ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s – but not before – there have been undergraduate and graduate university courses in philosophy in the English-speaking world which have gone by, or include, the title ‘Continental Philosophy’. Why it came about at that time that some courses came to be so called is reasonably clear, although, as we shall see, it was in some ways a rather odd choice. In order not to beg too many questions about that oddness, I want first to give the reason for the introduction of this title in a rather roundabout way. The reason, prosaically speaking, was this. In the English-speaking world there were (and still are) a number of professional philosophers with a serious working interest in ideas and arguments developed by authors whose work was (and largely remains) not at all well regarded by most mainstream ‘analytic’ philosophers. The course titles which were typically being used to teach the work of such authors included, among others, ‘Phenomenology’, ‘Existentialism’, ‘Hegel and Marx’, ‘Hermeneutics’ and ‘Critical Theory’. These were all quite different (if typically overlapping) courses, but they were all beginning to look like explorations of authors and themes with increasingly more historical interest than contemporary relevance. By this I mean that the ideas at the heart of such courses were being challenged by many of those whom they most deeply influenced. New trends and new thinkers were emerging that could not be happily included in courses going under those old titles. We can be even more precise here, for there is near universal agreement that the changeover to the new title occurred in order to enable teachers in the English-speaking world to include in the syllabuses of their various courses authors whose work was coming to be known, as Simon Critchley puts it, by ‘the rather unhelpful and approximative labels’ of ‘post-structuralism’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘French feminism’. 1 ‘Continental philosophy’, an appropriately vague category that was already to hand, provided the convenient catch-all for courses covering both the old and the new.
