Modern Continental Philosophy

Pragmatism

  • Emblematic school of philosophy that grew up in North America in the early 20th century.
  • Emphasizes what an idea or scheme can achieve or what difference it makes.
  • The proof or truth of an idea lies in its consequences.
  • Representatives include:
    • Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914)
    • William James (1842-1910)
    • John Dewey (1859-1952)
  • Pragmatists believed that metaphysical ideas and categories have no discernible consequences, rendering metaphysical discussions worthless.
  • This contrasts with the book's thesis that abstract philosophical positions have profound practical consequences.
  • Examples: Nietzsche and Hitler, Aquinas and Mother Teresa, Marx and Stalin, Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher worked from metaphysical commitments.

Pierce and Semiotics

  • Charles Sanders Pierce is considered the father of semiotics (philosophy of signs).
  • A sign can be related to what it signifies in different ways.
  • Pierce distinguishes between:
    • Symbol: Relation is of human construction (conventional). Example: warning sign shape or the letters "STOP".
    • Index: Stronger relation without direct likeness. Example: raised temperature as an index of infection, thermometer reading.
    • Icon: Direct likeness to what it signifies. Example: photograph or non-abstract painting.
  • Theologians can consider everything a sign of God since everything comes from God.
  • Signification predates created things internally in the Godhead. The Son is the Word, internally the sign of the Father.
  • The world of signs exists only as the sign of the sign.

Vitalism

  • A significant school associated with France that takes life as its starting point.
  • Principal representative: Henri Bergson (1859-1941).
  • Bergson's work is a rebuttal of materialism.
  • Vitalists believe life is the most metaphysical place for philosophy to begin.
  • Bergson regarded life as the most significant feature of the universe and the interpretive key to the whole.
  • The history of the universe is the history of the progress of the Elan Vital or Life Urge, resembling Hegelianism with life replacing thought, indebted to Darwin.
  • Bergson rejected objectivity and believed philosophy should deal with the world as perceived from inside a human life.
  • Example: Emphasis on "Dury" (real or lived time) rather than abstract clock time.
  • Vitalism was taken up by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and finds a parallel in process theology.
  • Bergson's work influenced Jacques and Raissa Maritain, who found grounds for living beyond a meaningless shift of matter.
  • Bergson posed questions to materialism that materialism could not answer.

Structuralism

  • An intellectual outlook with French roots.
  • Genealogy begins with Ferdinand de Saussure and his course in general linguistics.
  • Influence spread to anthropology in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss.
  • Saussure claimed any attempt to study individual elements of language in isolation is misguided.
  • Each part of language means something on account of its relation to the rest.
  • Words only have meanings based on how they contrast with others.
  • Emphasis shifted from individual parts (parole) to the structure as a whole (langue).
  • Example: the word "meat" has different meanings depending on the system of other words it is placed within.

English of the prayer book: "He gave them their meat in due season" refers to food in general.

River Cottage Meatbook: "meat" is in contrast to vegetables.

  • Meanings emerge by contrast, seen in dictionaries of antonyms.
  • Saussure turned attention away from individual elements of language towards the study of the structure as a whole.
  • He highlighted the role of language and culture in the production of meaning.
  • Shifted emphasis from the history of a word (diachronic) to the meaning in the culture where it is used at a particular time (synchronic).
  • Etymology is illustrative, but the meaning is determined in the current day.

Wittgenstein

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is a significant 20th-century philosopher.
  • Key works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations.
  • Concern with words.
  • At the forefront of the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy.
  • Tractatus argues that words are stable signs corresponding to items in the world, and language maps onto the world.
  • Argues that what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence (paragraph 7).
  • He thought he was ruling out metaphysical statements.
  • Things that cannot be put into words make themselves manifest (6.522), which is mystical.
  • Philosophical Investigations: Meaning of a word is inseparable from the context in which it is used (language game).
  • Any given word has a family of uses with overlapping meanings.
  • Concerned with the limits of thought and preventing philosophy from overstretching itself..
  • Human language is adequate for everyday tasks, but trouble arises when applied beyond those settings.
  • Theologians are interested in Wittgenstein's link between meanings and practices, which are called forms of life.
  • Lindbeck made complementarity with practice one arbiter of truth.
  • Hauerwas stresses the formation of individual and community and virtues that align with Christian doctrine.

