A Thing of This World ─ A History of Continental Anti-realism

Viewing the current split between analytic and continental branches of philosophy as worse than the earlier split between rationalism and empiricism and detrimental to philosophy as a whole, the author of this book seeks to initiate a rapprochement between the two based on the same foundation as the rationalist-empiricist synthesis, Kant's idea that the mind actively organizes experience. Aiming his remarks to members of the analytic tradition, he constructs a history of continental anti-realism in order to show that the continental philosophers have been concerned with many of the same issues as analytic philosophy, albeit in a different context and with different vocabularies. The history focuses on the writings of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida and, by translating their thought into an analytic vocabulary, aims to demonstrate the radical contributions of later Heidegger to anti-realism and related issues and the possibility that the work of Derrida has pointed the way to a new paradigm by recasting the idea of conceptual schemes as deeply unstable. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Lee Braver is chair of the department of philosophy at Hiram College in Ohio.