Contemporary Phil
Contemporary Phil
The contemporary western philosophy could be traced from the beginning of the 19th century
continued to 20th and 21st century. It deals with the upheavals produced by a series of conflicts
within philosophical discourse over the basis of knowledge, with classical certainties
overthrown, and new social, economic, scientific and logical problems. Contemporary
philosophy was set for a series of attempts to reform and preserve, and to alter or abolish, older
knowledge systems. This was done with the emergence of two main philosophy schools the
Analytic school and the Continental school
Analytic School
Analytical school is the dominant philosophical tradition in the 20th century English speaking
world. It is characterized by the logical and linguistical turn in philosophy. There are at least
two reasons for this linguistic and logical turn in philosophy. First due to enormous success of
science and technology these philosophers felt science had taken over much of the territory
formerly occupied by philosophy. Second new and more powerful methods of logic had been
developed in the 20th century that promised to solve some of the perennial philosophical
problems.
The term analysis (analusis) refers to the activity of taking something apart. It follows the
epistemological principles that the whole can be explained with references to its parts. it is a
method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by analysing them
into simpler constituent elements. This wide spread method was initiated by philosophers like
Russell, Moore, Gottlob Frege and extensively by Wittgenstein. Thus for them the goal of
philosophy is clarity and method of philosophy is analysis. Philosophical investigations move
from subjective to objective and from psychological to logical realms. We are able to
understand them in their essential nature for what they are in themselves not some idea or
mental representation of them.
Continental School
Continental school of thought, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and
20th century philosophy from mainland Europe (France and Germany). This sense of the term
originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who
used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental
philosophy includes Phenomenology, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Structuralism, post-
Structuralism etc.
Features of Continental Philosophy: First, continental philosophers generally reject
scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding
phenomena. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a “pre-theoretical
substrate of experience”, a form of the Kantian conditions of possible experience, and that
scientific methods are inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility. Second,
continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable:
determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or
history. Historicism is important while analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms
of discrete problems, capable of being analysed apart from their historical origins. Third
continental philosophy typically suggests that “philosophical argument cannot be divorced
from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence”. Fourth continental
philosophy is an emphasis on Meta-Philosophy, i.e. the study of the nature, aims, and methods
of philosophy.
Existentialism
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an
account of the structure of conscious experience in general. An important part of Husserl’s
phenomenological project was to show that all conscious acts are directed at or about objective
content, a feature that Husserl called intentionality. In his work, the Logical Investigations
(1901), he launched an extended attack on psychologism and develops the technique of
descriptive phenomenology, with the aim of showing how objective judgments are indeed
grounded in conscious experience; not, however, in the first-person experience of particular
individuals, but in the properties essential to any experiences of the kind in question. He also
attempted to identify the essential properties of any act of meaning. He developed the method
further in Ideas (1913) as transcendental phenomenology, proposing to ground actual
experience, and thus all fields of human knowledge, in the structure of consciousness of an
ideal, or transcendental, ego. Later, he attempted to reconcile his transcendental standpoint with
an acknowledgement of the intersubjective life-world in which real individual subjects interact.
Husserl published only a few works in his lifetime, which treat phenomenology mainly in
abstract methodological terms; but he left an enormous quantity of unpublished concrete
analyses. The other phenomenologist are Martin Heidegger (formerly Husserl’s research
assistant), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, through the work of
Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl’s focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of
existentialism.
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation. Traditional hermeneutics, Biblical
hermeneutics, refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the
areas of literature, religion and law. Contemporary, or modern, hermeneutics encompasses not
only issues involving the written text, but everything in the interpretative process. This includes
verbal and nonverbal forms of communication as well as prior aspects that affect
communication, such as presuppositions, pre-understandings, the meaning and philosophy of
language, and semiotics. Philosophical hermeneutics refers primarily to Hans-George
Gadamer’s theory of knowledge as developed in Truth and Method, and sometimes to Paul
Ricoeur. Hermeneutic consistency refers to analysis of texts for coherent explanation. A
hermeneutic (singular) refers to one particular method or strand of interpretation. The terms
exegesis and hermeneutics are sometimes used interchangeably because exegesis focuses
primarily on the written text. Hermeneutics however is a more widely defined discipline of
interpretation theory including the entire framework of the interpretive process and,
encompassing all forms of communication and expression; written, verbal, artistic, geo-
political, physiological, sociological etc.
