↪Joshs OK, thanks. It's an interesting take on Rorty's part but I'm not sure it's held by too many others. It makes for some strange groupings -- Husserl is meant to have more in common with Quine, on this view, than e.g. Heidegger or Sartre, which seems wrong — J
can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work? — Joshs
A similar survey of the supposed vast ranks of continental philosophers? — Banno
First of all, consider this: can you think of any philosophers generally thought of as Analytic who mentioned Hegel positively, or at all, in their work?
— Joshs
John McDowell and Robert Brandom. — Janus
“Thus we have a paradox: at the very moment when analytic philosophy is recognized as the "dominant movement" in world philosophy, it has come to the end of its own project-the dead end, not the completion.”
My take on the matter is that it starts from Hegel; Analytic Philosophers, due to very biased (and wrong, I think) readings of german idealism by Russell and Moore, jump from Kant to Frege, leaving them unable to share a common language with Continental Philosophers, which carried on the tradition from Kant through the nineteenth century.
I guess then that in Analytic Philosophy, the bridging has been done by those Philosophers who stumbled upon Hegel; I'm referring to the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy, who enlists Wilfrid Sellars (who said that his major work "empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" were in fact hegelian meditations), Richard Rorty (who bridges Epistemology to Hermeneutics in "Philosophy and the mirror of Nature" and in various essays collected in "Consequences of Pragmatism" and "Essays on Heidegger and Others"; he also engaged very deeply with post-modernism, in the guise of Lyotard and Derrida, coming to strikingly close conclusions), John McDowell (Pittsburgh Epistemologist whose "Mind And World" was defined by himself as propedeutic to the reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of The Spirit, and whose work drew fruitful Epistemological and Metaphisical comparisons of Sellars and Gadamer), and finally Robert Brandom, whose theory of Inferentialism defined in his masterpiece "Making It Explicit" is essentially a Semantic Reading of Hegel (Brandom is actually working on a book on Hegel's Phenomenology).
We have then other Analytic Philosophers whose work does not explicitly refers to Continental Philosophers, but can be thought as Analytic Philosophers arrived at "Continental" conclusions. In Epistemology they are of course Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (especially the latter, he has nothing in common with the teleology of contemporary analytic Philosophers such as Quine or Searle), Bas Van Fraassen (whose epistemology draws from the latter wittgenstein to form a "constructive empiricism" he also calls "hermeneutic") and the Communitarian epistemologist such as David Bloor and Martin Kusch (Kusch actually wrote his PhD dissertation under Jaakko Hintikka on the theme of Language in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, and also devoted a book to Michel Foucault's Epistemolgy. His interests shifted towards a more standard analytic Philosophy in later years, but in his book "Knowledge by Agreement" he writes that his position is so strongly influenced by the likes of Gadamer and Habermas that he sees no opportunity to engage critically with their thoughts in the book). Hilary Putnam then has been a Reader of certain Continental Philosophers, such as Buber, Levinas and Habermas, and its later internal realism share some views with Rorty on the subjects of truth and knowledge. Michael Dummett has produced one of the most important researches in Analytic Philosophy by drawing its birth through a comparison of Frege's Philosophy and Husserl's phenomenology. Some Philosophers of Mind are actually rediscovering the works of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-ponty on the subjects of perception (even though their understanding of these works is at least doubtful). Other lesser known Analytic philosophers have engaged with continental thoughts (Diego Marconi wrote his PhD dissertation under Sellars on Hegel's Logic, Stanley Cavell has written extensively on Heidegger, Jacques Bouveresse has compared philosophy of language of Hermeneutics with the latter Wittgenstein and with Speech Act theory)
In continental Philosophy the matter is a little more complex. Many continentals do not engage with the mainstream analytic thought, because it is viewed (quite arguably) as discovering platitudes already well known, or to have misguided aims (the desperate search for grounding beliefs and knowledge, described by Heidegger as the real problem of philosophy, this search, not the ground itself).
Many important continental Philosophers have nonetheless shown that they do indeed read analytic works: Jurgen Habermas has written extensively on Speech Acts, Putnam, Davidson, and has been one of the first to recognize the significance of Robert Brandom's works. Karl-Otto Apel has crafted a neo-kantian philosophy (sometimes called also neo-hermeneutics) by a thorough and careful reading and comparing the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Ernst Tugendhat book "Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie" can be considered one of the best works by a continental philosopher on the themes of Analytic Philosophy. Some Continental "Masters" have shown an acquaintance with analytic themes and authors; Gadamer remarked how the Hermeneutic he detailed in Wahrheit und Methode (1960) contains a great deal of concepts also found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
they represent a departure from ‘classic’ Analytic thought. — Joshs
it seems to me that "You just don't get it yet" is the underlying notion here — AmadeusD
↪Janus . . . And then there's Derrida. Like Janus, I've done my due diligence with him and have concluded that he's an extremely good rhetorician who discovered a "cool gig" and stuck with it. So, an exception to every — J
This is a tall order, but if you had to name a single work by Derrida that shows him at his best, what would it be? If I haven't read it, I'll try to. — J
then you need a very robust "theory of error" to explain how it's the case that thousands of skilled philosophers think otherwise, — J
What explains a Habermas scholar being fooled by Habermas? Dumb? Perverse? Doesn’t really seem to fit. What, then? — J
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