analytic vs continental philosophy

references

On Philosophical Methodology: A Sellarsian Look at the Analytic vs Continental Divide * &&& Journal by Daniel Sacilotto

• I will situate some of Wilfrid Sellars’ epistemology and metaphysics in the context of broad methodological concerns that have brought about a fundamental divergence in mainstream approaches of the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions in 20th Century philosophy.

• Sellars’ appropriation of Kant – his ‘naturalism with a normative turn’, as James O’Shea calls it – can be helpfully understood as a possible resolution of the disjunction between the wholesale depreciation of epistemology conceived by some strands within the Continental post-Heideggerian tradition, and the continuation of epistemology and of the scientific aspirations of philosophy within the context of the analytic ‘linguistic turn’

• the idea the transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge is itself informed by, and not merely propaedeutic to, the empirical labor of the natural sciences

• His materialist transvaluation of Kant’s critical philosophy.

• His rationalist assault on empiricist approaches to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

• His dialectical articulation of the relation between the manifest and scientific images of man in the world.

• Taken together, these principles allow us to envisage the idea of an epistemologically adjudicated, critical materialism, beyond the pitfalls of classical metaphysics

• In the first section, I provide a brief preliminary sketch of the methodological issues that lie at the heart of the split between the two philosophical traditions and their respective approaches

• In the second section, I flesh out the underlying historical motivations behind these divergences in method by considering three possible readings or genealogies

• Finally, I explain how a third, Sellarsian approach, informed by the three central tenets outlined above, can be understood as preparing a successful resolution of these divergences, reconciling the radicalized critical impetus of the Continental tradition with the insistence on the pertinence of epistemology and the adherence to the scientific method proper to the analytic tradition.

• reactions to the problems raised throughout modern rationalist and empiricist epistemology, concerning the relation between thinking and being, mind and world

• Richard Rorty[3] proposed to read the heart of the ‘analytic project of semantic analysis’ – as Robert Brandom calls it[4] – as a direct sequel to the Kantian transcendental project in linguistic key, thereby continuing the Enlightenment ideal that a theory of knowledge informed by a rigorous understanding of language and meaning would set philosophy in “the secure path of the sciences”

• it was Sellars who famously claimed that analytic philosophy had, if anything, lagged behind the critical turn initiated by Kant, and had rather remained caught in its ‘Humean phase’

• these characterizations agree in seeing a fateful continuity between the scientific aspirations of modern epistemology, and the analytic linguistic turn of the 20th Century

• the Continental tradition was largely taken by the disillusionment with reason that had emerged in the late 19th Century, with the manifold genealogical critiques of rationality, both local and global, and whose central, inaugural names were Marx, Nietzsche and Freud

• Heidegger proposes to radicalize Kant’s own attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge through a resolutely non-epistemological, but rather existential and pragmatic kind of fundamental ontology, for which the question of knowledge is displaced from philosophical primacy so as to reveal more primitive forms of intentionality than those tracked by the cognitive stance, including that of Husserlian phenomenology

• The various forms of post-Heideggerean assaults against metaphysics implied then a kind of radicalization of critique which would put the systematic and scientific aspirations of philosophy in a crisis, with the common diagnosis that philosophy’s alignment to the scientific method was now understood as a pathological hang-up carried from the modern philosophical ambitions, if not perversions.

• the Continental tradition largely conceived of the task of philosophy (or post-philosophical ‘thinking’) as a definitive break with the guiding impetus of modernity towards knowledge and the alignment of philosophy with science

• At the end of this vector of ‘radicalizing critique’, we find the repeated operation of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (to use Foucault’s term), progressively revealing further prejudices in the philosophical text, pushing critique towards the limit of self-reflexivity, even calling philosophy’s rights to exist into question.

• Two traditions, separated it would seem by a divergent appreciation of the legacy of modernity, yielding two destinies for philosophy: either as continuous with science or the scientific method, or else as perturbing the urge toward scientificity which grounds at once metaphysical and scientific cognition.

• I accordingly propose to trace three possible readings about the relation between philosophical and scientific modernity, on whose basis we can better assess the demands for a contemporary philosophy that traverses the methodological disjunction between its analytic and ‘Continental’ trajectories. It is precisely the work of Sellars that embodies and anticipates how this traversal is to be carried out.

• From this schematic outline, we appear cornered between an orthodox ‘transcendentalist’ view according to which one must above all reject the reduction of subjectivity to objective phenomena and to the methods used to investigate the Natural world, and a resolutely ‘materialist’ view that re-inscribes thought within the natural order.

