Final exam is written
There is written preparation throughout the semester, 4 of them. These are connected to the ”reading seminars”.
For every reading seminar you have to answer a couple of assignments. You have 2 weeks to submit answers to these.
You have to submit at least 2 reading assignments in order to take the test.
There might be some type of mock exam for this course.
We do not choose our philosophy, we are chosen by our philosophy; Heidegger lol
There are 2 readers in Toledo, one on the seminar and one on the lecture course. These are seperate.
What is continental philosophy?
What is the continental / analytic divide?
The divide is both a social problem and a problem of power, but it is entirely unreasonable outside of academic philosophy.
The divide began with anglo-saxon thinkers referring to what they did not do. All the stuff that they didn’t like became continental philosophy.
The word continental philosophy initially bore a pejorative undertone. It’s a bunch of currents of thought that are entirely heterogenous, they have different principles and ideas, which are defined only in terms of being an Other to the anglo-saxon thinkers.
For the anglo-saxon thinkers, the continental thinkers were doing literature. It was not robust, strict nor coherent in their eyes.
The origins however go even deeper, in the circle of Vienna, the Wienerkreis. It was under the direction of Schlick. They were all Marxists.
Rudolf Carnap, Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache, 1931.
Carnap in his studies had lecture courses with Edmund Husserl, a founding figure of the continental tradition.
It was done against Heidegger’s conference What is Metaphysics. He inaugurated a certain style of philosophy which is a critique based on the insight on the logical operation of our language. Everything that works against our logical laws of language can be dismantled as absolute nonsense. Every philosophy that makes logical mistakes is improper and so on merely suggestive. It is not properly argumenting but is simply trying to inundate people with nonsensical positions.
For Carnap, Metaphysical statements are such that they cannot be verified or falsified, they are pseudo-statements. eg. Das Nichts nichtet.
Because the Nothing is not used as a subject word, it is a logical operator that negates a noun or a state of affairs.
It is not an object that should stand on the position of a subject in a proposition. Subjekt et Predikat. This is simply a logical mistake.
Heidegger however, believes in a different style of philosophy.
Pseudo-statements can seem like they are grammatically correct, but they are really not logically correct and so cannot technically be grammatically correct either.
Analytic philosophy sees itself as providing an analysis, a decomposition of language into its logical building parts and into the structure that relates those parts.
Analytic philosophy focuses on language, and believes much like continental philosophy, that language is the overall medium through which we communicate the world to what is. Understanding this medium, which accesses everything else, is also the medium through which we better understand the world itself.
Today, analytic philosophy has stopped doing this to such an immediate extent. The fighting between the two traditions is still somewhat real though, but it is slowly healing. (Wittgenstein for example was inspired inherently by both traditions).
Another imprecise criterion for analytic philosophy is that it restricts philosophy as being about what is actually meaningful. It is not about the unspeakable, the irrational or the illogical. These things are all a part of the analytic tradition. Another, could be the restriction to what can be empirically verifiable, to whatever is palpable there. Such as rejecting anything transcendental.
Continental philosophy contains more or less anything that isn’t only about the above domains.
Continental philosophy likes limit phenomena, cases of irrationality as well as the genetic & transcendental considerations of rationality, understanding and cognition.
It tries to often understand the origin of certain objects, which tends to lie in the history of the subject, the rejections and becomings of it.
Continental philosophy has been done everywhere, and is done in any language, so saying that it comes from some specific geographic or cultural location is also very dubitable.
It is interesting to remark that analytic philosophy in the beginning lacked any value for the history of philosophy, which now has flipped on its head entirely, as analytic philosophy is a clear tradition, and a tradition is constituted by a certain set of core authors that everyone in the tradition has read and knows.
In continental philosophy, concepts are creations which are discovered, but which become a new paradigm and a new way of being, an entire existence. These concepts are open to a certain way of moving oneself in the whole of philosophy. They give you the possibility to see the world differently. The true subject of the history of philosophy are not the persons but the concepts, which is less the case for how analytic philosophy goes forth.
What is contemporary philosophy? Is it temporally contemporary? Or is it qualitative? Is there for example a style of doing philosophy which is different?
