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Philosophy For Our Times
How they ruined philosophy | Babette Babich, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, and Christoph Schuringa
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- [00:00]
A
Nietzsche's someone who read the Greeks in Greek. If you don't read Aristotle in Greek, you cannot understand his argument.
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B
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ed today and I'm introducing the episode How They Ruined Philosophy. So you can imagine this is quite a big episode in its scope, covering, well, I guess thousands of years of the history of philosophy and in particular, exploring the dividing line which runs through that history which really separates most philosophers, those in the analytic camp and those in the continental side. And our panel today will be debating whether analytic philosophy ruined philosophy as a practice. And so our speakers are Babette Babich, who is professor of philosophy at Fordham University, Christoph Schuringer, who's known for his works on German philosophy and is also the editor of the Hegel Bulletin, and Ginja Schonbamsfeld, who is professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. And keeping them all in check is our host, Danielle Sands, who I will hand over to now.
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C
Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the Future of European Thought. So for more than a century, there's been a divide in Western philosophy between two distinct approaches, often described as analytic and continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy is predominantly based in the English speaking world, taking its name from Bertrand Russell's philosophy of logical analysis that overthrew the grand Hegelian metaphysics of the 19th century. It did so in favor of a focus on logic and linguistic precision, with the assumption that science would do the serious work of uncovering the nature of reality. Continental philosophy, based primarily in France and Germany, has offered a broad range of outlooks on the nature of the human condition and the world. It's been defined by its critics simply in opposition to analytic philosophy. Few thinkers have bridged the divide to be taken seriously by both camps. Yet both traditions now have deep challenges. The original focus of analytic philosophy has become increasingly blurred, whilst in France, English speaking philosophy is now in vogue. So today we have three renowned philosophers exploring the key questions, what is the future of European thought? Are we seeing the end of the analytic and continental dividend? Or is the Enlightenment tradition itself under threat and with it the influence and identity of European philosophy? So let's meet our speakers this morning. So on my right, Christophe Schrodinger, who is associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University. He's the editor of the Hegel Bulletin and he describes himself as a fierce critic of the apolitical self image of analytic philosophy. And on my left, Genia Schoenbaumsfeldt, who is professor of philosophy at Southampton University. An expert on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. Her work challenges the idea that belief in God should be treated like a scientific hypothesis. And last but not least, Babette Babich, who is professor of philosophy at Fordham University. She's the editor of the journal New Nietzsche Studies, and she's published extensively on aesthetics, philosophy of science and technology. So we start by giving our speakers each the very generous amount of time of 3 minutes so they can give us their opening pitches. And we'll start with you, Christophe. Are we seeing the end of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy?
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D
So I think, no, we're done.
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C
That's it.
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D
I don't need three minutes, right. I don't think we've seen the end of the divide. And I think it's very interesting actually, what the landscape is now, if we think about in what sense there is a divide, because analytic philosophy, just looking at it from the side of analytic philosophy for a moment, has increasingly started to present itself as much more hospitable and much more friendly to continental philosophy. So there's a much reduce sort of harshness in the way in which analytic philosophers oppose themselves to continental philosophers. So there was a time when the American philosopher John Searle, for example, could say in response to the question, have you ever read any Derrida? He said, no, but I've trod in some. But we don't really hear that sort of thing anymore. So it looks much friendlier. But I think actually what we see from the analytic side is that the analytics are effectively able to declare victory in the conflict with continental philosophers. And we can see that because analytic philosophers now have their own versions of basically all continental philosophy. So there was analytic Nietzsche, then there was analytic Heidegger, now there's analytic Derrida. Basically anything can be redone analytically. I think on the continental side, sort of looking from the continental side, a really interesting set of developments recently has been that some of the people who came out of one of the most recent sort of movements that we might identify within continental philosophy, which is speculative realism, which includes people like Quentin Meassoux in France and also people like Ray Brassier. We now see Brassier increasingly interested in specific bits of the analytic tradition. And the bits that they're most interested in tend to be figures like, for example, the mid 20th century American philosopher Wilfred Sellars, who's actually one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy in the States after the Second World War. But he's also somebody who was extraordinarily deeply informed about the history of philosophy. And I think this is part of what's motivating this interest in this particular analytic figure. So there's real potential, I think from the continental side, although the continental scene is very fragmented, I think there's real potential there for an engagement with the analytic tradition where what we're getting at is really a renegotiation of the very idea of what philosophy is and what some of the really fundamental questions are that, that Sellars is latching onto, which actually go back to Kant and which go back to the situation of European philosophy back in the 18th century and ways in which Kant was really fundamentally thinking what the task of philosophy was.
