Jack Alan Reynolds

One of the more important and under-thematized philosophical disputes in contemporary European philosophy pertains to the significance that is given to the inter-related phenomena of habituality, skilful coping, and learning. This paper examines this dispute by focusing on the work of the Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger-inspired phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, and contrasting his analyses with those of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in Difference and Repetition. Both Deleuze and Dreyfus pay a lot of attention to learning and coping, while arriving at distinct conclusions about these phenomena with a quite different ethico-political force. By getting to the bottom of the former, my hope is to problematize aspects of the latter in both philosophers' work. In Deleuze's case, it will be argued that he adopts a problematic position on learning that is aptly termed 'empirico-romanticism'. While I will agree with the general thrust of Dreyfus' foregrounding of habit and skilful coping, even in the political realm, it will also be argued that there are some risks associated with his view, notably of devolving into a conservative communitarianism.

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies, feminism and race theory.

A battle over the politics of time is a major part of what is at stake in the differences between three competing currents of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, post-structuralist philosophy, and phenomenological philosophy. Avowed or tacit philosophies of time define representatives of each of these groups and also guard against their potential interlocutors. However, by bringing the temporal differences between these philosophical trajectories to the fore, and showing both their methodological presuppositions and their ethico-political implications, this book begins a long overdue dialogue on their respective strengths and weaknesses. It argues that there are systemic temporal problems that afflict each, but especially the post-structuralist tradition and the analytic tradition. What is required is a “middle-way” that does not treat the living-present and the pragmatic temporality associated with bodily coping as an epiphenomenon to be explained away as either a transcendental illusion, or as a subjective/psychological experience that is not ultimately real.

While there have been many essays devoted to comparing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with that of Jacques Derrida, there has been no sustained book-length treatment of these two French philosophers. Additionally, many of the essays presuppose an oppositional relationship between them, and between phenomenology and deconstruction more generally. Jack Reynolds systematically explores their relationship by analyzing each philosopher in terms of two important and related issues—embodiment and alterity. Focusing on areas with which they are not commonly associated (e.g., Derrida on the body and Merleau-Ponty on alterity) makes clear that their work cannot be adequately characterized in a strictly oppositional way. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity proposes the possibility of a Merleau-Ponty-inspired philosophy that does not so avowedly seek to extricate itself from phenomenology, but that also cannot easily be dismissed as simply another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. Reynolds argues that there are salient ethico-political reasons for choosing an alternative that accords greater attention to our embodied situation.

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without 'relations of explication' and any kind of pre-understanding (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical 'going beyond' the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations.

The Continuum Companion to Existentialism offers the definitive guide to a key area of modern European philosophy. The book covers the fundamental questions asked by existentialism, providing valuable guidance for students and researchers to some of the many important and enduring contributions of existentialist thinkers. Eighteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts explore existentialism’s relationship to philosophical method; ontology; politics; psychoanalysis; ethics; religion; literature; emotion; feminism and sexuality; cognitive science; authenticity and the self; its significance in Latin American culture; and its contribution to the development of Poststructuralism. In addition, five short chapters summarise the status of canonical figures Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, delineating the historical approach to their work, while pointing to new directions such research is now taking. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools (A to Z of terms, concepts and thinkers; timeline of existentialism; list of resources and an annotated guide to further reading), this Companion is an essential tool to help the new reader navigate through the heart of Existentialism and modern European philosophy.

This paper critically engages with Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. In this paper, however, I raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other. I also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’.

This essay examines some of Derrida’s most famous ‘possible-impossible’ aporias, including his discussions of giving, hospitality, forgiveness, and mourning. He argues that the condition of the possibility of such themes is also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility. In order to reveal the shared logic upon which these aporias rely, and also to raise some questions about their persuasive efficacy, it will be argued that of the two polarities evoked by each of his possible-impossible aporias, the ‘impossible’ term of the opposition invariably posits a separation between “two radical singularities”, or in somewhat more controversial terms, between a self and an other. While Derrida emphasises this ‘impossible’ aspect of giving, hospitality, forgiveness, etc., Merleau-Ponty’s abiding emphasis upon the chiasmic intertwining of self and other provides the resources to challenge this emphasis, and even to reverse it. While Merleau-Ponty rarely directly addresses the kind of aporias that concern Derrida, his chiasmic account of embodiment, and his emphasis upon the body-subject’s propensity to seek an equilibrium with its environment, better accounts for the ‘possible’ side of the aporias that Derrida describes. In the process, it will be argued that Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy also allows for a more politically efficacious idea of responsibility towards the other than the position to which Derrida is tacitly committed.

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one's answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of 'mind'– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge.

There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, often involving either painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and Deleuze). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I instead propose a rather more speculative way of teasing out the differences between them, interpreting them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s non-oppositional typology of sadism and masochism, as it is expressed in Difference and Repetition and ‘Coldness and Cruelty’.