I sometimes get asked why one should bother attending to continental metaphysics.*
It's an impossible question to answer in generality, because different people asking it usually have such contradictory presuppositions. If the person is anti-metaphysical, any answer has to be directed to the neo-Kantian presumption that proper philosophy is some form of transcendental epistemology. If the person is anti-continental then you have to try to demonstrate that there are resources relevant to their projects. Sometimes this is possible.** Often it is not, especially if your interlocutor has decided a priori that large swaths of contemporary French and German philosophy is "crap philosophy."
I was thus very happy to read this interview with Graham Priest (who himself has wonderful chapters on Heidegger, Hegel, and Derrida in Beyond the Limits of Thought and also delves deeply into the continental tradition in his new book One).
The key general passage of the interview is:
Great philosophical writings have such depth and profundity that each generation can go back and read them with new eyes, see new things in them, apply them in different ways. So we study the history of philosophy that we may do philosophy.
One of my friends said that he regards the history of philosophy as rather like a text book of chess openings. Just as it is part of being a good chess player to know the openings, it is part of being a good philosopher to know standard views and arguments, so that they can pick them up and run with them.
There is a lot of truth in this analogy, but it sells the history of philosophy short as well. Chess is pursued within a fixed and determinate set of rules. These cannot be changed. But part of good philosophy (like good art) involves breaking the rules. Past philosophers may have played by various sets of rule; but sometimes we can see their projects and ideas can fruitfully (perhaps more fruitfully) be articulated in different frameworks—perhaps frameworks of which they could have had no idea—and so which can plumb their ideas to depths of which they were not aware.
He goes on to give a couple of examples. But what's interesting to me now is that this also applies to why philosophers in one tradition should study other traditions generally.
In this interesting post*** Eric Schliesser makes a related, slightly more specific, point:
Joel Katzav has convinced me that what I have just described is, perhaps, necessary but not sufficient for philosophical competence; we should, rather, conceive philosophical competence as the skillful understanding of more than one philosophical tradition. By 'skillful understanding' I mean that one is capable of actively engaging with an alternative tradition or rival school in informative and critical fashion. That is, one is capable of asking illuminating questions about such an alternative (recall the example of Copp above) and one is capable of distinguishing good work and bad work in it (not about it) without simply assimilating it to one's own perspective. (One need not make a contribution to it, but it would, perhaps counterfactually, not be impossible.) The alternative need not be a live school; it can also be a historical alternative. Or, it might exist in an entirely different professional/cultural context. An example of competence is a person capable of working on, say, Mencius (in 14th century China) while writing for, say, a broadly analytical contemporary audience.
Schliesser and Priest's posts are very good reads, and I think that their points both compliment each other, and provide the beginning of answers to some of the skeptical interlocutors I've been encountering. But even independently of that, Joe Bob says check them out.
[Notes:
*Including German Idealism, Nicolai Hartmann type ontology, Deleuziana, Speculative Realism, contemporary French and German "analytic" philosophy (Frederic Nef, Claudine Tiercelin, Markus Gabriel etc.), the Parisian 68ers as interpreted by people like Brad Stone, Lee Braver, Tom Sparrow, and Debbie Goldgaber, etc. etc. etc. All of these overlap in various ways.
**Jonathan Schaffer's revival of monism as a position worth taking seriously, Johanna Seibt's process ontology, Nancy Cartwright, Jessica Wilson, and other's work on capacities, as well as other recent work on modal realism without possible worlds, and debates about universals/particularity all create openings.
***I'm pretty sure I unconsciously plagiarized Schliesser when I was answering Harman's question about analytic and continental philosophy here. My practice of telling my students interested in both that they have to master one tradition to the standards of the most rebarbative curmudgeon predates Schliesser's post, but me thinking this is in itself (not just prudential) good advice might be from reading Schliesser.]
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