20th-Century Philosophy: An Introduction

[Lockesdonkey]

I've noticed that there is a severe lack of threads about the humanities on this forum, especially all of the interesting stuff that has gone on in the last century. So, without further ado, I begin.

Overview
On account of my (ongoing) Western education, I will focus essentially exclusively on modern Western philosophy. Western philosophy can be broadly divided into two groups, dating back from the end of the Renaissance: British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism; for some reason, they are generally just termed Empirical and Continental philosophy, respectively.

The school of empiricism--which while predominant in the English-speaking world also has adherents on the Continent, most notably in Austria and Germany--is based in the theory that the only things that are known are those that are directly observed by the senses--either directly or through someone else's reports. In the modern age it has focused chiefly on science, and its application to other fields. Empirical philosophy is the basis of modern democracy and capitalism, but has evolved to a point of being essentially the analysis of language and the use of logic. This field of philosophy was very active up until the 1950s and 1960s, when there were essentially no more ideas to discover--there simply wasn't too much more to say about it. It's still very much alive, as its products, such as symbolic logic, are such useful tools for more than just philosophy--they form an excellent system to view everything from mathematics to computer science to politics.

The larger school, continental philosophy, is much more diverse and less "hard," focused on the "meaning of life"-type questions, as opposed to the cold objects of the empiricists. Unlike empiricism, it (originally at least) denies that the senses are the exclusive source of knowledge, and, at several points in history, often doubted that the senses were a reliable source of knowlege: how do we know we're not all plugged into the Matrix, or something like that? This school is constantly developing, even right now.


I'm not going to get into Objectivism (a vaguely empiricist philosophy) in this post.

Now that I've explained everything from Descartes and Locke to Russell and Foucault in two paragraphs, without naming names, I'll actually bother explaining.

First, twentieth-century philosophy actually begins in the middle of the nineteenth, with the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Friederich Nietzsche. While they had some influence in their time, their primary influence occured in the twentieth century, after their deaths.

Two Men with Unpronouncable Names
I'll start with Kierkegaard. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard did most of his work in the 1840s and 1850s, before he died young (at the age of 42) in 1855.

It was in Kierkegaard's lifetime that the Industrial Revolution came into full swing on the Continent after the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars, which had ended when Kierkegaard was 2. Raised by his father to be a devout Christian, his father's deathbed wish was for young Søren to become a pastor, which he did. At university, he found himself more interested in philosophy than theology, but his philosophy was nevertheless profoundly influenced by Christianity and much of his later writing and later life focused on the role of Christianity and on criticizing the hollowness of modern "Christendom" (i.e. the institutions and practices, rather than the doctrines, of Chrisitians).

Kierkegaard's life, during the mad race of the Industrial Revolution, caused him to see not progress but regression--an emptiness and a hollowness which was papered over by the material gains of industry. He blamed this on several factors, and engaged in a long argument with Hegelians over several issues, but he chiefly criticized the use of the objective truth in ALL matters, arguing that subjectivity IS truth, that truth IS subjectivity. The key, acording to Kierkegaard, is that the most important thing is for a person to discover his Self, and his Self is all. And to know the Self, one had to know truth, and to know truth, one had to be subjective. By rejecting subjectivity in favor of objectivity in matters where objectivity is not desirable, the Industrial Revolution, Kierkegaard argued, forced people into living a lie.

This general line of reasoning is regarded as the first Existentialism, which is the key to much of twentieth-century Continental (read: French, and, to a lesser extent, German) philosophy.

Another segment of Existentialism, the Absurd, was touched upon by Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in which the "knight of faith" is one who gives up all, trusting the in the Absurd belief that God will bring it back to him. The Absurd is important for several philosophers later.

The other Man with an Unpronouncable Name is Friederich Nietzsche, a German who was only eleven at the time of Kierkegaard's death. Nietzsche, presumably, is more familiar to you; at least some of you played SMAC, where The Will To Power was a technology, complete with Nietzsche blurb. While the Will to Power is a key concept, it is not his ONLY concept.

Nietzsche also saw the emptiness left by the Industrial Revolution, but he argued that it wasn't an acceptance of the objective that did this, but Christianity and its "slave morality" of pity. While I don't wish to get into specifics, Nietzsche fundamentally argued that those who have strong senses of self, are individuals rather than a part of the crowd, should determine morality--a "master" morality, and that the objective of humans is to have a sense of self. He extended on Kierkegaard in many ways (even if he didn't intend to) by criticizing the Christian institutions of the day for twisting the original doctrines of Christianity--which, for him, were the words of Jesus, one of the few who ever got close to the status of Übermensch ("over-man" or individual of great power).

