Continental Philosophy refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th Century philosophy in mainland Europe. It is a general term for those philosophical schools and movements not included under the label Analytic Philosophy, which was the other, largely Anglophone, main philosophical tradition of the period.
As a movement, Continental Philosophy lacks clear definition, and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views, its main purpose being to distinguish itself from Analytic Philosophy, although the term was used as early as 1840 by John Stuart Mill to distinguish European Kant-influenced thought from the more British-based movements such as British Empiricism and Utilitarianism.
Continental Philosophy, then, is a catch-all label incorporating such Continental European-based schools as German Idealism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Romanticism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Marxism, Deconstructionism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Hermeneutics, French Feminism, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
Although many consider that the distinction between Continental and Analytic Philosophy is misleading or even worthless, some common "Continental" themes can be identified:
- It generally rejects Scientism (the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena).
- It tends towards Historicism in its view of possible experience as variable, and determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture and history.
- It typically holds that conscious human agency can change these conditions of possible experience, and tend to see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation.
- It tends to emphasize metaphilosophy (the study of the subject and matter, methods and aims of philosophy itself, or the "philosophy of philosophy").
* * * * * * * * *
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions
from mainland Europe.[1][2] This
sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second
half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and
traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy
includes the following movements: German
idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such
as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics,
structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches
of Western Marxism.[3]
It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all
the preceding philosophical movements. The term "continental
philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks clear
definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical
views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the
term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label
for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.[4]Nonetheless, Michael
E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically
characterize continental philosophy.[5]
- First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience" (a version of Kantian conditions of possible experience or the phenomenological "lifeworld") and that scientific methods are inadequate to fully understand such conditions of intelligibility.[6]
- Second, continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism (or historicity). Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence".[7]
- Third, continental philosophy typically holds that human agency can change these conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways".[8] Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and often see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.
- A
final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis
on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development
and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often
sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.[9] In
some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a
renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first,
foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as
hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that
philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or
practical. And some continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, or Derrida) doubt whether any conception of
philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals.
Ultimately, the foregoing themes derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that
knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best
understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical
inquiry.[10]
Contents
The term
The term "continental philosophy", in the above sense, was first
widely used by English-speaking philosophers to describe university courses in
the 1970s, emerging as a collective name for the philosophies then widespread
in France and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism,
and post-structuralism.[11]
However, the term (and its approximate sense) can be found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of "Continental philosophy" and "Continental philosophers" with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally.[12] This notion gained prominence in the early 20th century as figures such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore advanced a vision of philosophy closely allied with natural science, progressing through logical analysis. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as "analytic philosophy", became dominant in Britain and the United States from roughly 1930 onward. Russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement.[13]Commenting on the history of the distinction in 1945, Russell distinguished "two schools of philosophy, which may be broadly distinguished as the Continental and the British respectively", a division he saw as operative "from the time of Locke".[14]
Since the 1970s, however, many philosophers in the United States and Britain have taken interest in continental philosophers since Kant, and the philosophical traditions in many European countries have similarly incorporated many aspects of the "analytic" movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Likewise, self-described "continental philosophers" can be found in philosophy departments in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia,[15] and some well-known analytic philosophers claim to conduct better scholarship on continental philosophy than self-identified programs in continental philosophy, particularly at the level of graduate education.[16]"Continental philosophy" is thus defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions and influences rather than a geographic distinction.
However, the term (and its approximate sense) can be found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of "Continental philosophy" and "Continental philosophers" with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally.[12] This notion gained prominence in the early 20th century as figures such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore advanced a vision of philosophy closely allied with natural science, progressing through logical analysis. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as "analytic philosophy", became dominant in Britain and the United States from roughly 1930 onward. Russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement.[13]Commenting on the history of the distinction in 1945, Russell distinguished "two schools of philosophy, which may be broadly distinguished as the Continental and the British respectively", a division he saw as operative "from the time of Locke".[14]
Since the 1970s, however, many philosophers in the United States and Britain have taken interest in continental philosophers since Kant, and the philosophical traditions in many European countries have similarly incorporated many aspects of the "analytic" movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Likewise, self-described "continental philosophers" can be found in philosophy departments in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia,[15] and some well-known analytic philosophers claim to conduct better scholarship on continental philosophy than self-identified programs in continental philosophy, particularly at the level of graduate education.[16]"Continental philosophy" is thus defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions and influences rather than a geographic distinction.
