Recent ‘Continental Philosophy’

Absolutely nothing except for the (completely unoriginal point) that most of the roots of ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy actually lie on the ‘Continent’: i.e. Frege, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, etc. etc. etc. Likewise you could argue that many of the British ’empiricists’ have more in common with ‘Continental philosophy’ than they do with the logical positivists (Hume especially….Russell thought that Hume’s ‘disproof’ of causality was the beginning of modern ‘irrationalism’). ‘Ordinary language philosophy’ clearly has much in common with ‘Continental philosophy’ (don’t forget the favourable review of ‘Being and Time’ that Ryle wrote). The situation with American philosophy is even more striking. Rorty is not entirely wrong when he draws parallels between American pragmatism and ‘post-modernism’, and ‘Heidegger as pragmatist’ is quickly becoming a cliche (in certain circles). Not to mention the fact that ‘post-modernism’ (as we understand the term) is essentially an Anglo-American idea (few, if any, of the ‘founding French fathers’ of the ‘movement’ described themselves as ‘post-modernists’. Derrida certainly didn’t).

I might also add that there are numerous contemporary French philosophers who are as influenced by the ‘Anglo-American’ tradition as by the ‘Continental’. Moreover, even in the ‘classic’ French tradition, there were schisms: Pierre Bourdieu was always highly sceptical about ‘deconstruction’ and stuff like that for example.

So the whole ‘distinction’ is complete nonsense, essentially. But that is hardly an original point.

if you want to start with Kant, as I do
I don’t see Kant as a “Continental” philosopher. Doesn’t the rift start rather with Post-Kantian German Idealism and Romanticism? In spite of all the “British Idealism” and McTaggart, there is something in Hegel, Schopenhauer , then Marx, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche that does not seem to have lasting effects on Anglo-American(-Polish) philosophy.
OTOH, Kant is deeply influential on Pragmaticism (e.g. C.I. Lewis) and so-called Descriptive Metaphysics.

brendan : Russell thought that Hume’s ‘disproof’ of causality was the beginning of modern ‘irrationalism’
Really? I thought Russell’s Causal Eliminativism (“Causal Republicanism”) was basically Humean (although his ontology of universals is not).

I’m not sure when Alan Watts interviewed Bertrand Russell, I’d guess towards the end of his life so the late sixties. If you listen to the first chunk here, about eight minutes in he talks about “the continental approach” (contrasting it with Oxford / ordinary language philosophy).

‘OTOH, Kant is deeply influential on Pragmaticism (e.g. C.I. Lewis) and so-called Descriptive Metaphysics.’

But so was Hegel. Cf Hegel’s influence on Dewey, amongst others.

As for the Bertrand Russell reference I remember reading it somewhere but I can’t track down the reference now. Perhaps I’m wrong. But this paper agrees with me (http://www.tau.ac.il/~agass/joseph-papers/SMITH.pdf).

‘Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the Continental/Anglo-American dichotomy really only becomes a real and useful distinction (unless one’s using it merely geographically) after WWII.’

This is probably true, but I think it’s even more true to say that the divergence only becomes tinged with animosity with the development of post-structuralism in the ’60s. ‘Anglo-American’ philosophers didn’t have much time for existentialism, but (based on what I’ve read) they didn’t despise it, or think that it was something other than philosophy. Moreover ‘structuralism’ per se was not particularly disliked by ‘Anglo-American’ thinkers: in fact, thinkers like Levi-Strauss (and the early Barthes) were generally respected. It was only when Derrida (and those who followed him) started to write that the real schism began. (Note: this is basically backed up by the intitial post, which pointed out that the phrase only started to be used, really, in the early ’70s).

