Continental philosophy

"Continental Philosophy" redirects here. For the 2005 book by William R. Schroeder, see Continental Philosophy: A Critical Approach.
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Continental philosophy is an umbrella term for philosophies prominent in continental Europe.[1][page needed] Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy.[2] These themes proposed by Rosen derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.[3]

Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as well as branches of Freudian, Hegelian and Western Marxist views.[4] Continental philosophy is often contrasted with analytic philosophy.[5]

There is no academic consensus on the definition of continental philosophy. Prior to the twentieth century, the term "continental" was used broadly to refer to philosophy from continental Europe.[6][7] A different use of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement.[8] The term continental philosophy may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views; Hans-Johann Glock has made a similar argument for analytic philosophy.[9] Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term “continental philosophy” was originally more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.[10]

  1. ^ Critchley 2001.
  2. ^ Rosen, Michael E., "Continental Philosophy from Hegel", in Philosophy 2: Further through the Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 665.
  3. ^ Continental philosophers usually identify such conditions with the transcendental subject or self: Solomon 1988, p. 6, "It is with Kant that philosophical claims about the self attain new and remarkable proportions. The self becomes not just the focus of attention but the entire subject-matter of philosophy. The self is not just another entity in the world, but in an important sense it creates the world, and the reflecting self does not just know itself, but in knowing itself knows all selves, and the structure of any and every possible self."
  4. ^ The above list includes only those movements common to both lists compiled by Critchley 2001, p. 13 and Glendinning 2006, pp. 58–65
  5. ^ H.-J. Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 86
  6. ^ Leiter 2007, p. 2: "As a first approximation, we might say that philosophy in Continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is best understood as a connected weave of traditions, some of which overlap, but no one of which dominates all the others."
  7. ^ Critchley, Simon (1998). "Introduction: what is continental philosophy?". In Critchley, Simon; Schroder, William (eds.). A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. p. 4.
  8. ^ Critchley 2001, p. 32: "As such, Continental philosophy is an invention, or, more accurately, a projection of the Anglo-American academy onto a Continental Europe.."
  9. ^ Glock, H.J. (2008). What is Analytic Philosophy?. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-87267-6. Retrieved 2023-08-28.
  10. ^ Glendinning 2006, p. 12.