Post Modernism
Post modernism is the term that emerged as an area of academic study since 1980’s though its
beginning could be traced to 1960’s. It is hard to define this term because for the following
reason. The chronological proximity, its ubiquitous character, plurality of its significance, the
uncertainty regarding what is modernity and exactly when its origin can be placed and the
confusion in using different terms(postmodernism, post modernity, postmodern etc.). But our
question here is how can we see it as a philosophical school. As a philosophical school it tries
to believe that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject
to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power, relations, and
motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female,
straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities
to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests
consist of. Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including religion, literary
criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, anthropology, visual arts, and music.
The Characteristics of Postmodernism: (1) No to system building (2) No to totalization and
Meta-Narratives and proliferation of Mini-Narratives. (3) Held that meaning is provisional,
contingent and there are no final and definitive meanings. (4) Objectivity is put to doubt, i.e.,
postmodernism, by resisting the monopoly of scientific knowledge as the only form of true
knowledge, postmodernism makes room for different forms of knowledge: aesthetic, religious,
political, historical and mythical. (5) Ambiguity and Plurality: i.e. they believed that
contradictions are part and parcel of life and reality. However, in allowing plurality
postmodernism did affirm the identity and importance of smaller and hitherto neglected groups
in the society.
Other Subjects in the Development of Contemporary Philosophy
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or
proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in
the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected.
Pragmatism originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century.
Although it has significantly influenced non-philosophers notably in the fields of law,
education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism this article deals with it only
as a movement within philosophy. The term “pragmatism” was first used in print to designate
a philosophical outlook about a century ago when William James (1842-1910) pressed the word
into service during an 1898 address entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,”
delivered at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously swore, however, that
the term had been coined almost three decades earlier by his compatriot and friend C. S. Peirce
(1839-1914). (Peirce, eager to distinguish his doctrines from the views promulgated by James,
later re-labelled his own position “pragmaticism” a name, he said, “ugly enough to be safe from
kidnappers.”) The third major figure in the classical pragmatist pantheon is John Dewey (1859-
1952), whose wide-ranging writings had considerable impact on American intellectual life for
a half-century. After Dewey, however, pragmatism lost much of its momentum. There has been
a recent resurgence of interest in pragmatism, with several high-profile philosophers exploring
and selectively appropriating themes and ideas embedded in the rich tradition of Peirce, James,
and Dewey. While the best-known and most controversial of these so-called “neo-pragmatists”
is Richard Rorty, the following contemporary philosophers are often considered to be
pragmatists: Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Haack, Robert
Brandom and Cornel West.
Process Philosophy
The chief advocate of process philosophy, a trend of philosophy in the twentieth century is
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), a British Mathematician, Scientist and philosopher.
Whitehead addressed it as ‘philosophy of organism’. For Whitehead any reality is constituted
of two poles, a physical pole and a mental pole. And what is primary is not being but becoming.
For Whitehead reality is process and God is no exemption to metaphysical principle, God is
also a subject of becoming. Such a position was so radical and has invited so many criticism
even from the religious circles. Whitehead’s methodology is more attuned to East.
Neo-Scholasticism
Neo-Scholasticism is the development of the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages during the latter
half of the nineteenth century. It is not merely the resuscitation of a philosophy long since
defunct, but rather a restatement in our own day of the philosophia perennis which, elaborated
by the Greeks and brought to perfection by the great medieval teachers, has never ceased to
exist even in modern times. It has some times been called neo-Thomism partly because St.
Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century gave to Scholasticism among the Latins its final
form, partly because the idea has gained ground that only Thomism can infuse vitality into
twentieth century scholasticism. But Thomism is too narrow a term; the system itself is too
large and comprehensive to be expressed by the name of any single exponent. Neo-
Scholasticism seeks to restore the fundamental organic doctrines embodied in the
Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. It claims that philosophy does not vary with each
passing phase of history; that the truth of seven hundred years ago is still true today, and that
if the great medieval thinkers; Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus, succeeded in
constructing a sound philosophical system on the data supplied by the Greeks, especially by
Aristotle, it must be possible, in our own day, to gather from the speculation of the Middle
Ages the soul of truth which it contains. The neo-Scholastic programme includes, in the next
place, the adaptation of medieval principles and doctrines to our present intellectual needs.
