Analytic Philosophy’s Discovery of What It Can Be

Christoph Schuringa’s Social History of Analytic Philosophy is a lesser but worthy sequel to Gyorgy Lukacs’s comprehensive ideology critique of twentieth century philosophy in The Destruction of Reason . Like Lukacs, Schuringa identifies analytic philosophy’s weak critical sensibility with its bourgeois liberalism, which impedes its ability to address adequately class, gender, and race discrimination. Schuringa is most interesting when he turns to the revival of metaphysics within the analytic tradition, especially modality, which is pivotal for the political imagination, given its focus on what can and ought to be. Saul Kripke is the focal figure, whose relationship to deconstruction and artificial intelligence is probed.