Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe.^[1][2] This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes the following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches of Western Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory.^[3]

It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements. The term "continental philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.^[4] Babette Babich emphasizes the political basis of the distinction, still an issue when it comes to appointments and book contracts.^[5] Nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy.^[6]

• First, continental philosophers generally reject scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding phenomena. This contrasts with analytic philosophers, many of whom have considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience" (a version of the Kantian conditions of possible experience or the phenomenological concept of the "lifeworld") and that scientific methods are inadequate to fully understand such conditions of intelligibility.^[7]

• Second, continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence".^[8]

• Third, continental philosophy typically holds that conscious human agency can change these conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways".^[9] Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and tend to see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.

• A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.^[10] In some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And some continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, or Derrida) doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals.

Ultimately, the foregoing themes derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.^[11]

The term[link]

The term "continental philosophy," in the above sense, was first widely used by English-speaking philosophers to describe university courses in the 1970s, emerging as a collective name for the philosophies then widespread in France and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.^[12]

However, the term (and its approximate sense) can be found at least as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill's 1840 essay on Coleridge, where Mill contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of "Continental philosophy" and "Continental philosophers" with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally.^[13] This notion gained prominence in the early 20th century as figures such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore advanced a vision of philosophy closely allied with natural science, progressing through logical analysis. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as "analytic philosophy", became dominant in Britain and America from roughly 1930 onward. Russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement.^[14] Commenting on the history of the distinction in 1945, Russell distinguished "two schools of philosophy, which may be broadly distinguished as the Continental and the British respectively", a division he saw as operative "from the time of Locke".^[15]

Since the 1970s, however, many philosophers in America and Britain have taken interest in continental philosophers since Kant, and the philosophical traditions in many European countries have similarly incorporated many aspects of the "analytic" movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including philosophers such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati, and Pascal Engel. Likewise, self-described "continental philosophers" can be found in philosophy departments in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia,^[16] and some well-known analytic philosophers claim to conduct better scholarship on continental philosophy than self-identified programs in continental philosophy, particularly at the level of graduate education.^[17] "Continental philosophy" is thus defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions and influences rather than a geographic distinction.

History[link]

The history of continental philosophy (taken in its narrower sense) is usually thought to begin with German idealism.^[18] Led by figures like Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German idealism developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely linked with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. Besides the central figures listed above, important contributors to German idealism also included Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

As the institutional roots of "continental philosophy" in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology,^[19] Edmund Husserl has always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition.^[20] Husserl's notion of a noema (a non-psychological content of thought), his correspondence with Gottlob Frege, and his investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest among analytic philosophers.

J.G. Merquior^[21] argued that a distinction between analytic and continental philosophies can be first clearly identified with Henri Bergson (1859-1941), whose wariness of science and elevation of intuition paved the way for existentialism. Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path [from the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One might say it all began with Henri Bergson."

An illustration of some important differences between "analytic" and "continental" styles of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language" (Originally published in 1932 as "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache"), a paper some observers^[who?] have described as particularly polemical. Carnap's paper argues that Heidegger's lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements.^[22] Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning.

With the rise of Nazism, many of Germany's philosophers, especially those of Jewish descent or leftist or liberal political sympathies (such as many in the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School), fled to the English-speaking world. Those philosophers who remained—if they remained in academia at all—had to reconcile themselves to Nazi control of the universities. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, among the most prominent German philosophers to stay in Germany, embraced Nazism when it came to power.

Both before and after World War II there was a growth of interest in German philosophy in France. A new interest in communism translated into an interest in Marx and Hegel, who became for the first time studied extensively in the politically conservative French university system of the Third Republic. At the same time the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger became increasingly influential, perhaps owing to its resonances with those French philosophies which placed great stock in the first-person perspective (an idea found in divergent forms such as Cartesianism, spiritualism, and Bergsonism). Most important in this popularization of phenomenology was the author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who called his philosophy existentialism. (See 20th-century French philosophy.)