Heidegger, Existentialism, and Phenomenology

  • Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) has influenced subsequent theology.
  • Being and Time (1927) was taken up by existentialist theologians.
  • Existentialism emphasizes attention to existence as we experience it.
  • Kierkegaard rejected overarching schemes in favor of the individual in a position of inescapable choice.
  • Human freedom is marked by anxiety.
  • Non-Christian existentialists (Heidegger, Sartre) favored clear-headed acknowledgment that the world cannot be understood in relation to God.
  • Heidegger cast human being as "being towards death."
  • Sartre placed freedom center stage as both absolute and absurd (existence precedes essence).
  • Christian response: Hold to the characterfulness of things.
  • Heidegger's late works took a more mystical and ethical route, focusing on practical objects or situations.
  • Noticed a shift in attention from being to dwelling.
  • Argued that the history of philosophy has been forgetful of being since Plato.
  • Philosophers talked about being with neutral indifference, not with the authentic response of care or concern (Sorge).
  • Plato was accused of identifying objects with our conceptions of them.
  • Christian thought rehabilitated forms as ideas in the mind of God.
  • Heidegger characterized human particularity as thrownness, including our mood.
  • Awareness of death becomes important.
  • Heidegger had a horror of confusing being as such with individual beings but wanted to focus on particular objects and situations.
  • Later writing can sound like esoteric.
  • He is closest to Christian philosophy in his sense of wonder.
  • His terminology reflects his exposure to Christian philosophy.
  • Nothingness plays an important role.
  • Heidegger analyzed the situation in which that human being finds him or herself in terms of a fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, mortals.
  • The human task is to dwell, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to use and practice their state as mortal so that there may be a good death.
  • Sought an account of being that rang true to human experience, making him a phenomenologist.
  • Sought an account of subjectivity that allows us to attend to the way things are in themselves.
  • The jug emerges as more than we can casually depict.

Phenomenology

  • Describes a school of philosophy and a broader philosophical approach.
  • Proceeds on the basis of phenomena or their appearing.
  • Urges return to human experience as the basis for philosophy.
  • The founder is usually taken as Edmund Husserl.
  • Britano stressed the centrality of intentionality for philosophy.
  • Concerned with the ways in which phenomena appear to us and what that reveals about the structures of perception, thought, consciousness, and the world.
  • Built on answering the question of what it is like to perceive phenomena.
  • Phenomenology is broadened by consideration of what it is about the world and our place in it that provides a structure within which attending to appearances is possible.
  • Has produced accounts of bodiliness (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
  • Husserl asked us to suspend judgment about the object of perception to attend only to the appearing of the object as internally apprehended.
  • Husserl called this the discipline of bracketing (epoché).
  • Maintains a first-person perspective.
  • Has something in common with empiricism and Kant.

Levinas

  • Levinas emphasized encounter, especially with another human being.
  • Stressed the other person and their address, which calls us to go beyond ourselves and presents us with demands.
  • Other person can be so magnified as to appear almost as a idol.
  • The eye of traditional phenomenology required both the supplement to you
  • The emphasis on interiority was supplemented by Edith Stein, who stressed that feelings and thoughts are expressed through the body.
  • Outside strict phenomenologists, an approach is broadly phenomenological when paying attention to how we perceive something (e.g., a phenomenological study of worship).
  • In the late 20th century, phenomenology became theological, especially in France.
  • Theological turn in French phenomenology: figures like LaVenus, Marion, Cretien, Henri, and Lacoste made God central.
  • drawn to attend to God because the world gives itself, which implies a giver.
  • Insisting on transcendence accounts as the source of what is perceived (Edit Stein tradition)

Postmodernism

  • Movement born in the second half of the 20th century.
  • Rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations, and the possibility of objective knowledge.
  • Skeptical of truth, unity, and progress.
  • Opposes elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity, heterogeneity.
  • No overall story can be told.
  • Postmodern writers combine insights with preposterous ideas.
  • Aims for an approach outside of history, postmodern thinkers are fully immersed.
  • Postmodern philosophy typically reads like prose poetry.
  • Recognizes problems associated with expressing meaning.
  • Can strike us as an assault upon reason.
  • Theology was thought to rest on three legs, scripture, tradition and reason
    • The reformation questioned tradition
    • The enlightenment questioned scripture
    • Postmodernism questions tradition
  • Style of writing needs its own style of reading.
  • Postmodern philosophy can be secular mysticism of the negative (apophatic) form.
  • Analytic writing can fail through a quest for the objectivity of mathematics, postmodern philosophers risk seeming whimsical.

Postmodernity and Modernity

  • Questions of relation between postmodernity and modernity.
  • Modernity: period from at least the 16th century, characterized by confidence in reason, universality, and progress.
  • For some, postmodernity marks a profound break.
  • For others, postmodernity is continuous with modernity.
  • Still others combine both continuity and disparity.
  • The relation of postmodernity to what went before is complicated and varies across disciplines.
  • Architecture was an important arena for postmodernism.
  • Postmodernity is our cultural condition, postmodernism is a more intellectual affair.
  • Postmodernism describes our times.
  • Postmodern thought is less successful at teaching us how to respond.
  • Political edge of postmodernism: been better at describing the condition than transforming it.

