While many (perhaps most) of those engaged in the study of philosophy would accept the continued reality and importance of an analytic/continental divide in the discipline, there has been no serious examination of the political dimensions of this rift. Here a series of political assumptions are revealed to be widely held among the British analytic philosophers who were active during the period in which the analytic/continental divide was being established. This paper will approach demonstrating the analysts’ beliefs (...) about the political affiliations of continental philosophy in three ways. Firstly, it will produce direct evidence of the analysts’ belief in the relationship between 19th century continental philosophy and various politically undesirable regimes. Secondly, it will examine in detail one illustrative example, that of Hegel. Thirdly, it will illustrate how the political beliefs already canvassed permeated beyond the limited political critique of continental philosophy into the analysts’ writing on the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations and superiority of the white race in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his anti-emancipationist perspective in “The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” followed by John Stuart Mill’s divergent response to him in 1850 titled, “The Negro Question.” In 1878, The Westminster Review also published a woman’s (...) perspective, “The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question” by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. Although Mill’s essay was a direct attack on Carlyle’s explosive article and is overtly against Carlyle and Bodington’s ideas, this paper argues that an imperialist agenda underlies Mill’s views and in fact poses the same theories of Carlyle and Bodington. The paper first proceeds to interrogate Mill’s hegemonic subtext through a comparison of these three essays by situating them within the scientific discourse of the era, arguing that science, especially phrenology and evolution theories, didn’t exist in a vacuum, but was used to perpetrate the normative racial ideologies of the period. The paper also uses Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering the Orient’ in Culture and Imperialism to show that while Mill seemingly diverges from Carlyle’s stance, this ‘othering’ is in fact present in all three writers’ works. (shrink)

"Kant, Kantianism and Idealism" presents an overview of German Idealism, the major movement in philosophy from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th Century. The period was dominated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose work influenced not just philosophy, but also art, theology and politics. The volume covers not only these major figures but also their main followers and interpreters. These include Kant's younger contemporary Herder, his early critics such as Jacobi, Reinhold, and (...) Maimon, and his readers Schiller and Schlegel - who shaped much of the subsequent reception of Kant in art, literature and aesthetics - as well as Schopenhauer, whose unique appropriation and criticism of theories of cognition later had a decisive influence on Nietzsche. The "Young Hegelians" - such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose writings would influence Engels and Marx - are also discussed. The influence of Kant and German Idealism also extended into France, shaping the thought of such figures as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon, whose work would prove decisive for subsequent philosophical, political, and economic thinking in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. (shrink)

In this article I argue that new light can be shed on the analytic/Continental divide by looking at the controversy on the nature of philosophy in late 19th-century/early-20th-century Germany. The controversy is between those thinkers who understand philosophy primarily as a worldview [Weltanschauung] and those who insist that it should be understood as a science [Wissenschaft]. The positions of the two main representatives of the two camps, Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, are presented and (...) assessed. Their mutual disagreement on what philosophy ought to be reflects in a striking way some of the major tensions existing between the analytic and the Continental camps today. At the end of the article I formulate a historical hypothesis about how the Wissenschaft/Weltanschauung controversy petrified into the analytic/Continental divide. (shrink)

Continental philosophy is one of the twentieth century's most important and challenging philosophical movements. This major volume includes fourteen chapters on its major representatives and schools, including phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism.

This book offers a cutting-edge interpretation of the philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling by critically reconsidering the interpretations of some of his "successors". It argues that Schelling's philosophy should be read as an ontology of immanence, highlighting its relevance for ongoing debates on ethics and freedom. The book builds on a key notion from Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation where he outlines the process through which transcendence must return to immanence in order to be grasped and understood. The author (...) identifies Jaspers, Heidegger, and Deleuze as the main interpreters of Schelling's philosophical activity, highlighting their relevance for subsequent Schelling scholarship. Heidegger and Jaspers refer to Schelling's philosophy in negative terms, namely as an incomplete and unviable philosophical system, whereas Deleuze holds the immanent core of Schelling's ontological discourse in high regard. The author's analysis demonstrates that reading Schelling's philosophy as an ontology of immanence not only avoids Heidegger's and Jaspers's criticisms but is also more fitting to Schelling's original meaning. Accordingly, his reading allows us to fully grasp Schelling's thought in all its strength and consistency: as a philosophy that avoids metaphysical abstractions and maintains the concreteness of concepts like God, nature, freedom by binding them to a solid and material account of Being. Finally, the author uses Schelling to propose an innovative reading of freedom as a matter of resistance, and of philosophy as an activity whose main purpose is that of seeking the actual extent and place of (human) life and freedom within nature. The author originally emphasises the relevance of these conclusions on contemporary debates in Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent. From Philosophy of Nature to Environmental Ethics will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in 19th-century Continental philosophy, German idealism, and Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. (shrink)

