‘One’ judges thus, ‘one’ holds the
fork in such and such a way, etc. (Husserl 1952, p. 269). I learn what counts
as normal from others—and indeed, initially and for the most part from
those closest to me, hence from those I grow up with, those who teach me,
and those belonging to the most intimate sphere of my life (Husserl 1973c,
pp. 428–429, 569, 602–604). And it is in this way that I participate in a
communal tradition. In this vein, Husserl stresses, as Brandom does, the fact
that each new generation inherits what was constituted through the labor
of previous generations, and then by reshaping this heritage makes its own
contribution to the constitution of the communal unity of the tradition.
Husserl has a term for this: he refers to normal life as generative life and
states that every (normal) human being is historical by virtue of being con-
stituted as a member of a historically enduring community (Husserl 1973c,
pp. 138–139, 431). Community and communalization inherently point
beyond themselves to the open endlessness of the chain of generations, and
this in turn points to the historicity of human existence itself. Ultimately,
Husserl would consider the subject’s birth into a living tradition to have
constitutive implications. It is not merely the case that I live in a world,
which as a correlate of normality is permeated by references to others, and
which others have already furnished with meaning, or that I understand the
world (and myself) through a traditional, handed down, linguistic conven-
tionality. The very meaning that the world has for me is such that it has its
origin outside of me, in a historical past.
Furthermore, Husserl offers important tools to qualify the notion of
disagreement that plays a key role in the understanding of objectivity. He
distinguishes different levels of normality. First of all, we speak of normal-
ity when we are dealing with a mature, healthy, and rational person. Here
the abnormal will be the infant, the blind, or the mentally ill. Secondly, we
speak of normality when it concerns our own (sub)culture or homeworld,
whereas abnormality is attributed to the foreigner, who, however, if cer-
tain conditions are fulfilled, can be apprehended as a member of a foreign
normality. It is precisely in the latter context that the disagreement gains a
vital constitutive significance, since the experience of discrepancy between
normal subjects (including the experience of a plurality of normalities,
each of which has its own notion of what counts as true) can motivate us
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 321
to search for a truth that is valid for us all (Husserl 1954, p. 324). That is
to say, “if we set up the goal of a truth . . . which is unconditionally valid
for all subjects, beginning with that on which normal Europeans, normal
Hindus, Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity,” we are on the way
to an objective science (Husserl 1954, p. 142). It consequently turns out
to be necessary to differentiate between (1) ‘normal’ objectivity, which is
correlated with a limited intersubjectivity (a community of normal sub-
jects) and (2) ‘rigorous’ objectivity, which is correlated with the unlimited
totality of all rational subjects (Husserl 1973b, p. 111). Husserl accord-
ingly believed a correlation to exist between different levels of normality
and different levels of objectivity (Husserl 1973c, p. 155). Even absolute
objective being and truth is correlated with a subject‑dependent normal-
ity: the normality of rational subjects (Husserl 1973c, pp. 35–36). Ever
new generations cooperate in transcendentally building up the structures
of validity pertaining to the objective world, which is precisely a world
handed down in tradition (Husserl 1973c, p. 463). There is, as Husserl
writes, no fixed world; rather, it is what it is for us only in the relativity
of normalities and abnormalities (Husserl 1973c, pp. 212, 381, Husserl
1954, p. 270).

5. CONCLUDING REMARKS

At the beginning of this contribution, we referred to three underlying assump-

tions shared—even if only implicitly—by most contemporary accounts of
collective intentionality. The assumptions were the following. First, a com-
mitment to a uniformity claim about collective intentionality that conceives
of all its forms as ultimately reducible to one. Second, a privileging of joint
action vis-à-vis other collective forms of intentionality, such as shared emo-
tions or other distinct forms of relating to others proper to communal and
institutional forms of life. Third, the dominance of abstract models of col-
lectivity, leaving aside the historical, temporal, and spatial contexts of such
social formations.
Throughout this contribution, we have shown how the debate can be
enriched by including considerations from a number of different sources,
including developmental and evolutionary psychology, social approaches
to mind and language, and classical phenomenological accounts of shared
intentionality. Furthermore, we hope to have made a good case for pro-
moting further dialogue between the analytic-minded literature (repre-
sented by the work of Tomasello, Brandom, and Davidson) and authors
that belong to the classical phenomenological tradition, including Walther,
Schutz, and Husserl. In analyzing all these different contributions to the
topic of collective intentionality, it becomes apparent not only that there
are important overlaps between their approaches, but also that there are
obvious ways in which they can complement each other.