• for the post-Heideggerean continental tradition the analytic schools remain encumbered by the nefarious hopes for an epistemology over-determined by an unquestioned ‘metaphysics of presence’

• for the analytic orthodoxy the Continental appeals to the irreducibility of the experiential and historical-textual-cultural mediation appears as a pious form of anti-realism or relativism, resisting the desirable fate of scientific specialization

• From the revisionist reading I propose that we draw the following lesson: in conceiving of subjectivity as the ground of ontological reflection, radically separated from the material world described by the natural sciences, transcendental philosophy risked to delegate our self-conception to the authority of our phenomenological wisdom, hypostasizing the vocabulary of immediate experience or the concepts laden in the manifest image.

• The post-Kantian transcendental philosophers of the Continental tradition ironically begin by seeking to expose unquestioned prejudices latent in the modern philosophical enterprise, but end up instead reifying a given phenomenological, natural-linguistic vocabulary as being ontologically fundamental, accessible from the armchair, and beyond revision.

• The idea that the vocabulary to describe our experience of the world – in its conceptual, pragmatic and sensory dimensions* is simultaneously liable to revision but is also harbors a dimension that is not empirical in scope, of course, lies at the heart of Sellars’ famous critique of the Myth of the Given.

• The point is not to say that conceptual activity is ‘more fundamental’ with respect to transparent coping, but simply to remind us that (a) non-conceptual behavior only deserves to be called understanding to the extent that it is liable to conceptual articulation, and (b) that the vocabulary that we use to characterize our know-how or non-conceptual experiences is no less problematic than the vocabulary we use to describe entities in a theoretical or cognitive register.

• Once depurated from its residual piety, the thinking mind finds itself to be just as problematic with the Nature which it explores, which is to say that, insofar as knowledge of ourselves, as beings in the world, is just as conceptually labored as knowledge about the world, and so is not fundamentally different than the knowledge of the worldly objects we describe in the third person. This holds, again, even if we reckon that we must distinguish the functional and normative dimension of conceptual thought in non-ontological terms before we understand what it means to make empirical descriptions of what the world happens to be, i.e. that metaphysics is not first philosophy.

• From the orthodox reading, I propose that we draw the following lesson: to dissolve the critical exigency to adjudicate our theses about the world, threatens to slip right back into dogmatic metaphysics in all its forms. In the last instance, the ‘disintegration’ of critique reveals itself, in the name of an ‘authentically modern’ stance, as ignoring rather than resolving the epistemological and skeptical problematic that inspired Kant to propose the critical inquiry into the conditions for metaphysics. The basic lesson of the great ‘critics’ and genealogists remains ours: thought does not have guaranteed access to being (as the idealist thesis of intellectual intuition would have it), nor is it its unproblematic ‘expression’ (as the vitalist Bergsonist and Deleuzean panpsychist thesis would have it). Thought must think of the conditions under which it can think being, or indeed anything whatsoever. And it is this dimension of inquiry which, Kant tells us, is not-objective, insofar as to ask about the conditions of possibility to think of what there exists empirically is not itself to undertake an empirical investigation into the material structure of the thinker who questions.

• This principle, together with the lessons drawn from the revisionary history, provide the basis to understand the twofold ambition proper to the Sellarsian project, which Jim O’Shea has helpfully schematized in terms of the “causal reducibility cum logical irreducibility” of the manifest image with respect to the scientific image

• That is, the ambition to reconcile the idea that intelligence is, on the one hand, something that occurs in a resolutely material universe, bound by objective laws like everything else, and the idea that there is a dimension of thought which remains nevertheless not tractable by an empirical account of its material conditions. Thinking is causally reducible insofar as it is only by virtue of being instantiated in material bodies that intelligence can operate. But thinking is also logically irreducible insofar as it is the concept of the subject as a logical unit which provides the functional kernel of agency, intelligence and reasoning, and it is this dimension which can be abstracted and specified irrespective of the material constraints of the system. Subjectivity is in this functional sense transcendental with regards to its empirical or material constraints.

• The reconciliation of the normative conception of thinking which depurates Kant’s metaphysical overtones, with a naturalism that depurates its Aristotelian overtones in light of contemporary natural science (as Johanna Seibt emphasizes) remains one of the most distinct facets of Sellars’ work, i.e. the attempt to reconcile transcendental philosophy with a kind of naturalism, thereby interrupting the anthropocentrism to which the former had been hitherto delivered.

• “20th-century analytical ontology did not succeed in overcoming the traditional preoccupation with ‘static’ entities, despite its scientific orientations and despite scientific developments (relativity theory, quantum physics) suggesting the primacy of processes or events. Since the formal tools of analytical ontology, such as the predicate calculus, are standardly interpreted over a domain of substance-like “objects,” 20th-century ontological research—with few exceptions noted below—has even reinforced the topical and theoretical bias of the tradition. Only most recently analytical ontologists have begun to explore the idea that an ontological scheme could postulate that dynamic entities are entities in their own right or even are basic entities in terms of which the familiar notions of ‘static’ types of beings (things, persons, facts etc.) may be defined

• Or is it possible to think of an epistemology depurated from its metaphysical prejudices, as necessarily propaedeutic to ontological speculation?

