Philosophical Columbusing refers to the appropriation of radical philosophical traditions by analytical-philosophy, named after Christopher Columbus’s claim to have “discovered” lands already inhabited and known. The term, adapted from Kevin Richardson’s use in discussing analytic philosophy’s “social turn,” captures how analytic philosophers appropriate insights from Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory whilst neutralising their critical power.
The mechanism of appropriation
Analytic philosophy subjects radical traditions to what Richardson calls “philosophical Columbusing”: passing off what many already know as newly discovered insights. However, the danger extends beyond mere reinvention. As Schuringa argues, analytic philosophy risks “selling the wheel back to its original inventors after having subjected it to analytic refurbishment.”
The appropriation follows a consistent pattern:
- Radical traditions are recast in liberal individualist terms
- Structural and political dimensions are abstracted away
- Critical power is neutralised through methodological constraints
- The result is marketised as rigorous “analytic” philosophy
The liberal marketplace of ideas
The ideology underlying this appropriation is liberalism. Analytic philosophy conceives philosophical discourse as a liberal marketplace of ideas where:
- Participants enter as free, sovereign individuals
- The best ideas win through market circulation
- Entry conditions are assumed equal for all
- Power relations shaping the marketplace remain unexamined
This fiction of equal entry, like in commercial marketplaces, serves the interests of those who exercise power whilst obscuring structural barriers to participation.
Historical examples
Analytic Marxism
In the 1970s, G.A. Cohen—educated at Oxford—created “analytic Marxism” or “non-bullshit Marxism.” Cohen’s 1978 Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence defended orthodox technological-determinism using analytic philosophical methods.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood observes, Cohen’s work is “less a reinterpretation of Marx than an uncompromising defence of the most orthodox interpretation.” Crucially, it is “so diluted that it has no explanatory value” for understanding capitalism. Marx’s historical materialism becomes an ahistorical “theory of history as such,” useless for its original purpose.
The “September Group” (Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer) committed to methodological individualism and game theory, attempting to “dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.” Cohen rejected dialectic as “bullshit” and insisted analysis was “unrevisable.” Any resistance to analytic techniques was dismissed as “irrational obscurantism.”
Analytic feminism
In the 1990s, Sally Haslanger and Rae Langton created analytic feminism, drawing primarily on Catharine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography activism. MacKinnon’s work—marked by impassioned rhetoric and anti-liberal Marxist feminism—seems an unlikely source for liberal analytic arguments.
Yet Haslanger and Langton repurposed MacKinnon’s insights, confining them within liberal parameters. Langton’s 1990 “Whose Right?” worked “entirely within the Dworkinian theoretical system” to show feminist arguments could be accommodated by Ronald Dworkin’s liberalism.
This coincided with third-wave feminism’s challenges to MacKinnon:
- Sex-positive feminism questioned women as inherently subordinated
- Intersectionality complicated single-axis analyses
- Queer theory challenged heteronormative assumptions
Analytic philosophy’s “straight reading” of texts struggles fundamentally with such complications.
Philosophy of race
Kwame Anthony Appiah initiated analytic philosophy of race in the early 1990s as a denier of race’s reality and opponent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s black radical tradition. Charles Mills, while drawing on critical race theory, worked to lead that fundamentally anti-liberal tradition back into liberalism’s fold.
The “social turn” illusion
Richardson’s claim of a “social turn” analogous to the “linguistic turn” misunderstands what is occurring. The linguistic turn promised methodological revolution—a new way of doing philosophy. The alleged “social turn” involves no such transformation.
Analytic philosophers simply apply existing methods and tools to previously ignored subject areas. They have not “turned social” but extended their empire to social territories. Richardson himself lists practitioners: Quill Kukla (social philosophy of language), Kristie Dotson, Miranda Fricker, Jennifer Lackey (social epistemology), Keya Maitra (feminist philosophy of mind), Sally Haslanger (social ontology).
These philosophers are “analytic philosophers in a traditional mould, continuing methodologically as they were before.”
Double forgetfulness in decolonisation
Analytic philosophy’s approach to decolonising curricula exhibits peculiar double forgetfulness:
- It forgets it is itself a tradition among others
- It forgets it is not coeval with “Western philosophy”
This allows analytic philosophy to equate decolonisation with exposure to “non-Western philosophy”—traditions alternative to Western philosophy. In this vanishing act where analytic philosophy goes missing from the picture, it insulates itself from decolonial thought’s critical power.
“The tradition that is none cannot be touched, just as whiteness, the colour that is none, cannot be seen.”
Limits of appropriation
Analytic philosophy faces grave difficulties giving radical traditions their critical due, thanks to blindness about its tendency to neutralise and defang them. The liberal marketplace framework prevents genuine engagement with:
- Structural analyses of power and oppression
- Historical materialism and dialectical methods
- Challenges to methodological individualism
- Critiques of liberal ideology itself
Thanks to these developments, analytic philosophers have greater exposure to radical traditions. But ideological constraints prevent them from recognising how they systematically appropriate and neutralise critical insights.
Further reading
- Schuringa, C. (2025). A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, Chapter 10
- Wood, E.M. on analytic Marxism’s limitations
- Richardson, K. on the alleged “social turn” in analytic philosophy