322 Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne
When it comes to the relation between analytic philosophy and phe-
nomenology, there is consequently no reason to accept either Dummett’s
claim that “we have reached a point at which it’s as if we’re working in
different subjects” and that “it is no use now shouting across the gulf”
(1996, p. 193), or Searle’s assertion that phenomenologists “do not have
much to contribute to the topics of the logical structure of intentionality
or the logical structure of social and institutional reality” (Searle 1999,
p. 11).

NOTES

1 Thus, according to Tomasello, what made the difference for the evolution
of human-specific forms of intentionality was the need for cooperation that
resulted in more and more complex forms of cooperative sociality: “Human
beings, in contrast, are all about (or mostly about) cooperation. Human social
life is much more cooperatively organized than that of other primates, and
so, in the current hypothesis, it was these more complex forms of coopera-
tive sociality that acted as the selective pressures that transformed great ape
individual intentionality and thinking into human shared intentionality and
thinking” (Tomasello 2014, p. 31).
2 More specifically, Tomasello lists the following three key components: “(I) the
ability to cognitively represent experiences to oneself ‘off-line’; (2) the ability
to simulate or make inferences transforming these representations causally,
intentionally, and/or logically; and (3) the ability to self-monitor and evaluate
how these simulated experiences might lead to specific behavioral outcomes”
(Tomasello 2014, p. 4).
3 Another problem for such an account is an ‘essential tension’ found in its
account of the objective content of thought and language (Hutto and Satne
2015). Such tension consists in postulating a role for social interaction in an
account of thinking and at the same time assuming that thinking is required
for social interaction to happen. The problem is due to the fact that the theory
assumes that in order to engage in joint intentionality one needs to already
entertain representations of other people’s mental states as well as of exter-
nal states of affairs. For a more in-depth treatment of this issue, which also
discusses how the essential tension affects the approaches of Tomasello and
others, see Hutto and Satne 2015.
4 Walther’s distinction bears a clear affinity with what Hogg and Abrams much
later have termed personal and social attraction. Whereas personal attraction
is an interindividual attraction that is firmly rooted in close personal relation-
ships and whose object is a unique individual, social attraction is a form of
intragroup attraction that is grounded in group membership: “It is an attrac-
tion to an ingroup stereotype and hence to any and all individuals who are
perceived to be stereotypic or prototypic of the group” (Hogg and Abrams
1998, p. 94).
5 For a comparison of other aspects of Walther’s and Schutz’s theories, see León
and Zahavi 2015.
6 For a thorough defence of this reading of Davidson see Malpas (1997, 1992).
Empirical conditions on how to occupy an apex in the triangle have been ex-
plored by different authors (e.g., Gomila 2010; for criticism, Andrews 2002),
thereby complementing Davidson’s remarks on the conditions of possibility of
 Varieties of Shared Intentionality 323
objective thinking with theories of development and evolution of such capaci-
ties. See fn. 11 below.
7 Tomasello (2014, pp. 149–151) differentiates his view from Davidson’s pre-
cisely on this point, since he claims that language capacities are not required
in order to jointly intend with another. One should make clear, however, that
Davidson, as said, does not think that a common language is required or that
the interactants already need to know a language. What is required is a capac-
ity, the capacity for interpretation, and it is this capacity that is also required
for language.
8 From a technical point of view, Davidson formulates this requirement in terms
of a set of principles that govern and make possible interpretation: the prin-
ciple of charity (I take most of the beliefs of the other to be true), coherence (I
take others not to have contradictory beliefs), etc. These details, however, are
not important for our present purposes.
9 For an in-depth discussion, see Zahavi (2001).
10 In strikingly similar terms, Davidson claims that it is only by grasping the very
notion of perspective that the distinction between how things appear to me
and how things are emerges (Davidson 2001, p. 105).
11 It must be emphasized that Davidson and Brandom are not out to offer ei-
ther a psychological account or an evolutionary or developmental story of
how thinking emerges (for further discussion, see Weiss and Wanderer 2010).
