Yesterday Roberta Millstein (HERE) raised the question of why the H4 journals (Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Mind) have such a central place in the pantheon of analytic philosophy. While I am convinced by her that it is misleading at best to refer to these as "generalist journals," I am not convinced that this should undermine their centrality.
I think that any journal in analytic philosophy with the H4 level of centrality will of necessity privilege Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind. This is because if ones philosophical practice presupposes (independent of whether one takes the presupposition to be true as a philosophical proposition!) a strong distinction between form and content, then following asymmetry holds.
All areas of philosophy will have to make linguistic, epistemic, conceptual, and metaphysical presuppositions relevant to the truth of their claims. But if form is independent of content in certain ways, this dependency is asymmetric. For example, aesthetic presuppositions might render a philosophical paper more or less fun to read, but would not be relevant to the truth of the claims (it's not anti-symmetric, because the paper might be on the metaphysics of beauty).
So LEMM is "core analytic" precisely because all analytic philosophy is asymmetrically dependent upon it.
I should note that at the end of the day I don't think that form and content are seperable in the way I presuppose that they are in the way I conduct my research. However, I think that the false presupposition is a necessary fiction for the proper unfolding of the dialectic (or rather that there need to be institutions in science (Fichtean sense of "science" here) generally where much of the work makes the presupposition).
This is also why I am not looking for some kind of Hegelian synthesis between analytic and continental philosophy (even though there is massive overlap with respect to individual works; see this related post, for what I take to be distinctive of continental philosophy as a practice), but still think that that we must learn from one another. But this is the subject for other posts. Here I just wanted to defend the centrality of LEMM to analytic philosophy.
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