The Idea Of Continental Philosophy

The Idea of Continental Philosophy A PHILOSOPHICAL CHRONICLE For Jennie THE IDEA OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY A PHILOSOPHICAL CHRONICLE 2 Simon Glendinning Edinburgh University Press © Simon Glendinning, 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13 0 7486 2470 8 (hardback) 978 0 7486 2470 6 0 7486 2471 6 (paperback) 978 0 7486 2471 3 The right of Simon Glendinning to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents 1 Starting Points 1 2 A Meeting of (Some) Minds: Phenomenology at Large 21 3 The Usual Suspects 38 4 The Analytic Perspective on the Idea 69 5 The Continental Perspective on the Idea 91 6 The (B)end of the Idea 115 Appendix: Continental Philosophy in Britain since 1986 128 Index 139 v 1 Starting Points An Initiation into Philosophy I must have been about seventeen. From the hallway I could hear two of my older brothers talking very enthusiastically about things they were beginning to explore in their studies at university. They were talking about something called ‘semiotics’. The door to the room was open as usual and I moved closer, cautiously approaching my spirited brothers inside. At the doorway I asked for an explanation, but whatever I was given just hung in the air and left me out of the charmed circle of my brothers’ talk. I had no idea what they were on about and couldn’t get into the conversation about French literary theory that they were then getting into. About four years later something of all this must have been lurking still in the delight I felt on stumbling over John Locke’s identification, on the very last page of my edition of the Essay, of ‘Shmeiwtikh/’ as one of the three most basic sorts of human inquiry.1 I was delighted above all that I would now be able to recall for others (it has taken me a long time to get round to this) that a serious engagement with a ‘doctrine of signs’ under that title wasn’t the special preserve of recent French thought. That delightful discovery would come later in my time as a philosophy student, but my initial forays into this kind of talk at university left me more or less where I had been as a teenager: stationed firmly at the (I assumed open) doorway. In fact, the number of shiny words and closed conversations only grew, and their enigmatic obscurity became ever more exhausting. Third-year and graduate students were now talking about ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘critical theory’ and ‘deconstruction’, as well as ‘semiotics’. And philosophical figures that remained largely invisible in an academic degree programme centred on the analytic tradition were also looming into some kind of hazy view: ‘Hegel’, ‘Kierkegaard’, ‘Nietzsche’, ‘Marx’, ‘Heidegger’, ‘Adorno’, ‘Barthes’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Deleuze and Guatari’, ‘Irigaray’ . . . I started to engage in a 1 The Idea of Continental Philosophy serious effort to get my head round the basics of what was being called ‘Continental philosophy’. I wanted to come to terms with this distinctive and alternative philosophical tradition. And yet that effort only served to heighten my confusion. There simply didn’t seem to be