Ch 2 Origins of Continental Philosophy: Kant to GI Flashcards
(25 cards)
Who started the writing of the history of philosophy with systematic argumentative intent?
Arguably Hegel in phenomenology of spirit. More recent examples are habermas knowledge and human interests and Foucault madness and civilisation.
What are two (historical not systematic) ways of distinguishing continental from analytic philosophy
You could begin with husserl logical investigations or kant
If one starts with husserl what does that show about the origins of the divide?
between focus on frege philosophy of language and logic and those derived from often critical confrontations with husserls phenomenology.
What relationship between frege and husserl?
Frege reviews husserl s book on philosophy of arithmetic much changed husserls mind about logic viz psychology ie that the former cannot be reduced to the latter.
What are the Central European origins of both analytic and phenomenology
Both frege and husserl took from Bolzano idea that thoughts are not subjective mental experiences but have objective content capable of analysis. From Brent’s they took intentionality or thought is directed bot locked in a cabinet of consciousness.
What did Brentano and balzano’s ideas do?
Rejection of scepticism , relativism and psychologism
What was psychologism
19th century idea that all logical and philosophical problems could be reduced to psy mechanisms.
What unites philosophy of language and phenomenology?
Attempts to reduce philosophy to empirical science and critique of psychologism.
What is psychologism? GPT
Psychologism is a philosophical position that tries to explain logical, mathematical, or philosophical concepts in terms of psychological processes. In other words, it’s the idea that logic (or other abstract thought systems) is grounded in human psychology.
Key Points:
•In logic and mathematics: Psychologism suggests that the laws of logic are descriptive of how people actually think — rather than being objective, universal laws independent of the mind.
•In epistemology: It implies that knowledge and truth are rooted in psychological states, like belief or perception.
Criticism:
Psychologism was heavily criticized, most notably by Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, who argued that logic must be objective and not contingent on the quirks or variability of human thought.
Why it matters:
Rejecting psychologism helped establish modern analytic philosophy and formal logic, reinforcing the idea that logical truths are not dependent on human minds but hold universally.
Want a historical context or examples of how it influenced debates?
How can one understand the difference between analytic and continental related to Kant?
Kant last common precursor to both traditions and marks parting of ways. Depends on how and how much Kant you read. Kant’s concern with knowledge in first critique would suggest him as a subject of study to analytical philosophy. But his desire to bridge freedom and nature in third critique announces advent of German idealism. This knitting of theory and practice etc arguably what motivated continental philosophy ever since.
How do we get from Kant to GI?
Collapse of sovereignty of reason. Critics of Kant inc hamman accuse him of overvaluing formal character of knowledge and starting vicious dualisms eg reason v experience and idea that posteriori can be divorced from priori. So if reason must criticise all and itself is criticised what is to stop this meta critic forming becoming scepticism and nihilism.
What concept then best describes diff between the two philosophical traditions
Nihilism
Nihilism at centre of two controversies at which Jacobi was at the centre. What were they?
Atheism conflict and pantheism conflict
What was the atheism conflict? GPT
Timeframe: Early 1790s
Main figures: Jacobi, Fichte
Key work: Jacobi’s Open Letter to Fichte (1799)
Background
This time, Jacobi turned his sights on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the early German Idealists, who was accused of atheism because of his highly abstract, self-grounding system of philosophy—where the “I” (ego) posits both itself and the world.
Jacobi’s Argument
•Fichte’s philosophy eliminates God as a real, personal being.
•By grounding everything in human self-consciousness or the absolute ego, Fichte turns God into a mere idea, not a real entity.
•Thus, Idealism, like Spinozism, leads to atheism—again, reason destroying belief.
Fichte’s Position
Fichte denied being an atheist. He argued that he believed in a moral order as divine, but his God was not a person but a moral world-order. This didn’t satisfy Jacobi, who believed this was still effectively atheistic.
Jacobi’s Core Concern in Both Conflicts
Across both controversies, Jacobi was motivated by the fear that:
•Philosophy based on pure reason leads to nihilism.
•Personal, living faith in God gets replaced by abstract systems.
•Without faith, intuition, and feeling, you end up with moral and spiritual collapse.
What was the pantheism conflict? GPT
Background
Jacobi claimed that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—a major Enlightenment figure—had confessed to him privately that he was a Spinozist. For Jacobi, this meant that Lessing effectively endorsed pantheism, which Jacobi interpreted as deterministic and fatalistic, and thus tantamount to atheism.
Jacobi’s Argument
•Spinozism = Pantheism = Atheism: Because Spinoza equated God with nature (Deus sive Natura), Jacobi believed this denied a personal, transcendent God.
•Reason leads to nihilism: If one follows rational, systematic philosophy to its end (as Spinoza did), one ends up with fatalism, determinism, and no room for moral freedom or faith.
