Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and
20th-century philosophical traditions from
mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated
among English-speaking philosophers in the
second half of the 20th century, who used
it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions
outside the analytic movement. Continental
philosophy includes the following movements:
German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism
(and its antecedents, such as the thought
of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics,
structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction,
French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School
and related branches of Western Marxism.It
is difficult to identify non-trivial claims
that would be common to all the preceding
philosophical movements. The term "continental
philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks
clear definition and may mark merely a family
resemblance across disparate philosophical
views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that
the term was originally more pejorative than
descriptive, functioning as a label for types
of western philosophy rejected or disliked
by analytic philosophers. Nonetheless, Michael
E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes
that typically characterize continental philosophy.
First, continental philosophers generally
reject the view that the natural sciences
are the only or most accurate way of understanding
natural phenomena. This contrasts with many
analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries
as continuous with, or subordinate to, those
of the natural sciences. Continental philosophers
often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical
substrate of experience" (a version of Kantian
conditions of possible experience or the phenomenological
"lifeworld") and that scientific methods are
inadequate to fully understand such conditions
of intelligibility.
Second, continental philosophy usually considers
these conditions of possible experience as
variable: determined at least partly by factors
such as context, space and time, language,
culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy
tends toward historicism (or historicity).
Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy
in terms of discrete problems, capable of
being analyzed apart from their historical
origins (much as scientists consider the history
of science inessential to scientific inquiry),
continental philosophy typically suggests
that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced
from the textual and contextual conditions
of its historical emergence".
Third, continental philosophy typically holds
that human agency can change these conditions
of possible experience: "if human experience
is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated
in other ways". Thus continental philosophers
tend to take a strong interest in the unity
of theory and practice, and often see their
philosophical inquiries as closely related
to personal, moral, or political transformation.
This tendency is very clear in the Marxist
tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point, however,
is to change it"), but is also central in
existentialism and post-structuralism.
A final characteristic trait of continental
philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy.
In the wake of the development and success
of the natural sciences, continental philosophers
have often sought to redefine the method and
nature of philosophy. In some cases (such
as German idealism or phenomenology), this
manifests as a renovation of the traditional
view that philosophy is the first, foundational,
a priori science. In other cases (such as
hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism),
it is held that philosophy investigates a
domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical.
And some continental philosophers (such as
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Heidegger,
or Derrida) doubt whether any conception of
philosophy can coherently achieve its stated
goals.Ultimately, the foregoing themes derive
from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge,
experience, and reality are bound and shaped
by conditions best understood through philosophical
reflection rather than exclusively empirical
inquiry.
== The term ==
The term "continental philosophy", in the
above sense, was first widely used by English-speaking
philosophers to describe university courses
in the 1970s, emerging as a collective name
for the philosophies then widespread in France
and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism,
structuralism, and post-structuralism.However,
the term (and its approximate sense) can be
found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart
Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill
contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of
"Continental philosophy" and "Continental
philosophers" with the English empiricism
of Bentham and the 18th century generally.
This notion gained prominence in the early
20th century as figures such as Bertrand Russell
and G. E. Moore advanced a vision of philosophy
closely allied with natural science, progressing
through logical analysis. This tradition,
which has come to be known broadly as "analytic
philosophy", became dominant in Britain and
the United States from roughly 1930 onward.
Russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism
and its philosophical relatives a distinctive
part of their new movement. Commenting on
the history of the distinction in 1945, Russell
distinguished "two schools of philosophy,
which may be broadly distinguished as the
Continental and the British respectively",
a division he saw as operative "from the time
of Locke".Since the 1970s, however, many philosophers
in the United States and Britain have taken
interest in continental philosophers since
Kant, and the philosophical traditions in
many European countries have similarly incorporated
many aspects of the "analytic" movement. Self-described
analytic philosophy flourishes in France,
including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin,
Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger,
François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Likewise,
self-described "continental philosophers"
can be found in philosophy departments in
the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia,
and some well-known analytic philosophers
claim to conduct better scholarship on continental
philosophy than self-identified programs in
continental philosophy, particularly at the
level of graduate education. "Continental
philosophy" is thus defined in terms of a
family of philosophical traditions and influences
rather than a geographic distinction.
