Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 08:51:47 -0400
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Hello?




Howard Hastings wrote:
> 
> Anyone out there done any work in 19th century history of American
> colleges and universities, disciplinarly history, history of English
> studies?   Anyone out there interested in the history of the relation
> between analytic and continental philsophy? 

	I haven't been much of a fly wheel -- will get better soon.
	But, I've just finished reviewing an excellent MSS that deals with the relation of the McCarthy Era and the rise and
enduring hegemony of analytic philosophy in America.  I don't know if there were analogous events in, say, English or
the human sciences, but this book documents a turn in the discipline of philosophy away from questions that had a
socio-cultural context to a highly abstracted and scientistic philosophical posture.  Beyond the documented rousting out
of Communists and ideologues led by the likes of Sidney Hook and Raymond B. Allen  playing into the hands of
anti-ideological paranoia of McCarthy, most remarkable is the author's discussion of philosophy's analytically dominated
elite being almost pathologically incapable of conducting even 'routine' reflections on the state of the discipline and
their rather bizarre blindness to the history of analytic philosophy.  And, although analytic philosophy has generally
been in decline -- apostates abound, like Rorty, Davidson, etc. -- the analyists maintain a self-perpetuating controll
over the preeminent graduate programs.  So, as one logician said when the Pluralists finally won the Presidency of the
Easter Division of the APA, "You can have the meetings, we'll keep the graduate schools!" 
	I would think you, Howard, would find it particularly interesting, as would anyone interested in the politics of
intellectual history.  The author has published an article along the same lines in Diacritics 26.1 (1996) 33-49, John
McCumber. 

Ciao,
Reg


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