Now it might seem churlish and perhaps more than a little touchy to pick up on what was at most a throwaway, unconscious reference by Grayling, but given that it was made in the process of defending philosophy against Hawking's accusation of mysticism and irrelevance I feel there is nevertheless something to be noted.
Clearly Grayling had a thought in the back of his mind to the effect that only the "analytic, Anglophone" brand of philosophy can be considered legitimate. According to this generalisation, all so-called "Continental" philosophy stands accused of obscurantism. There is no need to retread the lines of this division in academic philosophy between the two traditions of "Anglophone" and "Continental" thought, which has been covered in easily-digestible form elsewhere. Nor do I want to want to enter into a debate about the validity of ethnically-specific names for intellectual traditions. Rather, what I'd like to attempt here is a defence of some of what is known pejoratively as "Continental" philosophy against the charge of irrelevance in a supposedly post-philosophical age of scientific maturity.
In order to set the terms for my claim that "Continental" philosophy continues to be relevant from the point-of-view of scientific knowledge I would like first to briefly sketch what I take to be the classical "Anglophone" - which is to say, analytical - position on the purpose of philosophy in a scientific age. Adhering to what Bernard Williams described as 'workmanlike' virtues, "Anglophone" philosophy assumes the role of handmaiden to science - 'responsible as opposed to frivolous' and working in the cause of 'truth', or at the very least 'knowledge'. Its principal methodological resource is "logical analysis" and its goal is, in the words of John Searle, 'the analysis of meaning'.
In light of this "Anglophone" paradigm, "Continental" philosophers often stand accused of a failure to engage with a universally valid scientific method for developing our knowledge that all scientists, and by extension all "Anglophone" philosophers, are believed to have adopted. Epithets such as "literary" and "theoretical" are often deployed to dismiss out of hand a wide range of approaches to "Continental" philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction. In the more favourable version of this generalisation, "Continental" philosophers are said to oppose "scientism".
However, as Simon Critchley has recognised, what is at work here is a variation on the themes of C. P. Snow's defining 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures:
Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground.Yet anyone with at least a passing familiarity with the work of those labelled as "Continental" philosophers ought to be aware that there is ample evidence of active engagement with scientific concerns in their work, albeit not necessarily the same scientific concerns as those valued by Grayling and other "Anglophone" philosophers.
For example, in his short summary of twentieth-century French philosophy for the New Left Review, Alain Badiou identifies four 'moves' that characterise the approach adopted by French philosophers in the postwar period. One of these moves 'concerns science', as Badiou explained:
French philosophers sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge by demonstrating that, as a mode of productive or creative activity, and not merely an object of reflection or cognition, it went far beyond the realm of knowledge. They interrogated science for models of invention and transformation that would inscribe it as a practice of creative thought, comparable to artistic activity, rather than as the organization of revealed phenomena.No doubt this is a radically different conception of the scientific method to that proposed by philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, but it is important not to see it as a rejection of science itself. Indeed, given that the analytical tradition has a tendency to reduce scientific practice to a set of empirical procedures, this creative conception of science could be said to open up greater possibilities for scientific achievement. In a sense, perhaps this is the true distinction between "Anglophone" and "Continental" philosophy, at least from the point of view of science - that "Anglophone" philosophers seek to rationalise and thus universalize the scientific method through logical analysis of its procedures, whereas "Continental" philosophers interrogate scientific practice in order to mine it for new ways of looking at the world (it would perhaps then be a question of whether this is simply a less eloquent way of making Snow's old distinction).
What appeals to me about the conception of science as it appears in the French tradition identified by Badiou is that it is about more than a methodology, that it allows us to engage with science without the prerequisite of expertise in a particular field - we do not need to be theoretical physicists or epidemiologists or mathematicians to understand and value science. Moreover, this radical approach to science allows us to use scientific theories and methodologies to interrogate other domains of knowledge, and likewise to use other variations of the intellect to comprehend scientific concerns.
