Dozens of women from the speculative philosophical tradition worked in American academia during the first half of the twentieth century and yet have been largely forgotten. I have, with Krist Vaesen and Dorothy Rogers, been trying to draw attention to their work. Our first joint project was an edition of the Australasian Philosophical Review (abbreviated APR) about Grace Andrus de Laguna (1878-1978), completed in 2021 and currently in press (see here for the lead article). A recently completed project is Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers (abbreviated KMR); see here for a copy of the introduction. This book brings together and explains some of the work of de Laguna and another nine women from her milieu, work on the nature of philosophy, knowledge, science, the mind-matter nexus, time, and freedom and the individual. We hope our collection will be useful to scholars working on twentieth-century philosophy, teachers looking for resources for their courses, and advanced students. My post provides some background about the women whose work is included in the volume and motivates interest in their work. I will suggest that their work anticipates key positions and arguments in analytic philosophy, has ongoing relevance to current debates, and yet exemplifies an alternative to analytic philosophy that helps understand and critique it.
Absolute idealism is the view that all reality is ultimately one mind-like phenomenon. One of the remarkable things about late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American proponents of absolute idealism is that they, unlike early analytic philosophers, successfully took up the challenge of including women in academic philosophy’s ranks. The idealist efforts were especially notable at Cornell University (1st woman philosophy PhD in 1880), the University of Michigan (1st woman philosophy PhD in 1891), and Yale University (1st woman philosophy PhD in 1896). The person who primarily sustained the effort at Cornell was the absolute idealist and Hegelian James Edwin Creighton, hired to do so by another absolute idealist, Jacob Gould Schurman. Creighton made Cornell the most successful American university at training and placing American women philosophers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Five of the ten women whose work is collected in KMR—de Laguna, Grace Neal Dolson (1874-1961), Marjorie Silliman Harris (1890-1976), Marie Collins Swabey (1890-1966), and Ellen Bliss Talbot (1867-1968)—were Creighton’s students. A sixth contributor—Dorothy Walsh (1901-1982)—was de Laguna’s student. Creighton supported his students by training them, publishing their work in the journal he edited, The Philosophical Review, and helping them find academic posts. Interestingly, the proportion of women publishing in Creighton’s journal was only matched again in the same journal late in the twentieth century.
Creighton saw himself as adopting a Hegelian approach to philosophy, which he called speculative. While this approach had absolute idealist origins, similar approaches were dominant throughout American philosophy during the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, including, for example, among pragmatists such as Charles Saunders Peirce and John Dewey. Speculative approaches were also dominant among Creighton’s students, including those whose work is collected in KMR. Roughly, the approach aims to learn from, but also to go beyond, established science to develop a vision of reality as a whole that includes a place for the human knower; often, a critique of science was part of the engagement with it. The visions of reality developed by Creighton’s students were often similar to his. Dolson, Harris, Swabey, and (perhaps) Talbot were, like Creighton, absolute idealists. De Laguna’s and Walsh’s metaphysical systems are forms of ontological pluralism—they suppose that, ultimately, reality comprises multiple independent phenomena—though their views are developments of Creighton’s monism. Another woman whose work appears in the volume is Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930). She, like Creighton, was a speculative philosopher and an absolute idealist, though her absolute idealism was of the subjectivist variety; she believed that, ultimately, all entities are subjects within a single all-encompassing subject, while Creighton and his absolute idealist students thought that meaning and value, rather than subjectivity, are ultimate. (The logician Christine Ladd-Franklin reports that her conversion to idealism was due to Calkins’ work.)
Under the influence of Creighton, Calkins, and other speculative philosophers (e.g., Josiah Royce and Morris Raphael Cohen in America and Bernard Bosanquet and James Ward in the United Kingdom), Anglophone speculative philosophy closely engaged with science, including formal logic and psychology. As a result, American speculative philosophy during the early decades of the twentieth century included many of the views and arguments that later came to be important within analytic philosophy. Thus, for example, de Laguna and Swabey were philosophers of science already working in America before the arrival of logical positivism. By 1930, de Laguna put forward sophisticated versions of many of the key views and arguments that transformed analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and that helped establish key analytic figures. She developed, with her husband, Theodore, a sophisticated form of meaning holism alongside a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, precisely what propelled Willard V. Quine to fame in the 1950s and helped drive analytic philosophy into its post-logical positivist phase. She also developed a critique of type physicalism on the basis of what we would call ‘multiple realisability,’ a critique that transformed analytic philosophy of mind fifty years later when put forward by Jerry Fodor and Hillary Putnam. Further ideas and arguments that she developed and which became central to analytic philosophy include a sophisticated functionalist view of mind (again, later attributed to Fodor and Putnam), a private language argument, and the idea that linguistic meaning is tied to use (which were key to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s transformation into his later self), and a modal ontology (which analytic metaphysicians such as David Lewis made much ado about). There is much more (see Peter Olen’s work on Wilfrid Sellars and de Laguna and the forthcoming response articles in the APR edition on de Laguna).
Swabey’s philosophy of science, mostly found in her 1930 book Logic and Nature, tackles many problems which later became staples of analytic philosophy of science. She offers a response to the problem of induction, a probabilistic view of laws of nature, an objectivist interpretation of probability, and a critique of subjectivism in science. What distinguishes Swabey’s treatment of these topics is, among other things, its rationalist bent, giving her work a strong post-logical empiricist flavor (see also below). The work collected in KMR further helps to illustrate analytic philosophy’s repressed origins, as does the work of other women and men in the speculative tradition. For example, de Laguna’s husband developed deflationary views of truth, properties, and knowledge before Frank Ramsey developed his view of truth. Ramsey’s view of truth is commonly assumed to have initiated the discussion of deflationary views.
Without an understanding of the context in which the speculative figures worked or of the speculative side of their philosophy, one might be led mistakenly to suggest that they are forgotten analytic philosophers. With sufficient background in early twentieth-century speculative philosophy, one comes to realize that analytic philosophy was not so much something novel but a narrowing down of philosophy so that it excluded its speculative side. The speculative thinkers, however, are not interesting merely as historical figures who anticipate and illuminate the history of analytic philosophy. They are also of interest because much of what they have to offer is directly relevant to live debates within twenty-first-century Anglophone philosophy. Indeed, they provide us with a relatively recent, further perspective beyond continental philosophy from which to understand and critique the dominant approach in Anglophone philosophy. Pragmatism sometimes serves this third role in the Anglophone world, but the speculative tradition is broader than pragmatism.
To begin with relevance to live debates, it is interesting to note the similarities between ideas in de Laguna’s work and ideas in the work of prominent analytic philosophers that followed her in the twentieth century, such as Quine, Wittgenstein, Fodor, and Putnam. But de Laguna’s work, to my mind far more than these more recent figures, belongs firmly in the twenty-first century. For example, de Laguna’s philosophy of science recognizes the centrality of idealization in science and aims to consider how this affects the assessment of scientific hypotheses. As a result, perspective and the situatedness of knowledge are central to her philosophy of science. Moreover, it is natural to compare this philosophy of science with recent work on scientific perspectivism, e.g., that of Angela Potochnick, or Michela Massimi. Or consider the work of Calkins. She equated philosophy with metaphysics conceived of as inquiry into the ultimate ground of various aspects of reality and, in the end, of all that there is. The combination of her grounding approach to metaphysics and her personalistic form of absolute idealism results in a position that is similar to some recent forms of panpsychism, e.g., Philip Goff’s grounding-based panpsychism.
