Prado, C. G. Review of Lee Braver, A THING OF THIS WORLD. NDPR (June 2010).

Braver, Lee. A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007. This impressive book is characterized by three special virtues: first, it presents difficult philosophical ideas and developments clearly; second, it manifests an unusual and admirable facility with both analytic and continental positions and methodologies; and third, it boasts an extraordinary level of scholarship. My strongest endorsement of Braver's book is that I dearly wish I'd had it two decades ago. . . . The Introduction begins with a comparison of the contemporary split between analytic and continental philosophy and the split between rationalism and empiricism at the end of the eighteenth century, a split that culminated in rationalist metaphysical excess and empiricist epistemological bankruptcy. Braver maintains that the ground for reconciliation of analytic and continental philosophy is "the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis" and this is "the idea that the mind actively organizes experience" (5). This is where Braver's originality shows itself, and also where things begin to get complicated for readers who don't approach the book with an open mind. Braver goes on to say that the mind's organizing activity is seen as entailing anti-realism by analytic philosophers and has been extensively discussed by such notables as Davidson, Dummett, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, and Wittgenstein. Given Kant's influence on continental thought, the mind's organizing activity is also pivotal for continental philosophers. Braver's idea is that if the two traditions' different vocabularies are properly understood and correlated by members of each, we will be able to "identify Kant's idea as seminal for both camps" and thereby have a basis for "informed dialogue and debate" (5). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19848.