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ON THE VERY IDEA OF CONTINENTAL (OR FOR THATMATTER
ANGLO-AMERICAN) PHILOSOPHY
TODD MAY
ABSTRACT: For most of the past century, philosophers on the
Continent andthose in the United States and Britain have taken
themselves to be working in verydifferent, even mutually exclusive,
philosophical traditions. Although that mayhave been true until
recently, it is no longer so. This piece surveys ten
differentproposed distinctions that have been offered between the
two traditions, and itshows that none of them works, as there are
major thinkers on both sides of eachproposed distinction that do
not neatly fit the proposal. The upshot of this is that itno longer
makes sense to uphold the idea of two traditions, and that it is
time weall dropped the mutual suspicion and denigration that have
characterized relation-ships between us for the past hundred
years.
Keywords: Anglo-American philosophy, Continental philosophy,
foundational-ism, politics, postmodernism, relativism, science.
For much of the past century, philosophers have found it
convenient todistinguish between the philosophical texts written in
the United Statesand Britain on the one hand and Continental
Europe, primarily France andGermany, on the other. Of course, the
term convenient is a euphemism. Formany philosophers, the
distinction between what used to be calledanalytic philosophy and
is now more often (and more accurately)called Anglo-American
philosophy and Continental philosophymarks the most fundamental
distinction in Western philosophy. Situatingoneself on either side
of this divide still lends a philosopher a sense ofidentity and,
lets face it, superiority. Philosophers, after all, like
everyoneelse, need to feel good about themselves.
Unfortunately, this particular mechanism of self-esteem is
anachronis-tic. The division between Anglo-American and Continental
philosophy hasbecome completely superficial. It is, as we
Francophile philosophers say,pass. There simply is no interesting
distinction to be drawn between thephilosophical work of the
European Continent and that of Britain and theUnited States. Or, as
we Anglo-American philosophers say, so I shallargue. (There is an
uninteresting and unhelpful distinction between them,however, that
I shall consider below.) I know this position creates someproblems
for those who think of themselves as either Continental or
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Anglo-American philosophers. But here, as in many other things,
what ishappening on the ground has run ahead of our ability to
conceptualize it.Or, otherwise put, there has recently been much
cross-fertilization betweentraditions, although as yet no
overarching story has emerged about thatcross-fertilization or the
blurring of boundaries that it has caused.
For the bulk of this piece, I would like to consider the most
prominentcandidates for a distinction between Anglo-American and
Continentalphilosophy, and to show that all of them fail to capture
the work beingdone on either side of this so-called divide. Then I
would like to turn towhat I consider the one defensible distinction
between the two, and toargue that this distinction is little more
than a lingering effect of nearly acentury of mutual suspicion, and
that it should be and in much recentphilosophical work is becoming
effaced. The upshot of this is that theterm Continental philosophy
and the corresponding term Anglo-Americanphilosophy should be
abandoned. They are two halves of a distinctionwithout a
(worthwhile) difference.
At the outset, I should concede that the vapidity of this
distinction wasnot always such. During the first half of the
twentieth century, and even upto the 1960s, there were stark
differences between the approaches of thoseon and those off the
Continent. That period, to which the term analyticoften
appropriately applies to the philosophy done in the United States
andBritain, saw a difference in philosophical scope and subject
matter that didindeed make communication difficult. The narrow
scope of analytic philo-sophical reflection, its dismissal (in many
quarters) of the value of philo-sophical reflection on normative
issues, its overriding debt to science allcontrast sharply with the
broad brushstrokes, the political and ethicalorientation, and the
suspicion toward science that characterized muchprominent
Continental work. (There are exceptions here, such as the workof
Merleau-Ponty, but the exceptions stand out against the background
ofthe rest of the work of the period.) But with the reintroduction
of largerissues and normative concerns on the Anglo-American side
and thedetailed linguistic and empirical work of the structuralists
on theContinental side, these differences gradually diminished, to
the pointwhere it does more harm than good to continue to insist on
a distinctionbetween the two traditions.
In turning to the proposed distinctions, let me start first, and
verybriefly, with the distinction that once seemed to impose itself
upon Westernphilosophy: between those who cut wide swathes with
their philosophicalstories and those who cut narrow ones, that is,
the wild-eyed speculatorsand the logic choppers. This proposal
needs no more than a brief look,because I am not sure anybody
actually believes in it any more.
On the Anglo-American side, the narrowness of scope was
abandoned,it seems, through two related philosophical developments.
In the first,stemming from the work of philosophers like Thomas
Kuhn and W. V. O.Quine, and especially Ludwig Wittgenstein, the
epistemic differences
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between scientific practices and other practices began to be
called intoquestion. It could no longer be held as incontrovertible
that scienceprovides the model for all epistemic claims, and that
language should bestyled on the verificationist model ascribed
(wrongly, as it turns out) toscientific claims. Relatedly, the
resurgence of normative work in Anglo-American philosophy,
exemplified perhaps most importantly in RawlssTheory of Justice,1
helped reawaken moral and political concerns amongAnglo-American
philosophers. These developments turned Anglo-American philosophy
away from the narrow analytic concerns that hadpreoccupied it for
much of the first half of the century and widened itsfocus of
attention.
The sharpening of focus on the Continental side has not been
asdramatic as the widening of focus on the Anglo-American one.
Certaintrends are worth noting, such as the introduction of
empirical research(starting with the writings of Claude Lvi-Strauss
and Jacques Lacan andcontinuing through the work of Michel
Foucault, Paul Virilio, and PierreBourdieu), and more recently the
appeal to Anglo-American linguisticphilosophy.2 Continental
philosophy, however, remains preoccupied withbroader philosophical
problems.
This treatment is brief, but as I mentioned earlier, there seems
no reasonto linger over a position that nobody who has followed the
trends in recentWestern philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy in
particular, would betempted to hold.
What, then, might be considered candidates for perspectives
leadingone to think that there is a distinction to be drawn between
Anglo-American and Continental philosophy? I propose to consider
nine differ-ent candidates, none of which will, in the end, work.
After that, I shallpoint to a tenth, which does still distinguish
between the two but not in anyway worth preserving. The first four
candidates I shall group under thegeneral idea of postmodernism. I
do this for three reasons. First, one of thedistinctions sometimes
offered to distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philosophy
is that the former, but not the latter, either endorses
CONTINENTAL AND ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 403
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1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. To avoid
burdening this piece withnotes, I shall reserve footnotes for
citing quotations or specific texts mentioned in the pieceand for
citing exemplary texts of writers who might be less familiar to
readers familiar withonly one side of this purported divide.
2 Cf., for example, Habermass use of the works of J. L. Austin
in chapter 3 of TheTheory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason
and the Rationalization of Society, trans.Thomas McCarthy (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984), originally published in 1981; Lyotardsappeal
to Saul Kripkes discussion on naming in his discussion The
Referent, the Namein The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele.
(Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988), originally
published in 1983; Karl-Otto Apels use of Peirce and Wittgensteinin
Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic
Perspective, trans.Georgia Warnke (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1984), originally published in 1979; andErnst Tugendhats
articulation of Heidegger and Anglo-American philosophy of
languagein Traditional and Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.:
Cambridge University Press,1982).
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or is at least preoccupied with postmodernist themes. Second,
postmod-ernism itself is a grab bag of diverse themes, and sorting
out the relationof each tradition to them will show that neither
has a particular hold on oravoidance of postmodernity. Finally, no
self-respecting review of an acad-emic field would be complete
without reference to postmodernism, so Imight as well get it out of
the way.
