Page 241 - Contribution To Phenomenology

234 STANFORD M LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

Analysis considered philosophy to be just what it did and, while some of us
non-Analysts always thought that what Analysis did was philosophy, we refused—to
put it in terms of logic—to convert an "A proposition."
The opposition to the academic-professional hegemony of Analytic Philosophy,
which included not only domination of the American Philosophical Association but
also various accrediting agencies, and the grant committees at the National
Endowment of the Humanities, took the form of a "Committee on Pluralism," which
included Catholics, Historians of Philosophy, and Pragmatists as well as Continentals
(Feminist philosophy was still emerging and benefited considerably from this struggle
without participating in it as a distinct group). The pluralist movement showed that
Analytic Philosophy was actually not a majority but only a plurality among all
American philosophers and was even, eventually, seen to be itself an unstable
oligarchy of tendencies that put on a homogeneous face toward minority tendencies,
much as the Euro-Americans do in the wider American society.
This effort took an interesting amount of agitation, articles in the New York
Tunes, amusing-to-remember stereotyping and even some bad manners on all sides,
probably some equivalent to race baiting, directed at non-Analytic Philosophical
orientations that preserved or enhanced solidarity within the White-like oligarchic
hegemony that was challenged. But, there also emerged an increasing manifestation
of tolerance on all sides and a questioning of any assumption that a single
philosophical orientation had established once and for all that it had developed the
superior if not the sole valid approach (which seems a manifestation of the
"professional contract," as one might call it), etc. After all, that philosophy smacked
of dogmatism and ideology, which it is most unphilosophical to find oneself smacking
of.
After almost ten years, the playing field had been leveled enough through formal
changes in the election rules and committee structure as well as through a series
of explicitly pluralistic presidential elections in the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association that it began to seem to me at least that the continuing
differences among factions were more understandable in terms of the stronger
universities, sheer numbers and the constant proportion of talent, as well as the
age of members, i.e., the issues dividing philosophers were not chiefly orientational
differences, although there were differences affected by an orientationally structured
past, especially resentments about how Analysis continued to dominate the big
schools in the North East. Whether the widespread tokenism that emerged recently
will expand to something like proportional representation is for the moment an open
question.
It has also seemed to me curious that, once some ground had been gained and
more members recruited, the more or less tacit alliance within so-called Continental
Philosophy began to break up. Especially among the devotees of the later
Heidegger, Deconstructionism and its allies seem of late to believe themseh^es
coterminous with Continental Philosophy and, with support from similar thought in
such non-philosophical disciplines as literature, they have attempted to exercise
hegemony over other Continental tendencies. A few years ago, one attempt was
beaten back within the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and,
at the time of this writing, there seems an uneasy truce among Continental
tendencies each of which would have difficulty arguing it is either dominant or