Commentary on the Ends of Thought Entry "Why is Continental Philosophy So Bad?""

I have responded to comments over at the Ends of Thought blog. I like Roman a lot. He's been a good interlocutor in the past, and with that said, I respectfully think he tells a very oversimplified story about Continental philosophy. I argue for a principle of charity that is hermeneutic in nature since so many of the ways of the writing of Continental philosophy is tied to particular pedagogic aims. It is unfair to say that Continental philosophy is all bad, especially how it is framed. That's just a one-sided engagement that would never honestly see what is at work in a particular text. How about some examples?

Caputo writes texts that deconstruct themselves or Levinas avoiding epistemic frameworks altogether in order to describe how such a view would "reduce the other to the same." Irigaray uses language to avoid the gendered speech of Romance languages and alludes to the symbolism and metaphor of things like angels and mucous to talk about something that has never existed before (a wholly developed living subjectivity of women liberated from power structures). Could analytics buy into Irigaray's use of figurative expression, Levinas' avoidance of all Western discourses that subsume difference into the same, or Caputo's heuristic deconstructionistic style? There's a point sometimes to the ambiguity. Or my particular favorite, Heidegger's move to change our understanding of language to a form of poetics. These are all points worthy of our consideration as philosophers. We need not stray away from Heidegger, Irigaray, Levinas or Caputo to see if they have anything to say. It's about time that analytic philosophers learned to read hermeneutically, not the other way around. 

The example of Irigaray is interesting. The New APPS blog did not comment on Margaret Whitford's contributions to philosophy but only listed her as doing work on Irigaray. Irigaray is an awesome styled thinker. As I noted earlier, her writing is Nietzschean and provocative in its own way. It would never sate the appetite of your typical analytic, however, nor the basis of her writings stemming from Lacan. It would be as dismissed as easily as women have been in this profession. It is one thing to shore up and be honest about one's personal biases and taste. It is another to think that there is no redeeming value in the strategies of engagement some Continental writers have taken up.

Leiterite Hysteria and the Protevi Journal Experiment

John Protevi works on Deleuze. He's good, and often goes to SPEP. He corresponds with "analytics" like this New APPS thread. The thread is started out as an empirical attempt to see where Continental thinkers have been covered in "mainstream" journals. So far, the disparity hasn't really been commented on or explained.

There has been a point of impatience from more mainstream philosophers (to call them analytic philosophers now might be to belabor the point) that Continental philosophy has not been victimized. An anonymous poster by the name of Bizarre wrote this full length comment on Lance's "Queering the Analytic/Continental Distinction" thread.

I find sk's and Shelley Tremain's interpretation of the tenor of the discussion here rather tendentious. Being a party-line continental is not in itself at all like being a woman in philosophy, or a gay person in philosophy, or a person of colour in philosophy, or a disabled person in philosophy. For any criticism of party-line continentals to "sound like blaming the victim" it would have to be plausible that they are in any reasonable sense victims qua party-line continentals. But they are not. There is a crowd whose egos are apparently in such need of Brian Leiter's approbation that they will raise all hell if they don't get it (cf. Michael Fray, who writes on another blog "I take special offense at [Leiter's view of SPEP departments] because I am studying at one of the programs Leiter impugns in that post. I have been absolutely infuriated ever since. It is TOTALLY untrue that my professors are 'inferior' or that I am receiving sub-par training; Leiter should be ashamed of himself for saying such things."). But having Leiter (or any other philosopher) think you are an intellectual mediocrity because of the kind of work you do (as opposed to because you are a woman, or gay, or a person of colour, or disabled) is not in and of itself being oppressed. Party-line continentals have for a while now had a much broader influence across the humanities than party-line analytics (and some of their defenders readily admit as much; cf. John Drabinski complaining how "far behind" the other humanities philosophy supposedly is). This overall intellectual climate makes cries of continental oppression sound rather hollow. Someone uncharitable might even compare the situation to astrologers complaining about not being respected in astronomy departments - never mind how many millions of dollars more are globally spent each year on astrological services and merchandise than on astronomical research.

Likewise, it would be cavalier to dismiss party-line continentals' facing the prospect of being "out of a job" if what was being discussed was in fact unemployment simpliciter, with all the difficulties it brings ("visiting the food-bank (again), making decisions whose alternatives are paying rent or purchasing a much-needed prescription drug, going on welfare, eating a steady diet of boiled potatoes, becoming a sex worker, committing suicide"). But it is not. Rather, the discussion merely touched upon the fact that they may not be able to get a job in philosophy departments ranked (highly) in the PGR. And while it's reasonable to think that everyone is entitled to gainful and non-dehumanising employment, it's surely not reasonable to think that everyone is entitled to being a philosophy professor (much less a philosophy professor in some select group of departments).

The academic job market is abysmal for everyone. Many departments train many more PhDs than there are available jobs. This is not limited to philosophy, either, as we all know. One of the roles the PGR (or any alternative) has to play is to give prospective graduate students some sense of how professionally risky it is to undertake a particular course of study (of course, mentors have a much larger responsibility to do this). Ideally, all philosophy students would be aware of their almost universally dismal academic job prospects. But this is all orthogonal to the continental/analytic divide and what we ought to think of it. Mark Lance, and Brian Leiter, and Rebecca Kukla, and Lee Braver, and some others in this thread, have made a number of useful suggestions as to how the divide should be understood and overcome. All of these suggestions centrally depend on the intellectual merits of pluralism, and intellectual demerits of anti-pluralism. None depend on the idea that party-line continentals are somehow victimised in the profession

I do not think anyone would say that systemic discrimination against sexual orientation or race is analogous to the often felt boundary policing on the part of Party-Line Analytics against the internal achievements of Continental philosophy. Again, boundary policing is not the same as discrimination, but it is a form of powerplay. In my own experience, I've seen it happen firsthand and it's embarrassing. At a national conference, I've heard a famous analytic metaphysician once claim that one avoids Foucault as a matter of "intellectual hygiene." I once heard an up and coming Descartes historian laugh off Continental philosophy as he proceeded down the hallway. At the University of British Columbia, it is so bad that an UNDERGROUND group of students met in secret to read Continental authors. I have no knowledge if they continue to meet. I met one of them in Point Grey at a cafe. The group member was so happy to know that I was leaving SFU to study Husserl. Somehow, this confirmed they were not crazy.

