It should be said that the SEP makes a bona fide effort to cover continental philosophy as well. There are entries on, e.g., Heidegger (two of them, actually), Gadamer, Ricoeur, Deleuze, existentialism, postmodernism, and many other key thinkers and topics.
It’s not so much that they ignore continental philosophy, but rather apply an analytic view to everything. Their articles on Nietzsche and Marx are like this.
I am curious why you'd say that. As in, legitimately curious, it's unclear to me why.
But maybe it's possible you're using the general word "analytic" and not the specific way it's being used here, to describe a particular tradition and approach?
The idea of an encyclopedia is based on the idea that paragraphs and sentences express ideas which can be reduced to their logical essence and put very simply. This is exactly what "continental philosophers" reject and so I don't think it makes sense to summarize them in this way.
With continental philosophy, most of the value is in how it makes you, the reader, feel, and not in the ideas that it expresses. This is not to say that there are no ideas (of course there are) but that, when those ideas are extracted and added to an entry in an encyclopedia, the result is a denaturing of the work. Some continental philosophy is very explicit in its hostility to being expressed analytically (particularly feminist philosophy like Kristeva and Irigaray).
Downthread you summarized what Derrida meant by difference. But if that's what Derrida wanted to do (transmit the idea you posted), why wouldn't he just have written what you wrote? That's what philosophers do. Plato, Hume, Kant, etc all write as clearly as possible. Derrida is explicitly rejecting this approach and therefore he is as much literature as he is philosophy (he was up for the Nobel in literature and is mainly influential in literary studies). This also means that, with Derrida, most of the point is how he says things, and so you should not summarize his ideas in an encyclopedia entry. Summarizing Derrida would be like summarizing Shakespeare, the plot is only a small part of the value.
I see, thanks. I am not sure I agree with your characterization of an encyclopedia, nor the continental approach to things, but I do at least grok your argument now.
> why wouldn't he just have written what you wrote?
For one, because it simply wouldn't have been as good at expressing the idea, but also, I'm writing for a very different audience than he was, so it's gonna come out a bit differently.
> etc all write as clearly as possible.
We'll have to agree to disagree :) Also, the "as possible" does a lot of work here, I would imagine that many people would say they're expressing themselves "as possible," and that's where a lot of the argument comes in.
(And yes, what "clear" even means is like, one of the differences between these traditions, for anyone else reading this discussion.)
> With continental philosophy, most of the value is in how it makes you, the reader, feel, and not in the ideas that it expresses.
That's a definition of mysticism, not philosophy. Reformulation of earlier ideas is key to any serious philosophical endevor, we can see this as far back as Plato/Aristotle and the early Chinese and Indian philosophers.
I think it is sophistry when you pass it off as philosophy. I don't think Derrida saw himself as a philosopher though. His disciples on the other hand...
Continental philosophers generally fall in line behind Heidegger who said "philosophy ended with Hegel". They saw the philosophical tradition running from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, where it ended, and they wanted to do something different.
There is filosofia.org for an Spanish equivalent. The looks are not the most modern in some places (it was created in 1996) but it's actively updated. Managed by the Gustavo Bueno foundation.
Not that I am aware of, probably because most centers of continental thought are in continental Europe (hence the name) and so are in French or German. I don’t speak those languages well enough to know if an equivalent encyclopedia exists, but I’d imagine a French encyclopedia of philosophy probably is quite continental in flavor.
I have the Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy but it’s just a book, not an online encyclopedia.
Otherwise, Wikipedia is actually not bad on most important continental thinkers.
Even the idea of "settling on English as a working lingua franca" has issues that display how deep this schism goes. When one of the questions you're exploring is "how exactly does language shape our thinking," for example, picking one language may be limiting what can be expressed, and therefore, thought. Some terms specifically have relationships to their meanings in the language they're written in, and so even English translations leave them in the original language and treat them as jargon.
Okay, after writing this, I'm still drinking my morning coffee, let's pick a specific example of this to show you what I'm talking about.
