This semester we've started a pluralist reading group at LSU. We've got students and faculty from both analytic and continental philosophy who may not have that much antecedent overlap in background and methodology. So (as much as possible) it's very important to get books that will help analytic philosophers learn continental philosophy while simultaneously help continental philosophers learn analytic philosophy.*
This semester and summer we're working through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, focusing on secondary material that will be accessible to both analytic and continental philosophers (Forster's Twenty-Five Years, Beiser's two books covering Kant to Hegel, Robert Stern's work, and Westphal's Blackwell Guide to the book). In summer we're going to move to contemporary philosophers who use Hegel, including Stern and Markus Gabriel's metaphysical works, anti-metaphysical Pittsburgh Hegeliana, and Zizek's recent doorstop. Given Stern's contentions about the connection between Hegel properly understood and Deleuze, we might move on to the recent interpretations of Deleuze that are interesting and pretty accessible to all (including Bell, Delanda, and Protevi).
Again, the ideal book will be such that analytic philosophers will learn some continental philosophy and continental philosophers would learn some analytic philosophy. The four authors who clearly satisfy these desiderata are Lee Braver, Ray Brassier, Hubert Dreyfus, and Samuel Wheeler.** We also thought of the great Crowell/Malpas anthology on Heidegger and the transcendental. But we couldn't come up with anything else.
Given the desiderata, where each book must be helpful to people with quited different training, there may not be much else out there. But it would probably be really helpful not just to the LSU reading group if anyone had anything else to suggest.
*I realize this post is problematic in various ways: (1) I'm assuming that "pluralism" = "analytic and continental" and hence leaving out huge swaths of philosophy, and (2) I'm thinking of the split between analytic and continental as if it carves nature at the joints. Think of this as dialectical, where coming to reason requires the understanding's tarrying with such oversimplifications.
**I would have liked to have described the relevant works in this post, but I am about to go enter the mouth of the beast. Jury duty. Hopefully in the next week or so I can do a post that is more informative about why such works are helpful for both analytic and continental philosophers. If anyone wants to take a stab at this in the comments with respect to any of the above works and/or any newly suggested works that would be cool too.
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