Is God Relational? If So, How Does This Affect His Impassibility?

Impassibility (from Latin in-, "not", passibilis, "able to suffer, experience emotion") describes the theological doctrine that God does not experience pain or pleasure from the actions of another being. ... However, in Christianity there is an ancient dispute about the impassibility of God (see Nestorianism). - from Wikipedia, "Impassibility"

A Standard Christian Creed of the Church

Recently I received an email from Tom Oord discussing the various aspects in which God is both passible and impassible. This subject seems to be generated whenever one speaks to the "Relationality between God and creation." Especially when framed by Process Theology which speaks to the idea that God is experiencing creation's timefulness with us rather than apart from it, above it, or beyond it.

These questions arise when thinking of whether God is primarily or secondarily affected by the creation He has made. If He is affected primarily by it then we are speaking to a process-based theology; if secondarily, then we are back to Calvinism's old legacies of the problem of sin and evil (theodicy) amongst other very basic questions about the Person and Work of God.

Certainly this topic is more complex than these simple introductory notes but to think of God as primarily relational seems to help us humans who are also primarily relational. Here are some examples of this relational puzzle:

• We are not things, or automotons, or non-beings. We are not bodies housing souls, or souls clothed by bodies, but whole beings composed both of soul and body. This would speak to the Jewish idea of wholeness vs. the Greek-Hellenistic idea of di/trichotomy;

• Moreover, man's essence is not found in his soul/spirit apart from his body as taught by Greek Stoicism for one; in Paul's day this work out in the books of Romans et al as the problem of antinomianism in the early church;

• In parallel with these adverse teachings are the many derivations of Persian Zoroastrianism which have subtended into the Christian gnosticisms of pelagianism primarily disputed in the third and fourth centuries of the church through to the Medieval Ages and even into contemporary times (cf. various Christian sects, denominations, and worship styles arranged around this topic) where Jesus is viewed as less than God because He was a man (or, conversely, more than a man because He was God).

The offshoots from the doctrine of relationality can become a doctrinal maze leading away from the pith of the idea of what humanity is in its essence. But, in sum, subtracting all the noise that can arise here, we are essentially beings with a heart, soul, body, and mind bearing a sense of self in relationship to the God of the universe as well as to creation itself.

By thinking of God as primarily relational than it also can speak to the idea that God has led out by divine decree and act through love ahead of all other attributes such as justice. Knowing that all things - whether metaphysical or physical - have been led out in love resolves a lot of questions but essentially reinforces the idea that God is first-and-foremost a relational God.

As such, for all these reasons, Calvinism has pushed back with the the paradigm that if God is relational than He is passible and not the God of the bible which speaks of Him as impassible. Certainly this is an untrue assertion by a system dealing with in its core/centeredness of a God more Force than Person, more Transcendent than Here (Jesus), more Other than Father, Son, and Spirit.

Further, the doctrine of Calvinism must lead out in God's judgment untempered by His grace than by God's grace which tempers His judgment (sic, the Law v Grace discussions of the church here). For all these initial reactions a Relational, Loving God is unwanted by church systems built up on doctrines of fear, uncertainty, guilt, and second-guessing (our future, for instance, when doing wrong and wondering how God will later punish us). A RELATIONAL Process Theology subverts all this, and when it does, comes under fire from the very systems which cannot answer the most basic questions of theology without reasserting their own creedal structures opposed in their core to the idea of God's relationality.

Thus my interest many years ago to revisit Arminianism to discover if Calvinism could be biblically replaced without any lose of God in all His love, divinity, power, and presence. After years of research and investigation (I've indexed many of these under topical discussions to the right) I found that I could. And when preceding forward then discovered Relational Process Thought (I stress "relational" because without this aspect Process Thought itself can be dry and barren).

Which brings us back to the subject of God's divine impassibility vs His passibility. I would submit that God is both:

God is Other than we are as relational beings but He is primarily Relational in the fullness of His being. To say it another way, God is wholly relational at all times and in His Otherness is also found to be fully relational. This retains the mystery of God while keeping to the Personhood of the Tri-une God at all times.

If we were to draw a circle of the universe and place all creation within that circle we could then draw another larger circle encompassing the creation-circle. This second, larger circle is the God of creation who exists both within our creation-circle and outside of it. This illustration allows God His "Otherness" if you will. But I would also like to think of the God-circle as being more than just itself. In truth, God is not only found "within" His God-circle but in all the empty space "outside" of the God-circle. This then would capture the idea behind classical theism while including the idea of panentheism as illustrated below which is central to the idea of Process Theology.

