Juarrero, Alicia (2024) Context Matters, an Introduction. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Why were luminaries of European philosophy like Bergson, Cassirer, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, even Marx systematically excluded from the North Atlantic canon of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Why did Anglo-American university philosophy departments for the most part lump together the philosophical schools to which many of these thinkers belonged --Phenomenology, Existentialism, Structuralism, Constructivism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism -- as Continental Philosophy. All were then dismissed as belonging more in literature and psychology departments than philosophy proper. That same worldview categorized Americans Emerson and Thoreau as well as Spaniards Ortega y Gassett and Unamuno (along with Montaigne and Isaiah Berlin) as essayists, not philosophers. French Existentialists Sartre and Camus? They clearly belonged in the literature departments (just ask the Nobel committee!). Freud’s theory of the superego? Excluded from epistemology and relegated to the psychology department to keep company with Koehler’s Gestalt Psychology and Husserl’s Phenomenology. Most likely because his reductionism bottomed out at the scale of transactions on material production, Karl Marx too was shunted into the political science and economics departments, where Marcuse, Lacan, Gramsci, and Althusser would keep him company a few years later. Comte’s ideas were safely ensconced in a new discipline, sociology, with an even newer subdiscipline, sociology of science, carved out a few years later for Robert Merton and Bruno Latour. More recently, the rest of the philosophical lot (Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, to name the most prominent) were likewise dismissed along with Whitehead’s Process philosophy, and for the same reason: they were thought to belong more to psychology or sociology than philosophy proper
Why? The monograph argues that the dismissals can be explained in terms of a generalized rejection of relations of interdependence and the context-dependent constraints that generate such mutualism.
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