Philosophy and/or politics?

two trajectories of philosophy after the great war and their contamination

Jack Reynolds

pp. 215-232

in: Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs, Jack Reynolds (eds), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental "divide' is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands.