New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy new issue

The JFFS is now an open-source peer-reviewed journal (what we should all hope is the wave of the future for academic journals). This issue includes, besides a number of articles (including one by Leonard Lawlor on the project of "continental philosophy" with which a first glance tells me that I will probably disagree on a number of points but from which I am sure to learn, as always with Lawlor), a forum on Fanon; as history would have it, the 50th anniversary of Les Damnés de la terre coincides with the "Revolutionary Spring of 2011."

What better way to celebrate, commemorate, critically reflect on, and think through Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth fifty years after its publication with a new North African syndrome: Revolution—or at least a series of revolts that continue to rock regimes across North Africa and the region.  Fanon beginsThe Wretched writing of decolonization as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order—often against the odds—willed from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is instead an absolute replacement of one “species” of humanity by another.

In periods of revolution, like the one we are experiencing today, such absolutes appear quite normal. Indeed, radical change becomes the “new normal” and the idea that revolutionary change is impossible is simply the rantings and ravings of the conservatives and reactionaries of the ancient regime.

Too long buried under the weight of the tomes of academic discourse, Fanon has been resuscitated by the new dawn of North African revolutions. 

 

On the origins of analytic philosophy

(Cross-posted at M-Phi.)

Greg Frost-Arnold has a nice post on the origins of the phrase ‘analytic philosophy’, in particular on when it began to be used roughly with its current meaning. He has a useful chart showing that already in the 1960s the phrase was being regularly used, whereas ‘continental philosophy’ only became more prominent as a phrase in the 1990s.

But besides the question of uses of the terminology, in comments to the post different people have been presenting insightful remarks on the origins of the very idea of ‘analytic philosophy’ as a particular way of doing philosophy. Greg himself (in comments) offers the following observation as a starting point:

Go back to Europe in 1932. We have the following 3 intellectual groups: the phenomenologists (esp. Husserl and Heidegger), the folks dedicated to (something like) Moorean analysis, and the Vienna Circle and their intellectual allies (perhaps we include here the Lvov-Warsaw school).

Synthese--a superficial, but hopefully, enlightening sociological tour of European (analytic) philosophy

[During the last few days I have received a number of informal queries from American colleagues about why European philosophers of science seem so eager to defend the reputation of Synthese and its editors come what may and why these seem not to understand the political ramifications of the disclaimer.  What follows is inspired by reflecting on blog comments in support of Synthese around the net; I will be terse, partial, and no doubt superficial in my sociology of European philosophy (on the Western part of the Continent). I list my observations as separate points for clarity but they are meant to be mutually enlightening.]

First, the general editors of Synthese have a sterling reputation for quality and probity. Johan Van Benthem, in particular, is arguably one of the most important analytic philosophers of Europe. His work in logic(s) and formal semantics is widely respected (not to mention his appointment in Stanford).

Second, in European philosophy (and the Humanities more generally) *research* funding has become *zero-sum*. (Such funding pays for PhD, post-doc, and research-intensive positions.) Grants are distributed by national and European grant agencies to favored individuals and, increasingly, (international) research groups. These grants are increasingly decided by ‘objective’ scientific metrics. In particular, publications in journals that have an ESF ‘A’ ranking, have reasonably high impact factors, and/or are listed in reputable indexing services such as Thomson’s Web-of-Science/Knowledge, are favored over all other forms of publications.

Comment I should have made to Taylor Carman

We've all been to philosophy talks where the person asking a question at the end of the talk just goes on and on about something tangential, and it is not even clear what the question really is, and by the end of it you just think that person is showboating. O.K. If you were at the Taylor Carman talk about Heidegger and ontological difference last week at the APA, that was me. I was the irritating question guy.

Aaugh! screwup in APA Central Division Program concerning Author Meets Critics session for Lee Braver's "A Thing of This World"

The program for the Central in a few weeks does not give correct information for the Author Meets Critics group discussion for Lee Braver's A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism.

