Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide

Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century

Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, Paul M. Livingston, Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, Paul M. Livingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317660996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice.

Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today.

1 Introduction

Contemporary Philosophy as Synthetic Philosophy

Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston

The thirteen new essays collected here, written from diverse perspectives, address many more or less interrelated topics of contemporary philosophical discussion and inquiry. What they most centrally share, though, is a common orientation toward the contemporary reality of what might be called synthetic philosophy: philosophical work that situates itself beyond the problematic “divide” between the “analytic” and “continental” traditions, which still largely shapes and constrains philosophical work in the English-speaking world.¹,²

As students of academic philosophy learn, typically relatively early in their careers, most of the work that goes on in many departments—at least most of the time—remains recognizably “analytic,” in drawing on the work of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and W.V.O. Quine. This is work that—characteristically but not exclusively—privileges logic, practices or responds to projects of linguistic or conceptual analysis, and often (though again not invariably) models philosophical inquiry itself as methodologically analogous to, or continuous with, empirical-scientific inquiry into the natural world. As beginning students also quickly discover, analytic philosophy in this sense is routinely contrasted, in the pedagogical practices as well as sociological divisions of academic philosophers, with what is called “continental” philosophy. This is—as a quick characterization might run—philosophy that draws on the work of thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, and develops diverse projects and methods (such as dialectics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, Marxism, critical theory, and deconstruction). These projects and methods are, at least at first glance, generally more or less distinct from those characteristic of the “analytic” tradition.

The starkness and apparent exhaustiveness of the division as it exists and is often maintained in academic philosophy today can present students on their way to specialization with a difficult and problematic choice: either to work in areas and pursue topics and questions to which they are not naturally drawn, or to risk marginalization or dismissal by pursuing the further development of the extant work that they see as most promising. At the same time, students whose abilities or inclinations make them more comfortable with “analytic” methods and concerns often undergo the frustrating experience of recognizing the relevance of texts and thinkers situated outside the analytic tradition, but lacking—due to the one-sidedness of their training—the resources seriously to engage with them. More broadly, though it is of relatively recent origin (coming to characterize academic philosophy generally only as recently as the 1960s), the division between the traditions has caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems among working philosophers and so has significantly limited, in many cases, the range and fruitfulness of philosophical discussions and debates.

The essays that comprise this volume attempt to move beyond this problematic situation by construing philosophy as a cosmopolitan endeavor that should not be constrained by any a priori presumption of metaphilosophical division. To this end, each of the essays draws centrally on problems, methods, and results of both traditions to produce new work across a variety of areas. The contemporary possibility of such work and its concrete reality today, as indicated and exemplified by the essays, also points toward a future of philosophical thought in the twenty-first century, no longer determined as “analytic” or “continental” but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of much of what is best in the diverse legacy of twentieth-century approaches.

In drawing in this way on the best outcomes of these methodologically diverse twentieth-century traditions, the new work assembled here thus shows how the characteristic problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed today. Collectively, they thereby point toward a future of philosophical thought and research that brings the best results and most significant outcomes of both traditions to bear in synthetic fashion on problems with which both have been deeply concerned. In so doing, they also indicate some of the possible forms of a philosophical future of discussion and inquiry that substantially inherits both traditions but is not limited to either one, and so point toward, at least in broad outline, some of the distinctive concerns and broad contours that might characterize much good philosophical work in general over the next several decades.³

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a large number of analyses of the causes or origins of the analytic-continental divide, or of its persistence in contemporary academic philosophy.⁴ Going back even further and continuing through the present, there have also been many attempts at what may be understood as “bridge-building”: projects that seek to make figures, themes, or topics identified with one or the other of the traditions available and intelligible to those trained, and at home, in the other.⁵ We do not dispute the usefulness and importance of either of these two kinds of projects, but the approach of this volume is different from either of them. Rather than attempting simply to comprehend the divide or place into dialogue two traditions still conceived as essentially distinct, the essays in this volume situate themselves beyond the divide in that they operate in a context wherein the divide is no longer assumed to determine or constrain philosophical thought and inquiry. Here, the right metaphor is no longer, we think, that of building bridges or routes of access between two distinct and (as it is often assumed) mutually incommensurable traditions. Rather, a better picture would be that of the confluence of two streams that, having a common origin and trajectory for much of their course, have recently diverged and run roughly in parallel for a while (although sometimes at significant distance from each other), before converging once again.⁶

In thus situating themselves in the dynamic confluence of the two traditions and realizing this confluence as a reality of contemporary thought, the essays of this volume also move beyond work that is simply “comparative” in the sense of identifying static similarities and differences of doctrine, theory, or result across the two twentieth-century traditions. Instead, in developing the implications of problems that are posed by the joint legacy of the two traditions as sites for contemporary philosophical research and thought, the essays in this volume pose and re-open longstanding philosophical questions and provide positive directives for future work on them in a pluralist context beyond the limitations of the analytic-continental divide, a context that is already—as the work collected here attests—recognizably “ours” today.