Derrida is someone who is often criticized by folks outside of the continental spheres for his writing. But there's specific reasons why the writing is this way, and it relates to what I'm talking about here. For example, take his term "différance." This is specifically a bit of wordplay in French that illuminates the concepts he's talking about in a deeper way. The regular spelling in French would be "différence", but there's also the verb "différer", and "différance" is "différence" spelled like "différer." My French is very poor (though I've always wanted to learn it, just haven't found a good way to do so...), but two things:
* One of the things Derrida is concerned with is the relationship between speech and writing. That you cannot hear the difference (get it?) between these two words in speech, but you can when written, is interesting. Derrida is responding to the phonocentrism of Ferdinand de Saussure, arguing that the idea that speech and writing are in binary opposition is incorrect.
* One of the things Derrida is interested in is how we come to understand meaning. "différer" means "to defer" as well as "to differ," and one of the things he talks about is how words always refer to other words. You cannot understand a word in vacuum, you can only understand them in relation to other words, and you learn them by understanding how they differ from other words. The difference is deferred, in other words.
Anyway, the point is, you cannot really get at what he's talking about without understanding at least the surface-level French. It doesn't really work as well without it. If Derrida had been forced to write in English, his point wouldn't be as well made.
And, if you find the above interesting, you may like continental philosophy in general. If you find it insufferable... you may not. Personally, I am very into it, though I'm more of a Deleuze guy than a Derrida guy.
I will say I don't think that wordplay is a very good way to do philosophy. Of course that's a very Anglophone opinion, including the notion that there is a good or bad way to do philosophy.
But it means that I will be forever cut off from Derrida. Which is fine; there is more than enough philosophy produced to keep me busy. But it means that the praise for him will forever baffle me, and if that bothers his fans, that is not a problem for either me or for philosophy as a whole.
And if I privately think that depending on conscious wordplay means muddled thinking, I'm entitled to that. It's not an opinion worth discussing since I'm not an expert in his thought. But when people want me to engage with his work, that private opinion is likely to come out if they won't settle for s polite "no thank you".
Yeah, you wouldn’t be alone there. I think it’s the opposite of muddled, it is being precise; the words are chosen very carefully! They’re chosen to try and convey very specific meanings. And everyone does this, my own choice of “wordplay” is meant to evoke meaning for specific reasons to convey what I was trying to, to specifically acknowledge that some folks feel the way you do. Heck, the parent chose “lingua franca,” which is not from English, to convey the specific meaning evoked from that phrase’s time and space!
In the end, talking about talking is hard (oh no there I go accidentally elevating speech above writing again), but not everyone is interested in everything or every methodology. We’re all trying to figure it out in our own ways.
It's part of the reason I went into philosophy via linguistics, and feel like I came out the other side. I feel like philosophy has been too influenced by talking about talking. It's the most accessible way to address thought, but the most misleading.
I'm pouring more energy into the thinking that occurs without talking. I hope it can capture some of the things that we hope to capture with shades of meaning, but without the disagreements about dictionaries.
Unfortunately it's leading me through some of the paths trodden by behaviorists, and that's a minefield of its own.
It's part of the reason I went into philosophy via linguistics...
Have you read any George Lakoff? I took a course from him at Berkeley. That’s the closest I’ve personally gotten to philosophy. Just curious if you have any thoughts about his approach.
Lakoff's work is incredibly important, and his work on the way language shapes our public discourse has been very prescient. A lot of what's going on right now is well understood through Lakoff's lens.
I think that his work on cognitive linguistics is incredibly insightful, but potentially (ahem) dangerous. Language illustrates the mind, but I've come to believe that the ability of semantics to get us over the bridge between speech and cognition is limited. We certainly do use metaphors to frame our thinking, but I think that's building on top of a non-verbal cognitive system that the verbal system coopts. Coopts so thoroughly it's easy to be misled into thinking that's all of it.
That's not what Lakoff is doing, of course. He's largely going the other direction, to show how language manipulates us. Very important stuff. Just less epistemological than I used to believe.
IMO (and I am a professional philosopher), you're right, it doesn't make very good philosophy ... except that (unlike most fields) it's not at all clear what counts as philosophy and what doesn't. I think Derrida makes very good something (I'm not sure what).