On the APA website it currently, and erroneously, reads:

GII-4. Society for Realist-Antirealist Discussion: Lee J. Braver, A Think of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Chair: Mark Okrent (Bates College)
Critic: Samuel C. Wheeler III (University of Connecticut)
Author: Lee J. Braver (Hiram College)

What were they thinking?!?! This not only neglects to mention two of the other critics (one of whom is me) but it also gets the title of the book wrong. Here's the correct version!

Central APA 2011, Thursday 3/31/2011

5:30-7:30 PM

Society for Realist-Antirealist Discussion: Lee J. Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

Session Chair: Mark Okrent, Professor of Philosophy, Bates College

Panelists:

Jon Cogburn, Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Louisiana State University

Professor Robert D'Amico, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida

Samuel C. Wheeler III, Professor of Philosophy, Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy University of Connecticut

Response:

Lee Braver, Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Hiram College

Paul Livingston: The Politics of Logic

Paul Livingston of the Philosophy Department at the University of New Mexico has a book coming out with Routledge this summer entitled The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein and the Consequences of Formalism. Sample chapters are available here. This passage from Chapter 1 gives a sense of the stakes involved: 

This is the question of the formalization of formalism itself, of the reflection of formal-symbolic structures within themselves, and thus of the possibility of these structures coming to comprehend and articulate their own internal constitution and limits.  

Within the analytic tradition, this question is posed and pursued within the ill-defined field sometimes called "metalogic."  Its results are recognized as profound, but their larger significance has, so far at least, been difficult to place.  In particular, despite the largely negative significance usually ascribed to them, the transformative results of Russell, Gödel, and Tarski, for instance, have in fact fundamentally articulated what we can expect from a critical reflection on the nature of language and our human access to it.  

On the "continental" side, as well, such transformative critical meta-reflection has resulted from the massive mid-century project of structuralism as soon as "post-structuralist" philosophers subjected it to internal critique on its own terms.  

One of my chief goals in the present work is thus to argue that these two strands of reflection on language – metalogical analysis on the "analytic" side, and post-structuralism in a deconstructive mode on the "continental" - can be allied, and thus can both be useful sources of critical reflection on the political implications of formalism as such.  Their combination can yield, in particular, a formally clarified understanding of the constitution and structure of political communities, as well as of their possibilities of alteration and internal dynamics of change.

I'm very much looking forward to reading this when it comes out. I taught a course on Badiou in Fall 2009 and while it was very rewarding for me, and I can honestly say I greatly admire Being and Event, I couldn't quite buy the linkage of formalism and politics, despite the valiant efforts contained in Peter Hallward's excellent Badiou: A Subject to Truth. To put it in kind of a jokey way (but not too jokey!), Badiou keeps saying you have to choose, so if I have to choose, I'll choose Deleuze, life, affect, biology, and so on, all the things that Badiou wants to leave behind. So I'm hoping that reading Livingston's book will make me choose again, and in a even more informed way this time. I still think I'll make the same choice, but I think it will be a more informed choice, if you see what I'm saying. 

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series)

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

For a really first-rate anthology that ecapsulates a lot of the main issues, see The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The anthology includes essays and interviews by Badiou, Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Alberto Toscano, Adrian Johnson, Martin Hagglund, Peter Hallward, Nathan Brown, Nick Srnicek, Reza Negarastani, Quentin Meillassoux, Francois Laruelle, Levi Bryant, Steven Shaviro, Bruno Latour, Gabriel Catren, Isabelle Stengers, Manuel Delanda, our very own John Protevi, and the indomitable Slavoj Zizek. Next Spring Semester I'm going to teach this anthology along with some of Harman's own books.

In Harman's post above he characterizes some of the prehistory of the term "Speculative Realism." The first plank is a revolt against the reigning pretense that phenomenology somehow got us past various idealism/realism controversies. Lee Braver's masterful A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-realism went far to verify Richard Rorty's contention about the pose of being beyond realism/idealism disputes. Rorty stated that what always ended up laying beyond the very dispute was in fact idealism. Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude critiqued the pervasiveness of various unacknowledged permutations of Berkeley's Hylas/Philonous master argument. Permutations of the same idealist argument is almost constitutively made by everyone who claims to deconstruct or somehow undermine the very distinction between realism and idealism. So the first step in speculative realism a rejection of the pretense that phenomenology provided some point where realism/anti-realism issues could be avoided, and to understand that very pretense as just being anti-realism. Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier all share this view.