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C
You've come in slightly under time, so thank you. Guinia, over to you. Just to remind you of the question, are we seeing the end of this divide?
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E
Okay, so my view is kind of a bit more nuanced to some extent. I think we are seeing an end of the divide. I think there have been many people who for a long time have already been challenging this hard and fast distinction. And maybe contrary to what Christoph was intimating, I actually think it's a good thing that so called analytic philosophers have reclaimed or have claimed the so called Continentals like Kirchhoff and Nietzsche and so on. I think that's a good thing. But one other reason I think, which depending on perspective, may or may not be so good, one other reason why they seem to be merging is because in many ways the analytic paradigm I think is in an ascendancy. So lots of European philosophy departments, for better or worse, are now adopting the analytic paradigm because if they want to be international players, if they want to get their papers into the really high ranked journals, then they have to start doing this analytic work. And I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not a bad thing if it leads to more clarity and rigor in the presentation of arguments. I think all philosophers should be wedded and committed to that. However, I do think it's a bad thing if it means that people who maybe challenge a particular scientistic paradigm. So I think one danger with analytic philosophy is that it tends to be maybe too friendly to a kind of scientific way of thinking about philosophy. I mean, in my view philosophy is not like science, it's not an empirical subject, it shouldn't be kind of competing with science. But many analytic philosophers think philosophy is ultimately a kind of competitor to science or even a kind of second rate science. And I think that's bad. So it depends on, you know, kind of which line you take a merge is happening. And to some extent it's a good thing, but I think it's not always a good thing.
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C
Thank you. Over to you, Babette.
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A
Okay, well, I do think that the divide remains, but I think it's also so I would agree to a certain extent with the question of ascendancy. And for me the ascendancy of analytic philosophy, that reclaiming, which I think is very true, I think you're quite right, is also a kind of colonization. And I came here just now from Heidelberg and I know for a fact that you need, if you get an American fellowship to study, to teach or visit Germany, you no longer need to learn German and you don't need to learn German. And I've taught at the Humboldt and I old fashionedly taught in German. And then I realized that my German colleagues were speaking bad English and I said, well, I can do that a little better. So I switched. And so there is, I think a linguistic ascendancy. And the ascendancy is definite, it's completely accurate, it's completely true. And Germans spend a lot of time trying to find out how they can get their work in English positions. I've also been visiting Germany since 1984, so that means for a very long time. And what I wanted to do was German philosophy of science, which I discovered when I arrived had not existed. It had already gone over to the analytic side. There was only analytic philosophy of science. And I said, well, if I could do that in England better, or I could do that in the United States. The problem for me, my teacher was someone named Gardamer. The problem for me, and the problem still is where do you get your teachers? And one can assume, oh yes, I analytic philosophers can teach you how to do, how to read Nietzsche, but I would say they really can't because you cannot read. It's just a logical problem of solecism. You cannot read Nietzsche in translation. You can, but you'll be reading a lovely man, Reg Hollingdale. You will not be reading Nietzsche or a not so nice man, Walter Kaufmann, you will not. He earns his name, he's a salesman. He sold Nietzsche to everyone as someone who was not really Nazi. So he's very good, but that's the problem. So for me the distinction's over because everyone has died. So it's a serious problem. Who are actual continental philosophers? You're looking at one, but there are not a lot of them and I'm not long for this world and it makes all the difference that I Had the teachers that I had, I can't invent myself. And analytic philosophers couldn't have taught me how to read. Why was Gadamer so important? Not because he was Gadamer and wrote Truth and Method. He wrote that when he was 60. Because he was a philologist, because I had studied Greek, because Nietzsche was a scholar of Greek. And that's why Bernard Williams, for example, was so interested in Nietzsche. Because Richard Betts, Same thing. Very analytic. Johns Hopkins. Nietzsche's someone who read the Greeks in Greek. If you don't read Aristotle in Greek, you cannot understand his argument. If you don't read Plato in Greek, you cannot understand his argument. If you translate it into English, someone somewhere along the line, except for the Cambridge edition, or will vary the word, and then the argument falls apart. And it's the same problem with Heidegger, with Nietzsche. And thank you. But that's where I stand. We are over by default. It's the Farewell Concerto. They have left the building.