Deleuze was always my favorite too, it's been years since I read his works but I've been thinking of going back for the fun of it. I had stumbled upon DeLanda who helped clarify A Thousand Plateaus, but do you have any recommendations for reading and understanding Deleuze? Unfortunately I don't have a very extensive philosophical background beyond some undergrad courses and personal exploration on my own, which makes it a bit difficult when parsing references to Freud, Nietzsche, etc.
I really like DeLanda too. Other related folks I enjoy are Brian Massumi and John Protevi (who wrote the SEP page on Deleuze, IIRC).
I think the first order of business is to understand that there are kind of three Deleuzes: there's Deleuze, and then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Finally there's also his film stuff.
There's a connection between them, of course, but they're kind of two different projects. Deleuze on his own is a scholar of philosophical history; he wrote a lot of books on other philosophers. There's a sort of over-arching project though; he's creating a kind of "secret history" where all the folks he write about are all building towards something. They're generally regarded as good books, but they're also just as much a sort of product of how Deleuze sees them, rather than purely about them themselves. The most controversial (and arguably his best, IMHO) is Nietzsche and Philosophy. He draws a bunch from material that Nietzsche didn't actually publish before his death, and his sister kind of... selectively edited. It's a whole thing. Regardless, IMHO it's a good take. Reasonable people may disagree. In order, they're "Empiricism and Subjectivity," "Nietzsche and Philosophy," "Kant’s Critical Philosophy," "Proust and Signs," "Bergsonism," "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy," "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," "Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation," and "Foucault." That is... a lot. IMHO, Nietzche, Spinoza, Foucault, and Kafka are the big ones, if you don't want to read like, ten books about ten people you probably haven't read yet. You can follow these up with "Difference and Repetition," his primary thesis, and "Logic of Sense," his final solo work before meeting Guattari. He wrote these in between some of those solo works, but IMHO, they make sense as a unit, with these as the end, even if they weren't written in that order.
His mind-meld with Guattari has a lot of the themes of his solo work, but is much more experimental and out there. A Thousand Plateaus is, well, you already know this: pretty friggin' wild. So it's not so much "student of philosophical history" as it is "holy shit." To me at least. This is the stuff DeLanda and a lot of secondary literature engages with,
Oh, and I really love "What is Philosophy?" even if it's a less intense, more straightforward text.
Finally, film Deleuze. I've always wanted to study film but never managed to. I don't have much to say about this.
Oh gosh, that's a lot of works and orderings, but uh, yeah. Actual strategy. IMHO, if you don't have a foundation in Marx, all of this is going to be really tough. Make sure you understand at least a good chunk of Capital Volume I, the first three chapters (aka part i) are the most important, parts VI, V, and VIII aren't necessary, but Marx is pretty foundational. Even if folks don't agree with him, everyone is familiar with him, and often speak in his terms, and you have to be able to understand something to reject it. Many do agree, to be clear, just like... it's foundational. David Harvey can help there, he's not always perfect but he's better than most.
From there, what I personally did was read On the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche. Then Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Then the Deleuze.
I am less well read with Freud than I should be to truly engage with Anti-Oedipus, but Civilization and its Discontents is worthwhile. Same with Marx, many many disagree, but all assume some level of familiarity.
Really, the best you can do is exactly what Massumi says about A Thousand Plateaus and "read it like a record":
> How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
Read some stuff, if you get to things you don't understand, go follow the citation and try to dig into that. Get that you probably won't really grok things the first time you read them, be curious, dig into stuff you like, ignore stuff that doesn't resonate, maybe come back to it later if your tastes change.
Good luck :)
Oh, one final thing: Ignore the "dark deleuze" garbage. It's bad. I literally forgot it existed because I wish it did not, but this is the internet so...
EDIT 2: oh my gosh. also, for computer folks: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Galloway. Not strictly Deleuzian, but related, and useful.
Nice, thanks for the detailed response! I did sociology & English in undergrad, so I got some decent exposure to Marx (I'll probably need a refresher though).