Rather, they are providing the necessary conditions for the obtaining of objec-
tive thinking. Objectivity is possible only in the context of an intersubjective
engagement with another similar to oneself with whom one is in communica-
tion. Their account of triangulation can, however, be complemented both by
Tomasello’s two-step theory of shared intentionality that targets the evolution
of the capacity for objective thinking and by a phenomenological account of
the pre-predicative and pre-linguistic strata of intersubjectivity.

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Contributors

Jeffrey A. Bell is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana

University, USA.
Lee Braver is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South
Florida, USA.
James Conant is Chester B. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Phi-
losophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, USA.
Andrew Cutrofello is Professor of Philosophy, Loyola University
Chicago, USA.
Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Phi-
losophy at Swarthmore College, USA.
Paul M. Livingston is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
New Mexico, USA.
Tamsin Lorraine is Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, USA.
John McCumber is Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of
California, Los Angeles, USA.
Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Assistant Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fel-
low in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen, The
Netherlands.
Graham Priest is Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Melbourne, Australia, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at
CUNY Graduate Center, USA.
Carol Rovane is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, USA.
Glenda Satne is Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research
(2012–2015) and Assistant Professor at Alberto Hurtado University,
Chile, 2015 onwards.
David W. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California
at Irvine, USA.
Samuel C. Wheeler III is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Connecticut, USA.
Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Sub-
jectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Index

Abelard, P. 83 archaeology 75, 84, 89 – 92, 104; of

action(s) 10, 29, 68, 125, 127, knowledge 89 – 90; of the subject
163 – 164, 182, 195, 202 – 203, 84
207, 212, 235 – 236, 238, Arendt, H. 10, 287 – 291, 296,
251, 278 – 280, 283, 286; 298, 301; relation to Badiou
collective 305 – 306, 308, 292 – 295, 300
311 – 316, 321 – 322; ordinary Aristophanes 93
vs. revolutionary 287 – 290, Aristotle 24, 38 – 39, 41 – 42, 72, 83, 85,
292 – 297, 299 – 302 87 – 88, 98 – 99, 105, 178 – 179,
Agamben, G. 246 187 – 188, 196, 211, 230 – 231,
alienation 263, 281, 284 253
Al-Saji, A. 68 Armstrong, D. 131, 135 – 138
alternativeness 261 – 262, 265 – 268, 278 attention 63, 65, 67, 70, 124, 203, 214,
analysis 4 – 6, 9 – 10, 11 – 12, 19, 43, 216, 218, 267, 274, 292, 306,
75 – 77, 83, 85, 89 – 91, 99 – 101, 307, 310
102, 125, 225; conceptual aufhebung 174, 178, 193
1, 22, 59 – 62, 64, 70 – 71, Augustine, St. 83, 223 – 225
104; genealogical 77, 79, 83, Austin, J.L. 5, 9, 22, 24, 59, 62 – 66,
92 – 94, 96, 99 – 101; historical 70 – 72, 163
75, 77 – 78, 80, 82, 89, 91,
95, 101, 161, 164; linguistic Bachelard, G. 82
4 – 5, 22, 239, 246; logical 21, Bacon, F. 69, 73
41, 215; paradox of 59 – 60; Badiou, A. 11, 12, 240, 287, 290 – 295,
phenomenological 5, 111 – 112, 297, 301 – 302
175, 318 – 319; transcendental Bates, S. 65
246; truth-conditional 117 Beiser, F. 103
analytic philosophy 1, 4, 8 – 9, 17 – 20, Beistegui, M. de 73
22 – 55, 59, 75 – 79, 82, 91, Benardete, J. 144 – 145
101 – 102, 130, 132, 135, 151, Bergmann, G. 4, 11
161 – 162, 164, 193, 213 – 215, Bergson, H. 31 – 32, 68, 73
217, 261 – 263, 265 – 266, Berkeley, G. 20, 273
272 – 273, 277 – 278, 287, 306, boredom 226
315, 322 Bradley, F.H. 252
Angst/anxiety 222 – 223, 226, 228, 242 Brandom, R. 12, 26, 103, 315 – 321,
Anscombe, G.E.M. 41, 48, 51 – 52 323
anti-realism 6 – 7, 130, 151, 161, Bratman, M. 305 – 306, 308
163 – 164, 238, 266, 273 Broad, C.D. 195, 217
Aquinas, T. 38, 83 Buridan, J. 99
330 Index
Cameron, R. 131, 138, 140 – 142, 145 Drummond, J. 124
Canguilhem, G. 82 – 85, 90, 93, 99, Dummett, M.A.E. 6, 11, 56, 163 – 165,
101, 103 – 104 167 – 168, 322
Cantor, G. 125, 239, 291, 295, 301
Carnap, R. 19, 21, 24, 27, 103, 115, emotion 70, 200, 206, 305, 306, 310,
228, 243 321
Casey, E.S. 197 – 203, 205 – 206, empathy 310
211 – 212 empiricism 19 – 20, 41, 52, 274
Cavell, S. 31, 65, 72 essentialism 61 – 62
Chalmers, D. 11, 239 ethics 7, 30, 93 – 94, 163, 223 – 225
Chisholm, R. 287 events 66 – 67, 69 – 70, 72 – 73, 80,
Christianity 80 – 81, 103 86 – 87, 90, 156, 159, 162, 168,
cinema 66, 68, 73 207, 215 – 216, 218, 236; event
Cohen, P. 291 of Ereignis 230; ordinary vs.
