Strangers

Alasdair MacIntyre

  • Modern French Philosophy by Vincent Descombes, translated by Lorna Scott Fox
    Cambridge, 192 pp, £14.50, January 1981, ISBN 0 521 22837 9

It is no secret that philosophy as it is taught and studied at UCLA or Princeton or Oxford is very different from philosophy as it is understood at Paris or Dijon or Nice. An intellectual milieu in which the household names include those of Quine, Strawson, Davidson and Kripke is unlikely to have much in common with one where Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida are taken with great seriousness. This might seem obvious: but we ought perhaps to be a little more surprised than we generally are at the extent to which almost total ignorance as to what is going on in the other of these two philosophical communities is no barrier to advancement and distinction in either of them. For this fact at least suggests the question: how far and in what sense are the members of these two communities engaged in the practice of one and the same mode of inquiry? Has philosophy been irreparably fragmented?

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