The distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is not a philosophical distinction. It is a sociological one, incorporating political and psychological dimensions. I shall argue that this distinction is a symptom of, most relevantly, professionalization, and that professionalization excludes philosophy. As a result, the only philosophically meaningful consequence that the analytic/continental distinction has is to alert us by conceptual contrast to what it is that we should concern ourselves with instead. This alternative focus is the a-professional contexts and features of (...) actual philosophy. The analytic/continental distinction usefully points us to these as that to which the specific structure and disciplinary effects of this distinction are entirely irrelevant. (shrink)

O presente trabalho visa mostrar a diferença substancial entre o projeto de psicologia descritiva de Brentano e a fenomenologia transcendental de Husserl e seu impacto na filosofia contemporânea da consciência. Em particular, consideraremos a questão da autorreflexividade da primeira pessoa ou, em outras palavras, o problema da referência do deíctico “eu” do ponto de vista da fenomenologia. Duas teorias de nível único, a teoria da consciência pré-reflexiva e a teoria da autorrepresentação, serão analisadas bem como a relação entre a consciência (...) fenomênica e a intencionalidade. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger shared with Max Weber the decisionist understanding of values as something that cannot be justified by scientists or philosophers. Although both accepted the challenge of modernity in this respect, they reacted in opposite ways. Carnap, along with the Vienna Circle, defended a scientific conception of the world in which science and instrumental rationality were to permeate all of life; Heidegger embarked on an understanding of metaphysics in which rationality and science were to be eliminated. Both (...) strategies were deeply political, and both resulted from the split in the German youth and life reform movement that took place during and immediately after World War I. I discuss this image here in the context of dialectical theology, the Vienna Circle, and the Davos Disputation, with a sideways glance at Ernst Cassirer, and with a view to earlier interpretations by Michael Friedman and Gottfried Gabriel. (shrink)

The author defends the thesis that with the neo-Kantian concept of the concept determinacy is conceived of as mediation but not also as self-mediation. In terms of Hegel, neo-Kantianism conceives of the concept as an essence, not as a concept. Consequently, neo-Kantianism does insufficient justice to its own claim of transcendental idealism to be the self-knowledge of reason. This thesis is substantiated by scrutinizing, first, the functional account of the concept as developed by the Marburg neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and the (...) Southwest neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch. Subsequently, the transcendental idealist conception of the concept as a function-concept is problematized by taking Hegel’s speculative-idealist doctrine of concepts into account. It becomes clear that concept progresses from itself as a concept of substance to the function-concept, and finally to the concept. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the phenomenon, known to today’s philosophers, as the split between analytic and continental philosophy. I provide a historical-institutional explanation for this split and then a propose a type of doing philosophy beyond the divide, which I call “synthetic philosophy.” Synthetic philosophy should take and synthesize the best of both traditions into a new form of philosophy, which I recommend for the future.

This paper explores Quentin Skinner's historiographical thesis, named linguistic contextualism, as a potential challenge to the dichotomy in contemporary philosophy between the ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ traditions. This divide, rooted in differing approaches to language and methodology, has led to labeling and categorizing philosophers into these two areas. However, Skinner’s work, drawing on the ideas of R.G. Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John L. Austin, presents a nuanced view that defies easy classification. By emphasizing the importance of historical context and the ways (...) language shapes philosophical inquiry, Skinner’s thesis blurs the boundaries between analytical and continental philosophy. We examine Skinner’s arguments and their implications for the ‘parting of ways’ concept, suggesting that linguistic contextualism challenges the validity of this dichotomy. Ultimately, it argues for the inclusion of linguistic contextualism as a significant alternative within contemporary philosophical discourse, particularly in discussions about metaphilosophy and the limitations of rigid categorizations. (shrink)

We argue that the recent debate over the meaning and identification of content has led to a shift in the theoretical circumstances that favored Frege’s divergence from Kant. Quine’s critique of the theoretical distinction of intensional identities removed the certainty that we can distinguish necessary from accidental identifications of content. The decline of the stability of language as a central object for the study of recognizable and predetermined attributes of meaningful information marks the end of the era of philosophical optimism (...) about the superiority of language analysis over psychologism and leads to a resurgence of philosophical emphasis on the study of mind and cognition. The extent of this shift is such that the central discrepancy between Frege's formal methodology of second-order quantification and Kant's synthetic theory of content identification has lost its significance. With the removal of these circumstances and the erosion of this discrepancy, we can now perceive the aspects in which Frege's theory is consistent with, rather than in direct opposition to, the cognitive perspective that Kant himself endorses. These aspects have always been present, but under unfavorable conditions they have been suppressed or disregarded. (shrink)

Despite its formative influence on the subsequent emergence of a supposed ‘divide’ between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy, the clash between the phenomenological tradition and early analytic philosophy is only a small part of a much broader, complex, and multi-faceted ‘parting of the ways’ between various strands of interwar Germanophone philosophy. It was certainly more than two parties that parted their ways. As Friedman (2000) rightly saw, this ‘parting’ was indeed largely an outcome of the post-war context of Neo-Kantianism’s ‘decline’. The (...) ensuing power vacuum generated clashes between multiple philosophical tendencies vying for the institutionally dominant position previously occupied by the Neo-Kantian schools. This power-struggle included, apart from Cassirer’s last stance in defence of Neo-Kantianism, not only the Logical Empiricists and the various offshoots of the Phenomenological tradition, but also Lebensphilosophie, Philosophical Anthropology, and the Frankfurt School. This paper will trace a path through some of the tendencies involved in the abovementioned ‘parting of the ways’, in an effort to bring some of them back into dialogue. I will focus on exploring one specific facet of Horkheimer’s account of the ‘parting of the ways’, namely his critique of the notion of givenness. The overall goal of the paper will be to set up a dialogue between three parting ways towards givenness: Horkheimer’s polemic against the Logical Empiricist myth of the given, Schlick’s polemic against the Bergsonian myth of the given, and the Bergsonian methodology of intuition. (shrink)