The success of Continental philosophy in the humanities is an indication to them that they have not been victims of intellectual censorship from more analytic heavy weights. However, the success of a worldview or thinker to have an effect on other topics not covered by "mainstream" philosophy is logically independent as to whether or not mainstream philosophy has been discriminatory to Continental philosophy. When you consider that analytic philosophy has strictly confined itself to a narrow focus on matters largely epistemic, then what goes on outside of their attention is completely unknown to them. Continentals did have a large impact on more humanistic and historically-centered disciplines, but analytic philosophy could have never known that it did have this effect all the while discriminating against this type of "other."

Of course, it is healthy for this silly distinction to go away. Yet, it has to go away for the right type of reasons, as I've said. There must be equal respect and command of hermeneutic attention to central Continental thinkers in a way that engages "Continental" philosophy for what it says in its own way. This means an enlargement of philosophy that accepts in principle that art, literary works and creative expression can also be ways to share ideas inasmuch as logical dialectic. Given this, I very much sympathize with Babette Babich's heated comment from the same thread above.

Analytic philosophy remains and will always remain closed to ‘continental philosophy’ of any but the ‘analyticized’ kind (i.e., the kind of continental philosophy that eliminates all the continental bits like style and like authors referred to in favor of analytic bits).

The reason for denying the distinction between the two, for arguing that such distinctions should be abolished, is the logical consequence of this closed approach. Thus one speaks of “philosophy” just philosophy – which is coincidentally the method of choice in analytic philosophy to exclude or banish whatever one does not wish to engage, one argues that the refused is simply not doing philosophy.

Q. E. D.

She's right. I hate to say it. In my short experience (10 years of schooling, or half a decade between studying analytic and Continental philosophy), it is never that analytics were interested in collaboration or integration with the exception of the Davidson / Gadamer correspondence about the Philebus. It has always been from those, like myself in question, that see merits in being philosophically ambidextrous.

However, it is hard to accept that philosophical ambidexterity will result any time soon. If typical Party-Line analytics continually insist that philosophical analysis consists in providing causal explanations, and these explanations must be made consistent with science, even if the consistency is speculative on the basis of science, then those philosophers have a different ideas altogether of what philosophy is from someone like me. I agree with Gadamer or Heidegger that philosophy is about the hermeneutic engagement with the various strands of philosophical history that enable us to talk to each other. I won't spell out what this means right now, but these are two very different and incompatible metaphilosophical and methodological commitments. Someone needs to analyze these moments of methodological differences before pluralistic analytics want to dissolve "Continental philosophy" and engage it analytically. This is easier said than done.

Even I am at odds within my own soul on this point. When I do "ethics", I am attempting to describe moral reality, arrive at a non-foundational account of morality, while trying to eschew charges of relativism. I stand firmly against consequentialist approaches and find Bernard William's assessment of utilitarianism persuasive. When I do this, I am certainly not at all consistent with the previous claim of favoring the hermeneutic style of reflection I often engage in. Then again, philosophy requires an encounter with cognitive dissonance. It is about shaking the ground of one's soul to enter the depths. It's not easy. I'm still trying to figure this all out, and probably won't for a while. Then again, that's the whole point. Part of the solution might rest in the following article:

Glendinning, Simon (2010) Argument all the way down: the demanding discipline of non-argumento-centric modes of philosophy. In: Reynolds, J. and Chase, J. and Williams, J., (eds.) Postanalytic and metacontinental crossing philosophical divides. Continuum, London, UK, pp. 71-84

Again, engaging Continental philosophy means at least understanding why it is that analytics did not engage with it in the first place and I haven't really heard any honest explanations on that point. Undoubtedly, this will be a principle explanation as to why Continental thinkers haven't been taken up in "mainstream" journals.

I wonder what the consensus will be empirically, yet I dare not remind everyone on Protevi's thread that interpretation of empirical results is just another form of hermeneutics.

Mark Lance's "Queering" the Analytic/Continental Divide

As pointed out by N.J. Jun on a previous thread, Mark Lance's thread is quite good. It suggests the divide is more damaging to the concept of rankings in general. I do have reservations, however, about the comment that someone just trained in, say, phenomenology has received bad training. Lance assumes a lot about an ideal world in which it is only the analytic and Continental philosophies that require synthesis.

When approached by someone else on the thread about various other regional and historical philosophies, there is an unfriendly tone.

I should just say that I've been living in this distinction for a while and would welcome its dissolution. However, it has to be dissolved for the right reasons over and against simply feigning tolerance for what has been around for a long time. These analytics have been fighting battles against Continentals for a great while. There is a long line of conflict stretching back to when Ryle reviewed Being and Time. This is to say nothing of the fact that I don't even know about LGBT philosophy, Latin-American political thought or Native-American philosophy, nor will I likely know more about them any time soon. I've been forced to specialize and read a lot about phenomenology and ethics. The dissertation will take time, and when applying for jobs all that time and research goes into specializing even more. I don't have the time to go off and read about an environmental ethics based off some Native-American conception of nature. I wouldn't know if I could learn from it one way or the other---that's the point! That's why the best inference suggests that we ought to be pluralistic.

We cannot know for certain where we can learn from, and hopefully we can find some common language to cross the threshold of why I ought to learn from this outside tradition... to the point that it is no longer even called an "outside" tradition. Thus, the openness of experience and to the world in general must be maintained for reasons above and beyond thinking that we have a sense of what could be "good philosophy" prior to its articulation. I will someday form a hiring committee and I will look for the philosopher of biology capable of teaching social/political and has an interest in medieval thought. I will write the job ad as wide as possible to catch someone that might somehow fit everything the search committee is looking for. I just hope that Kukla and Lance might see that someday.

Another Leiter Travesty

Leiter has remarkably come to the defense of a hack job book on Heidegger by Carlin Romano indirectly. See the post here.

But that does stop his rumination about Heidegger scholars, what I take it to be meant by cult:

There is also something interesting to be written about the ways in which the Heidegger cult and its temporal and cultural kin, the Strauss cult, have operated in similar, quasi-fascistic, "in group" vs. "out group" ways: esoteric terminology, hostility towards dialectic engagement, worship of the master, and so on.

