The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

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  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 5.

  2. Austin, “Performative-Constative,” 42. Philosophy will become “tomorrow perhaps grammar or linguistics. I think that in this way philosophy will overflow more and more widely from its original channel.”

  3. Hösle, Objective Idealism, 4–5.

  4. Descombes, “Something Different,” 67. Here and in the subsequent quotations I have emphasized the terms “France” or “French.”

  5. Schmitz, “Introduction,” 10.

  6. Michaud, “La fin de l’histoire de la philosophie,” 153.

  7. Wolff, “Avant-propos,” 6 (emphasis in original).

  8. The problem of hermeneutics, when it departs from its original theological foundations (that is, when it no longer limits its studies to sacred texts), is (in addition to understanding the status of its practice via the categories of comprehension, etc.) to justify the choice of a given author and a given period. Why interpret Aristotle rather than Descartes, Descartes rather than Hegel, etc.? Apart from the “hermeneutic phenomenology” launched by Heidegger (to which I will return), hermeneutics by and large does not seem to have addressed this question, and this is probably why Yves Michaud, with others, considers this laicized exegetical practice to be fruitless and demotes hermeneutics to the rank of the scholarly or, better, French discipline of “the history of philosophy.”

  9. Given this more and more extensive specialization, it is difficult not to recall Nietzsche’s famous passage against the “expert” who would not presume to understand the leech, a subject much too immense for a serious scientist, but only the brain of the leech and more precisely only one part of the leech’s brain (Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathrustra,” 360–63, aphorism 64, part 4, no. 4).

  10. Quine, “Reply to Morton White,” 664–65.

  11. Austin, “Performative-Constative,” 42.

  12. On this point, see Janicaud, Heidegger en France. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the viewpoints of Martial Guéroult, Jules Vuillemin, and Luigi Payerson (for Italy)—that is, the classic history of philosophy—are no longer included in the debates, and discussion about the history of philosophy has definitively crystallized around the question, “Is philosophy the study of a process that has come to its end (metaphysics), or ought it no longer to exist?” The choice is, to put it in blunt terms, Heidegger or Wittgenstein. What’s more, it’s worth noting that the thought of deconstruction is not uniquely French but has had, under the banner of Derrida, a considerable influence in the United States in the past thirty years; on this point, see Cusset, French Theory.

  13. I borrow these three examples from Dominique Janicaud, who describes these authors as “illustrations of the fecundity of the Heideggerian inspiration in the domain of the history of philosophy” (Heidegger en France, 1:497). But I know that Rémi Brague has quite vigorously criticized the Heideggerian interpretation of ancient Gree
ce, particularly the pre-Socratics, in Aristote et la question du monde; and that Jean-Luc Marion has constructed an oeuvre independent of the Heideggerian framework, which he has quite clearly left behind since Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes.

  14. Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

  15. It is as early as paragraph 7 of Being and Time that Heidegger thematizes his “hermeneutic phenomenology.” This practice is indissociable from the task of deconstruction of the ensemble of ontology. On the connections between hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ontology in Heidegger, and the genesis of these connections, see Volpi, “Phenomenology as Possibility.”

  16. Of this instability, which remains inchoate because it is less a question of affirming a thesis than denying the value of a practice, we could evoke certain (but not all) of the texts by Jacques Bouveresse, who, in fact, comments on Wittgenstein; François Rivenc or Philippe de Rouilhan, who comment on Frege, Carnap, and Tarski; or even Pascal Engel, who comments on Frege and Russell, in The Norm of Truth, and examines the history of a discipline through his articles in Philosophie et psychologie. Most often, it is a question of a French “manner” of doing Anglo-Saxon philosophy: one produces monographs on Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Cavell without ever accepting the idea that this work participates in the same practice as an interpretation of Suarez or Descartes.

  17. Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131.

  18. Ibid. I will return to Rorty’s view and its assessment by Bouveresse, who takes Rorty to be “one of the most interesting philosophers one can read today” (132).

  19. Ibid., 131 [translation modified]. The philosophers in question are not designated by name, but in the context it is a question of “historians of philosophy”; indeed, Bouveresse writes, “It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that the need to teach the history of the discipline … constitutes about the only thing that still justifies the existence of a good number of philosophy departments in French universities … [and] is what maintains the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline” (131, emphasis added). In this book, I hope to respond to Bouveresse by conceiving philosophy without the end of its history and its history without the end of philosophy. In confronting this charge—to say how philosophy is still a Fach, a field of knowledge and not merely an institutional vestige (and a typically French one, at that)—we must not be content to declare either that analytic philosophers are doing serious science and that, consequently, commentaries on them constitute doing science, nor, on the other hand, to deny that the episodes in the history of phenomenology de facto add up to doing philosophy. Nor can we be satisfied, in a supposedly middle road, to show how the best Continental philosophers are in fact analytic thinkers who haven’t gone all the way (consider, for example, the separation between the early Husserl, quite close to analytic philosophy, and the later, henceforth incomprehensible because “transcendental”), or, on the other hand, to show that the greatest analytic philosophers are doing deconstruction without realizing it (consider, for example, certain attempts to reinterpret Wittgenstein). To answer this challenge means rather to revive the time when “William James was read just about everywhere, and in particular, by Husserl … and by Bergson[; when] Mach was a world-renowned scientific and philosophical figure, and his works were studied and discussed in England, in France, and in Russia[; when] Russell disputed with Poincaré in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale; [when] its founder, Xavier Léon, let Frege know that, since he was struggling to have his philosophical and mathematical articles published in Germany, he was welcome to appear in the pages of the Revue” (Bouveresse, “Une différence sans distinction?” 169).