The second plank is the realism. The involves rejecting the idea that being is in any way necessarily correlated with human existence. But the rejection can take a variety of forms. One rejection is via some variety of panpsychism. This is to accept Berkeleyan arguments as sound, concluding that reality has properties we associate with minds, but to hold that this has nothing in particular to do with human minds. Or one can reject the validity of the Berkeleyan reasoning altogether, which may or may not lead to a form of nihilism (see Brassier's Nihil Unbound). I think Harman's own work is somewhere in the middle of this continuum. In his fantastic book Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects he radically externalizes relations that orthodox Heideggerians take to be constitutive of people/object interactions. For Harman, the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit play always takes place whenever any two objects interact. Critics and defenders have seen this as a subtle form of panpsychism. Harman argues that it is not, but notes that pan-psychism is closer to his view than many fashionable forms of naturalism, which he rejects.

The third plank is the "speculative" part. This is the most difficult to cash out. As Harman notes, the one thing in common to the early speculative realists is an appreciation for Lovecraft. This tempermant shows up in philosophy in a variety of ways: (1) A rejection of strong ties between conceivability and possibility. Reality first and foremost is what is capable of suprising us and problematizing whatever theory we apply to it. Human beings have no very good priveleged access about what is in fact conceivable, because reality always surprises us and overturns previous conceptions. This is why Lovecraft is a patron saint, because much of his fiction describes the indescribable as indescribable (Neal Hebert and I argue as much in a paper for me and Silcox's forthcoming anthology on philosophy and Dungeons and Dragons). Lee Braver actually has a really manuscript outlining a guerilla history of continental philosophy in terms of this very trope (I think he is developing it into a book project). Braver traces its first articulation to Kierkegaard. On its own in the history of continental philosophy it tends to lead to neo-Kantian "realism of the remainder" type realisms. The Object Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant has as its founding moment the rejection of realism of the remainder, the view that the real is some inarticulate and inarticulable mush (see Harman's Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things and Bryant's forthcoming Democracy of Objects). [The way in which this rejection is made actually ties their work to Graham Priest's main argument in Beyond the Limits of Thought in interesting ways]. But Harman and Bryant do accept the trope that part of what constitutes the real is the ability for novel things to happen, they just show what happens when you marry this view to a metaphysical commitment to objects that exist independently of humans. In terms of telling a new history of continental realism,there are open and interesting questions concerning the extent to which the "continental materialist" tradition tracing from Marx and Nietzsche through to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari provides something beyond realism of the remainder realism. The extent that it is fair to characterize Protevi and Delanda as Object Oriented Philosophers is the extent to which their development of these thinkers gets us beyond realism of the remainder. (2) Commitment to strong views of emergence. In the Object Oriented vein, when objects interact in novel ways, novel properties come to the fore. Again, Harman is able to articulate this beautifully in terms of a radical externalization of the way Heidegger presents the scheme/content distinction. My own work with Mark Silcox on emergent properties (we have papers in American Philosophical Quarterly and the British Journal of Aesthetics, and a chapter in our video games book) is part of what brought me into the fold. (3) A rejection of naturalism. Again, this is not necessarily to affirm anti-realism about science. It's just the view that there is more to reality than our scientific theories capture. C.S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga (who cites Lewis), Robert Brandom, and John McDowell all make arguments similar to some made by speculative realists. In the book proposal I am going to make to this series, one of the things I will try to do is to motivate Harmanian themes in part by critiquing the quietism of Brandom and McDowell, while accepting their anti-naturalism. The resulting view is a recognizable variety of speculative realism.

