RETHINKING DISAGREEMENT: PHILOSOPHICAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND META-PHILOSOPHY Richard J. Colledge (Australian Catholic University) Set in the context of the current interest among Analytic philosophers in the “epistemology of disagreement,” this paper explores the meta-philosophical problem of philosophical incommensurability. Motivated by Nietzsche’s provocative remark about philosophy as prejudices and desires of the heart “sifted and made abstract,” the paper first outlines the contours of the problem and then traces it through a series of examples. Drawing largely on the tradition of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics, a broadly Continental response to this formidable problem is suggested. Disagreement cannot be understood simply in terms of epistemological strategy, but needs to be regarded in a fundamentally hermeneutical light. An important feature of Australasian philosophy over the last decade has been its contribution to the growing exploration of the methodological divide between Analytic and Continental philosophy. 1 This paper looks to further this discussion through an engagement with a significant thread in recent Analytic epistemology concerning the problem of philosophical disagreement. 2 An analysis of this formidable philosophical issue reveals significant methodological disparities between the Analytic and Continental traditions that, it will be suggested, can only stem from strikingly different meta-philosophical assumptions. Perhaps the key focus of this newly intensified debate in the Analytic literature regarding the “epistemology of disagreement” is a concern with the rationality of maintaining one’s convictions with respect to a particular philosophical issue (or for that matter, any kind of issue at all) in a situation where others—especially one’s so-called “epistemic peers,” who are as intelligent and informed as oneself—hold just as strongly to a contrary and incompatible position on the basis of apparently similar or identical evidence. In particular, the debate has tended to focus on justifications for “conciliatory” or “permissive” positions on the question as opposed to those that argue for the rationality of a more “steadfast” res ponse even in the face of fundamental 1 See, for example, the work of Jack Reynolds and James Chase in their Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (London: Continuum, 2011) and Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011), as well as Marguerite La Caze, The Analytic Imaginary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). This scholarship is part of a growing field of research internationally. 2 This recent debate in Analytic epistemology might perhaps be traced back to Gilbert Harman’s Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), though a key founding text for recent conversation has been Peter van Inwagen’s oft-quoted little essay from 1996 in which he addresses W. K. Clifford’s famous claim announced in his “The Ethics of Belief” and which van Inwagen uses as the title for his own paper: “It is Wrong, Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone, to Believe Anything upon Insufficient Evidence,” in Faith, Freedom and Rationality, (ed.) J. Jordan and D. Howard-Snyder (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 137–54. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as WEA. Over the last few years, the literature in this area has grown significantly in prominent journals and edited collections, culminating in Feldman and Warfield’s 2010 edited collection, Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press). Debate continues and shows no signs of dissipating.