With that, we move on.

In the Wake of the Great War
While several philosophers did pick up on Keirkegaard and Nietzsche (Bergson, Sorel, and Pareto spring to mind) before the First World War, it was only after it that philosophy began to truly change.

The Great War and events in that time period utterly shattered the conceptions of the Western world. Going into the war, the West was confident in its moral superiority, technological progress, and the certainty of science. It was certain that it was the best that the world could produce, that it had a moral obligation to "civilize" the world because it was infinately more civilized than anyone else.

Then came the war.

Four years of utterly inhumane and largely pointless warfare which saw an entire generation decimated and scarred for life. Thousands of men cut down in a single attack by machine-gun fire to gain a few meters' worth of barren land. Disease in the trenches. The gas, killing and blinding and maiming soldiers silently. The pointless destruction of economies to be put into the unstoppable meatgrinder of the front. The utter horrors inflicted by one person on another, the young lives--some of them, such as Henry Moseley, the bright young chemist who invented the modern Periodic table--snuffed out too soon, in the name of what were supposed to be civilized governments--it was all too much. Common people began to realize what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had seen so long ago: Life in the modern world is empty, pointless, hollow. There is no meaning anymore.

People started looking for answers. Trying to remain sane, they looked to their old consolers--philosophy and science.

Science had no answers for them: just as the war began, physics, queen of the sciences, always so precise, so certain, underwent a revolution. Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915; Max Planck's concepts of quantum theory began to be accepted as De Broglie came out with his equation proving the wave-particle duality, Schrodinger came out with his wave equation, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was published. Science now indicated that the physical world was as uncertain as the one of their lives. That was no comfort.

Neither did philosophy have any answers; empiricists' reaction was to decide that philosophy's only business was the clarification of thought, ergo, the analysis of language; other philosophers said, "Nice. Let's analyze this..." which was no comfort, either. Hence we see the booze flow in New York and Paris and everywhere else.

First, we address the empiricists. The empiricist reaction to the postwar world--the Age of Anxiety--is to declare the old questions about the meaning of life, the existance of God, and basically all of the other major philosophical questions of history meaningless. Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Vienna Circle declared that the only concepts worth thinking about philosophically were those (and forgive me for generalizing) that have verifiable (or falsifiable) truth values. Everything else is just personal opinion. This won him many supporters in stolidly empiricist Britain, where he eventually moved on the invitation of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, among others. Russell and Alfred North Whitehead codified the modern system of analytic, logical philosophy with their massive Principia Mathematica, which provides an unparalleled system for the analysis of language. At this point, discussion in the empirical field becomes largely pointless.

On the other side of the Channel, however, philosophy was humming along quite nicely--and increasingly bizzarely. German Martin Heidegger attempted to totally alter the framework of philosophy by shifting the focus from things that are to the meaning of what it is to be in the first place--in the terminology, ontology. Heidegger expressed concern about many things, and wrote extensively. He is chiefly important in this introduction, however, because a statement he made being misinterpreted by Sartre, and because of his influence on Derrida's Deconstruction, a philosophy in vogue since the late 1960s.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the last modern philosophers who largely make sense to somebody who reads a few articles about him. A Frenchman profoundly disturbed by the Great War, he developed Kierkegaard's existentialism, with elements of Nietzsche and the assertion that all life is absurd (corrupted from Heidegger's statement that all life has the potential to become absurd) to form modern existentialism, which remained popular (among philosophers, and to a lesser extent the public) through the 1960s. Essentially, Sartre's existentialism argues that there is a meaning of life: that which the individual assigns to it. There is no "great plan" to which anyone can adhere. Every moment is a struggle to maintain that meaning, a struggle against suicide--a theme carried on by Sartre's pupil, Albert Camus.

Camus delves deeper into the idea of suicide and through it, the Absurd--the fundamental contradictions and paradoxes that define life. Camus inspired a whole generation of Absurdist novelists, particularly (and this is bizzare) in the United States: Joseph Heller's Catch-22, as well as virtually all of Thomas Pynchon's novels, deal with the concept of the Absurd, as inspired by Camus. This synthesis of philosophy and literature forshadow a radical development to come.

