Analytic and Continental

As everyone knows, there is supposed to be a large difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. The problem is of course that nobody has any clear idea of what analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are. We’re all very good at spotting clear instances of analytic philosophy (e.g. anything by David Lewis) and continental philosophy (e.g. anything by Lacan). But it’s very hard to spot any distinction of content between analytic and continental philosophy. For almost every doctrine espoused by continental philosophers, there is some analytic philosopher who has given mind-numbingly dull step-by-step arguments for that conclusion.

Two examples from the most recent literature in philosophy are pragmatic encroachment into knowledge and relativism about truth. According to advocates of pragmatic encroachment (such as myself, John Hawthorne, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath), what distinguishes knowledge from true belief is not just a matter of traditionally epistemic factors. One needs to take into account the putative knower’s practical situation as well; I think a similar thesis is true about other epistemic notions. The idea that ordinary epistemic notions are “impure” in this way does not seem like a traditionally analytic conclusion. According to relativists about truth, two people can disagree, and both be correct, since the truth of certain kinds of claims is relative to an evaluator. Both of these theses are ones that are usually associated with figures in the continental tradition (the former perhaps somewhat more Germanic, and the latter somewhat more French). An example from classic literature is skepticism about meaning facts. Different arguments for skepticism about determinate meaning-facts are central to both traditions (e.g. compare Derrida’s Of Grammatology with Chapter 2 of Quine’s Word and Object).

 So if the conclusions don’t distinguish clear instances of analytic philosophy from clear instances of continental philosophy, what does? I am certainly no scholar of continental philosophy. But one hypothesis worth entertaining is that it’s the style in which the philosophy is done which distinguishes it from analytic philosophy, or more precisely, the kind of considerations that are provided (often for very similar conclusions). While an analytic philosopher might give certain arguments for relativism about truth, or the social dimension of rationality, she will do so in such a way as to make vivid her commitment to an inter-subjective standard of rationality or truth according to which her arguments can be judged. In contrast, perhaps continental philosophers (as Marcus suggested to me last night) intend the literary style in which they make their arguments to underscore their view that there is only a spurious distinction between allegedly epistemically pure, truth-tracking disciplines, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.

 
-Jason

Comments

[Manuel Cabrera]

Your point about style has been made in various ways in various venues. A related one, apropos of recent French philosophy, one that I think is apt, is expressed by Alain Badiou in his recent essay for the New Left Review, "The Adventure of French Philosophy". The following quote is in a portion of the essay where Badiou is attempting to identify four characteristics that, taken together, isolate what has been distinctive about French philosophy in the last 40 or so years. I thought it might be of interest in relation to the topic of your entry:

"The fourth operation has to do with the modernization of philosophy, in a sense quite distinct from the cant of successive government administrations. French philosophers evinced a profound attraction to modernity. They followed contemporary artistic, cultural and social developments very closely. There was a strong philosophical interest in non-figurative painting, new music and theatre, detective novels, jazz and cinema, and a desire to bring philosophy to bear upon the most intense expressions of the modern world. Keen attention was also paid to sexuality and new modes of living. In all this, philosophy was seeking a new relation between the concept and the production of forms—artistic, social, or forms of life. Modernization was thus the quest for a new way in which philosophy could approach the creation of forms."

Later, Badiou says that it was essential to the program me for philosophy envisioned by the Penseurs Soixante-Huit "to create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer."

I think that the influence of high modernism on recent continental philosophy shouldn't be underestimated. For example, some of the most well-known/notorious figures--e.g. Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan, and Roland Barthes--were involved with the journal "Tel Quel", which combined a surrealist-influenced aesthetic with political radicalism and a fascination with high modernist avant-gardism. I think at least part of the impulse behind the distinctive strangeness of French philosophy came from an attempt to do to philosophy what the high modernists did to literature: combine literary experimenation with a commitment to playing ironically with the rhetorical conventions of the tradition. Of course, this is only part of the story. There was the long shadow of Heidegger, from whom they took the notions that the philosophical tradition as a whole has a few underlying biases that have been present throughout, and that the established philosophical lexicon has too much intellectual baggage behind it to be useful in expressing any viable alternative. There was the political situation with French colonialism that engendered both guilt and frustration with the social sciences academy in France, which was widely seen as being a tool used for dominating the colonies.