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C
I think you've made yourself clear, Barbet. Thank you. So now we move to our first theme, and again we'll move to our speakers in turn. So our first theme is, is there value in having different schools of philosophical thought, or is philosophy necessarily all encompassing? And I'm going to turn to you first. Guinea.
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E
Yes. So in typical philosophical mode, I might ask, what does it mean for philosophy to be all encompassing? But if that means there can only be one way of looking at things, I think that's wrong. Philosophy is obviously the discipline that challenges just one way of doing things. It always comes up with new perspectives, new objections, things that you haven't thought of before. So I think a diversity of approaches is definitely a good thing. However, I do think that all philosophers either are or ought to be committed to values like rigor, clarity, originality, et cetera. So I think a similar core in values, but not necessarily the same approach or the same methodology.
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C
Thank you, Babette. You're making some quite distinct faces here. I think you've got a strong opinion.
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A
Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to react. It's very hard not to because it's such a persuasive, clear and very well argued position. So that is, for me, overwhelming and except, and I speak as a veteran of philosophy departments for a long time, we've hired analytic philosophers exclusively at Fordham University. Since I was hired. I think they hired me by accident. I certainly guaranteed that accident because I needed the job. But analytic philosophy is boring. So this is the real problem with it. It is not exciting. And I teach at a Jesuit university with the Jesuits because of theology. Require philosophy because of theology. Not anymore. We have just abolished the requirement. Thank you. Analytic philosophy. And I agree with that. No one should be forced to take a course in analytic philosophy. It's not necessary. You don't need it. You can learn to reason from a mathematician. I hope you would. Or a physicist or a biologist. I was trained in biology. I don't think philosophy has a monopoly on that. So I think we can get it from there. And the problem with the boring factor is how do you get. I studied at Stony Brook because of biology. If it weren't continental, we wouldn't have had a philosophy department. People took the classes because they wanted to, because they were exciting. That's what you need at Fordham. They're forced. Not anymore. Will we still have them as.
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C
Can I bring you back to. So the point that Genier raised was that philosophy should be committed to values of clarity and rigor. All philosophy, across the different areas. Do you disagree with that claim?
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A
Yes, of course I disagree with that. Because who's judging? Honestly? I mean, I can appreciate it, but it doesn't mean I'm judging it. Would it be the rigor for my standards? Maybe not. I already said you need all that depth and all that history.
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E
Can I say something?
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C
Go for it.
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E
So, I mean, if you ask who judges, you've just said the most judgmental thing of all, namely that analytic philosophy is boring. So I think that's. I think that's just a caricature view. Some analytic philosophers might be boring, but good analytic philosophy is just good philosophy and therefore isn't boring. And trying to figure out the solutions to important questions isn't boring. I mean, you don't have to write Nietzsche aphorisms to be classed as not boring. And I admire Nietzsche and I myself work on people like Kirchhoff and Wittgenstein, so it's not like I'm this paradigmatic, evil analytic philosopher. But. Yeah. So I think that statement can't go unchallenged.
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A
Well, I was only thinking of the students.
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E
Well, the students on the whole, like, interesting philosophy of Mind courses, for example. So I think that's not true either. I'm afraid so.
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C
Not all analytic philosophy is boring. That's your bold claim here.
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E
Yes, absolutely. So controversial.
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C
Christophe, sitting comfortably here with your popcorn on the sidelines. Do you want to jump in?