Heidegger doesn't engage in dialectical argument because for him, the purpose of philosophy is to describe human facticity. He is teasing out phenomenological descriptions of human existence. Maybe that is, in itself, an argument---yet in so doing, philosophy is not a description of some problem abstracted from history. It occurs within an ontotheology. In this way, it is resistant to the very positivism that carries Leiter's naturalistic Nietzsche (of course, I would argue something like that someday)! This is not some weird obscurantism if people were honestly going to give him an honest reading, know the background of the philosophy that gives birth to Heidegger, i.e. Husserl, know his contemporaries like Natorp, the background of Dilthey, and see him as completing (by Heidegger's self-estimation) the shortcoming of Husserl's phenomenology. When you know all of that, Heidegger is up to something whether or not one agrees with its status in the history of phenomenology, or philosophy at large.

Moreover, understanding the context of Heideggerian phenomenology in its beginning allows one to encounter why Heidegger moves to poetry. In fact, the language Heidegger adopts is provocative; it has a purpose beyond the lens put to language in any analytic framework. But again, one would have to understand the under-currents of Rilke, Holderlin, Heidegger's rejection of some central themes of the metaphysics of presence and the attempt to implement phenomenology as reasons for why Heidegger requires/uses language the way he does.

The charitability of Leiter's lapse is as charitable as a Protestant Minister's characterizing Leiter's work on moral psychology and Nietzsche. Just because Heidegger and those influenced by his philosophy look like something from the outside doesn't mean they are that way. This is a separate issue from whether or not Continental philosophers and supporters of Heidegger in general have done a good job of talking to outsiders. However, the outsiders must be willing to listen, and one good way might be to honestly represent Continental philosophy schools that are marginalized. And, I might add, have great scholars in phenomenology working on Heidegger! But this problem is more complicated than just than the professional dimension.

Leiter also displays some ignorance of the status of this debate. Consider the following,

"Faye's leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden ("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit." OK, so how do these "reactionary ideas" about exaltation of "the state and the Volk" figure in the main themes of Being and Time? I have no idea...

Since Leiter finds the argument from one phrase of Romano on Faye somewhat "interesting", let's look at the above. First, this theme has already been taken up by a number of skeptics and critics. The big book, Mr. Leiter is Victor Farias' Heidegger and Nazism. So, now you have some "idea"; you're only about twenty years too late in your ignorance (It was published in 1987 by Temple University Press).

Really... Oh yes, he does Continental philosophy lady and gentleman. Lest we forget. Now, I know he is nice to me when he says, "The ideas that Heidegger's books should be banned and that anyone who studies Heidegger is a Nazi sympathizer are so ludicrously offensive as to defy belief." I take that as nice, and what he might mean by generous. But seriously, you have to listen to people, like myself, who engage in this stuff before characterizing us from the outside. At least, he goes to Thomson and Carman as good philosophers working on phenomenology. At least, we should respect him that far. Yet, the spirits of his comments are redolent of generosity cloud in the intolerance we Continental Philosophers (Aspiring or Established) find ourselves.

Ethics and the Tradition of Cultural Critique

This opposition between a timeless conceptual analysis in ethics of, say, common sense morality, and the Continental suspicion of mainstream culture overlap, I think. This overlap is another point of contact between roughly two figures that would not talk to each other, and as such, I want to at least offer an initial point of contact.

After having seen Butler in action in Bodies That Matter, one might regard her analysis as calling into question mainstream cultural opinions, especially about how it is that we acquire a sexed position in language. Her critique resembles the general propensity of Continental philosophers to question culture, and offer critique. In some ways, Heidegger reading back the question of Being into our culture and finding no ability to express this question (to the point that even Carnap becomes a symptom of the question's inexpressibility) is a symptom of our culture. In Husserl, the natural attitude conceals over the implicit consciousness that structures our world. We forget that intentionality is there, and take it for granted. In all these ways, there is a suspicion of our cultural world. So, what I am getting at is exactly this: construing philosophy as a form of cultural critique would inform a general suspicion that can also be suspicious of certain trends within philosophy that exemplify a targeted cultural problematic. As such, some philosophical questions in the Analytic tradition presuppose what some Continentals would reject as ridiculous unsubstantiated assumptions.

Now, take this move of cultural critique to someone like Sidgwick and his ruminations about the possibility of ethics. Sidgwick is answering the question why do we find common-sense morality so plausible. For me, this may assume a hegemony of one's culture, upbringing or Zeitgeist of the age that determines why Sidgwick is answering this question. Before we answer this, let's at least be clear what Sidgwick might think he is doing. First, Sidgwick is not saying that common sense morality is independently valid. Clearly, he thinks that common sense morality offers us action-guidance, but it must do so only because a more fundamental principle undergirds its possibility for action-guidance. For him, it is the utilitarian principle.

There is a backdoor to this line as well. Sidgwick reconciles an intuitionist epistemology with the utilitarian principle. In this way, Sidgwick opens himself up to the charge that all intuitionists face, namely, that one's intuitions are simply echoed historical socializations. Thus, his classical four criteria for an intuition to be true is just a deeper problematic of our age, one in which elevates the subject beyond the historical conditions under which the subject is realized (as Foucault explains very well in applying a Nietzschean geneaology to numerous problematics). This might also be a way of reading historicity back into another author that offers another anti-historic analysis of right and wrong. You might notice, dear reader, I have been thinking of this theme of history as it relates to the possibility of ethics as of late.

Now, I'm not going to give content to Sidgwick or to any particular form of cultural critique. Instead, I am only suggesting an initial conceptual tension, one already realized at least on the side of the Continental tradition that sees historicity as a theme of human existence inseparable from the possibility of realizing an ethics (where ethics means the possibility of creating a theory that explains what I ought to do). Thus, the analytic move to offer a conceptual story is left at an impasse, yet that is not the only impasse here. Moreover, this move to account for historicity and seeing ethics as determined by cultural forces also confronts the possibility of some Continental authors that see their work in light of emancipation, such as maybe Critical Theorists or Marxists themselves. The Continentals seem required to explain why some normative emancipation is better than the cultural status-quo. Whatever the complaint may be, the normative force driving any emancipatory analysis requires moral justification. Moral justification would seem, then, be needed, and traditionally, I find only analytic ethics concerned solely with why I find certain actions, policies or events morally valuable. Thus, the Continentals at large are largely at an impasse too.

Where does this leave me? Well, I don't know. I don't have an answer of how to incorporate an appropriate understanding of historicity or cultural critique into ethics without transgressing the limit of one side of the Analytic/Continental divide. If I were to venture a guess, then incorporating historicity might involve (amongst other things), the habituation we find in Aristotle and hermeneutic problem of practical wisdom in general. In one sense, such a response will lose precision in action-guidance, though it is arguable whether or not content of action-guidance was ever a strong feature of moral theory anyway, and that action-guidance would be more sensitive to the framework of its historical origin. Thus, a return to the Nicomachean is in order at least if the beginning ruminations on my part can sketch a response to the concerns of both traditions in ethics.

