Gestures of Philosophy. 50 Years of Showing Philosophy 1920-1970

The project elaborates a history of certain methods of European and US philosophy between 1920 and 1970. We intend to replace the contrast between analytic and continental philosophy, now declared obsolete by almost all Western philosophers, with differentiations inspired by early Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing. We call the philosophical methods we have in mind those of gestural or showing philosophy, which we distinguish from an assertive one. It is true that currents of gestural philosophy react with different means to a public-practical loss of relevance of academically established assertive philosophy. What they have in common, however, are procedures of showing that occur alongside or in place of assertions. There are four procedures in particular that we have located in gestural philosophy in this context: (i) the telling of micro-histories to point to everyday language use; (ii) the construction of exaggerated philosophical-historical caricatures to point to the dependence of assertive philosophical theorisations on social structures; (iii) negativist theorising as a critical gesture to point out of the spell of a social life without spontaneity; (iv) mapping or arranging images to point out the futility of certain philosophical problem formations; (v) pointing to one's own life in the autobiographical gesture to question a philosophical assertion. We divide the period of Western philosophy between 1920 and 1970 into three epochs: In the first (1920-1934), the difference between saying and showing is philosophically established; in the second (1935-1947), gestural philosophy manifests itself primarily as a critique of cultural modernity; finally, in the third (1949-1970), the ordinary is discovered as a hold against supposedly disastrous consequences of modern culture and negativist theory is developed as a critical gesture. The project aims to contribute to a history of methods in modern philosophy.

This project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.