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| Review of Origins of Analytic Philosophy. By Michael Dummett. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 199. (Published in The Philosophical Review, vol. 104 (1995), pp.613-615.)Dummett writes, "Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then, did this happen? What small ingredient into the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect?" (p. 26)The immediate aim of this book (a revised version of a series of lecturesoriginally published in Lingua e Stile 23 (1988), pp. 3-49, 171-210) is to lay afoundation for answering these last two questions. Dummett avows the furtheraim of helping to repair the rift that yawns between the analytic andContinental traditions. Yet this is not, and does not purport to be, a work inthe history of philosophy. For one, the author does not aspire tocomprehensiveness, ignoring such figures as Russell and Moore on the groundthat their contribution to the analytic tradition has already been welldocumented. Second, there is little attempt to trace causal connections amongphilosophers or within an individual philosopher's development. InsteadDummett will trace what he terms the history of thought rather than ofthinkers. Making no pretence to neutrality as between the analytic and Continentaltraditions, Dummett primarily speaks from the former point of view. Hecharacterizes analytic philosophy as adhering to two principles: (1) That aphilosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophicalaccount of language, and (2) That a comprehensive account of thought canonly be so attained (p. 4). Such a formulation is notoriously ambiguous, andthe above two theses should be rewritten as four, in the first two of which'thought' is replaced by 'propositions', while in the last two of which 'thought' is replaced by 'intentional states'. Thus disambiguated Dummett contends (Chapter Two) that Frege was anambivalent analytic philosopher, taking language to be at best a fallible guide--but our only guide--to the nature of propositions. (Lacking interest in thequestion, Frege is apparently innocent of failing to explain intentional statesin linguistic terms.) After repudiating the psychologism he espoused inPhilosophie der Arithmetik, so was Husserl, who joined Bolzano, Brentano, Frege and Meinong in insisting upon the mind-independence of propositions. However, unlike Frege, Husserl sought a characterization of intentional states,and not just their objects; further, he sought an account of the relationbetween intentional state and object that would apply to all such states, bethey attitudes towards propositions or not. For this purpose Husserlfashioned the notion of noema to serve as a constituent of all intentionalstates, serving, according to Dummett, as a mode of presentation of theirobjects. Following Follesdal, Dummett argues (Chapters Eight and Eleven)that Husserl's concept of a noema is a generalization of Frege's notion ofsense. But in thus generalizing this notion Husserl was precluded from takinglanguage as his guide. For noemata involved in, for instance, perceptualstates need not be the content of any sentence, so if we are to study them itis not through the medium of language. Rather we must resort to the famousphenomenological reduction and introspect upon the structure of intentionalstates themselves. Dummett contends that by virtue of generalizing Frege's notion of sense toarrive at that of the neoma Husserl broke decisively with the tradition thatwas to become analytic philosophy. It must also be contended, then, thatHusserl's use of the notion of neoma accounts for his undertaking, afterrepudiating naturalism in the period between 1905 and 1906, to
construct afirst philosophy that would undergird not just psychology but all of naturalscience. The eidetic reduction, the epoche, the process of bracketing for thesake of focusing just on the intentional state itself, are all part of thisfoundational enterprise, and Dummett is committed to showing that thesefeatures can in large part be accounted for in terms of Husserl'sgeneralization of the concept of sense. Dummett does not discharge thisburden in the present book, nor is it clear that it is possible to doso.For such a thing to be possible it would have to be that if only Husserl hadnot generalized the notion of sense to apply to states that are not linguisticin any straightforward way (or if only Frege had), then he and Frege wouldthroughout their careers have been fellow-laborers with largely similarinterests and aims. Yet Husserl's enormous debt to Brentano, only partlydocumented by Dummett in Chapter Five, makes this unlikely. Brentanofamously distinguished between mental and physical phenomena, but theexamples he gives of the latter are not rocks and chairs but, "...a color, ashape, a panorama which I see; a chord which I hear; warmth, cold, an odorwhich I experience; and also similar images which appear in the imagination." What would now be construed as physical phenomena play no role inBrentano's early thought, which bears the marks of a radical empiricism. ButBrentano also sought an "ideal intuition" (ideale Anschauung) that would yielda connected system of apodictic and a priori truths, and for him suchintuitions were to be found in self-knowledge. Husserl was an heir to thisapproach, and hoped to extend it further by showing that it could provide an epistemological foundation for all science, thereby accounting for the possibility of objective knowledge. Frege, on the other hand, while postulating mind-independent propositions to explain the possibility of communication, has no aim to locate an indubitable source from which all knowledge flows. I see no evidence that if only he had widened the notion of sense to that of a mode of presentation involved in all intentional states then he would have had this aim.In spite of my scepticism of the book's ostensible goal and the central thesisthat is supposed to further it, we should be grateful that Dummett hasattempted to examine the genesis of the fissure between philosophy's twomajor traditions. This will provoke others to undertake the inquiry as well. Further, the book contains valuable discussions of the relation betweenthought and language, and of Frege's and Husserl's views on perception. Italso contains clarifications of Dummett's earlier accounts of the proper formfor a theory of meaning. In addition there is an Appendix containing aninterview with the author conducted by Joachim Schulte. There the authorreflects upon his own philosophical development and on the nature ofcontemporary philosophy, and shares anecdotes concerning philosophy inBritain in recent decades. Mitchell S. Green University of Virginia |
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