Recent Continental Philosophy

Teach them the song “Ever”, by Flipper.

Unless your goal is to impress rather than to inform.

Being a fanboy, I can’t but help mention Ulrich Beck’s latest tomes on cosmopolitanism “Power in the Global Age” and “Cosmopolitan Vision”, using Kant’s essay on perpetual peace as a starting point and relating it to his work on Risk Society, Second Modernity and Reflexive Modernisation.

Ok, it’s not strictly philosophy, but his call to cosmopolitanise the social sciences and politics stuck in a nation-state rhetoric is too important to ignore.

His idea of enforced or involuntary enlightenment at the cosmopolitan moment, and ‘science beyond enlightenment’ (in Risk Society) would tie in nicely with your theme.

Apart from the good stuff ( Habermas etc. ) I would also try to highlight the intellectually weak aspects :
1) obscurity : E. Levinas ‘Ethics and Infinity’ 1985

2)muddle-headedness : practically anything from Baudrillard
3) half-baked/slipshod style : Zizek ‘On Belief’

P.S. Zizek’s approach seems characteristic of much of recent continental philosophy , he offers an argument to support a view but it is as if he wants an advantage of an argument without having to do any intellectual work and so his argument is lazy and slipshod.

it should be said that nothing is muddle-headed in baudrillard once you actually put in the effort to understand his works and their relation to each other amongst other things. if you don’t know that, you should as well read plato in english, because there again, you’ll miss all the jokes, most of the interesting analysis, and almost all of the real meaning. with baudrillard, you have to pay particular attention to his early foundations to see what is going on in his later works, so you can read them without feeling muddled.

from Habermas, ‘the unfinished project of modernity’
from Guattari, ‘chaosmosis’
‘everybody wants to be a fascist’
from Baudrillard, ‘america’
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man

To put in a plug for my personal faves….if you’re beginning with Kant, and want to get at the whole modernity/Enlightenment issue, why not give them Herder’s “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People,” a short essay available in Michael Forster’s recent collection of Herder translations. It’s a loose, weird, funky piece, but it gives one an intro to how, following Herder, later romantics and hermeneutic thinkers took up the pre-critical Kant against the Kantian tradition, and insisted on the priority of sentiment, culture, language and anthropology to any progress in morality and knowledge. In short, the counter-Enlightenment. Granted, you can get more quickly and cleanly to the really provocative antimodern/postmodern stuff by setting up the problem strictly the way Nietzsche and Heidegger later exploded it, but–perhaps because I’ve just never been particularly interested in much of the heavy theory out there (like zdenek, it has seemed mostly muddle-headed to me)–I kind of prefer making it clear that there have been, as Charles Taylor put it, “alternative modernities” all along.

One of my favorite guides on this topic, though he’s working it from the perspective of American pragmatism, is Richard Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. A chapter or two might be excellent material since Bernstein does very close readings of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas.

When I took a course in post-structuralist theory as an undergrad, we used Madan Sarap’s handy introduction, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. I don’t know what’s come along that’s new and improved since then, and I’m not familiar with Critchley, so I’d love to hear about other introductory/companion texts.

In addition to some of the above (especially Foucault and Habermas), and although I’m not sure where ‘recent’ begins, I would certainly use two volumes that provide nice introductions to phenomenology and existentialism respectively: Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2000), and David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1990). And I would fit Sartre and Beauvoir in as required and recommended reading. For example, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; his Critique of Dialectical Reason; his work on the emotions; several plays, including his rather neglected The Freud Scenario (English, 1985), and The War Diaries: November 1939/March 1940. As for Beauvoir’s work, there’s much to choose from in addition to The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, perhaps The Mandarins, Old Age, but also another comparatively neglected but brilliant book, her travel diaries from a sojourn in 1947 to the US: America Day by Day. On the recommended reading list would also be Joseph Fell’s study of Heidegger and Sartre. I’m rather old-fashioned, I suppose, and relatively ignorant of the latest productions of continental philosophy. In all fairness, we should fit Camus in here too!

