Shedding Light on the “Eclipse” Narrative: Some Notes on Pragmatism in the Twentieth Century

i begin by thanking David Hildebrand, Daniel Brunson, and the program committee for the magnificent job they have done under the very difficult circumstances imposed by the pandemic. I’d also like to thank the program committee for their generous invitation to present this 2021 Founders Lecture.

Since this is a Founders Lecture, it seems appropriate to recall that one of the society’s founders, Ralph Sleeper, said on more than one occasion that he would love to have a séance with Frank Ramsey about what he, Ramsey, said to Wittgenstein about pragmatism.

Now, thanks to an extraordinarily well-researched intellectual biography of Ramsey, Sleeper’s longed-for séance will not be necessary. Cheryl Misak’s book Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, published in 2020, helps to clarify Ramsey’s relationship with Wittgenstein and to establish his role in the foundation of what many today call “analytical pragmatism.” It is also a close study of his seminal contributions to mathematics, economics, and probability theory. All of that and more was accomplished before Ramsey’s untimely death, just short of his twenty-seventh birthday.

Despite Ramsey’s brilliant contributions to the study of formal systems, however, he harbored no illusions about their legislative applicability to everyday life. Although he helped establish rational choice theory in economics, for example (and much like his mentor John Maynard Keynes but unlike some of the rational choice theorists who followed), he understood that conditions such as emotions, cultural factors, and income inequities are important considerations when it comes to formulating economic policy. Like Dewey, Ramsey was also critical of single factor ethical theories. I am confident that Misak’s intellectual biography will become the standard reference source for Ramsey’s life and work. A great companion piece to Misak’s book is Zachary D. Carter’s book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. It is highly relevant to current thinking about pandemic and post-pandemic economic policies.

Given the scholarly excellence demonstrated in her Ramsey book, however, I expect that some may find Misak’s brief essay, published in 2019 in the journal Aeon with co-author Robert Talisse, somewhat baffling. In this essay, she rejects what she terms the “eclipse” narrative, which she attributes to Richard Rorty. According to this narrative, pragmatism dominated American philosophy “throughout Dewey’s heyday, from the early 1900s until the early ’40s.” Then, post-World War II professional philosophers in America “began fixating on the technical and methodological issues that today are associated with ‘analytic’ philosophy.” This was due in part to the influence of immigrant European positivists during the 1930s and 1940s who dismissed pragmatism as short on rigor and who swiftly gained “strongholds in nearly all the elite Ph.D. granting universities in the US.” Pragmatism, then, according to this “eclipse” narrative, went into—well, eclipse: it “was driven underground, where the remaining loyalists built scholarly networks devoted to keeping the classical idiom alive.” So that is the gist of the eclipse narrative as Misak characterizes it (Misak and Talisse, “Pragmatism Endures”).

Pushing back with her own “anti-eclipse” narrative, Misak argues that far from having been eclipsed, “pragmatism has been a constant and dominant force in philosophy for nearly 100 years” (Misak and Talisse, “Pragmatism Endures”). She faults those who buy into the eclipse narrative, among whom are those whose mission (she suggests) has been to recover or re-introduce Dewey’s ideas into mainstream philosophy. She thinks that these misguided people have introduced a “principled insularity” that is “tragic for the prospects of pragmatism” (“Pragmatism Endures”) because pragmatism in fact never left the American scene. This “resurrection story,” she argues, is “tinged with resentment.” “The steady production of volumes devoted to establishing Dewey’s ‘continuing relevance,’ ‘discovering’ his ideas and recapturing his ‘lessons’” has led these people to “talk mainly among themselves” (“Pragmatism Endures”). The net effect, in her view, is that “[a] more reliable strategy for marginalising the classical pragmatists could hardly be imagined” (“Pragmatism Endures”).

I suppose the first thing to note...