A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #14–Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations.

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.

14. Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations

Schuringa is not merely in the business of misrepresenting Dummett’s political work, but he also wants to be dismissive of Dummett’s philosophical projects—or at least one part of it in particular. For those that don’t know, one of Dummett’s philosophical projects was to get philosophers to take a closer look (or at least a new look) at Gottlob Frege’s work in the philosophy of language. And Frege certainly had been a key figure in the early days of Analytic philosophy. He corresponded with Russell and met Wittgenstein. He taught Carnap. He was on the Vienna Circle reading list. Although he was a fringe figure in mathematics, he was there at the inception of Analytic philosophy and remains a towering figure in Analytic philosophy today. But, somehow, Schuringa thinks that Dummett had things all wrong here; Frege was just a math guy.

Frege was principally presented, remarkably, not as the mathematician he had understood himself to be, but as an innovator in a field he himself had never heard of: philosophy of language. Dummett claimed that Frege had been “the first to have fashioned a genuine theory of meaning.” Consideration of Frege as a philosopher of mathematics was relegated to a second, slimmer volume, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics, which came out in 1991. Frege was a tremendous innovator, of profound importance for the development of twentieth-century philosophy. But his innovations were not those Dummett foisted on him. Frege’s actual achievement was a revolution in logic, achieved from within mathematics.

I cannot begin to describe just how batshit crazy this is. First, how could Schuringa possibly know that Frege “had never heard of” the philosophy of language? I mean, are we really asking whether he had heard the expression “Sprachphilosophie,” which was in use by 1820? Is that where we are?

But of course, who knows? As Jamie Tappenden has noted, we have really terrible records of who Frege interacted with:

Setting out to understand Frege, the scholar confronts a roadblock at the outset: We just have little to go on. Much of the unpublished work and correspondence is lost, probably forever. (Tappenden, 2008)

Challenges for us, maybe, but not for Schuringa. He just knows. Frege never even heard of the philosophy of language.

Except…well, we do know about one of the philosophers that Frege was familiar with. That would be HIS FATHER. Here I am going to draw on an essay by Jens Lemanski, snappily titled “Frege’s Father was a German Idealist.” The father, Alexander Frege, wrote on many topics, including some pedagogical materials on language instruction incorporating ideas about language from his teacher/mentor, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. And here is the crazy-ass thing: Krause did have his own earlier attempt at a “pasigraphy” – a universal written language or concept-script. And Krause’s work, like Frege’s later Begriffschrift, also had a similar 2-dimensional character.

Pasigraphies by (a) Leibniz, (b) Krause, (c) Frege (Illustration from Lemanski’s paper)

Of course, so far none of this definitively tells us that Frege had, indeed, never heard of sprachphilosophie, except, it seems, Krause wrote a book titled … checking notes … Zur Sprachphilosophie. And guess what? It is still in print today! You can buy it on Amazon (Krause, 2017).

Now sure, I suppose it is possible that Gottlob Frege hated his father and wasn’t interested in his work and it was all just a crazy coincidence that Frege ended up executing a pasigraphy that looked a lot like Krause’s. You know, shit happens with families. But then … was Frege also ignorant of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (AOS philosophy of language, logic, philology—the author of the famous etymology of the word “person”), who even used the term “Begriffsschrift” in his work? Why should we believe that Frege was aware of Trendelenburg’s work? I dunno, maybe because Frege cites it in … checking notes again … the Preface to the Begriffsschrift?

Apart from the question of how Frege could possibly not have heard of the philosophy of language, there is the question of whether what we call the philosophy of language was important to Frege’s project. Schuringa, who I guarantee you knows nothing about mathematical logic, insists that all this philosophy of language stuff was just some added-on stuff to clean up a few puzzles. Let’s take a minute to sort this out.

In the footnotes to A Social History, Schuringa makes several references to a collection of papers entitled From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, edited by one Jean van Heijenoort. Schuringa even celebrates the collection for including the preface to the Begriffsschrift, and he claims to be using that preface to build his case that Frege was not interested in the philosophy of language (Frege didn’t even know what it was!) How Schuringa missed the reference to Trendelenburg in that preface is a question that we set aside here.

Had Schuringa consulted the author of that Source Book he was citing, Jean van Heijenoort, he would have learned a couple of interesting things. First, in 1967, the same year that the Source Book came out, van Heijenoort published a paper entitled “Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language,” in which he argued that what set Frege apart from other logicians of his era—for example, Boole, Peirce, and Schröder—was that Frege did not view logic as a mode of calculation, but rather as a universal, perspicuous language in which content is expressed (van Heijenoort, 1967).

So, on van Heijenoort’s view, the biggest advance was not the introduction of quantification, or function-argument application to replace subject-predicate form, but rather Frege’s idea that logic was fundamentally a universal language in which not only mathematical inquiry could be conducted, but also in which all forms of inquiry could be conducted. (You can see elements of this idea in the title itself—Begriffsschrift, or concept writing.) It seems to me that understanding this goes a long way toward explaining why Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle were all so into Frege.

Here is a way to think about this: van Heijenoort’s paper provides a map of two different ways Western logicians have thought about what a logical system is. He uses that map to argue that there’s a real conceptual split in the history of logic, with Frege on one side and the Boole/Peirce/Schröder tradition on the other. If I read van Heijenoort correctly, the alternative (calculus rather than language-based) approaches to language are not even entitled to call what they are doing “logic.”

Now, it is true that Frege wasn’t giving a theory of natural language—he was giving a theory of an ideal language. But it was still language. This just means he wasn’t doing linguistics. He wasn’t Herder or Humbolt. The language he was building was an ideal one, optimized for clarity. But in building such a language he had to think about what properties it would have to have, because it would have to be designed for all forms of thinking (not just mathematical thinking), and this, ultimately, gets him into issues about sense and reference, and indexicals, and speech acts, and on and on.