Existentialism eventually faded away as several new concepts came to light. France, long the center of philosophy, became dominated by structuralism--too complicated to explain--in the 1960s, which quickly gave rise to post-structuralism and deconstruction: all part of postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a very large umbrella term for a group of ideas that hold several things to be true. Two keys:

1. That there is no social, religious or cultural truth. This differs somewhat from Wittgenstein's perspective in that a. logical positivists (as Wittgenstein's group is called) don't care whether or not there is a social, cultural, or religious truth, and that b. whereas logical positivists don't deal with social, religious, or cultural matters, postmodernists do.

2. That philosophy and literature are interconnected. This is particularly true of Derrida.

I will now go over some of the more important philosophers since the 1960s:

Michel Foucault was a key player in the recent philosophical world; an emphatic member of the social movements that swept the West in the 1960s, he found ways to meld them into philosophy. His monumental History of Sexuality introduced the concept that the idea of sexuality was invented to preserve a particular social order, among other things, and combined with the feminist concepts developed by Sartre's longtime partner Simone de Beauvoir, developed into the modern study of "Queer Theory."

Foucault also developed the concept of biopower: power by control of life. Essentially, it is the argument that in contrast to the old monarchies, where the state obtained its power by killing those who disobeyed, the modern state casts its job as protecting the lives of those who obey through military force and institutionalization of all kinds, with an assortment of ramifications, such as the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and the banning of water on airplanes...

Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction. It's hard to explain. Moving on...

Jacques Lacan wasn't a philosopher so much as a psychologist. It's hard to explain him; I haven't done much research. Sorry. The most important thing I know about him is that he influenced Slavoj Zizek, who in addition to finding deep truth in Jaws and E.T., ran for the Presidency of Slovenia and lost, only to find himself living now with the party he ran for at the helm.

I'm currently in the middle of studying Gilles Deleuze. Suffice it to say that Foucault said only half-jokingly that people would call the 20th century the Age of Deleuze.

And finally, there is Edward Said. This Palestinian, exiled in the United States, actually began in literature; he held a major professorship at Columbia in comparative literature. However, modern critical theory (i.e. postmodernism) allows for easy shifting between the two, and Said's real passion was his homeland. Drawing heavily on feminist analysis, he analyzed the systematic oppression and "otherization" (feminist term) of the colonized peoples. I primarily mention him because I've read more of him and understand him better than any other; but change "colonized peoples" to "women" or "non-heterosexuals" and you have the fundamental concepts of postmodern feminism and queer theory, respectively.

And now I'm exhausted. Thank you.

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

Thank you. I can never read too much about philosophy and it's nice to add a few titles to my already intimidating to read list.

 

[Verbose]

That's one mammoth task you set yourself there!

Full marks for general ballsyness, considering the chosen subject matter.

(I doubt many posters around would try to do something similar, even if they have en interest in the stuff.)

Just generally one might add that if there is an "The Modern Historians Philosopher" it's Michel Foucault.

Not least because Foucault was very, very interested in history. Makes for a rather happy meeting, as long as the traditional political historians can keep from blowing their tops over his attempts to shift the ground under them. Others tend to savour the sensation.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Thank you.

I agree, Foucault's historical perspective is very unique. I'm in the middle of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (for those of you who speak French, the original title is Surveiller et punir: La naissance de la prision (sp?); Foucault thought that "surveillance" didn't fit, nor did the traditional interpretations of "supervise" and "inspect"), and plan to read Power/Knowledge and Society Must Be Defended as soon as I finish. I highly recommend him--if you're going to read any post-1960s philosophy, start with Foucault. Virtually everything else hinges on him.

 

[Verbose]

if you're going to read any post-1960s philosophy, start with Foucault. Virtually everything else hinges on him.

And most of the good stuff in Foucault hinges on Nietzsche.

 

[Corlindale]

Great write-up! A very good summing up for those unfamiliar to philosophy. While I am familiar with most of the philosophers concerned, I still think you managed to give me a better idea of how they are connected, and how the philosophical schools have progressed lately. I am always eager to read about stuff like that, as I'm going to start studying Philosophy at university come september.

