Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

The Lost Continent of Europe

John Mann reviews An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Fundamental Questions edited by Andrew Schoedinger.

This book is a symptom of the divide between continental philosophy and anglo-american philosophy that has existed since the angloamerican rebellion against Hegel and idealism at the beginning of this century.

On the surface this is another ‘introduction’ style book, giving selections from the major philosophers on the usual topics of metaphysics – universals, causality, free will and personal identity (in fact Schoedinger also adds a section on Artificial Intelligence) – however the choice of philosophers follows a very rigid tradition: after Descartes continental philosophy ceases to exist.

This means that in a book on metaphysics we get no Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre or Derrida. Instead we get Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J.S.

…