Contemporary Metaphilosophy

What is philosophy? What is philosophy for? How should philosophy be done?

These are metaphilosophical questions, metaphilosophy being the study of the
nature of philosophy. Contemporary metaphilosophies within the Western
philosophical tradition can be divided, rather roughly, according to whether
they are associated with (1) Analytic philosophy, (2) Pragmatist philosophy, or
(3) Continental philosophy.

The pioneers of the Analytic movement held that philosophy should begin with
the analysis of propositions. In the hands of two of those pioneers, Russell and
Wittgenstein, such analysis gives a central role to logic and aims at disclosing
the deep structure of the world. But Russell and Wittgenstein thought
philosophy could say little about ethics. The movement known as Logical
Positivism shared the aversion to normative ethics. Nonetheless, the positivists
meant to be progressive. As part of that, they intended to eliminate
metaphysics. The so-called ordinary language philosophers agreed that
philosophy centrally involved the analysis of propositions, but, and this recalls a
third Analytic pioneer, namely Moore, their analyses remained at the level of
natural language as against logic. The later Wittgenstein has an affinity with
ordinary language philosophy. For Wittgenstein had come to hold that
philosophy should protect us against dangerous illusions by being a kind of
therapy for what normally passes for philosophy. Metaphilosophical views held
by later Analytic philosophers include the idea that philosophy can be pursued
as a descriptive but not a revisionary metaphysics and that philosophy is
continuous with science.

The pragmatists, like those Analytic philosophers who work in practical or

applied ethics, believed that philosophy should treat real problems (although
the pragmatists gave real problems a wider scope than the ethicists tend to).
The neopragmatist Rorty goes so far as to say the philosopher should fashion
her philosophy so as to promote her cultural, social, and political goals. Socalled post-Analytic philosophy is much influenced by pragmatism. Like the
pragmatists, the post-Analyticals tend (1) to favor a broad construal of the
philosophical enterprise and (2) to aim at dissolving rather than solving
traditional or narrow philosophical problems.

The first Continental position considered herein is Husserls phenomenology.

Husserl believed that his phenomenological method would enable philosophy
to become a rigorous and foundational science. Still, on Husserls conception,
philosophy is both a personal affair and something that is vital to realizing the
humanitarian hopes of the Enlightenment. Husserls existential successors
modified his method in various ways and stressed, and refashioned, the ideal of
authenticity presented by his writings. Another major Continental tradition,
namely Critical Theory, makes of philosophy a contributor to emancipatory
social theory; and the version of Critical Theory pursued by Jrgen Habermas
includes a call for 'postmetaphysical thinking'. The later thought of Heidegger
advocates a postmetaphysical thinking too, albeit a very different one; and
Heidegger associates metaphysics with the ills of modernity. Heidegger
strongly influenced Derridas metaphilosophy. Derridas deconstructive
approach to philosophy (1) aims at clarifying, and loosening the grip of, the
assumptions of previous, metaphysical philosophy, and (2) means to have an
ethical and political import.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Some Pre-Twentieth Century Metaphilosophy
Defining Metaphilosophy
Explicit and Implicit Metaphilosophy
The Classification of Metaphilosophies and the Treatment that Follows
Analytic Metaphilosophy
The Analytic Pioneers: Russell, the Early Wittgenstein, and Moore
Logical Positivism
Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Later Wittgenstein
Three Revivals
Normative Philosophy including Rawls and Practical Ethics
History of Philosophy
Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke

Naturalism including Experimentalism and Its Challenge to Intuitions

Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Post-Analytic Philosophy
Pragmatism
Neopragmatism: Rorty
Post-Analytic Philosophy
Continental Metaphilosophy
Phenomenology and Related Currents
Husserls Phenomenology
Existential Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism
Critical Theory
Critical Theory and the Critique of Instrumental Reason
Habermas
The Later Heidegger
Derrida's Post-Structuralism
References and Further Reading
Explicit Metaphilosophy and Works about Philosophical Movements or Traditions
Analytic Philosophy including Wittgenstein, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and
Logical Pragmatism
Pragmatism and Neopragmatism
Continental Philosophy
Other
1. Introduction

The main topic of the article is the Western metaphilosophy of the last hundred
years or so. But that topic is broached via a sketch of some earlier Western
metaphilosophies. (In the case of the sketch, Western means European. In the
remainder of the article, Western means European and North American. On
Eastern metaphilosophy, see the entries filed under such heads as Chinese
philosophy and Indian philosophy.) Once that sketch is in hand, the article
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defines the notion of metaphilosophy and distinguishes between explicit and

implicit metaphilosophy. Then there is a consideration of how metaphilosophies
might be categorized and an outline of the course of the remainder of the
article.

a. Some Pre-Twentieth Century Metaphilosophy

Socrates believed that the unexamined life the unphilosophical life was not
worth living (Plato, Apology, 38a). Indeed, Socrates saw his role as helping to
rouse people from unreflective lives. He did this by showing them, through his
famous Socratic method, that in fact they knew little about, for example,
justice, beauty, love or piety. Socrates use of that method contributed to his
being condemned to death by the Athenian state. But Socrates politics
contributed too; and here one can note that, according to the Republic (473cd), humanity will prosper only when philosophers are kings or kings
philosophers. It is notable too that, in Platos Phaedo, Socrates presents death
as liberation of the soul from the tomb of the body.

According to Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder, seeks the most

fundamental causes or principles of things, and is the least necessary but
thereby the most divine of sciences (Metaphysics, book alpha, sections 13).
Despite the point about necessity, Aristotle taught ethics, a subject he
conceived as a kind of political science (Nicomachean Ethics, book 1) and
which had the aim of making men good. Later philosophers continued and even
intensified the stress on philosophical practicality. According to the Hellenistic
philosophers the Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans and Stoics - philosophy
revealed (1) what was valuable and what was not, and (2) how one could
achieve the former and protect oneself against longing for the latter. The
Roman Cicero held that to study philosophy is to prepare oneself for death. The
later and neoplatonic thinker Plotinus asked, What, then, is Philosophy? and
answered, Philosophy is the supremely precious (Enneads, I.3.v): a means to
blissful contact with a mystical principle he called the One.

The idea that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, earlier propounded by

the Hellenistic thinker Philo of Alexandria, is most associated with the medieval
age and particularly with Aquinas. Aquinas resumed the project of synthesizing
Christianity with Greek philosophy - a project that had been pursued already by
various thinkers including Augustine, Anselm, and Boethius. (Boethius was a
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politician inspired by philosophy but the politics ended badly for him. In those
respects he resembles the earlier Seneca. And, like Seneca, Boethius wrote of
the consolations of philosophy.)

[T]he word philosophy means the study [or love philo] of wisdom, and by
wisdom is meant not only prudence in our everyday affairs but also a perfect
knowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing, both for the
conduct of life and for the preservation of health and the discovery of all
manner of skills. Thus Descartes (1988: p. 179). Lockes Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (bk. 4. ch. 19, p. 697) connects philosophy with the love
of truth and identifies the following as an unerring mark of that love: The not
entertaining any Proposition with greater assurance than the Proofs it is built
upon will warrant. Humes Of Suicide opens thus: One considerable
advantage that arises from Philosophy, consists in the sovereign antidote which
it affords to superstition and false religion (Hume 1980: 97). Kant held that
What can I know?, What ought I to do?, and, What may I hope? were the
ultimate questions of human reason (Critique of Pure Reason, A805 / B33) and
asserted that philosophys peculiar dignity lies in principles of morality,
legislation, and religion that it can provide (A318 / B375). According to Hegel,
the point of philosophy or of the dialectic is to enable people to recognize
the embodiment of their ideals in their social and political lives and thereby to
be at home in the world. Marxs famous eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
declared that, while philosophers had interpreted the world, the point was to
change it.

b. Defining Metaphilosophy

As the foregoing sketch begins to suggest, three very general

metaphilosophical questions are (1) What is philosophy? (2) What is, or what
should be, the point of philosophy? (3) How should one do philosophy? Those
questions resolve into a host of more specific metaphilosophical conundra,
some of which are as follows. Is philosophy a process or a product? What kind
of knowledge can philosophy attain? How should one understand philosophical
disagreement? Is philosophy historical in some special or deep way? Should
philosophy make us better people? Happier people? Is philosophy political?
What method(s) and types of evidence suit philosophy? How should philosophy
be written (presuming it should be written at all)? Is philosophy, in some sense,
over or should it be?

But how might one define metaphilosophy? One definition owes to Morris
Lazerowitz. (Lazerowitz claims to have invented the English word
metaphilosophy in 1940. But some foreign-language equivalents of the term
metaphilosophy antedate 1940. Note further that, in various languages
including English, sometimes the term takes a hyphen before the meta.)
Lazerowitz proposed (1970) that metaphilosophy is the investigation of the
nature of philosophy. If we take nature to include both the point of philosophy
and how one does (or should do) philosophy, then that definition fits with the
most general metaphilosophical questions just identified above. Still: there are
other definitions of metaphilosophy; and while Lazerowitzs definition will prove
best for our purposes, one needs in order to appreciate that fact, and in order
to give the definition a suitable (further) gloss to survey the alternatives.

One alternative definition construes metaphilosophy as the philosophy of

philosophy. Sometimes that definition intends this idea: metaphilosophy applies
the method(s) of philosophy to philosophy itself. That idea itself comes in two
versions. One is a first-order construal. The thought here is this.
Metaphilosophy, as the application of philosophy to philosophy itself, is simply
one more instance of philosophy (Wittgenstein 2001: section 121; Williamson
2007: ix). The other version the second-order version of the idea that
metaphilosophy applies philosophy to itself is as follows. Metaphilosophy
stands to philosophy as philosophy stands to its subject matter or to other
disciplines (Rescher 2006), such that, as Williamson puts it (loc. cit)
metaphilosophy look[s] down upon philosophy from above, or beyond.
(Williamson himself, who takes the first-order view, prefers the term the
philosophy of philosophy to metaphilosophy. For he thinks that
metaphilosophy has this connotation of looking down.) A different definition of
metaphilosophy exploits the fact that meta can mean not only about but also
after. On this definition, metaphilosophy is post-philosophy. Sometimes
Lazerowitz himself used metaphilosophy in that way. What he had in mind
here, more particularly, is the special kind of investigation which Wittgenstein
had described as one of the heirs of philosophy (Lazerowitz 1970). Some
French philosophers have used the term similarly, though with reference to
Heidegger and/or Marx rather than to Wittgenstein (Elden 2004: 83).

What then commends Lazerowitzs (original) definition the definition whereby

metaphilosophy is investigation of the nature (and point) of philosophy? Two
things. (1) The two philosophyofphilosophy construals are competing
specifications of that definition. Indeed, those construals have little content
until after one has a considerable idea of what philosophy is. (2) The equation
of metaphilosophy and post-philosophy is narrow and tendentious; but
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Lazerowitzs definition accommodates post-philosophy as a position within a

more widely construed metaphilosophy. Still: Lazerowitzs definition does
require qualification, since there is a sense in which it is too broad. For
investigation of the nature of philosophy suggests that any inquiry into
philosophy will count as metaphilosophical, whereas an inquiry tends to be
deemed metaphilosophical only when it pertains to the essence, or very
nature, of philosophy. (Such indeed is a third possible reading of the
philosophy-of-philosophy construal.) Now, just what does so pertain is moot;
and there is a risk of being too unaccommodating. We might want to deny the
title metaphilosophy to, say, various sociological studies of philosophy, and
even, perhaps, to philosophical pedagogy (that is, to the subject of how
philosophy is taught). On the other hand, we are inclined to count as metaphilosophical claims about, for instance, philosophy corrupting its students or
about professionalization corrupting philosophy (on these claims one may see
Stewart 1995 and Anscombe 1957).

What follows will give a moderately narrow interpretation to the term nature
within the phrase the nature of philosophy.

c. Explicit and Implicit Metaphilosophy

Explicit metaphilosophy is metaphilosophy pursued as a subfield of, or

attendant field to, philosophy. Metaphilosophy so conceived has waxed and
waned. In the early twenty-first century, it has waxed in Europe and in the
Anglophone (English-speaking) world. Probable causes of the
increasing
interest include Analytic philosophy having become more aware of itself as a
tradition, the rise of philosophizing of a more empirical sort, and a softening of
the divide between Analytic and Continental philosophy. (This article will
revisit all of those topics in one way or another.) However, even when waxing,
metaphilosophy generates much less activity than philosophy. Certainly the
philosophical scene contains few book-length pieces of metaphilosophy. Books
such as Williamsons The Philosophy of Philosophy, Reschers Essay on
Metaphilosophy, and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari these are
not the rule but the exception.

There is more to metaphilosophy than explicit metaphilosophy. For there is also

implicit metaphilosophy. To appreciate that point, consider, first, that
philosophical positions can have metaphilosophical aspects. Many philosophical
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views views about, say, knowledge, or language, or authenticity can have

implications for the task or nature of philosophy. Indeed, all philosophizing is
somewhat metaphilosophical, at least in this sense: any philosophical view or
orientation commits its holder to a metaphilosophy that accommodates it. Thus
if one advances an ontology one must have a metaphilosophy that
countenances ontology. Similarly, to adopt a method or style is to deem that
approach at least passable. Moreover, a conception of the nature and point of
philosophy, albeit perhaps an inchoate one, motivates and shapes much
philosophy. But and this is what allows there to be implicit metaphilosophy
sometimes none of this is emphasized, or even appreciated at all, by those who
philosophize. Much of the metaphilosophy treated here is implicit, at least in
the attenuated sense that its authors give philosophy much more attention
than philosophy.

d. The Classification of Metaphilosophies and the Treatment that Follows

One way of classifying metaphilosophy would be by the aim that a given

metaphilosophy attributes to philosophy. Alternatively, one could consider that
which is taken as the model for philosophy or for philosophical form. Science?
Art? Therapy? Something else? A further alternative is to distinguish
metaphilosophies according to whether or not they conceive philosophy as
somehow essentially linguistic. Another criterion would be the rejection or
adoption or conception of metaphysics (metaphysics being something like the
study of' the fundamental nature of reality). And many further classifications
are possible.

This article will employ the AnalyticContinental distinction as its most general
classificatory schema. Or rather it uses these categories: (1) Analytic
philosophy; (2) Continental philosophy; (3) pragmatism, neopragmatism, and
post-Analytic philosophy, these being only some of the most important of
metaphilosophies of the last century or so. Those metaphilosophies are
distinguished from one from another via the philosophies or philosophical
movements (movements narrower than those of the three top-level headings)
to which they have been conjoined. That approach, and indeed the article's
most general schema, means that this account is organized by chronology as
much as by theme. One virtue of the approach is that it provides a degree of
historical perspective. Another is that the approach helps to disclose some
rather implicit metaphilosophy associated with well-known philosophies. But
the article will be thematic to a degree because it will bring out some points of
identity and difference between various metaphilosophies and will consider
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criticisms of the metaphilosophies treated. However, the article will not much
attempt to determine, on metaphilosophical or other criteria, the respective
natures of Analytic philosophy, pragmatism, or Continental philosophy. The
article employs those categories solely for organizational purposes. But note
the following points.

