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.
By an operational treatment, we mean that we shall treat as continental those thinkers who are now or who have been at some time in the past so labelled by a reasonable portion of the philosophical or general intellectual community, whether or not that labelling constitutes a set whose essence can be defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that demarcates it from other types of philosophy. Indeed we will not even bind ourselves to what Wittgenstein would call a family resemblance, since the fact that philosophers as diverse in aim, method, and style as Hegel and Nietzsche, Deleuze and Levinas, Heidegger and Habermas, Irigaray and Gadamer, have all been called continental philosophers would seem to strain even that generous way of treating groups. By a genealogy of continental philosophy we mean to trace not only the history of the term, but also the various movements whose convergence and divergence have made up the shifting field of continental philosophy over the years.
First, what is the genealogy of the term ‘continental philosophy’? As Simon Glendinning points out in his article on Analytic Philosophy in the Dictionary, it was first used as a term of opprobrium by the Oxbridge philosophers of the 1950s for those ‘not like us,’ those over there on ‘the Continent’. Over the years ‘continental philosophy’ has come to lose its geographical sense, however, due to the strong interest in such a philosophy in the Anglophone world -- it makes little sense to call someone working with Derridean concepts in North America, Australia (or indeed the United Kingdom or Ireland), a ‘continental philosopher’ if that term is intended geographically! It has also lost some but not all of its polemical sting when used in analytic circles, and in fact it has come to be adopted as a positive self-designation by many, as evidenced by the shift of the title of the influential journal Man and World to its current Continental Philosophy Review.
Second, the genealogy of the various convergent and divergent movements of continental philosophy is often begun by citing a certain appropriation of Kant and has come to include the philosophical and intellectual movements of German Idealism, Marxism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, that branch of feminism sometimes called ‘French feminism,’ structuralism and post-structuralism, the French ‘philosophy of difference’ of the 1960s, philosophies based on or influenced by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the multitude of subfields produced by the intersections and mutual influences these movements have exerted on each other.
Indeed the best reason for offering an operational and genealogical treatment of continental philosophy rather than a definition of it lies in precisely the sort of combinatorial explosion that results when these movements are put into relation with one another. The resulting field provides an ever-shifting profusion of positions, theses, methodologies, and so forth, no one of which can be said to unify the field. (The logic of Derrida’s ‘quasi-transcendentality’ could be cited here: any term that aspires to rise from an empirical field to a transcendental ordering or conditioning position will leave behind it a mark of its absence from the field.) Among the factors in the field of continental philosophy are: (1) a reaction to the transcendental turn of Kant; (2) a materialist ‘overturning’ of Hegel; (3) the ‘overcoming of Platonism’; (4) a focus on corporeality or embodiment, often combined with a focus on gender; (5) a type of ‘linguistic turn’ via Saussure; (6) the disbelief in ‘grand narratives’; (7) the structuralist or post-structuralist ‘death of the subject’; (8) the philosophical implications of the ‘new sciences’ variously called catastrophe theory, chaos theory, or complexity theory; and many other themes, almost all of which can be combined with each other.
For example, one could imagine a cross of the readings of Deleuze and Guattari by Brian Massumi and Elizabeth Grosz as a post-structuralist feminist appropriation of complexity theory to consider gendered embodiment in globalised capitalism. Only a genealogy considering multiple factors can offer ways to consider such a field; a definition seeking to isolate an essence could only be arbitrary and produce artificial distinctions. To twist Deleuze’s famous citation of Spinoza: ‘we don’t know what the body [of continental philosophy] can do’. An essential definition pretends to tell you what a body can do; a genealogy only tells you what a body has done (although it may show what it might do in the [near] future).
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