But a bigger issue is this: Even if Frege somehow, someway, had never heard of the philosophy of language, or heard of it and didn’t care about it, and even if he thought it had nothing to do with his project on the foundations of mathematics—even if he wrote it all down on the back of an envelope just for the fucking hell of it—well, his work would be just as important. His work on the philosophy of language, even if he just called it “a bunch of shit that popped into my head,” would have had monumental importance, just as it continues to have monumental importance today.

There is a second point I wanted to make about Jean van Heijenoort. He is otherwise unmentioned in Schuringa’s book, but it must be noted that he is yet another example of an Analytic philosopher that is a counterexample to Schuringa’s thesis that they are all in the tank for neoliberalism. My friends, van Heijenoort was also the personal secretary and bodyguard to Leon fucking Trotsky! (I know what you are thinking, but van Heijenoort moved to New York a few months before Trotsky was assassinated.) Trust me when I tell you that we are coming back to this!

van Heijenoort with Leon Trotsky (to be continued…)

Before we move on from Frege, I have two observations. In one classic moment, Schuringa complains that “Frege had never spoken of a ‘theory of meaning’.” Were this true, it was probably a mistake for Frege to title his most famous paper, “Sinn und Bedeutung.” Now perhaps Schuringa was trying to say that Frege never successfully constructed a theory of meaning or a theory of sense and reference, and if by “theory” we mean “finished theory,” then that would be true. But Frege’s great accomplishment was not that he gave us a finished theory for us to venerate as though it were the end of science. He gave us something better: a research program that is still being pursued a century later. You know, it is a theory in the sense that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a theory—it is a theoretical research program.

Final note: Schuringa also takes issue with the fact that in his final version of Frege: The Philosophy of Language, Dummett did not include references to the locations in the text he was referencing. I agree that that is annoying. It would have sped up some of the Frege scholarship that followed in the wake of Dummett’s book. Schuringa, however, is outraged by this and is amazed by “Dummett’s ability to get away with such scholarly standards.” Perhaps the criticism is fair, but I don’t think that Schuringa is the one to deliver this message.

Schuringa’s confident yet unsupported and bizarre, upside-down statements about Frege are just one example in a flood of additional claims, in which Schuringa weaves a tapestry of Bizarro World takes on what Analytic philosophers must be saying and believing.

For example, did you know that Donald Davidson’s T-theories give truth conditions without a metalanguage? I shit you not, Schuringa said that. What was he trying to show? Who knows. But, of course, the whole point of a Davidsonian truth theory is that you give the truth conditions in the metalanguage. Now, there is no reason that Schuringa needs to know about this, but if he chooses not to understand it, why is he blathering on about it? This isn’t some minor error. It would be tantamount to saying that Marx rejected materialism, or Freud rejected the unconscious.

At one point, we are told that the logical truths are analytic truths, like “Bachelors are unmarried.” So-called analytic truths (statements true merely by definition, such as “Bachelors are unmarried”)—the logical truths—faced a problem. They relied on synonymy, which Quine persuasively showed was a far more slippery notion than one might suppose.

Ooof, just brutal.

At yet another point we are told that Wittgenstein destroyed Russell’s type-theory project in logic—i.e., that type theory was abandoned in the face of Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell. What? In the first place, while Wittgenstein was an important 20^th-century philosopher, no one gives a flying fuck what he thinks about logic. And type theory was not at all abandoned. It stands at the foundation of many logics, including categorial grammars of the sort that are nearly universally used by semanticists in linguistics departments around the world (see, for example, the semantics textbook by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer). Meanwhile, I can think of over a dozen computer languages that are grounded in type theory. I’m not even going to get into the use of type theory in the foundations of mathematics, because I mostly don’t understand most of it, but I know enough to inform you reliably that it is still very much in use.

Then there is this: Schuringa somehow got it into his head that Analytic philosophers have been fans of behaviorism, and when they aren’t behaviorists, they immediately become fans of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here is the passage in question.

But Analytic philosophy is much more intimately bound up with what we find elsewhere in the academy than such a schema recognizes. There are close affinities, in particular, with marginalism in economics, and with behaviourism in psychology.

After 1959, when Noam Chomsky’s damning review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior drove long nails into the coffin of behaviourism, its basic impulses were redirected, into a preoccupation with computers as taking the place of conscious agents. Today, this trend finds its counterpart in Analytic philosophers’ obsession with ‘artificial intelligence’ as supposedly analogous to conscious minds. (Schuringa, 2025)

Let’s set the business about economics aside for the moment (I can only sort out one confusion at a time). What’s this about behaviorism? He thinks Analytic philosophers are behaviorists! Or they were until Chomsky wrecked behaviorism, and they all became AI maxis.

I would really love to know who these behaviorists are that Schuringa is talking about. Quine no doubt, but who are the others? Some people have said that Wittgenstein and some of the Oxbridge ordinary language philosophers were “logical behaviorists,” but then we get into the whole Wittgenstein passage about the “beetle in the box.” Is this who Schuringa has in mind? He doesn’t say.

As to driving long nails into the coffin of behaviorism, what is Chomsky if not an Analytic philosopher? (We will come back to this.) Critically, Chomsky did not end behaviorism all by himself, and many Analytic philosophers were also engaged in that difficult project. Figures like Hilary Putnam (with his papers about super-Spartans) and Jerry Fodor, and many others were involved in the battles against behaviorism in the academy. Even in the 1980s, when I was at Stony Brook, behaviorism was alive in psychology departments. I started a cognitive science group to give the non-behaviorist minority within the psychology department at Stony Brook a safe space. We invited Jerry Fodor to come give a talk, and the behaviorists who (unwisely) came to heckle him got a full dose of Jerry Fodor. This was in the late 1980s. So no, Analytic philosophers were not behaviorists; they played important roles in dismantling behaviorism.