The particular placing of some individual philosophers within the schema is

problematic. The case of the so-called later Wittgenstein is particularly moot. Is
he Analytic? Should he have his own category?
The delineation of the traditions themselves is controversial. The notions of the
Analytic and the Continental are particularly vexed. The difficulties here start
with the fact that here a geographical category is juxtaposed to a more
thematic or doctrinal one (Williams 2003). Moreover, some philosophers deny
that Analytic philosophy has any substantial existence (Preston 2007; see also
Rorty 1991a: 217); and some assert the same of Continental philosophy
(Glendinning 2006: 13 and ff).
Even only within contemporary Western history, there are significant
approaches to philosophy that seem to at least somewhat warrant their own
categories. Among those approaches are traditionalist philosophy, which
devotes itself to the study of the grand [...] tradition of Western philosophy
ranging from the Pre-Socratics to Kant (Glock 2008: 85f.), feminism, and
environmental philosophy. This article does not examine those approaches.
2. Analytic Metaphilosophy

a. The Analytic Pioneers: Russell, the Early Wittgenstein, and Moore

Bertrand Russell, his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their colleague G. E. Moore
the pioneers of Analytic philosophy shared the view that all sound
philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions (Russell 1992: 9; first
published in 1900). In Russell and Wittgenstein such analysis was centrally a
matter of logic. (Note, however, that the expression Analytic philosophy
seems to have emerged only in the 1930s.)

Russellian analysis has two stages (Beaney 2007: 23 and 2009: section 3;
Urmson 1956). First, propositions of ordinary or scientific language are
transformed into what Russell regarded as their true form. This logical or
9

transformative analysis draws heavily upon the new logic of Frege and finds
its exemplar in Russells theory of descriptions (Analytic Philosophy, section
2.a). The next step is to correlate elements within the transformed propositions
with elements in the world. Commentators have called this second stage or
form of analysis which Russell counted as a matter of philosophical logic
reductive, decompositional, and metaphysical. It is decompositional and
reductive inasmuch as, like chemical analysis, it seeks to revolve its objects
into their simplest elements, such an element being simple in that it itself lacks
parts or constituents. The analysis is metaphysical in that it yields a
metaphysics. According to the metaphysics that Russell actually derived from
his analysis the metaphysics which he called logical atomism the world
comprises indivisible atoms that combine, in structures limned by logic, to
form the entities of science and everyday life. Russells empiricism inclined him
to conceive the atoms as mind-independent sense-data. (See further Russells
Metaphysics, section 4.)

Logic in the dual form of analysis just sketched was the essence of philosophy,
according to Russell (2009: ch. 2). Nonetheless, Russell wrote on practical
matters, advocating, and campaigning for, liberal and socialist ideas. But he
tended to regard such activities as unphilosophical, believing that ethical
statements were non-cognitive and hence little amenable to philosophical
analysis (see Non-Cognitivism in Ethics). But he did come to hold a form of
utilitarianism that allowed ethical statements a kind of truth-aptness. And he
did endorse a qualified version of this venerable idea: the contemplation of
profound things enlarges the self and fosters happiness. Russell held further
that practicing an ethics was little use given contemporary politics, a view
informed by worries about the effects of conformity and technocracy. (On all
this, see Schultz 1992.)

Wittgenstein agreed with Frege and Russell that the apparent logical form of a
proposition need not be its real one (Wittgenstein 1961: section 4.0031). And
he agreed with Russell that language and the world share a common,
ultimately atomistic, form. But Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
developed these ideas into a somewhat Kantian and actually rather
Schopenhauerian position. (That book, first published in 1921, is the main and
arguably only work of the so-called early Wittgenstein. section 2.c treats
Wittgensteins later views.) The Tractatus taught the following. Only when
propositions depict possible states of affairs do they have sense. Propositions of
science and of everyday language pass that test. Propositions of logic do not
quite do so. They have the form necessary for depiction; but they depict
nothing because they boil down to either tautologies or contradictions. Hence
10

they are senseless (in Wittgensteins original German: sinnlos). As to

metaphysical statements statements about, inter alia, the meaning of life and
God, and statements of ethics and aesthetics they are nonsense (Unsinn).
They try to depict something. But what they try to depict is no possible state of
affairs within the world. Wittgenstein concludes that philosophy is a critique of
language that detects and expunges metaphysical talk (Wittgenstein 1961:
section 4.0031). [W]henever someone [...] want[s] to say something
metaphysical, one should demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a
meaning to certain signs in his propositions (section 6.53). But there is a
complication. Wittgenstein (section 6.547): anyone who understands me
eventually recognizes [my own propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used
themas stepsto climb up beyond them [...] He must transcend these
propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak
about we must pass over in silence. Still, Wittgenstein applies the honorifics
mystical and higher (section 6.426.522) to his statements about the limits
of language and to various other metaphysical statements, including ethical
ones. In the case of these (mystical/higher) nonsensical propositions, the
point of remaining silent about them is not to damn them but rather to leave
their truth unprofaned.

Like Russell and Wittgenstein, Moore advocated a form of decompositional

analysis. He held that a thing becomes intelligible first when it is analyzed into
its constituent concepts (Moore 1899: 182; see further Beaney 2009: section
4). But Moore uses normal language rather than logic to specify those
constituents; and, in his hands, analysis often supported commonplace, prephilosophical beliefs. Nonetheless, and despite confessing that other
philosophers rather than the world prompted his philosophizing (Schilpp 1942:
14), Moore held that philosophy should give a general description of the whole
Universe (1953: 1). Accordingly, Moore tackled ethics and aesthetics as well as
epistemology and metaphysics. His Principia Ethica used the not-especiallycommonsensical idea that goodness was a simple, indefinable quality in order
to defend the meaningfulness of ethical statements and the objectivity of moral
value. Additionally, Moore advanced a normative ethic, the wider social or
political implications of which are debated (Hutchinson 2001).

Russells tendency to exclude ethics from philosophy, and Wittgensteins

protective version of the exclusion, are contentious and presuppose their
respective versions of atomism. In turn, that atomism relies heavily upon the
idea, as metaphilosophical as it is philosophical, of an ideal language (or at
least of an ideal analysis of natural language). Later sections criticize that idea.
Such criticism finds little target in Moore. Yet Moore is a target for those who
11

hold that philosophy should be little concerned with words or even, perhaps,
with concepts (see section 2.c and the revivals treated in section 2.d).

b. Logical Positivism

We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing

measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing,
architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational
principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it. The
task of philosophical work lies in [...] clarification of problems and assertions,
not in the propounding of special philosophical pronouncements. The method
of this clarification is that of logical analysis.

The foregoing passages owe to a manifesto issued by the Vienna Circle

(Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn 1973: 317f. and 328). Leading members of that
Circle included Moritz Schlick (a physicist turned philosopher), Rudolf Carnap
(primarily a logician), and Otto Neurath (economist, sociologist, and
philosopher). These thinkers were inspired by the original positivist, Auguste
Comte. Other influences included the empiricisms of Hume, Russell and Ernst
Mach, and also the RussellWittgenstein idea of an ideal logical language.
(Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in particular, was a massive influence.) The Circle, in
turn, gave rise to an international movement that went under several names:
logical positivism, logical empiricism, neopositivism, and simply positivism.

The clarification or logical analysis advocated by positivism is two-sided. Its

destructive task was the use of the so-called verifiability principle to eliminate
metaphysics. According to that principle, a statement is meaningful only when
either true by definition or verifiable through experience. (So there is no
synthetic apriori. See Kant, Metaphysics, section 2, and A Priori and A
Posteriori.) The positivists placed mathematics and logic within the true-bydefinition (or analytic apriori) category, and science and most normal talk in
the category of verifiable-through-experience (or synthetic aposteriori). All else
was deemed meaningless. That fate befell metaphysical statements and finds
its most famous illustration in Carnaps attack (1931) on Heideggers What is
Metaphysics? It was the fate, too, of ethical and aesthetic statements. Hence
the non-cognitivist meta-ethics that some positivists developed.

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The constructive side of positivistic analysis involved epistemology and

philosophy of science. The positivists wanted to know exactly how experience
justified empirical knowledge. Sometimes the positivists took various
positions on the issue the idea was to reduce all scientific statements to those
of physics. (See Reductionism.) That particular effort went under the heading of
unified science. So too did an idea that sought to make good on the claim that
positivism served life. The idea I have in mind was this: the sciences should
collaborate in order to help solve social problems. That project was championed
by the so-called Left Vienna Circle and, within that, especially by Neurath (who
served in a socialist Munich government and, later, was a central figure in
Austrian housing movements). The positivists had close relations with the
Bauhaus movement, which was itself understood by its members as socially
progressive (Galison 1990).

Positivism had its problems and its detractors. The believer in special
philosophical pronouncements will think that positivism decapitates philosophy
(compare section 4.a below, on Husserl). Moreover, positivism itself seemingly
involved at least one special read: metaphysical pronouncement, namely,
the verifiability principle. Further, there is reason to distrust the very idea of
providing strict criteria for nonsense (see Glendinning 2001). Further yet, the
idea of an ideal logical language was attacked as unachievable, incoherent,
and/or when used as a means to certify philosophical truth circular (Copi
1949). There were the following doubts, too, about whether positivism really
served life. (1) Might positivisms narrow notion of fact prevent it from
comprehending the real nature of society? (Critical Theory leveled that
objection. See ONeill and Uebel 2004.) (2) Might positivism involve a
disastrous reduction of politics to the discovery of technical solutions to
depoliticized ends? (This objection owes again to Critical Theory, but also to
others. See Galison 1990 and ONeill 2003.)

Positivism retained some coherence as a movement or doctrine until the late

1960s, even though the Nazis with whom the positivists clashed forced the
Circle into exile. In fact, that exile helped to spread the positivist creed. But, not
long after the Second World War, the ascendancy that positivism had acquired
in Anglophone philosophy began to diminish. It did so partly because of the
developments considered by the next section.

c. Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Later Wittgenstein

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Some accounts group ordinary language philosophy and the philosophy of the
later Wittgenstein (and of Wittgensteins disciples) together under the title
linguistic philosophy. That grouping can mislead. All previous Analytic
philosophy was centrally concerned with language. In that sense, all previous
Analytic philosophy had taken the so-called linguistic turn (see Rorty 1992).
Nevertheless, ordinary language philosophy and the later Wittgenstein do mark
a change. They twist the linguistic turn away from logical or constructed
languages and towards ordinary (that is, vernacular) language, or at least
towards natural (non-artificial) language. Thereby the new bodies of thought
represent a movement away from Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the
positivists (and back, to an extent, towards Moore). In short and as many
accounts of the history of Analytic philosophy put it we have here a shift from
ideal language philosophy to ordinary language philosophy.

Ordinary language philosophy began with and centrally comprised a loose

grouping of philosophers among whom the Oxford dons Gilbert Ryle and J. L.
Austin loomed largest. The following view united these philosophers. Patient
analysis of the meaning of words can tap the rich distinctions of natural
languages and minimize the unclarities, equivocations and conflations to which
philosophers are prone. So construed, philosophy is unlike natural science and
even, insofar as it avoided systematization, unlike linguistics. The majority of
ordinary language philosophers did hold, with Austin, that such analysis was
not the the last word in philosophy. Specialist knowledge and techniques can
in principle everywhere augment and improve it. But natural or ordinary
language is the first word (Austin 1979: 185; see also Analytic Philosophy,
section 4a).

The later Wittgenstein did hold, or at least came close to holding, that ordinary
language has the last word in philosophy. This later Wittgenstein retained his
earlier view that philosophy was a critique of language of language that tried
to be metaphysical or philosophical. But he abandoned the idea (itself
problematically metaphysical) that there was one true form to language. He
came to think, instead, that all philosophical problems owe to
misinterpretation of our forms of language (Wittgenstein 2001: section 111).
They owe to misunderstanding of the ways language actually works. A principal
cause of such misunderstanding, Wittgenstein thought, is misassimilation of
expressions one to another. Such misassimilation can be motivated, in turn, by
a craving for generality (Wittgenstein 1975: 17ff.) that is inspired by science.
The later Wittgensteins own philosophizing means to be a kind of therapy for
philosophers, a therapy which will liberate them from their problems by
showing how, in their very formulations of those problems, their words have
14

ceased to make sense. Wittgenstein tries to show how the words that give
philosophers trouble words such as know, mind, and sensation become
problematical only when, in philosophers hands, they depart from the uses and
the contexts that give them meaning. Thus a sense in which philosophy leaves
everything as it is (2001: section 124). [W]e must do away with all
explanation, and description alone must take its place (section 124). Still,
Wittgenstein himself once asked, [W]hat is the use of studying philosophy if all
that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some
abstruse questions of logic, etc. [...]? (cited in Malcolm 1984: 35 and 93). And
in one sense Wittgenstein did not want to leave everything as it was. To wit: he
wanted to end the worship of science. For the view that science could express
all genuine truths was, he held, barbarizing us by impoverishing our
understanding of the world and of ourselves.

Much metaphilosophical flack has been aimed at the later Wittgenstein and
ordinary language philosophy. They have been accused of: abolishing practical
philosophy; rendering philosophy uncritical; trivializing philosophy by making it
a mere matter of words; enshrining the ignorance of common speech; and, in
Wittgensteins case and in his own words (taken out of context) of
destroy[ing] everything interesting (2001: section 118; on these criticisms see
Russell 1995: ch. 18, Marcuse 1991: ch. 7 and Gellner 2005). Nonetheless, it is
at least arguable that these movements of thought permanently changed
Analytic philosophy by making it more sensitive to linguistic nuance and to the
oddities of philosophical language. Moreover, some contemporary philosophers
have defended more or less Wittgensteinian conceptions of philosophy. One
such philosopher is Peter Strawson (on whom see section 2.d.iii). Another is
Stanley Cavell. Note also that some writers have attempted to develop the
more practical side of Wittgensteins thought (Pitkin 1993, Cavell 1979).

d. Three Revivals

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, there were three significant, and persisting,
metaphilosophical developments within the Analytic tradition.

i. Normative Philosophy including Rawls and Practical Ethics

15

During positivisms ascendancy, and for some time thereafter, substantive

normative issues questions about how one should live, what sort of
government is best or legitimate, and so on were widely deemed quasiphilosophical. Positivisms non-cognitivism was a major cause. So was the
distrust, in the later Wittgenstein and in ordinary language philosophy, of
philosophical theorizing. This neglect of the normative had its exceptions. But
the real change occurred with the appearance, in 1971, of A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls.

Many took Rawls' book to show, through its systematicity and clarity, that
normative theory was possible without loss of rigor (Weithman 2003: 6).
Rawls' procedure for justifying normative principles is of particular
metaphilosophical note. That procedure, called reflective equilibrium, has
three steps. (The quotations that follow are from Schroeter 2004.)

[W]e elicit the moral judgments of competent moral judges on whatever topic
is at issue. (In Theories of Justice itself, distributive justice was the topic.)
Thereby we obtain a set of considered judgments, in which we have strong
confidence.
[W]e construct a scheme of explicit principles, which will explicate, fit,
match or account for the set of considered judgments.
By moving back and forth between the initial judgments and the principles,
making the adjustments which seem the most plausible, we remove any
discrepancy which might remain between the judgments derived from the
scheme of principles and the initial considered judgments, thereby achieving
a point of equilibrium, where principles and judgments coincide.
The conception of reflective equilibrium was perhaps less philosophically
orthodox than most readers of Theory of Justice believed. For Rawls came to
argue that his conception of justice was, or should be construed as, political
not metaphysical (Rawls 1999b: 4772). A political conception of justice stays
on the surface, philosophically speaking (Rawls 1999b: 395). It appeals only to
that which given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life [...]
is the most reasonable doctrine for us (p. 307). A metaphysical conception of
justice appeals to something beyond such contingencies. However: despite
advocating the political conception, Rawls appeals to an overlapping
consensus (his term) of metaphysical doctrines. The idea here, or hope, is this
(Rawls, section 3; Freeman 2007: 324415). Citizens in modern democracies
hold various and not fully inter-compatible political and social ideas. But those
citizens will be able to unite in supporting a liberal conception of justice.
16

Around the same time as Theory of Justice appeared, a parallel revival in

normative philosophy begun. This was the rise of practical ethics. Here is how
one prominent practical ethicist presents the most plausible explanation for
that development. [L]aw, ethics, and many of the professionsincluding
medicine, business, engineering, and scientific researchwere profoundly and
permanently affected by issues and concerns in the wider society regarding
individual liberties, social equality, and various forms of abuse and injustice
that date from the late 1950s (Beauchamp 2002: 133f.). Now the new
ethicists, who insisted that philosophy should treat real problems (Beauchamp
2002: 134), did something largely foreign to previous Analytic philosophy (and
to that extent did not, in fact, constitute a revival). They applied moral theory
to such concrete and pressing matters as racism, sexual equality, abortion,
governance and war. (On those problems, see Ethics, section 3).

