Bob Newhart on Leiter's "party line continentals" shenaningans

Leiter picking at Graham Harman again HERE (Harman's response HERE). Neither leave comments open.

Leiter links to an earlier post on "party line continentals," which he defines in this manner: 

For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him).

Readers of Ferry and Renault's La Pensée 68 (translated into English as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) will recognize this immediately. Ferry and Renault characterize each soixante-huitard as "Heidegger +" someone else (e.g. Foucault is "Heidegger + Nietzsche," Bourdieu is "Heidegger + Marx," and Derrida is "Heidegger + Derrida's style"), and like Leiter describe it in conspiratorial terms.

I have no idea how fair Ferry and Renault were. What's more relevant here is that their book came out during the Reagen administration! And, no matter how you voted back then, basic fairness should lead you to admit that quite a bit has changed.

In particular, since many of the other  Baby Boomer culture wars seem to be winding down with the forces of truth and beauty winning, can we please just do the same with this one?

I'm very serious.

One thing Adrian Johnston and I have in common is that we were both undergraduates at the University of Texas during the enviable time when the Iowa metaphysicians (Herbert Hochberg, Edwin Allaire) and Sellarsians (in particular, Johanna Seibt, who taught a class on Hegel's Phenomenology while I was there) had an excellent rapproachment with continental philosophers such as Douglas Kellner, Kelly Oliver, Kathleen Higgens, Lewis Mackie,  and Robert Solomon. This spirit of rapproachment at least set the tone for the undergraduates and graduate students there at the time. Even though U.T. is still a great department, for those of us that germinated in that enviornment (especially Mackie's grad. students after he died), it was somewhat traumatic as the academic versions of the late eighties culture wars proved to be so destructive to the pluralism that in part made the place such a fertile place to think (Kellner touches on it in this interview). 

With respect to Leiter's fervent efforts to keep alive the Ferry-Renault critique, I should just say that as an analytic philosopher (there are symbols in my papers) who has been to one SPEP and two continental conferences now, I call shenanigans.

Of course people are working in the phenomenological tradition through Derrida, and of course Leiter is free not to like this work (to be fair, he gives reasons in places). But characterizing this as "party line" anything is exactly analogous to characterizing analytic philosophy in terms of the subset of metaphysicians who subscribe to Quine's dictum that to be is to be the value of a bound variable. There's no "political effort" by anyone to impose that form of philosophy on anyone else. There just isn't in either case. It's extraordinarily misleading to people who aren't in a position to know better, and given Leiter's penchant for characterizing SPEP in this manner, destructive to boot.

Maybe what Leiter describes had some valency thirty years ago. I don't know. The key point is that it doesn't matter anyhow.

So can we please just stop it? I'm serious. I don't think that this is too much to expect from, nor too hard for, people who love wisdom.

I've gone on long enough. I should, however note that on my impressions about what is distinctive (and healthy) about SPEP as an intellectual tradition, see THIS POST. The discussion in that string didn't focus on that aspect of the post, and I'd be interested if there's anything I'm missing.

And finally, I shouldn't have to say this, but I do. This post is just meant to do with the "party line continental" nonsense and has nothing to do with the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which I think is on the whole a force of good, though of course there are related issues with respect to it. Nor does it have anything to do with Leiter's own scholarship in continental philosophy which I think very highly of (this book is on my shelf).

I just don't understand why we can't do our own projects without having to define ourselves so much in terms of what we don't like. I don't like Quine's dictum at all. I think that it's as mistaken as anything ever uttered by philosopher. Good for me. But so what. This dislike has nothing to do with my own work. People who do like Quine's dictum haven't hindered my own attempts at metaphysics in any way, and moreover, I learn from many of them.