Continental Philosophy and Chickening Out: A Reply to Simon Glendinning

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Notes

1 This is indebted to Simon Glendinning for his book, to Jon Roffe, David Morris, and James Chase for repeated conversations around these themes, and to the Australian Research Council for providing funding support for the broader project of which this is a part, which includes a forthcoming co‐authored monograph with James Chase, Analytic Versus Continental? (Acumen).

2 Some of the key articles include: Hans‐Johann Glock, ‘Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?’, Metaphilosophy 35 (4) (2004); Todd May, ‘On the Very Idea of Continental (or for that Matter Anglo‐American) Philosophy’, Metaphilosophy 33 (4) (2002); Alain Badiou, ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, New Left Review 35 (2005); Richard Campbell, ‘The Covert Metaphysics of the Clash Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9 (2) (2001), pp. 341–59; Stephen Buckle, ‘Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy: The Campbell Thesis Revisited’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 12 (1) (2004), pp. 111–50; Graham Priest, ‘Where is Philosophy at the Start of the Twenty‐First Century?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103 (2003), pp. 85–99; Tom Rockmore, ‘On the Structure of Twentieth Century Philosophy’, Metaphilosophy, 35 (4) (2004), pp. 466–78; M. Dascal, ‘How Rational Can a Polemic Across the Analytic–Continental Divide Be?’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 9 (3) (2001), pp. 319–39; David Cooper, ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994), pp. 1–18; Pascal Engel, ‘Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Norms’, Monist 82 (2) (1999), pp. 218–34; Neil Levy, ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences’, Metaphilosophy 34 (3) (2003), pp. 285–304. There have been a few books devoted to addressing related themes, including Bruce Wiltshire’s Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), C. J. Prado’s A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Humanity Books, 2003), Barry Smith’s European Philosophy and the Academy (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1994), Michael Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2003), Hill and Rosado’s Husserl or Frege? Meaning, Objectivity and Mathematics (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2003), Prado’s Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford, 2000). There are also some important comparative essays on Gilbert Harman and David Lewis in James Williams’s The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze (Manchester: Clinamen, 2005). Much of Richard Rorty and Hubert Dreyfus’s work is also important in this regard.

3 See B. Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy’, in Prado, A House Divided, pp. 63–104.

4 In Europe, of course, the term ‘continental philosophy’ has generally not been accepted and is sometimes greeted with incredulity, although it should be noted that it is regularly deployed by Pascal Engel and other analytic philosophers in France (who remain a minority) to differentiate their work from that of their compatriots.

5 I am thinking of Rawls’s discussions regarding ‘overlapping consensus’ in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 134.

6 N. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1981).

7 L. Embree, ‘Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 11 (2) (2003), pp. 177–90.

8 One might also see the formative aspects of this distinction in the divergent receptions of Kant, one of which emphasized his status as pro‐science and debunker of other claims to knowledge, the other of which focuses on his larger philosophical and aesthetic enterprise and emphasizes his own ‘temporal turn’ – which Heidegger suggests is the turning point in modern philosophy. We might also consider the significant differences between what we have come to call British empiricism and continental rationalism – thanks to David Morris and Robert Sinnerbrink for these observations. For me, though, all of these latent historical forces somehow calcified around the start of the twentieth century to fortify the divide in a way that had not previously obtained, perhaps partly because of an increasing move towards academic specialization in modern universities.

9 B. Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’ (1914), in Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 8, ed. J. G. Slater (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 42.

10 On their view, Husserl remained committed to a prioritization of a metaphysical present, of a ‘now’ moment, that their work sought to overcome.

11 See Negri’s own comments on this relation in Time for Revolution, trans. M. Mandrini (London: Continuum, 2005).

12 These are Levinas’s terms from Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

13 S. Haddad, ‘Inheriting Democracy to Come’, Theory and Event, 8 (1) (2005).

14 D. Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 22.

15 Williams, The Tranoversal Thought, p. 114.

16 See A. Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drives (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005) and K. Faulkner, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).

17 B. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, trans. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and E. Alliez, Capital Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

18 To this I must plead guilty. To give merely one example, Merleau‐Ponty objects that Sartre’s philosophy is haunted by the spectre of the instant, and he argues that one need not take the Bergsonian pill of radically separating time and space and privileging the former.

19 In this respect, see: T. Button, ‘There’s no Time like the Present’, Analysis, 66 (April 2006), pp. 130–5; N. McKinnon, ‘Presentism and Consciousness’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81 (4) (2003), pp. 305–23; and J. Grupp, ‘The Impossibility of Temporal Relations Between Non‐Identical Times: New Arguments for Presentism’, Disputatio, 11 (18) (May 2005), pp. 91–125.

20 An interesting case in point would be Huw Price’s attempts in Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) to re‐establish an Archimedean point for knowledge outside the relativism that seems to be a consequence of the special theory of relativity and our various anthropocentric biases, most particularly the fact that our philosophizing and thinking about time is greatly affected by our own finite status as creatures in time. While Price might hence seem to agree with Heidegger, it is significant that he adopts the reverse procedure and attempts to dispel rather than dwell on this paradoxical temporal structure by reinstating an objective atemporality, a view from ‘nowhen’.

21 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 164–6.

22 This ‘alliance’ gravitates around a renewed Kantianism and has figures like Habermas, Gadamer, Brandom, and other pragmatists involved, and is concerned with communicative ethics. See E. Alliez, ‘Questionnaire on Deleuze’, trans. P. Goodchild and N. Millett, Theory, Culture and Society, 14(2) (1997), p. 82.

23 Jim O’Shea has suggested to me that Wilfrid Sellars may be one such case, given his lifelong attempts to reconcile a Kantian, experiential conception of time with the scientific image of time, and the manner in which his challenges to ‘the myth of the given’ involved a critique of both ‘common sense’ and ‘presentism’.