According to some practical ethicists, moral principles are not only applied to,
but also drawn from, cases. The issue here the relation between theory and
its application broadened out into a more thoroughly metaphilosophical
debate. For, soon after Analytic philosophers had returned to normative ethics,
some of them rejected a prevalent conception of normative ethical theory, and
others entirely rejected such theory. The first camp rejects moral theory qua
decision procedure for moral reasoning (Williams 1981: ix-x) but does not
foreclose other types of normative theory such as virtue ethics. The second and
more radical camp holds that the moral world is too complex for any
(prescriptive) codification that warrants the name theory. (On these positions,
see Lance and Little 2006, Clarke 1987, Chappell 2009.)

ii. History of Philosophy

For a long time, most analytic philosophers held that the history of philosophy
had little to do with doing philosophy. For what they asked - was the history of
philosophy save, largely, a series of mistakes? We might learn from those
mistakes, and the history might contain some occasional insights. But (the line
of thought continues) we should be wary of resurrecting the mistakes and
beware the archive fever that leads to the idea that there is no such thing as
philosophical progress. But in the 1970s a more positive attitude to the history
of philosophy began to emerge, together with an attempt to reinstate or relegitimate serious historical scholarship within philosophy (compare Analytic
Philosophy section 5.c).
17

The newly positive attitude towards the history of philosophy was premised on
the view that the study of past philosophies was of significant philosophical
value. Reasons adduced for that view include the following (Sorell and Rogers
2005). History of philosophy can disclose our assumptions. It can show the
strengths of positions that we find uncongenial. It can suggest rolesthat
philosophy might take today by revealing ways in which philosophy has been
embedded in a wider intellectual and sociocultural frameworks. A more radical
view, espoused by Charles Taylor (1984: 17) is that, Philosophy and the history
of philosophy are one; we cannot do the first without also doing the second.

Many Analytical philosophers continue to regard the study of philosophys

history as very much secondary to philosophy itself. By contrast, many socalled Continental philosophers take the foregoing ideas, including the more
radical view which is associated with Hegel as axiomatic. (See much of
section 4, below.)

iii. Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke

Positivism, the later Wittgenstein, and Ordinary Language Philosophy

suppressed Analytic metaphysics. Yet it recovered, thanks especially to three
figures, beginning with Peter Strawson.

Strawson had his origins in the ordinary language tradition and he declares a
large debt or affinity to Wittgenstein (Strawson 2003: 12). But he is indebted,
also, to Kant; and, with Strawson, ordinary language philosophy became more
systematic and more ambitious. However, Strawson retained an element of
what one might call, in Rae Langtons phrase, Kantian humility. In order to
understand these characterizations, one needs to appreciate that which
Strawson advocated under the heading of descriptive metaphysics. In turn,
descriptive metaphysics is best approached via that which Strawson called
connective analysis.

Connective analysis seeks to elucidate concepts by discerning their

interconnections, which is to say, the ways in which concepts variously imply,
presuppose, and exclude one another. Strawson contrasts this connective
18

model with the reductive or atomistic model that aims to dismantle or

reduce the concepts we examine to other and simpler concepts (all Strawson
1991: 21). The latter model is that of Russell, the Tractatus, and, indeed,
Moore. Another way in which Strawson departs from Russell and the Tractatus,
but not from Moore, lies in this: a principal method of connective analysis is
close examination of the actual use of words (Strawson 1959: 9). But when
Strawson turns to descriptive metaphysics, such examination is not enough.

Descriptive metaphysics is, or proceeds via, a very general form of connective

analysis. The goal here is to lay bare the most general features of our
conceptual structure (Strawson 1959: 9). Those most general features our
most general concepts have a special importance. For those concepts, or at
least those of them in which Strawson is most interested, are (he thinks) basic
or fundamental in the following sense. They are (1) irreducible, (2)
unchangeable in that they comprise a massive central core of human thinking
which has no history (1959: 10) and (3) necessary to any conception of
experience which we can make intelligible to ourselves (Strawson 1991: 26).
And the structure that these concepts comprise does not readily display itself
on the surface of language, but lies submerged (1956: 9f.).

Descriptive metaphysics is considerably Kantian (see Kant, metaphysics).

Strawson is Kantian, too, in rejecting what he calls revisionary metaphysics.
Here we have the element of Kantian humility within Strawsons enterprise.
Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our
thought about the world, whereas revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a
better structure (Strawson 1959: 9; my stress). Strawson urges several points
against revisionary metaphysics.

A revisionary metaphysic is apt to be an overgeneralization of some particular

aspect of our conceptual scheme and/or
to be a confusion between conceptions of how things really are with some
Weltanschauung.
Revisionary metaphysics attempts the impossible, namely, to depart from the
fundamental features of our conceptual scheme. The first point shows the
influence of Wittgenstein. So does the third, although it is also (as Strawson
may have recognized) somewhat Heideggerian. The second point is
reminiscent of Carnaps version of logical positivism. All this notwithstanding,
and consistently enough, Strawson held that systems of revisionary
19

metaphysics can, through the partial vision (1959: 9) that they provide, be
useful to descriptive metaphysics.
Here are some worries about Strawsons metaphilosophy. [T]he conceptual
system with which we are operating may be much more changing, relative,
and culturally limited than Strawson assumes it to be (Burtt 1963: 35). Next:
Strawson imparts very little about the method(s) of descriptive metaphysics
(although one might try to discern techniques in which imagination seems to
play a central role from his actual analyses). More serious is that Strawson
imparts little by way of answer to the following questions. What is a concept?
How are concepts individuated? What is a conceptual scheme? How are
conceptual schemes individuated? What is the relation between a language
and a conceptual scheme? (Haack 1979: 366f.). Further: why believe that the
analytic philosopher has no business providing new and revealing vision[s]
(Strawson 1992: 2)? At any rate, Strawson helped those philosophers who
rejected reductive (especially Russellian and positivistic) versions of analysis
but who wanted to continue to call themselves analytic. For he gave them a
reasonably narrow conception of analysis to which they could adhere (Beaney
2009: section 8; compare Glock 2008: 159). Finally note that, despite his
criticisms of Strawson, the contemporary philosopher Peter Hacker defends a
metaphilosophy rather similar to descriptive metaphysics (Hacker 2003 and
2007).

William Van Orman Quine was a second prime mover in the metaphysical
revival. Quines metaphysics, which is revisionary in Strawsons terms,
emerged from Quines attack upon two dogmas of modern empiricism. Those
ostensible dogmas are: (1) belief in some fundamental cleavage between
truths that are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of
fact, and truths that are synthetic, or grounded in fact; (2) reductionism: the
belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical
construction upon terms which refer to immediate experience (Quine 1980:
20). Against 1, Quine argues that every belief has some connection to
experience. Against 2, he argues that the connection is never direct. For when
experience clashes with some belief, which belief(s) must be changed is
underdetermined. Beliefs face the tribunal of sense experience not individually
but as a corporate body (p. 41; see Evidence section 3.c.i). Quine expresses
this holistic and radically empiricist conception by speaking of the web of
belief. Some beliefs those near the edge of the web are more exposed to
experience than others; but the interlinking of beliefs is such that no belief is
immune to experience.

20

Quine saves metaphysics from positivism. More judiciously put: Quines

conception, if correct, saves metaphysics from the verifiability criterion (q.v.
section 2.b). For the notion of the web of belief implies that ontological beliefs
beliefs about the most general traits of reality (Quine 1960: 161) are
answerable to experience. And, if that is so, then ontological beliefs differ from
other beliefs only in their generality. Quine infers that, Ontological questions
[...] are on a par with questions of natural science (1980: 45). In fact, since
Quine thinks that natural science, and in particular physics, is the best way of
fitting our beliefs to reality, he infers that ontology should be determined by
the best available comprehensive scientific theory. In that sense, metaphysics
is the metaphysics of science (Glock 2003a: 30).

Is the metaphysics of science actually only science? Quine asserts that it is

only within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be
identified and described (1981: 21). Yet he does leave a job for the
philosopher. The philosopher is to translate the best available scientific theory
into that which Quine called canonical notation, namely, the language of
modern logic as developed by Frege, Peirce, Russell and others (Orenstein
2002: 16). Moreover, the philosopher is to make the translation in such a way
as to minimize the theorys ontological commitments. Only after such a
translation, which Quine calls explication can one say, at a philosophical level:
that is What There Is. (However, Quine cannot fully capitalize those letters, as
it were. For he thinks that there is a pragmatic element to ontology. See section
3.a below.) This role for philosophy is a reduced one. For one thing, it deprives
philosophy of something traditionally considered one of its greatest aspirations:
necessary truth. On Quines conception, no truth can be absolutely necessary.
(That holds even for the truths of Quines beloved logic, since they, too, fall
within the web of belief.) By contrast, even Strawson and the positivists the
latter in the form of analytic truth had countenanced versions of necessary
truth.

Saul Kripke - the third important reviver of metaphysics - allows the philosopher
a role that is perhaps slightly more distinct than Quine does. Kripke does that
precisely by propounding a new notion of necessity. (That said, some identify
Ruth Barcan Marcus as the discoverer of the necessity at issue.) According to
Kripke (1980), a truth T about X is necessary just when T holds in all possible
worlds that contain X. To explain: science shows us that, for example, water is
composed of H20; the philosophical question is whether that truth holds of all
possible worlds (all possible worlds in which water exists) and is thereby
necessary. Any such science-derived necessities are aposteriori just because,
and in the sense that, they are (partially) derived from science.
21

Aposteriori necessity is a controversial idea. Kripke realizes this. But he asks

why it is controversial. The notions of the apriori and aposteriori are
epistemological (they are about whether or not one needs to investigate the
world in order to know something), whereas Kripke points out his notion of
necessity is ontological (that is, about whether things could be otherwise). As
to how one determines whether a truth obtains in all possible worlds, Kripkes
main appeal is to the intuitions of philosophers. The next subsection somewhat
scrutinizes that appeal, together with some of the other ideas of this
subsection.

e. Naturalism including Experimentalism and Its Challenge to Intuitions

Kripke and especially Quine helped to create, particularly in the United States,
a new orthodoxy within Analytic philosophy. That orthodoxy is naturalism or the term used by its detractors - scientism. But naturalism (/scientism) is no
one thing (Glock 2003a: 46; compare Papineau 2009). Ontological naturalism
holds that the entities treated by natural science exhaust reality. Metaphilosophical naturalism which is the focus in what follows asserts a strong
continuity between philosophy and science. A common construal of that
continuity runs thus. Philosophical problems are in one way or another
tractable through the methods of the empirical sciences (Naturalism,
Introduction). Now, within metaphilosophical naturalism, one can distinguish
empirical philosophers from experimental philosophers (Prinz 2008). Empirical
philosophers enlist science to answer, or to help answer, philosophical
problems. Experimental philosophers (or experimentalists) themselves do
science, or do so in collaboration with scientists. Let us start with empirical
philosophy.

Quine is an empirical philosopher in his approach to metaphysics and even

more so in his approach to epistemology. Quine presents and urges his
epistemology thus: The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence
anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world.
Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for
psychology? (Quine 1977: 75). Such naturalistic epistemology in Quines own
formulation, naturalized epistemology has been extended to moral
epistemology. A naturalized moral epistemology is simply a naturalized
epistemology that concerns itself with moral knowledge (Campbell and Hunter
2000: 1). There is such a thing, too, as naturalized aesthetics: the attempt to
22

use science to solve aesthetical problems (McMahon 2007). Other forms of

empirical philosophy include neurophilosophy, which applies methods from
neuroscience, and sometimes computer science, to questions in the philosophy
of mind.

Naturalized epistemology has been criticized for being insufficiently normative.

How can descriptions of epistemic mechanisms determine license for belief?
The difficulty seems especially pressing in the case of moral epistemology.
Wittgensteins complaint against naturalistic aesthetics a view he called
exceedingly stupid may intend a similar point. The sort of explanation one
is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal
explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how
people react (all Wittgenstein 1966: 17, 21). A wider disquiet about metaphilosophical naturalism is this: it presupposes a controversial view explicitly
endorsed by Quine, namely that science alone provides true or good
knowledge (Glock 2003a: 28, 46). For that reason and for others, some
philosophers, including Wittgenstein, are suspicious even of scientificallyinformed philosophy of mind.

Now the experimentalists the philosophers who actually do science tend to

use science not to propose new philosophical ideas or theories but rather to
investigate existing philosophical claims. The philosophical claims at issue are
based upon intuitions, intuitions being something like seemings or
spontaneous judgments. Sometimes philosophers have employed intuitions in
support of empirical claims. For example, some ethicists have asserted, from
their philosophical armchairs, that character is the most significant determinant
of action. Another example: some philosophers have speculated that most
people are incompatibilists about determinism. (The claim in this second
example is, though empirical, construable as a certain type of second-order
intuition, namely, as a claim that is empirical, yet made from the armchair,
about the intuitions that other people have.) Experimentalists have put such
hunches to the test, often concluding that they are mistaken (see Levin 2009
and Levy 2009). At other times, though, the type of intuitively-based claim that
experimentalists investigate is non-empirical or at least not evidently empirical.
Here one finds, for instance, intuitions about what counts as knowledge, about
whether some feature of something is necessary to it (recall Kripke, above),
about what the best resolution of a moral dilemma is, and about whether or not
we have free will. Now, experimentalists have not quite tested claims of this
second sort. But they have used empirical methods in interrogating the ways in
which philosophers, in considering such claims, have employed intuitions.
Analytic philosophers have been wont to use their intuitions about such non23

empirical matters to establish burdens of proof, to support premises, and to

serve as data against which to test philosophical theories. But experimentalists
have claimed to find that, at least in the case of non-philosophers, intuitions
about such matters vary considerably. (See for instance Weinberg, Nichols and
Stitch 2001.) So, why privilege the intuitions of some particular philosopher?

Armchair philosophers have offered various responses. One is that

philosophers intuitions diverge from folk intuitions only in this way: the
former are more considered versions of the latter (Levin 2009). But might not
such considered intuitions vary among themselves? Moreover: why at all trust
even considered intuitions? Why not think with Quine (and William James,
Richard Rorty, Nietzsche, and others) that intuitions are sedimentations of
culturally or biologically inherited views? A traditional response to that last
question (an ordinary language response and equally, perhaps, an ideal
language response) runs as follows. Intuitions do not convey views of the
world. Rather they convey an implicit knowledge of concepts or of language. A
variation upon that reply gives it a more naturalistic gloss. The idea here is that
(considered) intuitions, though indeed synthetic and, as such, defeasible,
represent good prima facie evidence for the philosophical views at issue, at
least if those views are about the nature of concepts (see for instance Graham
and Horgan 1994).

3. Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Post-Analytic Philosophy

a. Pragmatism

The original or classical pragmatists are the North Americans C.S. Peirce (1839
1914), William James (18421910), John Dewey (18591952) and, perhaps, G.
H. Mead. The metaphilosophy of pragmatism unfolds from that which became
known as the pragmatic maxim.

Peirce invented the pragmatic maxim as a tool for clarifying ideas. His best
known formulation of the maxim runs thus: Consider what effects, which might
conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of
the object (Peirce 1931-58, volume 5: section 402). Sometimes the maxim
reveals an idea to have no meaning. Such was the result, Peirce thought, of
24

applying the maxim to transubstantiation, and, indeed, to many metaphysical

ideas. Dewey deployed the maxim similarly. He saw it as a method for
inoculating ourselves against certain blind alleys in philosophy (Talisse and
Aikin 2008: 17). James construed the maxim differently. Whereas Peirce
seemed to hold that the effects at issue were, solely, effects upon sensory
experience, James extended those effects into the psychological effects of
believing in the idea(s) in question. Moreover, whereas Peirce construed the
maxim as a conception of meaning, James turned it into a conception of truth.
The true is that which, in almost any fashion, but in the long run and on
the whole, is expedient in the way of our thinking (James 1995: 86). As a
consequence of these moves, James thought that many philosophical disputes
were resolvable, and were only resolvable, through the pragmatic maxim.

None of the pragmatists opposed metaphysics as such or as a whole. That may

be because each of them held that philosophy is not fundamentally different to
other inquiries. Each of Peirce, James and Dewey elaborates the notion of
inquiry, and the relative distinctiveness of philosophy, in his own way. But there
is common ground on two views. (1) Inquiry is a matter of coping. Dewey, and
to an extent James, understand inquiry as an organism trying to cope with its
environment. Indeed Dewey was considerably influenced by Darwin. (2)
Experimental science is the exemplar of inquiry. One finds this second idea in
Dewey but also and especially in Peirce. The idea is that experimental science
is the best method or model of inquiry, be the inquiry practical or theoretical,
descriptive or normative, philosophical or non-philosophical. Pragmatism as
attitude represents what Mr. Peirce has happily termed the laboratory habit of
mind extended into every area where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on
(Dewey 1998, volume 2: 378). Each of these views (that is, both 1 and 2) may
be called naturalistic (the second being a version of metaphilosophical
naturalism; q.v. section 2.e).

According to pragmatism (though Peirce is perhaps an exception) pragmatism

was a humanism. Its purpose was to serve humanity. Here is James (1995: 2):
no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over
the worlds perspectives, the it here being pragmatist philosophy and also
philosophy in general. James held further that pragmatism, this time in contrast
with some other philosophies, allows the universe to appear as a place in
which human thoughts, choices, and aspirations count for something (Gallie
1952: 24). As to Dewey, he held the following. Ideals and values must be
evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or as
valuable instruments for social progress; and philosophy, because of the
breadth of its concern and its critical approach, can play a crucial role in this
25

evaluation (Dewey, section 4). Indeed, according to Dewey, philosophy is to be

a social hope reduced to a working programme of action, a prophecy of the
future, but one disciplined by serious thought and knowledge (Dewey 1998,
vol. 1: 72). Dewey himself pursued such a programme, and not only in his
writing in which he championed a pervasive form of democracy but also
(and to help enable such democracy) as an educationalist.

Humanism notwithstanding, pragmatism was not hostile to religion. Dewey

could endorse religion as a means of articulating our highest values. James
tended to hold that the truth of religious ideas was to be determined, at the
broadest level, in the same way as the truth of anything else. Peirce, for his
part, was a more traditional philosophical theist. The conceptions of religion
advocated by James and Dewey have been criticized for being very much
reconceptions (Talisse and Aikin 2008: 9094). A broader objection to
pragmatist humanism is that its making of man the measure of all things is
false and even pernicious. One finds versions of that objection in Heidegger
and Critical Theory. One could level the charge, too, from the perspective of
environmental ethics. Rather differently, and even more broadly, one might
think that moral and political ambitions have no place within philosophy
proper (Glock 2003a: 22 glossing Quine). Objections of a more specific kind
have targeted the pragmatic maxim. Critics have faulted Peirces version of the
pragmatic maxim for being too narrow or too indeterminate; and Russell and
others have criticized James' version as a misanalysis of what we mean by
true.

Pragmatism was superseded (most notably in the United States) or occluded (in
those places where it took little hold in the first place) by logical positivism. But
the metaphilosophy of logical positivism has important similarities to
pragmatisms. Positivisms verifiability principle is very similar to Peirces
maxim. The positivists held that science is the exemplar of inquiry. And the
positivists, like pragmatism, aimed at the betterment of society. Note also that
positivism itself dissolved partly because its original tenets underwent a
pragmaticization (Rorty 1991b: xviii). That pragmaticization was the work
especially of Quine and Davidson, who are logical pragmatists in that they use
logical techniques to develop some of the main ideas of pragmatists (Glock
2003a: 223; see also Rynin 1956). The ideas at issue include epistemological
holism and the underdetermination of various type of theory by evidence. The
latter is the aforementioned (section 2.d.iii) pragmatic element within Quines
approach to ontology (on which see further Quines Philosophy of Science,
section 3).

26

b. Neopragmatism: Rorty

The label neopragmatism has been applied to Robert Brandom, Susan Haack,
Nicholas Rescher, Richard Rorty, and other thinkers who, like them, identify
themselves with some part(s) of classical pragmatism. (Karl-Otto Apel, Jrgen
Habermas, John McDowell, and Hilary Putnam are borderline cases; each takes
much from pragmatism but is wary about pragmatist as a self-description.)
This section concentrates upon the best known, most controversial, and
possibly the most metaphilosophical, of the neopragmatists: Rorty.

Much of Rortys metaphilosophy issues from his antirepresentationalism.

Antirepresentationalism is, in the first instance, this view: no representation
(linguistic or mental conception) corresponds to reality in a way that exceeds
our commonsensical and scientific notions of what it is to get the world right.
Rortys arguments against the sort of privileged representations that are at
issue here terminate or summarize as follows. [N]othing counts as justification
unless by reference to what we already accept [...] [T]here is no way to get
outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than
coherence (Rorty 1980: 178). Rorty infers that the notion of representation,
or that of fact of the matter, has no useful role in philosophy (Rorty 1991b:
2). We are to conceive ourselves, or our conceptions, not as answerable to the
world, but only to our fellows (see McDowell 2000: 110).

Rorty thinks that antirepresentationalism entails the rejection of a

metaphilosophy which goes back to the Greeks, found a classic expression in
Kant, and which is pursued in Analytic philosophy. That metaphilosophy, which
Rorty calls epistemological, presents philosophy as a tribunal of pure reason,
upholding or denying the claims of the rest of culture (Rorty 1980: 4). More
fully: philosophy judges discourses, be they religious, scientific, moral, political,
aesthetical or metaphysical, by seeing which of them, and to what degree,
disclose reality as it really is. (Clearly, though, more needs to be said if this
conception is to accommodate Kants transcendental idealism. See Kant:
Metaphysics, section 4.)

Rorty wants the philosopher to be, not a cultural overseer adjudicating types
of truth claims, but an informed dilettante and a Socratic intermediary (Rorty
1980: 317). That is, the philosopher is to elicit agreement, or, at least, exciting
27

and fruitful disagreement (Rorty 1980: 318) between or within various types or
areas of discourse. Philosophy so conceived Rorty calls hermeneutics. The
Rortian philosopher does not seek some schema allowing two or more
discourses to be translated perfectly one to the other (an idea Rorty associates
with representationalism). Instead she inhabits hermeneutic circle. [W]e play
back and forth between guesses about how to characterize particular
statements or other events, and guesses about the point of the whole situation,
until gradually we feel at ease with what was hitherto strange (1980: 319).
Rorty connects this procedure to the edification that consists in finding new,
better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking (p. 360) and, thereby,
to a goal he calls existentialist: the goal of finding new types of selfconception and, in that manner, finding new ways to be.

Rortys elaboration of all this introduces further notable metaphilosophical

views. First: Blake is as much of a philosopher Fichte and Henry Adams more of
a philosopher than Frege (Rorty 1991a: xv). For Sellars was right, Rorty
believes, to define philosophy as an attempt to see how things, in the broadest
possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the
term (Sellars 1963: 1; compare section 6, Sellars Philosophy of Mind;
presumably, though, Rorty holds that one has good philosophy when such
attempts prove edifying). Second: what counts as a philosophical problem is
contingent, and not just in that people only discover certain philosophical
problems at certain times. Third: philosophical argument, at least when it
aspires to be conclusive, requires shared assumptions; where there are no or
few shared assumptions, such argument is impossible.

The last of the foregoing ideas is important for what one might call Rortys
practical metaphilosophy. Rorty maintains that one can argue about morals
and/or politics only with someone with whom one shares some assumptions.
The neutral ground that philosophy has sought for debates with staunch
egoists and unbending totalitarians is a fantasy. All the philosopher can do,
besides point that out, is to create a conception that articulates, but does not
strictly support, his or her moral or political vision. The philosopher ought to be
putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit (Rorty 1991b: 178) and
similarly for morality. Rorty thinks that no less a political philosopher than John
Rawls has already come close to this stance (Rorty 1991b: 191). Nor does Rorty
bemoan any of this. The cultural politics which suggests changes in the
vocabularies deployed in moral and political deliberation (Rorty 2007: ix) is
more useful than the attempt to find philosophical foundations for some such
vocabulary. The term cultural politics could mislead, though. Rorty does not
advocate an exclusive concentration on cultural as against social or economic
28

issues. He deplores the sort of philosophy or cultural or literary theory that

makes it almost impossible to clamber back down [...] to a level [...] on which
one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political
strategy (Rorty 2007: 93).

Rortys metaphilosophy, and the philosophical views with which it is

intertwined, have been attacked as irrationalist, self-refuting, relativist, unduly
ethnocentric, complacent, anti-progressive, and even as insincere. Even Rortys
self-identification with the pragmatist tradition has been challenged (despite
the existence of at least some clear continuities). So have his readings, or
appropriations, of his philosophical heroes, who include not only James and
Dewey but also Wittgenstein, Heidegger and, to a lesser extent, Davidson and
Derrida. For a sample of all these criticisms, see Brandom 2000 (which includes
replies by Rorty) and Talisse and Aikin 2008: 140148.

c. Post-Analytic Philosophy

Post-Analytic philosophy is a vaguely-defined term for something that is a

current rather than a group or school. The term (in use as early as Rajchman
and West 1985) denotes the work of philosophers who owe much to Analytic
philosophy but who think that they have made some significant departure from
it. Often the departures in question are motivated by pragmatist allegiance or
influence. (Hence the placing of this section.) The following are all considerably
pragmatist and are all counted as post-Analytic philosophers: Richard Rorty;
Hilary Putnam; Robert Brandom; John McDowell. Still, those same figures
exhibit, also, a turn to Hegel (a turn rendered slightly less remarkable by
Hegels influence upon Peirce and especially upon Dewey). Some
Wittgensteinians count as post-Analytic too, as might the later Wittgenstein
himself. Stanley Cavell stands out here, though in one way or another
Wittgenstein strongly influenced most of philosophers mentioned in this
paragraph. Another common characteristic of those deemed post-Analytic is
interest in a range of Continental thinkers. Rorty looms large here. But there is
also the aforementioned interest in Hegel, and, for instance, the fact that one
finds McDowell citing Gadamer.

Post-Analytic philosophy is associated with various more or less metaphilosophical views. One is the rejection or severe revision of any notion of
philosophical analysis. Witness Rorty, Brandoms self-styled analytic
29

pragmatism, and perhaps, metaphilosophical naturalism (q.v. section 2.e).

(Still: only rarely as in Graham and Horgan 1994, who advocate what they call
Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy do naturalists call themselves post-Analytic.)
Some post-Analytic philosophers go further, in that they tend, often under the
influence of Wittgenstein, to attempt less to solve and more to dissolve or even
discard philosophical problems. Each of Putnam, McDowell and Rorty has his
own version of this approach, and each singles out for dissolution the problem
of how mind or language relates to the world. A third characteristic feature of
post-Analytic philosophy is the rejection of a certain kind of narrow
professionalism. That sort of professionalism is preoccupied with specialized
problems and tends to be indifferent to broader social and cultural questions.
One finds a break from such narrow professionalism in Cavell, in Rorty, in
Bernard Williams, and to an extent in Putnam (although also in such "public"
Analytic philosophers as A. C. Grayling).

Moreover, innovative or heterodox style is something of a criterion of postAnalytic philosophy. One thinks here especially of Cavell. But one might
mention McDowell too. Now, one critic of McDowell faults him for putting
barriers of jargon, convolution, and metaphor before the reader hardly less
formidable than those characteristically erected by his German luminaries
(Wright 2002: 157). The criticism betokens the way in post-Analytic
philosophers are often regarded, namely as apostates. Post-Analytic
philosophers tend to defend themselves by arguing either that Analytic
philosophy needs to reconnect itself with the rest of culture, and/or that
Analytic philosophy has itself shown the untenability of some of its most central
assumptions and even perhaps come to the end of its own projectthe dead
end (Putnam 1985: 28).

4. Continental Metaphilosophy

a. Phenomenology and Related Currents

i. Husserls Phenomenology

Phenomenology, as pursued by Edmund Husserl describes phenomena.

Phenomena are things in the manner in which they appear. That definition
becomes more appreciable through the technique through which Husserl
30

means to gain access to phenomena. Husserl calls that technique the epoche
(a term that owes to Ancient Greek skepticism). He designates the perspective
that it achieves the perspective that presents one with phenomena the
phenomenological reduction. The epoche consists in suspending the natural
attitude (another term of Husserls coinage). The natural attitude comprises
assumptions about the causes, the composition, and indeed the very existence
of that which one experiences. The epoche, Husserl says, temporarily
brackets these assumptions, or puts them out of play allowing one to
describe the world solely in the manner in which it appears. That description is
phenomenology.

Phenomenology means to have epistemological and ontological import. Husserl

presents the epistemological import to begin with that in a provocative way:
If positivism is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all
sciences on the positive, that is to say, on what can be seized upon
originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists (Husserl 1931: 20). The idea
that Husserl shares with the positivists is that experience is the sole source of
knowledge. Hence Husserls principle of all principles: whatever presents
itself in intuition in primordial form [...] is simply to be accepted as it gives
itself out to be, but obviously only within the limits in which it thus presents
itself (Husserl 1931: section 24). However, and like various other philosophers
(including William James and the German Idealists), Husserl thinks that
experience extends beyond what empiricism makes of it. For one thing and
this reveals phenomenologys intended ontological import experience can be
of essences. A technique of imaginative variation similar to Descartes'
procedure with the wax (see Descartes, section 4) allows one to distinguish
that which is essential to a phenomenon and, thereby, to make discoveries
about the nature of such phenomena as numbers and material things. Now,
one might think that this attempt to derive essences from phenomena (from
things in the manner in which they appear) must be idealist. Indeed and
despite the fact that he used the phrase to the things themselves! as his
slogan Husserl did avow a transcendental idealism, whereby transcendental
subjectivity [...] constitutes sense and being (Husserl 1999: section 41).
However, the exact content of that idealism i.e. the exact meaning of the
phrase just quoted is a matter of some interpretative difficulty. It is evident
enough, though, that Husserl's idealism involves (at least) the following ideas.
Experience necessarily involves various subjective achievements. Those
achievements comprise various operations that Husserl calls syntheses and
which one might (although here one encounters difficulties) call 'mental'.
Moreover, the achievements are attributable to a subjectivity that deserves the
name 'transcendental' in that (1) the achievements are necessary conditions
for our experience, (2) the subjectivity at issue is transcendent in this sense: it
exists outside the natural world (and, hence, cannot entirely be identified with
31

what we normally construe as the mind). (On the notion of the transcendental,
see further Kants transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments.)

