#Philosophy #Europe Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the infinite task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), xii + 412.

Abstract

When philosophers have turned their attention to Europe they have typically done so in order to interrupt geographical and geo-political determinations of its identity, and to stress instead that its cultural - or spiritual - identity is caught up with the Greek idea of philosophy. Europe, on this classical philosophical construal, is not simply the place where philosophy was first elaborated and developed. On the contrary, Europe first arises as a place only in and through the elaboration and development of philosophy. Europe is thus itself a philosophical phenomenon - its identity inseparable from the idea of a project that concerns ‘rational animality’ as such, and hence humanity as a whole. In his book on philosophical approaches to Europe from Husserl to Derrida, Rodophe Gasché introduces and defends the classical idea of Europe's Greek origin. Finding a somewhat different stress in Derrida's own study of Europe as a philosophical concept, this review attempts to open up a conception of Europe as a ‘philosopheme’ which resists conceptual clarification in the terms Gasché recommends, enjoining one instead to a task that is always beyond theoretical lucidity: to ‘stick one's neck out’ in the name of Europe.