Of course, this is all part of a widely told sociological tale about post-war French philosophy. I'm not in a position to assess how accurate it is. However, it does provide a background to the claims you've made in your entry.

The winds seem to be blowing the other way now, as far as I can tell. There are folks like Badiou, who--altough I've not been able to make that much sense of his work--writes in an accessible prose style. Interpreters of dense and obscure philosophers like Deleuze and Lacan have been at pains to demonstrate that they aren't relativists or anti-rationalists at all. I'm skeptical that these labors have been successful, but there does seem to have been a lot of ink spilled in recent years trying to place these figures in the philosophical tradition rather than seeing them as chic rebels making a radical break from it.

[BL]

Alas, style won't do it. Hegel, I take it, has to count as "paradigmatically Continental," but his style is not literary, and he offers very detailed arguments. And do you really want to say that McDowell "make[s] vivid his commitment to an inter-subjective standard of rationality or truth according to which his arguments can be judged"? True, McDowell is not a more difficult writer than Hegel, but that means that while both offer arguments which can be rationally assessed, neither make "vivid" a "commitment" to "inter-subjective standard[] of rationality or truth."

The problem with this account runs in another direction as well. For don't Descartes and Hume "make vivid" a "commitment to an inter-subjective standard of rationality or truth"? And is not Plato's characteristic style a "literary" one? But I hope it doesn't turn out that, therefore, Descartes and Hume are "analytic" philosophers, while Plato is "Continental" (it's true he was from Greece, though!). For if that's the case, then the categories really don't illuminate very much.

[Ron Mallon]

I agree that style won't do it, but there's something right about it as well. I've always been fond of the thought that philosophy was comprised of different traditions, where these are identified both by descendant relations (in terms of whose problems and statements of those problems take seriously) and by relations to one's contemporaries (which of one's contemporaries one reads, writes about, takes seriously). If that's right, one ought to find groups of people working "within a tradition" are reading and citing one another at a much higher rate than they read and cite people outside their tradition. I suspect that's true. When McDowell discusses Gadamer, it amounts to working within a very broad tradition (of Western philosophy or Western thought), but working between other (sub)traditions (analytic vs. Continental philosophy). But it's still the case that McDowell cites and is cited more by analytic philosophers than by Continental ones. I think such traditions also may make sense of subdisciplines within philosophy that seem to be working on similar problems, and sometimes even offer parallel solutions, but without many connections being drawn.
In any case, if such traditions exist, there's no reason to think they are exhausted by citation relations (that's would just be a tool for trying to identify them). One might also expect to find different statements of problems, different styles of writing, and different rules of argumentation - all of which would serve to reinforce the relative isolation of the traditions (e.g. by raising the costs of citing across traditions).

[Robert Johnson]

Jason, true, there is *supposed to be* a difference between analytical and continental philosophy. But I wonder whether there really is. My operating assumption -- in teaching, for instance -- has been that there is not. There is good/bad, interesting/dull, significant/trivial, and so on, philosophy. There are different areas of philosophy, divided loosely by topic, each with their histories. The insistence that there is a real difference I think really masks other worries. One area of concern is that philosophers do not and often cannot read widely in their discipline anymore. It takes a considerable amount of effort and time to master the lingo and dominant ideas in many areas. And partisans of both supposed camps will complain loudly of having tried to make headway through the jungle belonging to the other, only to find it wasn't worth the effort for one reason or another. The most maddening case is, of course, when there is no serious intellectual content, after all the work. (This happens, as I say, among so-called 'analytical' philosophers as well as so-called continental philosophers).

[Jason Stanley]

Brian,

I don't think the analytic/continental divide should be stretched back before the last century. Indeed, I don't even think the analytic/continental divide should encompass figures such as Husserl. I mean, students of Brentano such as Meinong are clearly part of the analytic tradition --Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl are struggling with some of the very same issues that Moore (in e.g. "The Nature of Judgment") and Russell in "On Denoting" are struggling with (of course, Russell engaged with Meinong's work a lot, not just in "On Denoting", but also his "Meinong's Theory of Complexes and Assumptions" papers). Bradley is a bad writer and a monistic idealist -- but he is analytic or continental? I'm not sure. I did hear Jonathan Schaffer give a paper arguing for monism recently (though I don't think Jonathan thinks the one thing there is is mental, but I'm not sure how important that is if there is only one of 'em). I think these are contemporary categories, used to distinguish (say) Derrida, Lacan, and Habermas on one side, and Lewis, Kripke, and Judith Jarvis Thomson on the other (come to think of it, I doubt that Derrida and Habermas make a natural kind of anything).