Complete immobility is no less incompatible with progress than out-and-out relativism. To
make Scholasticism rigid and stationary would be fatal to it. The doctrines revived by the new
movement are like an inherited fortune; to refuse it would be folly, but to manage it without
regard to actual conditions would be worse.
Feminist Philosophy
Feminism is, in fact, a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing and defending
equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts
overlap with those of women’s rights. Much of feminism deals specifically with the problems
women face in overcoming social barriers, but some feminists argue that gender equality
implies a necessary liberation of both men and women from traditional cultural roles, and look
at the problems men face as well. Feminists; that is, persons practicing feminism, may be
persons of either sex (Wikipedia). Feminist philosophy emerged from these feminist
movements and includes general theories and theories about the origins of inequality, and, in
some cases, about the social construction of sex and gender, in a variety of disciplines. Feminist
activists have campaigned for women’s rights; such as in contract, property, and voting, while
also promoting women’s rights to bodily integrity and autonomy and reproductive rights. They
have opposed domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. In economics, they
have advocated for workplace rights, including equal pay and opportunities for careers and to
start businesses. Feminist philosophy emerged in the US in the 1970s following only a decade
behind the rise of the US women’s movement in the 1960s. Although Simone de Beauvoir
published her now highly influential The Second Sex in 1953, it would take at least a decade
for women in the US to begin to organize around the injustices Beauvoir identified, and even
longer for feminist philosophers in the US to turn to her work for inspiration. Although feminist
philosophies are common in US, it is important to stress that it is still evolving in other parts
of the world.
Contemporary Thinkers
Jean-Paul Sartre
He was a French existentialist philosopher. Psychology of the Imagination (1972), Sketch for
a Theory of the Emotions (1971) The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness (1957) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
(1958) Existentialism and Humanism (1973) are some of the philosophical writings of Sartre.
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943) is a philosophical
treatise of Sartre. Its main purpose was to assert the individual’s existence as prior to the
individual’s essence. Being and Nothingness was to vindicate the fundamental freedom of the
human being, against determinists of all stripes. Sartre sketches his own theory of
consciousness, being and phenomena through criticism of both earlier phenomenologists (most
notably Husserl and Heidegger) as well as idealists, rationalists and empiricists. According to
him one of the major achievements of modern philosophy has been to free us of the kinds of
dualism that set the existent up as having a “hidden” nature as with Kant’s noumenon;
Phenomenology has removed “the illusion of worlds behind the scene.” Based on an
examination of the nature of phenomena, he describes the nature of two types of being, being-
in-itself and being-for-itself. While being-in itself is something that can only be approximated
by human being, being-for-itself is the being of consciousness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein represents the analytical philosophy. The central task of the analytical philosophy
is to clarify the meaning of language. In his work Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1919),
Wittgenstein said the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophical
Investigations (1953) of Wittgenstein explains that language has ‘many’ functions besides
simply ‘picturing’ the reality. Language always function in a context and therefore has as
many purposes as there are contexts. By recognizing the diversity of the functions of language,
Wittgenstein inevitably altered the task of philosophy. Philosophy is a battle against the
bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. He considers the aim of philosophy
was to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. He believed that philosophical puzzlement
can be removed by a careful description of language as we ordinarily use it. As he put it, the
result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions, but to make propositions
clear. The right method of philosophy would be to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the
propositions of science. Wittgenstein first adopted Russell’s atomism, which insists that
sentences must be broken down to reveal their logical complexities. He tried to show that
meaning derives from atomic logical sentences which form an accurate picture of what he
called the ‘atomic facts’ of the world. ‘The limits of my language are the limits of the world’:
there are limits to the sorts of meaningful thoughts we can have with language. Metaphysical
problems only arise because philosophers are trying to ‘say what cannot be said.’ He later
abandoned his first atomist quest to solve the ‘problem of meaning’ and begun to question all
traditional philosophical quests for generality or ‘essences’. He claimed that the great 20th
century search for the ‘meaning of meaning’ is futile because it was founded on the
misconception that ‘meaning’ is something ‘separate’ from language. Language is a series of
different kinds of ‘games’ with many different purposes and goals. Meaning is the result of
socially agreed conventions and cannot possibly be established outside of language. Meaning
is in the use; it is not to be found anywhere else. He adopted a therapeutic view of philosophical
discourse, which he claimed was in a situation of sickness, where language is on holiday, so
that one language game becomes confused with another. His later philosophy of mind is also
anti-Cartesian. Thought is linguistic. Language is a social product and therefore cannot be
‘private’. This means that any phenomenological quest for certainty is misconceived.
