RESUMO 05 | PALESTRA INTERNACIONAL

20 Years Later: “A Parting of the Ways” Revisited

LUFT, Sebastian | Maquette University, Germany

Nearly 20 years ago Stanford philosopher Michael Friedman published the now-infamous “A Parting of the Ways.” In this book, he reconstructs the 1929 Davos meeting between Heidegger and Cassirer (with Carnap in the audience) as the pivotal philosophical event of the 20th century. It is such a landmark “happening” because, according to Friedman, it was a meeting, which made clear what the philosophical options were for the next period of European philosophy: Either to pursue the project of “rigorous scientific” philosophy by entering into what later came to be called the “linguistic turn” and turn away thereby from the existence of the subject (and its history, its lifeworld, etc.), or to overturn philosophy-as-we-know-it through a radical turn to the finite subject. Thus, the options seemed to be either to follow the positivistic or the existentialist paradigm. The former then led to the so-called “analytic," the latter to the so-called “continental” philosophy, terms which weren’t established until the post-war period. This split has dominated the philosophical scene since. Now this was one of the eyebrow-raising claims of Friedman. The second, perhaps even more surprising claim was that there was a forgotten middle path between this dialectical antithesis, and this was represented in Cassirer’s philosophy of culture, which, in Friedman’s reading neither gives up on philosophical rigor nor is insensitive to the historical and social existence of the human being. In this talk, I want to assess the significance Friedman's reading had on philosophical historiography and trace the impact it has had on the philosophical landscape since. Since then, many symposia and volumes have been produced discussing the “overcoming of the analytic-continental split.” While some want to retain this split and see their philosophical identities in peril if it becomes moot, others attempt to philosophize in this spirit and see those hanging on to the split as hopelessly outdated. No matter how one assesses it, it is nonetheless curious that it still informs self-proclaimed identities of entire Philosophy Departments and retains a strong institutional power. Thus, apart from the philosophical merits of this distinction, it is also a lesson in the sociology of trends and fashions that take place even in a field that allegedly is out to seek the Truth. This talk shall assess the sociological and institutional aspects of this “parting” some two decades afterwards and reassess Friedman’s thesis in light of the state of contemporary philosophy.