On the “obsession with ‘artificial intelligence’ as supposedly analogous to conscious minds,” what in the name of All Holy Hell is Schuringa talking about? Schuringa himself mentions Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior but he does not mention that Chomsky has also been a persistent critic of AI, most recently in a coauthored piece in the New York Times, entitled “The False Promise of ChatGPT” (Chomsky, Roberts, and Watamull, 2023). It is not just Chomsky fanbois and fangrrrls that are going to find middle ground here. I don’t know of a single behaviorist philosopher since Quine passed away on Christmas Day in 2000, and I only know of one philosopher that is in the tank for artificial intelligence. Everyone else is engaged in some sort of philosophical reflection in which we have some form of consciousness, some level of agency, and in which it is not at all obvious that AI agents do or ever will have such things.

We can even quantify how many Analytic philosophers might hold the view that Schuringa is attributing to them. In a survey reported by David Bourget and David Chalmers, roughly a thousand, predominantly Analytic, philosophers were asked (among other things) if they thought current AI systems were conscious (Bourget and Chalmers, 2023). 3.4% said yes. For context, 23% thought earthworms were conscious. 2% thought that atomic particles were conscious.

The list could go on. Bit by bit, page by page, we learn by induction that Schuringa has no idea what he is talking about. His understanding of the doctrinal parts of Analytic philosophy is completely hallucinated.

Along the way, Schuringa can’t help but pause to toss more turds in the punchbowl—in that there are these random, pointless detours that Schuringa makes just to say something nasty, and, as it would happen, also false. These detours are really quite something to behold, often taking the form of pronouncements uttered as if from Mt. Olympus, with supreme confidence, when it is clear that he is in no position to make them. We already covered one case in which he said, based on nothing, that Frege never heard of the philosophy of language. Another example of this is when he claims that Bertrand Russell was incorrect in saying that British Idealism was dominant in Cambridge when Russell was a student.

There is no sense in which Cambridge was simply dominated by idealism at the time Russell and Moore were students in the 1890s: there was no monolithic ‘idealist tradition’ for them to react against. (Schuringa, 2025)

As if we are supposed to imagine that Schuringa knows more about 1890s Cambridge philosophy than Russell and Moore. Who were there.

To support his thesis, Schuringa notes that there only four dons in philosophy at Cambridge in the 1890s.

In the 1890s, when Russell and Moore were students, there were just four dons: Sidgwick, James Ward, G. F. Stout and McTaggart. Ward and Stout were psychologists as well as philosophers.

Right now you are asking, what does the number of dons have to do with this? And the answer is that I have no idea. Also, does Schuringa think that psychologists can’t be Idealists? Who knows, but come on, please … Ward, for example, advocated what he called “Spiritualistic monism”—a kind of panpsychist British Idealism influenced by Lotze. He was defending an anti-materialist, mind-suffused universe. Sorry, but that sounds like philosophical idealism to me. Stout certainly began as an Idealist; I don’t know where he ended up. McTaggart is obviously an Idealist, and as for Sidgwick, there is a famous essay by one C.J. Dewey (not that Dewey) in which he describes Sidgwick as idealist-influenced. Meaning, his project was armoring ethics against Idealism. In other words, Sidgwick was reacting against the same Idealist tradition that Russell and Moore were. But these are just the dons. What of all the college fellows? Does Schuringa think he knows what their philosophical proclivities were as well?

Perhaps I can say something helpful. First, there is William Ritchie Sorley (Wikipedia, 2026f). While he didn’t become a don until 1900, he was there, as a fellow, at Trinity, when Russell was there. And he was an idealist. I hope no one is going to try and dispute that. Then there is John Stuart MacKenzie, who was a fellow at Trinity up until 1896 (Wikipedia, 2026g). He’s the guy who said “… the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finally maintained.” Sounds like an idealist to me.

As for all the other tutors and fellows, let’s hope some of them knew their idealism, because that was a subject on the Tripos exam. According to the 1891 Guide to the Moral Sciences Tripos edited by James Ward, the ethics syllabus explicitly included “Idealistic Ethics” as one of the four main schools of ethical thought and it recommended Bradley’s Ethical Studies and Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics as representative works of Idealistic Ethics, adding this: “Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics may be strongly recommended as the most important English book dealing with the relation of Metaphysics to Ethics.”

And I get it, Bradley and Green weren’t at Cambridge. They were at Oxford. But that doesn’t mean they could not influence the intellectual culture of Cambridge for Russell and Moore, since, you know, they were on the reading list! For the Tripos exam! But wait, there’s more.

After we are told that idealism wasn’t really a thing at Cambridge, we get this:

[Russell and Moore’s] target was a view they themselves had come to relatively recently (Russell in 1894, just before completing his Tripos), and was far from imposed on them by their teachers. (Schuringa, 2025)

What is the logic here? It seems to be this: Russell wasn’t an idealist when he showed up at Cambridge, but by the time he finished his Tripos he was an idealist, and therefore his becoming an idealist had nothing to do with his education at Cambridge. Did I get that right?

If you thought Schuringa was out over his skis with his bold, god-like proclamations about the origins of Frege’s ideas and the character of philosophy in Cambridge in the 1890s, well, all that was just a warm-up for the 10^th and final chapter of the book: “Colonizing Philosophy.” Or, as he also puts it: “Columbusing philosophy.” Who are these Columbuses, and what are they Columbusing/colonizing? What they are colonizing are areas like gender studies, race studies, and, I suppose, queer studies, but he doesn’t mention that last one. And who is doing the colonizing? Well, that is where shit gets wild, because Schuringa is about to name names.

The people colonizing gender studies and feminist philosophy are Sally Haslanger, Rae Langton, Catharine MacKinnon (not an Analytic philosopher, I know, but tell that to Schuringa), and Miranda Fricker. You are perhaps thinking, what? There are feminist philosophers in every philosophy department in the US and Britain; why are these four singled out for scorn? Who knows. The point here, now, is that Schuringa sees them as the four horsewomen of the apocalypse, charging off of the Niña, the Pinta, and Santa Maria, swords drawn in the Columbusing of feminism.