On the Tension in Doing Philosophy

I have the practical wisdom to see that writing in a Continental style requires a close examination of the text, and the "argument" is interwoven with the attempt to come to grips with the text before me.

To come back, to return to the style of my literary love is hard. When you read my statement of research, I say that I look at Continental philosophers as those that offer insights into typical meta-ethical problems. I take from them like a robber in the night an insight, put it into a proposition to be argued for as it relates to my philosophizing as a description of the world. In this way, my robbery of a text transgresses against the careful details of figurative expression, symbolism, metaphor and historical horizon of these texts. Two opposite poles are at tension in my philosophizing: (1) where philosophy is systematically argued description of ahistorical problems and (2) that philosophy is a description of our lived-experience, our facticity, our situatedness in the context of our very historicity. If philosophy, according to many Continental authors, cannot be lived in concrete experience, then all the fancy moves of a deductive logically preserving language bear no fruit. They have no intellectual purchase.

In a way, my style borrows from an example known to many, Korsgaard. Korsgaard's Kant is not the historically and textually centered Kant. Far from it, her eoKantianism in ethics is like what I saw myself doing when I applied. Korsgaard borrows from the historical Kant for a descriptive project outside the aim of historically situating Kant. This is just the tension of the historian of philosophy qua philosopher AND the problem-solver qua philosopher. For myself, I wanted to use phenomenology, but in so doing, appropriation is like a heresy, a heresy where the aim transgresses the text to the point that I'm worse than Derrida. At least, Derrida tries to read the author against himself (whatever that means specifically); I'm, as I said, a robber. Borrowing with only the smallest intent to return!

This is not to say that learning these texts is outside my intention. In fact, just the opposite---I want to learn the movement of these texts. Any philosopher may know that outside philosophy departments, these texts of Continental philosophy inspire thousands. There is a dimension to which they have reached that analytics envy, and rightly so. Their ideas are infectious, bound to the very marrow of human experience in ways that scientiphiles loathe. It's just that I wanted to craft a philosophy that achieves two levels of adequacy. I call these two conditions of adequacy of any philosophical theory, influenced by my love of philosophy as an intertwining of the Continental and the Analytic perspectives. Consider the following two conditions of adequacy:

A) Phenomenologically a theory must make sense of our lived-experience, and no attempt can be made to subordinate the phenomenology to a naturalistic ontology.

B) Weak Naturalism sees all events, I claim, in terms of explanations (but not all events require causal explanation) and where it is appropriate elements of our human experience might have to look to the sciences for compatibility as long as A) is maintained as well.

In doing philosophy, I come up against the challenge of writing it well. In my discussions in the teaching seminar, I have begun to dig deep on the analytic perspective that philosophy is about conceptual clarity: clarity in writing reflects the level of clarity in one's thinking, as long as the equation between thought in the head and spoken language can be maintained. I feel this, I really do. However, I also see the merit in saying the goal of teaching philosophy is about the questions that stir one to take it, to awaken in students the philosophical core of their own inquiry. Perhaps, this is true only insofar as students are willing to work, yet the method of many Continentals seems rather to disturb the ground of students, to make them uncomfortable and shock them out of their absorption of the world. This again, I think, speaks to the difference in which Continentals write. Continentals write within the text many layers, many layers of subtle meaning -- shifting from clarity to the ambiguity -- , often exploiting the very ambiguity in their own language. For example, Luce Irigray exploits the French:

There is not, there will not be the moment of wonder of the wedding, an ecstasy that remains in-stant. ("Sexual Difference" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p 14).

Here's the clincher: The hyphenation of the normal word "instant" plays upon the notion of standing within oneself, its root meaning. Such a standing within oneself emphasizes the contrast with ecstasy, which is standing outside the self. The playing off these senses is crucial to the overall point she is making. Explaining it would take away from what I am doing here, but the point holds as far as writing in Continental philosophy holds. The root meanings of these words are approached as a medium in which understanding of sexual difference occurs. As such, the metaphors, figurative expressions and symbolism of our language invoke atypical manners of expressing how charged or loaded language is. Such conventions are appropriate to use and illustrate, especially for an author that sees her native French language as sexed.

The example of Irigaray brings up another salient point, one which I think is lost on the complaint as old as Heidegger and Carnap: the charge of obscurantism. This charge equally is a hyperbolic of two things. First, the fact is, we are reading Continental philosophers in translation and translating ourselves the distance of those authors and the text itself. In so doing, we keep to the same verbosity of our tradition not out of disrespect for clarity, but keeping the horizon in which these authors are writing in either the French of the German. Since so much hinges on that contextual understanding, we keep the history of their discourse in mind as a background in order to engage the very act of the translated/translating text.

Such historic motivations fall on deaf ears. My analytic gut tells me to logically preserve the meaning and seek out the problem they are addressing. There must be some abstraction, some sense to which Foucault or Heidegger are writing. A successful implementation of philosophy would find that problem, dissolve it of its ambiguity and place it in its very clarity for all to see. However, in doing that, I do violence to Continental philosophy wherein my biases for clarity prevent accessibility in the very way I ought to proceed. If the essence of language is logic, then I can see myself very much in this tradition seeing all philosophy as only the current set of problems for all to see and solve by rigor, consistency and dialectic exchange of arguments.

Likewise, the inverse is equally true. My Continental gut tells me to not logically preserve meaning. Yet, I do violence against the Continental side--that's what motivated this initial explanation of what I mean by the "tension in doing philosophy." I do violence in the very way that one of the introductions to Heidegger's Kant Book. It is the violence of interpretation which robs the context of the Continental philosopher. Violence in this case is robbing the text, paying no heed to the with-textness illustrated by the Latin root of "context." I merely seek to describe some audacious claim, inspired as if a muse had instructed my stealing away from history and context. A grave robber of ideas?

However, philosophy is not only about the historical situation in which I find myself but also describing the world in my encounter with it. On this, I feel I will always be in tension. So I ask the larger world, can the tension between both conceptions of philosophy I offer as well as the two levels of adequacy of any philosophical theory hold? Can they even commingle? And what does that say about my reflections in writing and teaching philosophy at large?