•Faith is essential: Jacobi defended the need for a “leap of faith” (Glauben)—an intuitive, non-rational basis for belief in God and freedom.
Mendelssohn’s Response
Mendelssohn tried to defend Lessing’s legacy and argued that Spinozism wasn’t atheistic, but rather a rational faith in a divine order.
Outcome/Significance
The debate forced German thinkers to confront the limits of Enlightenment rationalism and grapple with the tension between reason and faith—an issue that later shaped both German Idealism and Romanticism.
How did Stirner’s view fall out of this? GPT
Max Stirner and Nihilism
In The Ego and Its Own (1844), Stirner anticipates many themes of nihilism through his radical rejection of all fixed ideas—what he calls “spooks” (e.g., morality, religion, nation, humanity, truth). He believes that these abstract ideals enslave the individual, and he advocates instead for the ego as the only legitimate authority:
•Rejection of external authorities: Stirner undermines religion, morality, state, and even liberal humanism as mere constructs with no inherent truth.
•Radical individualism: He champions the self as the only source of meaning, prefiguring existentialist and nihilist thought.
•Destructive freedom: By demolishing all absolutes, Stirner opens the door to a kind of “active nihilism”—where all values are seen as contingent and the individual is free to create their own.
Stirner isn’t a nihilist in the passive, despairing sense—he’s more of a proto-nihilist or “post-idealist” who celebrates the void left by the death of all higher ideals
How does Doestoyevsky’s in the devils
In The Devils (1872), Dostoyevsky dramatizes the social and psychological consequences of nihilism in Russia. Including fact that only logical consequence to nihilism is suicide.
With Maimons critique of Kant’s warring dualisms the hunt was in for unification. How did various people go about this?
What is required is some higher, unifying principle that would be immune to these criticisms. It is with this question that Fichte and German idealism begins. Fichte located this unifying principle in the activity of the subject. The dualism of theory and practice is unified in the self-reflection of the subject, its consciousness of freedom. This was the view that Fichte explored in the celebrated The Doctrine of Science (1794). For the young Schelling, on the contrary, the unifying principle was the notion of force or life, expressed in his early philosophy of nature. For Hegel, it was the notion of Spirit, for Arthur Schopenhauer it was the notion of the Will, for Nietzsche it was Power, for Marx it was Praxis, for Freud it was the Unconscious, for Heidegger it was Being. This list could be extended. The point here is that the problematic of Continental philosophy arose out of these criticisms of Kant and must be understood in this context.
How does Jacobi version of Pascal’s wager anticipate modern debate?
The question of the status of reason and rationality versus the irrationality of much of human existence is a conflict that is at the heart of disagreements in the Continental tradition to this day, for example in the modernism/postmodernism debate that defined much of the 1980s and early 1990s.
So what is the authors overall argument about the 2 sides of philosophy?
In summary, I have made two historical claims for Continental philosophy: it is a professional self-description and it is a cultural feature. As a self-description, Continental philosophy is a necessary – but perhaps transitory – evil of the professionalization of the discipline. As a cultural feature, Continental philosophy goes back at least to the time of Mill, and what can be learned from his views is that the division between philosophical traditions is the expression of a conflict (and moreover a sectarian conflict) that is internal to ‘Englishness’ and not a geographical opposition between the English-speaking world and the Continent. As such, the gulf between analytic and Continental philosophy is the expression of a deep cultural divide between differing and opposed habits of thought – let’s call them Benthamite and Coleridgean, or empirical–scientific and hermeneutic–romantic. Mill’s deeper point is that the philosophical and cultural truth of matters, whatever that might be, is not to be found by choosing sides, and thereby mistaking a part for the whole. Rather, in Hegel’s words, the true is the whole, and the whole has to be understood in its systematic movement and historical development. This book is hopefully a contribution to such understanding.
What is another example of understanding philosophy in terms of the two cultures model?
Snows essay on scientists v literary intellectuals
How does snow suggest the divide can be bridged?
Education. The new polys where an example where scientists got humanistic educational alongside. Abandoned now for vague interdisciplinarity
What was Stephen Toulmins argument in cosmopolis?
there are two cultures because there were two beginnings to modernity, one humanistic, the other rationalistic. If the name of Descartes is habitually associated with the latter, then it is Toulmin’s contention that the scientific modernity that begins in the early decades of the 17th century obscures and even distorts a humanistic modernity that can be indexed to the practically minded humanistic scepticism of Montaigne’s Essais that appeared in 1580. There has been, for Toulmin, an unrecognized twin trajectory of modernity – humanistic and scientific – which has led to the breakdown or breaking apart of the integrity of theory and practice, truth and meaning, or knowledge and wisdom. Toulmin’s
What did husserls take from
Brentano (apricot cocktails)
Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ – a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.