And this is the God we worship. A God "Who"! (not "What"!) is Truth, and Light, and Beauty. Who loves us, spawned us, is WITH us, and saves us. He is God for the very reason that He is. Whose Being gives all of creation its purpose and meaning driven by His Divine will to re-center all back to Himself in fullness through free will allegiance (the idea of a submitting partnership between both the Divine and the Human, if you well).

This is the process of redemption. It is a divine process which refuses to let go of creation until it is fully and completely united within the fellowship of the Godhead even as that fellowship is partially displayed now in the time, place, and loci of our very lives when we seek God and allow Him His gracious rule in our lives.

R.E. Slater

September 5, 2017

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A Relational God -- Thomas Jay Oord 

September 5, 2017

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Affirming a Relational God

I'm find puzzling those who think God is impassible in all respects. By "impassible," I mean the idea that God is not affected by give-and-receive relations with us.

As I read Scripture and think about the logic of love, it seems obvious that God is passible/relational. I don't think all aspects of God are affected by creatures. For instance, I think God's eternal nature is unaffected and immutable. Affirming an unchanging and impassible nature seems important if we are to say God's love is steadfast.

But I don't understand why some are reluctant to say God is relational in ANY respect. The biblical witness strongly suggests otherwise. We creatures influence our Creator.

I find it most helpful to say God is impassible in some ways and passible in others. To do this, I distinguish between God's timeless nature and God's time-full experience. God's nature is impassible and immutable. But God's moment-by-moment experiential life is passible and relational.

I'm nearly finished writing an essay affirming "strong divine passibility." As I use the phrase, it means that a necessary aspect of God is everlastingly passible.

My essay will appear in a "4 Views" book on divine impassibility. If you've got any advice for me as I complete my essay, let me know asap.

I'm attaching a few links to recent blog essays on God's relationality. I'd love to hear your thoughts on them too!

Tom

Recent Blog Essay: "God IS Relational"

Recent Blog Essay: "What does 'God is Relational' Mean?"

Recent Blog Essay: "The Jesus Argument for a Relational God"

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New Book Coming Out this Month:

Theologians and Philosophers Using Social Media: Advice, Tips, and Testimonials

I've been working on a major book project that includes more than 90 theologians, philosophers, biblical scholars, and religious leaders. Each essayist describes how they use social media and technology. The book is big: 460 pages!

This is the kind of resource just about everyone will want, because it provides tips and advice. It's more of a practical "how to" book than a theoretical "here's why" book. Some of the most influential scholars and leaders write essays, along with some rising stars.

The book is published by SacraSage Press and will be available in print and as an ebook. Look for Theologians and Philosophers Using Social Media by mid September on Amazon and other booksellers.

- Tom

Definitions of Continental Philosophy

By Movement / School > Modern > Continental Philosophy

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").

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Continental philosophy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

1     The term

2     History

3     Recent Anglo-American developments

4     Significant works

5     See also

6     Notes

7     References

8     External links

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.

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.

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

·        A Cyborg Manifesto

·        After Theory

·        A Theory of Feelings

·        A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

·        Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

·        Being and Event

·        Being and Nothingness

·        Being and Time

·        Blindness and Insight

·        Dialectic of Enlightenment

·        Difference and Repetition

·        Du mode d'existence des objets techniques

·        Eclipse of Reason

·        Eros and Civilization

·        Finite Being and Eternal Being

·        Gender Trouble

·        Madness and Civilization

·        Minima Moralia

·        Mythologies

·        Negative Dialectics

·        History and Class Consciousness

·        Homo Sacer

·        I and Thou

·        Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

·        Illuminations

·        Logical Investigations

·        One-Dimensional Man

·        Oneself as Another

·        Of Grammatology

·        Prison Notebooks

·        Phenomenology of Perception

·        The Phenomenology of Spirit

·        Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

·        Reading Capital

·        Simulacra and Simulation

·        Society of the Spectacle

·        Technics and Time

·        The History of Sexuality

·        The Human Condition

·        The Myth of Sisyphus

·        The Order of Things

·        The Poetics of Space

·        The Postmodern Condition

·        The Second Sex

·        The Third Body

·        Time and Narrative

·        Totality and Infinity

·        Truth and Method

·        Writing and Difference


See also

·        Existential Thomism

·        Index of continental philosophy articles

·        Non-philosophy

·        Speculative realism

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.

8.      Critchley 2001, p. 64.

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

24.  Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

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.

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Continental philosophy

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/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

1     General Characteristics

2     History

3     The Term

4     Continental philosophy in English speaking countries: recent developments

5     See also

6     Notes

7     References

8     External links

9     Credits

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

Analytic philosophy

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.

↑ Critchley, 57
↑ Critchley, 64.

↑ 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

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