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On The History Of Continental Philosophy [Swiss Philosophical Preprint Series.No-65]
Mulligan, Kevin
Mulligan, Kevin
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Philosophie.ch_65.pdf
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"Continental philosophy" is now a well-established term in the English-speaking world: it has a point and is taken to refer to a fairly well-defined entity. It is, for example, regularly used in job descriptions. But any explanation that goes beyond something like the following, "Continental philosophy is the sort of philosophy produced by or in the wake of philosophers such as Heidegger and Adorno, Habermas and Apel, Sartre and Lévinas, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser and Derrida" is likely to be controversial. The term excludes analytical and other types of exact philosophy done on the continent.1 Nor is the contrast between Analytic and Continental Philosophy supposed to encourage the assumption that Wittgenstein and Carnap are honorary Anglo-Saxons. Continental Philosophy is often held to have the following distinctive features : it is inherently obscure and obscurantist, often closer to the genre of literature than to that of philosophy; it is devoid of arguments, distinctions, examples and analysis; it is problemarm. "Ask me what I'm working on, and I'll reply with the name of a problem", the Analytical philosopher will proudly say, "ask them, and they'll reply with a proper name"; (a variant on this: Continental Philosopher to an Analytical Philosopher: "I'm a Phenomenologist", "I'm an Analytical Philosopher, I think for myself"). It is also, he will ruefully add, terribly popular, but, he will happily continue, mainly in departments of literature and in some of the human sciences. He might also add that Continental Philosophy came to prominence in the English-speaking world because it seemed to address issues that analytical philosophy had conspicuously failed to address: the nature of textual interpretation, aesthetic questions, as well as a variety of issues in social and political philosophy. The fact that this one-sidedness had all but disappeared by the 1970's does not, he will have to go on to say, seem to have impeded the career of Continental Philosophy.
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2009
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With permission of the license/copyright holder