Fashionable Philosophy

Theory entered the academy in the late 1960s—and philosophy has been at odds with it ever since.

From the perspective of philosophy, theory is their thing. The term itself can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy where thinkers like Xenophanes and Aristotle coined its historical role in Western thought.

William James, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University from 1880 to 1889 and 1897 to 1907 (he was on the psychology faculty during the middle period), wrote in his final book, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), "every generation of men produces some individuals exceptionally preoccupied with theory." "Such men," he continues,

find matter for puzzle and astonishment where no one else does. Their imagination invents explanations and combines them. They store up the learning of their time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are regarded as sages.

For James, this theoretical work is the work of philosophy, something he regards as an essential part of a liberal education. "Philosophy," wrote James, "indeed, in one sense of the term is only a compendious name for the spirit in education which the word 'college' stands for in America."

The story of how theory came to be at odds with philosophy in the late twentieth-century is a sad one. James had a pluralistic view of philosophy, one where many different theoretical approaches to the problems that interest us are a key part of the academy. "To know the chief rival attitudes towards life, as the history of human thinking has developed them, and to have heard some of the reasons they can give for themselves," said James, "ought to be considered an essential part of liberal education." One hundred years later though this vision of a liberal education has been lost. Part of the reason is that philosophy in the academy lost its pluralistic spirit.

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Late twentieth-century theory was not the theoria of antiquity.

Though there are a number of senses of theory, such as the idea that theory is the "methods" of literary studies; that theory is a collection of schools or movements; that theory is a flexible toolbox of concepts; and that theory is just what every specialist knows, one particular idea of theory stood above them all and came to be theory's central signifier: the somewhat narrow structuralist and poststructuralist high-theory notion.

In the late '60s and early '70s, structuralist and poststructuralist thought came to be regarded as the "linguistic turn." It would have a profound and revolutionary impact on the human sciences including literary studies and philosophy. Not only did theory challenge the critical model of the New Criticism then fashionable in English departments, it also had a ripple effect in philosophy departments, which were then largely divided along analytic and continental lines.

Whereas English departments were relatively quick to absorb the fruits of the linguistic turns of structuralism and poststructuralism into their curriculums and scholarship, philosophy departments had the opposite reaction. Instead of widely embracing the linguistic turn, the roots of which lay deep in the philosophical tradition, they used it as an opportunity to further widen the analytic and continental divide in philosophy.

Whereas prior to the linguistic turn, continental philosophy from the perspective of the American philosophy department largely involved phenomenology, existentialism, and the Frankfurt school, after the linguistic turn it expanded to include structuralism and poststructuralism. By the close of the twentieth-century, though the continental philosophies of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others, were an important part of the American higher educational curriculum with many professors producing scholarship in this area, it was largely not due to the efforts of its philosophy departments, which widely refused to teach the work in this area or even to recognize it as "good" philosophy. Instead, the rise of theory in the academy was largely due to its adoption by English, comparative literature, and foreign language departments.

The reason for this is that philosophy in America in the late-twentieth century was still on a course laid out a century earlier when it came to be bitten by...