I don’t know how many readers of this blog have any idea what it’s like to try to read, say, literary criticism after getting training in analytic philosophy. Arguments are hard to find, in their place are loads of jargon whose meaning the author himself seems unsure of, plus reverential references to famous writers of dubious intellectual merit. These writers will be a mix of crackpots no longer taken seriously in their home disciplines (Marx, Freud) and “philosophers” who thought philosophy means being as incomprehensible as possible (Derrida). At least that’s my impression from very occasionally trying to read literary criticism, though the last time I did that it was because I had put off my last three credits of literature until my last semester of college, and was thus forced to take a literature class.
So maybe that’s just unfair stereotype on my part. Or not. Brian Leiter linked to statistics on the most-cited authors in the humanities, which basically vindicates all my stereotypes about work in the humanities outside of philosophy. I like Leiter’s take: “slightly depressing… At least Foucault is ahead of Derrida.” But Freud is ahead of Chomsky, even though Chomsky, unlike Freud, made legitimate contributions to psychology. Actually, Chomsky is one of the few people on the list who I can take completely seriously.
Yes, there are a few figures who the analytic philosophical tradition generally regards as its own, but three of them (Kant, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn) are a bit borderline. Kant had some genuinely important insights, but deserves a lot of the blame for making people think philosophy should be as weird and incomprehensible as possible. The Vienna Circle loved Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but he could never figure out why they did, and later in his life he tried to claim a lot of what goes on in philosophy is just a “language game.” And Kuhn seems to owe much of his popularity to the fact that sociologists could read him as saying, “you don’t have to listen to those superior SOBs in the physics department who call you ‘soft’ scientists, what they do isn’t driven by reason anyway.”
The one solidly analytic figure on the list is Rawls. I should be happy about this, most analytic types are proud of the recognition Rawls has earned outside the analytic philosophy world. But I suspect Rawls made the cut not because poli sci types are impressed by his clear thinking, but because he flatters the sort of liberal political sensibilities common throughout the humanities. (Rawls would say “systematizes the considered judgments of members of liberal democracies through the method of reflective equilibrium,” but that’s what it always sounds like to my ear.)
One thing that the list doesn’t indicate is whether the citations are positive or negative. I would actually suspect that, despite your comments about Rawls being flattering, a huge proportion of the cites to him are critical. In the sort of circles that cite Foucault and Derrida a lot, “liberal” is about the worst thing you can be — instead, you should be “radical” or of “the left.”
Good point. Could the same apply to the citations of Derrida and Freud? I wish, but am skeptical. In circles where they aren’t taken seriously, people get tired of bashing them after awhile. But I can easily imagine literary critics investing hundreds of pages in bashing Rawls for being merely “liberal.”
There is a third type of citation, neither lauding or derogatory, which we might call honorary. For example, psychology textbooks invariably cite Freud throughout, and not just historically. But (accept for the history) this is unnecessary. So why is he quoted? I suspect its honorary. Freud’s work, though largely irrelevant, inspired the field, much of the shell of terminology has remained, and due to popularizing he’s a good pedagogical starting point. Plus there’s some sense in which we “owe” our psychological fruits to Freud.
Surely this honorary type of citation accounts for a lot.
The psychology textbooks I’ve seen (all intro textbooks) have tended to be pretty terrible. The attitude is “Gee, we have to tell everyone about all these historically important people,” without really paying any attention to how seriously their ideas are or should be taken. This is worrisome, because it probably gives a lot of people the impression that silly ideas like Freud’s are what psychology is all about. I suspect this tendency explains much of the ability of literary critics to respectfully cite Freud with a straight face.
I can imagine sensible and relatively neutral ways to mention Freud in a psychology book, but I doubt that kind of reference happens very often. And we’re talking about the humanities, not social science textbooks, remember.