Not too long ago I picked up a copy of French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Gary Gutting, that gave some helpful info on the context of some of Deleuze's works (e.g. the Bergson and Spinoza stuff).
And ditto on ATP, what a trip haha. Not for the faint of heart!
>>* you cannot really get at what he's talking about without understanding at least the surface-level French?*
Can't we? The specific example is certainly worse translated, like translating a song... Can't we get at the same idea using different words, wordplays, parabbles and such? Is the point that you cannot have the same thoughts or make the same points points in another language?
I am saying that words are hard, and some things are more easily expressed in different languages.
Any Turing-complete programming language can implement anything from any other Turing-complete programming language, but that doesn't mean that a web application is just as easy to write in assembly as it is in Ruby, even if you could do it. And if we said "all serious programming must be done in assembly," it would make discussing web applications more tedious than allowing folks interested in stuff Ruby is good at to write Ruby. More generically, this is the argument for DSLs.
And, while theoretically possible to do so, practically speaking, a lot less people would do it, and so we'd probably wouldn't have as advanced web applications.
If that is the intended meaning, I agree. Philosophy isn't science. At least in 2021, it is rarely about "solving the X problem." It's definitely worth using your best language for philosophy, rather than a standard language you can't use as well.
That said, if someone does come along with a definitive solution to the other minds problem or whatnot, I'm confident that the concepts will traverse language just fine.
Any thoughts on translatable vs untranslatable concepts? Does being translatable or untranslatable tell us anything about the concept itself?
I mean, I can't say for sure, but if we take Derrida's ideas I'm talking about in this thread as a guide, the question kind of doesn't make sense. There is no such thing as an "untranslatable" concept, because words don't have specific meanings that come from outside of their historical (and other) contingencies. You are always translating, in some sense.
That is, it's not even clear that the unit of "x language" is the right unit to consider for translating. "différance" is not a standard French word, so even someone who does natively speak French wouldn't immediately understand it, though it might be easier for them since they know things that are closer to its understanding. Jargons form sub-languages. To take it back to programming for a moment, the sentence "I built this web application in Python" is an English sentence, using only English words, that even many children could understand in a grammar and vocabulary sense. But it may not make any sense to them unless they understand that "Python" in this context means a programming language and not a snake, and even if they do understand that it's a programming language, they may not understand the implications of that as well as someone who is a developer.
Like, even if we did say "sorry philosophy must be done in English," if I said "oh you know how D&G said 'Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are'? Well, I was thinking about that, and..." you would still likely need 'translation' for, I'm guessing, four of those eleven words. It's pretty much halfway to "Les multiplicités sont rhizomatiques, et dénoncent les pseudomultiplicités arborescentes" and is unique enough of a sentence that even though I haven't read Mille Plateaux in French (because again my French is basically non-existent), I was able to grab the original quote pretty quickly. You'd also maybe not recognize "D&G" and may need expansion on that, even if grammatically you would understand it as some sort of subject of the sentence that produced the quote.
I guess at this point I turn into a cliche and find french philosophy not that interesting.
It seems to me that (those damned barrel-dwelling philosophers) ask all the questions backwards, as if their goal is to eventually gain an adequate non-understanding of something.
Besides ambiguity and context dependence "I built this web application using Python" also has a translatable meaning. You might need to translate "python" to "my computer" or "built" to "construit." You will have a hard time without pre-existing notions of computers or web applications. The sentence is translatable though.
A lot of things don't exist if you look too closely, but appear as you zoom out. There is no such thing as "species" in nature. It's a classification created by people. Language. Yet, it does describe something that nature abides by sometimes. It exists, even if it isn't discrete.
To each their own :) I don't find the analytic project compelling, generally. Good thing there's lots of room!
> also has a translatable meaning
Yes. My point is that everything is "translatable." There is nothing that cannot be translated.
> There is no such thing as "species" in nature. It's a classification created by people.
Yes, this is a fantastic example, and actually pretty close to my favorite French guy's heart. Maybe you've got some continental in you after all. ;) (I think you're arguing that a continental person would argue that species don't exist, but many at least wouldn't. They would exactly argue that it's a system created by people, that is sometimes useful, and sometimes not.)
