McCumber - Time and Philosophy

TIME AND PHILOSOPHY

TIME AND PHILOSOPHY

A History of Continental Thought

John McCumber

First published 2011 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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John McCumber, 2011

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ISBN: 978-1-84465-275-4 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-84465-276-1 (paperback)

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CONTENTS

Charlton Payne compiled the suggestions for further reading. I am indebted to my department chairs, Hans Wagener and James Schultz, and to my Dean, Timothy Stowell, for arranging my teaching as to both time and topic so that it could contribute to this volume. Brenda Wirkus and Dianna Taylor afforded me the privilege of a term at John Carroll University, during which this project had its genesis. Tristan Palmer performed near-miraculous feats as my editor, rounding up four excellent readers from whose reports I learned much.

Jeffrey Rice and my colleagues in the UCLA German Department have provided ongoing inspiration and encouragement, as has Franoise Lionnet. My greatest debt is to my students at John Carroll University, Northwestern University and UCLA. They have taught me far more than I have taught them, and I aspire to be their worthy disciple.

A NOTE ON TEXTS

Works by Kant are cited by volume and page number in the Berlin Academy edition, the Akademie Ausgabe (Immanuel Kants gesammelte Schriften, 28 vols [Berlin, 1902]), except for the Critique of Pure Reason, which is cited by page numbers to the A and B editions in the Akademie Ausgabe edition (vols IV and III, respectively).

References to Heideggers Being and Time are to the marginal pagination, which follows that of the German edition of 1927.

References to Aristotle and Plato use Bekker and Stephanus numbering, respectively, which is given marginally in most translations. Abbreviations follow those used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Except for primary texts, all translations are my own.

True madness lies primarily in immutability.

Horkheimer & Adorno (DE 194)

THE PARADOX OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Continental philosophy is the most important intellectual tradition of the past two centuries. Billions not millions of people the world over have not only studied it in detail, but have tried to live by it. It has transformed our understanding of God, of society, of art and literature, of minority groups and of human life in general. It has provided much of the vocabulary in which educated people from Buenos Aires to Hanoi, from Moscow to Cairo, from Mexico City to Mauritius, from Shanghai to Brussels, think about their lives and communities. The only intellectual project that can rival it in importance is the rise of science, but science is far too huge and diverse to be a single tradition. The representatives of continental philosophy, by contrast, form a relatively cohesive group whose later members read and learnt from the earlier ones, and often knew them personally.

The claims I made in the previous paragraph are immense, but the name of just one of continental philosophys practitioners, Karl Marx, is enough to establish them. Adding the other continental philosophers to be discussed in this book gives us one of the greatest collections of intellectual superheroes ever to storm the heavens of the mind: Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, Badiou, Beauvoir, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Hegel, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rancire and Sartre. And there are many more.

In spite of its importance, however, continental philosophy remains little understood today, particularly in the anglophone world. What connects these thinkers? Why do we think of Hannah Arendt together with Marx and Jacques Derrida but not with John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell? This is no small mystery, but one of the central paradoxes of contemporary intellectual life. How can something so important be so little understood?