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Continental philosophy is an umbrella term for philosophies prominent in continental Europe. [1] [page needed] Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. [2]
- Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history...
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Continental philosophy. Wikimedia Commons has media related...
- Contemporary philosophy
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- Overview
- German idealism and the defense of reason
- Kant
continental philosophy, series of Western philosophical schools and movements associated primarily with the countries of the western European continent, especially Germany and France. The term continental philosophy was adopted by professional philosophers in England after World War II to describe the various schools and movements then prominent in...
Modern continental philosophy emerged in response to the skeptical challenges posed by the philosophies of the British empiricists, especially George Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–76). Berkeley argued ingeniously that esse est percipi (aut percipere), “to be is to be perceived (or to perceive)”—everything real is either an idea or a mind (see idealism). Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), rejected the reality of cause and effect as ordinarily conceived, arguing that belief in particular causal connections could not be justified rationally but could be explained psychologically as the product of mere “habit” and the “association of ideas.” In so doing he potentially undermined the rational foundations not only of beliefs about things not immediately present in space or time but of all scientific knowledge (see induction, problem of). Both philosophers questioned the commonplace assumptions that there is a “reality” distinct from the ideas or perceptions given in experience and that it is within the power of human reason to discern that reality’s true nature. The forceful skepticism to which they contributed, which became one of the most powerful philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, treated the scope of human knowledge as severely limited and the powers traditionally attributed to human reason—especially during the era of great metaphysical system building in the 17th century—as little more than dogmatic pretensions.
The philosophy of German idealism arose to challenge the Enlightenment’s skeptical, materialist, empiricist, and antimetaphysical worldview. German idealist philosophers sought thereby to restore reason to its former preeminence and grandeur as the universal tool through which human understanding of reality is possible.
Hume’s skepticism was the explicit point of departure for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who acknowledged that it was Hume who had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Although Kant’s subsequent “critical” philosophy emphasized the limitations of human reason, it did so in a manner that ultimately vindicated the claims to knowledge that more-traditional philosophers had made on its behalf.
Following the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), Kant insisted that any investigation of the scope of human knowledge must begin with an examination of the cognitive faculties through which it is acquired. This general approach became characteristic of later German idealism and has exerted an enormous influence on continental philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), Kant presciently observed that “the critical path alone is open,” meaning that any approach to the problem of knowledge that failed to respect the limitations that he had laid down risked falling into the metaphysical dogmatism of old.
The problem of knowledge, according to Kant, is to explain how some judgments about the world can be necessarily true and therefore knowable “a priori,” or independently of experience (see a posteriori knowledge). Until Kant’s time, all empirical judgments were regarded as vulnerable to skeptical doubt, because human experience is inherently fallible. On the other hand, all a priori judgments, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” were regarded as empty of content, because they did not present any information that was not already contained in the concepts with which they were composed (being unmarried is part of what it is to be a bachelor). If human knowledge of the world was to be possible, therefore, there would have to be judgments that were both empirical and a priori.
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The genius and originality of Kant’s philosophy lay in the means by which he made room for such judgments. In what he described, in the preface to the second edition (1787) of the Critique of Pure Reason, as his “Copernican” revolution, he proposed that knowledge should not depend on the conformity of a judgment to an object in experience; rather, the existence of an object in experience should depend on its conformity to human knowledge.
- Richard Wolin
Contemporary philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning at the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of analytic and continental philosophy.
The term continental philosophy originated among English-speaking philosophers in the late twentieth century who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions that had been largely ignored or neglected by the analytic movement.
Continental philosophy. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Continental philosophy. Pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable. This category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large.
Aug 10, 2024 · Continental philosophy - Nietzsche, Existentialism, Postmodernism: As a youthful disciple of Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was influenced by the older philosopher’s critique of reason and by his suggestion that art, as an expression of genius, afforded a glimpse of being-in-itself.
Aug 10, 2024 · Continental philosophy - Dilthey, Bergson, Existentialism: Nietzsche’s skepticism about the capacities of reason, as well as his belief in the inherent limitations of a predominantly scientific culture, was shared by many late 19th-century thinkers and writers.
