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December 21, 2005
A review of a book on the future of (analytic) philosophy edited by Brian Leiter. This tacitly equates philosophy with analytic philosophy--on a old rhetorical trick. The justification is provided by Leiter. Gary Gutting, the reviewer, notes Leiter's argument:
"'Continental' philosophy’ has . . . become a meaningless category” ...This so first because its foil, analytic philosophy, now includes such a variety of methods and substantive positions that it “survives, if at all, as a certain style that emphasizes 'logic', 'rigor', and 'argument'"...the point being, as he maintains a bit later, that “now . . . claims about stylistic distinctiveness [of Continental from analytic philosophy] are less tenable” ....More important, however, is the fact that we now realize that “the 'Continental tradition' . . . is no tradition at all, but a series of [seven to nine] partly overlapping philosophical developments that have in common primarily that they occurred mainly in Germany and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”.
Gutting says that Leiter supports this point by noting exceptions to various doctrinal features proposed as distinctive of Continental thought. For example, Marxism and German materialism in general refute a characterization in terms of anti-materialism, while Schopenhauer’s critique of Hegel and Nietzsche’s ignoring of him exclude a shared Hegelian sympathy.
Can you imagine the Phenomenology of Spirit, Das Kapital ,The Birth of Tragedy, or Being and Time being written from within the analytic tradition?
Okay, there are different and antagonistic strands to continental philosophy--just as there are within the analytic tradition. So why say there is no continental philosophy but there is analytic philosophy? Maybe the divide has outlived its usefulness, and just refers to the history of philosophy in the 20th century?
I've always understood the central differences to be the differing responses to positivism, to the reduction of reason to natural science, and to the reduction of naturalism to scientific materialism (atomism & mechanism) and the different conceptions of everyday experience. In the continental tradition philosophersturn away from physical nature and toward human history and so they replace replace metaphysics and epistemology with social philosophy as the "core" of the discipline.
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