History
The history of continental philosophy (taken in its narrower sense) is
usually thought to begin with German
idealism.[17] Led
by figures like Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German
idealism developed out of the work of Immanuel
Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely linked with romanticism and
the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. Besides the central figures listed
above, important contributors to German idealism also included Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
As the institutional roots of "continental philosophy" in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology,[18] Edmund Husserl has always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition.[19] Husserl's notion of a noema, the non-psychological content of thought, his correspondence with Gottlob Frege, and his investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest among analytic philosophers.
J. G. Merquior[20] argued that a distinction between analytic and continental philosophies can be first clearly identified with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose wariness of science and elevation of intuitionpaved the way for existentialism. Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path [from the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One might say it all began with Henri Bergson."
An illustration of some important differences between "analytic" and "continental" styles of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language" (Originally published in 1932 as "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache"), a paper some observers[who?] have described as particularly polemical. Carnap's paper argues that Heidegger's lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements.[21] Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning.
With the rise of Nazism, many of Germany's philosophers, especially those of Jewish descent or leftist or liberal political sympathies (such as many in the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School), fled to the English-speaking world. Those philosophers who remained—if they remained in academia at all—had to reconcile themselves to Nazi control of the universities. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, among the most prominent German philosophers to stay in Germany, embraced Nazism when it came to power.
Both before and after World War II there was a growth of interest in German philosophy in France. A new interest in communism translated into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who became for the first time studied extensively in the politically conservative French university system of the Third Republic. At the same time the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger became increasingly influential, perhaps owing to its resonances with French philosophies which placed great stock in the first-person perspective (an idea found in divergent forms such as Cartesianism, spiritualism, and Bergsonism). Most important in this popularization of phenomenology was the author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who called his philosophy existentialism. (See 20th-century French philosophy.) Another major strain of continental thought is structuralism/post-structuralism. Influenced by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss began to apply the structural paradigm to the humanities. In the 1960s and '70s, post-structuralists developed various critiques of structuralism. Post-structuralist thinkers include Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
As the institutional roots of "continental philosophy" in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology,[18] Edmund Husserl has always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition.[19] Husserl's notion of a noema, the non-psychological content of thought, his correspondence with Gottlob Frege, and his investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest among analytic philosophers.
J. G. Merquior[20] argued that a distinction between analytic and continental philosophies can be first clearly identified with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose wariness of science and elevation of intuitionpaved the way for existentialism. Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path [from the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One might say it all began with Henri Bergson."
An illustration of some important differences between "analytic" and "continental" styles of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language" (Originally published in 1932 as "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache"), a paper some observers[who?] have described as particularly polemical. Carnap's paper argues that Heidegger's lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements.[21] Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning.
With the rise of Nazism, many of Germany's philosophers, especially those of Jewish descent or leftist or liberal political sympathies (such as many in the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School), fled to the English-speaking world. Those philosophers who remained—if they remained in academia at all—had to reconcile themselves to Nazi control of the universities. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, among the most prominent German philosophers to stay in Germany, embraced Nazism when it came to power.
Both before and after World War II there was a growth of interest in German philosophy in France. A new interest in communism translated into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who became for the first time studied extensively in the politically conservative French university system of the Third Republic. At the same time the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger became increasingly influential, perhaps owing to its resonances with French philosophies which placed great stock in the first-person perspective (an idea found in divergent forms such as Cartesianism, spiritualism, and Bergsonism). Most important in this popularization of phenomenology was the author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who called his philosophy existentialism. (See 20th-century French philosophy.) Another major strain of continental thought is structuralism/post-structuralism. Influenced by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss began to apply the structural paradigm to the humanities. In the 1960s and '70s, post-structuralists developed various critiques of structuralism. Post-structuralist thinkers include Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
Recent Anglo-American
developments
From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were
only intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an
influx of continental philosophers, particularly German Jewish students
of Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the United States on account of the persecution
of the Jews and later World War II; Hannah
Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor
W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably the
most notable of this wave, arriving in the late 1930s and early 1940s. However,
philosophy departments began offering courses in continental philosophy in the
late 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s,
some British and American philosophers became more vocally opposed to the
methods and conclusions of continental philosophers. For example, John
Searle[22]criticized
Derrida's deconstruction for "obvious and manifest
intellectual weaknesses". Later, Barry Smith and assorted
signatories protested against the award of an honorary degree to Derrida
by Cambridge University.[23]
American university departments in literature, the fine arts, film,
sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and
arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research.
