A Parting of the Ways

Philosophy is deeply divided between two hostile camps: analytic philosophy (dominant in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries) and continental philosophy (dominant in Germany and France). In this volume, Friedman explores the common origin of analytic and continental philosophy, showing how social and political events intertwined and influenced philosophy during the early twentieth-century. Friedman gives a general overview of the philosophical issues of the period, paying special attention to the relationships among three key twentieth-century philosophers: Rudolf Carnap, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger. Already polarized by their philosophical disagreements, the approaches of Carnap and Heidegger-now practiced largely in isolation from one another-were further split apart by the rise of Naziism and the resulting emigration of all influential German-speaking philosophers except for Heidegger. While the radical directions taken by Carnap (analytic philosophy) and Heidegger (post-modernism) have been hugely influential, Friedman enters a plea on behalf of Cassirer's "middle way" as a bridge between the dead ends now reached in both analytic and continental philosophy.