• Or is it possible to resist the anti-realist fate assigned to epistemology and to say, instead, that it is possible to reconcile critique with a realism through which we would understand the conditions of possibility for thought insofar as it represents a reality foreign to itself?

• Or is it possible to reject the Platonist and Aristotelian hypostasis of substance and of essence, in sight of a future metaphysics within which process and dynamicity are inherent to the thought of being?

• https://diigo.com/0i70fv

Analytics and continentals: Historical fragments of a war

• INSTRUCTOR: Daniel Sacilotto

  PROGRAM: Critical Philosophy CREDIT(S): 2 DATE: Sundays, July 5, 12, 19, 26, August 2, 9, 16, 23 TIME: 2 * 4:30 PM ET

• DESCRIPTION: This seminar explores the bifurcation between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions since its inception, focusing on some of the central debates, methodological approaches, and canonical figures that animate its historical unfolding. Above all, we shall clarify how different conceptions of what constitutes philosophical practice become progressively forged throughout this historical split by identifying key moments and themes that define it and attending to periods of oftentimes frustrated exchange.

• After a brief excursus into the historical antecedents leading to the consolidation of the split, during the first session we focus on ^^the critique of psychologism prosecuted by Husserl and Frege^^, in which central methodological tenets in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language become first crystallized. https://youtu.be/p0z-JOe2aG0

• In the second session, we focus on how this incipient separation was also accentuated and mediated by ^^divergent responses to the legacy of German Idealism^^. exploring the response to British Hegelianism pursued by Moore and Russell, as well as the development and growth of phenomenology from the neo-Kantian tradition with Husserl and Ricoeur. As we shall see, ^^if phenomenological thinking radicalized the transcendental Kantian approach, then semantic analysis understood the rot to have begun already with Kant^^.

• In the third session, we explore how ^^the logical empiricist and historicist hermeneutic orientations of thought proposed two competing narratives concerning the ‘end of metaphysics’^^: one in the name of a ^^ruthless positivism aligned to the modern ideal of scientificity^^, the other in the name of a ^^comprehensive critique of modernity and the conception of philosophy as a science^^ derived from its Greek beginning.

• In the fourth session, we revisit the debate between Searle and Derrida during the mid-70s, which emerged in response to J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, and in which ^^the constructive aspirations of speech-act theory and the deconstruction of metaphysics of presence give way to not only different conceptions of language, communication, but also intentionality^^. In parallel, we attend to the debate between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971 concerning the question of human nature, where the aspirations of generative linguistics and the archeology of knowledge reflect two conceptions of ethico-political practice: ^^a universalist avowal of invariant human values and the need for concrete engagement on the side of the former, versus a genealogical approach which tracks the dynamics of power with skepticism regarding the naturalization of the concept of ‘human nature’^^ and the dangers of concrete engagement.

• In the fifth session, we explore ^^how different strands of Sellarsian school proposed to rehabilitate the legacy of German Idealism in the wake of new naturalist and functionalist approaches to the philosophy of mind^^. Looking at works by Jay Rosenberg, Richard Rorty, John McDowell,Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, and Sebastian Rodl we will see how this tradition attempted not only an approximation to several canonical figures commonly associated with the Continental tradition but also thought of an integral philosophical practice which would include the concerns of both traditions.

• Extending on this trajectory, in the sixth session, we look at ^^the contrast in contemporary approaches to Hegelian scholarship and the valences of the dialectical method today^^: the Pittsburgh Hegelian school on the side of the analytic tradition, and the Lacanian-Slovenian school on the side of the Continental tradition. https://youtu.be/1XklV46ezQ8

• In the seventh session, we delve into ^^contemporary ontologies of world-building and systematic philosophy in both traditions^^, contrasting the ^^modal realist metaphysics proposed by Nelson Goodman^^ in Of Mind and Other Matters to the ^^transcendental phenomenology of worlds proposed by Alain Badiou^^ in Logics of Worlds.

• Finally, in the eighth session, we briefly survey some prominent contemporary attempts to destratify the difference between the continental and analytic schools altogether, bringing a holistic approach that would synthesize the methods and insights of both traditions at once. ^^We show how this contemporary approach challenges the myopia of specialization characteristic of the analytic tradition, while refusing the relativistic and skeptical tendencies associated with much of the Continental tradition^^, attending in particular to certain works by ^^Fernando Zalamea, Lorenz Puntel, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani^^.