Cohen, T. 65 revolutionary 10, 287, 290 – 302
community 10, 31, 33 – 36, 87, 153, existentialism 1, 223
212, 263, 273, 276, 281,
284 – 285, 311 – 313, 316 – 321 facts 50, 60, 64, 92, 93, 95, 112, 115,
Conant, J. 151, 243 118, 134, 137 – 139, 141 – 142,
conceptual schemes 24, 152 – 154, 156, 162, 172, 182 – 183, 224 – 225,
162, 164, 166, 262, 265, 268, 227 – 228, 232, 234 – 235, 240,
272, 274 – 275, 286 245, 266, 277, 279; institutional
Condorcet, Marquis de 294 92; normative 141; social 317
continental philosophy (or tradition) 1, Fodor, J. 27, 95
4, 9, 17 – 18, 56, 102, 129 – 130, Føllesdal, D. 180
146, 214, 222, 263, 281 forms of life 10, 68, 89, 91, 97, 104,
contingency 81, 84, 86 – 87, 90, 92 – 93, 241, 246, 276, 280, 283, 321
95, 98, 105, 240, 245 Foucault, M. 7, 9, 12, 75 – 77, 82 – 83,
Craig, E. 75 – 77, 89, 92 – 97, 105–106 89 – 94, 96 – 98, 101, 104 – 106,
151 – 152, 155 – 169
Darwin, C. 89, 94, 105 Frege, G. 1, 9, 36 – 37, 40, 43 – 44,
Davidson, D. 6, 8, 27, 112, 172 – 173, 60, 71, 112 – 114, 180, 236,
175, 188, 246, 262, 265, 244; Begriffsschrift 112, 126;
274 – 275, 286 – 287, 315 – 323; conception of sense [Sinn]
on metaphor 178, 181 – 183; 60, 112 – 114; “On Sense and
relation to Derrida 183 – 187 Reference” 44
deconstruction 77, 185 Geach, P. 41, 88
Deleuze, G. 61, 72 – 73, 130 – 131, genealogy 7, 75 – 106, 152, 185, 189;
149, 218, 287, 302; on Derrida’s 185; Nietzschean 77,
concepts 66 – 71; on difference- 79 – 81, 87, 90 – 92, 97, 101, 103,
makers 142 – 146; Difference 104, 106; Foucault’s 90, 152
and Repetition 143 – 144 on Geuss, R. 79 – 81, 87, 103
multiplicity 143 – 144; Francis Gilbert, M. 305 – 306
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation gluons 249, 251 – 253, 255 – 256
68 – 69; The Logic of Sense 5 Gödel, K. 3, 115, 291, 295
Derrida, J. 8, 130, 146, 172 – 181, Greene, G. 205 – 209; The Honorary
188 – 189, 211; relation to Consul 205 – 206
Davidson 183 – 187; “White Grice, P. 24, 27, 30, 37
Mythology” 172 – 181 Griffin, J. 51 – 52
Descartes, R. 83, 85, 181, 233, 237,
274 – 275 Habermas, J. 40, 102, 159, 163, 263,
Dewey, J. 26 276 – 277, 281
dialectics 88, 233, 293 Hacking, I. 75, 77, 82, 103, 105
 Index 331
Harman, G. 214 James, W. 26
Hegel, G.W.F. 1, 6, 12, 25 – 26, 31 – 32, Jefferson, T. 288 – 289
37 42, 57, 80 – 81, 102 – 103,
152, 154, 168, 173 – 174, Kant, I. 38, 56, 105, 127, 151 – 156,
178 – 180, 183 – 84, 215, 166, 208, 210 – 211, 218, 229,
218 – 219, 233, 239, 244 – 245, 233, 265, 282 – 283, 294, 301;
263, 274, 276, 280 – 283, 293, cosmological antinomies 239; on
302, 317 judgments of beauty 65, 72, 296;
Hegelian/Hegelianism 6, 25, 31 – 32, on time and space 194, 196
41 – 42, 57, 86, 215 – 216, Kierkegaard, S. 223 – 225
276 – 277 Kim, J. 287