I think you might be misunderestimating. The terms are loser leaves the internet. No quarter.
I didn't mean to imply either position by continentals. I don't really know enough about this stuff to have such a specific stereotyping. Also, as an irishman I fart in a specific general direction on anglo-french disputes.
I picked species naively. It's just a good example of "exists yet doesn't." I assumed we can all agree that it exists, yet doesn't. I don't see what the problem is, philosophically. Both the word species and the phenomenon are approximations. That kind of "problem" is abundant. Money is that. Language is that. Etc.
The problem can be approached from a lot of ways philosophically. Geeky, information-centric understandings. Classical, plato-esque idealism. None of these are incompatible and I don't really see what problem we're trying we're trying to solve. Some stuff isn't stuff. When was this not known?
I think you're wrong. I think "coming of age" (when used metaphorically) expresses part of the idea in that German word and other English words and phrases express other parts of it, including "education" ("In today’s German language, Bildung very often refers to no more than 'normal' education").
I think the assertion (made by the previous poster) that "picking one language may be limiting what can be expressed" is wrong. The fact that there's no 1:1 translation for bildung in no way implies that the meaning behind that German word is inexpressible without taking it as a loanword. In fact, the article you linked explicitly translates the idea into English in various ways that are totally comprehensible to an English speaker: "self-cultivation," "maturation," "unification of selfhood and identity within the broader society," and so on.
You didn't explicitly deny it but the previous poster raised the possibility: "picking one language may be limiting what can be expressed" (this is Sapir-Whorf). I thought you gave bildung as an example of something that cannot be expressed in English but I may have misinterpreted you.
> Of course English speakers can talk about the concept using circumlocutions or using a number of overlapping concepts.
I don't see any circumlocution here but that aside, you seem to agree that picking one language does not limit what can be expressed.
> But the concept Bildung is not central to Anglo-Saxon pedagogy or education, that's why you don't have a real word for it.
I understand there's no exact word:word translation. Anyway, I think the concept expressed in bildung is not specifically German, I think it's related to the concept of education in general, specifically to the idea of an education that produces an individual who is simultaneously part of a collective and fully himself, an integrated individual, someone who who can appear in public and take part in discourse and also contemplate on his own. That goes back to Plato and, I'm sure, earlier. Another English word we use to express this is "civics".
In western philosophy there was a divergence in both in style, lexicon, and method in the early 20th century that was exasperated by the two world wars. They share common ancestors (Kant basically), but to a certain extent are mutually incomprehensible (an exaggeration, but not exactly untrue). The philosophical world basically divides into Anglophone philosophy (the dominant flavour worldwide) vs everything else which cannot be neatly categorized into a single brand.
Also, while there are non-western traditions none of them have the same degree of professionalisation and size (in terms of practitioners) as western philosophy. Some western philosophers would question whether all that many that do exist are doing the same activity - a curator/historian of philosophy or culture, vs actual philosophers trying to produce original work (again, broad strokes and exaggeration).
Different situation than in say, natural science. Philosophy is much more diverse in terms of inputs and outputs.
When your source materials are in German (Marx, Adorno, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, etc.) or French (Deleuze, Badiou, Foucault, etc.) you end up needing to learn those languages to make any serious academic progress. Philosophy is much less fungible than physics, in other words. So while there are no doubt more papers in English, the tradition and institutions in German and French speaking countries are probably more influential.
SEP is the leading encyclopedia in professional philosophy.
I wish the site had a basic diff view e.g. a toggle to highlight all new/modified words in a text since last revision.
You can actually download all their articles as a PDF with a small yearly subscription. If that's not an option I've had good luck with pandoc in the past.
Genuinely the best online resource for academic philosophy. Primers on pretty much every sub discipline that might be of interest to any western philosopher written and edited by subject matter experts on the topic. All free, and with excellent support for things like BibTeX and other things useful for academic work.
For those interested, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, maintained by University of Tennessee at Martin, is also a very nice resource, similar to SEP.
Here is their entry on Gettier cases, for example.
