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Is this (from Barry Allen's letter to prospective graduate students) just an individual assessment or the expression of a wider pattern for understanding the complicated landscape of continental (French) philosophy? If the second, how could the pattern be stated in abstract form, i.e. without reference to those specific names?

A frank admission of prejudices might be useful in deciding whether we can work together. After some effort I have decided that I never want to read Lyotard again. I have never read Levinas and nothing I have heard makes me want to start. I have the same reaction to Badiou. I think phenomenology is philosophically empty. I don't think Hegel or Heidegger have anything to say to us anymore. I find it difficult to take Freud as seriously as I need to to take Lacan seriously. I am bored with Foucault, and exhausted by Derrida.

On the other hand, I am very interested in the work of Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour. Nietzsche still seems imminently worth thinking about in connection with pretty much anything. I have recently become deeply impressed with the neglected philosophy of Bergson.

Drux
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    Even when I agree with many of Allen's aversions and prejudices, he does not more than just expressing his personal view and experience. His statement lacks any argument. - What is your question now? Shall we provide the missing arguments and find the common denominator for Lyotard, Levinas, Badiou, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida? - Instead, could you pick up please one or two precise questions for this blog? – Jo Wehler Aug 30 '15 at 05:32
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    I didn't take this post on his website to be trying to argue generally so much as saying, if you want to write on these people, find someone else (along with a frank off-the-cuff style assessment of why -- probably so people don't imagine he could be convinced). – virmaior Aug 30 '15 at 07:25
  • I don't think its a serious critique of the continental tradition; or to be fair, an explicitly serious critique: after all Freud influenced Lacan, and Derrida Deleuze - perhaps he wants new perspectives? Most of the philosophers he mentions have been around some time ie Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas. – Mozibur Ullah Aug 30 '15 at 15:15
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because well, in context, he's just explaining what sort of graduate students he wants to have write with him. While this might reflect his views, it's not really a well-developed argument, so we're just reading between the line to guess. – virmaior Aug 31 '15 at 00:47

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I'm really not sure what is intended,but isn't this part of a general frustration with the trajectory of subject-centered ontologies since Kant, and the seeming political dead-end of constructivism, hermeneutics, and textual analysis? One impulse seems to be the recovery of some sort of non-dogmatic attachment to the natural sciences, and hence to "nature" of some sort. More of a poplar "mood" than a new classification.

Nelson Alexander
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