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How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed course of philosophy forever

#1
C C Offline
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magaz...ontinental

INTRO: In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing the line between them. Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. The analytic school, meanwhile, has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and has been until fairly recently much more narrowly focused, concentrating mainly on logic and language.

The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned.

This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade. And a man who did more than his fair share to entrench the gulf.

[...] Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. ... To invoke the old cliché about Germans lacking a sense of humour was bad enough, but talking about “Führership” at a time when memories of the Nazi regime were still raw was crass in the extreme. And yet, in this paper, Ryle did it, not once, but twice ... Unlike the Germans, he seemed to suggest, the British trusted in logic rather than leadership: “At least the main lines of our philosophical thinking during this century can be fully understood only by someone who has studied the massive developments of our logical theory.”

Awkwardly for Ryle, two out of the three founders of what he called “our logical theory,” namely Frege and Wittgenstein, were continentals. However, as Russell and Wittgenstein had both worked at Cambridge, he was able, at a stretch, to characterise it as “The Cambridge Transformation of the Theory of Concepts.” The jingoism of one scholar would, ordinarily, have been something the world of philosophy could have laughed off with a shrug. But unfortunately there was nothing ordinary about Ryle ... Ryle could strongly influence, and sometimes dictate, what subjects British philosophers discussed and how they discussed them.

[...] Throughout those departments, British philosophers propagated Ryle’s sense that he and his colleagues were doing philosophy in a way that broke sharply both with philosophers of the past, and with those from other countries. Their way was the better way, and philosophy from earlier times and other places wasn’t really worth bothering with. Ryle’s long-lasting dominance of British philosophy—and his contempt for that undertaken elsewhere—had many far-reaching consequences. But one was the unfortunate neglect of his immediate predecessor in the Waynflete chair, Robin George Collingwood.

Unless you’re a professional philosopher or a scholar of Roman Britain, you may never have heard of Collingwood. And yet he was one of the most interesting British philosophers of the last century. Unlike Ryle and his disciples in the analytic school, Collingwood took a deep interest in both the history of his subject and the work of philosophers from the European continent, being especially influenced by two Italians, Benedetto Croce and Giambattista Vico.

His intellectual range was astonishing. In philosophy itself, Collingwood made important contributions to aesthetics, the philosophy of history, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the understanding of philosophical method. He had important things to say about how each of these contributes to our understanding of ourselves. ... Outside philosophy, he did important work in archaeology and history ... In addition, he was an extremely accomplished musician, a talented painter and a gifted linguist, able to read scholarship in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin and Greek. He also wrote one of the most fascinating (if decidedly odd) autobiographies ever published. Thanks to Sartre and Derrida, an artistic and literary bent is common enough among philosophers of the continent, but much less evident among the analytic school.

[...] Traditional logic treats an individual proposition as the “bearer of truth.” Most philosophers of the analytic school would follow Frege in regarding the proposition also as the bearer of meaning. ... All this is abandoned by Collingwood. For him, you could never hope to understand what a person means simply by studying or analysing the sentences that they utter. Instead, you have to know something about the context in which those sentences are uttered. ... Every question contains a presupposition ... Many everyday presuppositions are relative: they can themselves be the answer to a question, and can therefore be shown to be either or true or false (relative to that question)...

[...] An absolute presupposition, by contrast, cannot be questioned, not because it is certainly true, but rather because, within the framework of question and answer to which it belongs, it does not make sense to question it. This is because its assumption is part of what gives the whole framework its meaning, so it cannot be questioned without collapsing into meaninglessness.

An example that Collingwood gives of this concerns the frameworks (he calls them “constellations”) provided by the Newtonian, the Kantian and the Einsteinian modes of scientific enquiry. Each of these assumes a peculiar notion of causation, and within any one of them, this notion cannot be questioned. It is not thought of as true; it is simply taken for granted. It is an absolute presupposition...

... To understand a work of art, a person, a historical epoch or a religion is, so to speak, to “get inside its mind,” to see the world through the eyes of people using a different set of presuppositions to our own. If we try to understand others using only our own presuppositions, we will always fail. Historical understanding, for example, “is the attempt to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times.” Again, if we insist on regarding Christianity as “false,” we will never understand it.

For Collingwood then, unlike philosophers in the Ryle mould, imagination and empathy play a crucial role in understanding. And here, perhaps, we have a tantalising glimpse of how British philosophy might have developed differently had Collingwood not died so early and if he had had the sort of influence that Ryle acquired... (MORE - details)
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#2
Yazata Offline
This thing that CC is quoting was written by somebody named Ray Monk (who I've never heard of). He's apparently a retired British philosopher. His writing seems to largely consist of philosophical biography, emphasizing Wittgenstein in particular.

(Sep 7, 2019 07:53 PM)C C Wrote: INTRO: In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.

