r/AcademicPhilosophy • u/islamicphilosopher • 13d ago
what's the status of Carnap & Quine in academia today?
SEP, Routledge Encyclopedia, and Cambridge's Companion all state that, while Carnap was forgotten when he died, his ideas are currently enjoying a revival. On the other hand, while Quine is often attributed to undermining Carnap's thought, and dominating the later half of 20st century philosophy, I've heard he's currently receiving a pushback. Few questions:
- What's the nature of the Carnapian revival? In what fields is it more obvious? What are the main ideas of Neo-Carnapians?
- If Quine really is receiving a pushback, is that primarily by Neo-Carnapians? or rather by ultra-metaphysical realists?
- What's the overall status of Carnap and Quine in contemporary academic philosophy?
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u/HaydenCarruth 13d ago
Hello, student currently in an intro Phil Sci HPS course here. We read a lot more Carnap than Quine. I’ve been told by my professor that since Quine was really popular, academic teaching started focusing less on Quine since everybody had already read Quine. But in recent years, this trend is reversing since people aren’t reading Quine anymore. So Quine is reentering the teaching space.
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u/plemgruber 13d ago edited 13d ago
You might get better answers in /r/askphilosophy. But here's my thoughts:
One of the big ones is ontological deflationism. Carnap had a deflationary and pragmatic approach to ontological questions, viewing them as either trivially answered by science (if they're internal to a theoretical framework) or unanswerable (if they're external to a framework). The latter prompts pragmatic questions about the choice of a framework. This is, as I understand it, the basis for Thomasson's Ontology Made Easy, a very influential neo-carnapian metaontology.
The critics I'm familiar with are the neo-aristotelians, like Jonathan Schaffer, Kit Fine and Kathrin Koslicki. Schaffer's On What Grounds What is a direct response to Quine's On What There Is and contains some of the most common criticisms of Quine's metaontology: objecting to parsimony as the ultimate metaontological value, to this narrow construal of the ontological question, etc.
I'd say Quine is still very influential, his views just aren't seen as the default anymore. He's still widely read and respected, and he has a permanent spot in the curriculum of anyone teaching analytic metaphysics. Carnap, on the other hand, is not completely rehabilitated but definitely on his way. In the past, he was often thrown out with the bathwater of logical empiricism, and that has been changing as the legacy of positivism itself is being reevaluated.