The second half of the 19th Century saw a revolution in both European politics and philosophy. Philosophical fervour reflected political fervour. Five great critics dominated the European intellectual scene: Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. "Nineteenth-Century Philosophy" assesses the response of each of these leading figures to Hegelian philosophy - the dominant paradigm of the time - to the shifting political landscape of Europe and the United States, and also (...) to the emerging critique of modernity itself. Both individually and collectively, these thinkers succeeded in revolutionizing theology, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The period also saw the emergence of new schools of thought and new disciplinary thinking. The volume covers the birth of sociology and the social sciences, the development of French spiritualism, the beginning of American pragmatism, the rise of science and mathematics, and the maturation of hermeneutics and phenomenology. (shrink)

Throughout much of the 20th Century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. -/- Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late 19th Century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book (...) goes on to explore in detail the main methodological differences between the two approaches. This covers a very wide range of topics, from issues of style and clarity of exposition to formal methods arising from logic and probability theory. The final section presents a balanced critique of the two schools’ approaches to key issues such as Time, Truth, Subjectivity, Mind and Body, Language and Meaning, and Ethics. -/- Analytic Versus Continental is the first sustained analysis of both approaches to philosophy, examining the limits and possibilities of each. It provides a clear overview of a much-disputed history and, in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both traditions, also offers future directions for both continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The nineteenth century was a dynamic time of philosophical development. This volume explores the rich tradition of nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, highlighting the importance of this tradition for the leading streams of thought of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Tra le figure più importanti del dibattito filosofico italiano del Novecento, Antonio Banfi ha svolto nell'Italia del secondo dopoguerra anche un ruolo politico di rilievo come senatore del PCI. La sua interpretazione del marxismo ha presentato una forte accentuazione umanistica. Tra i suoi scolari filosofi e storici della filosofia come Giulio Preti, Enzo Paci, Remo Cantoni, Paolo Rossi. Il saggio prende in esame la prima fase della riflessione filosofica di Banfi, nella quale ha una importanza decisiva la conoscenza diretta del (...) dibattito tedesco tra le due guerre mondiali, in primo luogo della fenomenologia di Husserl e della ontologia di N. Hartmann. I Principi di una teoria della ragione - libro apparso alla fine degli anni '20 - e poi una serie di incisivi saggi degli anni '30 documentano una conoscenza approfondita e critica di un dibattito di cui mostrerà di nutrirsi in misura decisiva l'interpretazione di Banfi non solo di Hegel, ma anche di Marx. Among the leading philosophers in Italy during the 20th century, Antonio Banfi played an important role not only in the cultural debate during the 1930s and the 1940s, but also in the political scene of post-war Italy, advocating - as a representative of the Italian Communist Party in Italian Senate - a liberal, humanist view of Marxism. Among his students were influential philosophers and historians of philosophy such as Giulio Preti, Enzo Paci, Remo Cantoni and Paolo Rossi. This paper investigates the first phase of Banfi's philosophical development, an analysis of which must include a scrutiny of Banfi's deep indebtedness to German debate between the two World Wars, primarily Husserl's phenomenology and Hartmann's critical ontology. Banfi's phenomenological apprenticeship at the school of Husserl, and the sensitive and critical attitude of his presentation of the German debate in his Principi di una teoria della ragione, are of substantial importance in nourishing his later interpretation of Hegel and Marx. (shrink)

Lawlor discusses major theoretical trends in the work of these philosophers -- immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics.