So the style suggestion allows one to perhaps make one kind of contemporary classification...though you're of course right that this places figures such as (some of) McDowell in an interesting position.

[Mark van Roojen]

I think that there was a time that you could make distinctions based both on style and content, but that time is long past. Perhaps it might be that there is still some separation in terms of which questions are seen as most pressing, but I'm not sure.

I think that you can still do a kind of division by tracing chains of influence -- who read whom and who was responding to whom. I think that you would find a kind of split as the 20th Century progressed up into perhaps the 1970s, at which point you'd see more people in each of the main branches starting to read, cite and respond to authors in the other branch. Rawls and Habermas each played a role in that within political philosophy, but my guess is that it has happened in other areas of philosophy as well. Come to think of it, this way of seeing things might also explain why certain questions are central to one or the other tradition, insofar as people will see themselves as responding to the concerns raised by their predecessors.

[Neil]

I've argued elsewhere (Metaphilosophy 2003) that AP is philosophy with the fine structure of the sciences. AP sets itself puzzles which are (in principle) solvable; it has a great deal of agreement over methodology and approach, and it is divided into sub (and sub-sub) disciplines. None of this is true in CP. There is almost no agreement on what the issues worth pursuing are, or on how to pursue them. AP is a normal science, CP is closer to modern art in its self-understanding and its goals. Because AP agrees on an approach and a method (that is, people in your sub-discipline agree...) it can confine itself to relatively short articles. Because CP has no such methodological agreement, the unit of transmission is the book, in which the entire approach is set out. I'm one of the few people who has seriously done both styles of philosophy (successively, not concurrently), and I'm reasonably convinced of this characterization. BTW, it also shows just why they are hard to combine: they are not 2 ways of doing the same thing, they are ways of doing different things.

[Murray]

Certain Anglophone scholars of CP like to state the difference this way: AP aims at knowledge while CP aims at wisdom. Obviously not a rigorous distinction, but I think there's something to it.

[BL]

Jason, I'm happy to have a time limit placed on the categories, but two points:

(1) this is now revisionary of how "Continental" is most commonly used, namely, to pick out much German and French philosophy after Kant (pick up, say, the Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy; Michael Rosen and mine's Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (forthcoming) is similar in scope [not content!]); so your temporal delimitation is, already, a concession to my point that style won't serve to demarcate traditions. What you say about Husserl et al. is, of course, correct, but why does that make him part of the "analytic tradition"? The reaction against 19th-century German materialism and naturalism, which animates both Husserl and Frege, was as much a factor for NeoKantianism, so important to philosophy in Continental Europe in the early 20th century. Husserl's phenomenology, so important for Heidegger and Sartre, among others, was equally a central facet of much that is held up as paradigmatically "Continental." Rather than showing Husserl to be part of one "tradition" or the other, what the actual history shows is that the gross categories "Continental" and "analytic" don't capture the actual chains of philosophical influence and the nature of the shared philosophical problems.

(2) The temporal limitation still doesn't solve the problem. Habermas's style, for example, esp. in the Theory of Communicative Action and after--though even before--is argumentative and analytical (whatever one may think of the quality of the arguments and analysis), in a way that is quite different from Derrida or the phenomenologists. It seems to me that, at best, you've got a characterization of certain kinds of French philosophy after WWII, and especially in the post-structuralists, and not of "Continental" philosophy.