Continental/Analytic Divide

Paul Patton's lovely talk about Continental philosophy is stirring and inspirational. It's absolutely lovely and correct--understanding CP as an Anglophonic projection! His thoughts connect themes of Continental philosophy to application of immediate insight to one's concrete world (especially thematic reflections on Australia). Among these I liked: The Question of the Other in Derrida, Levinas and maybe Arendt as real themes in Australia's colonial past. Foucault's analysis of our present with the modes of past thought---philosophy as a mode of reflection on the present and its consequence for Australian law.

The Problem of the Lifeworld's Legitimacy as a Philosophical Problem

I am interested in the origins of phenomenology as a way into explicating irreducible structures of our social and historical experience, what we might call the field of the lifeworld. The tendency of the Neo-Kantians to link science with Kant was, as far as I can tell, a similar situation with contemporary philosophy today. Analytically-trained naturalists are skeptical of a philosophy that seeks to explain all fields of experience. What counts as worth talking about is only those categories supported by the natural sciences, or in a way, at least plausible within a narrow scientifically informed window of plausible speculation. In their view, science should not seek to integrate in explanation of our experience sources of artistic, cultural or historical domains. These features are more for the phenomenologist that accepts these features of human existence as irreducible in the sense that the analytically-trained naturalist could not provide a suitable space for them in the first place. We just tend to ignore this refusal to talk. Thus, there is a disagreement between whether or not to treat irreducible features of human existence as real. Instead, our philosophy should only be engaged with what the sciences directly or indirectly support as real.

More specific to the German situation was the relationship of science to culture. To explain this relationship, it is important to first mention something of the term for science since it is peculiar to the German language. The word for 'science' is Wissenschaft. Wissenshaft includes both the natural sciences and humanities under its rubric. Thus, to strive for unity in science in general is to explain how physics or history may relate to each other. This striving-for unity engages in a dialogue with how science relates to culture at large. As far as I can tell, a philosopher that wants to integrate cultural life into science would be forced to equate forms of culture, like art, with the value of science. However, since much of ontology for the analytically-trained naturalist drives the machine of what we should even begin to philosophize about, I wonder if the Divide between Analtyic/Continental should be recast as a problem of legitimacy of the lifeworld.

I find this problematic attractive since I entertain the thought that objects of culture like historical works, literature and art contribute and express insights about humanity. To consider them sources of knowledge would mean that analytic philosophers would have to abandon the professional insight that we can only talk about things that science can support and that are clearly expressed in logical argumentation. We would have to embrace other forms of communicating insights about the human condition in ways other than logical argumentation. For me, this makes legitimate more literary or poetic styles of communicating even philosophical ideas.

Maverick Philosopher's Distortion of Continental Verbage

Some analytically-minded philosophers continually mock Continentals for the manner they compose, write or explore an issue. Some CPers are more literary than substantial, as the saying goes. The rhetorical flourish is mocked for obscuring clarity and concealing the argument within. This is an old strategy, probably Carnapian in some weird tangential ways. I digress. For the purpose of this entry, let's take a look at the passage Maverick Philosopher looks at from Paul Tillich, the Christian existentialist theologian. Maverick cites:

Atheism can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. (Dynamics of Faith; quoted from White, Eternal Quest, p. 94)

Before, I forget. This is the blog entry I am taking issue with.

The example is supposed to be from someone highly influenced by Heidegger, but not a philosopher per se. Pau Tillich was a theologian. We'll let that slide (I could be a "stickler" for that one) since many European thinkers crossed disciplinary boundaries. Merleau-Ponty taught child psychology, and Husserl was a mathematician originally.

Now, Maverick takes this passage out of the text, and I want to discuss the second point he makes at the end. Maverick tries to summarize puts Tillich is making. He introduces the following summary of the argument:

1. God =df one’s ultimate concern.
2. To deny God is to deny that God is one’s ultimate concern.
3. To deny that God is one’s ultimate concern is to affirm one’s ultimate concern.
Therefore
4. To deny God is to affirm one’s ultimate concern.
Therefore
5. To deny God is to affirm God.

The problem with this argument is the initial assumption, (1). God cannot possibly be identified with whatever is one’s ultimate concern, since this is different for different people. God is not a role occupiable by different things for different people, but an individual. Once this is clearly seen, it will also be clearly seen why atheism cannot be defined as the attempt to remove any ultimate concern. Atheism is not the denial of ultimate concern but the denial that a certain being is a possible object of one’s ultimate concern. The fact that ultimate concern cannot be removed since everyone has one does nothing to show that God’s existence cannot be denied (Maverick Philosopher blog entry).

My concern is that such re-positioning of Tillich's point might distort what he is doing, and the context he's writing in. Since he is a theologian, he is most likely not concerned about the different ultimate concerns others might have. Theologians have a particular way of ignoring that one.

Secondly, I wonder if Heideggerian influences are abound here, especially with making God is not an individual being, but something we relate to (or in Heideggerian language the object of our comportment). Heidegger looks to analyze and describe the practical activity of how we relate concretely to the world. Now, defining God as one's ultimate concern would seem to fit the Heideggerian motif. However, such context is displaced when you extract passages with no context and judge them on their intellectual merit alone. I'm only suggesting this as one possible way why God is seen as one's ultimate concern, and one of the many possible dangers to posts like this.

Now, it should be clear: I'M NOT SAYING I KNOW WHAT TILLICH IS DOING (The floor is open to anyone who could amend the observations herein). There's just a range of hermeneutic concerns not addressed by reproducing the argument from the passage formally---meaning, "God cannot possibly be identified with whatever is one’s ultimate concern, since this is different for different people" might be a distortion. Following Heidegger, we have a way to say that there might be reasons why Tillich sees God as "someone's ultimate concern" since we're analyzing subjectivity phenomenologically. To know that, however, would require a more detailed and nuanced discussion of the text in question. In other words, I would think that only a very charitable reproduction could succeed since the charity would extend to knowing exactly the context and the history of the particular text in question.

Any suggestions?

Words, Reference and Being

A couple of days ago, I sat with a prestigious philosopher of language. He claimed that Heidegger was a fraud. The substantive claim revolved around Heidegger's fixation on the obscurity of Being, and dislike for science (amazingly enough the reasons for disfavor weren't concerned with the politics of the man!). Thus, we can see this charge as amounting to both a claim about Heidegger's ambiguous word-usage and uncritical rejection of science. In this post, I want to dismiss these as mere hand-waving. There is, indeed, a purpose to the language use, and points made about science and technology. I'll speak to each point in turn first starting with the claim of language.

