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In this blog-post on a criticism of Nagels book Mind & Cosmos the author makes the assertion:

This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded in the act of rejecting PSR. Our forefathers’ attempt to balance between common sense and the truths of science meant -- as science and the PSR parted ways -- the willing submission to brute, ultimate facts.

Is this a useful characterisation of the Anglo-Analytical tradition? Presumably, this founding act is one discerned after the fact, and not a necessarily conscious one. Or is there a single person to whom this founding act can be attributed to?

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    This is a rather idiosyncratic claim by Eric Schliesser who also names the scoundrel responsible for the "rejection of PSR": Bertrand Russell. I am at a loss on how to understand this, other than referring to a programmatic attitude - common to most of scientific philosophy - not to philosophically justify science as a knowledge enterprise, but as a philosopher to learn from science what justification actually means. But the relation to PSR is only incidental and concerns the way in which "science and the PSR parted ways", not analytic philosophy.
    – DBK
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 1:05
  • Yea, I didn't mean to mislead by linking you to newapps, I just wanted to "warn" that the Nagel book I was referring to has been heavily criticized (the top of the post links to other criticisms). I think DBK's reading is probably the right one (or at least the only plausible one I can think of).
    – Dennis
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 1:23
  • @DBK: I found it clarifying but I accept it is eccentric as the charge could also be levelled at continental philosophy. In the sense teleological explanations are given short shrift. It looks like to me a move that separates modern philosophy from rational theology. Spinoza for example I think would accept PSR.
    – Mozibur Ullah
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 14:40
  • @MoziburUllah: Right, teleological explanations came to my mind as well. There are many X in the history of philosophy for which "science and X parted ways" is true.
    – DBK
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 18:40

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I think Nagel has no clue what "Principle of Sufficient Reason" really means. Perhaps he's right that analytic philosophers have traditionally felt comfortable with assuming ultimate, brute facts which are intelligible without any further context, but this has everything to do with nominalism (in the sense in which D. Armstrong accused W.V. Quine of Ostrich Nominalism) or anti-transcendentalism (in the sense in which Foucault, Kuhn and Hacking are transcendentalists - because they think any fact is intelligible only in a broader context of sense-making), although I wouldn't be so sure (ex. Wittgenstein, both early and late), and nothing with the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is what we would nowadays call: The Law of Causality. It says that, for any X that happened, there is such Y whose happening explains X's happening, which means that a) Y happened and b) had Y not happened, X wouldn't either.

A good example of the use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is how Leibniz justifies his Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles by invoking God. If two indiscernible objects were nevertheless different, God would've acted without any reason by distinguishing them (instantiating one and not the other). But God necessarily acts rationally, therefore: the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles holds. He uses similar arguments against Newtonian absolute space (and non-relationist theories of space generally), cf. David J. Hyder, Three Paradoxces Concerning Causality and Time: Parmenides, Leibniz, Einstein/Schrödinger.

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  • Can, whoever downvoted my answer, please tell me what's incorrect in my discussion?
    – user73173
    Commented Mar 24 at 22:40
  • I didn't downvote you. From your own PSR answer above there must be some sufficient reason why someone downvotes here, in the exactly same way as there must be some sufficient reason that someone upvotes your answer in other posts. So there must be something else that makes you only worry about your downvote. But if I adopt anti-transcendental nominalism for downvote, then I would part away with PSR accepting this as brute fact, so similarly the analytic tradition still effectively rejects PSR at the end of the day, right?...
    – Double Knot
    Commented Mar 25 at 3:55
  • @DoubleKnot I'm certain that there is a reason for these facts, whether the Principle holds in general or not. But an agreement is comprehensible through the judgement in question itself whereas a disagreement is not, or, in other words, you don't know what you don't know. I fail to understand your further ironic comments which seem to conflate what I warned to carefully distinguish (in order, I assume, to make fun of my terminology?).
    – user73173
    Commented Mar 25 at 16:09
  • "fail to understand' is the norm here otherwise since most people reading your answer in expectation of something to understand would upvote your answers in volume which seems not the case so far... Also how can you know for sure upvotes are really for good reason and comprehensible judgment? I also fail to understand what I seem to conflate, I just don't see a definite answer from your first relevant section about this question...
    – Double Knot
    Commented Mar 25 at 17:57
  • @DoubleKnot I don't know what my other answers (which mostly concern other topics) have to do with the validity of this answer. You seem to be struggling to articulate any definite objection to any of my statements (whether concerning the other answers or this answer - if you have something to say about my other answers, you can also downvote and preferably say what's wrong with them). The first sense of my answer just asserts that there's a difference between insisting that there is a sufficient reason for any fact and asserting that there are basic brute facts intelligible with no context.
    – user73173
    Commented Mar 26 at 0:06

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