Heidegger, M. 9, 103, 121, 126, 130, Koopman, C. 90 – 91, 94, 96 – 98, 100,
146, 158, 197, 209 – 210, 218, 102, 105
238 – 246, 256 – 257, 287, 295; Kripke, S. 61, 71, 188, 273
question of being 226, 229 – 230, Kuhn, T. 12, 82, 154 – 155, 162, 164
249 – 251, 253; on Wittgenstein Kusch, M. 78, 82, 104–105, 126
229 – 237; Wittgenstein on
223 – 228 language 4–9, 11, 21–22, 24, 29, 44,
hermeneutics 316 – 317 62, 64–66, 68, 70, 72, 102, 106,
Hilbert, D. 88, 115, 126 112–113, 115–116, 120, 122,
Hintikka, J. 116, 125 – 126 125–127, 132, 134, 155, 157, 165,
historicism 61, 80 – 82, 124 172, 174, 177, 181–188, 205,
history of philosophy 25 – 26, 36 – 40, 211, 222–223, 225–228, 233,
46, 50, 52 – 54, 56, 75 – 76, 235–238, 240–241, 245–246,
83 – 84, 102, 223 250, 256, 262, 265, 275, 284, 293,
Hobbes, T. 83, 93 – 94 306, 308, 316, 321–323
Honneth, A. 264, 282, 284, 286 Leibniz. G.W. 38 – 39, 83, 130, 144,
Horwich, P. 194, 212 – 213, 216 252, 299 – 300, 302
Hume, D. 40, 93 – 94, 136, 148 Leiter, B. 11, 81, 87, 89, 103, 105
Husserl, E. 12, 40, 114 – 115, 119 – 122, Lewis, C.I. 26
126 – 128, 180, 197, 201 – 203, Lewis, D.K. 8, 10, 130, 137, 146 – 148,
211, 218, 239, 310, 318 – 321; 215, 287, 299, 302
Cartesian Meditations 203; Libera, A. de 83 – 84, 103 – 104
epoché 111, 113, 123 – 125, linguistic turn 4 – 6, 11, 102, 239 – 240,
129 – 130; Ideas I 113, 117, 245
123; Ideas II 319 – 320; Logical Livingston, P. 121, 295 – 296
Investigations 112 – 113, 116, logic 1, 19, 21, 24, 42 – 43, 100, 112,
122 – 123 125 – 127, 226, 228, 237 – 238,
Hylton, P. 51 – 54, 77 – 78, 168 244 – 245, 267; Aristotelian
87 – 88; critique of 95; force of
idealism 5, 6, 25 – 26, 42, 123 – 124, 235 – 236; paraconsistent 240,
152, 163, 265, 272 – 273; see also 252, 256 – 257
Russell, rejection of idealism logical atomism 19, 50 – 51
intentionality 111 – 125, 127, 130, logical form 87, 98 – 99, 132 – 134,
186, 241, 283 – 284, 287, 293; 234 – 235, 241
collective (or “communal,”
“joint” or “shared”) 10, McCumber, J. 161
305 – 308, 310 – 311, 313, 315, McDowell, J. 11, 26, 31, 33 – 34,
318, 321 – 323 133 – 134, 145, 315
intuition 32, 59, 85, 99, 119 – 121, McTaggart, J.M.E. 213, 215 – 217, 219,
155 – 56, 166, 181, 194; visual 287, 291, 297 – 300
121 Marx, K. 42, 103, 168, 263, 276 – 277,
intuitionism 6 280 – 283, 293, 302
332 Index
Marxism 1, 41, 87 – 88, 97 Parmenides 241
Mead, G.H. 274 persons/personhood 24, 66 – 67, 79, 87,
Meillassoux, Q. 130, 214, 245 94, 160, 182, 184, 186, 198,
Meinong, A. 50, 253 207 – 208, 214, 217, 219, 264,
Merleau-Ponty, M. 197, 205, 309 – 310 283 – 284, 312 – 314, 320, 322;
metaphysics 157, 173 – 177, 181, first-person 113, 117, 119 – 122,
187, 228 – 30, 243, 277, 282; 224, 274, 311, 316; second-
“analytic” 239; critique of 7 – 8; person 306 – 310, 316; third-
