Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition In Twentieth-century Philosophy

FUTURE PASTS This page intentionally left blank FUTURE PASTS The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy Edited by JULIET FLOYD SANFORD SHIEH OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Future pasts : the analytic tradition in twentieth-century philosophy / edited by Juliet Floyd and Sant'ord Shieh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513916-X 1. Analysis (Philosophy) I. Floyd, Juliet, 1960- II. Shieh, Sanford, 1962B808.5 .F88 2000 146'.4—dc21 00-035622 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. This page intentionally left blank Dedication The authors wish joinlly to dedicate this volume to Burton Dreben (1927-1999), Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Harvard University, and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. Dreben exercised a profound influence on American analytic philosophy over the last thirty-five years, especially through his teachings on the significance and nature of the history of the analytic tradition. Every contributor to this volume has been either a colleague or a doctoral student of Dreben and each has written at least partly in reaction to Dreben's views, especially his insistence that the evolution of the analytic tradition represents a failed but noble effort to achieve scientific clarity about the nature of philosophy, and that precisely because of its failures, it is the most profound of twentieth-century philosophical traditions. Dreben took the analytic tradition to have begun with Frege and Russell, and to have been ended by Quine and Wittgenstein (from thoroughly different perspectives), hoist on the petard of its own aspirations to achieve the rigor and clarity of science. His pessimism about the rationality and progress of philosophy, and his simultaneous insistence on the importance of its history, stimulated students and colleagues from many different walks of philosophy over several generations. Some of Dreben's views are discussed in detail in John Rawls's afterword. Rawls speaks for all of us in expressing our gratitude for Dreben's teaching and scholarship. Here we wish to record our collective debt to his colleagueship and constructive criticisms of our work over many years. This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments We are