Yes, you are right about Dewey. It is also true that with Peirce and Brandom there are still traces of some elements of Hegel but they are aufgehoben as “holism” or “coherentism”. Dialectics had no direct influence AFAIK (except maybe Australian dialetheism?).

the Continental/Anglo-American dichotomy really only becomes a real and useful distinction after WWII

Or maybe WWI, which exacerbate national traditions. Before the Great War, Bergson, Husserl and Russell still share a kind of intellectual community but this disappears in the 20’s for various reasons like the Heideggerian jargon and the logical formalisations (one major exception would be Cassirer who could read both). Ayer writes somewhere (IIRC) that he cannot ascertain what current phenomenology is about.

When I was young, Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy were just taking over from logical positivism, and the whole Anglo coalition seemed to be taking over philosophy as a whole. The opposition struggled to survive and banded together in an odd defensive coalition: Catholic philosophy, Marxist philosophy, and phenomenology. The first two have faded, and structuralism and postmodernism have been added.

My feeling is that the weirder forms of clown show postmodernism suit analytic philosophers just fine. Deconstruction is sort of like the Washington Generals or Brand X — it always loses.

The real losers after 1950 were the pragmatists and the “world view” philosophers, especially the politically-engaged ones. Following McCumber, Mirowski, and my own evil nature, I choose to think the worst of this transition.

The Man realized that it was going to be difficult to explain the switch from an anti-Fascist ideology allied with Communism to an anti-Commuist ideology allied with Fascism, so they slotted in a non-ideology according to which technicians and adminstrators following rational procedures could be assumed to be right, and social critics using a philosophical vocabulary could be assumed to be talking nonsense.

What’s nice about Emerson’s theory is that then analytic philosophy can dismiss that explanation of its own hegemony as un-philosophical. (Doubtless, the words “argument” and “evidence” would appear in such a dismissal, in italics.)

Is metaphysics still not allowed? (I’m a little behind — I get most of my information on analytic philosophy from one particular commenter to my website, who seems to have stopped at Quine.)

Quine is Da Man. Quine Roolz. Nancy Droolz.

@ adam kotsko
On the contrary, I would say metaphysics became more central in the analytic tradition since at least the 1970s (partly because of Philosophy of Mind, partly because of Australian realism and partly because of “semantic” discussions on Essentialism and Modality). Some latter-day Quineans and Wittgensteinians think it is a catastrophe but I gather they are a minority.

Could any of you knowledgeable folks recommend a good introduction to Heidegger for a non-philosopher? Or is that like asking for an eighth grade reader on quantum physics?

I must say I quite dislike the term “continental philosophy” as if all philosophy in Europe is the same and/or has greater similarities to one another than it might with Anglo-American philosophy. Both take Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc. very seriously, etc.

Perhaps it is best to speak of either national traditions or certain schools of thought. For example, there are certainly connections to be had in Idealism (Kant, Hegel, Green, Bradley, perhaps even later Husserl), German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Habermas), French philosophy, phenomenology, and so on. Lumping everyone together as if the way Germans and French “do” philosophy is a bit nuts. Similarly, it is difficult enough speaking of British philosophy as one thing, as it is a combination of many different traditions that include Hobbes and Locke, Hume and Smith, Green and Bradley, Russell and beyond.

Critchley thinks the perniciousness is the fault of the Anglos, for being close-minded. I am inclined to think that there is probably equal close-mindedness to be found on both sides, if it comes to that. But setting the question of blame aside…

But where’s the fun in that?

This exchange between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilbert Ryle, following a paper Ryle delivered in France in 1960, which is quoted by Critchley, is indicative:

Merleau-Ponty: Notre programme n’est-il pas la meme?
Ryle: J’espere que non.

on a purely philological note, the phrase ‘continental philosophy’ must have originated in England, no? I’ve never heard an American or Canadian speak of Europe as ‘the continent’. For obvious reasons.

Why’s it called ‘Continental’?

I don’t know: maybe because it only pretends to be free, leaves you hungry, and used to be the ne plus ultra of chic but has since been co-opted by global corporations as a cost-cutting measure?

(You were fishing for a pun between Continental philosophy and continental breakfasts, weren’t you?)

