The Analytic Turn in American Philosophy: An Institutional Perspective— Part II: Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy

This article continues a reconstruction of the analytic turn in American philosophy between 1940 and 1970. The first part argued that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia sought to stimulate ‘humanistic’ approaches to philosophy in their hiring policies and tenure decisions, thereby marginalizing the ‘scientific’ philosophies that were in vogue among their students. This second part unearths some of the mechanisms that contributed to the analytic turn once the movement’s fiercest opponents retired. I argue that a new generation of deans and chairmen initially tried to craft ‘balanced’ departments but that various external variables—competition between elite universities, a shortage of graduates with training in modern logic, and the explosive growth of American higher education—eventually led to major policy shifts. Within a decade, I show, the distorted job market helped tip the balance into the other direction, strongly advantaging departments that had invested in analytic philosophy. By the late 1960s, the movement became so successful that the traditional division between humanistic and scientific approaches began to be replaced by a distinction between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy, referring to the schools of philosophy were popular across the Atlantic. American philosophy, by then, just was analytic philosophy.