Husserl argued that the denial of transcendental subjectivity decapitates

philosophy (Husserl 1970: 9). He calls such philosophy objectivism and
asserts that it confines itself to the universe of mere facts and allies itself with
the sciences. (Thus Husserl employs positivism and naturalism as terms with
similar import to objectivism.) But objectivism cannot even understand
science itself, according to Husserl; for science, he maintains, presupposes the
achievements of transcendental subjectivity. Further, objectivism can make
little sense of the human mind, of humanitys place within nature, and of
values. These latter failings contribute to a perceived meaninglessness to life
and a fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity (Husserl 1970: 9).
Consequently, and because serious investigation of science, mind, our place in
nature, and of values belongs to Europes very raison dtre, objectivism helps
to cause nothing less than a crisis of European humanity (Husserl 1970: 299).
There is even some suggestion (in the same text) that objectivism prevents us
from experiencing people as people: as more than mere things.

The foregoing shows that phenomenology has a normative aspect. Husserl did
make a start upon a systematic moral philosophy. But phenomenology is
intrinsically ethical (D. Smith 2003: 46), in that the phenomenologist eschews
prejudice and seeks to divine matters for him- or herself.

ii. Existential Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism

Husserl hoped to found a unified and collaborative movement. His hope was
partially fulfilled. Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty count as heirs to Husserl
because (or mainly because) they believed in the philosophical primacy of
description of experience. Moreover, many of the themes of post-Husserlian
phenomenology are present already, one way or other, in Husserl. But there
are considerable, and indeed metaphilosophical, differences between Husserl
and his successors. The metaphilosophical differences can be unfolded from
this: Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty adhere to an existential
phenomenology. Existential phenomenology has two senses. Each construal
matters metaphilosophically.

32

In one sense, existential phenomenology denotes phenomenology that

departs
from
Husserls
self-proclaimed
pure
or
transcendental
phenomenology. At issue here is this view of Husserls: it is logically possible
that a consciousness could survive the annihilation of everything else (Husserl
1999: section 13). Existential phenomenologists deny the view. For they accept
a kind of externalism whereby experience, or the self, is what it is and not just
causally by dint of the world that is experienced. (On externalism, see
Philosophy of Language, section 4a and Mental Causation, section 3.b.ii.)
Various slogans and terms within the work existential phenomenologists
express these views. Heideggers Being and Time presents the human mode of
being as being-in-the-world and speaks not of the subject or consciousness
but of Da-sein (existence or, more literally, being-there). Merleau-Ponty
asserts that we are through and through compounded of relationships with the
world, destined to the world (2002: xixv). In Being and Nothingness, Sartre
parenthesiz[es] the word of when referring, say, to consciousness (of) a
table [in order] to reject the reificatory idea of consciousness as some thing
or container distinct from the world in the midst of which we are conscious
(Cooper 1999: 201).

Existential phenomenology, so construed, has metaphilosophical import

because it affects philosophical (phenomenological) method. Being and
Nothingness holds that the inseparability of consciousness from the objects of
consciousness ruins Husserls method of epoche (Sartre 1989: part one,
chapter one; Cerbone 2006: 1989). Merleau-Ponty may not go as far. His
Phenomenology of Perception has it that, because we are destined to the
world, The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a
complete reduction (2002: xv). But the interpretation of this remark is debated
(see J Smith 2005). At any rate though this is one of the things that an
interpreter of his stance on the reduction has to reckon with Merleau-Ponty
found a greater philosophical use for the empirical sciences than did Husserl.
Heidegger was more inclined to keep the sciences in their place. But he too
partly because of his existential (externalist) conception of phenomenology
differed from Husserl on the epoche. Again, however, Heideggers precise
position is hard to discern. (Caputo 1977 describes the interpretative problem
and tries to solve it.) Still, Heideggers principal innovation in philosophical
method has little to do with the epoche. This article considers that innovation
before turning to the other sense of existential phenomenology.

Heideggers revisions of phenomenological method place him within the

hermeneutic tradition. Hermeneutics is the art or practice of interpretation. The
hermeneutic tradition (sometimes just called hermeneutics) is a tradition that
33

gives great philosophical weight to an interpretative mode of understanding.

Members of this tradition include Friedrich Schleiermacher (17681834),
Wilhelm Dilthey (18331911) and, after Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer
(19002002) and Paul Ricur. Heidegger is hermeneutical in that he holds the
following. All understanding is interpretative in that it always has
preconceptions. One has genuine understanding insofar as one has worked
through the relevant preconceptions. One starts with a preliminary, general
view of something; this general view can guide us to insights, which then lead
should lead to a revised general view, and so on (Polt 1999: 98). This
hermeneutic circle has a special import for phenomenology. For (according to
Heidegger) our initial understanding of our relations to the world involves some
particularly misleading and stubborn preconceptions, some of which derive
from philosophical tradition. Heidegger concludes that what is necessary is a
destructiona critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first
must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the [experiential,
phenomenological] sources from which they were drawn (Heidegger 1988:
22f.). But Heideggers position may be insufficiently, or inconsistently,
hermeneutical. The thought is that Heideggers own views entail a thesis that,
subsequently, Gadamer propounded explicitly. Namely: The very idea of a
definitive interpretation [of anything] seems to be intrinsically contradictory
(Gadamer 1981: 105). This thesis, which Gadamer reaches by conceiving
understanding as inherently historical and linguistic, bodes badly for
Heideggers aspiration to provide definitive ontological answers (an aspiration
that he possessed at least as much as Husserl did). Yet arguably (compare
Mulhall 1996: 1925) that very result gels with another of Heideggers goals,
namely, to help his readers to achieve authenticity (on which more
momentarily).

The second meaning or construal of existential phenomenology is

existentialism. Gabriel Marcel invented that latter term for ideas held by Sartre
and by Simone de Beauvoir. Subsequently, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Camus,
Karl Jaspers, Kafka, and others, got placed under the label. A term used so
broadly is hard to define precisely. But the following five theses each have a
good claim to be called existentialist. Indeed: each of the major existential
phenomenologists held some version of at least most of the theses (although,
while Sartre came to accept the label existentialist, Heidegger did not).

Ones life determines ever anew the person that one is.
One is free to determine ones life and, hence, ones identity.

34

There is no objective moral order that can determine ones values. One
encounters values within the world (indeed, one encounters them bound up
with facts); but nothing rationally compels decision between values.
13 perturb. Hence a tendency towards the inauthenticity (Heideggers term)
or bad faith (Sartres term) which consists in the denial or refusal of those
points often by letting society determine ones values and/or identity.
The relation to ones death as well as to certain types of anxiety and
absurdity or groundlessness is important for disclosing possibilities of
authentic existence.
These theses indicate that for the existentialist philosophy must be practical. It
is not, though, that existentialism puts ethics at the heart of philosophy. That is
because a further central existentialist idea is that no-one, even in principle,
can legislate values for another. True, Sartre declared freedom to be the
foundation of all values (Sartre 2007: 61); and he wrote Notebooks for an
Ethics. According to the ethic in question, to will ones own freedom is to will
the freedom of others. But in no further way does that ethic make much claim
to objectivity. Instead, much of it turns upon the good faith that consists in not
denying the fact of ones freedom.

What of politics? Little in Husserl fits a conventional understanding of political

philosophy. Sartre came to hold that his existential ethics made sense only for
a society that had been emancipated by Marxism (Sartre 1963: xxv-xxvi).
Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenologically informed political philosophy
and disagreed with Sartre on concrete political questions and on the manner in
which the philosopher should be engaged (Diprose and Reynolds: ch. 8;
Carmen and Hansen 2005: ch. 12). Sartre and Merleau-Ponty give one to think,
also, about the idea of artistic presentations of philosophy (Diprose and
Reynolds: ch.s 9 and 18). What of Heidegger? He was, of course, a Nazi,
although for how long how long after he led the Nazification of Freiburg
University is debated, as is the relation between his Nazism and his
philosophy (Wolin 1993; Young 1997; see also section 4.c below). Now the
Heidegger case raises, or makes more urgent, some general metaphilosophical issues. Should philosophers get involved in politics? And was
Gilbert Ryle right to say - as allegedly, apropos Heidegger, he did say (Cohen
2002: 337 n. 21), - that a shit from the heels up cant do good philosophy?

The foregoing material indicates a sense in which phenomenology is its own

best critic. Indeed, some reactions against phenomenology and existentialism
as such against the whole or broad conception of philosophy embodied they
35

represent owe to apostates or to heterodox philosophers within those camps.

We saw that, in effect, Sartre came to think that existentialism was insufficient
for politics. In fact, he came to hold this: Every philosophy is practical, even
the one which at first sight appears to be the most contemplative [. . . Every
philosophy is] a social and political weapon (Sartre 1960: 5). Levinas accused
phenomenologists prior to himself of ignoring an absolutely fundamental
ethical dimension to experience (see Davis 1996). Derrida resembles Sartre
and Levinas, in that, like them, he developed his own metaphilosophy (treated
below) largely via internal criticism of phenomenology. Another objection to
phenomenology is that it collapses philosophy into psychology or anthropology.
(Husserl himself criticized Heidegger in that way.) Rather differently, some
philosophers hold that, despite its attitude to naturalism, phenomenology
needs to be naturalized (Petitot et al 1999). As to existentialism, it has been
criticized for ruining ethics and for propounding an outlook that is not only an
intellectual mistake but also and Heidegger is taken as the prime exhibit
politically dangerous (see Adorno 1986 and ch. 8 of Wolin).

b. Critical Theory

Critical Theory names the so-called Frankfurt School the tradition associated
with the Institute of Social Research (Institutfrsozialforschung) which was
founded in Frankfurt in 1924. (See Literary Theory section 1 for a wider or less
historical notion of Critical Theory.) According to Critical Theory, the point of
philosophy is that it can contribute to a critical and emancipatory social theory.
The specification of that idea depends upon which Critical Theory is at issue;
Critical Theory is an extended and somewhat diverse tradition. Its first
generation included Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.
Most of the members of this generation had Jewish backgrounds. For that
reason, and because the Institute was Marxist, the first generation fled the
Nazis. The Institute re-opened in Frankfurt in 1950. Within the second
generation, the most prominent figures are Jrgen Habermas and Albrecht
Wellmer. Within the third, Axel Honneth is the best known. There is a fourth
generation too. Moreover, there were stages or phases within the first
generation (Dubiel 1985). To wit: materialism, 19301937; Critical Theory,
19371940; critique of instrumental reason, 19401945; and a proto-stage
wherein Critical Theory was more traditionally Marxist than it was subsequently.
What follows can consider only some of these versions of Critical Theory.

i. Critical Theory and the Critique of Instrumental Reason

36

The term the critical theory of society (Critical Theory for short) was
introduced only in 1937. It was introduced by Horkheimer, who was director of
the Institute at the time. He introduced it partly from prudence. By 1937 the
Institute was in the United States, wherein it was unwise for the Institute to call
itself Marxist or even to continue to call itself materialist. But prudence was
not the only motive for the new name. Horkheimer meant to clarify and shape
the enterprise he was leading. According to Horkheimer (1947), Critical Theory
is social theory that is, first of all, broad. It treats society as a whole or in all its
aspects. That breadth, together with the idea that society is more independent
of the economy than traditional Marxism recognizes, means that Critical Theory
must be interdisciplinary. (The expertise of the first-generation encompassed
economics, sociology, law, politics, psychology, aesthetics and philosophy.)
Next, Critical Theory is emancipatory. It aims at a society that is rational and
free and which meets the needs of all. It is to that end that Critical Theory is
critical. It means to reveal how contemporary capitalist society, in its economy
and its culture and in their interplay, deceives and dominates.

Critical Theory so defined involves philosophy in several ways. (1) From its
inception, it adapted philosophical ideas, especially from German Idealism, in
order to analyze society. Nonetheless, and following Lukcs, (2) Critical Theory
thought that some parts of some philosophies could be understood as
unknowing reflection of social conditions. (3) Philosophy tends to enter not as
the normative underpinning of the theory but in justification for the lack of such
underpinning. Horkheimer and company little specified the rational society
they sought and little defended the norms by which they indicted
contemporary society. With Marx, they held that one should not legislate for
what should be the free creation of the future. With Hegel, they held that,
anyway, knowledge is conditioned by its time and place. They held also, and
again in Hegelian fashion, that there are norms that exist (largely unactualized)
within capitalism norms of justice and freedom and so forth which suffice to
indict capitalism. (4) Critical Theory conceives itself as philosophys inheritor.
Philosophy, especially post-Kantian German Idealism, had tried to overcome
various types of alienation. But only the achievement of a truly free society
could actually do that, according to Critical Theory. Note lastly here that, at
least after 1936, Critical Theory denied both that ostensibly Marxist regimes
were such and that emancipation was anywhere nearly at hand. Consequently,
this stage of Critical Theory tended to aim less at revolution and more at
propagating awareness of the faults of capitalism and (to a lesser extent) of
actually existing socialism.

37

There is a sense in which philosophy looms larger (or even larger) in the next
phase of the first generation of Critical Theory. For this phase of the moment
propounded that which we might call (with a nod to Lyotard) a (very!) grand
narrative. Adorno and Horkheimer are the principle figures of this phase, and
their co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment its main text. That text connects
enlightenment to that which Max Weber had called the disenchantment of the
world. To disenchant the world is to render it calculable. The Dialectic traces
disenchantment from the historical Enlightenment back to the proto-rationality
of myth and forward to modern industrial capitalism (to its economy,
psychology, society, politics, and even to its philosophies). Weber thought that
disenchantment had yielded a world wherein individuals were trapped within
an iron cage (his term) of economy and bureaucracy. Here is the parallel idea
in the Dialectic. Enlightenment has reverted to myth, in that the calculated
world of contemporary capitalism is ruled, as the mythic world was ruled, by
impersonal and brutish forces. Further analysis in the Dialectic introduces
instrumental reason. That term owes to Horkheimers Eclipse of Reason, which
is something of a popularization of the Dialectic. The Dialectic itself speaks of
subjective reason. Disenchantment produces a merely instrumental reason in
that it pushes choice among ends outside of the purview of rationality. That
said, the result Horkheimer and Adorno argue is a kind of
instrumentalization of ends. Ends get replaced, as a kind of default, by things
previously regarded merely instrumentally. Thus, at least or especially by the
time of contemporary capitalism, life comes to be governed by such meansbecome-ends as profit, technical expertise, systematization, distraction, and
self-preservation.

Do these ideas really amount to Critical Theory? Perhaps they are too abstract
to count as interdisciplinary. Worse: they might seem to exclude any orientation
towards emancipation. True, commentators show that Adorno offered more
practical guidance than was previously thought. Also, first-generation Critical
Theory, including the critique of instrumental reason, did inspire the 1960s
student movement. However: while Marcuse responded to that movement with
some enthusiasm, Adorno and Horkheimer did not. Perhaps they could not. For
though they fix their hopes upon reason (upon enlightenment thinking), they
indict that very same thing. They write (2002: xvi):

We have no doubtand herein lies our petitio principiithat freedom in society

is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with
equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the
concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined,
already contains the germ of the regression.
38

ii. Habermas

Habermas is a principal source of the criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer just

presented. (He expresses the last of those criticisms by speaking of a
performative contradiction.) Nonetheless, or exactly because he thinks that
his predecessors have failed to make good upon the conception, Habermas
pursues Critical Theory as Horkheimer defined it, which is to say, as broad,
interdisciplinary, critical, and emancipatory social theory.