When I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Michigan from 1971 to 1976 “continental” was used in an invidious way to denote philosophical thought that 1) originated outside a very specific Anglo-American tradition (so Frege and Wittgenstein, et al. could be grandfathered in) and 2) smacked of “metaphysics” in the logical positivist usage of the word.

At that point Michigan had faculty members from Oxford, and others who had been trained by English folks, so the students took it as given that the term originated in England.

When I went back to grad school in literature at Iowa in the early 80s the term was in much wider and less invidious usage.

I don’t know how this works out in print, but that’s how it worked in Angell Hall (UM) and the English-Philosophy Building (UI).

@31. Not much change at U of M through 85 when I came out (doubled with Comp Sci, all under Art Burks). Continental ran Husserl – Habermas – Merleau-Ponty – Derrida, all with a “Danger, here be communists” warning.

There are some surveys of contemporary intellectual and cultural trends that Isaiah Berlin wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook(s) in 1950-53, which don’t so far as I recall use the terms ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’, but do distinguish between philosophy in the English-speaking/Scandinavian world and Continental Europe, along the same lines as the current divide. Also, when Cassirer came to Oxford in the 1930s the younger philosophers were, at first, somewhat impressed, but became impatient with him — Berlin later said something to the effect of, ‘there were no arguments’. Also, Berlin’s writings from the 1930s are rather dismissive of Nietzsche and I think maybe Schopenhauer (I don’t quite remember), though on the other hand he did take Max Scheler seriously. So that suggests the divergence was underway before WWII, though it may have intensified later.
That’s the Berlin-eye view, anyway; I imagine that other British philosophers of his generation were even less receptive to ‘Continental’ philosophy — Ayer, I believe, rubbished Sartre in the late ’40s/early ’50s.

So my mildly provocative statement about continental philosophers’ contribution to progressive politics goes into the moderation queue. I always knew these Yoorpeans were touchy…

Adam Kotsko writes, in comment 34:

“It’s true that most continental philosophers in the 20th Century were socialists, which is of course completely different from the founders of analytic philosophy. (Or if some of them did happen to be socialists, you could tell they didn’t believe in it, because they spent their whole careers doing completely non-ideological things that have nothing to do with politics.)”

Hmm…Husserl was one of the founders of continental philosophy — my history books about German left-wing politics until 1938 must have carelessly neglected his contributions. And I guess the chapter on socialism in the Logische Untersuchungen must have been dropped by its publishers. Or perhaps his contributions to progressive politics were stifled by the restrictions placed upon Jewish academics at the university by that even more distinguished founder of continental philosophy, Martin Heidegger, who I guess was a socialist, albeit of the national (aryan supremecy) variety.

You write that “the founders of analytic philosophy spent their whole careers doing completely non-ideological things that have nothing to do with politics”. This is the kind of ignorant nonsense that embarrases me about being an academic in the United States. Mr. Kotsko obviously has no clue who Bertrand Russell was. As far as distinguished recent analytic philosophers, Hilary Putnam was a Maoist throughout the 1960s and 1970s; some of his students in the philosophy of science from those years continue as dedicated Marxists (e.g. Richard Boyd, the distinguished philosopher of science at Cornell). Noam Chomsky is surely one of the most, if not the most, prominent philosopher of language and mind over the last 30 years; he certainly has staked out central positions in most debates in these areas since the 1960s, and has been a teacher and colleague of many of us. Last I checked, Noam was somewhat involved in progressive politics. But maybe Mr. Kotsko thinks that Lacan has had more influence on the progressive movement in the Twentieth Century than Russell or Chomsky.

Of course, the depth of a philosophical tradition should scarcely be judged on its influence on the progressive movement. My purpose here is only to correct absurd factual error.

Talking of Sartre, has he had any lasting influence? I don’t see any evidence of it but I probably wouldn’t, having taken my efforts in reading Being and Nothingness as sufficient excuse not to do anything similar thereafter.

‘And yes, the Heideggerese has proved to be a stumbling block, in particular because I’m interested in formalization of some of his ideas.’

You’ll have your work cut out for you.

Refuting Idealists/metaphysicians became not only a matter of trying to practice good philosophy, but doing your patriotic duty.

Have you any _evidence_ for this Thom? It would surely be ironic to conceive of Russell’s rejection of the idealists as an instance of him performing his patriotic duty in wartime.

In response to Chris at comment 45: I think the famous example of this sort of attack-on-Idealism as patriotism is Hobhouse’s Metaphysical Theory of the State — with its line about how the zeppelin bombing of London was the consequence of Hegel’s philosophy. But it should be noted that this was an attack on Idealist political thought, which of course didn’t leave the rest of Idealist thought untouched, but didn’t draw any connection between Idealist logic, say, and the War (as far as I remember); and that Hobhouse, while he had been sympathetic to some aspects of Idealist political thought, had already been something of a critic of Idealism.
And I’m afraid Thom Brooks is a bit off with the dates — Russell’s conversion away from Idealism happened around the turn of the century — which was around the same time as G.E. Moore and John Cook Wilson began their attacks on Idealism. The idea that Idealism in British life suffered a sudden eclipse because of WWI is common, and as Thom Brooks notes, there is some evidence supporting it; but it was actually a gradual, complicated process, with Idealism starting to come under heavy fire from the philosophical avant-garde in the 1890s, and lingering on (at least at Oxford) until WWII, though one gets the sense it was passe by the ’30s. But that was just Idealism; as Chris says, there was some interest in Sartre — Mary Warnock and Iris Murdoch both wrote about him, and Berlin and Stuart Hampshire at least read him.

The total eclipse of Idealism gives hope to those of us who believe that satanic trinity of Frege, Husserl, and Freud has ruined the philosophy of our time.

Dude, Jason, calm down.

I take the point: as I noted, I feared my dates with Russell were off and so they were. I should not have suggested that Russell was patriotic at all, but rather that “in the air” it may well have seemed right and proper for British philosophers to turn their knives on Idealism.

Evidence of the rather quick and dramatic death of Idealism in Britian is easier to come by when we look at old issues of Mind and IJE. These journals were most clearly dominated by Idealists (in particular, figures like Mackenzie and Muirhead) until the start of WWI. We then see a dramatic shift. I certainly grant that their opponents were gaining strength since the turn of the century, but the onset of WWI seems to have really helped the cause. Indeed, British Idealists, not least Muirhead, found themselves going to fairly considerable lengths to justify their interest in a way of doing/thinking about philosophy that had strong roots in Germany during WWI (most dramatically true with Muirhead’s aforementioned pamphlet on Germans vs German philosophy that is quite a curious read).

Whilst it is most true that the rise of Moore coincided with the fall of the Idealists, as it were, I would want to state differently the way the movement died. The “death” seemed to be more in the form of its failure to gain new, significant members (with important exceptions, such as Collingwood, Oakeshott, etc) rather than its knights lay on their swords. Figures such as Sir Hector Hetherington, Sir Henry Jones, Mackenzie, etc continued to do great work both in writing (esp Jones and Mackenzie) and in society: Jones and Hetherington, for example, helped create universities in Wales. Muirhead helped pioneer Birmingham University. Indeed, Brum boasts both the Muirhead Tower and Muirhead Library. I once commented to a dear friend, Simon Caney, how wonderful it was to see buildings commemorate Muirhead—yet he’d never heard of him. Of course, Muirhead was a major figure even post-war. His edited series “The Muirhead Library” published any number of important works, such as Bradley’s Knowledge & Appearance, the first translation of Hegel’s PhG, Radhakrishnan’s and Russell’s early work, etc. Post-WWII their numbers depleted as they died off, as it were. Now, thankfully, interest in British Idealism is taking off yet again both with an eye towards understanding its past and developing its future—I’m particularly interested in this second part.

There was time (pre-WWI) when one couldn’t pick up an academic journal that wasn’t dominated by the Idealists. When I went to write papers on both the decline of British Idealism and also on Hetherington, Muirhead, and Mackenzie, I was struck by the fact that about nothing had been written on these persons for at least fifty years. Perhaps we don’t know much about what happened with the split from Idealism because we simply haven’t thought about it much. I certainly share some this blame as well.

I should add that Mirowski does provide concrete details about the way the American university system was tied into the WWII war effort, and how “operations research” and other paradigms developed within the military came to be influential within postwar civilian intellectual enterprises, often with government and foundation encouragement. It’s not just a “connect the dots” “qui bono” type argument.

David, allow me to express embarrassment a second time: it was unpardonable. Would a pound of my flesh provide sufficient recompense?

One factor which hasn’t been stressed much thus far is the role of religion in all this. In Britain Idealism seems to have been associated with (some form of) religious belief, while logical positivism (and to a lesser extent other strains of early ‘analytic’ philosophy) tended to be anti-clerical and atheistic. This certainly seems to have been a large part of the self-perception of many of the logical positivists as left-wing (Ayer stood as a Labour candidate somewhere in London, if I remember rightly), and of the Idealists (and some of the more dogmatic Oxford realists) as conservative. So there was a political element to this — with, contra the general perception, the ‘analytics’ representing the more ‘left-wing’ party.
This may seem a bit strange, given both Idealism’s earlier association with social reform, and the later association of ‘continental’ philosophy with radicalism — and the accusation that analytic philosophy is politically quietist, if not conservative (though, as Jason Stanley says [perhaps a bit too robustly], many analytic philosophers have tended, and tend, to be left-wing). But it does just show you how things change, as the forces of revolt become the reigning orthodoxy (I suspect that this had something to do with Idealism’s decline: it was too hegemonically dominant for too long, and had to be swept away by something that seemed new, fresh, challenging — that at least is the impression one gets from the memoirs of those involved in the revolt against it. I suspect that this is why the younger philosophers were attracted to the anti-Idealist camp — which, as Thom Brooks suggests, is really what did for Idealism.
At individual places, personality also seems to haveplayed a role — viz Bradley and to a lesser extent Collingwood’s isolation, in contrast to Ryle’s and Austin’s organisational capacity and Ayer’s crusading, at Oxford — but I don’t see how this can explain the overall trend (especially since, as Thom Brooks says, it predated this period). There may be something to Collingwood’s claim that the Idealists’ rivals tended to neglect politics — and this may have helped them. The impression I get, looking at Oxford before and after WWI, is that the Idealist tutors were very concerned about (and good at) training students who then went into politics and administration (in which Idealist ideas retained an influence to after WWII), while the anti-Idealists focussed much more on training other academics, who eventually took over the universities.
All in all, though, Thom Brooks is right — we really don’t know exactly what happened, and there’s a lot of work to be done on this topic.

In tennis, breakfast, and philosophy, the continentals are under attack. And the Lincoln Continental is not doing too well either, even though the thought of Derrida driving down the road in one is high-fuckin-larious.

Many thanks to Josh for his interesting post, with just a brief comment or two to add. First, it is true that the British Idealists were religious, many of them Puritans. This did not lead them to embrace the Tories, but, in fact, the Liberal Party: one thing uniting Idealists perhaps more than anything else is their staunch adherence to the Liberals. Few crossed over to the Labour Party and none (as far as I know) went to the Tories—certainly before the end of WWII. In a book I haven’t found too persuasive, Matt Carter (secretary of the Labour Party today) claims a link from TH Green to Tony Blair. The good news would then be that the Idealists views on social reforms are alive. The bad news is that, well, Tony doesn’t do any of them (and, hence, I found the book unpersuasive…not least because Green and friends were not Labour supporters at all).