Continental Philosophy features prominently in a number of British and Irish
Philosophy departments, for instance at the University of Essex, Warwick,
Sussex and Dundee, Manchester Metropolitan, Kingston University, Staffordshire
University and University College Dublin, and in North American Philosophy
departments, including the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Boston College,
Stony Brook University (SUNY), Vanderbilt University, DePaul University,
Villanova University, the University of Guelph, The New School, Pennsylvania
State University, University of Oregon, Emory University, Duquesne University,
the University of Memphis, University of King's College, and
Loyola University Chicago. The most prominent organization for continental philosophy
in the United States is the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (known as SPEP).[24]
The rise of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy can be interpreted both as a prophylactic and a therapeutic movement:
on the one hand, Whitehead's life and thought show that analytic rigor and
speculative imagination can work together; on the other hand, Whiteheadian
scholarship has sometimes provided bridges between these fields.[25]
Significant works
Notes
1.
Leiter
2007, p. 2: "As a first approximation, we might say that
philosophy in Continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is
best understood as a connected weave of traditions, some of which overlap, but
no one of which dominates all the others."
2.
Critchley, Simon (1998), "Introduction: what is continental philosophy?",
in Critchley, Simon; Schroder, William, A Companion to Continental
Philosophy, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, p. 4.
3.
The above list includes only those movements common to both lists compiled
by Critchley
2001, p. 13 and Glendinning
2006, pp. 58–65
4.
Glendinning
2006, p. 12.
5.
The following list of four traits is adapted from Rosen, Michael,
"Continental Philosophy from Hegel", in Grayling,
A.C., Philosophy 2: Further through the Subject, p. 665
6.
Critchley
2001, p. 115.
7.
Critchley
2001, p. 57.
9.
Leiter
2007, p. 4: "While forms of philosophical naturalism have been
dominant in Anglophone philosophy, the vast majority of authors within the
Continental traditions insist on the distinctiveness of philosophical methods
and their priority to those of the natural sciences."
10. Continental philosophers usually identify such
conditions with the transcendental subject or self: Solomon
1988, p. 6, "It is with Kant that philosophical claims about the
self attain new and remarkable proportions. The self becomes not just the focus
of attention but the entire subject-matter of philosophy. The self is not just
another entity in the world, but in an important sense it creates the world,
and the reflecting self does not just know itself, but in knowing itself knows
all selves, and the structure of any and every possible self."
11. Critchley
2001, p. 38.
12. Mill,
John Stuart (1950). On Bentham and Coleridge. Harper Torchbooks.
New York: Harper & Row. pp. 104, 133, 155.
13. Russell,
Bertrand (1959). My Philosophical Development. London: Allen
& Unwin. p. 62. Hegelians had all kinds of arguments to prove
this or that was not 'real'. Number, space, time, matter, were all professedly
convicted of being self-contradictory. Nothing was real, so we were assured,
except the Absolute, which could think only of itself since there was nothing
else for it to think of and which thought eternally the sort of things that
idealist philosophers thought in their books.
14. B. Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy, (Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 643 and 641. Russell proposes
the following broad points of distinction between Continental and British types
of philosophy: (1) in method, deductive
system-building vs. piecemeal induction; (2) in metaphysics, rationalist
theology vs. metaphysical agnosticism; (3) in ethics, non-naturalist deontology
vs. naturalist hedonism; and (4) in politics, authoritarianism vs. liberalism.
Ibid., pp. 643-647.
15. See, e.g., Walter Brogan and James Risser
(eds.), American Continental Philosophy: A Reader (Indiana
University Press, 2000).
16. Brian
Leiter is most commonly associated with such claims.
17. Critchley
2001 and Solomon
1988 date the origins of continental philosophy a generation earlier,
to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
18. E.g., the largest academic organization devoted
to furthering the study of continental philosophy is the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
19. Kenny, Anthony (ed). The Oxford
Illustrated History of Western Philosophy. ISBN 0-19-285440-2
20. Merquior, J.G. (1987). Foucault (Fontana Modern Masters series),
University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-06062-8.