Now, I am aware that if you have come this far in my review, you perhaps consider yourself an intelligent person, and are thus already asking yourself questions, like: How are those four women supposed to be colonizing feminist theory? They are women. Well, silly reader with your liberal, Columbian, sexist logic… what you fail to see is that those four are either (a) not the right women to be working on women’s issues, or (b) they are not doing it the right way! Which is to say that they aren’t doing it the way that Christoph Schuringa thinks women should be executing feminist philosophy. Ballsy. But there is a difference between being a Chad and trying to teabag an alligator.

Schuringa isn’t just telling women how to conduct their liberation movements. He has things to tell black folk as well. Here he zeroes in on Anthony Appiah, and my former colleague (now deceased) Charles Mills. For good measure, he tosses in some scorn for Chike Jeffers, Quayshawn Spencer, and Joshua Glasgow. You may think of these philosophers as heroes of a sort—articulating the nature of racial oppression in a way in which you had not understood it before. But all this explaining and understanding is just a bunch of liberal Columbusing of racial studies. I don’t know exactly what Schuringa wants them to say instead, but I’m sure it has something to do with Marx circa 1948. In any case, they are either (a) the wrong black guys to be doing black studies, or (b) they are doing it all wrong—i.e. not the way Schuringa wants them to do it.

It is pretty easy to see where this project goes next. If someone is working on the nature of oppression for some group – women, blacks, Asians, whatever—they are going to have to get approval from a white guy, Christoph Schuringa, teaching somewhere in London. If he likes what they are doing and (more importantly) how they are doing it, he will nod approvingly in their direction. But if he does not like the way they are conducting their own liberation movement, he will say that they are “Columbusing” their field of study.

I don’t mean to suggest that Schuringa doesn’t introduce arguments against what these people are doing, but even I, a kind-of outsider to their field, can see that he is wildly misrepresenting their positions (no surprise there, I guess). Whether these misrepresentations are intentional or the product of the challenging nature of basic reading comprehension is the fundamental question of Schuringa’s book. In this case, the key misrepresentation is the idea that Analytic race studies turns on how people use the word “race” (in his words, “a question they largely examine by asking how ‘competent users of English’ use the word ‘race’”). Sorry, but these people are in the business of studying race and the concept of race, not how we use certain words. Word usage can be evidence for the structure of our concepts, but that is not the object of study. Even if they were interested in the lexicon of “race,” as I am, there would be questions about the norms governing the correct application of words like “race,” which would in turn raise empirical issues about biological and social facts about the world. But beyond this point, they are also proposing that we can ameliorate these concepts if some good can come from that. They are in the business of engineering concepts, not just accepting them as given.

When Schuringa then turns to the Columbusing of Marxist studies it is at least marginally less offensive, except for the fact that the juxtaposition of the cases suggests that Schuringa finds himself to be an oppressed minority, just like women and blacks, by virtue of being some flavor of Marxist/non-Analytic philosopher:

Analytic philosophy simply cannot help thinking of itself as just philosophy as such—not unlike the way in which, as Charles Mills underlined, whites simply cannot help thinking of themselves as just humanity as such. (Schuringa, 2025)

(Imagining what Charles’s reaction to that would have been fills me with mirth.)

But back to Marxist studies. Who is the colonizer here? The people he is attacking here are Analytic Marxists like Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster, and John E. Roemer, but they were doing Marxist studies before Schuringa was born. It would be years before he was wearing short pants and sailor suits, and still more years before he read Marx and decided he knew more about it than all those who came before.

I aim to return to Analytic Marxism later, after we have covered a few more background topics, but it does seem to me that Schuringa doesn’t really have a criticism of the work, so much as just a sneer and one background thought, which is this: That shit is not how Marx would have done it! True, I suppose, of Marx trapped in 1848, but what forms of scientific investigation and technologies would Marx have availed himself of in the 20^th and 21^st centuries? We will come back to this, but for now, we have to move on to a new issue.

In the middle of all his hallucinated ideas about what Analytic philosophers believe, and in the middle of his project to dump on the quality and integrity of Analytic philosophy writ large, and in the middle of all the random, pointless defamations, pseudo-arguments and breakdowns in scholarship, Schuringa decides that there are movements within Analytic philosophy that are in some sense good, or at least better. For some reason, he thinks that modal logic must be a good thing, or at least a better thing than the alternative, which is no modal logic.

Does Schuringa understand what modal logic is? Clearly not, but we are beyond all that. What I believe is driving this exemption for modal logic is an online lecture by the logician Max Cresswell, who had a very political spin, that modal logic was the logic of the people, and the philosophers against it were rich mfers like Quine, whose father owned a tire mold company in Akron, Ohio (Cresswell, 2022). (A veritable titan of industry.) Cresswell’s argument here, as he admitted, was pretty thin, resting on the fact that Quine was undeniably a right-wing Nixon supporter, and that there was one logician, William T. Parry, who went to the Soviet Union (also Vienna in 1932, btw) and became a socialist. Or … Cresswell wonders … maybe Quine just didn’t like his dissertation advisor, C.I. Lewis. Too late to consider that last possibility; Schuringa has already grabbed onto the first idea, and he is not letting it go!

(Cresswell, 2022)

Whether Cresswell’s take on modal logic makes any sense is not the point. What matters to us now is that Schuringa positively eats it up. And thus, he carves out a space within Analytic philosophy where good guys can be found – in the modal logicians! They are like a sleeper communist cell, hidden in plain sight at the very center of Analytic philosophy. This is already deeply nutty (in part because everyone except Quine believes in modal logic), but it gets even nuttier. Schuringa starts applying his patented method to it, which is to say he provides potted biographies intended to show that modal logicians are good, hardworking children of the proletariat, whereas the people against modal logic (as far as I know, that would be Quine, full stop) were the scions of tire mold manufacturers. This becomes hilarious when Schuringa steps in to hype Ruth Marcus and Saul Kripke.

