The living Hegelian dialectic in hardback!

The disciplinary identity of philosophy is in question. So says John McCumber in “Reshaping Reason”, where he makes a serious argument with evidence of trends pointing toward a sort of Hegelian synthesis in American philosophy to overcome the “Fantasy Island” of analytic thought and the “Subversive Struggle” of continental thought.

“Fantasy Island” and “Subversive Struggle” are McCumber’s well-reasoned nicknames for the two schools. Here are his two primary criticisms of the schools: (1) analytic thought traps itself in present tense language, ignoring the substantive insights of Hegel and Heidegger about the temporal present-past-future structure of thought or the subject; (2) continental thought dooms itself by pretending that it can continue to talk intelligibly while getting rid of the concept of true statements, irrespective of social construction — that’s why so much continental philosophy is bad.

McCumber gives to the analytic tradition that philosophy must cede ground to science on much of its old territory, but insists that there is one job (at least one, but he discusses others) only philosophy is uniquely situated to do, and that is the “situating” of reason and knowledge as such, especially their being situated in time.  It’s a very Hegelian idea: after science, philosophy becomes the practice of understanding — to be sure, with handy dandy new post-Fregean analytic conceptual tools — the historical becoming and meaning of knowledge in the context of the present. This is a job that can actually have relevance for the public (you know, all those weird people outside the walls of academia?).

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