I spotted only one very grave omission:

Spoiler :

You failed to mention that Kierkegaard also has a quote in SMAC

 

[Kyriakos]

Kierkegaard uses a lot of christian imagery. If he was a modern writer he would have been seen mostly as a christian philosopher, and not as a founder of a new movement.
I have only read Fear and Trembling though, back in the university years. Most of my essays were on Nietzche anyway

Imo modern philosophy is mostly blurred with theoretical (ie non clinical) psychology. That is fine, ofcourse, since philosophy was always about analysis and the search for new viewpoints and their examination.

One could also say that Nietzsche was a sort of early psychologist of the essense of power. The "will for power" and the examination of the effects of the individual being locked out of being powerfull, were very important in his work. Also the examination of the connections between the concepts of "beauty" and the concepts of "ethical goodness", in his "Genealogy of ethics".

 

[Fifty]

Postmodernism has had little to no influence on mainstream philosophy, I'm not sure why every layman seems to think that it does. My suspicion is that postmodernism is so prevalent in literature, and that many people are introduced to philosophy through literature.

Anyways, it would have been more prudent to follow up Wittgensteinian Quietism with Quine and naturalism, rather than the largely irrelevant (for real philosophy) concept of postmodernism.

 

[Plotinus]

Personally I'd hesitate to describe modern analytic and Continental philosophy as, respectively, simply empiricism and rationalism with new names, which it seems to me is the idea here. Empiricism was the belief that all knowledge comes from experience (not necessarily the senses), while rationalism was the belief that knowledge can also come from non-experiential sources. In particular, the rationalists typically shared the Stoic belief that true concepts are somehow qualitatively different from false ones, which means that you can establish what is true simply by analysing the concepts, and you don't have to go out and look at the world.

I don't think anyone accepts either of these positions today, at least not fully. Locke-style empiricism was, to all intents and purposes, refuted by Leibniz (although his arguments are more associated with Kant, who inexplicably gets all the credit for this these days). Cartesian-style rationalism had, to be frank, already been refuted in antiquity by the Academics, but it too largely crumbled after Kant (despite the odd attempt to revive it by people like the British idealist J.M.E. McTaggart). Modern analytic philosophy draws on both of these early modern movements equally - indeed, I should think you'll hear Descartes discussed more than Locke in most analytic philosophy departments. Russell was not an empiricist, at least not in the same way that Locke was. After all, what's empiricist about the Principia Mathematica, which is about the logical foundations of mathematics? It's got nothing to do with linguistic analysis - on the contrary, its attempt to derive the system of mathematics from logical axioms is surely as rationalist as you can get.

Modern Continental philosophy, to my mind, doesn't have a great deal to do with either the early modern empiricists or the early modern rationalists. What does Foucault have to do with Spinoza? Rather, I would say that modern Continental philosophy has its roots in quite different soil: the semiotics of Saussure and the phenomenology of Husserl (itself influenced more by empiricism than by rationalism, I'd say), both in the early twentieth century.

I think that the real difference between analytic and Continental philosophy is that the former focuses on details and the latter paints a big picture. For example, one of the eternally discussed problems in analytic philosophy is the question - what is knowledge? Plato pointed out that knowledge is true belief, but it is more than that, since you can have a belief that is true just by luck, as it were, without really knowing it. Much ink has been spilled trying to establish what the extra ingredient is that turns true belief into knowledge, and it's done by trying to think about how we use the word "know" and what we mean by it. That's how analytic philosophy works - there's nothing distinctively empiricist or rationalist about it, in the sense that we apply those words to early modern philosophy. It's also concerned, above all, with arguments and their analysis - is this argument valid? Are its premises true? Continental philosophers, by contrast, have a tendency simply to describe an immense system in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way. Continental philosophy always reminds me of Tillich's comment about (Karl, not Roland) Barth - he throws his ideas at you like bricks.

 

[Fifty]

I'll definitely agree with Plotinus that analytic vs. continental encompasses something quite different than empiricism vs. rationalism.

I disagree though with his distinction between continental and analytic as having to do with the scope of the problems addressed by each.

I'm 99% sure that, as far as mainstream academic philosophers go, they generally regard the analytical vs. continental distinction as only having value in demarking the geographical location and time period of philosophy. Continental philosophy being the philosophy largely practiced in France and Germany in the 19th and 20th century, and analytic being the rest of philosophy in a similar time period (IIRC).

Continental philosophy in particular encompassed so many different movements that it is difficult to classify them all together in any non-geographic or non-temporal way.

