A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #16–Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

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

16. Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis

As we noted, in cases ranging from Otto Neurath to Susan Stebbing to Michael Dummett, Schuringa has a strategy of noting the activism of Analytic philosophers when he must, but then dismissing it with a wave of the hand. This strategy is again on display in the section on Angela Davis, where Schuringa dutifully notes that Donald Davidson tried and failed to hire Davis at Princeton, that Donald Kalish successfully hired her at UCLA, and that the philosophy department at UCLA later voted to reappoint her 14-0 with three abstentions. Leading Analytic philosophers thereby put their asses on the line and ultimately had to deal with death threats. Even William Pruett, the TA for her course, had to have security guards (p.c. Gary Mar). You or I might hear about this and think, wow!, Analytic philosophy went out of its way to support Angela Davis! But once again, Schuringa is unimpressed, stating that this was just a one-off encounter:

Angela Davis was never to cross paths with Analytic philosophy again. In the 1970s the world of American academic philosophy settled down, and resumed its liberal slumber. (Schuringa, 2025)

This is false.

To give just one example, in 2004, the philosophy department at Stony Brook brought Angela Davis in to teach a mini-course. The chief proponent of hiring Davis was Gary Mar, then a junior professor and UCLA-trained logician. To the best of my knowledge, her appointment had unanimous support from the Analytic philosophers.

Angela Davis and Donald Kalish at UCLA

The fact of the matter is that Analytic philosophers are still engaged with her work. For example, Harvard’s Tommie Shelby, in his book, The Idea of Prison Abolition, explicitly treats Davis as the central philosophical voice for full prison abolition, lays out her core arguments, and then asks whether a just society could still legitimately imprison anyone. Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford professor who was a student of Timothy Williams and John Hawthorn, explicitly invokes Angela Davis in The Right to Sex and related work. Schuringa actually cites Kate Manne’s book In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, but must have skipped the part where Manne refers to Angela Davis’s analysis of gendered state violence and incarceration.

Of course, Analytic philosophers don’t just write books about Davis, they include her work in their course materials as well. For example, MIT’s Sally Hasslanger incorporated Davis into her course on race, racism, and the criminal punishment system. She also screened Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. My former colleague Elizabeth Anderson cites Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class in her Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science” (Anderson, 2024)

How does Schuringa miss all this? Did he miss it? Or did he just bury it? Those are interesting questions. I suppose it is always possible to say that this work just isn’t that radical, but recall that the point we are speaking to is the claim, by Schuringa, that “Angela Davis was never to cross paths with Analytic philosophy again.” And I certainly don’t mean to say that this is the only contemporary Analytic philosophy that leans on the work of Angela Davis. I’m just saying that this is the work I know about, so the amount of Analytic philosophy engaging with Davis could be vast, for all I know.

Schuringa doesn’t seem the least bit interested in political engagement that doesn’t involve rock-star level activists like Angela Davis. But there is plenty of it to see if you care to look. Gary Mar, who I mentioned earlier, is a UCLA product—a student of Donald Kalish, David Kaplan, and Alonzo Church, but also politically active at the local level, and involved in raising consciousness about Chinese-American issues and connecting that work with other liberation movements. His institute at Stony Brook, called the Asian-American Bridge, attempts to bridge various liberation movements with Asian-American activism. So, for example, he introduced Angela Davis to Asian American activists, and did the same when Noam Chomsky visited. The model for Mar’s work was Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese activist who is most famous for the LIFE magazine photo of her holding Malcom X’s head in her hands after he was shot. She is also somewhat famous for her role in a takeover of the Statue of Liberty. Mar brought her to Stony Brook and later interviewed here precisely because she was the sort of activist that inspired him – one who built bridges with other oppressed groups (Mar, 2019). She sought allies everywhere.

Yuri Kochiyama holding the head of Malcom X

Yuri Kochiyama occupies the Statue of Liberty to support Puerto Rican independence.

Despite the confidence with which Schuringa makes his proclamations about activism in Analytic philosophy, he clearly knows nothing about it. If he knows about Gary Mar’s work, he isn’t talking. But Mar is not one of a kind. Analytic philosophers all over the world are engaged in their own way. Sometimes they are involved in prison education (Consider, for example, Jennifer Lackey’s tireless work on this), or providing legal support, or financial support, or emotional support. Perhaps the bigger question is, why is knowledge of this activity often suppressed?

For example, Gary Mar’s technical work on chaotic liars, co-written with Patrick Grim, was hyped by his home university and was reported in Scientific American magazine. But his political activism is not apt to be mentioned anywhere, despite his work connecting with political activists like Angela Davis, Yuri Kochiyama, and many others. Schuringa imagines that if he does not know about such work, it is because it must not be happening. And it never occurs to him that it might be happening, but that university administrators and corporate media prefer not to talk about such work other than to demonize it. It is almost as if Schuringa has no idea about the kind of world we live in, nor about the forces that are at work against any progressive agenda. But such progressive projects are happening, and they are happening everywhere in Analytic philosophy.

Even I, possibly the least politically engaged Analytic philosopher in the world, have had some level of engagement. For example, I supported Chelsea Manning by attending her trial at Fort Meade (there were some 22 charges brought against her, including “aiding the enemy,” which could have brought the death sentence). I was also involved in talking to attorneys and writing letters to judges to try to keep hacker/anarchists like Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown out of prison. They went to prison. (They are now out of prison, and last I saw, Jeremy, released after 10 years, was leading the antifa protests against ICE in Chicago.) I wouldn’t expect anyone to know about that work. But many more Analytic philosophers around the globe are doing the same sort of thing, albeit more often and more effectively than I did. Either the self-proclaimed social historian Christoph Schuringa is ignorant of all of it, or he is suppressing the information. Neither is good. This brings us back to two of the biggest omissions—Jean van Heijenoort and Noam Chomsky.

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