Recent Anglo-American developments[link]

From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an influx of continental philosophers, particularly German Jewish students of Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the United States on account of the persecution of the Jews and later World War II; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably the most notable of this wave, arriving in the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, philosophy departments began offering courses in continental philosophy in the late 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s, some British and American philosophers became more vocally opposed to the methods and conclusions of continental philosophers. For example, John Searle^[23] criticized Derrida's deconstruction for "obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses" and, later, assorted signatories protested against the award of an honorary degree to Derrida by Cambridge University.^[24]

American university departments in literature, the fine arts, film, sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research. Continental Philosophy is also the central specialization in a number of British Philosophy departments, for instance at the University of Essex and Kingston University, and in North American Philosophy departments, including Boston College, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Vanderbilt University, DePaul University, Villanova University, the University of Guelph, New School University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Oregon, Emory University, Duquesne University, the University of Memphis, and Loyola University Chicago. The most prominent organization for continental philosophy in the United States is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (known as SPEP^[25]).

See also[link]

• Analytic philosophy
• Index of continental philosophy articles

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Babich, Babette (2003). "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy." In: C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. pp. 63–103. 
• Critchley, Simon (2001). Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-285359-7. 
• Cutrofello, Andrew (2005). Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy. New York; Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 
• Glendinning, Simon (2006). The idea of continental philosophy: a philosophical chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. 
• Leiter, Brian; Rosen, Michael, eds. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. 
• Schrift, Alan D. (2010). The History of Continental Philosophy. Chicago; Illinois: University of Chicago Press Press. 
• Solomon, Robert C. (1988). Continental philosophy since 1750: the rise and fall of the self. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. 
• Kenny, Anthony (2007). A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume IV: Philosophy in the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Timothy Williamson (born Uppsala, 6 August 1955) is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

He is currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of New College, Oxford. He was previously Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh (1995–2000); Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Oxford (1988–1994); and Lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin (1980–1988). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA),^[1] the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters,^[2] Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Education[link]

Timothy Williamson's education began at Leighton Park School and continued at Henley Grammar School. He then went to Oxford University. He graduated in 1976 with a B.A. (first class honours) in Mathematics and Philosophy, and in 1981 with a doctorate in philosophy (D.Phil.) for a thesis examining "The Concept of Approximation to the Truth".

Contribution to philosophy[link]

Williamson has contributed to analytic philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

On vagueness, he holds a position known as epistemicism, which states that every seemingly vague predicate (like "bald", or "thin") actually has a sharp cutoff, which is impossible for us to know. That is, there is some number of hairs such that anyone with that number is bald, and anyone with even one more hair is not. In actuality, this condition will be spelled out only partly in terms of numbers of hairs, but whatever measures are relevant will have some precise cutoff. This solution to the difficult sorites paradox was considered an astonishing and unacceptable consequence, but has become a relatively mainstream view since his defense of it.^[3] Williamson is fond of using the statement, "no one knows whether I am thin" to illustrate his view.^[4]

In epistemology, he suggests that the concept of knowledge is unanalyzable. This goes against the common trend in philosophical literature up to that point, which was to argue that knowledge could be analysed into constituent concepts. (Typically this would be justified true belief plus an extra factor.) He agrees that knowledge entails justification, truth and belief, but that it is conceptually primitive. He accounts for the importance of belief by discussing its connections with knowledge, but avoids the disjunctivist position of saying that belief can be analyzed as the disjunction of knowledge with some distinct, non-factive mental state.

Publications[link]

• Identity and Discrimination, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Vagueness, London: Routledge, 1994.
• Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Williamson has also published more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

External links[link]

• Timothy Williamson's homepage at University of Oxford's Department of Philosophy.
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Timothy Williamson October 4, 2010.
• Roundtable on aims and methods of philosophy with Timothy Williamson as the main presenter October 6, 2010

References[link]

John Rogers Searle

Born	(1932-07-31) July 31, 1932 (age 79) Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality
Notable ideas	Indirect speech acts · Chinese room
Influenced by David Hume · J.L. Austin · Bertrand Russell · Ludwig Wittgenstein Gottlob Frege · P.F. Strawson Hubert Dreyfus
Signature

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.

Biography[link]

Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.

