Peter Dews

Kieran Setiya refers to Bernard Williams’s remark that contrasting analytic and Continental philosophy is like dividing cars into ‘front-wheel drive and Japanese’, since it involves opposing a method or approach to a geographical region (LRB, 18 February). Unfortunately, this has become the go-to formula for philosophers who want to contest the idea that there are two sub-traditions of contemporary...

In his/her response to my review of Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung Pat Kane (Letters, 10 June) highlights the dangers of appeals to a substantive conception of human nature as a means of grounding a normative political theory. The dangers are far from illusory, but I would like to correct a misunderstanding in his/her letter, and also to suggest that the issue of substantive universals is inevitably...