McCarthy

Conclusions American philosophy, then, may still not have climbed out of the ditch into which the McCarthy Era plunged it. This is not to say that the defensive posture it adopted after World War II had no good results. Once philosophy had been removed from concrete questions, it gained a certain sort of freedom. It was, for example, only after the McCarthy Era, with its obvious anti-Semitism, that Jews were really free to pursue careers in American philosophy departments. One wonders how soon that would have happened if philosophy had continued to be the sort of value-bound enterprise it tended to be earlier--bound in part, inevitably, to the higher wisdoms of the small-minded America of which Bertrand Russell--and not only he--had run afoul. …