Doing so also involves reflecting the reality of the rapidly changing situation of the institutions and forms of academic philosophy today, as new technologies and media increasingly shape and modulate philosophical discussion, both within and without academia itself. This volume has its proximal origin in an online symposium that took place in 2013 on the philosophy blog NewAPPS, devoted to the discussion of a paper by one of the editors (Livingston) and including extensive critical commentary by another editor (Bell) as well as one of the current contributors (Novaes). The discussion of the paper—on connections between Derrida’s deconstructive notion of the “undecidable” and the classic formalization of that notion in the context of the axiomatic theory of arithmetic by Kurt Gödel—drew in comments by a wide variety of discussants, ranging from graduate students to professional analytic as well as continental philosophers, and thereby bearing witness to the actual possibility (though also some of the limitations and inherent obstacles) of pluralist philosophical discussion on the web. In the spirit of this discussion and its contemporary relevance—but also in the belief that the more traditional media of essay and book still provide the essential conditions for the development of philosophical problems and questions—the essays collected here all draw together currents of recent and contemporary philosophy usually held apart and illustrate some of the genuine emerging possibilities for synthetic philosophy today.

In addition to drawing together themes, topics, and concrete problems of recent philosophy on both sides of the divide, the issues developed in the various essays that comprise this volume already point toward at least some of the likely contours of philosophical discussions to come. In the remainder of this introduction, we adumbrate briefly some of these contours, as they are already evident in various and overlapping ways in the texts collected here, and as they point toward problems and questions likely to be discussed much more, in a pluralist context, over the next several decades. These contours, as we shall see, pass through a wide variety of topical areas and also crosscut the fourfold division of (rough) topic areas we have adopted for the organization of the essays in the volume itself. Their eclectic traversal of the various topic areas into which academic philosophical activity is traditionally divided indexes, we think, not only the possibility but the contemporary reality, evident in the approaches and arguments of the essays here included, of new kinds of philosophical discussion and practice beyond the divide.⁷

1. Sense Beyond Language: After the Linguistic Turn

In 1967, Richard Rorty used the phrase “The Linguistic Turn” (adopted from Gustav Bergmann) as the title for an anthology of papers by a variety of representatives of (what was then just becoming defined as) analytic philosophy.⁸ The anthology comprised essays by, and about, representatives of logical positivism and the “ordinary language” school of philosophical analysis, as well the newer project of applying insights from scientific linguistics to philosophical and linguistic analysis. As Rorty suggested in the volume’s introduction, these partisans of the turn to language might be identified as those holding the view that “philosophical problems … may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use,” and this view was (at the time of Rorty’s writing) taken by many of those proponents as “the most important philosophical discovery of our time.”⁹ Beyond giving unity and shape to the “analytic” tradition for many—though by no means all—of its practitioners, this kind of commitment to the revolutionary implications of language and the analysis of its structure for traditional philosophical problems has also played a decisive role for many (though again not all) of the diverse projects grouped as “continental” philosophy in the twentieth century. For structuralism, philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory, and many of the varieties of “post-structuralism” (to name just a few), reflection on language and its structure has provided both a key methodological resource and an essential thematic dimension, determining or articulating projects and problems, as well as the prospects for their solution, resolution, or transformation.

Today, however, many philosophers on both sides of the divide have come to see their projects as located, in important ways, beyond or after the linguistic turn. This does not necessarily mean that they philosophize as if the turn had never occurred, or that they repudiate or challenge the important and varied results (for instance those about linguistic structure, meaning, reference and sense) that have emerged from it. But it does mean that, while philosophers continue to employ methods and presuppose results drawn from the linguistic turn, there is a greater sense today of the genuine depth of the questions that are inherently involved in the use of language as a philosophical resource or the analysis of its structure as a means of resolving philosophical problems.¹⁰ For instance, one is today likely to see analyses of referential and other forms of meaning undertaken—on the “analytic” side—as analyses of the structure of mental or cognitive, rather than strictly linguistic, content.¹¹ Likewise, one is today more likely to see projects of analysis and critical reflection on the “continental” side taking up in a renewed way the broader questions of the relationship of language to being and the world, rather than simply assuming this application, as in the forms of linguistic idealism or constructivism that have characterized some such projects in the past.¹²

One way to receive the linguistic turn in this partially transformed context is to see its methods and results as pointing toward the possibility of a broader conception of the foundations of meaning, concepts, and their analysis. This kind of conception draws on the implications and the results of specifically linguistic analysis but generalizes them beyond language itself or considers their broader bearing on questions of the basis of meaning or sense, without prejudice to its linguistic foundation or determination. In the current volume, David Woodruff Smith’s essay, “Truth and Epoché: The Semantic Conception of Truth in Phenomenology,” might be considered exemplary in this regard. In the essay, Smith shows how the “semantic” conception of truth developed by Alfred Tarski on the basis of his formal analysis of the definition and structure of truth-predicates for specific formal languages can be generalized to provide a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of truth as it occurs in experiencing consciousness, without prejudice to its linguistic or non-linguistic status. Here, then, and for projects of this sort more broadly, it is not taken for granted either that the analysis of linguistic structure must be rigorously separated from the analysis of phenomenological experience, or that one kind of analysis must serve as a foundation for the other. Instead, the focus is on developing the forms and structures that underlie linguistic meaning specifically alongside homologous or shared ones that plausibly underlie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Contemporary Philosophy as Synthetic Philosophy
• Part I Methodologies
• Part II Truth and Meaning
• Part III Metaphysics and Ontology
• Part IV Values, Personhood, and Agency
• List of Contributors
• Index