John Protevi's Blog

A Thing of This World

I just got an advance copy of A Thing of This World, a new book at Northwestern University Press by Lee Braver of Hiram College. Here's the publisher's description:

At a time when the analytic/continental split dominates contemporary philosophy, this ambitious work offers a careful and clear-minded way to bridge that divide. Combining conceptual rigor and clarity of prose with historical erudition, A Thing of This World shows how one of the standard issues of analytic philosophy--realism and anti-realism--has also been at the heart of continental philosophy. Using a framework derived from prominent analytic thinkers, Lee Braver traces the roots of anti-realism to Kant's idea that the mind actively organizes experience. He then shows in depth and in detail how this idea evolves through the works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. This narrative presents an illuminating account of the history of continental philosophy by explaining how these thinkers build on each other's attempts to develop new concepts of reality and truth in the wake of the rejection of realism. Braver demonstrates that the analytic and continental traditions have been discussing the same issues, albeit with different vocabularies, interests, and approaches. By developing a commensurate vocabulary, his book promotes a dialogue between the two branches of philosophy in which each can begin to learn from the other.

I was asked to blurb the book. Here's what I wrote, portions of which show up on the back cover:

Analytic and Continental Philosophy II: Resources

[UPDATED with additions and revised categories on Wednesday May 16.]

Here's the start of (what I hope will be) a collaborative bibliography on the relation of Analytic and Continental Philosophy. So far I have three categories:

1. Discussions of the AP / CP divide
2. Beyond the divide
3. Discussions of Individual CP figures and Analytic Philosophy

I decided to expand the original version of the third category from just "Derrida and AP" to other figures, e.g., Foucault and Deleuze. You should also check out Shaun King's list of Rorty articles to consider in this comment.

Please email me or comment here with additions or annotations. Thanks!

Analytic and Continental Philosophy III: Continental Philosophy is impossible to define

I've always maintained that while you can't define "continental philosophy," you can treat the extension of the term both synchronically and diachronically, or as I say in the Preface to A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale UP, 2006; available outside North America as The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy [Edinburgh UP, 2005]):

‘Continental philosophy’ has always been an exceedingly difficult term to define. In fact, it may even be impossible to define. After all, Nietzsche tells us in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘only that which is without history can be defined’, and not only does continental philosophy have a history, but most – although perhaps not all – of its practitioners would agree with Nietzsche that a historical treatment (or what he would call a ‘genealogy’) of philosophical texts is vitally important. Thus, in lieu of a definition, this Preface offers a (synchronic) operational treatment and a (diachronic) genealogy of continental philosophy.

Nominalism!

Aaron Preston has a very interesting comment in response to this post by Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports.

In his post, Leiter excoriates Nancy Holland -- and by extension the editors at Notre Dame Philosophical Review for letting it pass -- for saying this in her review of Jason Powell's Jacques Derrida: A Biography:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America "has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise" leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy "has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization" (pp. 124-125).  Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument.

Here's my two cents, on what Preston says, not on Leiter, Holland, Powell, or Derrida:

New Book Series: "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science"

I've recently become series editor for a new series with Palgrave Macmillan entitled New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. The topic of the series is a great occasion for dialogue between analytic and continental philosophers, if you ask me, and since you're visiting my blog, I guess you are asking me.

I've added a link to the left column, but if you don't want to click on it, here's what you'll read there:

Naturalist vs Non-Naturalist instead of Analytic vs Continental

Jon Cogburn writes in a comment to this post as well as here on his own blog that other ways of cutting up the philosophical scene than "analytic" and "continental" are needed. I completely agree. Here's what I write in the Preface to my current book project (about which I hope to hear very soon from the press where it's awaiting final approval).

Instead of assigning thinkers to the camps of "continental" and "analytic" philosophy as our sorting procedure, why not use "realist" vs. "anti-realist" or "naturalist" vs. "anti-naturalist"? Now at first glance, these seem  be simply new terms for the same division, as many analytic philosophers are naturalizers and many continental philosophers insist on a non-naturalizable "difference" which they claim appears through our relation to language. For these continental thinkers, language is a network of signs or signifiers that constructs a network of concepts or signifieds. The meaning of signs or concepts does not come from their isolated presence, but from their difference from all the other nodes of the network. Furthermore, it's commonly held by these philosophers that these differential networks construct a reality for a culture. Such social constructivism implies that naturalization of the social / subjective is hopelessly circular, as any concept of nature is already socially constructed. In the same way, such strong social constructivist thinkers are anti-realists.