The four postmodern themes are: loss of grand narratives;
relativism;death of the subject; and consumerism, media dominance,
and the rise oftransnational capitalism. The five nonpostmodernist
candidates for distin-guishing the two traditions are (Continental
side first): a rejection versusan embrace of science; a leftist
versus a liberal orientation; a concern withversus a rejection of
the history of philosophy; creating perspectivesversus limning
reality; and obscurity versus clarity.
In treating these candidates I cannot, of course, offer an
exhaustiveanalysis. At points I shall be little more than
suggestive. My goal is not toclinch the idea that there is no
worthwhile distinction to be maintainedbetween Anglo-American and
Continental philosophy that would take abook but to shift the
burden of proof onto anyone who would like tomaintain such a
distinction. Of course, philosophers do not argue for
themaintenance of such a distinction in any formal way; but the
distinctionbetween the traditions is maintained both in hiring
practices, where posi-tions for Continentalists are seen as
distinct from other positions, and inthe hallways and offices of
academe. (We know who we are here, Iassume.)
A final note before embarking. In order to make my case more
plausi-ble, I shall discuss only major figures in each tradition.
My claim is notsimply that one can discover somebody, somewhere, in
Continental orAnglo-American philosophy who does not fit the mold
being cut for them.Rather, it is that the proposed molds just do
not fit, and, as a consequence,that there are significant reasons
for people writing in many areas in onetradition to read similarly
situated people writing in the other. In order topress that point,
it seems best to stick to philosophers who have set theparameters
for much recent discussion in the two traditions.3
Postmodern Candidate 1: Loss of Grand NarrativesOne of the
peculiar features ascribed to our theoretical situation, a
featurein virtue of which it is called postmodernist, is that we
have lost our faithin grand narratives. As Jean-Franois Lyotard
writes, in probably the mostsignificant postmodern text to date,
The Postmodern Condition, I define
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3 Moreover, I shall avoid discussion of philosophers writing on
the Continent whomnobody would ever consider calling
Continentalists, such as Wolfgang Stegmuller andJacques Bouveresse,
and philosophers in the United States who have gone under the
nameContinentalists.
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postmodern as the incredulity toward metanarratives.4 By
metanarrative,Lyotard means a covering narrative, a narrative under
which all othernarratives might be subsumed. In short, a grand
narrative.
Grand narratives can be grand for at least two reasons: they are
founda-tional and/or they are encompassing. Foundational narratives
are epistemicstories that try to offer the (indubitable, apodictic,
not-to-be-surpassed)grounding of all our other epistemic claims.
Husserl offered foundationalnarratives; early on, so did Russell.
Encompassing narratives, by contrast,do not necessarily try to
burrow beneath our knowledge toward its foun-dations but instead
stretch out to its limits, trying to tell a single coherentstory
within which all our claims fit. Those who think science offers
theonly example of epistemically respectable claims and also think
that therecan be a unified theory in science would embrace the idea
of an encom-passing grand narrative, but not a foundational
one.
The question, then, is whether Continental philosophers are
joinedagainst their Anglo-American counterparts in embracing the
idea that welive in an age in which grand narratives have been
lost. The answer to thisquestion is twofold: Continental
philosophers are not as one in thinkingthat grand narratives are
lost; and Anglo-American philosophers are notas one in thinking
that there are still grand narratives to be told. Of course,many
thinkers on the Continental side are well known to have rejected
theidea of foundational or encompassing narratives, particularly in
France(Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard). It is not entirely
clear, however,that Habermas has done so. In his recent work in
discourse ethics, heclaims, drawing on the work of Karl-Otto Apel,5
that at least the form, ifnot the content, of communicative
discourse can be transcendentallygrounded. His principle U of
universalization, roughly that the norms ofconversation must be
acceptable to all participants, receives a
transcen-dental-pragmatic grounding to the effect that a violation
of U, while nota logical contradiction, is a performative one.6
Although this is not a tradi-tional foundationalism, it shares with
traditional foundationalism theattempt to establish commitments
that must be embraced by, if not allrational beings, at least all
communicative ones in their capacity ascommunicators.
On the Anglo-American side, it would be difficult to see grand
narra-
CONTINENTAL AND ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 405
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4. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington andBrian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), originally published in1979, xxiv.
5 Most influential in this regard is Apels seminal essay The A
Priori of theCommunication Community and the Foundations of Ethics:
The Problem of a RationalFoundation of Ethics in the Scientific
Age, in Toward a Transformation of Philosophy,trans. Glyn Adey and
David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980),
originallypublished in 1972, 1973.
6 On this, see especially Discourse Ethics: Notes on
Philosophical Justification, in TheCommunicative Ethics
Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmyer (Cambridge,Mass.:
MIT Press, 1990), 60110.
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tives as holding much more sway than on the Continental side.
Perhapsone of the seminal articles in this respect is Wilfrid
Sellarss Philosophyand the Scientific Image of Man,7 in which
Sellars discusses the tensionbetween the scientific image of human
beings and what he calls the mani-fest image, where we treat others
as fellow beings, and where he calls fora joining of the two images
that would be neither a reduction of one to theother nor a melding
of the two. But recent Anglo-American work is repletewith evidence
of the rejection of grand narratives. Take, for instance,
JohnRawlss revisiting of his political ideas in Political
Liberalism.8 One of thecentral clarifications (modifications?)
Rawls offers of his original work isthat the commitments to be
derived from the original position depend, inpart, on the cultural
conditions under which the exercise is to beperformed. Or again,
take the work of Richard Rorty. Philosophy and theMirror of
Nature,9 one of the ground-breaking works of recent Anglo-American
philosophy, maintains that the driving idea of the grand narra-tive
in philosophy, both Anglo-American and Continental, is obsolete
andshould be replaced by the more supple idea of conversation.
We can see, then, that the idea of a loss of the philosophical
project ofgrand narratives is not a central idea of Continental
thought, nor is itsrejection a central idea of Anglo-American
thought.
Postmodern Candidate 2: RelativismSo maybe the idea of a grand
narrative does not distinguish the two fromeach other. But perhaps
what makes Continental rejectors of grand narra-tives different
from their Anglo-American counterparts is thatContinentalists are
relativists where Anglo-Americans are not.
In approaching this claim, we need first to ask what kind of
relativistswe are talking about. The relativism in question cannot
be just any kind ofrelativism. Gilbert Harman, for instance, would
probably be surprised todiscover that he was not a relativist.10 I
suspect the relativism in questionwould be an epistemological
relativism. Even then, we need a furtherdistinction. Are we talking
about relativism of knowledge, of truth, or ofjustification? If the
relativism is a relativism of justification, thenContinentalists
are in the company of some seminal philosophers in
theAnglo-American tradition. Wittgenstein, for example, thinks that
reasonsare relative to the language games in which they are given
(an idea that canbe taken as the starting point for Lyotards
reflections in The Differend).More recently, Robert Brandoms Making
It Explicit11 argues that the epis-temic commitments to which one
ought to be held are inferentially relative
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7 In Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1963), 140.8 New York: Columbia University Press,
1993.9 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
10 Cf. Moral Relativism Defended, Philosophical Review 84
(1975): 322.11 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994.
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to those epistemic commitments that one has explicitly endorsed.
In fact,the idea of justification as relative is not a terribly
controversial one. Inorder to reject it, one would have to offer a
nonrelative justificatory prac-tice, which would seem to land us
back into grand narratives of the foun-dational kind.