Ambiguous word usage is sometimes called the charge of obscurantism. Commonly, this charge is made also against Derrida and post-structuralist thinkers as well. In Heidegger, the language use reflects the methodological commitment of Heideggerian phenomenology. Legitimating this project involves several things that should be noted about the project itself. Good criticisms only come from charitable understanding. First, Heidegger regards philosophy as uncovering the implicit structures of our practical everyday being-in-the-world, which means that philosophy is directed at describing the concrete facticity of human existence, not fundamental inquiries of a more conceptual nature. In this way, Heidegger intends to turn philosophy inside-out. It no longer concerns the tripartite Kantian division of logic, metaphysics and ethics. Instead, philosophy works not from the outside looking at problems in the previous areas, but exposes from within those relations that are taken for granted in our everydayness. In this way, Heideggerian phenomenology looks to uproot common associations in our experience of being-in-the-world.

Secondly, the concern with Being is a philosophical problem abandoned in the practice of philosophy, and Heidegger needed to develop a way of retrieving and uncovering this old problem that's no longer talked about in a more original way. As such, he chose to pursue it through the lens of phenomenology which seeks to describe things as they reveal themselves. Phenomenology amounts to describing the world as it is lived and experienced through and through. Hence, the language is in the service of looking at a phenomena long since avoided in philosophy to begin with. We can pay attention to things like how relate to our own mortality or the inauthentic modes of our decisions. The upshot of thematizing things of our everydayness means philosophy has more to dealing with our actual existence than dealing with problems abstracted from the way we encounter the world (as Kant would have philosophy divided into logic, metaphysics and ethics). This also means the language must reflect those lived experience structures now coming under the attention of phenomenological description. Indeed, some creativity is needed in developing a language that can render the problem of Being in a way we can answer the question through phenomenology.

Now, the common move is to suggest that Heidegger doesn't mean anything by observing that the meaning of his terms are obscure. Sure people talk about authenticity or being-towards-death, but does that talk pick out anything really real in the world? Well, this attitude starts from several observations. Let's get the first one out of the way. First, the problem with such general skepticism coming from analytics is that reading a German thinker in translation, and judging them by the translation is severely misplaced. However, let's move beyond that one and straight to the heart of the matter. Heidegger is hard to understand. Yet, the implicit strategy of the skeptic is to mistrust Heidegger since the only true way we can speak about the world is somehow informed by the sciences (I say somehow informed since I want to leave a lot of room for disagreement amongst naturalists). However, it cannot be that the sciences are all that is true. Instead, what needs argued is a different but just as reliable way of knowing, namely, showing that the humanities can succeed in ways that the sciences cannot. Maintaining the sciences and humanities as distinctly different allows for us to speak about things that the humanities speak about (legitimating the literary side of things is one positive contribution that underscores much of Gadamer's project). In the same way, this also is Husserl's point about giving priority to the phenomenological viewpoint as a realm onto itself.

On the next move, Heidegger grew suspicious of science and the norms that constitute its possibility. The best articulation of the connection between his philosophy of technology and science comes from Iain Thomson (Understanding Technology Ontotheologically, or: The Danger and the Promise of Heidegger, an American Perspective," in Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis, eds., New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 146-66.). For Thomson, the critique of Being is a critique against our metaphysics, that is, the dominant metaphysical view (an ontotheology in the words of Heidegger and Thomson) that determines the limits of our conceptual understanding and interpretation of the world--as well as the source of the attack on Heidegger's antiscientism!

I thus interpret Heidegger's understanding of the ontotheological structure of Western metaphysics as advancing a doctrine of ontological holism. By giving shape to our historical understanding of 'what is' metaphysics determines the most basic presuppositions of what anything is, ourselves included. This is what Heidegger means when he writes that "Western humanity, in all its comportment toward entities, and even toward itself, as in every respect sustained and guided by metaphysics" (N4 205/NII 343). This ontological holism explains how the successful ontotheologies can function historically like self-fulfilling prophecies, pervasively reshaping intelligibility. Put simply since all entities are, when a new ontotheological understanding of what and how entities are takes hold and spreads, it progressively transforms our basic understanding of all entities...our great metaphysicians help establish the fundamental conceptual parameters and ultimate standards of legitimacy for each of our successive historical epochs (150).

This has a lot to say against any contemporary scientifically-minded philosopher that thinks Heidegger full of crap. They impose the standards of what is available to them at their own time. The authority of science purports to describe what basic categories exist, and if words can only express real things in the world, then the ontological holism of our time will determine the extent to which words are ontologically real and accessible. However, Thomson adds more to follow. There's a point to linking ontological holism about the ontotheologies with the culmination of Nietzsche's thinking

.

Nietzsche is the pivotal figure in Heidegger's critique of technological epoch of enframing because, according to Heidegger's reductive yet revealing reading, Nietzsche's unthought metaphysics provides the ontotheological lenses that implicitly structure our current sense of reality...As Heidegger, thus puts it, Nietzsche understands the 'totality of entities a s such' ontotheologically as 'eternally recurring will-to-power,' that is, as an unending disaggregation and reaggregation of forces through their continual self-overcoming (In this Nietzsche was effectively universalizing insights Darwin had already drawn from his study of living entities and Adam Smith from his examination of the economic domain). Now, our Western culture's unthinking reliance on this implicitly Nietzschean ontotheology is leading us to transform all entities into Bestand, mere resources standing to be optimized, ordered and enhanced with maximal efficiency...[regarding ourselves]no longer as modern subjects seeking to master an objective world, but merely as one more intrinsically meaningless resource to be optimized, ordered and enhanced with maximal efficiency, whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically or even cybernetically (151, brackets mine).

