CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
52order is focused on acts of mercy and
justice in the world.
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY. Phi-
losophy that is influenced by Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Der-
rida, Irigary, Adorno, Ricoeur, Gadamer,
and those philosophers who resemble
them. In the early and middle twentieth
century “continental philosophy” came
to be distinguished by phenomenology
(a methodology that stresses the study
of appearances or lived experience) as
opposed to the perceived aridity and
merely apparent rigor of Anglo-Ameri-
can analytic philosophy associated with
Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, J. L. Austin,
Gilbert Ryle, et al. Later twentieth-
century philosophy has blurred this
distinction with “analytic philosophers”
employing phenomenology and some
“continental philosophers” forswearing
phenomenology for linguistic and struc-
tural methodologies.
CONTINGENT. A state of affairs is con-
tingent if it does not obtain or does not
necessarily obtain. “The cat is on the mat”
is contingent as it is not a necessary truth
that any cat is on any mat. Objects are
contingent when they do not necessarily
exist.
CONWAY, ANNE FINCH (1631–1679).
A student and close friend of Henry
More, the Cambridge Platonist. She
sought to develop a more immanent view
of God’s relation to the world than in
classical Christian theism. She is among
the early Quaker (or Society of Friends)
philosophers. She is the author of The
Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern
Philosophy (written in the early 1670s,
published posthumously in 1690).COOPERATION WITH EVIL. Cases
when a person aids or does not prevent
an evil. Cicero advanced the concept of
passive injustice, when a person does
not object to or protest an evident evil.
Traditional moral theology distinguished
between formal cooperation (in which a
person consents or agrees with an evil)
versus material cooperation with or with-
out consent (for example, a person sells
or gives to a burglar tools needed for a
robbery).COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. An
argument for theism based on the contin-
gency of the cosmos. The cosmological
argument holds that without a necessari-
ly-existing (not contingent) being, the
existence of a contingent cosmos is unex-
plained and we must posit an infinity
of contingent explanations. According to
this argument, as long as the cosmos is
still seen to be contingent there will be
a failure to reach a complete or full expla-
nation of the cosmos unless we posit
the existence of God to ground or form