21. Gregory, Wanda T. Heidegger,
Carnap and Quine at the Crossroads of Language Archived 2006-08-21
at the Wayback Machine., and Abraham D. Stone. Heidegger and
Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics
22. Searle, John R. "Word
Turned Upside Down." New York Times Review of Books, Volume 30,
Number 16 · October 27, 1983.
23. Barry Smith et al. Open letter
against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University , The
Times(London), Saturday 9 May 1992
25. See Michel
Weber, « Much Ado
About Duckspeak », Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3,
Issue 1, 2011, pp. 135-142; « Whitehead's
creative advance from formal to existential ontology », Logique
et Analyse, 54/214, juin 2011, Special Issue on Whitehead’s Early Work, pp.
127-133.
References
·
Babich, Babette (2003). "On the
Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s
Speaking Language, and Philosophy." In: C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided:
Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity
Books. pp. 63–103.
·
Critchley, Simon (2001). Continental
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-285359-7.
·
Cutrofello, Andrew (2005). Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary
Introduction. Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy. New York;
Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
·
Glendinning, Simon (2006). The idea of continental philosophy: a
philosophical chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
·
Leiter, Brian; Rosen, Michael, eds. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of
Continental Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
·
Schrift, Alan D. (2010). The History of Continental Philosophy.
Chicago; Illinois: University of Chicago Press Press.
·
Solomon, Robert C. (1988). Continental
philosophy since 1750: the rise and fall of the self. Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press.
·
Kenny, Anthony (2007). A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume IV:
Philosophy in the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press.
* * * * * * * * *
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy, as
the phrase is used today, refers to a set of traditions of nineteenth and
twentieth century philosophy from mainland Europe.[1] Continental philosophy includes the
following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as
the thoughts of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, and the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School and some other branches of
western Marxism.[2]
The term continental
philosophy originated among English-speaking philosophers in the late twentieth
century who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions
that had been largely ignored or neglected by the analytic movement. Conversely, philosophers in
the continental tradition have largely ignored analytic philosophy, developed
primarily in English speaking countries such as England and the United States.
Contents
Contemporary Western
philosophy, thus, has been broadly divided into two trends, continental
philosophy and analytic philosophy, each with fundamentally different
philosophical concerns, methodologies, styles, and approaches. Today, although
the majority of Western philosophers still stand on either side of the two
traditions, there is less of a separation or lack of communication between
them.
General Characteristics
It is difficult to identify
non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical
movements. The term "continental philosophy," like "analytic philosophy,"
lacks clear definition and may mark merely a "family resemblance"[3] across
disparate philosophical views. Some scholars have suggested the term may be
more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of Western
philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.[4] Nonetheless,
some scholars have ventured to identify common themes that typically
characterize continental philosophy.[5]
First, continental
philosophers generally reject scientism, the view
that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding
all phenomena. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a
"pre-theoretical substrate of experience," a form of the Kantianconditions of possible experience, and that scientific
methods are inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility.[6]
Second, continental
philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as
variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and
time, language, culture, or history. Where analytic
philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of
being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider
the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental
philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be
divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical
emergence".[7]
Third, continental
philosophy typically holds that conscious human agency can change these
conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent
creation, then it can be recreated in other ways".[8] Thus
continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory
and practice, and tend to see their philosophical inquiries as closely related
to personal, moral, or political
transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition
("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it"),
but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.
A final characteristic
trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake
of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental
philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.
In some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a
renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational,
a priori science. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory,
or structuralism), it is
held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or
practical. And in some cases, continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the
later Heidegger, or Derrida)
harbor grave doubts about the coherence of any conceptions of philosophy.
Ultimately, the foregoing
distinctive traits derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that the nature of
knowledge and experience is bound by conditions that are not directly
accessible to empirical inquiry.[9]
History
The history of continental
philosophy (taken in its narrower sense) is usually thought to begin with German idealism.[10] Led by
figures like Fichte, Schelling, and
later Hegel, German idealism
developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in
the 1780s and 1790s and was closely linked with both romanticism and
the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. Besides
the central figures listed above, important contributors to German idealism also
included Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,
Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
As the institutional roots
of "continental philosophy" in many cases directly descend from those
of phenomenology,[11] Edmund Husserlhas
always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl
is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition.[12] Husserl's
notion of a noema (a non-psychological content of thought), his correspondence
with Gottlob Frege, and his
investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest among
analytic philosophers.