If it is not a relativism of justification that distinguishes
Anglo-American from Continental philosophy, perhaps it is a
relativism ofknowledge or of truth. These would be problematic
relativisms, for theythreaten self-referential paradox. (Are the
claims All knowledge/truth isrelative to X themselves relative
claims or not? Either way, they do notgo through.) There are no
prominent Anglo-American philosophers whoembrace them.
Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated when itcomes to
Continental philosophy, because some of the objects of the claimor
charge of relativism do not distinguish among truth, justification,
andknowledge. In particular, the work of Foucault and Derrida is
particularlyelusive in this regard. Neither Foucault nor Derrida
(nor, for that matter,Lyotard or Deleuze) distinguishes among
justification, truth, and knowl-edge, at least as those terms are
used in Anglo-American thought.12 Whatdo we do, then? Should we
think of them as engaged in self-refutingclaims or not?
It seems to me a good rule of thumb in coming to grips with the
thoughtof other philosophers to restrain oneself from ascribing
silly positions tothem if there are better interpretive options
available. In this case, whatthat amounts to is recognizing that
some of the terms they use, if inter-preting in Anglo-American
fashion, would be self-refuting; and, since theydo not make the
same distinctions among these terms as Anglo-Americanphilosophers
do, substituting the appropriate Anglo-American term (oftenthe term
justification for the terms truth and knowledge)13 when it
seemsthat would give a more plausible reading of the text. How and
when thisshould be done is, of course, beyond the scope of this
essay.14 But, at thevery least, the opening of that interpretive
strategy should give pause tothose who want to distinguish
Continental from Anglo-American philoso-phy by ascribing to one a
set of self-refuting positions that the otheravoids.
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12 I discuss this issue in Foucaults case in chapter 5 of my
Between Genealogy andEpistemology: Psychology, Politics, and
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault(University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
13 Moreover, the term knowledge is often used to translate the
distinct French termssavoir and connaissance, which themselves are
often terms of art among different philoso-phers.
14 I do this for Foucault in chapter 6 of my Between Genealogy
and Epistemology andbegin to lay out some similar terrain for
Derrida although I ultimately critique him inchapter 2 of my
Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and
Deleuze(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1997).
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Postmodern Candidate 3: Death of the SubjectThe idea of the
death of the subject has been an attractive one inContinental
circles since Roland Barthess discussions of the death of
theauthor15 and Michel Foucaults reflections on the demise of the
figure ofman in the final pages of The Order of Things.16 Perhaps
this idea, whichhas also been associated (correctly, in my view)
with Derrida, Lyotard, andHabermas, provides a way to distinguish
Continental from Anglo-American philosophy. In order to tell if it
does we shall have to flesh outthe idea a bit more.
One thing the death of the subject clearly does not mean is that
every-one has died (although in my conversations with some
Anglo-Americanphilosophers, I have found this obvious fact elusive
for them). What it hasto do with is the idea that the conscious
perspective of the interpretingsubject, whether it concern an
interpretation of a text, social relations, orones own mental
state, can no longer be considered an unsurpassable hori-zon for
appropriate interpretation. The subjects perspective on what
isgoing on is not necessarily the right take on what is going on.
In short,Cartesianism is dead.
This idea is appropriated differently by different philosophers
in theContinental tradition. For Barthes, it is the authors
perspective on his orher work that has to be overcome. For
Foucault, it is the idea of man as theinterpretive centerpiece of
the world. For Habermas, it is the methodolog-ical primacy of
subjective consciousness over communicative interaction.For
Derrida, it is the subjects self-presence as a guarantor of the
stabilityof linguistic meaning. In each case, though, there has
been a move awayfrom the epistemic and linguistic privileging of
the reflecting subjecttoward other perspectives that are held to be
more accurate or importantepistemically and/or lingustically.
If the death of the subject were not a commitment of
Anglo-Americanthought, then we would surely have an important
distinction between thesetwo traditions. Philosophy that occurs
from a first-person, subject-centeredperspective differs
significantly from philosophy that sees the subject asdetermined as
well as determining, and therefore rejects the subject as
aninterpretive center. Put this way, however, it is immediately
clear that thedeath of the subject, the rejection of Cartesianism,
is also a tenet of muchof Anglo-American philosophy.
Dating the emergence of this tenet can be a matter of some
dispute. Butsurely, since the linguistic turn of Anglo-American
philosophy in the1920s and 1930s, it would be absurd to hold that
it is the subjectsconscious perspective that dominates
Anglo-American philosophy. Untilrecently, language as determining
system of thought would be a better
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15 Cf., for example, The Death of the Author, in Image Music
Text, trans. StephenHeath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142148.
Essay originally published in 1968.
16 New York: Random House, 1970. Originally published in
1966.
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candidate than subjective consciousness to play that role. More
recently, inpart because of the influence of Wittgenstein, the
concept of social prac-tices has, in many quarters, started to play
the same role.17 (The focus onsocial practices is also a hallmark
of the work of Foucault and Lyotard, liesnascent in Gadamers
treatment of the hermeneutic focus on tradition, andcan be glimpsed
in Habermass and Apels discussions of communicativeaction.)
Moreover, the re-emergence of naturalism in
Anglo-Americanphilosophy has reinforced the idea that the
appropriate starting point forphilosophical understanding is not
the individuals own reflections but thenatural order. There are, of
course, still places in which the primacy ofconsciousness is
maintained, in both Anglo-American and Continentalphilosophy (among
followers of Chisholm and Husserl, for example). Butthe death of
the subject, or at least its demise as an analytic centerpiece,
iscommon to both traditions.
Postmodern Candidate 4: Consumerism, Media Dominance, and
theRise of Transnational CapitalismNestled within the final
postmodern candidate is a view of what hashappened to our society
that is influential to many, a view that, whateverits final merit,
surely has cottoned on to some important changes that havetaken
place in the contemporary world. In order to address it, let me
givea quick overview of how the story associated with the fourth
candidateruns and then say a few words about it.
The story starts with the idea that the emergence of large
transnationalcorporations over the past thirty years or so has
fundamentally changed thecharacter of the society in which we live.
There are, perhaps, three changesthat are most important. First,
capitalism has replaced the role formerlyplayed by nationalism in
giving people a sense of their own identity.Whereas once we thought
of ourselves as (among other things) membersof a certain country
with certain traditions who spoke a certain language,now we think
of ourselves more in terms of participants in a system ofworld
capitalism, purchasing various items from various places with
vari-ous (and fading) national characters. This is not to say that
we no longerthink of ourselves as, for example, Americans or
Indonesians; rather, it isto say that those aspects of our
identities are becoming less important tous.
Second, and related, people are thinking of themselves more
asconsumers and less as either producers or active participants in
a publicorder. The dominance of advanced capitalism has removed us
from ourcapacities as determiners of the features of the world we
live in, whether bymaking things or by contributing to national or
even local discussion
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17 Cf., for example, Robert Brandoms monumental study Making It
Explicit (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
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about the proper character of our society, and has turned us
primarily intoconsumers of produced goods and services. This is not
to say that nobodymakes things anymore or talks about the state of
the world (although, withthe rise of mall culture, the forums for
public discussion are narrowing).Rather, it is to say that peoples
lives are gaining more significance andtaking more focus from their
roles as consumers than as producers ordiscussants.
Third, and again related, the rise and suffusion of various
media havecontributed to the passivity, isolation, and
consumer-orientation of peoplein technologically advanced
societies, and in many societies not so tech-nologically advanced.
