Year: 2006
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: WHY POLISH PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT EXIST 1. The Scandal of "Continental Philosophy"There are many hundreds of courses taught under the title "Continental Philosophy" (C.P.) each year in North-American universities.Such courses deal not with philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, however, but rather with a highly selective portion of Franco-German philosophy, centred above all around the person of Martin Heidegger.Around him is gathered a rotating crew of currently fashionable, primarily French thinkers, each successive generation of which claims itself the "end" of philosophy (or of "man," or of "reason," of "the subject," of "identity" etc.) as we know it.A sort of competition then exists to produce ever wilder and more dadaistic claims along these lines, a competition that bears comparison, in more than one respect, with the competition among Hollywood film directors to outdo each other in producing ever more shocking or brutal or inhuman films.The later Husserl, Heidegger's teacher, is sometimes taken account of in courses of this "Continental Philosophy"; not, however, Husserl's own teacher Brentano and not, for example, such important twentieth-century German philosophers as Ernst Cassirer or Nicolai Hartmann.French philosophers working in the tradition of Poincaré or Duhem or Bergson or Gilson are similarly ignored, as, of course, are Austrian or Scandinavian or Czech philosophers.What, then, is the moment of unity of this "Continental Philosophy"?What is it that Heidegger and Derrida and Luce Irigaray have in common, which distinguishes them from phenomenologists such as Reinach or Scheler or the famous Daubert?The answer, it seems, is: antipathy to science, or more generally, antipathy to learning and to scholarly activity, to all the normal bourgeois purposes of the Western university (and we note in passing that, as far as phenomenology is concerned, it was Heidegger who was responsible for terminating that previously from J. J.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Barry Smith
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2685683397