Alan Schrift

This major work of reference is an indispensable resource for anyone conducting research or teaching in philosophy. An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together under the general editorship of Alan Schrift and the volume editors to provide authoritative analyses of the continental tradition of philosophy from Kant to the present day. Divided, chronologically, into eight volumes, "The History of Continental Philosophy" is designed to be accessible to a wide range of readers, from the scholar looking for original insight and the latest thinking to the student wishing for a masterly encapsulation of a particular thinker's views. By placing continental philosophy within a historical context, "The History of Continental Philosophy" helps define what the continental tradition has been and where it is moving. It will become a landmark publication in its field. Volume 1 covers the period from 1780 until 1848, focusing primarily on the main philosophical figures and developments in Germany during that period, but also including a description of economic and social theories in France that set the stage for the philosophical and social movements that predominated in Germany and France during the second half of the nineteenth century. Volume 2 examines what is often referred to as the 'Age of Revolution' as various responses to Hegel, while also attending to developments in science, mathematics, sociology and aesthetics during the second half of the nineteenth century that would set the stage for the twentieth century. Volume 3 examines the earliest developments in the twentieth century: while attending to a number of key thinkers (Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Jaspers, Scheler), it also discusses the emergence of French sociology in the Durkheim school, developments in modern science, the philosophical response to evolution, and the schools of phenomenology and neo-Kantianism. Volume 4, as the title indicates, charts the various responses to phenomenology that appeared in the years following Husserl, with particular attention to the emergence of existentialism and existential theology, as well as its relations with philosophy of science, aesthetics and ethics. Volume 5 surveys some of the main continental movements and philosophers associated with social and political philosophy and philosophy of the human sciences (notably history, linguistics, and social and political science) during the period from 1940 through to 1968. Volume 6 looks at the major figures associated with the two dominant movements that emerge in the 1960s - poststructuralism and critical theory - while also attending to the emergence of philosophical feminism and some influential figures in those years not easily situated in the "standard" histories of the period (Serres, Bourdieu). Volume 7 examines the developments in Continental philosophy in the years, roughly, 1980-95, the period immediately after the hegemony of poststructuralism in France and of Habermas in Germany. Volume 8 attempts to situate the present scene in continental philosophy in terms of various new developments that are framed as attempts to rethink some of the classic themes with which the history of continental philosophy has been more or less consistently engaged.

"Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation" analyses the major themes and developments in a period that brought continental philosophy to the forefront of scholarship in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and that set the agenda for philosophical thought on the continent and elsewhere from the 1960s to the present. Focusing on the years 1960-1984, the volume examines the major figures associated with poststructuralism and the second generation of critical theory, the two dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Habermas. Influential thinkers such as Serres, Bourdieu, and Rorty, who are not easily placed in "standard" histories of the period, are also covered. Beyond this, thematic essays engage with issues as diverse as the Nietzschean legacy, the linguistic turn in continental thinking, the phenomenological inheritance of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the influence of psychoanalysis, the emergence of feminist thought and a philosophy of sexual difference, the renewal of the critical theory tradition, and the importation of continental philosophy into literary theory.

