Exiled Empiricists: American Philosophy and the Great Intellectual Migration

Project Information

EXILED-EMPIRICISTS

Grant agreement ID: 101039904

DOI

10.3030/101039904

EC signature date 18 March 2022

Start date 1 August 2022

End date 31 July 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 493 680,00

EU contribution

€ 1 493 680,00

Coordinated by

TILBURG UNIVERSITY- UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EXILED-EMPIRICISTS (Exiled Empiricists: American Philosophy and the Great Intellectual Migration)

Reporting period: 2022-08-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the 1930s, hundreds of European academics fled to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Among them were a few dozen philosophers from a variety of different schools: logical empiricists, phenomenologists, and critical theorists. Especially the first group would have a tremendous impact on American philosophy. Although the local intellectual climate had been dictated by distinctively American traditions such as pragmatism, U.S. philosophers soon began to advance views that were heavily indebted to the empiricists, thereby transforming the American philosophical landscape.

Historians have reconstructed the fate of the exiled empiricists. Still, little attention has been paid to the American context in which their movement came to full bloom. This is remarkable, since any account of the empiricists’ success requires an explanation of why the Americans were so susceptible to their views. What explains the surprisingly positive reception of logical empiricism? And why were the Americans more receptive to empiricism than to phenomenology or critical theory? This project shifts the perspective from the migrant philosophers to the local philosophical climate by 1) quantitatively analyzing thousands of American journal publications and 2) qualitatively examining the archives of dozens of key U.S. philosophers and institutions.

Today, it seems natural to carve up the philosophical landscape into an ‘analytic’ and a ‘continental’ tradition. Yet few philosophers realize that this deeply engrained distinction is relatively new; it first became popular in the United States in the years after the intellectual migration. In studying the unique American melting pot of philosophical schools (e.g. pragmatism, logical empiricism, phenomenology, critical theory), this project offers a broader, unifying perspective on 20th-century philosophy, thereby transcending the school-based barriers that have often shaped its historiography.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research team working on the "Exiled Empricists" project consists of seven researchers, five of which are funded by Horizon-ERC: four postdoctoral researchers (Gregor Bös, Claudia Cristalli, Fons Dewulf, and Eugenio Petrovich), two Ph.D. candidates (Nina IJdens and Ties van Gemert), and the PI (Sander verhaegh). The project is divided into two main subprojects. The first subject aims to produce a reliable map of the American philosophical community and a detailed description of the changes in U.S. philosophy before and after the intellectual migration, the second aims to explain these changes through an investigation of the primary literature and a large set of little explored academic archives of a wide range of major and minor players in American Philosophy.

The researchers involved in the first subproject (Petrovich and Bös) have developed a new method—called mention analysis (more on this below)—that allows the project to track the development of American philosophy over time. They built a SQL database including over forty thousand philosophers and more than twenty thousand full-text journal articles published between 1890 and 1970. This database has helped the team to investigate philosophical discourse in different periods and journals. But the database has also been made publicly available (http://edhiphy.org) to help historians and philosophers (i) search articles mentioning specific (combinations of) philosophers, (ii) to produce statistics about the most-mentioned philosophers in particular periods and journals, (iii) to create co-mention networks (visualizations of the frequencies with which philosophers are mentioned in the same articles), and (iv) analyze the state of a debate in a particular period or journal.

The researchers involved in the second subproject (Cristalli, IJdens, and Verhaegh) have studied the philosophical and scientific literature of the 1920s and 1930s and spent several periods in the United to collect and study archival data. This data has been used to reconstruct various developments that paved the way for the reception of logical positivism a decade later, such as American philosophical responses to relativity theory, American debates about meaning and measurement, the emergence of the notion of scientific philosophy in American philosophy. Moreover, the team reconstructed some of the first encounters between European and American scientific philosophers in 1930s (most notably Susanne Langer, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. Quine) in order to trace the Americans first responses to the logical positivist movement. Finally, the team organized four international conferences. One of these brought together historians of American philosophy, phenomenology, critical theory, and logical empiricism to develop a broader, unifying perspective on the impact of the intellectual migration. A book featuring the contributions of fifteen of these historians is forthcoming at De Gruyter.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Standard methods to analyze large numbers of academic publications typically analyze links between authors via *citations*. These instruments tools allow historians to track, reconstruct and examine communities of scholars by counting citations and/or by constructing co-citation networks (visualizations of the frequencies with which philosophers are mentioned in the same articles). Philosophers, however, only started using standardized citations from the 1970s onwards. In order to be to study the development of philosophy before 1970, the project team created a new methodology—*mention analysis*—to map and analyze links between authors and academic papers. The starting point of this new approach is that though philosopher rarely *cite* work in this period, they do *mention* their colleagues and predecessors by referencing them by name. The goal of mention analysis is to extract and standardize large numbers of mentions in order to analyze mention behavior on a large scale and is a method that also promises to be useful for historians of science and philosophy who do not study promises mid-twentieth century philosophy. Contemporary citation norms are only a relatively recent invention and not universally applied, so mention analysis will provide an interesting alternative to any field of intellectual history that studies (1) periods in the history of science and scholarship before the advent of now-current citation practices, (2) academic disciplines with atypical publication or citation cultures.