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My invitation to contribute to this series of lectures on 'Philosophical Traditions' came with the kindly flattering explanation that it was being made in the light of (what was alleged to be) my 'expertise in continental philosophy'. There are, however, two problems with this explanation. In the first place it is by now pretty widely recognised that the term 'continental philosophy' is one of a far from precise art rather than of any sort of geographical, or indeed numerical, accuracy - there is, of course, no such thing as one identifiable school of thought that might be called 'continental philosophy'. And secondly, although there are by now a considerable number of people in the English-speaking philosophical world who do have a genuinely specialist knowledge of the loose group of traditions which came to be more or less recognisably referred to by this term, I cannot in all honesty pretend to belong to their expert company. Moreover, there now exist a respectable number of books designed to explain this ensemble of traditions, many of which include useful bibliographies listing their fellows. Let me here refer simply to two of them that, in their brevity as in their clarity, are most accessible, namely Simon Critchley's Continental Philosophy - A Very Short Introduction, published (by Oxford University Press) in 2001 and Simon Glendinning's The Idea of Continental Philosophy published (by Edinburgh University Press) in 2006. (Both authors, incidentally, express strong reservations about the key term appearing in the very titles of their books.)
The story of how and why I may have acquired a thus doubly misleading reputation has, inevitably, its purely personal side, which as such is of no general interest. However, it does also have aspects that belong to the (still on-going) history of a certain academic culture - one in which the boundaries between it and the not so strictly academic are both uncertain and potentially shifting. In what follows I shall try to reflect on those aspects of this story as I have seen it, and in particular on the factors that made it so difficult for us, students in the middle of the last century, to recognise what presented itself as philosophy coming from...