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D
Yeah, I would. Wanted to pick up on the point about clarity and rigor because I think it's true that analytic philosophy has presented Itself often as having a special commitment to clarity and rigor. As if almost they had some sort of monopoly on these virtues. And I just. I think we too easily let them have this claim. In the sense that there's a great deal of analytic philosophy that's actually not clear and it's actually not rigorous. One way in which analytic philosophy is often not so rigorous as it claims to be. Is that the place where analytic philosophers often rest their arguments. What they themselves call their intuitions. So they will sit in a seminar room and they will exchange with each other what their intuitive beliefs are about certain things. Sometimes you're told that when people say intuitions, really they mean something like basic beliefs, which is fine, as well as a term people's basic beliefs, which they essentially dogmatically then rest their arguments on. So that's a case where I think we should question whether there's the rigor that we traditionally demand of the very idea of philosophy in analytic philosophy. And I think often, actually, we find that there are great communicators on the side of continental philosophy. So if you read the work, for example, of someone like Graham Harman, there's a kind of display of these virtues of clear communication. They're very difficult to find in the kind of standard papers that we now expect in analytic philosophy. Where often so many qualifications are built into what the person's trying to say. Because of the pressures of academic publishing. Where you have to say something that's different from what any other person has ever said. Which is quite difficult to do unless you model what you're saying basically on what other people have said. And then you build in lots of little qualifications. So that it's actually very difficult. There's often, in my experience, anyway, very difficult to know what's actually being communicated. So I think that's an area where it's important not to let analytic philosophy just have these claims and let them be unexamined. And I think at its extreme, it can be a form of. To pick up on a word that Babette used earlier, colonialism or colonization. Because the future of the colonial mindset is that from within the colonial mindset, there is no outside. This is the way that things are done. Now, you can participate in that if you like. But there are certain conditions of entry. And the conditions of entry have to do with things like talking like us. And in the old days, there was much more. An analytic philosophy of trying to make things straightforward and not using horrible jargon. And that's a great thing, I think. But it's Just no longer really viable to say about the work that's done in analytic philosophy on the whole, that it avoids jargon. There's a great deal of it, and it's presented in a certain way and very often in short sentences where the style is very repetitive and sort of reminiscent of scientific papers. But it doesn't mean that jargon is actually not being used. It's just being smuggled in, I think, often.
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C
Thank you. I wonder whether you want to come back on that. And I'm curious that both Babette and Christophe have used this idea of the colonization that analytic philosophy may or may not be.
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E
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I totally agree. It's by no means true that just because you say you're an analytic philosopher, therefore you know how to do clarity and rigor. And I also completely agree that all this talk about intuitions is, to use a strong word, quite ridiculous. I always say when kind of PhD students talk about their intuitions, I kind of say, well, I'm not really interested in your intuitions or your feelings. Give me an argument for why that's a good view. So, yeah, I agree. And I think actually the worst problem with contemporary analytic philosophy, in my mind, is that they've forgotten all the brilliant Wittgensteinian lessons. And I think that's also why all of the jargon has now kind of started to dominate, because a lot of the stuff that, for example, went on in ordinary language philosophy in Oxford, although I want to stress, contrary to what people think, Wittgenstein was actually not an ordinary language philosopher. But obviously that line of philosophy was very much influenced by Wittgenstein. But there's now a positive hatred of Wittgenstein in the contemporary philosophical seen in particular in analytic philosophy. And I think that is partly to blame for the way in which things have gone. So I agree with Christophe that there's no monopoly here and also no implication that if you work on continental stuff, you can't be clear and rigorous. But I do think one ought to commit to those values and try to be clear and rigorous. But it certainly doesn't go without saying that just because you're an analytic philosopher, you can do that up. You might end up churning out all sorts of nonsense.
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D
So, yeah, could I just add something very brief about Wittgenstein? So it's very interesting you mentioned Wittgenstein and this, the Wittgenstein hatred. I think it's a fascinating phenomenon. And there are Italian scholars who've done empirical studies of how people got their jobs in America and based on what PhDs they'd done. And the best thing that you could write your PhD on WAS themes from the philosophy of David Lewis. That's not surprising. Most influential philosopher at Princeton in the 1970s. The worst thing you could write your dissertation on by that time was Wittgenstein. And I think that. Yeah, and that tells us something very, very interesting because as somebody that's not part of the kind of an academic industrial complex, you might think, well, one of the key figures of the analytic tradition is Wittgenstein, but this is not how it's seen from within. And even there's this tendency for analytic philosophers to sort of project Wittgenstein outwards from their tradition and call him a continental philosopher, which is a very curious thing. I mean, there are ways in which Wittgenstein's thought, and you'll know way more about this than I do, has its roots in particular Viennese culture. And so in that sense it's continental European in its influences in all sorts of ways. But if Wittgenstein is not a central figure in the analytic traditions, who is, let's say,
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E
completely agree?
