Abstract

ExcerptIn 1985, a collection titled Post-Analytic Philosophy appeared (Columbia University Press). Advertised with overly optimistic blurbs from Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, and featuring work by famous, pragmatically inclining, analytically trained philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Cornel West, Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Nagel, and John Rawls, the text announced the death of analytic philosophy at least thirty or forty years after the fact. But if Wittgenstein, Quine, and others had long ago convincingly refuted many of the core doctrines of “analytic philosophy,” British empiricism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, many American philosophers continued…