But it is not true that this categorization is complete: a good number of analytic philosophers resist naturalism, while some continental philosophers are naturalizers. (I should note here that the important aspect of naturalism for my project is not the narrow technical sense of trying to account for the objects and processes of abstract thought by natural causes. [This is in fact a false problem, an artifact of residual Cartesianism.] Rather, I use a more relaxed notion of naturalism as the attempt to understand natural and social / subjective phenomena with the same basic concepts. As Spinoza would say, humans do not constitute a separate "kingdom within the kingdom" of nature.) Now I wanted to write a book that would naturalistically treat the intersection of politics and affect. This puts me at odds with those within "continental" philosophy who are anti-naturalist "difference" thinkers, and it comes as a surprise to all those, "continental" and "analytic" alike, who identify contemporary French thought with anti-naturalism. But as I argued in a previous work, Deleuze and Geophilosophy, which I co-wrote with Mark Bonta, Deleuze and Guattari offer us a thoroughly differential philosophy (being thus recognizably "continental" thinkers) which is at the same time thoroughly naturalistic (thus confounding the received notion of "continental" philosophy as anti-naturalist).

Analytic and Continental Philosophy I: Becoming the Philosopher You Are

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to have my own venue in which to participate in the discussion on the relation of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy that pops up now and again on the web. For example, this post by  Keith DeRose at Certain Doubts, in which, although joining late (#81), I ask people not to conflate “postmodernism” (defined as a concern with “floating signifiers,” the “free play of meaning” or some such) with “continental philosophy” or even with “contemporary French philosophy.” Or this post by  Brian Leiter on “Styles of Philosophy,” in which I agree with Leiter that one cannot conceptually define “continental philosophy”(= “CP”) or (“analytic philosophy” [ = “AP”] for that matter), but in which I suggest we might be able to talk about the sociological reality of the two camps in terms of different hiring and citation networks.

There’s a nuance here that needs to be treated in further detail, and on which I plan to post in the near future, but I think we can distinguish – NB: using citation networks rather than a conceptual distinction – “analytic continental philosophy” [= “ACP”] as those works on continental figures which cite people belonging to the analytic network (e.g., Mike Wheeler's excellent book on Heidegger and cognitive science, Reconstructing the Cognitive World [MIT, 2005]) and “continental continental philosophy [= “CCP”] as those works on continental figures citing people belonging to the continental network (e.g., Reiner Schürmann’s superb book, Heidegger on Being and Acting [Indiana, 1987]). Both books are on Heidegger, but if we define “continental philosophy” solely by means of work on continental figures, then we’d have to say Mike Wheeler is a continental philosopher, and that seems to be something that neither Wheeler nor many others would accept.

I’m planning a series of posts on these topics, but thought I’d introduce them with some autobiography for the following reason. While I think we can establish the synchronic co-existence of two fairly distinct hiring and citation networks, I think it’s important to stress at the outset that, at least as far as the citation network goes, there is some opportunity for exchange, which I’ll detail below the fold. But you can also look diachronically at how people enter these networks, that is, how they become either analytic or continental philosophers by incorporating a set of beliefs / desires / tastes / emotional triggers, and so on, about what constitutes “good” or “bad” philosophy, or at least, “the sort of thing our people do.” We needn’t get too far into anthropology / sociology here (I do though really like the statement attributed to Bourdieu: “we should do an anthropology of ourselves and a sociology of others”), but I think this process is better described in terms of initiation or acculturation than it is in terms of rational deliberation. I don’t know about you, but I certainly never had equal exposure to both analytic and continental philosophy in my undergraduate training, and my decision to pursue continental philosophy training at the graduate level can’t really be said to be the result of rational deliberation as to the relative merits of the two fields. One – CP – just felt right to me – I knew enough about it to know that it was a challenge I wanted to take up; the other – AP – was largely terra incognita. I suspect it’s the other way around for those who ended up in AP, but I’d be happy to hear from others with different experiences.