A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #2–The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy.

(Schuringa, 2025)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy

3. The Death of Moritz Schlick

4. The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society

5. Otto Neurath

6. Rudoph Carnap

7. Hans Hahn

8. Philipp Frank

9. Edgar Zilsel

10. Rose Rand

11. Susan Stebbing

12. Russell and Moore

13. Michael Dummett

14. Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations

15. Analytic Philosophy in the Cold War Deep Freezer

16. Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis

17. Jean van Heijenoort

18. Noam Chomsky

19. On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics

20. On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment”

21. The Horkheimer-Neurath Reconciliation Attempt

22. The Punch Bowl Revisited

REFERENCES

The following essay,* by EJ Spode,** will be published here in 22 installments; this, the second, contains section 2.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #2

2. The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy

Let’s be clear on what the claims on the table are. One claim is that Analytic philosophy is ahistorical and uninterested in anything that has to do with the social or political. It is, by virtue of this alleged disinterest, that it can serve as a tool of liberal bourgeois ideology. As Schuringa puts it in the opening line of his book:

Analytic philosophy, today the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world and beyond, tends to think of itself as removed from the changing scenes of history. It acts as if it were pursuing its questions from a vantage point situated nowhere in particular, unaffected by social and political reality. It thus operates as a tradition that manages to think of itself as no tradition at all. (Schuringa, 2025)

Later, he says that this ahistorical, disconnected perspective can be found in the very style of Analytic philosophy and the topics that it engages.

The Analytic style is highly ahistorical and acultural…. Analytic philosophy tends to remain ignorant of large bodies of theory, particularly those concerned with culture, politics, anthropology, psychology, sexuality, religion, literature, and so on.

Neither of these claims are true of Analytic philosophy as it is. They are not even true of Analytic philosophy in its origins. As Schuringa surely knows, the founding document of Analytic philosophy – the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, speaks directly to this point. Consider, for example, the concluding paragraph of that manifesto.

Thus, the scientific world-conception is close to the life of the present. Certainly it is threatened with hard struggles and hostility. Nevertheless there are many who do not despair but, in view of the present sociological situation, look forward with hope to the course of events to come. Of course not every single adherent of the scientific world-conception will be a fighter. Some, glad of solitude, will lead a withdrawn existence on the icy slopes of logic; some may even disdain mingling with the masses and regret the “trivialized” form that these matters inevitably take on spreading. However, their achievements too will take a place among the historic developments. We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it. (Vienna Circle, 1996)

This does not sound like people who are “ahistorical” (to the contrary, their “world-conception is close to the life of the present.”). Nor does it sound like people who are “situated nowhere in particular, unaffected by social and political reality.” To the contrary, they say that their world-conception is penetrating “the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life,” albeit according to “rational principles,” which may be the thing that Schuringa is really objecting to.

Now Schuringa knows that this is the, or at least a, founding document of Analytic philosophy, but here and elsewhere he deploys a strategy of deception that he will conduct for some 330 pages, in which he acknowledges what he must (although, if he can get away with it, he will suppress it), and then spin up a story that the person in question was not really saying what they appear to be saying and doing. He will downplay the radicalism of radicals, and he will downplay the social engagement of the socially engaged. The end result is an astoundingly dishonest document, from its very first page to the last. I understand that that sounds harsh, but hear me out. We are going to walk through this book, claim-by-claim, defamation-by defamation, deception-by-deception, to try and sort this out.

What I intend to show is that, counter to Schuringa’s claims, it is absurd to say that Analytic philosophy is ignorant of “culture, politics, anthropology, psychology, sexuality, religion, literature.” It is absurd to say that Analytic philosophy has recoiled from radical and revolutionary political thought. Analytic philosophy has been engaged with all of these topics from the beginning. And the place we will start is with the Vienna Circle.

There is this mythology about the positivists that they were caught up in logic, and the language of science and nothing else. But the positivists, living in early 20^th-century Vienna, were neck deep in the culture, politics, anthropology, psychology, etc., of their age. They were key figures in the culture of their age, and they were working to find a way forward in the post-World War I wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is clear from Philipp Frank’s list of people they were reading: Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Vladimir Lenin, and Gottlob Frege. Despite the press they get, the members of the Vienna Circle were interested in everything.

To give just one example, members of the Circle had regular contact with the Bauhaus artists in Berlin. Otto Neurath was invited to the opening of the New Bauhaus in Dessau. Herbert Feigl and Rudolf Carnap also lectured there, and all were directly engaged with avant-garde artists of the age – Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers.

As Peter Galison notes in an article on their connection, the Vienna Circle and the Bauhaus were also drawn together by their common enemies: “the religious right, nationalist, anthroposophist, völkisch, and Nazi opponents” (Galison, 1990). Everyone knows the story about how Jewish artists and philosophers had to flee the Nazis, but I don’t think most people appreciate what they were actually up against philosophically. And the best way to illustrate this is in the case of the assassination of Circle leader Moritz Schlick and the aftermath of his assassination.

Schuringa is not impressed by the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, and he points to the carve-out in the final paragraph, for people who “lead a withdrawn existence on the icy slopes of logic.” But as we will see, even the members of the Circle who were not political, who led a “withdrawn existence on the icy slopes of logic,” were, in the context of their times, inherently political. There is no better illustration of this than the death of Moritz Schlick, who did not self-identify as one of the political members of the Circle. But in context, he was very much politically engaged. And sadly enough, the place where we can best see this is in his assassination in 1936.

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