Remarkable for our contemporary philosophy are the 2 world wars. They put an end to the cultural rise of Europe through the 1800s, and revealed the dark in all the processes which Europe was deeply tied to.
The entrance to the 20th century lies in the 19th century.
The catastrophe of the world wars revealed something about the corruptiveness of the European civlisation, which was hidden, but which was brought to the surface. This was already spoken of in the 19th century, but it was never brought out to the for without the wars.
”Contemporary” thought is marked by the Catastrophe, the crises which we live after.
Philosophy is however not a passive engagement to historical facts. Philosopy has its own temporality, which is the temporality of the becoming of the concepts, they have their own trajectory. Philosophers only accompany these trajectories, they only bring them to the fore.
There is no direct causal relationship between any events and the history of ideas.
They are interpretable from those glasses, but there is not a neat overlap. Often the history of ideas precedes the events.
Philosophical can also participate in history and its happening, but only retrospectively.
We can only say this after the fact.
→ Ideas and concepts have their own history.
This is why continental philosophy begins in the 19th century. With Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
These all are already anticipating the catastrophe of the European civilisation.
The three crises and their sollutions:
They emerged from 3 different prominent questions.
[What is our modern heritage?]
Is the knowing subject still a firm ground for the establishment of philosophy?
This line of thought starts with Descartes, when he institutes the knowing subject as the starting point of any philosophical enterprise. To the Res Cogitans, the knowing thing. Since Descartes, the subject was always the starting point for all philosophical endeavour. This was challenged by all our following thinkers. The crisis of knowledge insofar as it is related to a knowing subject, the Epistemic Crisis.
Are the notions of truth and knowledge still central to philosophy?
Should we strive to get closer to the highest truth, to pure knowledge? Maybe there is no knowledge to be grasped? Maybe something else is at stake? Here we see the crisis of truth, the epistemological crisis.
What is philosophy’s relationship to practice? To non-philosophical fields and disciplines?
Is it only reading and writing? Is it a doing? Maybe shooting the capitalists is much more important than inventing concepts. Maybe the truth of philosophy is only revealed in political struggle, and not in senseless writing. The last question regards the sociological crisis, what is the role of a philosopher in society?
The first one draws on the notion of episteme, knowledge, cognition and science.
These are dependent on the knowing subject, if no one knows something, knowledge itself is entirely senseless. If we have no knowledge of the self, we cannot also have knowledge of what is outside the self. Thee epistemic, as an adverb or adjective, with respect to knowing (activity) and knowledge (result).
The subject seems to be something very different than a transparent self-knowing subject.
The new philosophy overthrows important milestones of the entire endeavour of philosophy. For Socrates, Descartes and Kant, a fundamental building block of their thinking relies on the firm idea of the self.
For Socrates, the knowledge of the self is the starting point which we must reach in order to actually begin to gauge anything that is outside ourselves.
The pure acitivity of the subject, as a thinking and knowing activity, must be, in Descartes, a reason for the self’s own being and this gives us a first glimpse of what knowledge is and must look like.
In Kant, a new kind of cartesianism, called the copernican revolution by himself, it is postulated instead that the subject is what is still, and the world around it is moving. The knowing subject is the firm ground of all our knowledge and anything that takes place around it. We have to change our gaze, much like Copernicus, to the heliocentric universe, on our perspective of the subject and the object. For Kant, the dogmatic philosophers look to the world and see that they are the pure essential form, but to Kant this is entirely unknowable because we need to understand our capacity for knowing before we start reaching at the things that are around us, the things in themselves. For Kant we cannot know these things in themselves, we can only know how they appear. And they appear necessarily to our faculties of knowledge. They are merely implemented goggles.
This dominates the history of philosophy, the philosophy of Socrates has a climax in the modern era.
20th century: self knowledge becomes suspect.
Ideology, Geneaology and Unconscious are all concepts developed here which seem to make this kind of knowing entirely dubious. The subject seems to be fundamentally illusioned in multiple ways. The source of our ideas could come from our class belonging, from all those things about ourselves we are not consciously aware of, and our ideas might come from who we come from.
Humanity develops a tendency to dissimulate and disguise: the more we think we know ourselves, the more we are caught in illusion.