In the case of Kripke, we are told he was “the son of a rabbi and the grandson of a Polish-born bottle and barrel salesman.” The story could be put to violin music. What Schuringa doesn’t say, or somehow doesn’t know, is that Kripke’s father was rabbi and friend to Warren Buffett, and thus became an early investor with Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company and thus became insanely rich. How rich? All we know for sure is that in 1999, the Kripke family made a donation of $7 million dollars to refurbish the library tower at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It’s now named “The Kripke Tower.”

The Kripke Tower

In the case of Ruth Barcan Marcus, we are told that

Her parents, Sam and Rose Barcan, were Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in the Bronx. The household was socialist (though not communist); as in Lewis’s parental home, Eugene Debs was a “sainted” figure. Young Ruth attended the Red Falcons (“Marx for tots”). (Schuringa, 2025)

Promising!

Schuringa has a needle to thread here, since he has to deal with the allegations that Kripke “plagiarized” some of Marcus’s key ideas. He settles on the idea that this is “a distraction”:

The controversy about plagiarism is, however, a distraction from the more important issue. Even if it can be allowed that Kripke did not plagiarize Marcus, it remains true that, as she herself pointed out, for a long time her work in intensional and modal logic was not properly recognized or acknowledged. Kripke’s work, by contrast, was received with adulation. (Schuringa, 2025)

In other words, it wasn’t Kripke’s fault that those Analytic philosophers didn’t give Marcus the adulation she deserved.

Probably a more on-point thesis would be that logicians rarely get adulation because people rarely understand what they are up to, and in this case, it took Kripke’s lectures on naming and necessity to explain to people what the so-called Barcan formula even meant, how it worked, why it could be used to model metaphysical reality (complete with arguments!) and why it was important to philosophers. And in all honesty, he saw that it was important in ways that even Marcus had not seen.

The absolutely bizarre thing about Schuringa’s love for Marcus is that he seems to be completely unaware of her role in the 1980s as the Grande Inquisitor against Continental philosophy. Most of what I know about this is filtered through Continental philosophers that I knew at the time, but in their view, she had “purged” the Yale philosophy department of Continental philosophers and was generally on the warpath against Continental philosophy. She was already a leading protagonist (antagonist?), when the New York Times ran a story about the Analytic/Continental split in December of 1987, during the Eastern APA meetings.

Download

(Bernstein, 1987)

The NYT article does a pretty good job of laying out the dispute as it was drawn in the 1980s, and I believe as it still exists in Schuringa’s mind.

Professor Smith, Professor Sherover, and others dismiss this sort of thing as a bright but empty game played by the dreaded SMAG, the Singleminded Analytic al Group, and they promote a return to the more freewheeling, literary traditions of Europe, where Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre provided a more soulful alternative to the analysts’ brainy but dry logic. Many of the anti-analysts refer to themselves as Continental s. They in turn are disdained by some of the analysts as fuzzy, airy, ignorant of the empirical data, and more attached to feeling than to thought.

Marcus, quoted in the article, isn’t having any of it, and the first point she makes is pretty good: It is just false to think that concern for logic and mathematics is a new development that came with Analytic philosophers—philosophy has been obsessed with these issues from the beginning.

“It’s not just fake history, it isn’t even history,” she said, speaking of the pluralists’ version of philosophy’s changes. “The tradition up to Kant was Analytic al. It was one of addressing questions in a careful way and giving reasons for one’s point of view.”

“There was also a close connection between philosophy and science,” she said, dismissing a common pluralists’ charge that the analysts, whether they exist as a category or not, pretentiously mimic the sciences. “Plato’s Academy bore the inscription: ‘Those who have not studied mathematics shall not enter here.’ Leibniz invented the calculus. Spinoza wrote up his Ethics like geometry. Nobody is more Analytic al than Descartes. They had tremendously high standards of clarity and a healthy regard for good reasons.” (Bernstein, 1987)

Towards the end of the article, Marcus dropped the hammer.

“I’ll tell you what the issue is,” she said. “There are some people whose notion about philosophy is that it is something that you do. There’s some issue—knowledge, truth, the meaning of good—and they try to answer philosophical questions about it. Then there are a whole lot of other people who write about other philosophers, who interpret their work. A lot of the people who call themselves pluralists are interested in studying other people’s work.” (Bernstein, 1987)

Professor Marcus’s point is that the prestige departments—such as those at Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton—hired from the group that “does philosophy” leaving the resentful others on the sidelines, from where they have mounted a political counterattack.

Bejeebers, Schuringa picked a crazy ally there. A lot of good “Marx for tots” did her! Now, of course, Marcus is being unfair, but that was the state of the profession in the minds of leading philosophers all the way into the 1980s. Apparently, some philosophers still see the world divided up in this way, and Schuringa’s book is Exhibit One for that. But there is no reason we need to see it that way. And there is good reason not to see it that way.

Before we leave the subject of modal logicians not getting the adulation they deserve, there is the matter of the modal logician Oskar Becker. Why didn’t he get more credit for his work on modal logic during the 1930s? Was it because he was an assistant to Husserl and incorporated ideas from Heidegger? Or was it because he was too metaphysical for the taste of the logical positivists? Or … was it because he was another fucking Nazi?

And what a Nazi Becker was! This was the guy who argued for a “Nordic Metaphysics” and celebrated the fact that the meter of Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Dithyrambs could be heard in the marching cadence of the Sturmabteilung (aka “storm division,” aka “storm troopers,” aka “brown shirts”, aka “fashion consultants for Heidegger”).

