Two Kinds of "New Historicism" for Philosophers

Abstract

OULD PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS have anything to do with the activity that Michel Foucault called the history of the present? Yes, I say. No, says almost everyone else. So I have some explaining to do. Philosophical analysis is an activity, a way of doing philosophy, defined in part by its practitioners. It used to think of itself as analyzing concepts, and then turned to words. I think of J. L. Austin, C. D. Broad, Paul Grice, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but of course there are many very much younger, very much American, and very much alive analysts today. The men whom I have mentioned knew, in some cases, a great deal about the past and in particular about ancient philosophy. Some felt intellectual kinship with Aristotle. But a sense of the past played little role in their most creative work. Analytic philosophy is widely regarded as the very antithesis of historical sensibility. It needn't be, or so I contend. I have no desire to make peace between different traditions. Attempts to reconcile continental and analytic philosophy are at best bland, lacking the savor or pungency of either. I should add that in connecting philosophical analysis with certain techniques used by Foucault I am not making a point about recent French thought in general. I am discussing one kind of use of the past, represented by some of Foucault's books. Finally, although I in no way dissociate myself from analytic philosophy as at present practiced in America, my list of heroes in the second paragraph shows my connection with those roots primarily concerned with the analysis of concepts. There are other roots, those of the Vienna Circle, that are less