descriptive 22; neo-Aristotelian person 120
138; return to 7 – 8, 130 – 131; phenomenology/phenomenological 4,
“Western” 246; see also ontology 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 90, 111 – 13, 118,
Méthot, P.-O. 83, 103 – 104 120, 122 – 127, 175, 197 – 98,
Meyerhoff, H. 213 204, 213 – 15, 293, 306, 309 – 13,
Miller, I. 213 315, 321 – 22; linguistic 22;
Montesquieu, C. 288 ontology 158; of time 213;
Moore, G.E. 12, 19 – 20, 22 – 26, 50, 59, transcendental 123 – 125; see also
71, 223 – 225 analysis, phenomenological
Morris, M. 131, 133 – 136, 139 Pippin, R. 42, 57
Multimundialism 262–264, 268–272, Plato 24, 38 – 39, 41 – 42, 50, 52, 64, 83,
275–276, 278–281, 284, 286, 302 88, 93, 159, 163, 181, 188, 196,
Murdoch, I. 31 241; Symposium (dialogue) 93;
mysticism 32, 246 Theaetetus (dialogue) 50
Plotinus 254
Nagel, E. 100 possible worlds 59, 111 – 112,
Nagel, T. 271 115 – 117, 126, 130, 215, 287,
naturalism 8, 19, 22, 24, 61, 124 299 – 300
natural kinds 60, 71, 78 pragmatism 6, 25 – 26, 41, 151,
natural sciences 21; relation to 245 – 246, 265, 273
philosophy 23 – 24, 29, 52 Priest, G. 8, 240, 245, 257
Nietzsche, F. 75, 77, 79 – 92, 94, Prior, A. 194, 213, 215, 219
97, 101, 103 – 106, 151, 161, Proust, M. 68 – 69, 73
174, 234; see also genealogy, psychologism 62, 71, 180; Chomskyan
Nietzschean 61
nonsense 20, 62, 64, 154, 223 – 225, Putnam, H. 7, 26 – 27, 30, 56, 129 – 131,
227, 243 139, 145 – 147, 151 – 156, 158,
normality 83 – 84, 125, 156, 163 – 164, 160 – 166, 168, 245
205, 210, 287, 299 – 300,
320 – 321 Quine, W.V. 1, 8, 22, 24, 27, 36, 61,
normative insularity 268 – 269, 271, 126, 132, 136, 147, 151, 154,
278 – 279 162, 166, 175, 183, 185, 188,
normativity 273 – 274, 282 274, 316
nothing/nothingness 226, 228, 251
rationality 10, 154, 161 – 162, 164 – 165,
objectivity 213 – 214, 228, 233, 243, 263
245, 261 – 265, 270 – 274, 277, realism 6 – 7, 19, 155 – 156, 163 – 164,
280, 282, 284, 307, 315 – 316, 168, 245, 262, 265, 271, 273;
318 – 321, 323 about world 238 – 239; internal
Ockham, William of 83, 95 139, 152 – 153, 165 – 166, 245;
ontology 8, 115, 118, 124, 131, metaphysical 129, 131, 139, 145,
136, 158; historical 157; of 261; modal 287, 299; moral 168,
meaning 118; monistic 215 – 16; 279; scientific 166, 277, 279
phenomenological 158; set- recognition 264, 282 – 286, 313
theoretical 240, 291 Reichenbach, H. 26 – 27
 Index 333
relativism 7, 154, 160, 166, 185, 193 – 198, 202, 205, 208 – 219,
261 – 270, 272 – 275, 277 – 278, 275 – 277, 281, 302, 311, 313,
280 – 286, 318 315, 318; A series vs. B series
revolutions 85, 155, 157; American 194, 212, 215 – 217, 219, 287,
288 – 289; French 287 – 289, 291, 291 – 293, 296 – 300
293 – 295, 300 – 301; in physics Tomasello, M. 306 – 311, 315, 319,