But wait! We haven’t even gotten to the dark part of Becker’s philosophy! That part was his idea, which he called paraontology. In it, he treats things like “race,” “Volk,” “historical destiny,” etc., as deep conditions that shape how a people experiences and discloses the world. In other words, different races/peoples have different basic “styles” of world-disclosure, grounded in their racial being. My friends: He’s using phenomenology to ground racism! What does this have to do with math and logic? Becker’s idea is that mathematics arises from phenomenological structures tied to race becomes entangled with the claims that different Völker have different existential structures, therefore different mathematical possibilities, therefore mathematics has a racial dimension. And that my friends, is why Jews are so shitty at math, and ultimately why Aryan science is so much better than Jewish science—you know, the shit they were doing in The Vienna Circle.

Schuringa is aware of all this but doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by it:

Needless to say, Becker’s reputation was tainted by this—suffering in particular, during the post-war years, in the eyes of those who had fled Nazi persecution. (Schuringa, 2025)

Yes, “tainted reputation” is one way to put it. But, you know, it was only tainted “in the eyes of those who had fled Nazi persecution.” But hey, who cares what the fuck they think.

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that Nazism and racism are inevitable consequences of some kinds of metaphysical philosophy any more than I would say that they are consequences of doing modal logic. And let’s be honest, Frege was a rabid antisemite too. But, in the historical context of the 1930s and thereafter, one can understand how people came to have this thought. That might be worth exploring, if … you know … you were writing a social history of Analytic philosophy.

The real puzzle is why Schuringa is so smitten with essentialism and essential properties. Every Continental philosopher I know is always complaining about people who essentialize things. That is a bad thing! They don’t want it! The positivists didn’t want it. Quine didn’t want it. Derrideans certainly don’t want it. The other Continental philosophers don’t want it either. No one wants it! It’s the only thing that everyone can agree on. But apparently, Schuringa wants it.

Schuringa practically adores Kripke (and invents his safe biography for him) because he imagines that Kripke is the defender of metaphysics, essentialism, and essential properties. But this shows a failure to understand what Kripke accomplished—at least on my understanding of Kripke. Indulge me for a paragraph or two.

It was a thesis of Kant that there are “synthetic a priori” propositions (the positivists didn’t believe in them but set that aside). These are propositions that are informative, but which are known without the help of experience – for example, that 5+7=12. What Kripke showed was that there are propositions that are, in some sense, the inverse of that: They are necessary yet a posteriori. That is to say, there are necessary truths, or essential truths, that are empirically discovered. Science discovers essences! So, for example, it is an essential property of the water in my glass that it is composed, in part, of H₂O. Now, the thing is, we might (epistemic might) be wrong about this. Science may discover that water is actually made of something else. That is fine. Then we revise our understanding of what the essential properties are.

OK, let’s put this idea in context. The reason that the positivists were opposed to metaphysics and essential properties is because they did not want religion, or authority, or armchair reflection about what “must” be the case to dictate our theories of what is the case. And honestly, metaphysical reflection had handicapped our understanding of the world. Kant thought it was an a priori truth that there were six planets. Aristotle thought it was an essential truth that men had more teeth than women (they don’t; ask your dentist!).

So, what Kripke showed (and, by the way, what Marcus did not show) should have been compatible with the motivations underlying positivism, and Quine’s project, and any Continental project that rejects essential properties. We can have essential properties as long as we understand that we are free to reject them as soon as we can see that they are wrong.

This notion that you can reject an idea that you once thought important (maybe even an essential truth) is something that Schuringa just cannot wrap his mind around. Why do these Analytic philosophers keep saying that things are supposed to be necessary and then rejecting the very same ideas? More generally: WHY DO THEY KEEP CHANGING THEIR MINDS!?. How is that allowed???

This is a real problem for Schuringa, because if his attack on Analytic philosophy is to work, he has to show that Analytic philosophy is not just accidentally bad, or temporarily bad, but he has to show it is essentially bad. It is irredeemable. You can’t fix it. But how and why is Analytic philosophy essentially anything? No matter, Schuringa is apoplectic that the Analytic philosophers are not telling him what those necessary and sufficient conditions are. And isn’t that their job after all?

Schuringa’s frustration with the ability of Analytic philosophers to adopt and then reject essential properties like tissues at the psychotherapist’s office is nothing compared to the frustration he feels about the way Analytic philosophers use what they call “intuitions.” What is that about? They use intuitions one day and then toss them in the used intuition bin the next day. Again, how is that even allowed?

Kieran Setiya, in his review of Schuringa’s History in the Los Angeles Review of Books, attempts to help Schuringa understand: when you say it is an intuition, you are merely making your assumptions explicit (Setiya, 2025). An intuition is a premise that you are offering, and which, for the moment, you believe to be true. Timothy Williamson has argued that Analytic philosophers shouldn’t call these intuitions—they should call them “judgments,” like when you judge the height of someone. Judgments are not set in stone. You are allowed to revise your judgments. People do it all the time. It works like essential properties work post-Kripke.

Whatever. Schuringa is now obsessed with intuitions, and he cycles through case after case, noting the intuitions/judgments that are called on, and completely forgets to tell us what ideas those judgments were in the service of. For example, he talks about Putnam’s XYZ thought experiments, and sneers a bit, and then moves on, completely ignoring the philosophical project that those judgments were in the service of. And what they were in the service of was trying to help people see that we can be anti-Cartesians about word meanings and mental content. In other words, the thought experiments were illustrations in a project rejecting 400 years of Cartesianism! This project was advanced by a number of Analytic philosophers, including Davidson, Putnam, Tyler Burge, and, to some extent, by Schuringa’s beloved Kripke. Why should we trust such judgments (or intuitions, or whatever you want to call them) in these cases? Well, geez, maybe the idea is that we have some access to the contents of our own thoughts. Is that supposed to be a wacky idea to Schuringa?

Of course, we also get the obligatory sneering about Trolley cases, as though reflecting on whether we should switch the train to kill one person instead of five was just some form of irrelevant Analytic-style mental masturbation. But you know, even as you read this very essay, people are designing self-driving cars to do this very thing (Lin, 2017). Wouldn’t it be lovely if philosophers had a role in reflecting on these cases, rather than leaving it up to Elon Musk to sort it all out for us?