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C
I want to move us in a slightly different direction to think about, I guess, where we situate philosophy and sort of the broader social and political structures and maybe the role that philosophy plays. So moving us to our second theme, which is, is the Enlightenment tradition itself under threat and with it the influence and identity of European philosophy? So, Christophe, turn to you first.
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D
Yeah, I find this a really interesting question because I suppose I have maybe a slightly unusual take on what the Enlightenment is. So let me just say, as I understand it, the Enlightenment, historically speaking, was a kind of incomplete project. And what I mean by that is that we tend to think of the Enlightenment as sort of culminating in the late 18th century. We think of Immanuel Kant as one of the kind of late figures of the Enlightenment. We think of the French philosophy, who wrote the encyclopedia and so on in the 18th century, is sort of among its prime sort of late figures. And the great event of this period is the French Revolution of 1789. And what the Enlightenment was all about was, you know, as Kant's famous definition of the Enlightenment was that Enlightenment is the emergence of man, of the human, from their self imposed immaturity. So there was this notion of equipping oneself with one's own rational powers in face of arbitrary authority in the forms of the ruling class, the aristocracy, the monarchy and so on, and also the Church. And it's an incomplete project in the sense that if you just say to people, look, you as a human subject, are somehow spontaneously to take charge of yourself and to take charge of society, that's not going to get you very far. And in the French Revolution, as we know, there was a serious obstacle to how far this could go, and we know the direction that it turned in. And the Enlightenment, in my view, awaits its completion in the work of, and the thought of Karl Marx, who realizes that actually, to get you the notion of the autonomous subject that is equipped with its own reason and that can throw off arbitrary authority and contest myth and ideology and so on, you need a theory and also an actual movement of history. You need a historical movement by which a class of people can actually take charge and throw off the people that are keeping them down. Just telling them that they're autonomous subjects and so on isn't going to do it. And so, in that sense, I mean, to go to the question, I think that the Enlightenment is under threat, and part of the threat to the Enlightenment, both thought of as kind of the beginnings of it in the French philosoph and in Kant, and then sort of radicalized by Marx, has come from the side of continental philosophy and from a set of movements in continental philosophy that used to be very influential and that whose authority is now much more contested, which are essentially the post structuralist strands in continental philosophy. Right. So people like Derrida and Foucault, I think, have been the most influential in the kind of wider culture, and they're very much associated with a sort of relentless questioning of the Enlightenment. So I think from there, and this is sort of, I think, reflective of a wider culture as well as having influenced it, we have, in our sort of wider culture, a relativism and the sort of incredulity towards grand narratives and so on. That is, I think, as a matter of fact, that's a threat to the Enlightenment project. So I'm perhaps slightly unusual in thinking that the future of European philosophy very much relies on our reconnecting with the Enlightenment project. But thinking of this Enlightenment project in a very radicalized sense, in analytic philosophy, there's a sense in which analytic philosophy is very comfortable with the Enlightenment project, but the kind of incomplete Enlightenment project, which is just the project of telling people, as liberalism does, which is the ideology of this, you know, everybody is autonomous and free and can do what they like and pursue their projects without actually looking at the juridical and economic structures and so on that shape us. So analytic philosophy tends to produce this idea of a kind of A free space in which everyone can express themselves and explore their ideas. But it's actually much more constricted and it's sort of confined within this first phase of the Enlightenment that hasn't yet radicalized itself.
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E
Yeah, I agree that continental philosophy hasn't exactly been terribly helpful in this regard by kind of the post modern way of thinking has basically given people the idea that there is no such thing as truth, that anything goes, that we should be relativists. I mean, obviously I'm possibly exaggerating, might not be quite as clear cut as that, but certainly there have been these tendencies and this has basically seeped into wider culture. And so now we're seeing a lot of very worrying tendencies in society at large. You know, the proliferation of fake news, of conspiracy theories. I'm obviously interested in this because I'm working on a large ERC project, trying to connect some of Kirchhoff's thought with reasons for why people succumb to conspiracy theories. So I think getting people to think a bit more about, you know, in which channels are actually knowledge conducive and which aren't, and to have more intellectual courage and to be more daring to actually, you know, be happy to nail your colors to a mast, for example, rather than to be worried about what your peers think. And I think certainly in the west, it's become very difficult to have honest conversations about a lot of things because of these so called safe spaces and so on. Many of these things are of course, to an extent a good thing, but I think there's also a big danger in having something that ultimately kind of stifles critical exchange and intellectual courage.