The second half of the 19th Century saw a revolution in both European politics and philosophy. Philosophical fervour reflected political fervour. Five great critics dominated the European intellectual scene: Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. "Nineteenth-Century Philosophy" assesses the response of each of these leading figures to Hegelian philosophy - the dominant paradigm of the time - to the shifting political landscape of Europe and the United States, and also to the emerging critique of modernity itself. Both individually and collectively, these thinkers succeeded in revolutionizing theology, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The period also saw the emergence of new schools of thought and new disciplinary thinking. The volume covers the birth of sociology and the social sciences, the development of French spiritualism, the beginning of American pragmatism, the rise of science and mathematics, and the maturation of hermeneutics and phenomenology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on October 12–14, 2023. The SPEP 2023 plenary addresses were delivered by Rahel Jaeggi of Humboldt University of Berlin and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò of Georgetown University. Jaeggi’s presentation, “Progress and Regression,” defended Critical Theory’s traditional pairing of these two concepts as a necessary tool for diagnosing and analyzing the crises of our times. Táíwò’s presentation, “The Point Is to Change It,” expanded on the constructive approach to politics developed in his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022). Unfortunately, for various reasons, we are not able to include either of the plenary addresses in the present issue.The thirteen articles in this issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first set of papers, on “Varieties of French Philosophy,” address important themes in the work of three of the most influential and [End Page 209] important French philosophers of the past half-century: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres. Eric Aldieri, in “Infinite Speed, or the Metaphysical Basis for Deleuzian Epistemology,” argues that the Deleuzian concept of infinite speed plays a role in Deleuze’s epistemology similar to the role played by the concept of eternity in Spinoza’s epistemology. By carefully reconstructing Spinoza’s appeal to eternity as the foundation of adequate knowledge, Aldieri shows that although Deleuze is critical of how the category of eternity functions in Spinoza’s philosophy, his idea that thought operates at infinite speed functions in the same way as the condition of possibility of knowledge in Deleuze’s later work.Through a close reading of the formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events, M. Curtis Allen, in “Singularities and Genetic Structure in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense,” seeks to clarify the role of singularities in Deleuze’s early major works. Are they, Allen asks, physical, metaphysical, or logical primitives, or are they relational, formal, or functional indices? Are they the building blocks out of which things and thought are made, or are they points of degeneration that cause systems to break down? Ultimately, what Allen concludes is that these questions presuppose an opposition that Deleuze will not recognize because they both mistake singularities as states of affairs while for Deleuze singularities are events.In “Sense and Circumstance: Michel Serres on the Transcendental,” Brent Adkins argues that Serres’s account of the transcendental differs in important ways from the post-Kantian consensus that by transcendental, we refer to the general conditions of possibility. Such a view depends on understanding the difference between the conditions and the conditioned as the difference between the general and the particular, and this is where Serres intervenes by suggesting instead that the transcendental has nothing to do with generality; rather, it concerns particular circumstances coming together as contingent stabilities. Adkins concludes by suggesting that here Serres and Deleuze share common ground.Joshua Avery Dawson, in “Power Failure: Appearance and Change in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” has a two-fold task. First, he wants to show how William Watkin, in his groundbreaking work on Badiou’s Being and Event trilogy, offers an account of power that Dawson calls the “power of appearance” but fails to account for another function of power that Dawson calls the “power of change.” Moreover, if Watkin’s account of power in Badiou is accurate, and Dawson thinks it is, then this raises a serious problem for [End Page 210] Badiou’s account of power insofar as these two modes of power are incommensurable, and this incommensurability may render Badiou’s notion of the event unviable.The topic of the second set of papers is “Varieties of Phenomenology,” which assesses anti-colonial phenomenology, early origins of French phenomenology, and cross-cultural phenomenology. In “Tran Duc Thao: The Foundations of Anti-Colonial Phenomenology,” Ernesto...

In emphasizing the interpretive nature of perception and knowledge, proponents of a hermeneutic approach are faced with a basic difficulty: how to avoid the dogmatic positing of a single correct interpretation without lapsing into an unmitigated relativism which, rejecting "correctness" as the interpretive telos, is unable to adjudicate between competing interpretations. The premise of this study is that this dilemma has animated the various controversies within the hermeneutic tradition and the aim of this study is to show that a pluralistic approach generated from Nietzsche's text suggests a way to avoid the noxious consequences of this hermeneutic dilemma. ;In part one, I examine the two leading interpretive methodologies as they are exhibited in their respective readings of Nietzsche. In so doing, I show that the disagreement between these two methods of reading emerges as a re-inscription of the dilemma of interpretive dogmatism and relativism. In chapter one, Heidegger is criticized for unjustifiably limiting the rich ambiguity of Nietzsche's text in his dogmatic claim to have discovered the "essential truth" of that text as the culmination of the metaphysical oblivion of Being. In chapter two, I examine the deconstructionist approach, showing that in opening new areas of interpretive inquiry within the Nietzschean text, their fondness for indeterminacy tends toward sanctioning any and all interpretations. ;In part two, I explore a pluralistic approach suggested by the Nietzschean text. In chapter three, his view of language is shown to open the fields of traditional epistemology to the creative play of interpretation. Chapter four examines the opposition between Nietzsche's two basic interpretive motifs, showing that in claiming there is nothing other than interpretation while at the same time calling for an apprehension of the text without falsifying it by interpretation , a tension is present which anticipates the hermeneutic dilemma. In chapter five, I argue that Nietzsche's genealogical method plays between the demands of philological attentiveness and perspectival creativity. Genealogy emerges as an example of the praxis of interpretive pluralism, allowing for a proliferation of interpretations while retaining a standard in terms of which these interpretations can be judged.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles...

Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison or Discipline and Punish was his first work since his election to the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. Soon after his inaugural address, he announced the formation of the organization Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP). Due to Foucault's visibility as a social activist for prison reform, Discipline and Punish was received not just as a socio‐historical or philosophical analysis but as a work of radical social criticism. This chapter reviews (1) the context in which Foucault wrote this work; (2) its structure and central themes; (3) its initial reception; and (4) its general place in Foucault's oeuvre and its influence. The English publication of Discipline and Punish and the first History of Sexuality gave rise to an entirely new field of inquiry – queer theory.