And a cool thing, professors can get paid for the articles sometimes through their research grants and studying other things. High quality stuff here for students/professors/the curious.
This is going to become the next Wikipedia. There are so many articles unrelated or tangentially related to philosophy. Major mission creep. Once you get the good SEO rankings, you can turn it into anything you like. Good rankings creates an incentive to create more content even if the content is unrelated to the original mission of the site, because who wants to pass up on traffic.
Wikipedia does great on philosophy, but you can't cite it. SEP is great as a secondary resource if you want to make sure you have a "handle" on a concept or author.
Wikipedia is utterly fantastic for discovering about philosophy -- for getting the lay of the land of the different strands, concepts and philosophers. There's literally no better, unbiased, objective introduction than:
(For comparison, every intro-to-philosophy book or textbook I've ever come across has omitted huge swathes of what's in Wikipedia's intro article -- not just not going into depth on them, but not even mentioning them once. But because Wikipedia is collaboratively edited, those kinds of lacunae are much less likely to exist.)
Once you've identified the relevant topic/debate you're interested in and want to actually see what the "current" (within the past decade) state of debate is, then you reach for the SEP for an overview on a very specific subject.
Then you look up the relevant references using Google Scholar and explore using "cited by" and "related" to survey the entire literature related to it.
This model has worked very successfully for me. None of the three levels -- Wikipedia, SEP, Scholar -- is any better or worse than the others. They serve different purposes. Each is the best at its level.
Wikidata (Wikipedia's younger structured data semantic web resource) has entries for 13,000+ philosophers -- an order of magnitude more than the largest and most complete encyclopedia of philosophy which by my reckoning is not the SEP (as people seem to think here) but Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy
Give that the "Print Edition is $1693 as of May 2017" the SEP is slightly cheaper.
How did they achieve that enormous amount? Through the collaborative magic of the Wikipedia model.
FYI, this is often easier to read and better generally than wikipedia for a lot of articles.
If you want to know more about a hairy or highly contested subject, this is a great starting point. Content, in philosophy, is usually best got from the source. Frame though... I think you need an outside frame.
It's very hard to understand Marx, Rand, Popper, Kant or whatnot without a frame. First (eg Kant), a lot of philosophical work is overly complicated, so it's much easier approach once you have an approximate idea of where it's going. Second, a lot of modern philosophy is happens within an argument. Marx was writing in counter to Ricardo, political liberals and communists. Ayn Rand was writing a response to Trotsky, Kant and other rivals. It's hard to jump into the argument midway.
That's where SEC shines. It gets you started. It gives you an understanding of how philosophies are structured, as well as the basic teams and rivalries dynamics that you need for context. Form there, it's much easier to approach philosophy.
"FYI, this is often easier to read and better generally than wikipedia for a lot of articles."
I reckon you are correct, but as I mentioned some weeks back in a reply to a question about what books would I recommend for a beginner in philosophy, SEP was one of my references in that it is an excellent resource but my recommendation came with a caveat which was that there is a huge amount of detail that's likely to overwhelm all but the most hardened.
I refer regularly to SEP and when it's just a quick reference I often find myself getting bogged down in detail. There's nothing wrong with that so long as the student knows how to extract just what's needed, the trouble is at times that can be difficult (as there's essentially no delineation between the key points and details).
Ideally we'd also have a précised, much shortened students' version.
That's an understandable view. I think you'll find that Rand is taken much more seriously as a philosopher in the US than in other Anglophone countries such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand etc. (it seems to me that these countries have a more nuanced view about her that's not that dissimilar to the Continental one).
It's understandable that Rand holds greater sway and influence in the US given her libertarian right views and support for free markets, etc. (which hold high rank there among the conservative right).
Rand seems to have had two peaks of popularity, in the 1950s after Atlas Shrugged was published and again at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher years of the 1980s. That was also the time when the Austrian school—Hayek, Von Mises, and Chicago School—Friedman were in high favor with those politicians.
It will be interesting to see how Rand's popularity holds up into the much longer future.
An example: https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/eqh13j/where...
https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/Analytic_versus_Continen...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy