Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity

Devoted to the most important American Continental philosopher of his generation and one of the discipline’s founding fathers, and featuring some of the field’s most distinguished luminaries, this anthology constitutes a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. Taking up themes central to Schrag’s own philosophical concerns, these essays refer throughout to his salient
interventions
in the dialogue of late twentieth-century thought characterized as
postmodernity.
In doing so, all contributors address, implicitly or directly, the question of philosophy’s role and responsibility, or
task.
The volume begins with an overview of this task and of Schrag’s contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag’s work has extended and reconfigured. The following essays are organized around the four conceptual figures that are widely considered Schrag’s most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal rationality, the self after modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communicative praxis. Following and expanding on the implications of these themes, the authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self’s connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion’s disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. Taken together, these essays go beyond an appreciation of Calvin Schrag’s contribution to Continental philosophy to substantially elaborate upon and extend that contribution.