Anyhow, given my analytic background of writing about Dummett, and recent interests in Pittsburgh Hegelianism, I find Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology to be among the most exciting things going on in contemporary metaphysics. Hopefully the book will be able to substantiate this claim from an analytic perspective. Being fair to McDowell is probably going to add a year of writing time though.

A Neuroscientific Prediction Refuted

I just read a recent piece on The Guardian bearing the title “20 predictions for the next 25 years”. Amongst the usual predictions as to whether the US will hand over its super power seat to another nation or whether medicine will finally find a cure for cancer or AIDS, what struck me the most was David Eagleman’s overestimation of neuroscience: “We’ll be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex”. Of course, predictions are based on conjectures and speculations of all sorts but the vertiginous advance of science in the 20th century must have certainly surprised even the most skeptical minds. After all, no prediction can be refuted in advance, or not really, for the future can prove one very wrong, and this specially in terms of scientific discovery. No doubt, this beautiful piece of technological machinery which I’m using to write this piece, my beloved Macbook Pro, was simply unimaginable just a few decades ago, when the only real computer available was the massive and clumsy ENIAC.    

Nonetheless I too, like Antonio Tabucchi, confess lacking any particular talent for prediction, because—in the words of the Pessoa expert—“when you have three or four elements in hand, you don’t have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.” But the question is whether we actually have those three or four elements in hand, so that we can spread ourselves out and make such a bold prediction, like Eagleman, himself a neuroscientist, dared to make.  

Although Eagleman’s statements are lightly softened by ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys’, extravagant prophecies, unfortunately, are not at all unknown in the fields dealing with the sciences of the mind.

In a 1958 famous paper, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell gave a futuristic assessment of that which, at their time, was called heuristics—thought to be comparable to human intelligence simulated in a digital machine:

1. That within ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion, unless the rules bar it from competition.

2. That within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.

3. That within ten years a digital computer will write music that will be accepted by critics as possessing considerable aesthetic value.

4. That within ten years most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs, or of qualitative statements about the characteristics of computer programs.

Nobody has to remind us today of the fact that until now computers do not think—unless one entertained a petty and quite reductive understanding of human thinking. But still today the orthodoxy in cognitive science has it that general assumptions about the mind and intelligent thought and behavior are to be held, such as the following: the mind is an information processing system, a representational device and in some sense a computer (cf. the preface to the Blackwell Companion to Cognitive Science, edited by Bechtel and Graham). This is why it is not surprising to hear one high profile researcher and founder of these ideas and bizarre sci-fi dreams, Marvin Minsky, declaring that AI’s brain-dead while at the same time hoping for intelligent robotic waitresses to serve him martinis.  

The problem is that maybe some of those assumptions are plain wrong and that basic human coping is not to be measured on the basis of philosophical suppositions pretty much surpassed. Some positive signs are to be found recently. Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë is a good example that you can be both scientifically well-informed and be critically aware of the philosophical limitations of AI and cognitive science. 

So I’m ready to make a few predictions myself. Cognitive science will be fundamentally reformed by situated cognition, embedded and embodied approaches and phenomenology, or else it’ll keep stumbling upon failure after failure. This will contribute to the definitive collapse of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy and that anodyne gap will be saluted as a theoretical provincialism of the past. And believe me, some distinguished researchers around the world and some young PhD students like myself are already working on it.

But, you know, one has to be cautious with predictions and that’s why, on the matter, I tend to agree with Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future”.

 