I just finished teaching an upper division course on recent continental political philosophy at my mid-level SLAC. Since they were poli sci students mostly (with a smattering of phil majors), most had only one relevant prerequisite, usually either classical or modern political theory. I did all the background in the first 4 weeks; we started with Kant/Foucault “What is Enlightenment,” a bit from Philosophy of Right, read a series of selected aphorisms from Nietzsche, did the Critique of Violence, read Heidegger’s essays “What is Metaphysics,” and “Question Concerning Technology,” and read a selection from Dialectic of Enlightenment. This was a slog, but gave me a chance to contextualize the questions emerging in continental thought while helping them learn how to read this style of text. We then jumped straight into the last generation, reading Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Laclau and Mouffe Hegemony and SOcialist Strategy, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, Badiou’s Ethics, Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and excerpts from Between Fact and Norm. My students did a great job with these texts, despite their lack of background. I think there were two reasons for this: 1) they had to write a 4-5 page critical essay for each week’s readings, due before the seminar meeting (that ensured carefulreading and thoughtful prep), and 2) they had to write a research paper on one of the recent thinkers covered. I required a detailed lit review (at least 7 peer reviewed sources) for that project early in the semester, which meant a portion of the class had reviewed secondary literature on each hthinker before we discussed the work, thus raising the general level of knowledge in the class.

In short, this material can be taught to undergrads lacking huge amounts of prior knowledge, if you keep them deeply engaged in the texts by requiring lots of writing.

The problem here is that Recent Continental Philosophy does not make any sense at all without a fairly good grip on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx and any given structuralist (Levy-Strauss, Saussure, Archeology-era Foucault). Personally, I’ll go with Rorty. He has a good understanding of contemporary Continental Philosophy, is readable, and provide an instant comparison to pragmatism. Lyotard’s “The postmodern condition” is also useful, and much, much better than the lit-crit pomo/PS crap that typically “represents” postmodernism. It also fits nicely with Kant’s and Foucault’s essays on enlightenment.

Since I’m no longer speaking to the person who thinks you’re a continental philosopher, I am forced to make that statement to you and hope he overhears.

You might want to think about including Bataille — some of his pornographic writings would probably be more accessible to students, quite apart from their intrinsic interest.

Does analytic philosophy have any major figures who also wrote erotica?

Adam,
Two minds, one thought.

I took a class like this at DePaul. The way Kevin Thompson taught it was very good for setting up some major themes in a history sequence class. He organized it around the theme of responding to totalitarianism, which is a rather good way at getting to the heart of many of these philosophies.

The foundation of the class was: Husserl’s Vienna Lecture “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man”, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, and Arendt’s last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism. From there he set up the (false) dichotomoy of critical theory/poststructuralism as the outgrowth of these phenomenological positions. We read Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment then a piece from Habermas that I forget (something about colonizing the life-world – I think it’s his ‘big book’). For poststructuralism we read Foucault’s Birth of the Prision and then Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Society of Control”.

It was a really good class, we were able to see the debates within philosophy .. opps … continental philosophy. Two tests, one paper, required attendance.

If you have to use a Zizek text and it has to be one of his minor works use Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? or Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Immanuel Kant.

…..Oh, yes he can!

What do you call a philosopher working from Singapore? A Straits Philosopher?

He’s in an undefined cultural zone — mostly Chinese, sort of British, somewhat Muslim (but with Hindu-Buddhist highlights), and not really that far from some of the world’s few remaining cannibals.

Singapore isn’t even the Other, because no one cares. It’s more like the Semi or the Non or the Huh?

Of course, the Singaporian combination of technical efficiency and free markets, with managed democracy, minimal civil liberties, and minimal political participation is the wave of the future. You heard it here first.

I second Patrick’s vote for Cooper’s Existentialism, which I believe is out in a revised edition. Dermot Moran has an Introduction to Phenomenology too. Andrew Bowie has a couple of wide-ranging books, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche and From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German literary theory. Maybe Taylor on Heidegger (e.g. in Philosophical Arguments). Herder is a good idea (maybe Isaiah Berlin; Taylor too).