Politics[link]

In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).^[1]

While a professor at Berkeley in 1964, he joined the Free Speech Movement^[2] opposing policies of the university administration. Later, in 1969, he sided with the administration against the students over People's Park. Also in 1969, he served as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California.^[3] He authored The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971).^[4] The book attempted to investigate the causes behind the campus uprisings of the era. In it, Searle notes: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts: "[M]y wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."^[1] In an op-ed piece written shortly after 9/11, Searle maintained that:

We need to give up on the fantasy that we are going to find Bin Laden hiding in a cave, and when we do so, our troubles will be over... There will be plenty of others, perhaps reinspired by his martyrdom, to take up where he left off.^[5]

Further, he argued the attacks were part of a longer-term struggle whose only solution was to root out governments that supported terrorism.^[6]

Philosophy[link]

Speech acts[link]

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J.L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.

Despite his announced intention^[7] to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act", Searle in fact does not give one.^{[citation needed]} Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences:

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction (an idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper "Meaning and Truth" [9]) and a direction of fit (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the word-to-world direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the world-to-word direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic^[8] (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of "illocutionary point". (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article "Performatives".)

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is offered by F.C. Doerge [10].^[9] Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in: Burkhardt 1990^[10] and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.^[11]

Searle-Derrida debate[link]

In the early 1970s Searle had a brief debate with Jacques Derrida regarding Speech Act theory. The debate was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood the basic points of the other.^[12] Searle was particularly hostile to the deconstructionist framework of Derrida and refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection of the papers in the debate, Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing. Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view such as to not legitimize it. Some critics have consequently considered the debate a non-debate, but rather simply a series of elaborate misunderstandings^[13], while others have seen either Derrida or Searle as having gained the upper hand.^[14] The level of hostility in the debate can be seen from the fact that Searle in his reply stated that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".^[15] The debate has nonetheless frequently been interpreted as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.

The debate began in 1972, when Jacques Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his paper "Signature Event Context". While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" - the words that are left unsaid, because of contextual constraints, and by "iterability", the strictures on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech act theory was misguided, because intentionality is restricted to be intentional about that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, and wondered whether this exclusion reflected that Austin had considered these speech genres to be governed by different structures of meaning, or simply by a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory was attempting to give a full account of language and meaning, when in fact its aim was much narrower, Searle considered leaving out parasitic discourse forms justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.^[16][17] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but Searle did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.^[14] This in turn caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.^[18] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction, and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle was at fault for the unsuccesful nature of the exchange, by being so grounded in the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with the continental phenomenlogical tradition represented by Derrida.^[18]

Derrida in his response to Searle, "Limited inc, abc..." ridiculed Searle's positions, suggesting that Searle had formed a Société à responsabilité limitée (Society for Limited Responsibility) with Austin, because of the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of the reply, since a clear sender of the message could not be established. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.^{[19][20][21][22][23][14][24][25]}

In 1995 Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality, in which he called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts. ..."^[26]

Intentionality and the Background[link]

Searle defines "Intentionality" as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world.^[27] The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of the Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality, (the part of the mind directed to/from/about objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (the logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade').^[28] In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies certain elements of his account(s) of "illocutionary acts" to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term the Background,^[29] which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,^[30] "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.") Background he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background"^[31]) and Bourdieu's habitus.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won't go off, that the board won't suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won't magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities won't have occurred to either player,^[32] Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).

In his debate with Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's notion that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.^[33][34]

Consciousness[link]

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). (p. 263)

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity[link]

Searle has argued^[35] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".^[36] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality".^[37] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence[link]

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.^[38]

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.^[39] (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.^[40]

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.^[41] Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.^[42]

Social reality[link]

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we're going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I'm going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he's going for a walk with me and thinks I think I'm going for a walk with him and ...").

Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Rationality[link]

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.

Yet most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says: " All rational activity presupposes free will ".^[43]

Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.

Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964),^[44] remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."^[45]

Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
• The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (political commentary; 1971)
• Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (essay collection; 1979)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983)
• Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (lecture collection; 1984)
• Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 1985)
• John Searle and His Critics (Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991)
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness (review collection; 1997)
• Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (summary of earlier work; 1998)
• Rationality in Action (2001)
• Consciousness and Language (essay collection; 2002)
• Freedom and Neurobiology (lecture collection; 2004)
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (summary of work in philosophy of mind; 2004)
• Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts (essay collection; 2007)
• Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
• Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Further reading[link]

• "Minds, Brains and Programs", The Behavioral and Brain Sciences.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27302-1
• Minds, Brains and Science (1984), Harvard University Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-674-57631-4, paperback: ISBN 0-674-57633-0
• "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" (1990) Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association
• "Collective Intentions and Actions" (1990) in Intentions in Communication J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. Cambridge, Mass.: . MIT Press: 401-416.
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X
• The Problem of Consciousness, Social Research, Vol. 60, No.1, Spring 1993.
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness, Granta Books, (1997) hardcover: ISBN 1-86207-122-5, New York Review Books paperback: ISBN 0-940322-06-4
• Consciousness Ann. Rev. Neurosci. (2000) 23:557-78. Review.
• Rationality in Action, MIT Press, (2001) – contains (among other things) Searle's account of akrasia
• Consciousness and Language (2002), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59744-7
• D. Koepsell (ed.) and L. Moss (ed.) "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" in John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions (2003), Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515733-8
• Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-13752-4
• Dualism revisited J Physiol Paris. 2007 Jul-Nov;101(4-6):169-78. Epub 2008 Jan 19.
• M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, J. Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-14044-4
• The Storm Over the University

• Doerge (2006), Friedrich Christoph: Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It. Tuebingen: Tuebingen University. http://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2006/2273/pdf/Dissertation_Doerge.pdf

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Searle

• John Searle's Machines Like Us interview
• Searle's homepage at UC Berkeley
• Conversations with Searle.
• Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and podcast.
• Conversations with History:John R. Searle on YouTube
• Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness
• John Searle at the Internet Movie Database
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures
• Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13
• BBC Reith Audio Lectures - John Searle: Minds, Brain & Science (1984)

Simon Critchley

Born	27 February 1960 Hertfordshire[1], England
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental Philosophy
Main interests	Politics, Ethics, Post-Religion, Aesthetics,
Influenced by Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Laclau, Nancy, Badiou

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics.

Academic Career[link]

Critchley studied philosophy at the University of Essex (BA 1985, PhD 1988,) and at the University of Nice (M.Phil. 1987). Among his teachers were Robert Bernasconi, Jay Bernstein, Frank Cioffi, Dominique Janicaud and Onora O'Neill. His M.Phil. thesis dealt with the problem of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger and Carnap; his Ph.D. dissertation was on the ethics of deconstruction in Emmanuel Levinas and Derrida.

Following a period as a university fellow at Cardiff University, Critchley was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at Essex in 1989, becoming reader in philosophy in 1995, and professor in 1999. He was director of the university's Centre for Theoretical Studies and collaborated closely with Ernesto Laclau. Critchley was president of the British Society for Phenomenology from 1994-99. In 1997 and 2001 he held a Humboldt Research Fellowship in philosophy at Frankfurt. Between 1998-2004, he was a programme director of the College international de philosophie, Paris. In 2006-7 he was a scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Since 2004 Critchley has been professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He held the position of chair in philosophy at the New School from 2008-2011, and became the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy in 2011. He has held visiting professorships at numerous universities, including Sydney (2000), Notre Dame (2002), Cardozo Law School (2005) and at the University of Oslo (2006). In 2009 he was appointed a part-time professor of philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he runs a summer school and teaches in philosophy and liberal arts. Critchley is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Critchley is "chief philosopher" of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through proclamations, "denunciations" and live events. He has collaborated closely with the novelist Tom McCarthy on projects including the society's Declaration on Inauthenticity^[1] and their joint publications on Joyce^[2] and Shakespeare.^[3] At an event at the Tate Britain art gallery two lecturers purporting to be Critchley and McCarthy were, in mischievous keeping with the inauthentic theme, played by actors.^[4] The Declaration of Inauthenticity was presented at the opening of the Athens Biennale by Greek actors in June 2009. Critchley also frequently collaborates with his wife, the American psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. Critchley has also worked with the French artist Philippe Parreno and the British conceptual artist Liam Gillick.