A particularly polemical
illustration of some differences between "analytic" and
"continental" styles of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's
"Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,"
which argues that Heidegger's lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" violates
logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements.[13]
Both before and after World War II there
was a growth of interest in German philosophy in France. The role of the French Communist
Party in liberating France meant that it became, for a brief period, the
largest political movement in the country. The attendant interest in communism
translated into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who were both studied
extensively for the first time in the conservative French university system.
Additionally, there was a major trend towards the ideas of Husserl, and toward
his former assistant Heidegger. Most important in this popularization of
phenomenology was the author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who
called his philosophy existentialism.
The Term
The term "continental
philosophy," in the above sense, was first widely used by English-speaking
philosophers to describe university courses in the 1970s, emerging as a
collective name for the philosophies then widespread in France and Germany,
such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.[14]
However, the term (and its
approximate sense) can be found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840
essay on Coleridge, where Mill
contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of "Continental philosophy"
and "Continental philosophers" with the English empiricism of Bentham and the
eighteenth century generally.[15] This notion
gained prominence in the early 1900s as figures such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore advanced
a vision of philosophy closely allied with natural science, progressing through
logical analysis. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as
"analytic philosophy," became dominant in Britain and America from
roughly 1930 onward.[16] Russell and
Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and
its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement.[17]
Meanwhile in Europe at the
turn of the twentieth century, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and
Reinach were developing a new philosophical method of their own, phenomenology. Heidegger took
this phenomenological approach in new directions, and, after World War II,
French philosophers led by Jean Paul Sartre developed Heidegger's ideas into a
movement known as existentialism. In the
1960s, structuralism became
the new vogue in France, followed by poststructuralism.
In general, during the
twentieth century, there was relatively limited contact between philosophers
working in the Anglophone tradition and philosophers from the European
continent working in the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and
structuralism. Commenting on the history of the distinction in 1945, Russell
distinguished "two schools of philosophy, which may be broadly
distinguished as the Continental and the British respectively," a division
he saw as operative "from the time of Locke".[18]
Since the 1970s, however,
many philosophers in America and Britain have taken interest in continental
philosophers since Kant, and the philosophical traditions in many European
countries have similarly incorporated many aspects of the legacy of the
"analytic" movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in
France, including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes,
Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Likewise,
self-described "continental philosophers" can be found in philosophy
departments in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia.[19] "Continental
philosophy" is thus defined in terms of a family of philosophical
traditions and influences rather than a geographic distinction. It remains
relevant that "continental philosophy" is a contested designation,
with many analytic philosophers laying claim to offer better "continental
philosophy" than traditional continental philosophy, particularly at the
level of graduate education.[20]
Continental philosophy in English speaking countries: recent
developments
From the early twentieth
century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently
discussed in British and American universities. However, philosophy departments
began offering courses in continental philosophy in the late 1960s and 1970s.
With post-modernism in the 1970s and 1980s, British and American philosophers
became more vocally opposed to the methods and conclusions of continental
philosophers. Derrida, for example, was the target of criticism by John Searle
and, later, assorted signatories protesting an honorary degree given to Derrida
by Cambridge University.
Meanwhile, university departments in literature, the fine arts, film,
sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and
arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research.
Increasingly, traditionally analytic philosophers are turning to continental
themes and figures. The most prominent organization for continental philosophy
in the United States is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy (known as SPEP).
See also
Notes
↑ "As a first
approximation, we might say that philosophy in Continental Europe in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries is best understood as a connected weave of
traditions, some of which overlap, but no one of which dominates all the
others." Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen. The Oxford Handbook of
Continental Philosophy. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. See also Simon
Critchley and William Schroder, (eds.), A Companion to Continental Philosophy.
(Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 4.
↑ The above list
includes only those movements common to both lists compiled by Simon Critchley.
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press,
2001), 13 and Simon Glendinning. The Idea of Continental Philosophy.(Edinburgh
University Press, 2006), 58-65.
↑ Wittgenstein's
terminology; similarity in a loose sense.
↑ Glendinning, 12.
↑ The following
list of four traits is adapted from Michael Rosen, "Continental Philosophy
from Hegel," in A.C. Grayling, (ed.), Philosophy 2: Further through the
Subject. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 665.
↑ Simon Critchley.
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. 115.