The history of modern logic is usually written as the history of mathematical or, more general, symbolic logic. As such it was created by mathematicians. Not regarding its anticipations in Scholastic logic and in the rationalistic era, its continuous development began with George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic of 1847, and it became a mathematical subdiscipline in the early 20th century. This style of presentation cuts off one eminent line of development, the philosophical development of logic, although logic (...) is evidently one of the basic disciplines of philosophy. One needs only to recall some of the standard 19th century definitions of logic as, e.g., the art and science of reasoning (Whateley) or as giving the normative rules of correct reasoning (Herbart). In the paper the relationship between the philosophical and the mathematical development of logic will be discussed. Answers to the following questions will be provided: 1. What were the reasons for the philosophers' lack of interest in formal logic? 2. What were the reasons for the mathematicians' interest in logic? 3. What did "logic reform" mean in the 19th century? Were the systems of mathematical logic initially regarded as contributions to a reform of logic? 4. Was mathematical logic regarded as art, as science or as both? (shrink)

This article surveys work on descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, And leibniz, Between 1960 and 1972, With particular attention to hintikka, Frankfurt, Kenny, Gueroult, Robinet, Rescher, Parkinson, Ishiguro, And mates. It is accompanied by an extensive bibliography.

In this article I argue that new light can be shed on the analytic/Continental divide by looking at the controversy on the nature of philosophy in late 19th-century/early-20th-century Germany. The controversy is between those thinkers who understand philosophy primarily as a worldview [ Weltanschauung] and those who insist that it should be understood as a science [ Wissenschaft]. The positions of the two main representatives of the two camps, Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, are (...) presented and assessed. Their mutual disagreement on what philosophy ought to be reflects in a striking way some of the major tensions existing between the analytic and the Continental camps today. At the end of the article I formulate a historical hypothesis about how the Wissenschaft/Weltanschauung controversy petrified into the analytic/Continental divide. (shrink)

In 19th century Germany, the number of publications in the history of philosophy increased dramatically. According to Ulrich Schneider’s calculations, from 1810 through 1899, 148 original textbooks by 114 authors were published in German. The aim of this article is to analyse how the documented in these publications canonic vision of 19th century German philosophy evolved. An analysis of 66 treatises published from 1802 through 1918 allows dividing 19th century philosophers into groups (...) based on the frequency of their names across the tables of contents, describing the changes in the leading group composition and in the share of attention received by a given philosopher over time. The paper presents thus a formal analysis of how historical reputations of philosophers were made, how they stabilised, or faded. The authors claim that the current understanding of the history of 19th century philosophy differs significantly from the one recorded in the German textbooks of the era. (shrink)

The Polish philosophy of mathematics in the 19th century had its origins in the Romantic period under the influence of the then-predominant idealist philosophies. The decline of Romantic philosophy precipitated changes in general philosophy, but what is less well known is how it triggered changes in the philosophy of mathematics. In this paper, we discuss how the Polish philosophy of mathematics evolved from the metaphysical approach that had been formed during the Romantic era (...) to the more modern positivistic paradigm. These evolutionary changes are attributed to the philosophers Henryk Struve, Antoni Molicki and Julian Ochorowicz, and mathematicians Karol Hertz and Samuel Dickstein. We also show how implicit ideas (i.e., those not declared openly) from the area between the philosophy of science and general philosophy played a crucial role in the paradigm shift in the Polish philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Continental philosophy is one of the twentieth century's most important and challenging philosophical movements. This major volume includes fourteen chapters on its major representatives and schools, including phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism.

Continental philosophy is one of the twentieth century's most important and challenging philosophical movements. This major volume includes fourteen chapters on its major representatives and schools, including phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism.

Continental philosophy is one of the twentieth century's most important and challenging philosophical movements. This major volume includes fourteen chapters on its major representatives and schools, including phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism.

This volume covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts and society which set the agenda for the rest of the century. In philosophy, the period saw the birth of analytic philosophy, the development of new programmes and new modes of inquiry, the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. This period saw the most influential (...) work of a remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated and transformed 19th-century thought. A generation of thinkers - among them, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - completed the disenchantment of the world and sought a new re-enchantment. (shrink)

A Book Encounter (Critical Notice) of Leonard Lawlor's Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy.