Works[link]

The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992)[link]

Critchley’s first book was The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Blackwell, 1992), which became an acclaimed source on deconstruction and was the first book to argue for an ethical dimension to deconstruction. A second expanded edition was published in 1999 by Edinburgh University Press. Rather than being concerned with deconstruction in terms of the contradictions inherent in any text — an approach typical of the early Derrida and those in literary criticism aiming to extract a critical method for an application to literature — Critchley concerns himself with the philosophical context necessary for an understanding of the ethics of deconstructive reading. Far from being some sort of value-free nihilism or textual free-play, Critchley showed the ethical impetus that was driving Derrida’s work. His claim was that Derrida’s understanding of ethics has to be understood in relation to his engagement with the work of Levinas and the book attempts to lay out the details of their philosophical confrontation.

Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997)[link]

Critchley’s second book, Very Little... Almost Nothing (Routledge, 1997) develops in a very different direction and shows his concern with the relation between philosophy and literature and the problem of nihilism. A second edition with additional material and a new preface was published in 2004. At the centre of Very Little... Almost Nothing is the problem of the meaning of life and what sense can be made of this problem in the absence of any religious belief. By way of a series of ‘lectures’ on Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Cavell and romanticism, Critchley argues for a conception of meaninglessness understood as the achievement of the everyday, a view which, he thinks, redeems us from the need for religious redemption.

Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999)[link]

Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (Verso, 1999) is a collection of essays that includes his debate with Richard Rorty, as well as series of essays on Derrida, Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy. These essays also show a pronounced political and psychoanalytic turn to Critchley’s thinking. A new edition of the book appeared in Verso’s Radical Thinkers series in 2009.

Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001)[link]

Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001), is both an introduction to that tradition of thinking and an essay in meta-philosophy, which lays out the way in which Critchley sees the role of theory and reflection. It has been translated into nine languages. In the book, Critchley addresses the perennial question of the two major Western philosophical traditions, that of analytical and continental philosophy. Critchley tries to avoid sectarianism, and argues that the professional opposition between analytic and Continental philosophy is something that needs to be transcended. Critchley accepts that there is risk within continental philosophy of obscurantism, just as there is a risk of scientism in much analytic philosophy. But the primary purpose of philosophy is to understand ourselves, our world and, as Hegel puts it, to comprehend one’s time in thought. Critchley offers the example of the ‘will of God’ as the prime example of obscurantism, but within continental philosophy also the ‘drives’ in Sigmund Freud, ‘archetypes’ in Carl Jung, the ‘real’ in Jaques Lacan, ‘power’ in Michel Foucault, ‘différance’ in Jaques Derrida, the ‘trace of God’ in Emmanuel Levinas, and the ‘epochal withdrawal of being in and as history’ in Martin Heidegger. Continental Philosophy has been translated into 9 languages.

On Humour (2002)[link]

Since 2000, Critchley has turned his attention to what he calls ‘impossible objects’: humour, poetry and music. His On Humour (Routledge, 2002) continues the meditation on nihilism begun in Very Little…Almost Nothing; but he continues it in a very different key, analysing the meaning and importance of humour. Critchley argues that humour is an oblique phenomenology of ordinary bringing about a change of situation that exerts a powerful critical function. On Humour has been translated into 10 languages and has exerted considerable influence over debates around the role of humour in contemporary art practice.

Things Merely Are (2005)[link]

In Things Merely Are (Routledge, 2005), Critchley examines the relation between philosophy and poetry through an extended meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Critchley’s particular focus in Stevens’ very late poems, which attempt to describe what poetry can and cannot say about a subject-independent reality.^[5] Critchley is referenced in the commentary on Stevens's poem Another Weeping Woman. The book also contains Critchley’s influential essay on Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

Infinitely Demanding (2007)[link]

Infinitely Demanding (Verso, 2007) is the most systematic overview of Critchley's philosophical position. It combines a meta-ethics based on the concepts of approval and demand with a phenomenology of ethical experience and ethical subjectivity. At the centre of the book is a theory of ethical subjectivity based on the relation to an infinite demand. Critchley extends his analysis into discussions of aesthetics and sublimation and into political theory and practice. Critchley argues for an ethically committed political anarchism. Infinitely Demanding has been translated into 8 languages. The book has led to some heated polemics, notably with Slavoj Žižek (See below, the Critchley-Žižek Debate). “Infinitely Demanding” is the topic of a special issue of the journal Critical Horizons (August 2009).