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is known as father of phenomenology and his views are
influenced Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The significant element in Husserl’s
phenomenology is the act of detachment, of standing back from the realm of experienced
existence in order to understand it. The philosophy and crisis of European man is the major
philosophical work of Husserl. As he explained the crisis consists of philosophy’s departure
from its true goal, which is to provide the best possible answers to man’s human and human
concerns, to deal rigorously with man’s quest for the highest values, and in short, to develop
the unique broad range capacities of human reason. He described the ‘crisis’ as the ‘seeming
collapse of reason’ and he set his life time objective as ‘saving human reason.’ his ultimate
objective is to save human reason by developing philosophy into a rigorous science. Husserl
believed that natural sciences have over the years developed a faulty attitude in western man
regarding what the world is like and how best to know it. He tries to build philosophy and its
method that based on to judge only by the evidence without any presuppositions and pre
conceived notions. Descartes employed systematic doubt; Husserl simply withheld any
judgment about his experience, seeking instead to describe his experience as fully as possible
in terms of the evidence of experience itself. Experience obviously revolve around the self, the
ego, and for Husserl as well as for Descartes, the source of all knowledge is the ego. Husserl
sees the ego simply as the matrix of experience. He puts his emphasis more on experience
instead of logic. His concern is to discover and describe the given in experience as it is
presented in its pure form and found as the immediate data of consciousness. He believed that
more accurate description of experience is expressed ego cogito cogitatum. For Husserl, we
understand the elements of our experience, phenomena, best by discovering the active role of
consciousness in intending and creating phenomena. For Husserl the human experience is not
simply the fact of consciousness but rather that consciousness is always consciousness of
something. He believed that the essence of consciousness is intentionality indeed for Husserl,
intentionality is the structure of consciousness itself and is also the fundamental category of
being. The presence of intentionality is disclosed through the process Husserl calls
phenomenological epoche. In order to prepare the way for the rigorous foundations of his
philosophy, Husserl again and again urged epoch, the bracketing of all presuppositions and
especially the presuppositions of the natural sciences. Husserl further argues that the life world
is the source from which the sciences must abstract their objects.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has had wide influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide
range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines The Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline
and Punish, Madness and Civilization, History of Sexuality, Order of Things, Birth of Clinic
are prominent writings of Foucault. He introduced concepts such as ‘discursive regime’. or re-
invoked those of older philosophers like ‘episteme’ and ‘genealogy’ in order to explain the
relationship among meaning, power, and social behaviour within social orders. A central
terms in Foucault’s work; he was particularly interested in knowledge of human beings
and power that acts on human beings. His works reveals that how ‘truths’ have changed
over centuries from age to age and from culture to culture. Truth is relative and
subjective. Power and knowledge are intrinsically related. In every society the production
of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain
number of procedures, whose role is “to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance
events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.” Discourse is controlled in order to have
its transformative potential checked, in order to limit the occurrence of the unexpected, and to
limit the substance of discourse as an event in itself. Discourse is controlled externally through
the rules of exclusion, which include prohibition; a form of power that circulates in the social
field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance the ‘discursive
field’, the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power. His aim
is to bring into view the marginalised and submerged discourses. His philosophical method
provides a novel way in understanding the social reality by exposing the politics of hegemony,
exclusion, and violence of dominant discourses. This provides the space for recognising the
social experience of the marginalised and articulating the politics of identity.
More Contemporary Thinkers
At each stage in human history, men and women have worked out some sort of picture of the
world and their place in it. The pieces they use to make up this picture have been obtained by
observing nature and through generalizing their day-to-day experiences. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud who Paul Ricouer describes as ‘Masters of Suspicion’, made
great contribution to development of critical thinking in the contemporary period. Continuing
the romantic revolt against reason and social organization, Nietzsche stressed the values of
individual self-assertion, biological instinct, and passion. Karl Marx developed the philosophy
of dialectical materialism, based on the dialectical logic of Hegel, but they made matter, rather
than mind, the ultimate reality. Freud by his Psycho analysis gave a fresh and scientific
understanding of human person.
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