On Kant scholarship

Corey Dyck makes an important point, but (as I will claim below) does not go far enough in his review of Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Dyck writes, "Hogan and Winkler both succeed in illuminating the points of convergence and divergence between Kant and his predecessors, yet I find that there is something of a missed opportunity in the decision to limit the consideration of background to the old opposition between the rationalists and empiricists. There is some, but only some, justification for this since, as both Guyer in his introduction and Winkler point out, Kant himself makes use of (a version of) this distinction when he contrasts intellectual philosophers or noologists (Plato and Leibniz) with sensual philosophers (Aristotle, Epicurus, and Locke) or "empirists [Empiristen]" (A853/B881-A854/B882; cf. also AA 5:13). Yet, this rather simplistic classification hardly captures the complex rationalism of the eighteenth-century German tradition that constitutes the most proximate context for the Critique and which, especially as elaborated in the systems of Christian Wolff, J. H. Lambert, and J. N. Tetens, aimed precisely at a syncretism of key elements of Leibnizian and Lockean thought, thus anticipating Kant's own grand synthesis.^[1] Given that Eric Watkins' recent book (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials [Cambridge, 2009]) has now made central portions of these texts from this tradition readily available to students, it is to be regretted that this volume was not bolder in challenging the exhaustiveness of this rather stale historical distinction when it comes to understanding the background to Kant's text."

Why stop here? The center of philosophic thought in the period was Paris (and its representatives in the Academies of Berlin and St. Petersburg, and more indirectly, of course, in Edinburgh). Wolff and Lambert, for example, are responding to it. Yet research on Kant proceeds as if Euler, D'Alembert, Maupertuis (etc) and their complex responses to (the historical) Newton and Dutch Newtonianism barely existed. (The analogy would be to write about some early 21st political philosopher, and to never mention Rawls or Nozick.)

Language variation and the analytic-continental divide

I’ve been quite busy lately with a lot of different things (including a most interesting workshop on the notion of form in 19^th and 20^th century logic and mathematics last week), so my blogging has not been very copious. I have, to be sure, written at least 3 or 4 blog posts in my head, but the extended mind thing is still not working as it should on the mind-world axis (^_^) (That’s a Japanese emoticon; I like them better, you don’t need to tilt your head to the side!)

Anyway, I wanted to comment on a post by Alva Noë, which Eric Schliesser brought to our attention last week. In the discussion prompted by the post, differences between analytic philosophy of language and continental philosophy of language have come up, and this is what I would like to talk about in connection with Alva’s post. He makes a good case for the claim that, when it comes to language, “it's variation all the way down, even at the level of the individual.” This is not an armchair claim, it is something established by empirical and historical studies of language (and really, that languages change all the time is something that we all ‘know’ on a phenomenological level).

I am an analytic philosopher, there’s no denying that, both with respect to methods and with respect to the literature that constitutes the background for my work. But way back, as an undergraduate, the first contact I had with philosophy of language was rather on the ‘continental’ side (as much of my undergraduate education, with its good old French, historical approach). In that context, the focus was precisely on language variation, on the perennial creative power of language to recreate and reinvent itself, while at the same time not in any way jeopardizing communication and understanding. I’m thinking specifically of Meleau-Ponty’s La Prose du Monde, but I guess similar points could be made about other authors (e.g. Heidegger).

CFP: Bodies of Thought: Fleshy Subjects, Embodied Minds, & Human Natures. Edinburgh 9-10 June

CALL FOR PAPERS: Bodies of Thought: Fleshy Subjects, Embodied Minds, & Human Natures.

9^th-10^th June 2011, Royal Society of Edinburgh

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Dr Christine Battersby (Reader Emerita in Philosophy, University of Warwick)
• Professor Susan Oyama (Professor Emerita in Psychology, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center, New York)
• Professor Michael Wheeler (Professor of Philosophy, University of Stirling).

The aim of this event is to foster a dialogue between researchers in feminist philosophy working on debates around the body, and researchers in philosophy of cognitive science with interests in embodied cognition and the extended mind. Many theorists of embodiment now think of mind and cognition as being continuous with life, in some theoretically significant way. Thus, contributions from those working in relevant areas of philosophy of biology will also form a natural part of this dialogue.

Why I love NDPR

Here's a battle of metaphysical heavyweights (EJ Lowe reviewing DM Armstrong's Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics). [I was suddenly attracted to the idea of an unsystematic metaphysics, for which the contents of my brain may be a truth-maker.]