The line between analytic and continental in terms of what problems they address is so blurred that the distinction is largely pointless (some influential philosophers argue that even figures such as Derrida could be argued as "analytic" figures)

 

[Verbose]

Fifity:
It sounds a bit partisan of you to sum up the divisions as "continental"=(just) what the Germans and the French got up to, and "analytical" = the (real) philosophy of everyone else.
(I know, that's a bit overstated of what you actually wrote. Not much though?)

You can assume the Italians are very close to the Germans in this. The Spanich speaking world isn't philosophically that attuned to what the "Anglosaxons" do. What are the Russians up to? Lots of structuralism, semiotics etc.
In Scandinavia Danes and Noewegians do all sorts (quite interesting), while the Swedes and Finns are staunchly in the analytical camp (though the Swedes are utter rubbish and the Finns very, very good).

Odds are "continental" beats "analytical" by a wide margin as for number of practitioners and curious bystanders.

What may also be true is that analytical philosophy is the choice of the most academically entrenched, professionalised group of philosophers.
In that respect I think you're bang on the money, but not because there's Real philosophy and The Rest, but because it's a professional division as much as an intellectual one.

Those labelled "continental philosophers" also tend to be in intense contact with all the other professional academic goups — historians, sociologists, anthropologists etc. I'm not too sure the same applies for analytical philosophy.
The stuff called "continental" has all and sundry throwing their more or less well found arguments into a big stew. Analytical is more... aloof. That at least is my impression of how this breaks down.

And besides "continental" is an appelation that only works for those outside of this "continent", i.e. the British, the Americans and to some extent the Scandinavians.
Beacuse "continental" is somehow a "catch-all-for-all-that's-not-deemed-analytical", i.e. what "we" do. No?

Oh, and I also consider "post-modernism" to have been somehow prematurely declared. But that's because historians tend not quite see how modernism would have been dethroned by it — one when starts comparing what's going on today with the past. The "postmodernists" may well be guilty of typically overvaluing their own present, and themselves.

Either "post-modernism" is pretty "modern", but not yet much "post", or the Victorians of the 19th c. were a kind of postmodernists, I suppose.

 

[Plotinus]

Actually, philosophers today usually recognise three main varieties of philosophy - analytic, Continental, and Asian. Continental philosophy is called that even in other continents. Of course, "Asian" is a pretty catch-all title too, given that it encompasses both Indian and Chinese philosophy, which are completely different; it normally refers primarily to Chinese philosophy. I'm lucky enough to be at a university which features all three disciplines prominently, which is quite unusual. It makes for interesting seminars.

There's also the minor matter of historical philosophy, which is another discipline altogether, but we'll let that pass (even though it's what I do).

I don't think it's true that analytic philosophy has less in common with other disciplines than Continental philosophy does. Rather, it just connects with different disciplines. Continental philosophy tends to have a big overlap with literary theory, semiotics, perhaps linguistics, anthropology and sociology, and that sort of thing. Thus you get people like Bourdieu who exist on the fringe between philosophy and anthropology. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, tends to overlap with the natural sciences, including psychology, and perhaps linguistics, and also mathematics. Both draw extensively on history. If I were tempted to make a massive and ridiculously over-simple generalisation, I would say that analytic philosophers are interested in the way the world is, while Continental philosophers are interested in the way the world seems to be. That might help explain why they generally overlap with different disciplines.

 

[Verbose]

I don't think it's true that analytic philosophy has less in common with other disciplines than Continental philosophy does. Rather, it just connects with different disciplines. Continental philosophy tends to have a big overlap with literary theory, semiotics, perhaps linguistics, anthropology and sociology, and that sort of thing. Thus you get people like Bourdieu who exist on the fringe between philosophy and anthropology. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, tends to overlap with the natural sciences, including psychology, and perhaps linguistics, and also mathematics. Both draw extensively on history. If I were tempted to make a massive and ridiculously over-simple generalisation, I would say that analytic philosophers are interested in the way the world is, while Continental philosophers are interested in the way the world seems to be. That might help explain why they generally overlap with different disciplines.

Well, Bourdieu was professional sociologist. And as such he was a surprisingly empirical one. He was fantastically innovative as far as methodology goes. Theoretically there's less to get from Bourdieu. It's when you apply what he's done to new groups of people that it gets interesting.

