Time in the Ditch

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In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effect of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. That McCarthyite forces damaged philosphy is in itself no scandal, nor is it scandalous that the damage was not clearly perceived for some time after the fact. But the possibility that the political pressures of the McCarthy era might have skewed the development of the discipline was barely addressed in the subsequent half century. Why has silence been maintained for so long? And what happens, McCumber asks, when political events and pressures go beyond interfering with individual careers to influence the nature of a discipline itself?While prevailing thought maintains that such things do not happen in America, McCumber argues that Joseph McCarthy and his "academic henchmen" had a decisive and lasting impact on American philosophy. Writing at the intersection of intellectual history and disciplinary history and working from documents of the American Philosophical Association and the American Association of University Professors, McCumber illuminates the shift in philosophical method that occurred in the wake of the McCarthy era: from a philosophy that was socially engaged and pragmatic in outlook to a socially disengaged vision that advocated a highly restricted "scientistic" conception of truth, language, and method. McCumber also sheds light on the degree to which McCarthyite ideology supported the entrenchment of the analytic conception of philosophy in the American canon.Finally, turning to sources such as Hegel, Heidegger, and the Greeks, McCumber offers a clear and compelling vision of a philosophy whose project is the establishment of narrative links betweenthe past and the present and that preserves the open-endedness of the future as a realm of imaginative thought and action.Time in the Ditch offers the first book-length treatment of a subject that has rarely been discussed by the philosophical community.