Anyway, there is a great historical irony lurking here: analytic philosophy got part of its identity by rebelling against the obscurity, metaphysical extravaganze, and lack of logical acuity of (British) Idealism (i.e., T.H. Green,  F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet J. M. E. McTaggart, H. H. Joachim, J. H. Muirhead, and G. R. G. Mure, etc. Amusingly, in the review Bradley is discussed with utmost respect. McTaggert is treated with utmost seriousness in lots of debates on time again.)

Armstromng is best known (by me?) for his Truthmaker theory (which is pretty central to contemporary metaphysics); it presupposes i) propositions, ii) things that make them true, and iii) their (internal) relation. Thus, in the name of "hard-core naturalism," (often no better than dogmatic realism) a whole philosophic industry has been built around assuming the reality of timeless & eternal entities (or something that figures like a proxy for these [My brilliant ex-colleague, Kris McDaniel once gave a devestating review of Armstrong's particular take on propositions. [GET WELL SOON, KRIS!]] and relations. (Yes, we can also discuss falsemakers.) Somewhere, Hegel must be nodding something obscure about cunning...

Comte --> Levinas

In some circles being labeled a 'positivist' is among the worst kinds of insults. I assume that this is true of the (expanding?) circle of folk who engage with Levinas.

So this review amused me, and also made me wonder about the possibility of a now-invisible history from Comte (now largely unread and stereo-typed) to Levinas. I quote from Kavka's review without further comment:

"Both near the end of Levinas's second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being (1974), and in the 1951 essay cited above, Levinas placed "theology" and "religion" in contradistinction to each other. And yet to infer from this that Levinas posited some kind of religious path in which performing ethical acts led to a state of affairs in which "God is found" (313) -- much like Martin Buber, who wrote in I and Thou (1923) that "whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the beings of the world finds him whom one cannot seek" -- is in my view to misunderstand Levinas. At one point (311f.), Cohen approvingly quotes the section of the 1951 essay in which Levinas distinguished between theology and religion. There is an important and unmarked ellipsis in Cohen's quote. The full quote appears below:

This tie to the other, which does not reduce itself to the representation of the Other but rather to his invocation, where invocation is not preceded by comprehension, we call religion. In choosing the term religion -- without having pronounced the word God or the word sacred -- we initially have in mind the meaning that Auguste Comte gives to this term in the beginning of his System of Positive Polity. Nothing theological, nothing mystical, lies hidden behind the analysis that we have just given of the encounter with the other (BPW, p. 8).

The most underrated philosopher of the week: Marietje van der Schaar

Here are the rules for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week entry: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) department (even thought these are also filled with underrated folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No untenured folk. 6. Excellence in more than one AOS. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones.)

This week's winner, Marietje van der Schaar, perfectly exhibits the spirit guiding this weekly feature. (Full disclosure: we are former colleagues at Leiden University.) She is a creative logician (especially constructive type theory), with a fine eye for its Mitteleuropa historical component. (Like many of the "most underrated" featured here, she dislikes self-promotion.) More recently she has started to recover Arnauld (and Locke) from previous neglect and misrepresentation. For Marietje history is, it seems, always philosophically alive. As the Frege-founding myth becomes less pronounced within analytic philosophy and interest in Brentano gains, Marietje's work will be a natural entry into alternative conceptions of logic. In fact, if Analytic and Continental philosophers ever learn to talk to each other (for real), it may well be through the bridging work of Marietje. Meanwhile, I can't wait to hear her next paper, on Locke and SPinoza!

NDPR review of "Postanalytic and Metacontinental"

The review is here. Excerpts: 

This important book is one of the better anthologies currently available on the relationship, or lack thereof, between the typically disparate traditions of analytic and continental philosophy. The anthology contains essays that offer broader general assessments of methodological differences between traditions as well as a number of very good essays on specific points of convergence or divergence between the traditions. The editors and authors are to be commended for their diligence in avoiding two common mistakes when characterizing these traditions -- either an essentialism which denies the possibility of meaningful dialogue between traditions or a deflationary view prone to ignoring important methodological and substantive differences between analytic and continental philosophy. 

Table of Contents below the fold.