And dividing them up along the lines of relative interest in "how the world is" vs "seem" does seem either partisan or problematic (well, both).

If you look to the so called "continental" philosophers they would protest that they ever only were interested in how the world is, and it's the analytical philosophers who have taken their own rigorous version of philosophy off on a tangent where it's losing touch with human reality — which the continentals see as social and historical, etc.

For them, when sciences claim something "is" vs something that "seems", it's a question of the sciences having put in place a set of rules that allows them to present something as "just the way things are", objective and all. And it's this process, how this was done, that becomes an object of study. And then they tend to point out all the ways in which science itself is obscuring how it in fact works in order to pull this off.

So, from the stuff I know, which is history of science and medicine, it's rather the scientists (and anlytical philosophers) who are interested in how things seem and not how they are, while the "continentals" are all about working out what people actually DO.

That's been the great turning point in the history of science in the 80's, when it shifted from writing either old-fashioned hagiographical accounts of Great Men of Science, or mucking about with pseudo-Marxist structuralist interpretations, to actually looking at what scientists do, and have done, in practice, in the form of micro-studies. By now it's a huge mass of very empirical accounts of what science does, not what is says it does.

Scientists can feel very threatened by this attention being paid to them. Of course the fur will fly.

It may be a case of analytical philosophy trying to find anchor points out of the way of human subjectivity then — which puts them in tune with the sciences — while the continentals are clearly doubting the possibility and usefulness of doing that.

One way of seeing this is Bourdieu's take on it (I like Bourdieu, I tend to agree, but I'll be happy to admit that Bourdieu has an ax of his own to grind over this):

Back track to Plato, and philosophy ranges far and wide over all aspects of reality, the natural world and human society alike.

Now look at the most professionalised group of philosophers, the analytical ones. They are in a sense left with the trunk of what was the original scope of philosophy. Theirs' is the part left behind as other groups of professional scientists and academics have arisen and lopped bits and peices off from philosophy, to make them their exlusive professional domain.

From that perspective someone like Bourdieu, or Foucault, or Deleuze, or (my personal favourite) Latour, is in fact not accepting this phasing out of philosophy in favour of professionalised science that has divyed the original project up between them.

It's just that this is threatening to what the professional analytical philosophers are still holding on to as their piece of intellectual property.

Admittedly, that's a partisan "continental" view of things.

 

[Fifty]

Fifity:
It sounds a bit partisan of you to sum up the divisions as "continental"=(just) what the Germans and the French got up to, and "analytical" = the (real) philosophy of everyone else.
(I know, that's a bit overstated of what you actually wrote. Not much though?)

My comment about "real" philosophy was with regard to postmodernism. Postmodernism (wherever it shows up) has precious little to do with mainstream philosophy. This is quite different than the analytic/continental debate. I just think that any treatment of 20th century western philosophy that mentions postmodernism to the exclusion of naturalism is way way way way way off the map as far as mainstream philosophy is concerned (I'm assuming that an overview of philosophy would focus primarily on the biggest movements/the mainstream).

As for the analytic/continental debate (which is entirely different from the postmodernism debate... continental philosophy has just as little to do with postmodernism as analytic philosophy), I just think that "continental" philosophy defies any sort of classification that isn't strictly based on the time period (late 19th and 20th century) and the region (france and germany mostly).

Continental philosophy encompasses German Idealism, German Materialism, Marxism, Neo-Kantianism, Phenomenology, Existentalism, Hermeneutics, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism. These movements are all so varied, that it is IMO dubious to make sweeping generalizations about what continental philosophy is, beyond a historical period in a certain geographical area.

As for Analytic philosophy, I certainly don't think that it's the "real" philosophy of everybody else. Analytic and Continental are both "real" philosophy. The only thing that I said wasn't "real" philosophy was postmodernism, which is true (postmodernism is only relevant in some fringes of philosophy). Analytic philosophy has somehow come to represent (in the popular mindset) the "bias of technical philosophers locked up in the academy". This isn't the case at all.