Whatever love that Schuringa has for Kripke and Marcus, he despises all the Analytic metaphysics that came after them. (I guess the idea is: You saved essentialism for me, now go home.) Schuringa weirdly has particular scorn for Ted Sider and Jonathan Schaffer, who Schuringa takes to be among those philosophers who traffic in intuitions (aka judgments). He has extra particular scorn for Sider’s book about four-dimensionalism. Why does Schuringa have an axe to grind about four-dimensionalism? I don’t even know anymore, but based on Schuringa’s angst, you would think that Sider pissed in Schuringa’s Cheerios.

We are told that “[e]ffectively, Sider has no methodology” (Schuringa, 2025). We are also told that

This methodological decrepitude has not gone unnoticed, and the armchair metaphysics of the likes of Schaffer and Sider has attracted criticism from some quarters within Analytic philosophy. (Schuringa, 2025)

And then there is this:

Although [Sider] professes to have “no good epistemology of metaphysics to offer,” that does not make his approach worthless, he thinks, because no epistemology can be established for any enquiry before embarking on it. (Schuringa, 2025)

Unaddressed by Schuringa is the following question: Did Sider say something false?

Nevermind that. All this methodological decrepitude has Schuringa asking questions:

One wonders what the institutional and social mechanisms are that serve to maintain the remarkable lack of methodological self-scrutiny that allows this to continue. (Schuringa, 2025)

Yes, right, why doesn’t the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of Analytic Philosophy put a stop to this decrepitude?

If you don’t know Sider’s work, you might be sitting here asking yourself, jeezuz what did that fucker do? I mean, Schuringa is handing out get-out-of-jail-free passes to Nazi philosophers left and right. Sider’s methodology must be some deeply Satanic shit.

And well, in Sider’s own words, in his own book, the methodology comes to this:

I will lay out some presuppositions of a more metaphysical nature that will guide the argument of the book. I will argue for these presuppositions whenever I can. Where I cannot, I simply flag them as my own prejudices. (Sider, 2003)

And this sounds a lot like what Kieran Setiya was saying about how intuitions/judgments are used. They are ways of making your basic premises explicit.

I wonder about Schuringa’s handwringing over Sider’s lack of an epistemology for his metaphysics. I mean, we don’t even have an epistemology for mathematics, and finding one is a project that consumed 19^th and 20^th-century philosophy of mathematics. That was part of what was driving Hilbert’s formalism, until it got nuked by Gödel. It drives much work in intuitionist/constructivist work in the foundations of mathematics, and Charles Parsons devoted much of his career to sorting out an epistemology for Gödel’s Platonism about mathematical objects (Gödel didn’t offer one). I mean, even Soviet mathematicians were at work on the problem. At one point, Hartry Field decided we should throw in the towel; he wrote a book called Science Without Numbers, in which he argued that the epistemological problem of mathematical objects is so dire, we should find a way to do science without numbers (Field, 1980). But the last time I checked, scientists still use numbers!

In saying all this, I don’t mean to suggest that I agree with Sider’s book Four-Dimensionalism. Quite to the contrary, I have a view that is, for all intents and purposes, the complete opposite of Sider’s. We even had an event at Cornell many years ago in which Sider and I presented our competing theories. My view was published in a widely unread book called Semantics, Tense, and Time. In saying that Sider is completely wrong about everything, however, I don’t find fault with his methodology. To the contrary, his methodology helps make explicit the different premises on which, for now, we cannot agree. His position is logically consistent, consistent with science, and consistent with Sider’s judgments about things metaphysical.

But getting back to Schuringa’s search for the essence of Analytic philosophy, he gives up on waiting for Analytic philosophers to tell us what their necessary and sufficient conditions are for Analytic philosophy, and so he tells us himself: It is inherently Humean.

[Analytic philosophy] is in fact unable to see itself as the local, ideologically specific tradition that it is: philosophically, an outgrowth of Hume that has bypassed everything in European philosophy since Kant; ideologically, the perpetuation of eighteenth-century liberalism. (Schuringa, 2025)

I bet you didn’t have that one on your bingo card! But you should have seen it coming, because it was in that Schuringa quote that I began this review with—the one about critical forces crushing its Humean enemies, seeing them driven before it, and hearing the lamentation of their women. But why Hume? I mean, why is Analytic philosophy not fundamentally Cartesian, or Leibnizian, or Kantian, or Spinozan, or … you know, all of the above? But no, Schuringa assures us that it is Humean. It is British Empiricism at its very core, and to back this up he quotes A.J. Ayer. Well, that settles that!

As convinced as Schuringa is that Analytic philosophers are all in the tank for British Empiricism, that idea doesn’t exactly line up with the views of actual Analytic philosophers. Earlier, I cited the survey published by Bourget and Chalmers (Bourget and Chalmers, 2023). Let’s look at that survey again. From about 1000 predominantly Analytic philosophers, we are told that 72.9% believe in a priori knowledge. Not a good start for the empiricists. We are also told that only 31.3% are Humeans about laws of nature. Ooof, it’s rough when even the science part of your project isn’t Humean.

Nevermind all this nitpicking about what people actually believe, Schuringa has a theory. This Humean-Analytic philosophy project, which, he assures us, is a thing (we aren’t talking him out of that), is responsible for many of the ills of today’s world. Did you know that…

Empiricism is the view that all knowledge is derivable from sensory experience; liberalism exalts the autonomy of the subject. Together, they form the ideology of the bourgeois class that rose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rise of the bourgeoisie was driven by capitalism, whose success in imposing itself as the global economic logic was in turn secured by the European colonial exploitation of the ‘new world’. The empiricist–liberal tradition, one of whose earliest and most ardent spokesmen was John Locke in the seventeenth century, reached its high point in the mid eighteenth century in the work of David Hume. (Schuringa, 2025)

You may find that passage befuddling, which is too bad, because it’s supposed to be his core thesis. But what is that thesis? Is he saying Humean empiricist-liberalism led to all this colonial expansion and capitalism? Or is he saying Humean empiricist-liberalism was spread by this colonial expansion? Like, it was the beneficiary? Or is he saying that it just happened to be the ideology of the people who made bank in the colonial expansion—you know, the house religion of the winners in the spread of capitalism and colonialism? There are a lot of options on the table, but not one of them makes a lick of sense.

