Dominick Cooper

Christoph Schuringa’s stimulating and provocative book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, offers a detailed treatment of the origins of its subject matter, particularly through the 1970s. This book adds to the important and ongoing conversation about US philosophy’s drift away from its prewar pluralism and the costs of that process. Both a social history and ideology critique of intellectual thought, Schuringa’s project is ambitious (covering over a century of philosophical development) and polemical (a style that he executes in ten well-written chapters). Readers who wonder about the capacity of philosophy for diagnosis of or orientation within moral and political struggles of the twenty-first century will find that Schuringa’s book is well worth the read. Some readers (as I do) may doubt that Schuringa fully vindicates the claims of ideology critique set out in the book. I will explore my own doubts by taking a closer look the role that Schuringa’s Marxism (he is also the recent author of Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy) plays in his ideology critique, particularly as it applies to analytical Marxism. Nonetheless, Schuringa’s text develops a perspective of analytic philosophy that affords readers the critical distance of historical context. That perspective, often in short supply within analytic philosophy, may be useful for analytic philosophers who, like Schuringa, worry that analytic philosophy is in crisis. In that regard, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is indispensable for those interrogating the past and possible futures of analytic philosophy.

In Minimal Morality, Michael Moehler justifies what he calls the weak principle of universalization as a principle of pure instrumental morality. This article addresses the application of this principle and problems associated with it. Specifically, the article focuses on the principle’s ability to protect the interests of the most vulnerable members of society: agents without primary moral standing, specifically non-human animals; and the weakest members of society, either as a result of their diminished relative bargaining power in certain cases of conflict, or because of their present standing in society, made worse off by historical injustices. To this end, the article considers, respectively, the problems of moral standing, indivisible goods and historical injustice.