It is possible, as well, to go beyond Badiou's initial formulation and see this trend in "Continental" philosophy diverging into different tendencies, reflecting attention to varied issues within the scientific landscape.
First of all, there is the historical tendency, beginning (to the degree that any historical perspective can ever be said to begin) with the historical epistemology of Abel Rey, Léon Brunschvicg, Alexandre Koyré and Gaston Bachelard. From that cluster we can trace a line either to the major revisions in the history of science undertaken by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, largely under the influence of Koyré, or, through Bachelard's successor as director of the Institut d'histoire des sciences, Georges Canguilhem, to the (post-)structural philosophy of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan.
Canguilhem was also significant for introducing biological and medical concepts into philosophy and thus for promoting a physiological as opposed to a physical understanding of the world. He defended the complexity of forms of life and the impact of environmental factors. However, as Foucault recognised in an essay on his old mentor, Canguilhem was never seduced by the idealistic tendencies of vitalism and remained a resolute defender of conceptual understanding against the subjective tendencies of his former classmate, Jean-Paul Sartre.
These conceptual schemas were taken up, under Canguilhem's supervision, by Gilbert Simondon, whose major contribution to philosophy was his theory of individuation. According to this theory, the individual is the contingent result of a process of individuation, rather than the reflection of a set of fixed reference points. As such, subjectivity was seen as an effect of individuation. In developing this theory, Simondon drew siginificantly on principles of metastability in complex dynamic processes, such as crystallisation.
At the same time, the influence of subjective philosophies such as existentialism and the new interpretations of Hegel proposed by the likes of Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hypollite had a significant impact on the work of the more widely celebrated of Canguilhem's students. In the case of Gilles Deleuze, these preoccupations were linked to a unique approach to the history of philosophy and contributed to perhaps the most radical transformation in our understanding of knowledge-formation introduced in France during the previous century. As I have already explained in an earlier post, Deleuze's chief philosophical inspiration came from the trinity of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, and as a result his approach to science can perhaps best be described as critical engagement. In Deleuze's work, science, alongside artistic endeavours such as literature or cinema, provides a series of case studies that are the leaping-off point for his chief philosophical task: the creation of concepts. As such, Deleuze was able to defend a specifically philosophical metaphysics against the imperial challenge presented by the physical sciences.
A similar defence of the validity of philosophical enquiry has been provided by Michel Serres, who studied philosophy under the direction of Bachelard. To a much greater extent than Deleuze, Serres defends the basic similarity of forms of knowledge-creation, whether scientific, literary or mythological. Moreover, what Deleuze did for the history of philosophy, Serres has emulated in the history of science, providing virtuousic accounts of a number of scientific subjects, including atomism, geometry, thermodynamics and information theory. For Serres, philosophy is an adventure, a chance to roam the many byways of our understanding.
The style of philosophy exemplified by Deleuze and Serres has been a principal influence on a subsequent generation of "Continental" philosophers, in intriguingly divergent ways. For Alain Badiou, it has provided a specific way of looking at the relationships between our forms of knowledge, culminating in a grand ontological synthesis based on set theory. In Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (and beyond) there is a strong emphasis on ethnological studies of scientific practice and the social context of intellectual innovation. Likewise, Bernard Stiegler has used these principles to inform a set of wide-ranging studies of productive technologies and their impact on our comprehension of the world. Meanwhile, Manuel de Landa has adapted an expressly Deleuzian philosophy into a thorough-going theory of assemblages, with particular emphasis on the principle of morphogenesis - bringing us back almost full circle to the biological preoccupations of Canguilhem.
Through this third generation we begin to see the tradition of "Continental" philosophers engaging with science breaking across national boundaries and long-standing stereotypes. Badiou, Latour and Stiegler have all found sizeable audiences outside of France, particularly in the United States, and de Landa has become the principal proponent of this new speculative turn in metaphysics within the English-speaking world. As such, it seems high time for "Anglophone" and "Continental" philosophers to seek a rapprochement about the value of their discipline.