== History ==
The history of continental philosophy (taken
in its narrower sense) is usually thought
to begin with German idealism. Led by figures
like Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German
idealism developed out of the work of Immanuel
Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely
linked with romanticism and the revolutionary
politics of the Enlightenment. Besides the
central figures listed above, important contributors
to German idealism also included Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl
Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
As the institutional roots of "continental
philosophy" in many cases directly descend
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 philosophies can
be first clearly identified with Henri Bergson
(1859–1941), whose wariness of science and
elevation of intuition paved the way for existentialism.
Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing
in France took a very dissimilar path [from
the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One
might say it all began with Henri Bergson."
An illustration of some important differences
between "analytic" and "continental" styles
of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's
"Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical
Analysis of Language" (originally published
in 1932 as "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch
Logische Analyse der Sprache"), a paper some
observers have described as particularly polemical.
Carnap's paper argues that Heidegger's lecture
"What Is Metaphysics?" violates logical syntax
to create nonsensical pseudo-statements. Moreover,
Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians
of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing
statements that were syntactically meaningless.
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 English-speaking
world. Those philosophers who remained—if
they remained in academia at all—had to
reconcile themselves to Nazi control of the
universities. Others, such as Martin Heidegger,
among the most prominent German philosophers
to stay in Germany, developed a diplomatic
relationship with Nazism when it came to power.
Both before and after World War II there was
a growth of interest in German philosophy
in France. A new interest in communism translated
into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who became
for the first time studied extensively in
the politically conservative French university
system of the Third Republic. At the same
time the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl
and Heidegger became increasingly influential,
perhaps owing to its resonances with French
philosophies which placed great stock in the
first-person perspective (an idea found in
divergent forms such as Cartesianism, spiritualism,
and Bergsonism). Most important in this popularization
of phenomenology was the author and philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre, who called his philosophy
existentialism. (See 20th-century French philosophy.)
Another major strain of continental thought
is structuralism/post-structuralism. Influenced
by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure, French anthropologists such as
Claude Lévi-Strauss began to apply the structural
paradigm to the humanities. In the 1960s and
'70s, post-structuralists developed various
critiques of structuralism. Post-structuralist
thinkers include Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
== 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,
particularly German Jewish students of Nietzsche
and Heidegger, to the United States on account
of the persecution of the Jews and later World
War II; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor
W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably
the most notable of this wave, arriving in
the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, philosophy
departments began offering courses in continental
philosophy in the late 1960s and 1970s.
American university departments in literature,
the 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 instance at the University of Essex, Warwick,
Sussex and Dundee, Manchester Metropolitan,
Kingston University, Staffordshire University
and University College Dublin, and in North
American Philosophy departments, including
the University of Hawai'i 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,
the University of Memphis, University of King's
College, 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 ==
== See also ==
Index of continental philosophy articlesLesser-known
continental movementsExistential Thomism
Neo-Hegelianism
Neo-Kantianism
Non-philosophy
Object-oriented ontology
Speculative realism
== Notes ==
== References ==
Babich, Babette (2003). "On the Analytic-Continental
Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth,
Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy."
In: C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing
Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Amherst,
NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. pp. 63–103.
Critchley, Simon (2001). Continental Philosophy:
A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285359-2.
Cutrofello, Andrew (2005). Continental Philosophy:
A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge Contemporary
Introductions to Philosophy. New York; Abingdon:
Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Glendinning, Simon (2006). The idea of continental
philosophy: a philosophical chronicle. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Leiter, Brian; Rosen, Michael, eds. (2007).
The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy.
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Schrift, Alan D. (2010). The History of Continental
Philosophy. Chicago; Illinois: University
of Chicago Press Press.
Solomon, Robert C. (1988). Continental philosophy
since 1750: the rise and fall of the self.
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Kenny, Anthony (2007). A New History of Western
Philosophy, Volume IV: Philosophy in the Modern
World. New York: Oxford University Press.
== External links ==
Continental philosophy at Curlie
