a point that came up while writing

The dominant school of continental philosophy in the twentieth-century was almost certainly phenomenology, if we take that in the broad sense to mean the legacy of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, even Derrida.

But now I go through the Table of Contents of The Speculative Turn and count 21 authors in the collection.

Of those 21, how many could possibly be classified as phenomenologists? I would say only three at most: Martin Hägglund, John Protevi, and I.

What’s the problem with phenomenology? As I look through the list of 18 non-phenomenologists, I imagine most of them reacting negatively for something like “correlationist” reasons. Phenomenology is trapped in the correlationist impasse, freezes us in a situation of paralyzing finitude of the human-world correlate.

I can’t speak for Hägglund or Protevi. But my response to the “Gang of 18” would be: “yes, admittedly, the phenomenological tradition is entirely correlationist. But it doesn’t matter, because there’s another key virtue there that cannot be abandoned.”