Habermas' Critical Theory comprises, at least centrally, his critique of

functionalist reason, which is a reworking of his predecessors critique of
instrumental reason. The central thesis of the critique of functionalist reason is
that the system has colonized the lifeworld. In order to understand the thesis,
one needs to understand not only the notions of system, lifeworld, and
colonization but also the notion of communicative action and this being the
most philosophical notion of the ensemble the notion of communicative
rationality.

Communicative action is action that issues from communicative rationality.

Communicative rationality consists, roughly, in free and open discussion [of
some issue] by all relevant persons, with a final decision being dependent upon
the strength of better argument, and never upon any form of coercion (Edgar
2006: 23). The lifeworld comprises those areas of life that exhibit
communicative action (or, we shall see, which could and perhaps should exhibit
it). The areas at issue include the family, education, and the public sphere. A
system is a social domain wherein action is determined by more or less
autonomous or instrumental procedures rather than by communicative
rationality. Habermas counts markets and bureaucracies as among the most
significant systems. So the thesis that the lifeworld has been colonized by the
system is the following claim. The extension of bureaucracy and markets into
areas such as the family, education, and the public sphere prevent those
spheres from being governed by free and open discussion.

Habermas uses his colonization thesis to explain alienation, social instability,

and the impoverishment of democracy. He maintains, further, that even
systems cannot function if colonization proceeds beyond a certain point. The
thinking runs thus. Part of the way in which systems undermine communicative
39

action is by depleting resources (social, cultural and psychological) necessary

for such action. But systems themselves depend upon those resources. (Note
that, sometimes, Habermas uses the term lifeworld to refer to those resources
themselves rather than to a domain that does or could exhibit communicative
action.) Still: Habermas makes it relatively clear that the colonization thesis is
meant not only as descriptive but also as normative. For consider the following.
(1) A critique as in critique of functional reason is, at least in its modern
usage, an indictment. (2) Habermas presents the creation of a communicative
lifeworld as essential to the completion a completion that he deems desirable
of what he calls the unfinished project of modernity. (3) Habermas tells us
(in his Theory of Communicative Action, which is the central text for the
colonization thesis) that he means to provide the normative basis for a critical
theory of society.

How far does Habermas warrant the normativity, which is to say, show that
colonization is bad? It is hard to be in favour of self-undermining societies. But
(some degree of?) alienation might be thought a price worth paying for certain
achievements; and not everyone advocates democracy (or at least the same
degree or type of it). But Habermas does have the following argument for the
badness of colonization. There is a normative content within language itself,
in that [r]eaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech;
and/but a colonized lifeworld, which by definition is not a domain of
communicative action, thwarts that telos. (Habermas 1992a: 109 and
Habermas 1984: 287 respectively.)

The idea that language has a communicative telos is the crux of Habermas
thought. For it is central both to his philosophy of language (or to his so-called
universal pragmatics) and to his ethics. To put the second of those points more
accurately: the idea of a communicative telos is central to his respective
conceptions of both ethics and morality. Habermas understands morality to be
a matter of norms that are mainly norms of justice and which are in all cases
universally-binding. Ethics, by contrast, is a matter of values, where those
values: express what is good for some individual or some group; have no
authority beyond the individual or group concerned; and are trumped by
morality when they conflict with it. Habermas has a principle, derived from the
linguistic, communicative telos mentioned above, which he applies to both
normal norms and ethical values. To wit: a norm or value is acceptable only if
all those affected by it could accept it in reasonable rational and uncoerced
discourse. This principle makes morality and ethics matters not for the
philosopher but for the discourse between citizens (Habermas 1992a: 158).
(For more on Habermas moral philosophy his discourse ethics, as it is
40

known and on his political philosophy, and also on the ways in which the
various aspects of his thought fit together, see Finlayson 2005. Note, too, that
in the twenty-first century Habermas has turned his attention to (1) that which
religion can contribute to the public discourse of secular states and (2)
bioethics.)

Habermas denial that philosophers have special normative privileges is part of

his general (meta)philosophical orientation. He calls that orientation
postmetaphysical thinking. In rejecting metaphysics, Habermas means to
reject not only a normative privilege for philosophy but also the idea that
philosophy can make claims about the world as a whole (Dews 1995: 209).
Habermas connects postmetaphysical thinking to something else too. He
connects it to his rejection of that which he calls the philosophy of
consciousness. Habermas detects the philosophy of consciousness in
Descartes, in German Idealism, and in much other philosophy besides.
Seemingly a philosophy counts as a philosophy of consciousness, for
Habermas, just in case it holds this: the human subject apprehends the world in
an essentially individual and non-linguistic way. To take Habermas so-called
communicative turn is to reject that view; it is to hold, instead, that human
apprehension is at root both linguistic and intersubjective. Habermas believes
that Wittgenstein, Mead, and others prefigured and even somewhat
accomplished this paradigm shift (Habermas 1992a: 173, 194).

Habermasian postmetaphysical thinking has been charged both with retaining

objectionable metaphysical elements and with abandoning too many of
philosophy's aspirations. (The second criticism is most associated with KarlOtto Apel, who nonetheless has co-operated with Habermas in developing
discourse ethics. On the first criticism, see for instance Geuss 1981: 94f.)
Habermas has been charged, also, with making Critical Theory uncritical. The
idea here is this. In allowing that it is alright for some markets and
bureaucracies to be systems, Habermas allows too much. (A related but less
metaphilosophical issue, touched on above, is whether Habermas has an
adequate normative basis for its social criticisms. This issue is an instance of
the so-called normativity problem in Critical Theory, on which see Freyenhagen
2008; Finlayson 2009.)

Here are two further metaphilosophical issues. (1) Is it really tenable or

desirable for philosophy to be as intertwined with social science as Critical
Theory wishes it to be? (For an affirmative answer, see Geuss 2008.) (2)
Intelligibility seems particularly important for any thinker who means to reduce
41

the tension between his own insight and the oppressed humanity in whose
service he thinks (Horkheimer 1937: 221); but Critical Theory has been
criticized as culpably obscure and even as mystificatory (see especially the
pieces by Popper and Albert in Adorno et al 1976). Adorno has been the
principal target for such criticisms (and Adorno did defend his style; see Joll
2009). Yet Habermas, too, is very hard to interpret. That is partly because this
philosopher of communication exhibits an unbelievable compulsion to
synthesize (Kndler-Bunte in Habermas 1992a: 124), which is to say, to
combine seemingly disparate and arguably incompatible ideas.

c. The Later Heidegger

The later Heidegger is the Heidegger of, roughly, the 1940s onwards. (Some
differences between the two Heideggers will emerge below. But hereafter
normally Heidegger will mean the later Heidegger.) Heideggers difficult,
radical, and influential metaphilosophy holds that: philosophy is metaphysics;
metaphysics involves a fundamental mistake; metaphysics is complicit in
modernitys ills; metaphysics is entering into its end; and thinking should
replace metaphysics/philosophy.

Heideggers criterion of metaphysics to start with that is the identification of

being with beings. To explain: metaphysics seeks something designatable as
being in that metaphysics seeks a principle or ground of beings; and
metaphysics identifies being with beings in that it identifies this principle or
ground (i.e. being) with something that it itself a being or at least a cause or
property of some being or beings. Heidegger's favored examples of such
construals of being include: the Idea in Plato; Aristotelian or Cartesian or
Lockean substance; various construals of God; the Leibnizian monad;
Husserlian subjectivity; and the Nietzschean will to power. Philosophy is coextensive with metaphysics in that all philosophy since Plato involves such a
project of grounding.

Now Heidegger himself holds that beings (das Seiende) have a dependence
upon being (das Sein). Yet, being is not God and not a cosmic ground
(Heidegger 1994: 234). Indeed, being is identical to no being or being(s) or
property or cause of any being(s) whatsoever. This distinction is the
ontological differencethe differentiation between being and beings
(Heidegger 1982: 17; this statement is from Heidegger's earlier work, but this
42

idea, if not quite the term, persists). We may put the contention thus: pace
metaphysics/philosophy, being is not ontic. But what, then, is being?

It may be that Heidegger employs das Sein in two senses (Young 2002: ch. 1,
Philipse 1998: section 13b; compare for instance Caputo 1993: 30). We might
(as do Young and Philipse) use 'being', uncapitalized, to refer to the first of
these sense and 'Being' (capitalized) to refer to the other. (Where both senses
are in play, as sometimes they seem to be in Heidegger's writing, this article
resorts sometimes to the German das Sein. Note, however, that this distinction
between two senses of Heideggerian Sein is interpretatively controversial.) In
the first and as it were lowercase sense, being is what Heidegger calls
sometimes a 'way of revealing'. That is, it is something something ostensibly
non-ontic by dint of which beings are 'revealed' or 'unconcealed' or 'come to
presence', and indeed do so in the particular way or ways in which they do. In
the second and 'uppercase' sense, Being is that which is responsible for
unconcealment, i.e. is responsible for das Sein in the first, lowercase sense. A
little more specifically, Being (in this second, uppercase sense) sends or
destines being; accordingly, it is that from which beings are revealed, the
reservoir of the non-yet-uncovered, the un-uncovered (Heidegger 1971: 60).
With this second notion of das Sein, Heidegger means to stress the following
point (a point that perhaps reverses a tendency in the early Heidegger):
humanity does not determine, at least not wholly, how beings are
unconcealed.

One wants specification of all this. We shall see that Heidegger provides some.
Nevertheless, it may be a mistake to seek an exact specification of the ideas at
issue. For Heidegger may not really mean das Sein (in either sense) to explain
anything. He may mean instead to stress the mysteriousness of the fact that
beings are accessible to us in the form that they are and, indeed, at all.

One way in which Heidegger fills out the foregoing ideas is by posit ing epochs
of being, which is to say, a historical series of ontological regimes (and here lies
another difference between the earlier and the later Heidegger). The series
runs thus: (1) the ancient Greek understanding of being, with which Heidegger
associates the word physis; (2) the Medieval Christian understanding of being,
whereby beings (except God and artifacts) are divinely created things; (3) the
modern understanding of being as resource (on which more below). That said,
sometimes Heidegger gives a longer list of epochs, in which list the epochs
correlate with metaphysical systems. Thus the idea of a history of being
[Seinsgeschichte] as metaphysics (Heidegger 2003: 65). It is important that
43

this history, and indeed the simpler tripartite scheme, does not mean to be a
history merely of conceptions of being. It means to be also a history of being
itself, i.e. of ontological regimes. Heidegger holds, then, that beings are
'unconcealed' in different ways in different epochs (although he holds also that
each metaphysic absolutizes its corresponding ontological regime, i.e. that
each metaphysic overlooks the fact that beings are unconcealed differently in
different epochs; see Young 2002: 29, 54, 68).

Heidegger allows also for some ontological heterogeneity within epochs, too.
Here one encounters Heideggers notion of the thing (das Ding). Trees, hills,
animals, jugs, bridges, and pictures can be Things in the emphatic sense at
issue, but such Things are modest in number, compared with the countless
objects. A Thing has a worlding being. It opens a world by gathering the
fourfold (das Geviert). The fourfold is a unity of earth and sky, divinities and
mortals. (All Heidegger 1971: 179ff.). Some of this conception is actually fairly
straightforward. Heidegger tries to show how a bridge (to take one case) can
be so interwoven with human life and thereby with other entities that, via the
world that comprises those interrelations (a world not identical with any
particular being), the following is the case. The Thing (the bridge), persons, and
numerous other phenomena all stand in relations of mutual determination, i.e.
make each other what they are.

But in modernity ontological variety is diminished, according to Heidegger. In

modernity Things become mere objects. Indeed subsequently objects
themselves, together with human beings, become mere resources. A resource
(or 'standing-reserve'; the German is Bestand) is something that, unlike an
object, is determined wholly by a network of purposes into which we place it.
Heideggers examples include a hydroelectric powerplant on the Rhine and an
airplane, together with the electricity and fuel systems to which those artifacts
are connected. Heidegger associates resources with modern science and with
the metaphysics of subjectivity within which (he argues) modern science
moves. That metaphysics, which tends towards seeing man as the measure of
all things, is in fact metaphysics as such, according to Heidegger. For
anthropocentrism is incipient in the very beginnings of philosophy, blossoms in
various later philosophers including Descartes and Kant, and reaches its
apogee in Nietzsche, the extremity of whose anthropocentrism is the end of
metaphysics. It is the end of metaphysics (or, pleonastically: of the
metaphysics of subjectivity) in that here, in Nietzsche's extreme
anthropocentrism, metaphysics reaches its completion or full unfolding. And
that end reflects the reign of resources. [T]he world of completed metaphysics
can be stringently called technology (Heidegger 2003: 82). However, in
44

Heideggers final analysis the ubiquity of resources owes not to science or

metaphysics but to a mode of revealing; it owes to an epochal ontological
regime that Heidegger calls Enframing, even if he seems to think, also, that a
change in human beings could mitigate Enframing and prepare for something
different and better. (More on this mitigation shortly.)

What though is wrong with the real being revealed as resource? Enframing is
monstrous (Heidegger 1994: 321). It is monstrous Heidegger contends
because it is nihilism. Nihilism is a forgetfulness of das Sein
(Seinsvergessenheit). Some such forgetfulness is nigh inevitable. We are
interested in beings as they present themselves to us. So we overlook the
conditions of that presentation, namely, being and Being. But Enframing
represents a more thoroughgoing form of forgetfulness. The hegemony of
resources makes it very hard (harder than usual recall above) to conceive
that beings could be otherwise, which is to say, to conceive that there is
something called Being that could yield different regimes of being. In fact,
Enframing actively denies being/Being. That is because Enframing, or the
metaphysics/science that corresponds to it, proceeds as if humanity were the
measure of all things and hence as if being, or that which grants being
independently of us (Being), were nothing. Such nihilism sounds bearable. But
Heidegger lays much at its door: an impoverishment of culture; a deep kind of
homelessness; the devaluation of the highest values (see Young 2002: ch. 2
and passim). He goes so far as to trace the events of world history in this [the
twentieth] century to Seinsvergessenheit (Heidegger in Wolin 1993: 69).

Heideggers response to nihilism is thinking (Denken). The thinking at issue is

a kind of thoughtful questioning. Its object that which it thinks about can be
the pre-Socratic ideas from which philosophy developed, or philosophys
history, or Things, or art. Whatever its object, thinking always involves
recognition that it is das Sein, albeit in some interplay with humanity, which
determines how beings are. Indeed, Heideggerian thinking involves wonder and
gratitude in the face of das Sein. Heidegger uses Meister Eckharts notion of
releasement to elaborate upon such thinking. The idea (prefigured, in fact, in
Heideggers earlier work) is of a non-impositional comportment towards beings
which lets beings be what they are. That comportment grant[s] us the
possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. It promises a new
ground and a new foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world
of technology without being imperiled by it (Heidegger 1966: 55). Heidegger
calls the dwelling at issue poetic and one way in which he specifies it is via
various poets. Moreover, some of Heideggers own writing is semi-poetic. A
small amount of it actually consists of poems. So it is not entirely surprising to
45

find Heidegger claiming that, All philosophical thinking' is 'in itself poetic
(Heidegger 1991, vol. 2: 73; Heidegger made this claim at a time when he still
considered himself a philosopher as against a non-metaphysical, and hence
non-philosophical, thinker). The claim is connected to the centrality that
Heidegger gives to language, a centrality that is summed up (a little
gnomically) in the statement that language is the house of das Sein
(Heidegger 1994: 217).

