An Analytic-Hermeneutic History of Consciousness

A great strength of the analytic tradition in philosophy (I count myself among it) is its affiliation with the mathematical logic of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Tarski: all graduate students are forced to learn its basics, and soon come to discipline their thoughts to fit its structures. This makes for a lingua franca, an admirable prevailing level of clarity and rigor, and interdisciplinary permeability with cognate fields sharing this affiliation. These all contribute to the continuing growth and dynamism of the global analytic-philosophical research community, which shows no sign of losing steam. But mathematical logic is not theory-neutral. Its characteristic use of truth as the fundamental analysans for validity and entailment reflects its origins as a tool for representing the discourse of the natural sciences, which aim at the truth from ‘outside’ their subject-matter. And—though this would conflict with the ‘unity of science’ (Carnap 1928/1927, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958) characteristically embraced by the analytic tradition—perhaps the discourse of the ‘human’ sciences is fundamentally different. After all, a disjuncture between ‘naturalistic’ and ‘humanistic’ discourse—less poetically, physical and mental—is the mainstay of the continental hermeneutic tradition (Schleiermacher 1834/1998, Dilthey 1883/1989, Gadamer 1976, Ricouer 1981); and for the twentieth-century anglophone nonanalytic philosopher Collingwood (1933/2005, 1946/1993), the ‘relation between the sciences of the body, or natural sciences, and the sciences of the mind[] is the relation inquiry into which ought to be substituted for the make-believe inquiry into the make-believe problem of ‘the relation between body and mind’ ’ (Collingwood 1942/92, 2.49). More specifically,