Based on insights from the history and sociology of science, I lay out a framework to describe the dynamics of academized twentieth-century philosophy in relation to its social and institutional context. Inspired by work from Steven Shapin and Andrew Abbott, this framework distinguishes between, on one hand, disciplinary bounds that guide philosophical actors in their practice and, on the other hand, the social institutions that stabilize and reproduce these bounds. With this framework, I argue, the historian of twentieth-century philosophy can ask better questions about the different social dynamics involved in the development of professional philosophy. To prove the potential fruitfulness of this framework, I discuss the emergence of philosophy of science as a distinct subdiscipline within professional American philosophy.

In this article, we examine the origins of the dialectical approach to the philosophy of mathematics. While this approach is commonly taken to begin with Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations, first published as a series of articles in 1963–64, it was preempted by the British logician G. T. Kneebone in a pair of forgotten articles in 1955 and 1957 and a chapter of his 1963 book. We introduce Kneebone’s dialectical approach to mathematics and compare it with Lakatos’s. Furthermore, we give evidence from the Lakatos archives at the London School of Economics that Kneebone and Lakatos were acquainted, in correspondence, and that Lakatos read and annotated Kneebone’s papers. Nonetheless, Kneebone is nowhere mentioned in Lakatos’s work. We finish with the question of why this might be.

This two-part paper reconstructs the analytic turn in American philosophy through a comparative, longitudinal study of philosophy departments at three major universities: Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. I trace their hiring policies, tenure decisions, and curriculum designs and the external pressures that forced them to continuously adapt their strategies, and I use those analyses to distill some of the factors that contributed to the rapid growth of analytic philosophy between 1940 and 1970. In this first part, I show that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia actively tried to promote a “humanistic” conception of philosophy until the early 1950s. I argue that logical positivism and related “scientific” approaches were seen as a fundamental threat to the discipline and that this opposition influenced decision-making at all three institutions. Although many students and recent graduates saw philosophy as a scientific discipline, senior members of the community deplored the decline of the humanities and appointed mostly humanistic philosophers. I show that this generational conflict was reinforced by demographic, political, and economic developments and argue that these discriminatory practices helped forge a coalition between logical empiricists, scientific pragmatists, and ordinary language philosophers, who all began to identify as “analytic” philosophers after the war.

It has been questioned why Wittgenstein wrote a significant amount on the foundations of probability in the Tractatus. In this article, I answer this question by claiming that the primary aim of Wittgenstein’s account was to criticize a Keynesian theory of probability and to provide multiple pieces of evidence to support this criticism. This claim then answers why Wittgenstein wrote such a significant amount on probability. He wrote it because it was salient at the time. While Wittgenstein was at Cambridge University, there was significant discussion of probability by his philosophical interlocutors, particularly Keynes but also Russell, Moore, and others. Wittgenstein thought he had the answers to the problems that were being discussed and set them out in the Tractatus.

The discovery of quantum physics opened a broad debate on the epistemological status of the principle of causality. In this article, I analyze the problem of causality in Heisenberg by distinguishing two levels of philosophical explanation in his thought. As a philosopher of science, his understanding of causality is closely linked to Moritz Schlick, although he will later adopt a neo-Kantian view of the a priori. As a philosopher of nature, Heisenberg recovers the notion of potency to understand the wave function. My thesis is that this notion of potency could have allowed him to elaborate a realistic and nondeterministic theory of causality, but the identification of causality and determinism (in Schlick’s line) did not lead him to such a conclusion.

In this article, I compare the formulation and applications of the “principle of permanence of equivalent forms” due to George Peacock, to whom the principle is first attributed, with the formulation and applications due to Hermann Hankel, the German mathematician to whom the popularity of the principle is owed. Despite Hankel’s explicit references to Peacock and the British algebraic tradition more broadly, I argue that Hankel’s project and applications of the principle show a rather different interpretation of the latter than what is to be found in Peacock, Hankel’s source. The principle has been regarded as key for the emergence of a broadly formalist understanding of mathematics. My claim is that it is only in Hankel’s understanding of the principle, but not in Peacock’s, that such a formalist outlook can be detected.

In this article, I argue for two main theses. The first is that Spinoza held that space was not an independently existing thing such as absolute space. This creates a problem for his account of individuation. The second thesis is that he can solve this problem by appealing to another doctrine he accepted, that there is absolute motion. I conclude that Spinoza was among the first early modern figures to reject absolute space but accept absolute motion.

In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”