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C
Thanks, Baba. I wonder whether you might want to defend the post structuralists and or the postmodernists against the battering they're getting on both sides of me.
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A
Well, it's very hard because I'm not so sure that one needs to go to Derrida or Foucault. I think one is leapfrogging over Adorno, and I think that if you do that, you have left. And that happens also in aesthetics. Roger Scruton, for example, couldn't stand Adorno and he didn't like his music. But I thought, you know, Adorno was a composer and at the end of the day that makes a huge difference. He really understood the logic, the theory of music in a way, and also composing in a way that Roger Scruton, who was all for that, did not. So there is that other aspect. And he wrote with Max Hort, the Dialectic of Enlightenment and so going back to this question, and how do you sapere? How do you dare? How do you this our day, this idea of risking what is sapere? What is knowledge? And Nietzsche said, let's look at what sapere means. It means to taste. So it takes you right, right back to David Hume. It's really very Scottish. And it's something that requires doubt, requires skepticism, requires asking a question, as opposed to thinking that you know what the truth is. I said I was trained in the sciences, and that means that I think that the truth is something we might get to, not something we've got that we could sort of guard other people against taking over. So to me, Derrida and Foucault are, in a certain sense, late comers. I've actually suggested that Derrida ripped off Husserl's and sort of discussion as Adorno represents it, because Adorno writes a book on Husserl, and Derrida reads it in German, translates it into French, and then becomes Derrida. Who would go back to Hussel to find that? Who would go back to Adorno to find that? No one, but someone who reads and reads in languages German and French. And by the time it gets into English, it's utterly lost and it's just exciting. And we find him Derridian, and then we prefer Foucault, most people. So it's a whole question. So I can't really defend the post structuralist to that side, except to say that if you go back to Adorno, you have a chance to open up questions for psychoanalysis that Adorno was also doing. And I think that that becomes then maybe another side to bring things in. Because to me, the word rigor, every time you say rigor, I am reminded of Heidegger. Heidegger. Because to do Heideggerian philosophy, you can only do this rigorously, but that does not mean according to analytic standards. It means according to Heidegger's standards. It means you have to know how to think.
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C
Gadia, you look like you might be keen to come back to that.
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E
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know what to say in response to you need to know how to think. I mean, any philosopher would agree with that. So I don't think that sets Heidegger apart from others. And I don't think anyone would object either to the idea that we have to remain open to the possibility that we're nowhere near having found the truth and that this is a continuous quest. But I think what's important is at least to recognize that there is such a thing as truth and that you can arrive at the truth. Whereas a lot of sort of post modernism and post structuralism has kind of said things like, there is no truth, there are only narratives, et cetera. So I think these tendencies in the wrong hands can actually be quite dangerous. So for that reason, I'm not in favor.
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A
Just one clarification. It's Heidegger who says that we're still not thinking. And his claim is that science does not think. So it's really. That's the rigor. The rigor is the precision. You can't just switch that over and say, oh, all philosophers think, I wish that were true. It is not entirely the case. And what Heidegger means by it scares me because I don't think it's fully clear what Heidegger means. And he wrote a book about it, basically Heist Denkin, which means, what is it to think? He's actually asking that as a question. He was fond of questions. And I would say we still need to ask, and I would love a dialogue, because I think that's something that would work, and we could maybe come to an agreement on that. But I don't think we're already there.
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D
Could I pick up on this question about what is thinking and Heidegger's. Heidegger's sort of invocation of the idea that we should explore first what thinking is, is, and discover what thinking is, and equip ourselves with the idea of thinking on the basis of ignorance that we don't yet know what thinking is, which he was saying right at the end of his career. And just juxtapose that with what analytic philosophy is like and the way in which it operates, which is, I think, that there is a way in which analytic philosophers are not reflective on this question in a really striking way. And that has changed over time, because in the early 20th century, in the kind of movements that analytic philosophy came out of, which are actually a distinct set of movements, so there was logical positivism in Vienna, there was what people were doing in Cambridge. There were certain roots in the United States and the pragmatist and realist traditions. And then it was Polish logic and Polish logic, by the way. That's a set of completely different philosophical views about the remit of philosophy from the other people that they then sort of get fused with. When analytic philosophy becomes a sort of monolithic entity, all of these movements are really thinking about what is philosophy? How does it work? What's its relationship to science? These people are all Very methodologically self conscious. And what's happened with analytic philosophy, as it's become the dominant paradigm and it's become hegemonic, is that it's just assumed often that there are certain procedures that are to be followed. And you can see this in the sort of aims that people set themselves implicitly, which is to give what analytic philosophers often call accounts of things. So there's belief or there's more specific sort of phenomena, sort of target phenomena to investigate. And the idea is, will you give an account of what this thing is? And you begin from intuitions and then you build in bits of science and so on, but there's relatively little reflection on what it, what this activity actually is, what it is to come to determine how things are.
