Tradition
Continental
Continental philosophy is mainland European thought since about 1900, including phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory and post-structuralism.
The label was largely coined by English-speaking philosophers and covers very different thinkers, whose roots lie in Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger founded phenomenology and its existential turn; Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre developed existentialism; Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutics; Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, critical theory; and Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, post-structuralism. Hannah Arendt wrote on politics and action. It answers questions on experience, interpretation, freedom, power, technology and culture.
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What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. Every Sunday I play hymns the congregation has sung hundreds of times, and every Sunday the same puzzle comes back to me. When the third note of a…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
What is Beauvoir actually claiming with ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’?
The line from The Second Sex gets quoted at me constantly, by people who think it settles every argument about gender in one direction and by people who think it's obviously false. I've realised I don't actually know what Beauvoir meant by…
Started by Aoife Kilbride5 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
Deconstruction is not “anything goes”, and its critics should stop saying it is
Every few months someone in a thread like this one says that Derrida licensed readers to make texts mean whatever they like. I want to argue that this is a caricature, and that it mostly comes from one misquoted sentence. The sentence…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies -
A translator cannot afford to be an anti-intentionalist
I want to defend a thesis that my academic friends find naive: translation makes anti-intentionalism impossible in practice, whatever its merits in theory. Here is why. Every page forces choices the source language does not force. German Sie or du maps onto…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters
Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in 1979 and the English version, which he prepared with David Herr, came out in 1984 as The Imperative of Responsibility. I taught ethics for years without reading it properly, and now that I have time I…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Objectivity belongs to scientific communities, not to individual scientists
I work alongside physicists, and I have never met an objective one. I include myself. We all have pet ideas, we read data in their favour, we are slow to give up an interpretation we have published. And yet I believe physics…
Started by Lars Eriksen6 replies -
Classical phenomenology described one kind of body and called it the structure of experience
This term my reading circle read the fifth chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the one translated as "The Fact of Blackness" in the older English edition and "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" in the newer. My students understood…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies -
Reading group: Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part Two, on prejudice and the fusion of horizons
I taught German literature for thirty years without ever reading Wahrheit und Methode (1960) from cover to cover, which is a confession. I would like to read the central part of it slowly with anyone willing. I propose the second part, the…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
Reading group: Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
Georges Canguilhem's essay began as his medical thesis in 1943, written while he was also active in the Resistance, and was reissued in 1966 with a second part, "New Reflections". It is one of the founding texts of the philosophy of medicine,…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Searle’s “X counts as Y in C” leaves out the power that makes people accept it
I spend a lot of time in job centres, accompanying people as a volunteer. A person walks in and, after one interview, counts as a jobseeker. The status comes with obligations (attend, apply, report), sanctions if they fail, and a set of…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt6 replies -
The analytic/continental split is mostly an accident of the 1930s, not a philosophical divide
Reading logic in Kraków gives me a particular view of this. The Lwów–Warsaw school that Twardowski founded (Łukasiewicz, Leśniewski, Tarski and others) was doing rigorous analytic work in central Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Then the war destroyed it. Tarski was…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak7 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
What does Derrida’s différance actually claim about meaning?
Every year one or two bright students in my terminale class discover Derrida online and come to class announcing that “there is nothing outside the text”, which they take to mean that nothing is real except words. The others are either impressed…
Started by Khady Sène4 replies -
What did Weber actually mean by “value-free” social science?
In arguments about whether journalism or research can be neutral, Max Weber gets quoted by both sides. One side says Weber proved social science must be value-free. The other says Weber admitted that values decide what we study, so neutrality is a…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Frege and Husserl started on the same side. What was the psychologism dispute about?
I've been reading about the split between analytic and continental philosophy because my colleagues treat it as two tribes. What surprised me is that both traditions are said to trace back, around 1900, to two men who agreed about something: Frege and…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
Reading group: Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, and whether ‘mind-only’ means idealism
Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā), with his own short commentary, is the most compact argument for the Yogācāra claim that there is "only consciousness" (vijñaptimātra). It is also the text that most invites the question of whether Yogācāra is a form of idealism,…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
My brother’s conversion: can an experience be real and its interpretation wrong?
My younger brother is an engineer, a careful and slightly dry man, raised like me without religion. Last spring he spent a week at a Benedictine abbey, mostly because a colleague recommended the silence. He came back saying that during the night…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Are talk therapy and antidepressants treating the same thing?
I have been in psychoanalysis for years in Buenos Aires, and like many people here I have also seen a psychiatrist and taken medication. At some point I started asking whether the two were working on the same problem from two sides…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 replies