Sander Verhaegh: Between Two Circles – Langer and the Making of American Analytic Philosophy

Historians of American philosophy often portray the analytic turn as a rupture. Richard Rorty wrote about a “take over” by European émigrés, who “showed up thanks to Hitler and various other historical contingencies”. Roy Wood Sellars described the analytic method as “a new kind of colonialism” led by Viennese scientists who knew little about American philosophy.
This paper challenges this narrative, using the encounters between Langer and the Vienna Circle to argue that analytic philosophy should not be viewed as European export but as a product of transatlantic exchange. 
First, I draw on archival material to show that American philosophy already harboured a substantive community of proto-analytic philosophers, exemplified by Langer’s circle of philosopher-logicians, well before it developed contacts with the Vienna Circle. 
Next, I reconstruct how Langer and her contemporaries tried to bridge cultural differences by developing different proposals for how to characterise the new philosophy. 
Finally, I argue that neither Langer nor the logical empiricists were able to control the narrative, focusing on the social mechanisms that contributed to the rise of a conception of analytic philosophy that still dominates the field today.