Now, one interpretive picture is in view about what is meant by Heidegger. Science is embedded in an enframed mindset by which the Nietzschean impulse to optimize translates into the outcomes of science, technology. The more this ontotheology spreads the more we relate to the world and ourselves differently. In fact, Heidegger says at one point that only "what is calculable is being." In other words, the very words we use must refer only to real things as determined by this pervasive ontotheology. This is his reason for being critical of science. As it produces more insight, the more Heidegger's critique of technology becomes apparent, and for Heidegger, the situation of this ontotheology is not replacing itself as it did in the past. Our way of talking is, now, stale. We've grown into a dogmatism within this enframed mindset and alienated ourselves from the very primordial relations that shape human experience. The very primordial relations to the world through art, literature, poetry, history and philosophy become/are continuously displaced, set farther away from our particular experience. This criticism of science might also explain the phenomenological demand of our age. A phenomenologist seeks to recover some sense of meaning in the world in opposition to the natural attitude that vitiates our experience of it. Ever since phenomenology's inception, the Nietzschean impetus for optimizing increases in reality, and this is also what Husserl and Heidegger have in common--or this is just me interpreting Husserl's criticism of the natural attitude through the Heidegger.

It can be said for these reasons that a) Heidegger is "onto something" with his use of language. Secondly, it can also be said that Heidegger's anti-scientism is defended for more critical reasons than is often charitably acknowledged.

Who is the most important Continental philosopher in the 20th century?

Selection Votes
Husserl 9% 30
Heidegger 35% 110
Agamben 1% 4
Arendt 1% 2
Badiou 2% 7
Baudrillard 0% 1
Blanchot 1% 2
Bataille 1% 3
Beauvoir 1% 2
Benjamin 1% 2
Derrida 8% 25
Deleuze 11% 36
Foucault 8% 26
Gadamer 1% 3
Irigaray 0% 1
Butler 1% 2
Kristeva 1% 3
Lacan 3% 8
Lyotard 1% 2
Levinas 1% 2
Merleau-Ponty 1% 4
Nancy 0% 0
Ricoeur 1% 2
Sartre 3% 8
Adorno 5% 17
Habermas 3% 8
Scheler 0% 1
Schutz 0% 0
Bergson 0% 1
Zizek 2% 6
Total votes: 318

Survey Update

I have only a 183 votes.

I want to run this for another week (March 17th) or so, and then post the results. For all those that voted, I want to say thank you.

Laura Miller has a horrendous review of Critchley's new book, The Book of Dead Philosophers

The review gets really bad on page 2 when Miller naively divides philosophy into its two camps of analytic and Continental philosophy. Now, while I think there might be something said about this distinction, certainly this cannot be it:

Critchley is an adherent of the continental strain of modern philosophy, as distinguished from the analytic strain favored by American and British philosophers. To put it very roughly (and consequently provoke squalls of protest), the analytic philosophers concern themselves with what the universe is, or rather how we can know what it is, while their continental counterparts are more focused on the question of how we ought to live. Critchley doesn't have much use for the analytic side and its conviction that "philosophy should aspire to the impersonality of natural science." He's not especially respectful of science in general, and speaks slightingly of American philosophy's "infatuation" with it. A few scientists (Galileo, Darwin) are included in the book; others, such as Newton, Einstein, are not. Perhaps one reason why classical philosophy gets little more than a flyover from Critchley is that it was fundamentally entangled with the sort of discipline that we now call science. He is more comfortable with thinkers devoted to ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics.

Ethics cuts both ways across the Divide. It's naive to think that Critchley is the par excellence of pursuing this question. Many people have echoed this criticism on the salon.com, and I won't give it too much attention. Instead, I'll only say that I am disappointed that the general question of ethics is taken to be Continental and somehow analytic philosophy means just being "infatuated" with the natural sciences. This just oversimplifies the contribution both types of philosophy make to their respective fields.

Best Continental Philosopher?

Who is the most important Continental philosopher in the 20th century?
	Husserl
	Heidegger
	Agamben
	Arendt
	Badiou
	Baudrillard
	Blanchot
	Bataille
	Beauvoir
	Benjamin
	Derrida
	Deleuze
	Foucault
	Gadamer
	Irigaray
	Butler
	Kristeva
	Lacan
	Lyotard
	Levinas
	Merleau-Ponty
	Nancy
	Ricoeur
	Sartre
	Adorno
	Habermas
	Scheler
	Schutz
	Bergson
	Zizek
pollcode.com free polls

Discourses, Foucault and Genealogies

Recently, I got into a disagreement with a colleague about the type of work Foucault does as proper philosophy. The typical strand of argument I got is no different than other analytic philosophers skeptical of CP. This feels heuristic more than precise, but here goes.

P1: If discourses are meaningful, then the discourses are in some way compatible with the natural sciences
P2: Discourses are meaningful
C: Therefore, discourses are in some way compatible with the the natural sciences.

In order to resist this argument, I reject that the only way discourses are meaningful is in their demonstrated compatibility with the sciences. Take for instance, when I encounter objects in the world, I first encounter them as available to my use, as objects of equipment. I encounter the world first in terms of my practical engagement with the world such that objects are encountered in what we might call the nexus of human purposes. I don't encounter a watch or a chair as objects with a stable electron configuration, as an object described by physics. Instead, I see it as related to my ends or purposes. Moreover, I postulate that I can still have an understanding of the world such that I can have an entire discourse describing my encounter with objects in my experience that pump the intuition that compatibility with the sciences is not the hallmark of a good discourse. It is just one possible formulation.

Likewise, the point I am driving at is simple. There are more than just philosophy qua science approaches in philosophy. In order to see that, consider a more positive argument to establish an example of responsible CP work.

P1: All discourses have norms that establish the standard of truth for that discourse
P2: Science is a discourse
P3: Therefore, science has norms that establish the standard of truth for that discourse.
P4: Normative standards are constituted by their socio-historic and socio-political conditions of the agent's doing science
P5: Nietzschean genealogies qua method provide access to how normative standards are constituted
C: Therefore, any theorist using Nietzschean genealogies as a theoretical device can explain the socio-historic and socio-political conditions of a discourse, including science.

The implication of the conclusion is that Foucault and Deleuze are employing responsible methods for what undergirds one type of human activity, science. This entire line of thinking also takes seriously Nietzsche's claim about history in the "(History Essay)...Uses and Abuses..." in that we are historically finite knowers and that understanding must reflect our position as finite knowers. These discourses are meaningful ways to understand the social conditions of how we do understand the world, and provide ways of encountering past philosophies as uncharitable to our finitude. Instead, classical epistemologies for instance construe our knowing as exemplified by some ideal epistemic agent that if these necessary and sufficient conditions are met, then we can know what it means to know. However, finitude cannot be avoided. Denying our finitude amounts to refusing to see how understanding is shaped by our historical situation. In the same token, Heidegger and Gadamer embrace this same concept, providing us with ways to interrogate the structure of discourses that persist not independent of our history, but shaped by it.