On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008)[link]

This volume (Routledge, 2008) combines Reiner Schürmann's lectures at the New School for Social Research on Heidegger’s Being and Time with Critchley’s New School lectures on the relation between Heidegger and Husserl and his own interpretation of Being and Time. Where Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology, Reiner Schürmann's proposal is to read Heidegger ‘backward’, arguing that Heidegger’s later work is the key to unraveling Being and Time. Critchley concludes the volume with an extended critique of Heidegger’s concept of authenticity.

The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009)[link]

An extended defense of the idea that to philosophize is to learn how to die, The Book of Dead Philosophers was published by Granta in the UK (2008), Vintage in the US (2009) and Melbourne University Press in Australia (2008). It has been translated into 13 languages. “The Book of Dead Philosophers” was widely reviewed and discussed (see below). It was on The New York Times Best-Seller List in March 2009 and was a top ten bestseller in Greece in Summer 2009. The aim of “The Book of Dead Philosophers” is to examine, defend and refine the ideal of the philosophical death in the context of a culture like ours that is defined by a denial of death. However, the deeper intention of the book is to challenge and revise the way we think about the history of philosophy. More specifically, the book tries to conceive of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers and thereby rethink the way in which approach the relation between the activity of philosophy and an individual life, between conceptuality and biography.

Der Katechismus des Bürgers (2008)[link]

This small volume (Diaphanes, Berlin, 2008) on the problem of politics and religion in Rousseau was first published in German.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (2010)[link]

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Polity, 2010), a sort of anti-self-help book, is a series of conversations between Critchley and Carl Cederström from 2009 and 2010, originally based on Swedish television series. The conversations are intended to provide an overview and introduction to Critchley's life and work. They are based around a series topics: life, death, love, humour and authenticity. The volume also contains a discussion with Tom McCarthy.

Impossible Objects (2011)[link]

A collection of interviews with Critchley over the past 10 years, edited by Carl Cederström and Todd Kesselman, published by Polity Press in 2011.

Recent Reviews:

• The Guardian Steven Poole, Et cetera: non-fiction reviews
• We Make Meaning Review for PopMatters.com

International Necronautical Society: Offizielle Mitteilungen (2011)[link]

The International Society Necronautical has been nourished by the faded avant-garde movements of the last century, whether artistic, cultural or political. This volume gathers a selection of official communications from the INS from 1999 to 2010, the first time are available in German; meticulously documenting their manifestos, reports, statements, meetings, and trials from 1999 onwards. “We are sometimes asked: How do I join? How does one become a necronaut? Wrong question. As Paragraph Three, lines five and six of the INS’s First Manifesto make clear, willfully pilfering and re-using the tired language of deconstruction, ‘We are all necronauts, always, already.’ Our mission is to disseminate that fact: not as conceptual knowledge but rather in the way that Molly Bloom fills her husband’s mouth with seedcake, then repeats that moment, with a silent Yes.” An English version of the book is forthcoming from Sternberg Press.

The Faith of the Faithless (2012)[link]

From the paradox of politics and religion in Rousseau to the political stakes of the return to St. Paul in the work of Heidegger, Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Carl Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Žižek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence and the limits of non-violence. The Faith of the Faithless - Experiments in Political Theology will be published by Verso in 2012.

Recent Reviews:

• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Publisher's Weekly.
• PoliticalTheology.com
• The Guardian
• BookForum
• New Statesman
• The Oxonian Review
• Times Higher Education

The Hamlet Doctrine (forthcoming)[link]

Critchley is currently finishing a book on Hamlet with Jamieson Webster that will deal with the play in the light of various 'outsider' interpretations, such as those of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan.

Work in Progress (forthcoming)[link]

Critchley is currently also completing an, as of yet, unnamed short book of conversations with Philippe Parreno.

[edit] Recent Press for The Faith of the Faithless

• Cornell West on The Faith of the Faithless at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
• Tea with Simon Critchley: The Separation of Church and State Is Impossible The New Yorker reviews the The Faith of the Faithless.