In this paper I consider Benedetto Croce’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s dialectic in Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1906)and I compare it with a very similar critique elaborated by Gilles Deleuze around sixty years later (in Différence et répetition, 1968, Nietzsche et la philosophie,1962 and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 1991). Even if they are two very different authors, belonging to very different traditions and contexts, both Croce andDeleuze criticise Hegel with a (...) very similar argument, namely by saying that Hegel did not adequately take into account the concept of difference, and subordinated it to opposition (or negation). In addition, albeit by taking different roads, both Croce and Deleuze thought that philosophy has its own specific logic, and this logic is a logic of concept. (shrink)

Jerzy Braun (1901–1975) began as a scout activist, in subsequent years he became known as a politician, poet, prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. In the inter-war years he founded and edited the periodicals Gazeta Literacka [Literary Gazette] and Zet, he also headed the Hoene-Wroński Society which propagated the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Under the Nazi occupation he founded and headed the underground organization Unia grouping Poland’s leading intellectuals. Unia propounded a universalistic program of integrating nations (...) and states whose outlines Braun had laid down before the war. Braun’s unionism theory, in which he strove for a harmonious combination of national and universal ideas, was based on 19th-century concepts developed by, among others, Bronisław Trentowski, August Cieszkowski and, of course, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Imprisoned by the communists after the war, in the 1960s Braun attended the Vaticanum II sessions as an unofficial ecumenism expert. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 209-213, January 2013.

Aristotelian philosophy played an important part in the history of 19th century philosophy and science but has been largely neglected by researchers. A key element in the newly emerging historiography of ancient philosophy, Aristotelian philosophy served at the same time as a corrective guide in a wide range of projects in philosophy. This volume examines both aspects of this reception history.

By offering an original reading of J. G. Fichte's central philosophic work, The Science of Knowledge , through the prism of his much over looked "Journal of Animal Magnetism" this dissertation situates Fichte's later metaphysics of the image within the concerns of contemporary media theory. It does so by taking seriously the political consequences of the historical transformation of the faculty of imagination in age of materialism. Such a reading is made possible by approaching German Idealism through the critical apparatus (...) of 20th century Continental Philosophy . ;In the 19th century, Post-Kantian idealism's designation of the imagination as a faculty was called into question. For instance, with the appearance of Mesmerism and the rise of magnetic psychology, the very validity of the transcendental subject was rendered suspect. The subject's imagination was shown to be transparent to external influence. In his own search for a physical instantiation of idealism Fichte realized that the imagination and its power of imaging was no longer limited to the transcendental subject, but was shown to be a function of material technique. Such a transformation would have far reaching political consequences. Specifically, if Fichte articulated spirit---which defined social wholeness---in terms of the imagination, then the appropriation of the imagination by technological materialism demanded a fundamental rethinking of the communicative ground of the social. (shrink)

Jerzy Braun (1901–1975) began as a scout activist, in subsequent years he became known as a politician, poet, prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian. In the inter-war years he founded and edited the periodicals Gazeta Literacka [Literary Gazette] and Zet, he also headed the Hoene-Wroński Society which propagated the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Under the Nazi occupation he founded and headed the underground organization Unia grouping Poland’s leading intellectuals. Unia propounded a universalistic program of integrating nations (...) and states whose outlines Braun had laid down before the war. Braun’s unionism theory, in which he strove for a harmonious combination of national and universal ideas, was based on 19th-century concepts developed by, among others, Bronisław Trentowski, August Cieszkowski and, of course, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński. Imprisoned by the communists after the war, in the 1960s Braun attended the Vaticanum II sessions as an unofficial ecumenism expert. (shrink)