I’m not entirely sure how Humean empiricist-liberalism could be the cause of European colonial expansion, or the beneficiary, or even just a fellow traveler. I mean, there were French Colonies. And there were Spanish Colonies. And there were Portuguese Colonies. And German and Belgian and even the Italians had colonies. Why wasn’t Continental philosophy the big winner in European colonial expansion? And apart from whatever ideology was driving colonial expansion, or profiting from it, what does any of it have to do with Hume? I mean, both North and South America had been colonized before Hume was born. Hell, they had been colonized before Locke was born. The East India Company had been formed and was in business in India before a single British Empiricist drew their first breath.

So, what is the connection between these things? In the end, you just have to understand that you can’t read this through the lenses of your Humean empiricist-liberal eyes. It will make more sense if you understand that he is just slamming a bunch of things that he doesn’t like into a single paragraph and hoping you associate them: colonialism, capitalism, exploitation, bourgeoisie, Hume.

Now it may be that where Schuringa lives, in London, elite folks are in some sense the intellectual children of Hume, so who knows, maybe that is the house ideology of British capitalists. I don’t know. But did it ever occur to Schuringa that capitalism isn’t tied to a single philosophical ideology? We already saw that Neurath, living in Vienna, thought that Continental Idealism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie. But why should capitalism even be limited to only two ideologies? Schuringa might want to ask himself if either British Empiricism or Continental Idealism are the ideology of Jack Ma (Alibaba), or Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries), or Li Ka-shing (CK Hutchison, Cheung Kong), or Gautam Adani (Adani Group), or Masayoshi Son (Softbank), or Zhang Yiming (TikTok), or Mohammed Al Amoudi (MIDROC), or Aliko Dangote (Dangote Group). Short answer: no, there are lots of Buddhists and Confucianists and Muslims on that list and they likely do not give a fuck about Hume. Or Hegel. But they are capitalists. Capitalism no longer looks like it looked in 1848.

The one thing I know for sure is that Lockean-Humean liberalism/empiricism is not the house ideology in the United States, nor for titans of industry, nor anyone else, it seems, and that is a topic we will return to later.

But for now, let’s forget all that contemporary capitalist ideology shit; we have to get back to Schuringa’s world. Back now? Good. Next, you have to transcend your empiricist-liberal mind and slay your inner Hume. After you do that, Schuringa wants to tell you about a missed opportunity.

On the European continent, philosophy after Hume was shaped by the systematic philosophy of German Idealism and its aftermath. In Britain, this systematic idealist philosophy never fully took hold, although it aroused interest there in the earlier nineteenth century … for a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century—the period in which Russell and Moore emerged—idealism secured for itself newfound kudos. In light of this brief success of the “alien import” of absolute idealism, the Oxford philosopher G.J. Warnock could write that Russell “symbolically joins hands with at least two centuries of British philosophy, across a gap of a few years occupied with new and strange things.”

What Schuringa is saying is that there was this one brief period of hope when philosophy in England was good and when it wasn’t in the tank for colonialism, and that was when Continental idealism ruled the seas of British philosophy (except, apparently, not at Cambridge). He says we can thank Carlyle, Coleridge, and de Quincy (the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater) for bringing idealism to England. Then Russell wrecked this one brief moment of hope and restored Hume to the throne of British philosophy. If only it had stuck to Continental idealism, England could have avoided all its 20^th-century imperial ambitions. Like Germany did.

Deep down, or maybe not so deep down, Schuringa must know he is peddling bullshit with this Hume talk, because, as he keeps cycling through Analytic projects to piss on them, he must have noticed that very few of them have anything to do with Hume. Or Locke. Or really anything to do with empiricism. And he cannot hide the fact that the sheer diversity of all these projects is infuriating to him.

Schuringa just cannot come to grips with how Analytic philosophy spins through idea after idea, never settling on one idea, wrecking their own projects left and right. And he clearly has an alternative idea of how philosophy should proceed: There should be a big theory (idealism, for example) with a set (if unclear) methodology, and people should follow that. But Analytic philosophy is more like the game Nomic, invented by the philosopher Peter Suber, in which you can change the rules as part of the gameplay. As long as you are clear about what you are up to, you are free to reconstruct the rules of philosophical inquiry. It’s not that there are no rules. It’s just that the rules are dynamic. Changing the rules is part of the rules. That is why Analytic philosophy lends itself to radical projects, and why there are so many spectacular philosophical crashes. It is a constant philosophical demolition derby, but also a source of projects that challenge the status quo. It never provides the view from nowhere, but it often yields the view from somewhere new.

The agony of it all for Schuringa is that in their continuous project of wreckage, Analytic philosophers have achieved (he believes) a level of hegemonic control over philosophy worldwide. It isn’t fair! And it never occurs to Schuringa that the global successes of Analytic methods have not been due to official doctrines that appear along the way and which must be venerated, but from the fact that the project is dynamic, open to revision, and particularly open to iconoclasm. It is egalitarian in that anyone, anywhere in the world, can morph the rules as they see fit. Above all, Analytic philosophers love to smash their idols. Of course, Continental philosophers love to do all this too (especially Derrideans), which makes me wonder what Schuringa is defending. It isn’t exactly Continental philosophy—it is more like an imagined golden age of Continental philosophy in which some bearded sage (in Schuringa’s case, Marx) told us what was what, and that was that.

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Against Professional Philosophy

A Co-Authored Anarcho-Philosophical Diary

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #14–Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations.

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