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C
I think we might have perhaps landed on a point of agreement. So you were suggesting that, you know, current analytic philosophy is perhaps less methodologically reflexive than it might or should be. And I wonder whether this is a point on which Guinea Babet you might agree with. Christophe.
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E
Yeah, I think I agree. I think there isn't enough self reflection going on in analytic philosophy and there's maybe too much of an assumption, as you say, that, you know, if I can come up with some sort of, even perhaps seemingly quite trite account of what something is that can be cashed out in one or two premises, I mean, that's often very reductive and can't possibly do justice to the complexity of the phenomena. So I think there's definitely a lot of that. And so engagement with people like Wittgenstein or Kirchhoff would be, I think, helpful,
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D
but and more reflection on what account giving actually is.
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E
Right, what is an account methodology is as well, and what their own methodology is. Because I think the particular danger about analytic philosophy is that they somehow think they actually have no methodology. It's like methodology free. It's, you know, it's just basically stating what is the case. And that's obviously a fantasy.
- [38:33]
D
And it's a great danger to think that you have no methodology is like it's somewhere hidden away.
- [38:39]
E
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
- [38:42]
A
Yes,
- [38:44]
C
perfect. Just what I needed. So we move to our final theme, which is obviously the biggest and hardest question. What is the future of European thought? Babette?
- [38:56]
A
It's in the hands of analytic philosophers because that is all you have. If you look at the formation, that is the PhDs as they were earned, as those individuals who are teaching at Premier Tier 1, we would say here schools in Germany, in France, in Hungary as well. I just got an application from a colleague there wants to talk on Heller, but from an analytic perspective. And in Italy, especially Italy. So I think that the future is analytic. Not because you might say so or for anyone else's perspective, any one of you might want to argue that, but just by default, I think that the future is in the hands of those who have jobs, those who are at universities, those who are regarded as good enough to get a job, and they determine the profession, and it is what they have made it as it is, and they are responsible. So to me, that's the future of Europe. Now, what about European philosophy in England, I think ceteris paribus. It also holds here, I think that it's also the same. So it really depends on colleagues, what their openness is, how they look at one another, how they look at these questions. So that's, to me, the future. The future is what we've got now.
- [40:15]
C
Gosh, that's quite pessimistic. Then. The future of European thought is analytic.
- [40:19]
A
Yes.
- [40:20]
C
Christophe, any more chair from you?
- [40:22]
D
Well, I have a different source of pessimism than I.
- [40:26]
C
Wonderful.
- [40:28]
D
Which is that, I mean, I think there is a great need for philosophy in our time. And it's interesting also that we're talking about European philosophy, and we could talk about ways in which. In our time, I mean, the very notion of European philosophy, of course, has been put in under question by no less figures than Derrida and so on for a very long time from within European thought. But this question of what do the people that come out of this whole tradition now do, I think has become urgent because of the very quickly shifting political landscape that we're in, in which I think it's very easy. I mean, going back to the Enlightenment, which we were talking about, it's now very easy for people on the extreme right to claim the Enlightenment for themselves by doing a kind of sneaky substitution. Which is the idea that, well, you know, our opponents are these liberals and they're all into postmodernism. And for them, it's, you know, anything goes, or whatever they think is the case is the case, and there's something suspicious about that. And the substitution is that's all that there is to anything that's not on the right. And so the right gets to be in this position of having a very easy time diffusing any sort of radical thought in philosophy. So I think it's a time in which we're really called upon in philosophy to kind of regroup and to get back to some of the really Fundamental questions about what the role of philosophy is and to think about what thinking is and how we think in a world where our thoughts are actually effective, rather than ending up just confined to the academy in a way that reproduces the same impotence over and over. And I think it's really the crucial question both on the analytic side and on the continental side, insofar as there's still a distinctive continental side, because both are at risk of pursuing philosophy in a way that's detached from the world, that's just sort of intellectually siphoned off from the world. And interestingly, sort of in both cases, there's a tendency for philosophy to collapse into a kind of linguistic self examination or to become a kind of conceptual juggling. So I think on the continental side, a real indicator of, of this for me is always the proliferation of abstract romance nouns that are nominalizations of verbs or that are normalizations of adjectives. So one example of this is materiality. We hear a lot about materiality, but we have relatively little about actual. The impulse to material change and how it's to be brought about. So their continental philosophy has this. There's a danger on the continental side of collapsing into something which the analytic tradition has been demonstrating in spades for many, many decades, which is that it renders itself more or less irrelevant except as a kind of.
- [43:39]
C
So you're saying that we're seeing the sort of same problem on both sides, which is a kind of disengagement from the world?
- [43:45]
D
I think certainly, yeah, there's a threat on both sides of that happening if people are not vigilant about what they're doing. And I think there's real potential in the ways in which some continental philosophers are sort of crossing over and thinking about central figures in the analytic tradition. Like as I mentioned before, the work of Ray Brassier, who's really getting back sort of philosophical fundamentals in a way where you can see sort of the nerve of the analytic tradition actually being engaged with in a way that's productive. I think that's a way in which philosophy can just become more like philosophy again and less of a kind of professionalized, you know, juggling around of concepts. Where on the analytics side there's this sort of tendency to extreme technicality so that you can only really understand what's being discussed if you understand all of the papers that are being referred to in a paper. But similarly on the continental side there's a sort of tendency to hermeticism that comes from, you know, you can only operate With a set of thoughts. If you have explored this whole complicated.
- [44:58]
C
Read the right thing.
- [44:59]
D
Yeah. And this is a complicated web of concepts that you have to be able to find your way around in because of having read, being able to get all the references.
- [45:10]
C
Thank you. Okay, so different pessimism, but still pessimism.
- [45:14]
D
Yes.
- [45:16]
C
Genia, looking to you for a little bit of lightness here. Perhaps. What is the future of European thought? Can you give us any hope?
- [45:25]
E
Maybe a tiny bit. But I certainly share some of the concerns that both Christophe and Babette have raised. So maybe starting with the political point that Christophe made. I think it's true that what we're seeing at the moment is that right wing politics is kind of reclaiming the Enlightenment for themselves, when in the past, this used to be something that the left was particularly keen on. But for the reasons that we've already discussed, all of this kind of relativism and post structuralism, et cetera, has led to an abandonment of the thought that we can say something that is actually true and that isn't just biased and colonial and whatever the various isms are that are currently in vogue. And I think there's obviously the danger that far right politicians can use philosophical thought for their own ends to kind of persuade people they are actually upholding these ideals. And so I actually think there is an important role now for philosophy to try and counteract that. But I think there is a problem in academia and certainly in Europe, that it's still the case that there is this default assumption. If you are an academic and particularly a philosopher, you have to be left wing. You can't possibly be anything else. And I think that leads to philosophers not actually wanting to challenge these equations that are currently happening. So I think there would also be an opportunity for philosophers to try and reignite the good debate about the Enlightenment ideals. And I think one thing that the crises that we're constantly witnessing shows is that people do have an appetite for philosophy. They do actually want more philosophy in their lives. So, yeah, what I think philosophers ought to do nowadays is, you know, to engage more with the general public and to try and undermine this narrative that there is no such thing as the truth. And if you think there is, then you have to be someone, you know, who'd be hospitable to kind of right wing thought.
- [48:05]
C
Thank you so much to our speakers. Thank you for coming. Thank you. To the Forum for European Philosophy.
- [48:11]
B
Okay. Thank you very much for listening to Philosophy for our Times. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, don't forget to like share, subscribe and if you want to get in contact with us. If you have any thoughts about the episode, you can find our email in the Show Notes. But until next time, take care. Bye bye.
- [48:38]
E
Support is available 247 with VRBoCare.
- [48:41]
D
We're here day or night, ready whenever
- [48:44]
A
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- [48:47]
E
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