BUT, this is not skepticism. This is why they are true philosophers. They do not end up concluding that we should kill ourselves.
The subject and knowledge become more complex, there is a knowledge of the unconscious self that is possible, but it is only by going through our illusions. Knowledge and the illusions are suddenly paradoxically intertwined. Everything disguises itself in the contrary mask of itself.
This is one of the trademarks of continental philosophy generally.
The crisis of truth, the epistemological crisis.
The logos (doctrine, theory) of episteme (knowledge, science).
Knowledge is based on true statements. Truth is a core concept of epistemology. The epistemological crisis enquires into knowledge, its structure and presuppositions and truth becomes important in that regard. In the 19th century, truth becomes more complex. It becomes multidimensional, polyphonic, equivocal and relational. The epistemological crisis is a kind of result from the epistemic crisis. Once you are undermining the subject, you also dismantle the kind of truth that epistemology requires.
The sociological crisis
The crisis of what kind of activity a philosopher should engage in. Philosophy in Germany was in a problematic situation, with the German idealists, who tried to develop Kantian philosophy into a state of properness. This became lofty and the ideas seemed strange and speculative, yet still powerful. However, this distanced philosophy more and more from empirical reality. It became a solitary doing for genius minds.
Hegelian philosophy was heavily criticised after Hegel’s death. Kantian philosophy became so speculative that it seemed to become nothing at all. There was a need to return to the empirical data which are still there.
Philosophy more and more became psychology. In psychology you use empirical methods, yet there is still a clear theorising. Philosophy positions were given to psychologists. There was a crisis of a job market for philosophers. They only wanted psychologists, because philosophers had mainly studied german idealism. This undermined the role of philosophers in society. Empirical knowledge became too prevalent instead, and pure thinking was entirely thrown off.
And so the exact sciences were invented.
Philosophy had to justify its reason for being Erkenntnistheorie.
Philosophy found this in engaging with its outside, its own Otherness. What preceeds philosophical speculation, what constitutes this sort of engagement?
Philosophy then implemented new methods, methods of experimentation and creation, which wasn’t entirely scholastic. There was a new way to relate to concepts.
Marx and Engels shows that the transformation of the world can be as important as the thinking itself. A philosophical insight is true insofar as it leads to a real revolution in society, to the betterment of all society.
Nietzsche renewed philosophy through aesthetics and artistic creation. In how the genius artist relates to aesthetic forms. The thinker invents forms, by wishing only their own success. This is an expression of their own genius, but prior we have always shyed away from these insights. What Socrates really wanted was to convince that he was the most smartest, and it has nothing with actually reaching any kind of truth. These ideas were only mediums which conveyed the domination and power of Socrates himself. Philosophy becomes a mask behind which a philosopher hides their true intentions.
Freud renewed philosophy through the considerations of the dynamic unconscious which produces things in us that are entirely contrary to what we actually believe about ourselves. The mini-me dominates me.
There is a clear relationship between the practical renewal and the first 2 crises.
After these thinkers, we can follow this tradition in Critical Theory, the Structuralism(s).
These are all inspired by the political, the aesthetical and the clinical fields of study.
There is also philosophy as a theoretical and historical reflection.
If you do theory, you are engaged in a practice that you are doing.
The theoretical renewal claims the return to philosophy by itself and claims a clarification of the situation of the philosophizing subject. It clears things out and rejects their attempts to base the philosphical subject on an empirical ground.
This is what happens in phenomenology with Husserl and Heidegger.
They claim to purify philosophy from its enmeshment with empirical sciences. Husserl does this in returning to a pure sense, the pure activity of knowing, going back to the sort of objects that mathematicians find and seek truth. And by so doing he reinsitutes the subject in a certain way. Heidegger thinks that we need a more thorough relationship with the past in order to attain any knowledge, self-knowledge is the outcome of a sedimentation of all those things that came before us.
Both of them try to renew philosophy internally, and not by acting in an exterior field like the other above thinkers.
Practical approaches within continental philosophy dismiss truth, knowledge and subjectivity whilst the theoretical approaches favour new interpretations of truth, knowledge and subjectivity. Either one tries to renew these problems in philosophy, or they dismiss them as beyond us.