Heideggerian thinking has been attacked as (some mixture of) irrationalist,

quietist, reactionary, and authoritarian (see for example Adorno 1973 and
Habermas 1987b: ch. 6). A related objection is that, though Heidegger claimed
to leave theology alone, what he produced was an incoherent reworking of
religion (Haar 1993; Philipse 1998). Of the more or less secular or (in Caputos
term) demythologized construals of Heidegger, many are sympathetic and,
among those, many fasten upon such topics as technology, nihilism, and
dwelling (Borgmann 1984, Young 2002: ch.s 79; Feenberg 1999: ch. 8). Other
secular admirers including, notably, Rorty and Derrida concentrate upon
Heideggers attempt to encapsulate and interrogate the entire philosophical
tradition.

d. Derrida's Post-Structuralism

Structuralism was an international trend in linguistics, literary theory,

anthropology, political theory, and other disciplines. It sought to explain
phenomena (sounds, tropes, behaviors, norms, beliefs . . .) less via the
phenomena themselves, or via their genesis, and more via structures that the
phenomena exist within or instantiate. The post-structuralists applied this
structural priority to philosophy. They are post-structuralists less because they
came after structuralism and more because, in appropriating structuralism,
they distanced themselves from the determinism and scientism it often
involved (Dews 1987: 14). The post-structuralists included Deleuze, Foucault,
Lyotard and Lacan (and sometimes post-structuralism is associated with postmodernism; see Malpas 2003: 711). Each of these thinkers (perhaps
excepting Lacan) is highly metaphilosophical. But attention is restricted to the
best known and most controversial of the post-structuralists, namely, Jacques
Derrida.

46

Derrida practiced deconstruction (Dconstruire, la Dconstruction; Derrida

adapts the notion of deconstruction from Heidegger's idea of 'destruction', on
which latter see section 4.a.ii above). Deconstruction is a textual operation
(Derrida 1987: 3). The notion of text here is a broad one. It extends from
written texts to conceptions, discourses, and even practices. Nevertheless,
Derrida's early work concentrates upon actual texts and, more often than not,
philosophical ones. The reason Derrida puts operation (textual operation)
within scare-quotes is that he holds that deconstruction is no method. That in
turn is for two reasons (each of which should become clearer below). First, the
nature of deconstruction varies with that which is deconstructed. Second, there
is a sense in which texts deconstruct themselves. Nonetheless: deconstruction,
as a practice, reveals such alleged self-deconstruction; and that practice does
have a degree of regularity. The practice of deconstruction has several stages.
(In presenting those stages, text is taken in the narrow sense. Moreover, it is
presumed that in each case a single text is, at least centrally, at issue.)

Deconstruction begins with a commentary (Derrida 1976: 158) - with a faithful

and interior reading of a text (Derrida 1987: 6). Within or via such
commentary, the focus is upon metaphysical oppositions. Derrida understands
metaphysics as the metaphysics of presence (another notion adapted from
Heidegger); and an opposition belongs to metaphysics (pleonastically, the
metaphysics of presence) just in case: (i) it contains a privileged term and a
subordinated term; and (ii) the privileged term has to do with presence.
Presence is presence to consciousness and/or the temporal present. The
oppositions at issue include not only presenceabsence (construed in either of
the two ways just indicated) but also, and among others (and with the term
that is privileged within each opposition given first) these: normal/abnormal,
standard/parasitic, fulfilled/void, serious/nonserious, literal/nonliteral (Derrida
1988: 93).

The next step in deconstruction is to show that the text undermines its own
metaphysical oppositions. That is: the privileged terms reveal themselves to be
less privileged over the subordinate terms less privileged vis--vis presence,
less simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical (Derrida 1988: 93)
than they give themselves out to be. Here is a common way in which Derrida
tries to establish the point. He tries to show that a privileged term essentially
depends upon, or shares some crucial feature(s) with, its supposed
subordinate. One of Derridas deconstructions of Husserl can serve as an
example. Husserl distinguishes mental life, which he holds to be inherently
intentional (inherently characterized by aboutness) from language, which is
intentional only via contingent association with such states. Thereby Husserl
47

privileges the mental over the linguistic. However: Husserls view of the
temporality of experience entails that the presence he makes criterial for
intrinsic intentionality a certain presence of meanings to the mind is always
partially absent. Or so Derrida argues (Derrida, section 4). A second strategy of
Derridas is to apply a distinction onto itself reflexively and thus show that it
itself is imbued with the disfavored term (Landau, 1992/1993: 1899). For
example, Derrida shows that when Aristotle and other philosophers discuss the
nature of metaphors (and thereby the distinction between metaphors and nonmetaphors), they use metaphors in the discussions themselves (idem) and so
fail in their attempts to relegate or denigrate metaphor. A further strategy
involves the notion of undecidability (see Derrida, section 5).

A third stage or aspect of deconstruction is, one can say, less negative or more
productive (and Derrida himself calls this the productive moment of
deconstruction). Consider Derridas deconstruction(s) of the opposition
between speech and writing. Derrida argues, initially, as follows. Speech and
even thought, understood as a kind of inner speech shares with writing
features that have often been used to present writing as only a poor
descendent of speech. Those features include being variously interpretable and
being derivative of something else. But there is more. Derrida posits
something, which he calls archi-criture, arche-writing, which is fundamental
to signifying processes in general, a writing that is the condition of all forms
of expression, whether scriptural, vocal, or otherwise (Johnson 1993: 66).
Indeed: as well as being a condition of possibility, arche-writing is, in Derridas
frequent and arresting phrase, a condition of its impossibility. Arche-writing
establishes or reveals a limit to any kind of expression (a limit, namely, to the
semantic transparency, and the self-sufficiency, of expressions). Other
deconstructions proceed similarly. A hierarchical opposition is undermined; a
new term is produced through a kind of generalization of the previously
subordinate term; and the new term such as supplement, trace and the
neologism diffrance (Derrida, section 3.ce) represents a condition of
possibility and impossibility for the opposition in question.

What is the status of these conditions? Sometimes Derrida calls them quasitranscendental. That encourages this idea: here we have an account not just
of concepts but of things or phenomena. Yet Derrida himself does not quite say
that. He denies that we can make any simple distinction between text and
world, between conceptual system and phenomena. Such may be part of the
thrust of the (in)famous pronouncement, There is nothing outside of the text
(il ny a pas de hors-texte; Derrida 1976: 158). Nor does Derrida think that, by
providing such notions as arche-writing, he himself wholly evades the
48

metaphysics of presence. We have no languageno syntax and no lexicon

that is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single deconstructive
proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the
implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest (Derrida 1990: 280f.).
Still: if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible
for giving in to it [...] this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are
of equal pertinence. The quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps
measured by the critical rigor with which this relation to the history of
metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought (Derrida 1990: 282).

Derrida retained the foregoing views, which he had developed by the end of
the 1960s. But there were developments of metaphilosophical significance. (1)
In the 70s, his style became more playful, and his approach to others text
became more literary (and those changes more or less persisted; Derrida would
want to know, however, just what we understand by playful and literary). (2)
Again from the 70s onwards, Derrida joined with others in order to: sustain and
promote the teaching of philosophy in schools; to consider philosophys role;
and to promote philosophy that transgressed disciplinary boundaries. (3) In the
80s, Derrida tried to show that deconstruction had an ethical and political
import. He turned to themes that included cosmopolitanism, decision,
forgiveness, law, mourning, racism, responsibility, religion, and terrorism and
claimed, remarkably, that deconstruction is justice (Derrida 1999: 15). To give
just a hint of this last idea: Justice is what the deconstruction of the law an
analysis of the laws conditions of possibility and impossibility, of its
presuppositions and limits means to bring about, where law means
legality, legitimacy, or legitimation (for example) (Caputo 1997: 131f.). (On
some of these topics, see Derrida, section 7.) (4) By the 90s, if not earlier,
Derrida held that in philosophy the nature of philosophy is always and
everywhere at issue (see for instance Derrida 1995: 411).

Despite his views about the difficulty of escaping metaphysics, and despite his
evident belief in the critical and exploratory value of philosophy, Derrida has
been attacked for undermining philosophy. Habermas provides an instance of
the criticism. Habermas argued that Derrida erases the distinction between
philosophy and literature. Habermas recognizes that Derrida means to be
simultaneously maintaining and relativizing the distinction between literature
and philosophy (Habermas 1987b: 192). But the result, Habermas thinks, is an
effacement of the differences between literature and philosophy. Habermas
adds, or infers, that Derrida does not belong to those philosophers who like to
argue (Habermas 1987b: 193). Derrida objected to being called
unargumentative. He objected, also, to Habermas' procedure of using other
49

deconstructionists those that Habermas deemed more argumentative as the

source for Derridas views.

Subsequently, Habermas and Derrida underwent something of a

rapprochement. Little reconciliation was achieved in the so-called Derrida
affair, wherein a collection of philosophers, angry that Derrida was to receive
an honorary degree from Cambridge, alleged that Derrida does not meet
accepted standards of clarity or rigor (quoted Derrida 1995: 420; a detailed
attack upon Derridas scholarship is Evans 1991).

There might be a sense in which Derrida is too rigorous. For he holds this:
Every concept that lays claim to any rigor whatsoever implies the alternative
of all or nothing (Derrida 1988: 116). One might reject that view. Might it be,
indeed, that Derrida insists upon rigid oppositions in order to legitimate the
project of calling them into question (Gerald Graff in Derrida 1988: 115)? One
might object, also, that Derridas interrogation of philosophy is more abstract,
more intangible, than most metaphysics. Something Levinas said apropos
Derrida serves as a response. The history of philosophy is probably nothing but
a growing awareness of the difficulty of thinking (Levinas 1996: 55; compare
Derrida 1995: 187f.). The following anxiety might persist. Despite Derridas socalled ethical and political turns, and despite the work he has inspired within
he humanities, deconstruction little illuminates phenomena that are not much
like anything reasonably designatable as a text (Dews 1987: 35). A more
general version of the anxiety is that, for all the presentations of Derrida as a
philosopher of difference, deconstruction obscures differences (Kearney 1984:
114; Habermas 1992a: 159).

5. References and Further Reading

Note that, in the case of many of the items that follow, the date given for a text
is not the date of its first publication.

a. Explicit Metaphilosophy and Works about Philosophical Movements or

Traditions

50

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957) Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth? in

her Human life, Action, and Ethics: Essays, pp. 161168. Exeter, UK: Imprint
Academic, 2005. Edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally.
Beaney, Michael (2007) The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-Century
Philosophy, in Beaney, Michael ed. The Analytic Turn. Essays in Early Analytic
Philosophy and Phenomenology, New York and London: Routledge, 2007.
Good on, especially, the notions of analysis in early Analytic philosophy and on
the historical precedents of those notions.
Beaney, Michael (2009) Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy:
Supplement to entry on Analysis, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Beauchamp, Tom L. (2002) Changes of Climate in the Development of Practical
Ethics, Science and Engineering Ethics 8: 131138.
Bernstein, Richard J. (2010) The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge MA and Cambridge.
An account of the influence and importance of pragmatism.
Chappell, Timothy (2009) Ethics
Investigations 32: 3 206243.

Beyond

Moral

Theory

Philosophical

Chase, James, and Reynolds, Jack (2010) Analytic Versus Continental:

Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy. Stocksfield: Acumen.
Clarke, Stanley G. (1987) Anti-Theory in Ethics, American Philosophical
Quarterly 24: 3 237244.
Deleuze, Giles, and Guattari, Flix (1994) What is Philosophy? London and New
York: Verso. Trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson.
Less of an introduction to metaphilosophy than its title might suggest.
Galison, Peter (1990) Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural
Modernism, Critical Inquiry, 16(4[Summer]): 709752.
Glendinning, Simon (2006) The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical
Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Glock, Hans-Johann (2008) What Is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Comprehensive. Illuminating. Not introductory.
Graham, George and Horgan, Terry (1994) Southern Fundamentalism and the
End of Philosophy, Philosophical Issues 5: 219247.
51

Lazerowitz, Morris (1970) A Note on Metaphilosophy, Metaphilosophy, 1(1):

9191 (sic).
An influential (but very short) definition of metaphilosophy.
Levin, Janet (2009) Experimental Philosophy, Analysis, 69(4) 2009: 761769.
Levy, Neil (2009) Empirically Informed Moral Theory: A Sketch of the
Landscape, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12:38.
McNaughton, David (2009) Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious?, Florida
Philosophical Review IX(2): 1-13.
Joll, Nicholas (2009) How Should Philosophy Be Clear? Loaded Clarity, Default
Clarity, and Adorno, Telos 146 (Spring): 7395.
Joll, Nicholas (Forthcoming) Review of Jrgen Habermas et al, An Awareness of
What Is Missing (Polity, 2010), Philosophy.
Tries to clarify and evaluate some of Habermas' thinking on religion.
Papineau, David (2009) The Poverty of Analysis, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume lxxxiii: 130.
Preston, Aaron (2007) Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion. London
and New York: Continuum.
Argues, controversially, that Analytic philosophy has never had any substantial
philosophical or metaphilosophical unity.
Prinz, Jesse J. (2008) Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy in J.
Knobe and S. Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Urmson, J. D. (1956) Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two
World Wars. London: Oxford University Press.
Rescher, Nicholas (2006) Philosophical Dialectics. An Essay on Metaphilosophy.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Centres upon the notion of philosophical progress. Contains numerous,
occasionally gross typographical errors.
Rorty, Richard ed. (1992) The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Second edition.
A useful study of 1930s to 1960s Analytic metaphilosophy.

