Then surely you will want to get your own copy after reading the review by Andy Hamilton (Durham) in British Journal for the History of Philosophy:
This excellent Handbook presents Anglophone work which aims to familiarize Continental Philosophy to Anglophone practitioners, whilst insisting on its distinctiveness. The term ‘Continental’ is taken to cover post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France, and traditions including Idealism, Marxism, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Structuralism. It is somewhat unusual in giving a thematic treatment in which key figures recur under different aspects. Part I covers philosophical method in relation to the sciences and to its own history; Part II, the response to Kant’s Copernican revolution; and Part III, questions of human existence and ethics.
An outstanding contribution to Part I is Michael Rosen’s ‘The History of Philosophy as Philosophy’, a model of clarity combining novel insights with deep knowledge of English and German philosophical literatures. Rosen outlines how history entered into philosophical method with Hegel, an approach foreign to the English-speaking world....
Alex Callinicos, in ‘Marxism and the Status of Critique’, also pursues Marx’s attitude to philosophy, in a pellucid treatment extending to the Frankfurt School and Habermas’ post-Marxism. He notes that Marx’s rejection of Idealism’s constitutive role for the subject led him not only to naturalistic positivism – which denied both philosophy’s cognitive status, and a normative dimension to the critique of capitalism – but also to the ‘philosophical anthropology’ which surfaced in
Capital and other works of1857–67. In this period, Marx continued to describe his enterprise as ‘scientific’, but also engaged in critique of bourgeois ideology, and Callinicos discerns complex theoretical sources in his resistance tomorally condemning capitalism, among them Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendentalism...There is an unusual level of clarity in this volume, given the nature of the material. Frederick Beiser, a sane commentator on Hegel, charts the complexities of ‘Historicism’: the programme of legitimating history as a science, which rejects both metaphysical explanation of historical action by goals outside history and naturalistic explanation of them as part of nature. Proponents included von Ranke, Dilthey and Burckhardt, with Hamann, Herder and von Humboldt as precursors....t is an implication of historicism that ‘all human values and institutions change . . . The autonomy of the social-historical world, and the complete historicization of the human world, are the two fundamental principles of historicism’ (158). Although historicism has often been equated with relativism, Beiser argues, no historicist regarded himself as such. However, Popper originated the Anglophone definition of historicism as (Hegelian and Marxist) teleological theory of history – a position precisely rejected byclassical German historicists....
Jessica Berry’s ‘The Legacy of Hellenic Harmony’ examines the philosophical significance of Germany’s long affair with Hellenic culture.
The central figure is art historian Johann Winckelman, who never set foot in the country whose cultural legacy he established. His pamphlet ‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture’ (1755) became enormously popular and led to his A History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). Berry discusses the ‘Winckelmannites’, Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, and Kant’s contrasting neglect of Greek heritage. Kant’s few references are vague.When he comments on the utility of Platonic archetypes, Berry writes, he really means ‘if Plato were not in fact Plato, but Kant, he should be imitated’ (608)!....Sebastian Gardner’s ‘Philosophical Aestheticism’ locates art and emotion in the grounds of philosophical thought. ‘Aestheticism’ here does not refer to, and indeed may conflict with, art for art’s sake, since ‘if art is its own end . . . no cognitive end may be attributed to it’ (76). (Distinguishing direct and indirect function may resolve this tension – Adorno for instance inherits the standpoint of art for art’s sake, whilst stressing art’s truth-content.) Kenneth Baynes’s ‘Freedom and Autonomy’ addresses freedom as selfgovernance, which he argues produced a Copernican revolution in practical philosophy as important as Kant’s critical epistemology. Positive versus negative freedom is also touched on in Fred Rush’s ‘Dialectic, Value Objectivity and the Unity of Reason’ in which he comments that Adorno was sceptical about both bourgeois, capitalist ‘negative freedom’, and selfactualizing ‘positive liberty’. James Finlayson’s ‘Political, Moral and Critical Theory’ addresses the Frankfurt School’s practical philosophy, commenting perceptively on Adorno’s ‘absent politics’.
I have focused my remarks on Idealism and Marxism, but there is equally wide treatment of Phenomenology and post-war French philosophy in this volume. Thomas Baldwin discusses ‘The Humanism Debate’ between Heidegger and Sartre, and others. He locates the classicist concept of ‘humanism’ as dating only from the later eighteenth century, but confusingly given the centrality of this use, Heidegger treats humanism as a metaphysical commitment to truth as representation. Michael N. Forster’s essay offers a wide-ranging survey of ‘Hermeneutics’.... Other very impressive essays include Robert Stern’s ‘Individual Existence and the Philosophy of Difference’, which contrasts Hegel’s solution of the problem of individuality with Deleuze’s critique; Herman Philipse’s ‘Overcoming Epistemology’; Stephen Mulhall on God’s place in post-Kantian philosophy; and ‘Morality Critics’ by Brian Leiter. This is a well-conceived and edited volume, and an excellent resource.
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