In a bold new argument, Ulrika Carlsson grasps hold of the figure of Eros that haunts Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, and for the first time, uses it as key to interpret that text and his second book, Either/Or. According to Carlsson, Kierkegaard adopts Plato's idea of Eros as the fundamental force that drives humans in all their pursuits. For him, every existential stance-every way of living and relating to the outside world-is at heart a way of loving. By (...) intensely examining Kierkegaard's erotic language, she also challenges the theory that the philosopher's first two books have little common ground and reveals that they are in fact intimately connected by the central and explicit topic of love. In this text suitable for both students and the Kierkegaard specialist, Carlsson claims that despite long-held beliefs about the disparity of his early work, his first two books both relate to love and Part I of Either/Or should be treated as the sequel to The Concept of Irony. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche should be understood as a “thorough-going nihilist”. Rather than broaching two general projects of destroying current values and constructing new ones, I argue that Nietzsche should be understood only as a destroyer of values. I do this by looking at Nietzsche’s views on nihilism and the role played by Nietzsche’s cyclical view of time, or his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. I provide a typology of nihilisms, as they are found (...) in Nietzsche—negative, reactive and radical—through a close reading of an unpublished fragment in his later notebooks, remnants of which are scattered throughout his published work. I show how the progression between the different stages of nihilism are a “necessary consequence of the ideals entertained hitherto” , with the eternal recurrence of the same playing a vital role in this progression. The last stage of nihilism—radical nihilism—is ambiguous between a life-denying, or passive, nihilism and a life-affirming, or active, one; but, I argue, both kinds of nihilism preclude a construction of new values. But there is an inherent tension within Nietzsche’s account of nihilism insofar as it relies on the eternal recurrence of the same. This tension is brought out nicely by Löwith and partially resolved by Klossowski. There are at least two meanings of the eternal recurrence of the same. In one sense, the cosmological reading, it is intended to make sense of the idea that time is infinite and matter is finite by claiming that every possible combination of matter will recur infinite times. In the other sense, the anthropological reading, it is a kind of thought experiment, analogous to Kant’s categorical imperative: “live in every moment so that you could will that moment back again over and over” . There is a tension between these readings insofar as one must will to live in such a way that they will do it again, over and over , but also that what they do will make no difference, for what one decides to do has been done innumerable times. I argue that this tension can only be resolved by considering Nietzsche as aiming at “goal-lessness as such” and placing him as an active nihilist. (shrink)

I clarify Hegel’s role in the Europeanization of philosophy over the course of the 19th century. I begin with an investigation of the way non-Western philosophy was conceptualized in Europe before, and after, I move on to a consideration of the debates about philosophy that emerged in late 19th century China because of European attempts, such as that of Hegel, to circumscribe the geographical and civilizational scope of this discipline. How may we see (...) the emergence of a distinctly modern, generally nationalist, discourse about “Chinese philosophy” within China as a reflection of larger global processes then taking place? (shrink)

A century ago the dominant philosophical outlook was not some form of materialism or naturalism, but idealism. However, this way of thinking about reality fell out of favour in the Anglo-American analytic tradition as well as the Continental schools of the twentieth century. The aim of this book is to restage and reassess the encounter between idealism and contemporary philosophy. The idealist side will be represented by the great figures of the 19th-century post-Kantian tradition (...) in Germany, from Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, followed by the towering Hegelians in Britain led by T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. Their 20th-century adversaries will be represented by the secular existentialists, especially the famous French trio of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, who sought to follow Nietzsche in philosophizing in light of the death of God. And the arena of encounter will be the philosophy of religion-more specifically, questions relating to the nature and existence of God, death and the meaning of life, and the problem of evil. The book argues that the existentialist critique of idealism enables an innovative as well as a more critical and adventurous approach that is sorely needed in philosophy of religion today. Idealism after Existentialism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Father Copleston’s now established series of textbooks on the history of philosophy divides progressively like a live cell. Vol. I expounded Greek philosophy, Vols. II and III examined Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy and Vol. IV, which was originally intended to cover modern philosophy from the 17th to the 19th century, expands now into three monographs dealing respectively with classic Rationalism, British Empiricism and the continental Enlightenment of the 18th century up to Kant. (...) Thus the present volume, after a general Introduction which states the broad currents of thinking and makes the qualifications appropriate to offset their artificial discussion in three separate books, concentrates upon the personal and capital philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. (shrink)

Andrew Shanks brings together a grand narrative of theology and continental philosophy to argue that the 'solidarity of the shaken' is the kingdom of God in secular dress. Using Jan Patocka's concept of the 'solidarity of the shaken', he explores mystical theology, gnosticism and ethical phenomenology through a set of key 19th- and 20th-century thinkers that exemplified the 'pathos of shakenness'.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Father Copleston’s now established series of textbooks on the history of philosophy divides progressively like a live cell. Vol. I expounded Greek philosophy, Vols. II and III examined Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy and Vol. IV, which was originally intended to cover modern philosophy from the 17th to the 19th century, expands now into three monographs dealing respectively with classic Rationalism, British Empiricism and the continental Enlightenment of the 18th century up to Kant. (...) Thus the present volume, after a general Introduction which states the broad currents of thinking and makes the qualifications appropriate to offset their artificial discussion in three separate books, concentrates upon the personal and capital philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. (shrink)