The Stone[link]

The Stone is an opinion series in The New York Times, moderated by Simon Critchley, that features the writings of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless - art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more. Recent contributors include J.M. Bernstein, Arthur Danto, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer, Natasha Lennard, Nancy Bauer, Todd May, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Railton, Galen Strawson, Feisal G. Mohamed, William Egginton, Andy Martin, Gary Gutting, and Critchley.^[6] Other articles by Critchley in The New York Times also include Beyond the Sea, How to Make It in the Afterlife, and Coin of Praise.

On May 21st, 2011 The New York Times brought back The Stone, due to its widespread popularity. In the first new entry since January, Critchley discusses the aims of the column and the role of philosophy in contemporary culture (The Stone Returns). Critchley's recent contributions to the The Stone include Let Be: An Answer to Hamlet’s Question, a collaboration with Jamieson Webster that traces the logic of action in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Euro Blind, a discussion of Sophocles and the so-called “tragedy" of the European debt crisis. More recently, Critchley contributed a three-part essay on the work of Philip K. Dick entitled Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher

[edit] The Guardian Series on Heidegger's Being and Time

In an essay series^[7] for the British newspaper The Guardian, Critchley explores Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, first published in 1927. The importance of Heidegger’s work, Crtichley explains, is not limited to philosophy, but has poured over into such diverse areas as architecture, contemporary art, social and political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry and theology. Yet, because of his political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, when he assumed the position of Rector of Freiburg University in south-western Germany, Heidegger continues to arouse controversy, polemic and much heated misunderstanding: How could arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century also have been a Nazi? What does his political commitment to National Socialism, however long or short it lasted, suggest about the nature of philosophy and its risks and dangers when stepping into the political realm? Critchley argues that such political questions cannot be properly confronted without coming to terms with Being and Time. The Guardian Series is a concise attempt to understand and feel the persuasive power of this seminal text.

Recent Interviews[link]

• Pursuing Impossible Objects An interview by John Douglas Millar for Monthly Review.
• On Philosophers, Violence, Humour & Tragedy An interview by Qalandar Bux Memon and Asif Akhtar for Naked Punch.
• Tragedy, Rage, Grief and Being an Arsehole An interview by Dave Ronalds for Parallax.
• Exhausted States Concluding their three-part exchange for Mute, artist Alfredo Jaar and philosopher Simon Critchley contemplate how to keep on, artistically and politically, in the face of the spectacular violence that washed-up liberal democracy meets with daily indifference. This exchange was convened by David Morris.
• Creating Interstices: On Ethics, Politics, and Curatorship Simon Critchley discusses aesthetics, nihilism, and ethical fidelity with Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro in Manifesta Journal, V.12
• Resisting the Meaningless Simon Critchley talks power, politics, and the problem of nihilism with Tom Cutterham for Cherwell.org
• Geluk wordt overschat "Happiness is Overrated": Simon Critchley speaks with Peter Giesen for De Volkskrant in the Netherlands.
• The Last Word: Critchley on Cattelan An interview with Critchley on Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective at the Guggenheim.
• My Daily Read for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• An Interview on The Faith of the Faithless with Stir to Action.
• The Ethics of Discomfort John Douglas Millar on art and politics according to Simon Critchley for Art Monthly.
• "월가 시위는 아나키즘의 가능성 보여준 사례" An interview with the Korean newspaper Hankookilbo.

Live Talks and Interviews[link]

Video[link]

• Symposium: We, Ourselves & Us Simon Critchley speaks in conjunction with the exhibition "If We Can’t Get It Together" at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada (January 23, 2009).
• Ten Years of Terror Edited by Simon Critchley and Brad Evans. This movie was screened at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York in September 2011.
• Simon Critchley offers his personal reflections on Ten Years of Terror for the histories of violence project.
• Barack Obama and the American Void Critchley's lecture "Barack Obama and the American Void" is Fora.TV's most-watched political program for 2009.
• The Diavlog of Dead Philosophers: Bloggingheads.tv Percontations Simon Critchley and David Shields discuss topics from the empty existential core of Los Angeles to the proximity of death and humor.
• Video To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die at Fora.tv
• James Corby interviews Simon Critchley by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009