The dominance of television, videos, and morerecently the Internet
has reduced the public space almost to nothing andhas turned people
into passive spectators of the world they inhabit. Werespond
individually and passively to what is before us on a screen in
theisolation of our homes and offices, rather than participating in
some formof world making.
This story is not, of course, a conceptually seamless one. One
can, forinstance, argue that the rise of the media is a product not
of transnationalcapitalism but of a technological development that
would have occurredwhether or not capitalism went transnational.
The issue, however, is not somuch the seamlessness of the story as
the general picture it presents. And,for our purposes, the question
is whether this picture, which is perhaps themost popular picture
of what a postmodern society is like, is one that canbe used to
distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philosophy.
There certainly are Continental thinkers for whom this picture
is acenterpiece of their work. The two most prominent thinkers in
this regardare Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.18 For
Baudrillard, the peculiar char-acteristic of our postmodern
situation is not only that the media haveburied our everyday
reality with their images but also that those imageshave indeed
replaced it. For him, we live in a situation in which reality
issimulated by the capitalist media, and any attempt to discover a
referenceoutside this simulated reality would prove not only
nostalgic but alsofutile. Virilio does not go quite so far as
Baudrillard, but he retains thecentral idea that the spread of
worldwide capitalist technology and mediahave fundamentally altered
our place in the world, and that we are largelysubject to the
reality that they have developed.
I should note in passing a similarity between this line of
thought and
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18 For representative samples of their work, see Baudrillards
Simulations, trans. PaulFoss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Virilios LostDimension, trans.
Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), originally
publishedin 1984. In Baudrillards earlier work, he was not nearly
as radical ontologically. There heintroduces the idea that we need
to shift the focus of political theorizing from the
traditionalMarxist category of production to that of consumption.
Cf. Consumer Society, in JeanBaudrillard: Selected Writings, ed.
Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1988), 2956.
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that of another thinker not usually associated with the excesses
of thelikes of Baudrillard: Jrgen Habermas. Habermas, too, worries
about thecolonizing effect of advanced capitalism on our ability to
maintain alifeworld independent of capitalist appropriation.19
Unlike Baudrillardboth in positing a modernist alternative to this
capitalist appropriationand in refusing to ratify that our reality
has become simulated by themedia, Habermas nevertheless embraces
the concern that we are livingin a world in which the globalization
of a technologically advancedmarketplace is the greatest threat to
our personal relationships (for him,our communicative practice) in
the current world. (Oddly, this worry alsolinks Habermas with
another thinker often cited as an opponent of his Lyotard, who in
some of the final pages of The Differend pens
similarconcerns.)20
While these thinkers are focused on this theme of
postmodernism,other major Continental thinkers are not. In
particular, Foucault andDerrida do not place themselves within the
broad picture I have justsketched. Although they are concerned with
the effects of capitalism oncontemporary life (who isnt?), they do
not work from within the frame-work of a postmodern situation
defined by the media and the technologyof advanced capitalism. In
fact, many of their themes run counter to thedominance of such a
framework. Foucault eschews the embrace of asingle explanatory
framework in his genealogical approach to
politicalself-understanding, preferring instead to see power
exercised from and ina variety of irreducibly different practices.
For his part, Derrida rejects anunderstanding of our current
situation that would focus so exclusively onrecent developments.
For him, we need to trace the history of Westernthought and culture
if we are to arrive at an understanding of our currentsituation,
and in doing so we find that this history is more continuous
thandiscontinous.
On the Anglo-American side, no major thinkers I am aware of
embracethis framework for understanding our recent historical
situation. This isnot to say that lessons cannot be drawn from
their work for approachingthese features of advanced capitalism.
(For instance, Dworkins promo-tion of a rights-based defense of the
individual against the utilitarian goalsof the social and political
structure might be fruitfully brought to bearupon current economic
relationships.) There are, however, no influentialtheorists in this
tradition who have recently theorized from within thatframework.
One might speculate as to why this is, given how much talkis in the
air about this framework as the condition of our postmodern
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19 He does this especially in chapter 6 of The Theory of
Communicative Action.20 Esp. pp. 17481. I should hasten to add here
that, although in league in having this
worry, their proposed solutions to the problem diverge sharply.
For Habermas we need torecover or remake an undistorted
communicative practice, while for Lyotard we need toreject the idea
of a single practice altogether, in favor of a profusion of many
nonmarketpractices.
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situation.21 But the important point for our purposes is not why
it is butthat it is.
Thus, we can conclude that there is no real distinction
betweenContinental and Anglo-American philosophy as regards a
preoccupationwith the dominance of transnational capitalism and
related media, technol-ogy, and consumerism. There is a strain of
Continental thought that takesthis as a central theme, but it is
only one of the strands of recent Continentalphilosophy. Combining
our rejection of this proposal with our rejection ofthe previous
postmodern proposals, we can arrive at the tentative conclu-sion
that there is no distinction to be drawn between Anglo-American
andContinental philosophy along the lines of postmodernism. Let us
turn, then,to other proposals for distinction to see how poorly
they fare.
A Rejection Versus an Embrace of ScienceA cursory glance at this
purported distinction might suggest that I amreviving an old
positivist approach in Anglo-American philosophy in orderto force a
distinction that will then be discredited. Actually, I am not.
WhatI am interested in here is what Philip Kitscher has described
as the returnof naturalism in recent Anglo-American philosophy.22
Of course, the termnaturalism takes its meaning from its contrast
with whatever it is that is notsupposed to be naturalism:
supernaturalism, nonessentialism, noncogni-tivism, and so forth. I
take Kitschers use of the term to contrast with an apriori approach
to philosophy that gives philosophy a special realm inwhich its
claims are immune to evidence from nonphilosophical areas ofstudy,
most especially the sciences. This view of naturalism is, in
fact,opposed to the traditional positivist approach, since it
rejects the idea ofphilosophy as a logical clarification of the
sciences. That idea of philoso-phy already holds that philosophy is
applied to, rather than interacts with,scientific practices.
On the view I am interested in here, whatever the role
philosophy mighthave, it does not play that role by standing
outside our empirical knowl-edge but rather by engaging with it.
There are, of course, many ways to seethat role and to see the
implications of that engagement. For my purposes,though, the
question is whether a rejection or an embrace of science
asinteracting with philosophy is a way of distinguishing
Anglo-Americanphilosophy from Continental.
Kitscher is concerned most with the return of naturalism in
epistemol-ogy. It should be noted, however, that naturalism in one
form or another isalso prevalent in more purely normative areas in
philosophy, such as moral
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21 My own speculation is that Anglo-American philosophers and
intellectuals generally tend to be more remote from concrete
political developments than do their Continentalcounterparts. There
are, of course, exceptions, of which Noam Chomsky would provide
astriking example.
22The Naturalists Return, Philosophical Review 101, no. 1
(January 1992): 53114.
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theory. Owen Flanagans Varieties of Moral Personality23 and, to
a lesserextent, Samuel Schefflers Human Morality24 are concerned to
articulateadequate moral positions that reflect realistic
approaches to our psycho-logical lives. The common thread in all
these attempts is a recognition thatphilosophy must answer to our
empirical knowledge just as our empiricalknowledge must answer to
philosophy. Philosophy does not dictate toempirical knowledge, but
neither are its claims immune from interrogationby it. (Whether
philosophy is wholly subject to empirical knowledge is anissue I
shall leave aside here.)
