the scene in 1927, his emphasis on negation was singled out by Carnap in the
second issue of Erkenntnis (1931) as the epitome of meaningless statements
arising by misuse of language. In England and the United States, the initial
enemy of the logicist movement was the Idealism of the previous generation,
during which the university had secularized; the attack had begun with Russell
early in the century, and continued down through the 1960s in the tendency
to brand all metaphysical philosophy an outmoded relic of religion. When
existentialism came into vogue in France in the 1940s and in Germany and in
U.S. literary circles in the 1950s, it replaced Idealism as the prime target for
condemnation.
In this midcentury generation the scheme became widely accepted in the
English-speaking world of a long-standing division between “Continental” and
“Anglo” philosophical traditions. For the purposes of this polemic, the rivalry
between logical positivists and ordinary language was downplayed into a grand
coalition of “analytic” philosophy characterizing the “Anglo” camp. One side
in the overriding dispute was styled as metaphysical (and, depending on one’s
loyalties, either meaningless pseudo-problems or the major questions of phi-
losophy), the other as empiricist, scientific, and commonsensical (and hence
either sound rationality or else banalities and narrow technicalities). This crude
and inconsistent division was the partisan ideology of midcentury factions,
projected backwards onto history. Its plausibility requires that we overlook the
philosophers who happen to be in the wrong camp (most glaringly Berkeley,
Green, Bradley, Royce, Peirce, and McTaggart in the Anglo sphere; Condillac,
Comte, Feuerbach, Büchner, Taine, Frege, Mach, and of course the Vienna
Circle on the Continent), or go through gyrations of selective reinterpretation
(such as those applied to aspects of Leibniz, Berkeley, and Peirce).^46 In reality,
the interpenetration of science and philosophy had been a common charac-
teristic of all European philosophy, and the networks of significant philoso-
phers had more often crossed the English Channel than they had been divided
by it. The dichotomy was hardly one that would have come naturally to
philosophers of Russell’s generation or any previously. Lockean empiricism
was the rage among Parisian philosophes; after the university revolution, first
German Idealism, then German materialism and mathematics were the beacon
stars for British modernizers.
What made this Continental-Anglo dichotomy dominant was the combi-
nation of the Nazis, World War II, and the emigration of the Vienna Circle.
In the United States, where most of the logical positivists ended up, the influx
coincided with the expansion of the universities under secular auspices and the
final dying out of the Idealist generation. It also was the period of expansion
for university research science and social science departments, for which Vi-
enna Circle offshoots such as Hempel made careers writing methodological
752 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths