Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy is a set of philosophical traditions from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries of continental Europe. In this sense, the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a variety of thinkers and traditions outside of the analytic movement. Continental philosophy develops mainly in Continental Europe (hence its name), especially in France and Germany, while analytical philosophy has its origin in the Anglo-Saxon countries of Great Britain and the United States. Continental philosophy is characterized by being more speculative and giving more importance to history than analytical philosophy.² Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and branches of Western Marxism. Some of the most influential authors of tradition were Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and José Ortega y Gasset in the first half of the century, followed by Michel Foucault, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and Gilles Deleuze in the second. The Frankfurt School had as prominent exponents Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas.

It is difficult to identify statements common to all these philosophical movements. The term continental philosophy, like analytic philosophy, lacks a clear definition and may simply mark a family resemblance of disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally pejorative rather than descriptive, serving as a label for types of Western philosophy rejected or despised by analytic philosophers. However, Michael E. Rosen has attempted to identify common issues that characterize continental philosophy.

• First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that natural sciences are the only or most accurate way to understand natural phenomena (see scientificism). This contrasts with many analytical philosophers who consider their research as continuous or subordinate to those of the natural sciences. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends on a "pre-theoretical substratum of experience" (a version of the Kantian conditions of possible experience or the "world of life" phenomenological) and that scientific methods are inappropriate to fully understand such conditions of intelligibility of the world.
• Second, continental philosophy usually considers these possible conditions of experience as variables: determined, at least in part, by factors such as context, time-space location, language, culture or history. Thus, continental philosophy tends towards historicalism. While analytical philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems capable of being analyzed apart from its historical origins (as scientists consider that the history of science is not essential to scientific research), continental philosophy generally suggests that "the philosophical argument cannot be separated from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergency."
• Third, continental philosophy generally maintains that the human agency can change these conditions of experience possible: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways." Therefore, continental philosophers tend to show great interest in the unity of theory and praxis, they often consider that their philosophical research is closely related to personal, moral or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in Marxist tradition ("The philosophers have done nothing but interpreting the world in various ways, but what it is about; the point, however, is to change it"), but it is also central to existentialism and poststructuralism.
• A last characteristic feature of continental philosophy is the emphasis on metaphilosophy. Following the development and success of natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases (such as in German idealism or phenomenology), this is manifested as a renewal of the traditional view that philosophy is first and foundational science, a priori. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory or structuralism), it is argued that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. Some continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the last Heidegger or Derrida) doubt that any conception of philosophy can consistently achieve their declared goals.

Ultimately, the above theses derive from a broad Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than purely empirical investigation..

The term

Henri Bergson

The term continental philosophy, in the above sense, was first used by English-speaking philosophers to describe certain university courses in the 1970s, emerging as a collective name for philosophies that later spread in France and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

However, the term (and its approximate meaning) can be found at least as far back as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill contrasts the thought of "continental philosophy" and "continental philosophers" of Kantian influence with the English empiricism of Jeremy Bentham and the 18th century in general. This notion gained prominence early in the century. XX, since figures like Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore propelled a vision of philosophy closely related to the natural sciences, progressing through the logical analysis of concepts. This tradition, which has come to be widely known as "analytic philosophy," became dominant in Britain and the United States from the 1930s onward. Russell and Moore rejected Hegelianism and similar philosophies as a distinctive part of their new movement. Commenting on the history of this distinction, in 1945 Bertrand Russell distinguished "two schools of philosophy, which can be broadly distinguished as Continental and British, respectively", a division he saw as operating "since the time of Locke".

Since the 1970s, however, many philosophers in the United States and Britain have been interested in continental philosophers since Kant, and philosophical traditions in many European countries have similarly incorporated many aspects of the &# 34;analytical". Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Similarly, self-described "continental philosophers" they can be found in philosophy departments in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia, and some well-known analytic philosophers claim to carry out better studies in Continental philosophy than self-identified programs in Continental Philosophy, particularly at the level of postgraduate education.. The "continental philosophy" it is thus defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions and influences rather than a geographical distinction. The issue of geographic specificity has been revisited more recently in postcolonial and decolonial approaches to 'continental philosophy', which critically examine the ways in which European imperial and colonial projects have influenced the production of academic knowledge. For this reason, some scholars have advocated a "postcontinental philosophy" as a development of continental philosophy.

History

Martin Heidegger

The history of Continental philosophy (taken in a narrower sense) is generally considered to begin with German Idealism. Led by figures such as Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German Idealism developed out of the work by Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely associated with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. In addition to the central figures listed above, some important contributors to German Idealism also include Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

As the institutional roots of "continental philosophy" in many cases descending directly from those of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl has always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition. Husserl's notion of a noema, the non-psychological content of thought, his correspondence with Gottlob Frege, and his investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest. among analytic philosophers.

J.G. Merquior argued that a distinction between analytic and continental philosophy can be clearly identified with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose scientific caution and elevation of insight paved the way for existentialism. Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very different path [from that of the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One could say that it all started with Henri Bergson".

An illustration of some important differences between "analytical" and "continental" can be found in the text "The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language" by Rudolf Carnap (originally published in 1932 as "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyze der Sprache"), a paper that some commentators have described as particularly controversial. Carnap's article argues that Heidegger's lecture "What is metaphysics?" violates logical syntax to create meaningless pseudo-propositions. Furthermore, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the time were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that lacked syntactical meaning.

With the rise of Nazism, many of Germany's philosophers, especially those of Jewish descent or leftist or liberal political sympathies (such as many in the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School) fled to the Anglo-Saxon world. Those philosophers who remained, if they stayed in academia at all, had to come to terms with Nazi control of the universities. Others, like Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany, developed a diplomatic relationship with Nazism when it came to power.

Both before and after World War II, there was a growing interest in German philosophy in France. A new interest in communism translated into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who were first studied extensively in the (politically conservative) French university system of the Third Republic. At the same time, Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenology became increasingly influential, perhaps due to its resonances with French philosophies that placed great importance on first-person perspective (an idea found in divergent forms of French thought such as Cartesianism, Spiritualism and Bergsonism). The most important writer in this popularization of phenomenology was the author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who called the philosophy existentialism after him. Another important tension of continental thought is the branches of structuralism and post-structuralism. Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics, French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss began to apply the structural paradigm to the humanities. In the 1960s and 1970s, poststructuralist authors such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze developed various critiques of structuralism.

Recent Anglo-American Developments

From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an influx of continental philosophers (especially German Jewish students of Nietzsche and Heidegger) to the United States because of the persecution of the Jews and after the Second World War. Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably the most notable of this wave, reaching the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, Anglo-Saxon philosophy departments began offering continental philosophy courses in the late 1960s and 1970s.

America's university departments of literature, fine arts, film, sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research. Continental philosophy features prominently in a number of British and Irish philosophy departments, for example at the University of Essex, Warwick, Sussex, Dundee, Aberdeen (Center for Modern Thought) and University College Dublin, as well as Manchester Metropolitan, Kingston, Staffordshire (postgraduate only) and the Open University. North American philosophy departments offering courses in Continental Philosophy include the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Boston College, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Vanderbilt University, DePaul University, Villanova University, the University of Guelph, The New School, Pennsylvania State University, University of Oregon, Emory University, Duquesne University, University of Memphis, King's College University, and Loyola University Chicago. The most prominent organization for continental philosophy in the United States is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (known as SPEP).

Significant works