The obvious underpinning for this form of naturalism is a
rejection oftraditional epistemological foundationalism. If
philosophy does notprovide a foundation for empirical knowledge,
and if the reason philoso-phy does not provide this foundation is
that there is no special a priorirealm from which it could do so,
then there is no reason to believe that theclaims of philosophy,
like the claims of other disciplines, should beimmune to evidence
or influence from more straightforwardly empiricaldisciplines.
Put solely as a matter of rejecting epistemological
foundationalism,there is nothing to distinguish Anglo-American
philosophy fromContinental. There are very few foundationalists
left on either side of thatpurported divide. It is slightly more
complicated, however, when we turnto the reasons for rejecting
epistemological foundationalism. But onlyslightly. One good reason
to reject such a foundationalism is that attemptsto provide it have
proven futile. Quine at least the Quine of the TwoDogmas of
Empiricism would seem to fall into this category. So
wouldDerrida.25 (This is a good strategy because by resisting the
attempt to givean a priori reason for rejecting foundationalism, it
does not risk falling intoproblems of self-reference.)
Alternatively, one might reject it because oneprefers to hold at
the center of ones philosophical perspective the seem-ingly
important truth that humans are natural, biological creatures.
Thisview seems to inspire many recent Anglo-American
epistemologists. Italso inspires Foucault. Yet again although not
finally one might wantones moral viewpoint to be responsive to the
world in which we actuallycarry out our lives, rather than dictate
to us from on high. This certainlyseems to be the motivation in
works like Flanagans and Schefflers cited
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23 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.24 Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992.25 I do not want to suggest here,
heaven forfend, that Quine is a Derridean or Derrida a
Quinean. My point is more modest. Derrida looks at the history
of philosophy, sees the fail-ure of foundationalist projects, and
draws conclusions concerning the operation ofdiffrance from the
ways those failures occur. Quine looks at the notion of
analyticity, seesthe failure of attempts to locate its difference
from syntheticity, and draws conclusions bothabout the failure of
positivist projects of offering a foundationalist epistemology and
aboutthe structure of an appropriate scientific epistemology. But
both philosophers draw theirconclusions concerning the failure of
foundationalism from a survey of the attempts of itsproponents.
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above. It is also an important motivation in Habermass discourse
ethics,although Habermas carries that motivation out in a different
way. (Thatdifferent way puts him in dialogue with more
contractualist approaches tomorality, such as those of Scanlon26
and Rawls.)
Perhaps, if we move away from the core issue of the rejection of
epis-temological foundationalism, we might find evidence of a
distinctionbetween Continental and Anglo-American philosophy in
this realm. Itseems that Anglo-Americans, rather than merely
acknowledging the vari-ous impingements of empirical knowledge on
philosophical work, activelyappropriate empirical findings in their
philosophical discussions. Do theContinentalists? Michel Foucault
was interested in the findings of history,and he appropriated them
in his work. Pierre Bourdieu, although an impor-tant figure in
recent Continental philosophical discussion, is by training
asociologist and anthropologist, and he buttresses his arguments
with hisown empirical work in those fields.27 Paul Virilio cites
and analyzes vari-ous contemporary developments in such far-flung
fields as militaryresearch and media studies.28 Not all
Continentalists by any means areconcerned with empirical issues.
Deleuze, Gadamer, and Derrida certainlyare not. But neither are all
major figures in contemporary Anglo-Americanphilosophy, especially
in moral and political theory. Rawls, Nozick, andScanlon, among
others, leap to mind in this regard.
Maybe we should revise the view yet again. Maybe it is not
recourse toempirical knowledge per se that distinguishes
Anglo-American fromContinental philosophers but recourse to and an
embrace of natural scien-tific empirical knowledge. Maybe it is
that Anglo-American philosophersrely on the natural sciences in a
way that Continental philosophers do not.
There is, I believe, some truth to this idea, but only very
little. To seehow little, notice first that philosophers like
Scheffler, who, in HumanMorality, appeals to psychoanalysis, and
perhaps even Flanagan, most ofwhose appeals are to psychological
theory and cognitive science, woulddrop out of the Anglo-American
tradition if this were the distinguishingcriterion. Note as well
that too close an embrace of this position might welllead us to the
positivist position that we saw Anglo-American theory rejectat the
outset of our discussion of this candidate for distinction. For
ifhewing to the results of natural science were criterial for
Anglo-Americanphilosophy, then the more purely normative fields of
morality, political
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26 Esp. Contractualism and Utilitarianism, in Post-Analytic
Philosophy, ed. JohnRajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
27 Perhaps most well-known in this regard are Outline of a
Theory of Practice, trans.Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), originally published in 1972,and
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984),
originally published in 1979.
28 For Virilios work in military history and research, see Speed
and Politics, trans. MarkPolizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986),
originally published in 1979. For some of hisrecent work in media
studies, see Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997),
orig-inally published in 1995.
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theory, and aesthetics would have to be abandoned as properly
philosoph-ical.29 Although one need not embrace a verificationist
theory of meaningor a sense-data view of observational sentences,
the unwelcome sectariannarrowness of the philosophical approach
associated with the termanalytic would certainly return as the
metaphilosophical yardstick on sucha criterion.
If we loosen the idea a bit, though, there may be a truth to be
glimpsedhere. Anglo-American philosophy of the twentieth century
has beenanimated by an ideal of science in general and physics in
particular that hasnot been evident in Continental philosophy.
(There are exceptions here,most notably Georges Canguilhem in
biology and Gaston Bachelard inphysics. It is perhaps interesting
that much of their work emerged duringthe period of positivism in
the Anglo-American tradition.) Anglo-American philosophy has leaned
more heavily on natural science, whileContinental philosophy has
leaned more heavily on the arts, literature inparticular. This
leaning is not so much a criterion of distinction betweenthe two
traditions as it is a loose orientation of interests (as well as
animpetus to philosophical idiom an issue I shall address later).
During thepositivist period in Anglo-American philosophy, it might
have beenconsidered more criterial. But, as is well known, the fact
that Anglo-American philosophy has changed in its relation to
natural science fromconsidering its incorporation criterial to
considering it orientational indi-cates a metaphilosophical change
in Anglo-American philosophy itself.That change was one I referred
to above as the widening of philosophicalconcerns. Given this
widening, and given that many Continental philoso-phers are open to
empirical knowledge generally, and further given thatthose openings
are confluent with a shared epistemological antifounda-tionalism,
it seems that what we are faced with here is less a criterion
fordistinguishing the two traditions and more an opportunity for
each to learnfrom the other in areas that have been relatively
neglected by the hometradition.
Leftist Versus Liberal OrientationContinental philosophers are
knee-jerk leftists; Anglo-American philoso-phers are knee-jerk
liberals. That seems to be the purported distinctionhere. This
candidate would be, in one sense, at the opposite pole of the
onejust considered. Instead of trying to find a distinction through
the realmsof ontology and epistemology, one turns to more purely
normative fieldsto discover it. What cannot be found in science can
perhaps be found inpolitics.
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29 A possible exception here might be those who think that
evolutionary biology can yieldreasonable norms. But even in that
case the ability to argue for such a position, inasmuch asit
presupposes a full moral vocabulary, would be radically
restricted.
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It cannot. And it will not take many words to see why. First,
the recentlyascendent political theorists in France are not the
theorists of the genera-tion of the 1960s those formed by the
events of May 1968 but the theo-rists of the generation after that.