But as you can tell I don’t have a background in this stuff. I wouldn’t discount the idea of sticking to primary texts, even complicated ones (e.g. ecw’s class, which sounds good). My fave actual Continentals are Deleuze (maybe Bergsonism, or D/G’s “Rhizome” in Mille Plateaux) and Gadamer (he and Habermas have a quick back and forth at one point: see Brice Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, an excellent collection). But I’m a bit (or more) behind the times by now, I imagine, as my exemplars seem to be dead.

aa: There was no ‘problem’ until your comment, perhaps a sign this post has petered out.

A strong second to Dave Maier’s suggestion of Andrew Bowie; his work on the various aesthetic and linguistic subcurrents in the stream of modernity (how’s that for a metaphor) is first rate. I particularly like a short, very sharp and wide-ranging (he touches on everyone from Kant to Wittgenstein, catching Rorty and the Vienna Circle along the way) essay of his titled “The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy” in Verstehen and Humane Understanding (CUP, 1997). As for his recommendation regarding Habermas and Gadamer, another second; you might also want to check out an old collection, Interpreting Politics (NYU Press, 1987). It has essays by Rorty, Geertz, Taylor, Habermas, Foucault and others, and is structured pretty much entirely around the hermeneutic debate.

What little I do know about ‘poststructuralists’ in spite of my Sartrian (and I suppose now ‘Habermasian,’ IF it means taking sides in ‘critical theory’ v. poststructuralist political thought) predilection, comes courtesy of Todd May’s Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (1994). His book on the moral theory of poststructuralism is on my ‘to read’ list (I admit to smiling upon learning how small the book was). I just discovered he’s also written a one volume study: Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy, which of course I’ve yet to read. Maybe if others are more familiar with May’s work they can let John know what they think….

Incidentally, when I was being trained in ‘Religious Studies,’ Gadamer’s Truth and Method was all-the-rage (along with anything by Ricoeur) prompting me to cultivate a fondness (yes, it’s possible) for Habermas. Indeed, I tried to defend his reading of Freud from Grunbaum’s rather positivistic attack in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis… (Grunbaum took on several leading lights there) in a seminar paper which I’ve since lost. One consequence of all this was a further and deeper immersion in the Freudian stuff, especially the neo-Freudian and Kleinian/neo-Kleinian literature (while Habermas himself seemed to have lost all interest), and if only for that reason I’m grateful Grunbaum stirred things up. No doubt my own hermeneutic skills have proven insufficient when it comes to the likes of Lacan, meaning Zizek has remained rather opaque for me, although I’ll concede he’s quite a clever fellow. I get a little dizzy from (intimidated by?) all the intellectual acrobatics and not a few unfamiliar references (I suppose in some measure I remain culturally illiterate). And on top of all that I could be dim-witted and impatient….

I’m not above wondering if there’s a bit too much fawning over the latest French intellectual fashions. And perhaps there’s a generation gap here too (at least in my case). So, at the end of the day, I’m ‘reading’ (i.e., preferring, enjoying) Sartre or Beauvoir or Habermas, while others are reading Lyotard and Lacan, Deleuze and Zizek.

If you are going to read something by Heidegger that gives you a background of phenomenology, why not the History of the Concept of Time? He discusses Brentano, Husserl, and his own project of Being and Time. I think that book is an easier intro. to his though than Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

“’m an analytic, but I team-taught a course last year with Aspazia from Mad Melancholic Feminista tracing the history of the analytic/continental divide”

Is the syllabus for this online? I’d love to see it.

If you want to draw undergraduates into the subject, I think it’s best to start with something they’ll be able to recognize, or at least grasp, then move to the target material.

For instance: the Searle/Derrida debates in Glyph, starting with your own paraphrase of SEC (not the essay itself, yet), then Searle’s understandable and naive objections, then finishing off with Derrida setting things straight in Limited, Inc.

From another tack: Give ’em appropriate excerpts from Marx (Capital), the Althusser, then Foucault.

Habermas… eh, ok, but as an “answer” to Foucault, there’s no point.

Likewise: selections from Freud’s Oedipus stuff, then Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Cixous for a version of continental feminism (no prior prep should be needed)

Zizek…? Joking, yes?

The closest you should come to Zizek is: forget Zizek. Just read Lacan’s lectures on Poe, then Derrida’s “Purveyor of Truth”. (too bad big D is dead; Zizek’s bloating corpus could really, really use a derridean scalpel)

Or not.