Continental Philosophy - Recent Anglo-American Developments

Recent Anglo-American Developments

From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an influx of continental philosophers, particularly German Jewish students of Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the United States on account of the persecution of the Jews and later World War II; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are probably the most notable of this wave, arriving in the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, philosophy departments began offering courses in continental philosophy in the late 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s, some British and American philosophers became more vocally opposed to the methods and conclusions of continental philosophers. For example, John Searle criticized Derrida's deconstruction for "obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses" and, later, assorted signatories protested against the award of an honorary degree to Derrida by Cambridge University.

American university departments in literature, the fine arts, film, sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research. Continental Philosophy is also the central specialization in a number of British Philosophy departments, for instance at the University of Essex, Warwick and Sussex, Manchester Metropolitan and Kingston University, and in North American Philosophy departments, including the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Boston College, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Vanderbilt University, DePaul University, Villanova University, the University of Guelph, New School University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Oregon, Emory University, Duquesne University, the University of Memphis, and Loyola University Chicago. The most prominent organization for continental philosophy in the United States is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (known as SPEP).