My opponent could refuse P1. He could say that there are discourses independent of norms. Yet, I cannot think of how a counter-factual would go that could deny the fact that discourses are a human activity. Maybe, you could give me one, maybe not.

Good Quote

Since much of my life rests on two divides. On the first, it is America and Canada, and this comes only since I have resided in Canada for the last 2.5 years. The second is, of course, invoked by the imagery of my blog's title, and that is the analytic/continental Divide. I found this quote a while back and wanted to share it with you. It comes from Gary Gutting's review of Leiter's Future of Philosophy over at the NDPR. I've been wondering if Leiter's newest edited anthology by Oxford University Press is a product of Gutting's deadly accurate criticism.

I agree that there is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of substantive doctrines distinctively characteristic of the two sides. But it seems to me that we can still draw a significant distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of experience and reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing in this volume.

Babette E. Babich's Essay on the Analytic/Continental Divide

This essay is far-reaching and well-accomplished. It spells out methodological difficulty of the stylistic propensity of our philosophical climate with a keen eye to Heidegger and Nietzsche. Very good.

Here's the link:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm

Philosophical Gourmet Report Tirade

Brian Leiter is now approaching the two year point where he uses 469 nominated evaluators to speak for a profession of 10,000 philosophy PhDs in North America, and countless numbers elsewhere. I cannot help but this is really an unfair evaluation process since it really doesn't do justice to the work or contribution of philosophers in general. I've always wondered why the current Continental Philosophy list never included the following schools:

1. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
2. Depaul University
3. Duquesne University
4. Villanova
5. University of Oregon
6. Middlesex University (in the UK)
7. Marquette University
8. University of Ottawa (Canada)
9. University of Guelph (Canada)

You can compare the 2006 - 2008 rankings on Leiter's page with the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy's website.

Good programs in Continental philosophy are specialized programs that offer chances to study texts in the original language, groups that informally study the texts of the European tradition, have foreign exchange programs with sister-universities in Europe and have more than just the typical "token" Continental in an overwhelmingly analytic department. In fact, this is upsetting since many schools proferred as places to study Continental philosophy like Cambridge, I imagine, do not have the same resources that, say, Penn-State University or New School University have to develop good solid Continental philosophers.

Don't get me wrong. There are several good recommendations on the list of the PGR's breakdown. I just don't imagine that 469 people can speak for the work done by 10,000. Instead, we should all follow the advice of the APA statement on rankings which encourages aspiring graduate students to seek out Graduate Directors of programs. Leiter's list becomes more of a developed high school popularity contest than truly representing the interests of European philosophers. Moreover, such a mainstream conception of philosophy tends to overlook really unique programs where one can study marginalized areas outside mainstream philosophy. There are some good programs in Indian philosophy at the University of New Mexico, University of Hawaii and perhaps Temple University--these schools are only taken seriously by evaluators insofar as they are good places to do Indian philosophy, but will never approach what is valued as mainstream philosophy. I think such perceptions pernicious to a discipline that is rooted in the "love of wisdom."

Post-Continental and Post-Analytic Philosophy

I thought I would supply the more accurate picture of the Divide's collapse as many people have commented on Alexander Pruss's blog. I've found that many people are listing my blog either in their blog rolls or providing a link to my entry entitled Continental Ignorance. In addition, google analytics reveals that I have had 30+ visitors in one day, and I am taking time to show two instances of scholarship that are not moving to become analytic philosophy simpliciter, however much Pruss would want such a thing to be true. On the contrary, philosophy is perhaps just becoming philosophy, and many people are realizing just exactly how much work and arguments are contained in the Continentals, especially those phenomenologists that I love seen as relevant to philosophy of mind. I am listing a few sources that might be of intellectual interest to people.

The first is a book review for Post-Analytic Philosophy edited by John Rajchman and Cornell West written by H. Veatch. I enjoyed this review and read a series of these essays long ago since this is a 1985 book. This is a PDF from mediafire.com.

Richard Rorty's comments in A House Divided are particularly salient to this discussion. The link here is only to Amazon.com.

Lastly, this is a link to the NDPR. Continental Philosophy (however, perjorative a term this might be) has been rather stagnant, and a new direction in CP is seen as a form of immanentism given in John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline.

Continental Ignorance

Alexander Pruss recently commented rather ignorantly on the merits of what constitutes philosophy proper. Too much work at the Ends of Thought blogspot has shown the erroneous nature on this already, and rehashing Roman Altshuler's thoughts on the matter need not repeated.

Philosophers trained to be biased of the perjorative "divide" between the two traditions is rather a source of irony historically. It is analytic philosophy that actively maintains there is something like continental philosophy. For, if someone tells me that I do continental philosophy and labels me a French poststructuralist, I will tell them that I find it insulting and that there is nothing in my love for Husserl or Heidegger that stands in common with such ignorant grouping (accepting certain interpretive commitments of Heidegger). A phenomenologist has nothing in common with a poststructuralist anymore than a poststructuralist has in common with a phenomenologist; pigeon-holing them does little to understand them. If someone is trained in analytic philosophy and is never taught anything about the Continental tradition, all the label "Continental philosophy" achieves is a mass grouping to recognize one's ignorance. There is no substantial work honestly demonstrated by grouping everything European in a geographical label, yet we've grown to accept in terms of an Anglo-American dominated world.

People will notice that I still use the term only because of its common nature. I find it a useful way of saying that, unlike Quine, I think that philosophy is more than just an extension of the natural sciences. Continental philosophy casts a wider net than a Quinean conception of philosophy allows. I find philosophy the intellectual engagement with human existence that liberates us from the drudgery afforded by an unexamined life. In this way, philosophy -- like literature or art -- uplifts and uproots our everyday absorption in a Western culture that often propagates injustices only because a large part of our human life goes without being subjected to inquiry. Thus, inquiry is an organic and creative expression of human freedom that Russell noted very aptly:

Philosophy has value not because it is likely to provide definitive answers to the questions it asks, but rather because the questions are profound and important ones. Philosophical contemplation removes us from our narrow everyday concerns and takes us into a realm of generality which can put our lives into new perspectives. (Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy)

Seeing authors in terms of the analytic tradition wrongly suggests that the history of philosophy is nothing more than the history of intellectual puzzles. The richness of philosophy from Tyler Burge to Gadamer, instead, reveal a richness in range beyond thinking of analytic philosophy as solving problems only.