46; philosophical 51 – 52 321 – 323
Robespierre, M. 289, 295 Treisman, M. 198
Rorty, R. 4, 11, 12, 103, 147, 168, triangulation 274 – 275, 315 – 316,
245 – 246, 261 – 263, 272 – 275, 318 – 319, 323
285 truth(s) 5 – 9, 12, 19, 24, 44, 60, 68,
Rousseau, J.-J. 76, 93, 188, 274, 288 70 – 71, 76, 78, 82, 94 – 97, 106,
Russell, B. 20, 22 – 23, 41 – 43, 51 – 54, 111 – 128, 130 – 132, 135 – 136,
115, 126, 251; Lectures on 138 – 141, 143, 146 – 147,
Logical Atomism 50; “On 152 – 156, 158 – 163, 168, 172,
Denoting” 44; Principia 174, 180 – 188, 214 – 215,
Mathematica 254; rejection of 218, 222, 227, 230 – 233, 235,
idealism 6, 12, 19, 25; Russell’s 237 – 238, 243 – 244, 246, 250,
paradox 239 – 240; “The 253, 255, 262 – 263, 265 – 273,
Philosophy of Bergson” 31 – 32; 275 – 277, 281, 291 – 297,
The Philosophy of Leibniz 39, 56 300 – 301, 315, 317 – 319, 321;
Ryle, G. 21, 23 – 24, 39 – 40, 42, 48, 50, moral 263 – 264, 276, 279 – 280,
56, 61, 201 282 – 283, 285
truthmakers 6, 129 – 133, 135 – 143,
Sartre, J.-P. 237 145 – 147
Schaffer, J. 131, 138 – 139, 141 – 142,
145, 148 Unimundialism 262 – 264, 268,
Schlick, M. 21, 23, 222 270 – 272, 276 – 277, 281 – 282,
Schutz, A. 313 – 315, 321 – 322 284 – 286
Searle, J. 305 – 306, 322 universality 125 – 127, 214, 219,
Sellars, W. 25, 41 – 42, 103, 133, 147, 262 – 264, 270 – 272, 276 – 285,
188 294, 296, 300, 307, 315,
set theory 11, 140, 239, 291, 295, 317 – 320
297 Urmson, J.O. 51
Sider, T. 239
simulation theory of mind 308 – 310 value(s) 6 – 7, 10, 76 – 77, 79 – 81, 83, 94,
Socrates 34, 50 96 – 97, 163, 178, 224 – 225, 244;
space 8, 67, 83, 93, 149, 193 – 198, moral 263 – 264, 278 – 284; truth-
202 – 205, 209 – 213, 216 – 218, values 78, 265, 268, 271 – 272,
299, 309, 311, 313, 315; logical 275, 286, 292
232, 299, 301; socio-political van Inwagen, P. 56
288, 292, 314; of theoretical
possibilities 99 Waismann, F. 222
Stein, E. 310 Walther, G. 311 – 313, 315, 321 – 322
Strawson, P.F. 22 – 25, 41 Weber, M. 313
Whitehead, A.N. 201, 254 – 255
Tarski, A. 5, 111 – 113, 115 – 120, 122, Williams, B. 31, 35, 38 – 39, 56, 75 – 77,
125 – 127, 131 – 132, 147, 181, 93 – 94, 97, 263, 277 – 281,
183, 188 283 – 284
theory theory of mind 308 – 310 Williams, C. 213 – 214
time 8, 9, 66 – 69, 73, 78, 80 – 81, Wilson, J. 131, 141 – 142, 146, 148
83 – 90, 93, 95, 97 – 99, 104, Wittgenstein, L. 21, 23 – 24, 104,
154 – 155, 160 – 162, 182, 186, 126, 165, 166, 211, 228, 230,
334 Index
232, 234, 238, 240, 242, 246, wonder 60, 63, 224 – 226, 310
256, 268, 273; on Heidegger Wright, C. 33 – 34, 266 – 267, 269 – 270,
222 – 223, 242; “Lecture on 286
Ethics” 224 – 226; Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus 132 – 133, Zhangzi 251
228, 243, 244 Žižek, S. 8, 292