Continental Philosophy: An Anthology

by William McNeill (Editor)

From Immanuel Kant to Postmodernism, this volume provides an unparalleled student a wide-ranging collection of the essential works of more than 50 seminal thinkers in modern European philosophy. Areas covered include Kant and German Idealism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Marxism and the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. Each section begins with a concise and helpful introduction, and all the texts have been selected for accessibility as well as significance, making the volume ideal for introductory and advanced levels in philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, and the history of modern thought.

Genres: Philosophy

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Traveller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I only realized after starting to read this volume, that it represents just an anthology of the works of the authors cited, the extracts being:

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Part I: The Age of the Systems: Kant and German Idealism.

1. Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant).

2. An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (Johann Gottlieb Fichte).

3. Judgemant and Being (Friedrich Hölderlin).

4. The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism).

5. Systems of Transcendental Idealism (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling)6. Phenomenology of Spirit (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).

Part II: Subjectivity in Question: Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics.

1. The World as Will and Representation (Arthur Schopenhauer).

2. Either/or (Soren Kierkegaard).

3. The Gay Science; Twilight of the Idols; The Will to Power (Friedrich Nietsche).

4. The Perception of Change (Henri Bergson).

5. Cartesian Mediatations (Edmund Husserl).

6. Being and Time (Martin Heidegger).

7. Man's Place in Nature (Max Scheler).

8. Philosophy of Existence (Karl Jaspers).

9. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Alexandre Kojève).

10. Being and Nothingness (Jean-Paul Sartre).

11. The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir).

12. The Visible and the Invisible (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

13. The Trace of the Other (Emmanuel Levinas).

14. The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (Hans-Georg Gadamer).

15. Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur).

Part III: Political Thought: Marxism and Critical Theory.

1. The Philosophy of Right (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).

2. Alienated Labor: The German Ideology (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels).

3. Democracy and Dictatorship (Rosa Luxembourg).

4. History and Class Consciousness (Georg Lukacs).

5. What is a Man (Antonio Gramsci).

6. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Walter Benjamin).

7. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer).

8. The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt).

9. For Marx (Louis Althusser).

10. One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse).

11. Knowledge and Human Interests (Jürgen Habermas).

Part VI: Structuralism and Psychoanalysis.

1. Course in General Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure).

2. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Claude Lévi-Strauss).

3. The Structuralist Activity (Roland Barthes).

4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Femininity (Sigmund Freud).

5. The Mirror Stage; The Significance of the Phallus (Jacques Lacan).

Part V: Deconstruction, Feminism, and Postmodernism.

1. The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade (Georges Bataille).

2. The Space of Literature (Maurice Blanchot).

3. Of Grammatology (Jacques Derrida).

4. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).

5. Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays (Hélène Cixous).

6. The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault).

7. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Jean-François Lyotard).

8. Women's Time (Julia Kristeva).

9. The Enigma of Woman (Sarah Kofman).

10. Sexual Difference (Luce Irigaray).

11. The Inoperative Community (Jean-Luc Nancy).

12. The Ecstasy of Communication (Jean Baudrillard).

13. The Nation-Thing (Slavoj Zizek).

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There is no exegesis of the philosophers' work, merely a short, paragraph long introduction on each philosopher in front of each extract.

I feel that it would have saved me a lot of money if someone had rather given me the reading list as contained in the TOC, since it would have been a lot cheaper to rather get hold of each philosopher's work in the original. On the other hand, its useful to have the most representative writing of each philosopher grouped together like this in one handy volume.

It's a good anthology, if an anthologized overview of the work of Continental philosophers is what you want. I see now, that "An Anthology" is written in small, grey, unnoticeable print in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover. It would have been much clearer if the title of the book would have read: "An Anthology of Continental Philosophy".

Given the emphasis on 'Continental Philosophy' in the title of the book, I would have appreciated at least a more extended introduction to each philosopher, placing him or her and their work in context, and giving an overview of his or her work, and telling us a bit about the person's significance in the greater scheme of things.

Because I feel the book fell short on this, I'm very tempted to take a half-star off, but I'll leave it as is for its wide selection of representative pieces.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly not as good as the analytic philosophy anthology.

Continental philosophy doesn't really lend itself to being read in an anthology just simply because of the importance of setting up an internalised discourse in a text that there is in most continental philosophy.

But this has given me a good overview, and has helped me to understand things like the wide reaching extent of Hegel's philosophy on western philosophy. you also get a kind of interesting negative imprint of Sociology's break from philosophy - which is important in trying to retain a cohesive verified philosophical view of a world in which society has a part to play.

If only most of these writer's didn't have to overwrite so much to create a realistic career for themselves - although i'm sure a great deal of these writes do this purely for narcissistic reasons.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why can't there be more women anthologized? And why 11 pages of Arendt and 50 billion of Husserl?

Still, a solid textbook. I like the emphasis on the political philosophers/

[Yan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from my teacher to read texts from various philosophers to get a feel of their ideations. Although I did not finish it and I'm not a student in philosophy, I did appreciate the amount of information present in it.

[Hassan Moayad]

good