Here's a relevant passage by Brian Leiter, a scholar of Nietzsche and Continental Philosophy:

it is time to pronounce the "bogeyman" of analytic philosophy laid ot rest: so-called "analytic" philosophers now inlcude quietists and naturalists; old-fashioned metaphysical philosophers and twentiet-century linguistic philosophers; historians of philosophy and philosophers who show litttle interest in the history of the field. Given the methodological and substantive pluralism of Anglophone philosophy, "analytic" philosophy survives, if at all, as a certain style that emphasizes "logic", "rigor", and "argument"--a stylistic commitment that does little to demarcate it, of course, from Kant, Hegel, Descartes, or Aristotle. The oft-vaunted "clarity" of analytic philosophy--which was, indeed, a distinctive feature of many of the most gifted writers in the genre such as Bertrand Russell, H. L. A. Hart, and Carl Hempel--would, if deemed essential now to membership, place major contemporary figures like John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke in some other, still unnamed philosophcial camp. Prototypical non-analytic figures, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are far clearer (and more beautiful) writers that many of the dominant figures in Anglophone philosophy today.

Yet the demise of analytic philosophy has at the same time had te salutary effect of making less meaningful the divide between so-called "analytiC" and "continental" philosophy--though this is, in significant part, attributable to the fact that "continental philosophy" has also become a meaningless category.

 

[Verbose]

My As for Analytic philosophy, I certainly don't think that it's the "real" philosophy of everybody else. Analytic and Continental are both "real" philosophy. The only thing that I said wasn't "real" philosophy was postmodernism, which is true (postmodernism is only relevant in some fringes of philosophy). Analytic philosophy has somehow come to represent (in the popular mindset) the "bias of technical philosophers locked up in the academy". This isn't the case at all.

Here's a relevant passage by Brian Leiter, a scholar of Nietzsche and Continental Philosophy:

Fair enough!
Postmodernism is a philosophical red-herring.

 

[jonatas]

As for the analytic/continental debate (which is entirely different from the postmodernism debate... continental philosophy has just as little to do with postmodernism as analytic philosophy)
[snip]
Continental philosophy encompasses German Idealism, German Materialism, Marxism, Neo-Kantianism, Phenomenology, Existentalism, Hermeneutics, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism.

Isn't Post-Structuralism Postmodern (whatever that means- still isn't there some connection there)?

Also, you say your list of continental philosophies is too varied to form categories other than a geographical/temporal one, but I see connnections between Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics and Post Structuralism (Heidegger), for example.

Oh, and I also consider "post-modernism" to have been somehow prematurely declared.

I agree.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

This is strange. I consider myself to know very little about philosophy but I have heard of pretty much every single person mentioned in this thread and some of their concepts and ideas. (I read too much.)

I never liked post-modernism. It just seemed too false in concept. Holding that there is no stable reference frame other than your own... too selfish in my view. As an engineer, it's hard to be truly post-modern in philosophy. No matter what you believe, nature always wins. The plane is too heavy? It won't fly, period. No changing of the reference frame of the calculations, perceptions, measurements... No matter what you do, it won't fly until L>W...

Then again, maybe that's just my experience of pro-post modernists trying to convince me with examples of physical concepts they don't understand, hmm?

 

[Fifty]

Isn't Post-Structuralism Postmodern (whatever that means- still isn't there some connection there)?

They have connections insofar as whatever influence postmodernism has in philosophy, it manifests itself within the realm of post-structuralism. Additionally, it is very easy to construe a post-structuralist writer as post-modern, and people in general like to attribute a variety of concepts to post-modernism that aren't really what postmodernism actually is.

Also, you say your list of continental philosophies is too varied to form categories other than a geographical/temporal one, but I see connnections between Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics and Post Structuralism (Heidegger), for example.

Of course there are connections! Most temporally consecutive movements will have connections. The connections just aren't consistent enough across the entirety of continental philosophy.

 

[jonatas]

They have connections insofar as whatever influence postmodernism has in philosophy, it manifests itself within the realm of post-structuralism.

Ok, that sounds like what I meant

Additionally, it is very easy to construe a post-structuralist writer as post-modern, and people in general like to attribute a variety of concepts to post-modernism that aren't really what postmodernism actually is.

[pain in the ass mode] How would you distinguish between Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, then? [/pain the ass mode]

Of course there are connections! Most temporally consecutive movements will have connections. The connections just aren't consistent enough across the entirety of continental philosophy.

IMO Heidegger (my example of a central continental philosopher) is a pretty big presence across the board, whether you talk about Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics or Post-Structuralism. That's not to mention his German background in philosophy, which I don't know that much of. I think it gets trickier when you starting talking about individuals, instead of isms. But maybe you have a different viewpoint to bring to the thread.