Refiguring Continental Philosophy

Abstract

Each year, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosts an annual meeting attended by some 500 philosophers and scholars-primarily from North Americ but increasingly including scholars from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere-working in the various traditions of so-called "continental" thought. At that meeting, over 150 blind-reviewed papers are delivered in areas that range from classical phenomenology and existentialism to hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, feminism, race theory, and beyond. A small selection of these papers from the 2006 meeting, hosted by Villanova University, is published in this SPEP supplement to Philosophy Today. These papers are indicative of the ways in which continental philosophy is presently engaged in refiguring how it understands itself as regards its methodology, its topics and issues, its relation to other philosophical traditions and, more broadly, its relation to other scholarly disciplines. Indeed, "refiguring" itself must be understood in a multiplicity of ways. To "refigure" can mean to give new form or shape, to retrace or remark, to re-imagine or rethink, or to reconstitute an existing political or ethical space. All these meanings are represented in the papers selected for this volume. Whether it be a question of the form of phenomenology or hermeneutics, the constitution of life and embodiment, the shape of the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, the representation of the political, or the very form of thinking itself, these papers explore the ways in which philosophers in the continental tradition are providing new figures for future work. We would like to dedicate this volume to Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) who was a faithful friend to SPEP. David Pellauer's eloquent essay, "Remembering Paul Ricoeur," presented at a memorial session devoted to Ricoeur at the 2006 meeting bears witness too the importance of Ricoeur's life and work for this Society and for philosophy in general. Issues in Phenomenology The four essays that comprise this first section are all explorations in refiguring classical themes or positions within phenomenology. John O'Connor's essay, "Anti-Psychologism and the Path Beyond Reductive Egology in Husserl," reexamines the criticism of Husserl's priority of the ego in phenomenological analysis. O'Connor defends Husserl's position by appealing not to the later writings where one finds Husserl's analyses of intersubjectivity and historicity, but to the earlier writings where Husserl is concerned with avoiding psychologism. It is O'Connor's contention that in his early writings Husserl works out his anti-psychologism in relation to the ego in a way that reveals an anti-reductionist tendency in his philosophy concerning the ego. Husserl, in opposition to psychologism, wants to avoid the "category mistake" of simply changing the ideal into the real. In "Reduction or Subtraction: Marion, Badiou, and the Recuperation of Truth," Adam Miller examines two of a new generation of phenomenologists' positions on the classical theme of truth. Miller contends that both Marion and Badiou share the view that it is not possible to articulate a positive notion of truth within the horizon of being where the notion of truth is caught up in the endless play of immanently constituted meanings. Miller finds that both Marion and Badiou instead attempt to describe truth in relation to a certain remove from subjectivity (a knowable object connected to a knowing subject). For Marion truth is inseparable from what he calls the "saturated phenomenon," the givenness in the phenomenon that always exceeds its appearance. The issue of truth becomes a matter of rendering this immanent excess phenomenologically intelligible. For Badiou truth is linked to the event; i.e., to an immanent excess that is ontologically anterior to the correlated appearance of the world. The real contrast between the two thinkers emerges from the fact that Badiou does not attempt to render the excess intelligible by means of a strict phenomenology. …