A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (review)

Proposing a new interpretation of Being or, which amounts to the same, of the history of philosophy, is among the most difficult tasks a philosopher can set for himself. It is much easier to describe a particular philosopher’s understanding of Being or a theme in a particular epoch in the history of philosophy, because other established interpretations are available upon which one may rely to justify his own contribution, if only by contrasting it to others. This, after all, is what distinguishes a philosopher from a professor of philosophy and, again, a thinker from an academic: while the latter is anxious to describe as clearly as possible, the former is interested in shedding new light.

Although Lee Braver’s text seems to belong to the latter category, it actually fits into the former, as the ordering of the title (A Thing of This World) and the subtitle (A History of Continental Anti-Realism) of his work indicates. If this order were reversed, the text itself would, perhaps, be poorer, in that it would indicate a simple reconstruction of the history of continental anti-realism; although such history is also one of Braver’s (achieved) objectives, it is not the most significant feature of his book. Braver’s main contribution lies in analyzing “in a newly created vocabulary” (i.e. the vocabulary of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida) the Kantian “idea that the mind actively organizes experience,” i.e. “a thing of this world” (5). While this might seem to be the task of a professor or an academic, Braver’s audience and goal go much further than the college student and historical reconstruction of continental anti-realism, respectively. Although all students will gain a lot from this text, its specific audience is all those analytic philosophers concerned with anti-realism (Putnam, Goodman, and Dummett, among others) who still have not taken seriously enough continental philosophy, in which Kant has also played a fundamental role. This is why the main goal of the text is to “prepare the ground for and begin a dialogue between [analytic and continental] traditions” (7). However, contrary to other contemporary philosophers who are interested in this dialogue, Braver does not want to make peace, but, on the contrary, to “instigate fruitful debate,” because “philosophy thrives on disagreement; the problem today is not that we are arguing with each other, but rather that we aren’t, that we have not yet risen to the point of disagreement” (7).

Although a summary of the text’s two parts and eight chapters is impossible within this review, it is important to emphasize the significance of chapters 2 and 6, since all the other chapters depend on them. In these chapters, Braver outlines how the “thing of this world” takes place in the “Kantian paradigm” and in the “Heideggerian paradigm,” respectively, paradigms that he not only considers as alternatives to realism, but also as the two most significant revolutions that conditioned contemporary continental philosophy. But what are these paradigms? While the first refers to a “single type of transcendental subject forming components of reality which are then known in the same way by everyone” (57), the second, instead, ventures into the possibility that one might “think and live without ultimate grounds or arché” (341) in order to overcome realism, i.e. metaphysics. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida are not examined alone throughout the text, which rather engages with commentaries by a wide range of critics such as John D. Caputo, Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Haar, and many others. It should also be pointed out that, for Braver, there are two different “Heideggers”: the early Heidegger “before the turn,” who was involved, together with Hegel and Nietzsche, in working out the implications of the Kantian paradigm, and the “later Heidegger” who “breaks free of Kant’s thought and takes his place” and also “marks the next major phase in continental philosophy...