In France, perhaps the most ascendentpolitical theorists are
liberals, especially Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut.30There has been a
backlash against the failure of Althusserian Marxism, theperceived
excesses of more radical theorists like Foucault, and also
againstthe perceived totalitarian tendencies of Heideggers thought
(broughtabout by a renewed recognition of Heideggers personal
involvement withNazism). This has led to a reinvigorated embrace of
liberalism amongcontemporary political philosophers in France. In
Germany, Habermassown evolution from critical theorist to
contractualist has already put himin dialogue with Rawls concerning
the proper approach and scope ofcontractualist theories of
justice,31 and has landed him squarely in the campof
Anglo-American-style contractualism.
The fact is, on the Continent, as in so many other places,
liberal theoryis currently without an influential philosophical
rival. And the upshot ofthat fact is that we can no longer assume
that the Continent is dominatedby leftist political thinkers while
liberalism is left to the Anglo-Americans.
A Concern with Versus a Rejection of the History of PhilosophyIt
has been a staple of those who believe in the split between
Anglo-American philosophers and Continental ones that the latter
still workwithin a framework that endorses appeal to major figures
in the history ofphilosophy, whereas Anglo-Americans, under the
influence of positivistapproaches to philosophy, have largely
jettisoned those figures. (Therehas, of course, always been a
respectful nod toward Hume; but that respecthas rarely been
translated into a positive philosophical engagement or
rein-terpretation.) The claim about Continental philosophy is
surely right.There are exceptions Sartre and, to a lesser extent,
Merleau-Ponty leapto mind here32 but by and large Continental
thinkers situate themselveswithin the broad tradition of the
history of philosophy and articulate theirthought within and
against members of that tradition (or, in the case ofDerrida,
within and against the tradition as a whole). To cite just a
fewexamples: Gadamer traces his lineage back through Heidegger to
earlierhermeneuticists, such as Schleiermacher; Deleuze relies
largely on theStoics, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson; Habermas
articulates his early
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30 For their critique of the generation of 1968, see French
Philosophy of the Sixties, trans.Mary Cattani (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1990). For a positive engage-ment with
liberalism and its history, see Luc Ferrys three-volume Political
Philosophy,trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 19901992).
31Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on
John Rawls Political
Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 10931.32 And
there have been exceptions on the Anglo-American side, such as
Strawson.
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work over and against Hegel and Marx and his later work in
dialogue withKant; Apels acknowledged influences include not only
Wittgenstein butalso Peirce.
Given the source of the Anglo-American jettisoning, however,
onemight expect that, with the waning of positivisms grasp, there
would be acorresponding openness to rethinking and reappropriating
the historicaltradition of philosophy. And this has indeed been the
case. In fact, aninstructive example here is a philosopher many of
whose works were writ-ten during the decline of positivism, not
during the more contemporaryphase of post-positivist Anglo-American
philosophy: Wilfrid Sellars.Sellars always saw his work as
articulated with and, at moments, againstthe larger canvas of
philosophical tradition. To take the most extendedexample of his
appropriation of historical figures, Science andMetaphysics
(subtitled Variations on Kantian Themes),33 Sellars weaves abroad
philosophical framework within the context of a
reinterpretedKantianism. What is instructive about Sellarss example
is that he was,along with Quine, the most influential force in
removing Anglo-Americanepistemology and philosophy of language from
the grip of positivism. Itcould, I believe, be argued that his
familiarity with historical themes in thehistory of philosophy and
his construction of a post-positivist perspectivewere, at least in
part, mutually determining.
Sellarss use of the history of philosophy, and of Kant in
particular, hasbeen extended in Robert Brandoms Making It Explicit.
But perhaps themore influential reappropriation of historical
figures has been in ethics,where the rediscovery of Aristotle by
Alisdair MacIntyre, BernardWilliams, and John McDowell has spawned
an entire third force inethics to stand beside consequentialism and
deontology. Recounting thedetails of this third force would take us
too far afield, but the basic idea isthat rather than seeing
morality as a set of codes of behavior, divorcedfrom other areas of
our lives, to which we have only or primarily a cogni-tive
relation, we need to see morality woven into our other attitudes
andeven our perception in short, to take up morality as a way of
being ratherthan merely a way of acting. Thus the substitution of
the broader termethics for that of the narrower term morality.
The most commonly cited philosophical predecessor for this
position is,as I mentioned, Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle is not
merely cited as a namebut is used as a philosophical resource for
developing recent philosophicalpositions.34 Thus, in a large and
influential stream in recent Anglo-American philosophical thinking,
the history of philosophy has figured inan articulation of the
issues in much the same way as it often does for thosephilosophers
associated with the Continental tradition.
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33 Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1967.34 Cf., for example,
chapter 3 of Bernard Williamss Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); or John McDowells
Virtue and Reason,Monist 62 (1979): 33150.
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There are, of course, other positions in Anglo-American
philosophy thatarise out of a dialogue with philosophys historical
tradition. Let two moreexamples suffice: Rortys appeal to Dewey in
developing his neopragmaticmetaphilosophical position and the
ongoing historical engagement withcontractualism that was revived
in Rawlss writings.
It is, perhaps, true that Anglo-American philosophers whose
concern ismore with natural science are less concerned with issues
in the history ofphilosophy. (Although those influenced by the
works of Thomas Kuhnmight be less than ready to concede the
appropriateness of that diminishedconcern.) On that basis, one
might be tempted to draw a distinctionbetween the less overtly
normative philosophical work concerned withnatural science and all
other philosophical work, allowing the history ofphilosophy to be
relevant to the latter but not to the former. That would befine
with me, but it would certainly be a curious way to draw the
distinc-tion between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy.
Creating Perspectives Versus Limning RealityIt is often said
that what divides Continentalists and their
Anglo-Americancounterparts is that the Continentalists are
concerned not so much with, inQuines phrase about science, limning
the true and ultimate structure ofreality35 as with creating useful
or interesting perspectives by means ofwhich to offer different
takes on the world, while Anglo-Americanphilosophers are driven by
the idea of truth, truth conceived of here asarticulating things or
at least some of them as they really are. One saysof a Continental
text what Merleau-Ponty says of painting: It is moreaccurate to say
that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see
it.36Although this distinction is, I believe, often offered as a
denigration ofContinental philosophy, it is worth taking seriously,
because of what wemight see according to it.
The first thing to note in this regard is that this distinction
is related to,but does not mirror exactly, the distinction offered
earlier thatContinentalists are more concerned with art and
literature, while Anglo-American philosophers are more concerned
with science. The reason thedistinction between creating
perspectives and limning reality does notmirror the earlier one is
that there seems to be no bar to creating a morepurely
philosophical perspective that takes itself to be a perspective,
butdone in the idiom and inferential structure of philosophy rather
than of liter-ature or the plastic arts. I take it that this is
precisely what Deleuze and hiscollaborator Felix Guattari envision
in their work What Is Philosophy?37
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35 Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960),
221.36
Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of
Perception, ed. James Edie(Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1964), 164.
37 Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchel (New York: Columbia
University Press,1994), originally published in 1991.
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That said, there is much to ask after in trying to untangle what
thisdistinction is all about. One way, surely unpromising, to take
the distinc-tion is to render it as a distinction between those
philosophical positionsthat do not seek our assent and those that
do. However, philosophical posi-tions that anyone would bother to
write down must seek our assent in somefashion or another. So let
us sharpen the distinction a little. Perhaps thedistinction runs
this way: Continental work does not seek our epistemicassent,
whereas Anglo-American work does. If we go in this direction,
weneed to ask, of course, what epistemic assent amounts to.
One thing it cannot amount to is belief as true in the sense of
corre-sponding to the world. The reason it cannot amount to this is
that thereare many Anglo-American philosophers who do not subscribe
to a corre-spondence theory of truth, and who would be surprised to
discover thatthey were, for that reason, Continentalists. How about
the more modestbelief as true in some sense of true? That seems a
bit vague. One way toclarify it, perhaps, is to take it in an
ontological direction: that the philo-sophical posits offered by
Continentalists do not request our assent asreferring to items
existing independent of our claims about them and thatthe
philosophical posits offered by Anglo-Americans do request
suchassent.
But that does not seem to work either. Leaving aside the older
instru-mentalist/realist debate in the philosophy of science, we
have the newerempiricist/realist debate,38 with writers like Bas
van Fraassen and RichardBoyd lining up on opposite sides of the
question of whether to take a real-ist understanding of scientific
discourse.39 Now, one might argue here thatthese debates are
irrelevant, because they concern the status of sciencerather than
of philosophy. Granted, the debates do concern the status
ofscience, but it is hard to see how they do not at least raise
larger, as yetunsettled issues regarding the status of the posits
of philosophicaldiscourse. In this sense, their debate may
fruitfully be seen in the light ofGadamerian hermeneutics. For
Gadamer, following Heidegger, the orien-tation of the epistemic
tradition of inquiry one engages in at least partiallydetermines
what one will discover as a result of that inquiry. Boyds viewis
that intertheoretic fit offers evidence for a realist understanding
of atheorys posits; van Fraassens claim is that because the project
of scienceis to save the phenomena, all it requires of us is an
acceptance of atheorys empirical adequacy. They can be seen as
competing understand-ings of how to appropriate and situate the
practices of science within ourepistemic tradition. (They can also
be read as competing views about whatimportant aspects of that
tradition amount to.)
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38 Not to mention the realist/antirealist debate in semantics
between Dummett andDavidson.
39 Cf. esp. van Fraassens Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980); and BoydsRealism, Underdetermination, and a Causal
Theory of Evidence, Nous 7, no. 1 (1973):112.
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Seen this way, matters do not look so simple concerning the
question ofthe posits of philosophical discourse. Neither Boyd nor
van Fraassenaddresses the Gadamerian issue of the status of the
epistemic traditionwithin which science has its role. It is, of
course, not their project to do so.In order to assess whether
Anglo-Americans and Continentalists aredivided on the metaphysical
status of philosophical posits, however, onewould need to address
the hermeneutic question of the epistemic status ofthe traditions
of philosophical inquiry. And there is no agreement on thatwithin
the two traditions. To cite just two examples from the range
ofoptions that could be taken here, we could appeal to Putnams
internal real-ism40 or to Derridas complicated stance that we have
at once to commit toand to undermine our commitment to our
philosophical posits.
From this perspective, we can notice two things. First, it is
not a settledmatter within Anglo-American philosophy whether its
philosophical positsare held to request our assent, or even what
that assent would amount to.Second, it is not a settled matter in
Continental philosophy either. It iscertainly the case that the
Nietzschean influence on contemporary Frenchphilosophy has moved
some thinkers, perhaps most notably Deleuze,toward creating
perspectives as opposed to limning reality. But the storywithin
Continental philosophy is more complicated than that. And, beforewe
dismiss Nietzschean-influenced thinkers like Deleuze for simply
creat-ing philosophical posits rather than endorsing their reality,
let us recall thatJohn Rawls also saw several of his central
philosophical posits as norma-tive rather than ontological. If
there is a Nietzschean influence on histhought, it is not so
readily apparent.
Obscurity Versus ClarityHanging around Anglo-American thinkers,
I often hear it said that theproblem with Continentalists is that
they are obscure, that they dont speakplainly. Hanging around
Continentalists, I often hear it said that Anglo-American
philosophers are obscure, that the point of their analyses, if
theyhave one, is difficult to wring out of them.
I am tempted to close this section with the preceding paragraph,
leavingits lesson plain for all to see. I suppose I could go on to
list major recentphilosophers in each tradition whose writings are
often consideredobscure, or at least turgid, even to those within
the tradition. I shall spareyou. You know who you are. (Or, as we
all fancy ourselves to be prettygood writers, you know who they
are.) Underlying this mutual recrimina-tion, however, lies
something deeper, which points to what I think is theonly
justifiable distinction (or perhaps pair of related distinctions)
leftbetween Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. It is a
distinction
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40 Developed in chapter 2 of Reason, Truth, and History
(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981).
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that, once recognized, will immediately reveal itself as a
distinction to beovercome rather than embraced: the idiom and
reference points of eachtradition.
Idiom and Reference PointsBy idiom I mean the way a philosopher
talks, the style he or she uses inaddressing his or her audience,
whether in writing or in speaking. By refer-ence points I mean
those other philosophers or nonphilosophical thinkersand their
perspectives with whom a philosopher sees himself or herself
asengaged. Reference points refer specifically to people and to the
perspec-tives of those people, not to philosophical issues per se.
I have been argu-ing that the two traditions cannot be
distinguished by reference tophilosophical issues, and that those
who think they can be are mistaken. Aphilosopher may see himself or
herself as engaged with an issue specificto his or her tradition.
With specific local exceptions, noted as I haveproceeded, he or she
would be wrong. Many philosophers, however, seethemselves as
engaged not simply by issues but also by the
philosophicalperspectives on those issues articulated by specific
philosophers. It is thosephilosophers and their perspectives that I
mean when I use the term refer-ence points.
It is the idiom and the reference points of those working in
Anglo-American and Continental philosophy that still divide them. I
shall discusseach in turn.
It is not really accurate to say that Anglo-American
philosophers work(largely) in one idiom and Continentalists work
(largely) in another. Themore accurate characterization would be
that while Anglo-Americanphilosophers work (largely) in an idiom,
Continentalists do not. Therehave developed common terms such as
supervenience and naturalismand type-token distinctions that can be
found across the range ofdiscourses among Anglo-American
philosophers. This is not to say that allAnglo-American
philosophers mean the same things when they use thoseterms. On the
contrary, in many debates what is at issue is what should bemeant
by them. The fact of their common use, however, tends to
fostercommunicative interaction of the sort that one does not see
as much inContinental philosophy.
I am not, of course, claiming that Continental philosophers do
notunderstand one anothers positions. Rather, I am making the more
modestclaim that Continental philosophy is not woven together
nearly as much bya common set of terms as Anglo-American philosophy
is. There is a disad-vantage to this. Inasmuch as a common
vocabulary promotes dialogue,there may be more monologue in the
Continental community than thereneed be. In my experience, there
probably is. Alternatively, however, thereis an advantage to fewer
common terms among Continentalists. Inasmuchas a common vocabulary
discourages thinking about issues in new and
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different terms that might help delineate fresh perspectives,
creativitysuffers when everyone is speaking in the same way. I want
to be clear here,as I am treading on ground that will be sensitive
to many. My claim is notthat Anglo-American philosophers are
uncreative but rather that a commonset of terms makes more
difficult whatever types of creativity can emergefrom the embrace
of more fluid vocabularies.
One might ask here how this difference has come about. Although
todiscuss it would take us far afield of the main point, I suspect
it has some-thing to do with the relative embrace (touched on
above) of Anglo-American philosophy with science and its linguistic
strictures and ofContinental philosophy with art and literature and
their linguistic open-ness. And, once again, as those relative
embraces slacken, we can expectthat the differences will slacken
with them.
However that may be, assuming what I have said here is roughly
right and if there is less difference in idiom than I am remarking,
so much thebetter for my thesis the question arises: Does this mark
a differencebetween the two traditions worth preserving as a
difference? The answerseems clearly to be that it does not. I
reckon that I can count on my read-ers to agree that both
communicative skill and creativity are good qualitiesfor
philosophers to have. Then why would we want to enact strategies
forkeeping them ghettoized in one tradition or another? If we can
learn tonavigate among different idioms Continentalists do it all
the time, andAnglo-American philosophers do it often enough,
particularly when thesame terms are often differently used by
different thinkers then boththese qualities can, in their tension,
be welcomed into both traditions.
One might raise the objection here, however, that these
qualities aremutually contradictory, in a sense that I myself
pointed out three para-graphs ago. There, I said that constraint by
a common vocabulary candampen at least certain forms of
philosophical creativity. If so, would wenot be better off keeping
two traditions, one in which creativity is empha-sized and the
other in which communication is emphasized (in the specificsense, I
should stress, in which I am now using these terms)?
To this objection there is a modest answer and a bolder one. The
modestanswer is that perhaps we would be better off with two
traditions ifphilosophers in either tradition actually read,
thought about, and discussedphilosophers in the other, and that as
a matter of course. As it stands,however, there is still enough
mutual suspicion that such reading, thinking,and discussion,
although gaining ground, is still not done as a matter ofcourse.
Inasmuch as the traditions encounter each other on the basis
ofhostility, Continentalist philosophers are not gaining the
benefit of certaintypes of communicative interaction, while
Anglo-American philosophersare not gaining the benefit of certain
types of creativity. I do not particu-larly like this reply, as it
grants too much in the way of a differencebetween traditions, but
it would still be an advance on our present situa-tion.
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The bolder reply, and by my lights the right one, is that there
seems noreason to expect that the distinction between an emphasis
on communica-tion and one on creativity should follow along
national or regional lines.Why should those writing on the
Continent have a corner on the form ofcreativity that comes with
new vocabularies and those in the United Statesand Britain have a
corner on the communicative flow that attaches to acommon
vocabulary? For one thing, thinkers like Habermas and
Lyotardalready do not fit the communicative/creative dichotomy I
have positedhere. Habermas has taken pains to make his perspective
more accessible toAnglo-American philosophers, and he has, as I
pointed out above, incor-porated much of their work into his own
projects. Lyotard, in turn, hastried to absorb much recent work in
Anglo-American philosophy whilestill leaving room for the creative
vocabulary associated with Continentalphilosophy.41 Alternatively,
Anglo-American thinkers like Isaiah Berlinhave had a powerful
influence on the Anglo-American tradition withoutassuming the
vocabularly associated with that tradition.42
There seems to be no bar to having a tradition that has a
dominantcommon vocabulary (or two) and yet recognizes rebels
against that vocab-ulary as potential contributors to a discussion
that has been framed withinthe vocabularys terms. All this in one
country or across many.
Turning to the second difference between Anglo-American
andContinental philosophy that we are considering in this section,
differentreference points, the claim I want to make is an obvious
one. People in theAnglo-American tradition read other
Anglo-American philosophers morethan they read their Continental
counterparts, even those counterparts whomight be working in the
same area. And vice versa for the Continentalists.This would make
sense if there was were other deep differences betweenthe two
traditions. But, as I have argued here, there are not deep
differ-ences. In fact, there are good reasons for people in one
tradition to readpeople in the other, reasons having as much to do
with the differentapproaches specific thinkers have to the same
issue as with the fact that itis the same issue they are
approaching. Let me point out briefly severalexamples of issues
where this kind of cross-reading might be fruitful.
The first example has, as I mentioned, already begun to take
place in thedialogue between Rawls and Habermas. Both philosophers
are contractu-alist, in some sense of the term. They both recognize
this, and on the basis
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41 For Lyotards take on some of the differences in play here,
see his article A BizarrePartner, in Postmodern Fables, trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press,
1997), originally published in 1993.
42 It may seem at this point that, by citing these thinkers, I
am conceding that there reallyis no idiomatic distinction between
Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. I wouldbe happy to
concede that, and I think things are moving in the right direction;
but a glanceat the literature of the respective traditions reveals
that, while slowly being effaced, theidiomatic distinction is still
dominant. Journals that consider themselves to be Anglo-American
journals resist non-Anglo-American idiom, and Continental journals
resist theAnglo-American idiom.
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of this recognition have begun to address each others work.
Expandingthis dialogue would require that other discussants, such
as Dworkin andNozick and Apel, find their way in.
A second example concerns hermeneutics. Both Davidson and
Gadamerare, in different ways, hermeneutic thinkers. There might be
much to learnin contrasting the formers concept of radical
interpretation and its focusspecifically on language with the
latters approach to the fusing of hori-zons between whole
traditions. Again, it is not that Davidson and Gadamerare saying
the same thing that would make dialogue interesting. On
thecontrary, it is because they are different thinkers concerned
with some ofthe same problems (as Davidson and Quine are, or as
Gadamer andHabermas are) that there may be profit in a dialogue
between the two orbetween those whose philosophical interests lie
in either.
A third example concerns the rise of neopragmatist
philosophicalconcerns in both traditions. Here the work of Wilfrid
Sellars or RobertBrandom might be usefully contrasted with and
appropriated by thoseworking on the thought of Michel Foucault.43
While Sellars and Brandomseem to provide some of the conceptual
underpinning that Foucault needsin order to elude charges of a
pernicious epistemic relativism, Foucaultprovides a political
approach to practices that would help prevent Anglo-American
neopragmatism from lapsing into an assumption one that oftenseems
to characterize Rortys approach that the evolution of practices
isalways an evolution from the unmitigatedly worse to the
unmitigatedlybetter: an assumption that practices change when the
change works betterfor everyone involved. (One way to see the
potential Foucaultian influencewould be to see it as fostering a
recognition that the term pragmatismought to be used to group those
approaches that see the concept of practiceas the central unit of
analysis, rather than to group those who think thatwhatever works
will prevail in the end.)
These examples do no more than gesture at fruitful research
programsthat could arise when we jettison the habit of reading only
within our owntradition traditions at this point amounting to no
more than those we aretold we should read and begin to see merit in
reading the work of thosewho were not taught, or not particularly
favored, in our respective gradu-ate schools. Of course, not every
issue lends itself to reading across thetraditions. As I pointed
out above, those whose interests lie primarily in thephilosophy of
natural science may find Continental philosophy pretty
slimpickings.44 Conversely, there is little in recent
Anglo-American literaturefor those interested in consumer culture,
media dominance, and transna-tional capitalism (although a change
here would not be surprising). But
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43 This has been the thrust of my own work, examples of which
are in the texts cited inthe footnotes above.
44 Although Joseph Rouse has written a fascinating book
incorporating Foucaultsperspective into a philosophy of natural
science, Knowledge and Power: Toward a PoliticalPhilosophy of
Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
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these are local distinctions that do not add up to a global one.
Perhaps weshould abandon the distinction between Continental and
Anglo-Americanphilosophy, since it is a distinction without a
difference, and join thosewho have begun to engage in an activity
that draws indifferently from thetwo.
What, then, shall we call this activity, an activity that is
neither Anglo-American philosophy nor Continental philosophy? How
about philoso-phy?
Department of Philosophy and ReligionClemson UniversitySuite 113
Holtzendorff HallClemson, SC [email protected]
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