Hi Derek,

I am glad that you also appreciate Rousseau, and yes his work on education has been quite important – not just in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, but more generally.

I am not sure about swapping 100 analytic philosophers for one Rousseau though. It’s a bit formal. Which specific analytic philosophers would we swap? Also I like to moderate my general, though healthy, cynicism with a touch of optimism about the potential for people, even those who are not the ‘Stars’, to find something new. Perhaps I would put it in terms of academic articles. When I think about the First and Second Discourses, particular the Second, in relation to much of the water that has gone under the bridge of the academic journal over the last 50 years or so….  But he was one of those rare thinkers, the sort of character that emerges very infrequently in the history of thought and so the comparison, like all comparisons, might be a little odious (a venerable thought and perhaps one contributors to the string might reflect on in terms of the string). 

You say: “Behind our discussion is a deeper question about what exactly philosophy is”. This is what I have been intimating regularly (almost constantly) in my posts to this string and its something that is really important in regard to the question of the divide (regardless of whether there is another string focusing on this topic). In general I agree with B. Christensen in his book Self and World – From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology (De Gruyter 2009) that European philosophy has generally been better at this sort of thing than analytic philosophy. But the meta-philosophical question is one that we really need to answer, certainly we need an orientation on philosophy that can think through the division and certainly such a meta-discursive orientation cannot presuppose that one tradition has all of the answers.

The anecdote about Camus is interesting. It seems silly to exclude someone who has had such an impact on philosophy simply on the basis that he did not jump through the right hoops. Surely the contribution speaks for itself. To me it just seems like the product of professionalism and institutionalism, petty stuff – the professionalized denizens of the modern institution protecting their turf in a way that risks excluding, by failing to recognize, valuable thinkers. Philosophy suffers as a consequence – I agree with you there. But philosophy often suffers as a consequence of itself. That is why philosophical auto-criticism is so important.

Phil