And some of the world's best 'analytic' philosophers come from Scandinavia, Finland in particular. (Finland is a hotbed of 'analytic' philosophy. Just think Jaako Hintikka). And obviously 'continental' philosophy is growing in American and British universities, through probably more in literature departments (literary theory is often dominated by it) than in philosophy departments. Even in France (Paris having supplanted Germany as the current homeland of trendy "theory"), the philosophy of science is typically conducted in the 'analytic' mode.

It doesn't really matter what the distinction is called, since the distinction is very real.

Quote:Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing the line between them.

True, but that's true of most philosophical distinctions. One obviously can recognize the difference when one sees it.

'Analytic' philosophy is organized around philosophical problems. Most broadly we have Epistemology. Metaphysics, Ethics, the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Science. Each of these can be divided and subdivided. Philosophical writing consists of contemporary philosophers addressing particular problems drawn from one of these headings and trying to contribute a little something incrementally to the ongoing conversation. Which creates a situation in which the general public can't really name any prominent contemporary analytical philosopher. So they ask, where are all the great names, the great thinkers in analytical philosophy?

'Continental' philosophy has no shortage of philosophers' names. It's organized around them. Often times they seem try to produce an entire world-view. Sometimes they even invent their own incomprehensible philosophical vocabulary unique to them. (Dasein!) There's Nietzsche's philosophy, Hegel's philosophy, Heidegger's philosophy, Sartre's philosophy, Bakhtin's philosophy, Lacan's philosophy, Derrida's philosophy and many more. Each of these names acquires a huge and ever-growing interpretive literature. What was Hegel's view on this or that? How can Hegel's view of this or that be applied to a hot political or social issue of today? Another distinguishing mark is that in 'continental' philosophy, philosophy becomes blurred together with and indistinguishable from literary, aesthetic and cultural criticism. Which explains its attractiveness to literary, art and political theorists, I guess.

Quote:Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl

I think that it goes back before Husserl to Hegel, Fichte and even to Kant. While Kant often isn't considered a 'continental' philosopher, most of the 'continental' philosophers seem to be reacting to him, for or against. Husserl's phenomenology for example, seems to have been trying to rewrite Kant's transcendental aesthetic. And obviously Marx and the subsequent Frankfurt school had a huge influence on 'continental' philosophy. 'Continental' philosophy wears its politics on its sleeve and is extraordinarily social-critical. Part of that can perhaps be attributed to the huge and still reverberating impact of the World Wars on the intellectual life of France, Germany and 'continental' Europe in general. And there's Nietzsche...

Quote:and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida.

Yes, 'continental' philosophers are no more in agreement with each other than 'analytical' philosophers.

Quote:The analytic school, meanwhile, has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein

I'd trace it back to the ancient Greeks. Certainly Aristotle addressed philosophy in terms of questions, issues and problems: Physics, Metaphysics, Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics... and his writing style addressed philosophy in a recognizably 'analytic' mode, striving for clarity and precision over literary allusiveness. He didn't spend his time writing elaborate studies of Platonic philosophy, trying to psychoanalyze Plato, or insisting that Plato meant anything you want him to mean. (Some philosophers today argue that way, interpreting Plato as a literary figure more than a philosopher and applying the 'death of the author' critical ideas to him.) Again, the medievals often seem to have addressed philosophy in a recognizable analytical mode, interested as they were in philosophical problems such as logical modality suggested to them by theology. The early modern philosophers again seem to me to have addressed philosophy in a recognizable analytical mode.

So I think that it's a mistake to attribute the rise of 'analytical' philosophy to some early 20th century events in which philosophy in the UK turned away from its fleeting late 19th century fascination with idealism in the Hegelian mode. It's a style of philosophizing that's much older than that. I read the entire history of western philosophy (apart from the 19th century Germans perhaps, and their successors) as being roughly continuous with the analytic tradition. We even see analogies in Indian philosophy, such as pramana theory.

Contemporary analytical philosophy is obviously still very interested in philosophical logic. That might indeed by traceable back through Russell to people like Frege. But it's rare to see any analytical philosophers today actually espousing Russelian or early-Wittgensteinian logical atomism. Analytical philosophy today isn't a body of doctrine, but rather a style of philosophical writing and philosophical method. And in my opinion, that style and method has far deeper roots than the late 19th century/early 20th century appearance of modern mathematical logic.

Quote:The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned.

True. I'm sure the reverse is true too. One could earn a philosophy degree in Germany or France and never encounter 'analytical' philosophy.

One thing I've noticed is that the 'analytic'/'continental' divide is often an object of resentment to 'continental' philosophers in the US and UK. They criticize the distinction (as Monk is doing) and find fault for it almost entirely with the 'analytical' side. With Ryle in this instance, somebody that Monk obviously doesn't like and seemingly the villain of the rest of the piece.
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