ISBN 0 7456 1184 2
ISBN 0 7456 1185 0 (paperback)
pp. viii + 278
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  Introduction:  What is Continental Philosophy?

2.  Modernity, Enlightenment and Their Continental Critics
From Modernity to Enlightenment
The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Continental Critics of Enlightenment
The Hegelian Synthesis

3.  Dialectics of Emancipation:  Marx, the Frankfurt School and Habermas
Feuerbach, Marx and Marxism
The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School
Habermas and the Renewal of Critical Theory

4.  Historicism, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology
Dilthey, Philosophy of Life and Hermeneutics
Husserl and Phenomenology
Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Being
Gadamer and the Universality of Hermeneutics

5.  Beyond Theory:  Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Existentialism
Søren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Jean-Paul Sartre and French Existentialism

6.  Beyond the Subject:  Structuralism and Poststructuralism
Decentring the Subject
The Break with Humanism
Foucault’s Genealogy of the Subject
Derrida’s Deconstruction of Western Metaphysics

7.  Postmodernism
Varieties of Postmodernism
The Philosophical Critique of Enlightenment and Modernity
Postmodernity as a Stage of Western Society
Politics of Difference and Ethics of the Other

Bibliography

Index

from the PREFACE

One of the most important and persistent features of continental philosophy, as we shall see, is its emphasis on the social, cultural and historical conditions of thought and existence.  Continental philosophy is self-consciously historical.  On the other hand, a major complaint against an Enlightenment too impressed by natural science is its wilful ignorance of history.  Not surprisingly, any adequate understanding of contemporary thinkers in the continental tradition requires at least some knowledge of the history of that tradition.  Thus, although the emphasis in what follows is on the ideas of currently influential thinkers and schools, their ideas are presented within a broad historical account.  Whereas analytical philosophers of the twentieth century can be regarded as the Enlightenment’s reasonably direct heirs, continental philosophy is the outcome of a series of critical responses to dominant currents of modern western and enlightenment philosophy.  Of course, it is impossible given the scope of this work to provide any reasonably complete account of even the major contributors to continental philosophy.  Rather the aim here is to describe only the most important ideas of some of the tradition’s most influential representatives.

In this spirit, the first chapter briefly characterises continental philosophy in terms of the opposition between continental and analytical philosophy and the historical and philosophical roots of this opposition.  It seems inevitable that some statement of the distinctiveness of continental philosophy must, in this way, come first.  But as Hegel recognised, such (and perhaps also these) prefatory remarks are more likely to be understood at the end than at the beginning.  Chapter Two presents a somewhat more detailed account of modernity, modern and enlightenment philosophy and some of the continental critics of these tendencies.  This chapter acts as a kind of hub for the rest of the book.  Subsequent continental thinkers and schools of thought are considered as developments of, or reactions against, the ideas of these continental critics.  Later chapters aim to provide succinct introductions to major philosophical approaches and thinkers, including Marxism and the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics and phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism and poststructuralism.  Finally, postmodernism can be seen as the most determined attempt yet to escape the fundamental assumptions of modern western philosophy.  Unavoidably, there are overlaps and sideways connections between some of the chapters.  For example, Heidegger is surely best understood in the context of hermeneutics and phenomenology, or in other words in the company of Husserl and Gadamer.  But Heidegger also exerted a major influence on Sartre, who is discussed in Chapter 5.  Again Nietzsche, discussed here in the company of Kierkegaard and Sartre, was a major contributor both to the thought of the Frankfurt School and to Heidegger and the poststructuralist critique of humanism and so, also, to postmodernism.

 
David West, Canberra, 1995.

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