Postmodern Philosophy

  • Usually Marxist.
  • Fails if it cannot affect political and economic transformation.
  • Heirs to the masters of suspicion: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, the other all important addition was feminist thoughts and the perspective of post colonialism.
  • At root lies Nietzsche's assumption that the dynamo for human action, including human culture, is the will to power
  • Resulted in a hermeneutic of suspicion.
  • No text or aspect of culture was considered without asking certain questions.
  • Good example: the canon of literature.
  • Focus shifts from what is said to preconditions in thought and action.
  • Michel Foucault called this the archaeology of thought.
  • Helpful for theologians concerned with justice shifting individual injustices, or that to the underlying structure.
  • Postmodernism better at diagnosis than repair and at pulling down than at pulling up.
  • Risk corroding whatever it touches because trust is a victim.
  • Consequence: a shift from acting to writing.

Two Routes into Postmodern Thought

East Coast
  • Argue carefully out of earlier confidence.
  • Wittgenstein emerges as a proto-postmodern figure.
  • Meaning extracted by relating the difference to other texts.
  • Used French term difference here which has notes of both difference and deferral.
  • Jacques Derrida's themes: difference and deconstruction.
  • Deconstruction aligns with the project of suspicion, looking for gaps or slips (aporia).
  • Deconstructionists were adept at tripping over them.
  • Writing as an attempt to leave a trace on the void (Chara).
  • Read about human life that they thought illustrates euphoria.
  • Christians reply that the gospel challenges how he complicates conveniently and makes impossible.
West Coast
  • Throws caution to the wind and dances in the void.
  • Kant's influence.
  • Phenomena are all that is accessible.
  • Surfaces are all that exists.
  • Freedom is paramount leading to consumerism etc
  • A principal postmodern example might be Gilles de lauz
  • Postmodern notions of the human being plastic.
  • Christian contrast: Augustine referred to people as means (to God's ends).
  • Our goal is to cooperate with the great project and attain meaning in relation to God.

Baudrillard

  • Was a mater at dreaming of titles for books.
  • Interested in everyday life and the meanings and values that adhere in the ways we deal with everyday rituals and the space which we live
  • Fascination with everyday objects and rituals is more than high culture captivated in what
  • Point was that we lost touch with reality.
  • His subjects for investigation were cinema, cyberspace, and all that is made of plastic.
  • Simulation emerges as much in post modernity.
  • gave the name of the real to common or garden old fashioned reality.
  • human life virtual reality, augmented, manipulated is designed
  • to reappear in the hyper real medium such that media presentations are constructed, like they would appear in outside that presentation.
  • Gulf War did not take place: the Gulf War was waged in the simulated realm of cruise missiles launched and tracked on computer screens
  • The theme of reality and simulation familiar in the Old Testament and dominic Cornelius put to god that is the ultimate reality.
  • America as the home of the hyper real.
  • dream becomes reality but remains still dream

Theology

  • Book might start in earnest at this point with discussions of philosophy.
  • Philosophy is most influential on contemporary theology.

Eclecticism

  • Eclecticism is a defining character of the present attitude towards philosophy.
  • no one dominant philosophical tradition among theologians today.
  • Diversity is particularly notable today.
  • Also eclectic in the sense that an individual is likely to look to a wide variety of influences
  • Can make for fuzziness.
  • Eclecticism today can be a corollary of confidence.

Theology among the political philosophers

  • Interaction of theology and philosophy comes from new political and atheist. attacks from polemic.
  • More philosophical interest in a theological interest amongst political philosophers (all but Simon de Botton as Scruton).
  • Interest in Paul and the possibility of transformation what they call an event tied with revolution.
  • Showings from that for more part theologians show significant interest in politics, therefore political philosophy
  • Theologians show a significant interest in politics and therefore in political philosophy
  • Recently Simon cringely and Alain de boten gave philosophical reasons for recovery of religious or quasi-religious.

Mindset in philosophy and technology

  • Philosophy today comes into varieties and so to philosophies.
  • Analytic and Continental philosphy
    • Analytic: Avoids the question that will not yield clear answer. Precisely defined by its method
    • Contental: Bracery and breadth.
  • Analyitic= Precise asnwers to questions that don't impact, continental may right and imepetrable. precise that is not possible can be a dange.
  • Protestant Theology says for minimum and Catholic for more and it has since said it can be of help, too.