Vandevelde, Pol. "Review of Brian Leiter, et al., eds. OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (December 2008).

Leiter, Brian, and Michael Rosen, eds. Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy. Oxford: OUP, 2008. This voluminous handbook is a very welcome tool that brings out many fundamental aspects of continental philosophy and puts them in a new light in order to show their importance and relevance. By "continental philosophy" the editors mean primarily the philosophy in France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. The handbook is intended for people who have been trained in the conceptual framework typical of Anglophone departments. This means that the contributors have undertaken to translate into another framework what they take to be the crucial and original points of the continental trends or philosophers they treat. Consequently, contributors have eliminated most jargon specific to authors, have chosen to focus on the aspects they deemed most important, instead of trying to be exhaustive, and have offered a critical account, instead of a general overview. The contributors were able to do this given the editors’ decision not to present topics like "intentionality" or "phenomenological reduction," but rather themes or theses like "phenomenology as rigorous science" or "the humanism debate." The advantage of this hermeneutic decision is that all these contributions are scholarly essays in the full sense, not surveys, reviews, or general presentations. In addition, these essays are relatively long for a handbook: from 20 to 51 pages. The contributors thus have the space and the freedom to present theses, however controversial some of them may be. The results of this massive effort at covering many different themes of continental philosophy in the form of creative and critical essays are quite impressive. All of the essays are of a very high caliber, strive toward as much clarity as possible, and do not sacrifice nuances or overlook difficulties. The scholarship of the contributors is impeccable. They are specialists in the areas they cover, and use original texts. This volume is a feat, one of the few that manages to articulate in a philosophical language mostly free of jargon the genuine multifaceted contributions of continental philosophy to the contemporary philosophical discussion. The volume is divided into three parts: Problems of Method, Reason and Consciousness, and Human Being. The first part is dedicated to some of the methods used in continental philosophy that differ from those of the sciences and are thus in some ways anti-naturalist: phenomenology, hermeneutics, aestheticism, the history of philosophy as philosophy, historicism, the philosophy of science, and Marxism. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14827.