Time in the Ditch

"In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effect of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. That McCarthyite forces damaged philosophy 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 was silence 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 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