↑ As Robert
Solomon notes, continental philosophers usually identify such conditions with
the transcendental subject or self: "It is with Kant that philosophical
claims about the self attain new and remarkable proportions. The self becomes
not just the focus of attention but the entire subject-matter of philosophy.
The self is not just another entity in the world, but in an important sense it
creates the world, and the reflecting self does not just know itself, but in
knowing itself knows all selves, and the structure of any and every possible
self." (R. Solomon. Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of
the Self. (Oxford University Press, 1988), 6)
↑ Critchley, 2001;
Solomon, 1988, dates the origins of continental philosophy a generation
earlier, to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
↑ E.g., the
largest academic organization devoted to furthering the study of continental
philosophy is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
↑ Anthony Kenny,
(ed). The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy. ISBN 0192854402
↑ Wanda T.
Gregory, Heidegger, Carnap and Quine at the Crossroads of Language, and Abraham D. Stone. Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics. Retrieved August 11, 2008.
↑ Critchley.
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction., 38.
↑ John Stuart
Mill. On Bentham and Coleridge. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950), 104, 133,
and 155.
↑ See, e.g.,
Michael Dummett. The Origins of Analytical Philosophy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994); or C. Prado, (ed.), A House Divided: Comparing
Analytic and Continental Philosophy. (New York: Prometheus/Humanity Books,
2003).
↑ E.g., Russell's
comments in My Philosophical Development. (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1959),
62: "Hegelians had all kinds of arguments to prove this or that was not
'real'. Number, space, time, matter, were all professedly convicted of being
self-contradictory. Nothing was real, so we were assured, except the Absolute,
which could think only of itself since there was nothing else for it to think
of and which thought eternally the sort of things that idealist philosophers
thought in their books."
↑ Bertrand
Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1945), 643, 641. Russell proposes the following broad points of distinction
between Continental and British types of philosophy: (1) in method, deductive
system-building vs. piecemeal induction; (2) in metaphysics, rationalist
theology vs. metaphysical agnosticism; (3) in ethics, non-naturalist deontology
vs. naturalist hedonism; and (4) in politics, authoritarianism vs. liberalism.
Russell, 1945, 643-647.
↑ See, e.g.,
Walter Brogan and James Risser, (eds.), American Continental Philosophy: A
Reader. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
↑ Brian Leiter is
most commonly associated with such claims and compiles the “Philosophical
Gourmet Report: A Ranking of Graduate Programs in the English-speaking World”
published online by Blackwell Publishers. Note the American Philosophical
Association's censuring of the "Gourmet Report" and the controversy
associated with that censuring. See, for a history of the analytic continental
divide in the context of professional philosophy in the United States, Bruce
Wilshire. Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002), as well as the first chapter by
Richard Rorty in Prado, ed., A House Divided.
References
Books and journals
Books and journals
Brogan, Walter, and James Risser. American
Continental Philosophy: A Reader. Studies in Continental thought. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000. ISBN 9780253213761
Critchley, Simon, and William Ralph Schroeder. A
Companion to Continental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. ISBN 9780631190134
Critchley, Simon. Continental Philosophy: A Very
Short Introduction. (Very short introductions), 43. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001. ISBN 9780192853592
Cutrofello, Andrew. Continental Philosophy: A
Contemporary Introduction. Routledge contemporary introductions to philosophy.
New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 9780415242097
Dummett, Michael A. E. Origins of Analytical
Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 9780674644724
Glendinning, Simon. The Idea of Continental
Philosophy A Philosophical Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2006. ISBN 9780748627097
Grayling, A. C. Philosophy 2: Further Through the
Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 9780198751786
Kenny, Anthony, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History
of Western Philosophy. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0192854402
Leiter, Brian,, and Michael Rosen. The Oxford
Handbook of Continental Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780199234097
John Stuart Mill. On Bentham and Coleridge. New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950.
Prado, C. G. A House Divided: Comparing Analytic
and Continental Philosophy. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003. ISBN 9781591021056
Prado, C. G. A House Divided: Comparing Analytic
and Continental Philosophy. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003. ISBN 1591021057
Richard Rorty in C.G. Prado, ed., A House Divided.
Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy.
New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972. ISBN 9780671201586
Russell, Bertrand. My Philosophical Development.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959.
Solomon, Robert C. Continental philosophy since
1750: the rise and fall of the self. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. ISBN 9780192892027
Wilshire, Bruce W. Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique
of Analytic Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2002. ISBN 9780791454305
