Sparrow on institutional conservatism in continental philosophy

I agree with Cogburn that this is a depressing post. See HERE.

All I can say to Sparrow is that I’ve been through this as well. Before Tool-Being was accepted by Open Court, it was torpedoed at the very last second by a university press even though one of the two reviews couldn’t possibly have been more positive. (I thought at the time that the other one was positive as well, but with the benefit of experience can now see that it was a catty, damn-with-faint-praise sort of operation.) Worse yet, this news wasn’t emailed to me (though I had been in frequent contact with the editor there), but was expressed in a printed letter that had been mailed to Egypt, and was the first thing I found in my office after arriving in Cairo in August 2000. In other words, they effectively sat on the rejection news for 6 weeks without telling me.

A number of graduate students have apparently found great encouragement in the remarks I made in Towards Speculative Realism about obstacles I’ve faced in the profession along the way. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until the sequel, which I currently plan to entitle Bells and Whistles.

But I’m in agreement with the complaint about the maneuver of converting all disagreements into misunderstandings. We should be honest about the points on which continental philosophy culture is inferior to analytic culture, and this is definitely one of them. I’m generally in favor of the continental focus on big historical figures, but we need to be honest with ourselves about the danger that entails. It’s not yet philosophy if you’re only interpreting someone else. And frankly, this is a stage from which quite a number of powerful people in the continental philosophy world fail to advance.