ABSTRACT

John McCumber, Northwestern University (V-C)

The following appeared in the Spring, 1996 issue of Diacritics:

[The currently available record suggests that] American philosophy during the McCarthy Era.. confronted difficulties beyond those faced by other disciplines. Philosophy's overall "spokesperson", the American Philosophical Association...failed miserably to come to grips with the threat. And the tactics by which the APA sought to avoid confronting the issues of that day turn out to instance intellectual gestures constitutive of much American philosophy since...

As...Richard Rorty and Richard J. Bernstein have recognized, Analytical philosophy came to dominance in American universities in the early Fifties...It is noteworthy that when Continental philosophy arrived in America--also after World War II--it was in two decidedly ahistorical and asocial forms: as phenomenological introspection into the structures of consciousness as such, and as an existentialism so radically individualistic that Sartre's Marxian commitments, evident after 1968, came as a shock to many American philosophers.

The whole issue has, strangely, gone almost wholly undiscussed in the United States and Britain (though not, for example, in France...). That philosophy was so much a target of the McCarthyites should be a badge of honor; why is it not worn? What really happened to American philosophy during and after the McCarthy Era?

After summarizing the research that raises these questions and suggests these conclusions, I will go on to draw some of the necessary philosophical lessons.