Introduction

One does not have to be particularly attentive to notice that a good deal of what goes on in philosophy these days cannot be neatly categorized either as “analytic” or as “continental.” Thanks especially to the path-breaking work of Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin and others, all the crossing and recrossing in recent years between Anglo-American and European philosophical traditions has opened up a depoliticized philosophical space between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. As a result questions and issues are being approached from a much wider and much more illuminating range of perspectives. And this makes possible previously unthinkable conversations across considerable historical, cultural, and philosophical distance.