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Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Pascal Engel
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Extract

People outside France have always wondered why analytical philosophy has had so little influence in this country, while it has gained currency in many other European countries, such as Germany and Italy, not to speak of Northern Europe, where the analytical tradition is strongly established. This can be explained only by a particular conjunction of historical, cultural, sociological and maybe economical factors, which it would be too long to detail here. If there are natural characters of nations, there is no reason to believe that there are no philosophical characters of nations. As Hume said, the characters of nations can have physical as well as moral causes. As for the physical causes, everybody in Britain knows how insular the Continent can be. So if there is such a thing as French analytical philosophy, nobody will be surprised to learn that it is very insular. Before presenting some of the work done by French philosophers related to the analytical tradition, let me try to give what I take to be some of the moral causes of their insularity.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

1 Hume, , ‘The National Characters of Nations’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (London, 1875).Google Scholar

2 Minuit, 1984 and 1985.

3 For instance, Jacques Bouveresse's books and papers (see below); Jacob, Pierre, L'empirisme logique (Minuit, 1980)Google Scholar. Joëlle Proust has recently published an important book about the history of the notion of analyticity from Hume to Carnap, which is also a study of the origins of analytical philosophy (Questions de forme (Fayard, 1986)).Google Scholar

4 La philosophie analytique (Minuit, 1962).Google Scholar

5 Benveniste was the first. See ‘La philosophie analytique et le langage’, in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Gallimard, 1966)Google Scholar. See also Ducrot, O., Dire et ne pas dire (Herman, 1972)Google Scholar, where the notion of presupposition is discussed. Chomskyan linguistic too attracted the interest of philosophers to the debates in analytical philosophy of language.

6 Vuillemin, J., Leçons sur la première philosophie de Russell (A. Colin, 1968)Google Scholar; La logique et le monde sensible (Flammarion, 1970).Google Scholar

7 Nécessité ou contingence; l'aporie de Diodore et les systèmes philosophiques (Minuit, 1984)Google Scholar. What is a Philosophical System? (Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar is an English adaptation of part II of this book.

8 Ishiguro, Hidé, ‘La philosophie analytique et l'histoire de la philosophie’, in Critique 399–400 (1980), 743–750.Google Scholar

9 Granger, G., Pensée formelle et sciences de l'homme (Aubier, 1962)Google Scholar (English trans., Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man Reidel, 1981Google Scholar); Essai d'une philosophie du style? (2nd ed. O. Jacob, 1987)Google Scholar; La théorie aristotélicienne de la science (Aubier, 1976)Google Scholar; Languages et épistémologue (Klinckskieck, 1980)Google Scholar; Wittgenstein (Seghers, 1968).Google Scholar

10 Dialogiques (Presses Universitaires de France, 1979)Google Scholar; Différence et subjectivité (Aubier, 1983)Google Scholar; L'espace logique de l'interlocution (PUF, 1985).Google Scholar

11 See Dialogiques.

12 L'espace logique de l'interlocution, 267–322.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 497–539.

14 See especially ibid., 461–496.

15 Par ex. ibid., 562.

16 Ibid., 248.

17 Ibid.

18 See Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, essays 9–11 (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar

19 Davidson, , Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980), 141.Google Scholar

20 L'espace logique de l'interlocution, 72, 135, 249.Google Scholar

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22 Sperber, D. and Wilson, Deirdre, Relevance, Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar

23 Fauconnier, C., Les espaces mentaux (Minuit, 1983)Google Scholar; English trans., Mental Spaces (MIT, 1985).Google Scholar

24 Although speech act theory and pragmatics have attracted the interest of many linguists, some work has been done on semantics from a logical standpoint. See especially Frédéric Nef, Sémantique de la référence temporelle (Lang, 1986)Google Scholar, a study of temporal reference within the framework of intensional logic.

25 Zaslawsky, D., Analyse de l'être (Minuit, 1983).Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 177.

27 I have reviewed this book in Revue Philosophique, 108, 3 (1983), pp. 317–22.Google Scholar

28 La parole malheureuse (Minuit, 1971), 12.Google Scholar

29 See Proust, Joëlle, Questions de forme, op. cit. sec. IV.Google Scholar

30 Cf. Bouveresse, Jacques, ‘La philosophie et les fondements’, Archives de philosophie 43, No. 1 (1980), 1–32.Google Scholar

31 Minuit, 1973.

32 Ibid., 228 seq.

33 See in particular Rorty, R., Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)Google Scholar, and Bouveresse's discussion in La philosophie chez les autophages, conclusion.

34 Raionalité et cynisme, 120–124.Google Scholar

35 See for instance his ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’, in Le Pore, E. (ed.), Truth and Interpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar

36 Rationalité et cynisme, 140.Google Scholar

37 ‘Frege, Dummett et la “nouvelle querelle du réalisme”’, Critique (10 1980), 881–896.Google Scholar

38 Op. cit., 896. Bouveresse follows here McDowell, J., ‘Antirealism and the Epistemology of Understanding’, in Parret, H. and Bouveresse, J. (eds), Meaning and Understanding (Berlin; De Gruyter, 1981).Google Scholar

39 The question whether Wittgenstein's philosophy can be interpreted as a transcendental philosophy has been much debated. For a recent account, see Lear, J., ‘Leaving the World Alone’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, No. 7, (07 1982), 382–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Vincent Descombes has given an interpretation of Wittgenstein notion of ‘grammar’ according to which the transcendental question in philosophy amounts to the study of the transcendental (in the medieval sense) or transcategorial notions, such as being, truth, or goodness. His analysis has many affinities with Zaslawsky's. See his book, Grammaire d'objets en tous genres (Minuit, 1983)Google Scholar, translated as Objects of all Sorts (Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar. I have not commented on Descombes' book because it is more a critique of contemporary French philosophy from the point of view of certain (reinterpreted) insights borrowed from analytical philosophy than a contribution to analytical philosophy. See my review of this book, ‘Des nuages de philosophie dans des gouttes de grammaire’, Critique, 451 (12 1984), 954–983.Google Scholar

41 See his book mentioned in note 3 above. See also Jacob, P. (ed.), De Vienne à Cambridge, l'héritage du positivisme logique (Gallimard, 1981)Google Scholar (a translation and edition on positivist and post-positivist philosophy of science). See also his papers ‘Réalisme et vérité’, Fundamenta Scientiae, 3/4, (1983)Google Scholar; ‘Le rationalisme peutil être déductif?’, Le temps de la réflexion, 5 (1984)Google Scholar, and especially ‘Is there a path halfway between realism and verificationism?’, to be published in Synthese. Pierre Jacob has also written on the philosophy of mind and psychology.

42 e.g. Kripke.