In response to Paul Meyer. 1. The divide betweem continental phil and the anglo-american tradition has been widening for, what, almost 200 years. At this point they're really quite separate projects whose results are not mutually translatable. I'm not sure how to deal with > In America, we don't have to be on guard against the "will > to power" among Hegelians or phenomenologists but I suppose it's true that the U.S. of A is not gravely threatened by whatever danger phenomenologists pose (mainly secondhand cigarette smoke, in my experience). However there surely is no need to take the anglo-am phil tradition as given anywhere. 2. There is at least one wholly admirable aspect of the anglo-am tradition, which you allude to: the insistence on careful definition. In the interest of definition and distinction, I have to protest the use of "postmodernism" as a portmanteau term to include post-structuralism, which is a distinct project. I also protest the tactic of making claims about continental phil at a very broad level of generalization, then attacking that generalization, and using that attack to impugn every descendant of that tradition. It's very easy to make any broad generalization in philosophy look fatuous. 3. Your "negative moment" -- critique -- is surely ample justification for using a variety of philosophical tools in soc sci, whether drawn from Quine or Baudrillard. Re "positive philosophy," the obvious point to make is that any soc sci requires some base notion of ontology and epistemology -- you can't avoid it, so that you do end up resting on some philosophical system in that sense. It is not a question of "insight into the world" but logical coherence in the way you look at the world and present conclusions about it. Marx would seem to be exhibit A for the essential role of philosophy (and continental philosophy in his case) in grounding a social ontology. Best, Colin PS to Lou: Sounds like you escaped phenomenology in the nick of time. If there really are disoriented grad students who believe that teaching and writing for journals is political work, isn't their disorientation at a rather more basic level than anything that can be blamed on the likes of Butler?
