April 15, 2004
In this paper Tom Rockmore charts the structure of twentieth century philosophy. It is part of a conference concerned with the Rapprochement of the Anglo-American and Continental Philosophical Traditions
Rockmore starts by stating the obvious:
"If we limit the question for the moment to roughly the last hundred years, we know that towards the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when other philosophical tendencies were in the ascendant, three important movements emerged independently, movements which for different reasons rapidly came to dominate the debate: American pragmatism, so-called continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
These three tendencies are very different, independent, and cannot be reduced to each other. Much of the discussion over the ensuing century takes the form of a contest for hegemony between them fought out in the philosophical space."
Fine. But what have the debates been about? How are the differences understood?
Rockmore goes back to Kant to anwer this. Again fair enough. because Kant is the philosophical crossroads in modernity.
But he come up with a conservative response when he says that the problem of knowledge is the key. He says:
"With respect to this theme, progress in philosophy concerns progress in formulating an acceptable theory of knowledge. Kant is a turning point since he points out clearly that theories of knowledge based on metaphysical realism must fail since no coherent account can be given of the relation of representations to objects. He shows that the most promising modern alternative, if epistemological scepticism is to be avoided, lies in working out some form of constructivist approach to knowledge on the basis of empirical realism.
If this is the criterion, then philosophy in the twentieth century has mainly been making time in different ways. Though some philosophical tendencies have diverged from the problems of knowledge, others have continued to repeat the concerns of the past without learning from the results of the prior discussion. All too often philosophers in the last century have restated interest in forms of metaphysical realism for ontological (Heidegger) or epistemological purposes (Husserl, Davidson, Rorty, Carnap, the early Wittgenstein). It has often failed to draw the lessons of the critical philosophy in trying to build on the results of the debate in carrying forward the most important insights of the modern debate."
A lot of continental philosophy displaced the problem of knowledge as understood by natural science and endeavoured to develop a philosophy that was not beholden to, or a part of science.
The key text here is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. That really does open new ground, even if it is largely an unread text these days. That text historicized philosophy, lead to the rejection of the God's eye view and introduced movement or becoming.
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I didn't have a chance to look over Rockemore's essay, but I am familiar with his work and with various currents in Anglo-American Philosophy (contemporary ethics and political philosophy), Pragmatism, and Continental philosophy. My knee-jerk reaction is that I don't think this debate has really taken place, but if it does I hope that methodology is one of the main focus points.