Speculative philosophy’s tendency to go beyond, and to critique, established opinion in answering its questions is one of the ways in which it contrasts with analytic philosophy. Here the contrast is with analytic philosophy’s epistemic conservatism, that is, its tendency to avoid critiquing this or that select part of established opinion, in answering its questions. Instead, analytic philosophy almost tends to try to squeeze out answers to its questions from privileged opinions. For some analytic philosophers, it is common sense, e.g., intuitive beliefs or commitments that are part of ordinary language, that is privileged and appealed to in order to address philosophical questions and thus that tends to be largely immune from criticism. For others, it is some privileged part of science, e.g., theoretical physics, that provides the part of established opinion that is accepted largely as is. De Laguna’s work and Calkins’ work illustrate this contrast with analytic philosophy. De Laguna explicitly identifies analytic philosophy as a form of epistemically conservative philosophy that condemns speculative philosophy, including hers. Moreover, she takes up Creighton’s suggestion that philosophy is a critique of all established opinion and argues that all knowledge is partial and thus is, strictly speaking, false. She deploys her conclusions against epistemically conservative philosophy. (A forthcoming symposium at the Asian Journal of Philosophy will be about de Laguna’s critique of analytic philosophy.) Calkins died while analytic philosophy was still being created, but she too rails against the attempt to make common sense or science authorities for theoretical philosophy. Moreover, unlike de Laguna, who left explicit contempt for the heroes of early analytic philosophy to her husband, Calkins was not silent about them. She directs particularly memorable jibes at Bertrand Russell, describing him in 1921 (well after his rise to fame!), as “a Saul among the prophets” and, when using his words to support her idealism in 1919, as “that peculiarly omniscient neo-realist.”
Let me describe two more ways in which speculative and analytic philosophy differ. First, speculative philosophy tends to be systematic. For the characteristic speculative philosopher, the vision of reality that results from a critical engagement with science includes the human knower, and thus includes an epistemology, a theory of mind and language, and, ultimately, a basis for an ethics. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, does not demand systematicity, and even at its most systematic does not tend to qualify as such by speculative standards. David Lewis, whose work supposedly exemplifies systematicity within analytic philosophy, does not even develop his epistemology in tandem with his metaphysics, never mind develop a vision of reality that includes a vision of the person. Second, not unrelated to its systematicity and again in contrast with analytic philosophy, speculative philosophy does not tend to presume that taking reason, including logic and science, seriously is in tension with recognizing its limitations—and, indeed, with recognizing the need to go beyond it in content and methodology. Adopting, say, a naturalistic approach in one article or book was no reason not to recognize its limitations and try something else in another. On the contrary, for many speculative philosophers, the demand for systematicity led to an examination of what is beyond reason.
De Laguna’s work is illustrative of speculative systematicity, including an attempt to go beyond reason. Her metaphysics and theory of knowledge, which includes a theory of mind and language, mesh together and are integrated with her critical analysis of science. Moreover, the metaphysics includes a theory of the person that underpins an ethics and recognises what is beyond science and nature. Hers is a universe of individuals upon which each science provides a perspective, but which are all beyond what all the sciences can collectively say. It is also a universe that is historical throughout, since even universals are supposed to evolve, and that has a place for being and individuality, which are beyond the universal and thus beyond thought. Swabey’s philosophy also illustrates systematicity, though, as far as I can tell, she had no sympathy for mysticism. Her view that material reality is atomistic fits, perhaps surprisingly, with her view that reality ultimately comprises a unified system of meanings, her absolute. This metaphysics is interwoven with her rationalist theory of knowledge and is developed in tandem with her philosophy of science. All ultimately support her defense of democracy (for her work on democracy, see Alexander A. Guerrero). Take a look at the chapters by Calkins in KMR, and especially her delightful ‘The Personalistic Conception of Nature,’ in order to start exploring her speculative system, including her theory of self and her ethics (see also work about her by Kris McDaniel and Emily Thomas).
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Joel Katzav
Joel Katzav is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland. He has published primarily in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, argumentation theory and the history of philosophy. His main research foci at the moment are the philosophy of climate science and the history of twentieth century philosophy.