52

Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, Jerome B., and Skinner, Quentin eds. (1984)
Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sorell, Tom, and Rogers, C. A. J. eds. (2005) Analytic Philosophy and History of
Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford.
Stewart, Jon (1995) Schopenhauers Charge and Modern Academic Philosophy:
Some Problems Facing Philosophical Pedagogy, Metaphilosophy 26(3): 270
278.
Taylor, Charles (1984) Philosophy and Its History, in Rorty, Schneewind, and
Skinner 1984.
Williams, Bernard (2003) Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look in The
Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James,
pp. 2537. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition.
Williamson, Timothy (2007) The Philosophy of Philosophy, Malden MA and
Oxford: Blackwell.
A dense, rather technical work aiming to remedy what it sees as a metaphilosophical lack in Analytic philosophy. Treats, among other things, these
notions: conceptual truth; intuitions; thought experiments.
b. Analytic Philosophy including Wittgenstein, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and
Logical Pragmatism

Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (1979). Third edition. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Burtt, E. A. (1963) Descriptive Metaphysics, Mind 72(285):1839.
Campbell, Richmond and Hunter, Bruce (2000) Introduction, in R. Campbell
and B. Hunter eds. Moral Epistemology Naturalized, Supple. Vol., Canadian
Journal of Philosophy: 128.
Campbell has a published a similar piece, under the title Moral Epistemology,
in the online resource the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Carnap (1931) The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of
Language in Ayer, A. J. (1959) ed. Logical Positivism. Glencoe IL: The Free
Press.
Cavell, Stanley (1979) The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality,
and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
53

Cohen, G. A. (2002) Deeper into Bullshit, in Buss, Sarah and Overton, Lee eds.
Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adapts Harry Frankfurts construal of bullshit in order to diagnose and indict
much bullshit in certain areas of philosophical and semi-philosophical culture
(p. 335). Reprinted in Hardcastle, Gary L. and Reich, George A. eds. Bullshit and
Philosophy, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2006.
Copi, Irving M. (1949) Language Analysis and Metaphysical Inquiry in Rorty
1992.
Freeman, Samuel (2007) Rawls. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Gellner, Ernest (2005) Words and Things. An Examination of, and an Attack on,
Linguistic Philosophy. Second edition. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Glock, Hans-Johann (2003a) Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and
Reality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Glock, Hans-Johann ed. (2003b) Strawson and Kant. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Haack, Susan (1979) Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics, Philosophical
Studies 35: 361371.
Hacker, P. M. S. (2003) On Strawsons Rehabilitation of Metaphysics in Glock
ed. 2003b.
Hacker, P. M. S. (2007) Human Nature: the Categorial Framework. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hutchinson, Brian (2001) G. E. Moores Ethical Theory: Resistance and
Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kripke, Saul A (1980) Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell. Revised and
Enlarged edition.
Lance, M. and Little, M., (2006) Particularism and anti-theory, in D. Copp, ed.,
The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Loux, Michael J (2002) Metaphysics. A Contemporary Introduction, second ed.
Routledge: London and New York.
Malcolm, Norman (1984) Ludwig Wittgenstein: a memoir / by Norman Malcolm;
with a biographical sketch by G. H. von Wright and Wittgensteins Letters to
Malcolm. Second ed. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
54

McDowell, John (1994) Mind and World. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard
University Press.
Perhaps the paradigmatic post-Analytic text.
McDowell, John (2000) Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity in Brandom ed.
(2000).
McMahon, Jennifer A. (2007) Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics
Naturalized. New York and London: Routledge.
Moore, G. E. (1899) The Nature of Judgement, in G. E. Moore Selected
Writings, London: Routledge, 1993, ed. T. Baldwin.
Moore, G. E. (1953) Some Main Problems of Philosophy. New York: Humanities
Press.
From lectures given in 1910 and 1911.
Moore, G. E. (1993) Principia Ethica. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Second and revised edition, containing some other writings by Moore.
Neurath, Otto, Carnap, Rudolf, and Hahn, Hans (1996) The Scientific
Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle, in Sarkar, Sahotra ed. The
Emergence of Logical Empiricism: from 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1996. pp. 321340.
An English translation of the manifesto issued by the Vienna Circle in 1929.
Orenstein, Alex (2002) W. V. Quine. Chesham, UK: Acumen.
Pitkin, Hanna (1993) Wittgenstein and Justice. On the Significance of Ludwig
Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. Berkeley and London: University
of California Press.
Putnam, Hilary (1985) After Empiricism in Rajchman and West 1985.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1977) Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York:
Columbia University Press. New edition.
Quine, W. V. O. (1980) From A Logical Point of View. Harvard: Harvard University
Press. New edition.
Quine, W. V. O. (1981) Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
55

Rawls, John (1999a) A Theory of Justice. Revised edition. Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John (1999b) Collected Papers ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Russell, Bertrand (1992) A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz.
London and New York: Routledge.
Russell, Bertrand (1995) My Philosophical Development. Abingdon, UK and New
York: Routledge.
Russell, Bertrand (2009) Our Knowledge of the External World: As a Field for
Scientific Method in Philosophy. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Rynin, David (1956) The Dogma of Logical Pragmatism, Mind 65(259): 379
391.
Schilpp, P. A. ed. (1942) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore Northwestern University
Press, Evanston IL.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur ed. (1942) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore. Evanston and
Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Schroeter, Franois (2004) Reflective Equilibrium and Antitheory, Nos, 38(1):
110134.
Schultz, Bart (1992) Bertrand Russell in Ethics and Politics, Ethics, 102: 3
(April): 594634.
Sellars, Wilfred (1963) Science, Perception and Reality. Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd; London, and The Humanities Press: New York.
Strawson, Peter (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.
London: Methuen.
Strawson, Peter (1991) Analysis and Metaphysics. An
Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Introduction

to

Both an introduction to philosophy and an introduction to Strawsons own

philosophical and metaphilosophical views.
Strawson, Peter (2003) A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography in Glock ed. 2003b.
Weinberg, Jonathan M., Nichols, Shaun and Stitch, Stephen (2001) Normativity
and Epistemic Intuitions, Philosophical Topics, 29(1&2): 429460.
Williams, Bernard (1981) Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

56

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears

and B.F. McGuinness. Routledge: London.
The title means schema of philosophical logic.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics,
Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969) The Blue and Brown Books. Preliminary Studies for
the Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell: Oxford.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001) Philosophical Investigations. The German Text,
with a Revised English Translation. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Third
edition. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.
The major work of the later Wittgenstein.
Wright, Crispin (2002) Human Nature? in Nicholas H. Smith ed. Reading
McDowell. On Mind and World. London and New York: Routledge.
c. Pragmatism and Neopragmatism

Brandom, Robert B. ed. (2000) Rorty and His Critics. Malden MA and Oxford:
Blackwell.
Dewey, John (1998) The Essential Dewey, two volumes, Larry Hickman and
Thomas M. Alexander eds. Indiana University Press.
James, William (1995) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of
Thinking. New York: Dover Publications.
Lectures.
Peirce, C. S. (193158) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. C.
Hartshorne, P. Weiss (Vols. 16) and A. Burks (Vols. 78). Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rortys magnum opus.
Rorty, Richard (1991a) Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 19721980).
Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Rorty, Richard (1991b) The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy, pp. 175196
of his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers, Volume 1.
Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
57

Rorty, Richard (1998) Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in TwentiethCentury America. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard (2007) Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers,
Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talisse, Robert B. and Aikin, Scott F. (2008) Pragmatism: A Guide for the
Perplexed. Continuum: London and New York.
Good and useful.
d. Continental Philosophy

Adorno, Theodor W. (1986) The Jargon of Authenticity. London and Henley:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986; trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trans. Edmund
Jephcott.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1976) with R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, H. Pilot, and K.
Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D.
Frisby, London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Documents from debates between Popperians (who were not, in fact, positivists
in any strict sense) and the Frankfurt School.
Baxter, Hugh (1987) System and Life-World in Habermas' Theory of
Communicative Action Theory and Society 16: 1 (January): 3986.
Braver, Lee (2009) Heideggers Later Writings. A Readers Guide. London and
New York: Continuum.
Accessible and helpful, yet perhaps somewhat superficial.
Caputo, John D (1977) The Question of Being and Transcendental
Phenomenology: Reflections on Heideggers relationship to Husserl, Research
in Phenomenology 7 (1):84105.
Caputo, John D (1993) Demythologizing
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger.

Bloomington

and

More Continental than one might guess merely from the title.
Caputo, John, D (1997) A Commentary, Part Two of Derrida, Jacques (1997)
Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York:
Fordam University Press. Edited and with a commentary by John D. Caputo.
58

Carmen, Taylor, and B. N. Hansen eds. (2005) The Cambridge Companion to

Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Cerbone, David (2006) Understanding Phenomenology. Chesham, UK: Acumen.
A good introduction to phenomenology.
Cooper, David (1999) Existentialism. A Reconstruction 2nd ed. Blackwell:
Oxford and Malden, MA
Careful, argumentative, fairly accessible.
Davis, Colin (1996) Levinas. An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Not only introduces Levinas but also mounts a strong challenge to him.
Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press. Trans. G. C. Spivak.
Derrida, Jacques (1987) Positions. London: Althone. Trans. Alan Bass.
Three relatively early interviews with Derrida. Relatively accessible.
Derrida, Jacques (1988) Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Contains Derridas side of an (acrimonious) debate with John Searle. Includes
an Afterword wherein Derrida answers questions put to him by Gerald Graff.
Derrida, Jacques (1990) Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Trans. Alan
Bass.
Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . . : Interviews, 19741994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf
et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1999) Force of Law in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and
David Gray Carlson eds. (1982) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,
New York: Routledge.
Dews, Peter (1987) Logics of Disintegration. Post-stucturalist Thought and the
Claims of Critical Theory. London and New York: Verso.
Dews, Peter (1995) Morality, Ethics and Postmetaphysical Thinking in his
The Limits of Disenchantment. Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy.
London and New York: Verso, 1995.
Diprose, Rosalyn and Reynolds, Jack eds. (2008) Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts.
Chesham, UK: Acumen.

59

Dubiel, Daniel (1985) Theory and Politics. Studies in the Development of Critical
Theory. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Edgar, Andrew (2006) Habermas. The Key Concepts. Routledge. London and
New York.
Elden, Stuart (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible.
London and New York: Continuum.
Evans, J. Claude (1991) Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of
the Voice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Detailed contestation of Derridas interpretation of, especially, Husserl.
Finlayson, Gordon (2005) Habermas: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Finlayson, Gordon (2009) Morality and Critical Theory. On the Normative
Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism, Telos (146: Spring): 741.
Freyenhagen, Fabian (2008) Moral Philosophy in Deborah Cook (ed.) Theodor
Adorno: Key Concepts. Stocksfield: Acumen.
A good and somewhat revisionist synopsis of Adornos moral philosophy.
Gadamer, Hans-Geog (1981) Reason in the Age of Science. Cambridge MA: MIT.
Trans. Frederick Lawrence.
Geuss, Raymond (1981) The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Geuss, Raymond (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press.
Glendinning, Simon (2001) Much Ado About Nothing (on Herman Philipse,
Heideggers Philosophy of Being). Ratio 14 (3):281288.
Haar, Michel (1993) Heidegger and the Essence of Man. New York: State
University of New York Press. Trans. McNeill, William.
Habermas, Jrgen (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1:
Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Trans. McCarthy,
Thomas.
Habermas, Jrgen (1987a) Knowledge and Human Interests. Cambridge: Polity.
Second edition. Trans. Jeremy Shapiro.

60

Habermas, Jrgen (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve

Lectures. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.
Trans. Frederick Lawrence.
One of Habermas' more accessible and more polemical works.
Habermas, Jrgen (1992a) Autonomy and Solidarity. Interviews with Jrgen
Habermas. Ed. Peter Dews. Revised edition.
A good place to start with Habermas.
Habermas, Jrgen (1992b) Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays.
Oxford: Polity Press. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten.
Habermas, Jrgen (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion. Philosophical
Essays. Cambridge and Malden Ma.: Polity. Trans. Ciaran Cronin.
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
The early Heideggers main work.
Heidegger, Martin (1966) Discourse on Thinking. A translation of Gelassenheit.
New York: Harper & Row. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund.
Heidegger, Martin (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
Heidegger, Martin (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Revised ed. Trans. Albert
Hofstadter.
Close in its doctrines to Being and Time, but often considerably more
accessible.
Heidegger, Martin (1991) Nietzsche, 4 volumes. New York: HarperCollins. Trans.
David Farrell Krell.
Heidegger, Martin (1994) Basic Writings. London: Routledge. Revised and
expanded edition.
Contains What is Metaphysics?, Letter on Humanism, and The Question
Concerning Technology, among other texts.
Heidegger, Martin (2003) The End of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Trans. Joan Stambaugh.
Held, David (1990) Introduction to Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity.

61

Broad-brush and fairly accessible account of first-generation Critical Theory and

of the relatively early Habermas.
Horkheimer, Max (1937) Traditional and Critical Theory in Horkheimer, Critical
Theory: Selected Essays. London and New York: Continuum, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max (1974) Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum.
Like Horkheimer and Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment, but more accessible.
Husserl, Edmund (1931) Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd / Humanities Press. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson.
Kluwer have produced a newer and more accurate version of this book; but the
Boyce Gibson version is slightly more readable.
Husserl, Edmund (1999) The Idea of Phenomenology Dordrecht: Kluwer. Trans.
Lee Hardy.
Probably Husserls most accessible (or least inaccessible) statement of
phenomenology.
Husserl, Edmund (1970) The Crisis of the European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Trans. David Carr.
Husserl, Edmund (1999) Cartesian Meditations. An
Phenomenology. Trans. Dorian Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Introduction

to

Johnson, Christopher (1993) System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques

Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Christopher (1999) Derrida. The Scene of Writing. New York:
Routledge.
Good, short, and orientated around Derrida's Of Grammatology.
Landau, Iddo (1992/1993 [sic]) Early and Later Deconstruction in the Writings
of Jacques Derrida, Cardozo Law Review, 14: 18951909.
Unusually clear.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1996) Proper Names. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Malpas, Simon (2003) Jean-Franois Lyotard. Routledge. London and New York.
Marcuse, Herbert (1991) One-Dimensional Man. Second edition. Routledge:
London.
A classic work of first-generation Critical Theory.
62

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. New York:

Routledge. Trans. Colin Smith.
Merleau-Pontys principal work.
Mulhall, Stephen (1996) Heidegger and Being and Time. Routledge: London and
New York.
Outhwaite, William (1994) Habermas. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge. Polity.
Pattison, George (2000) The Later Heidegger. London and New York: Routledge.
A helpful introduction to the later Heidegger.
Philipse, Herman (1998) Heideggers Philosophy
Interpretation. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

of

Being:

Critical

A large, serious, and very controversial work that sets out to understand, but
also to demolish much of, Heidegger. Q.v. Glendinning (2001) - which defends
Heidegger.
Plant, Robert (Forthcoming) This strange institution called philosophy:
Derrida and the primacy of metaphilosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Polt, Richard (1999) Heidegger: An Introduction. London: UCL Press.
Superb introduction, but light on the later Heidegger.
Russell, Matheson (2006) Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New
York: Continuum.
Excellent.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963) The Problem of Method. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
London: Methuen.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1989) Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology. London: Routledge. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
The early Sartres major work.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1992) Notebooks for an Ethics. Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press. Trans. David Pellauer.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2004) The Transcendence of the Ego. A Sketch for a
Phenomenological Description. Abingdon, U.K.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2007) Existentialism and Humanism. London: Methuen. Trans.
Philip Mairet.
63

Sartres philosophy at its most accessible.

Smith, David (2003) Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London and New
York: Routledge.
Smith, Joel (2005) Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenological Reduction,
Inquiry 48(6): 553571.
Wolin, Richard, ed. (1993) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader.
Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press.
The controversy in question concerns Heideggers Nazism. See also Young
1997.
Young, Julian (1997) Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Young, Julian (2002) Heideggers Later Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
A slim introduction to, and an attempt to make compelling, the thought of the
later Heidegger.
e. Other

Borgmann, Albert (1984) Technology and the Character of Everyday Life: A

Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Interesting and impassioned. Influenced by Heidegger.
Descartes, Ren (1988) The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes (3 vols).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Volume one.
Feenberg, Andrew (1999) Questioning Technology. London and New York:
Routledge.
This book has at least one foot in the Critical Theory tradition but also
appropriates some ideas from Heidegger.
Hume, David (1980) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the
Posthumous Essays Of the Immortality of the Soul and Of Suicide.
Indianapolis: Hackett. Ed. Richard H. Popkin.
Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason. Various translations.

64

As is standard, the article above refers to this work using the A and B
nomenclature. The number(s) following A denote pages from Kants first
edition of the text. Number(s) following B denote pages from Kants second
edition.
Locke, John (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ONeill, John (2003) Unified Science as Political Philosophy: Positivism,
Pluralism and Liberalism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 34
(September): 575596.
ONeill, John and Uebel, Thomas (2004) Horkheimer and Neurath: Restarting a
Disrupted Debate, European Journal of Philosophy, 12:1 75105.
Petitot, Jean, Varela, Francisco, Pachoud, Bernard, and Roy, Jean-Michel eds.
(2000) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Author and Article Information

Nicholas Joll
Email: joll.nicholas@gmail.com
United Kingdom

65