I am puzzled by Neil's proposal that, "Analytic Philosophy sets itself puzzles which are (in principle) solvable; it has a great deal of agreement over methodology and approach, and it is divided into sub (and sub-sub) disciplines. None of this is true in CP. There is almost no agreement on what the issues worth pursuing are, or on how to pursue them." What is the "agreement over methodology and approach" that explains why Fodor, Stich, McDowell, and Peacocke are all "analytic" philosophers? Or are they not all "analytic" philosophers, notwithstanding familiar usage? The converse claims about Continental philosophy (whatever that is!) seem to me to reflect ignorance about the professionalization of the discipline in Europe (by Neil's account, the "discourse ethics" industry in German counts as "analytic philosophy"!); indeed, "professionalization" is the same sociological fact that explains why there is "agreement over methodology and approach" within particular sub-communities of English-speaking philosophers (e.g., the Princeton-MIT-Rutgers-Arizona-ANU nexus, or the Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh-Harvard nexus, etc.).

I'm inclined to think that the comments of Ron Mallon and Robert Johnston come closer to the mark of what can reasonably be said in this context.

[Jason Stanley]

Brian,

I don't disagree with your points. Certainly, I had in mind "certain kinds of French philosophy after WWII" as paradigm examples. But I think Nietzsche and Heidegger also write in such a way as to fall under my 'style' point (I guess a case could be made for Wittgenstein as well). Habermas and Husserl do not. I don't actually find McDowell as unclear as others do, and the fact that he throws in some fancy undefined words doesn't make his writing non-analytic; just hard to interpret at certain points. You can see in the comments thread that I balked at incorporating Habermas and Derrida into a natural kind, for this reason and others (I actually get something useful out of Habermas, and I can't say the same about Derrida). But you're certainly right that a distinction that incorporates post-modern philosophy, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and perhaps Wittgenstein, but excludes Habermas and Husserl, doesn't capture the meaning-in-use of "continental philosophy". But that's just not even close to a natural kind (no doubt my distinction isn't either).

[BL]

Nietzsche's and Heidegger's styles are certainly not analytical and argumentative, but it seems to run roughshod over some important differences to assimilate them to each other and, in turn, to folks like Derrida. For one thing, Nietzsche is a brilliant prose stylist, and Heidegger is--how to put this gently?--not. For another, Nietzsche's rhetorical choices are connected to substantive views about the way in which one can change the beliefs of others about fundamental matters (such as questions of value), whereas Heidegger's rhetorical choices are either unmotivated or, as some have it, a requirement of the problems he has set himself and the tradition he seeks to escape. Perhaps non-discursive is a better term than "literary," since much that falls on what you intend as the "literary" side of the divide is devoid of literary merit (and some other philosophical writing--Plato again--has literary merits).

[Richard]

For the most part I think that attempts to compare and contrast "continental" and "analytic" traditions are unmotivated and not worthwhile. Really, there are only philosophers responding to one another and trying to answer philosophical questions. Few of these questions are specifically tied up to one school of thought or tradition. Derrida's writings on language are concerned with just the same sorts of issues as Saul Kripke's. Other points of contact are too numerous to mention.

One methological point does strike me though, and I think it's tied up to some other issues.

It's always struck me that the aspirations of analytic and continental philosophers differ in certain ways. In a twenty page essay, an analytic philosopher will perhaps try to make one point well; a continental philosopher is more likely to reflect on several themes. Perhaps what is offered is less an argument than a picture. (That's not to say that I don't think that arguments are offered; I just don't think they're of the premise/premise/conclusion type.) This point is true of books too, I think. A book by Alain Badiou might deal with more themes in less detail than an analytic book on the same subject. Perhaps in the analytic tradition, essays and chapters each constitute small steps in a bigger argument. In the continental tradition, the arguments are less linear. Essays compliment one another with alternative readings and perspectives, rather than fill in the gaps previously missing.

No doubt in part, this indirect approach has been deliberate and motivated in some continental projects. For example, the reluctance to elaborate on minute premises might constitute an effort to resist any scientistic or "totalising" instinct in Derrida's work. However, my not totally uneducated guess would be that this is not really a point about different traditions in philosophy, so much a point about different essay writing practices in different parts of the world. For example, I think that what I've said is much less true of German Continental Philosophers than it is French ones.

Furthermore, these differences in style might just be a consequence of the different numbers of analytic and continental philosophers. In a tradition with a couple of thousand philosophers (as is the case in the English speaking philosophical community now), there are likely to be more people responding to what is said by others. More objections will be raised, and people will be forced to slow down and develop the details. One example: when I was in Amsterdam, I could get away without paying too much attention to a possible objection to my work from Fodor's camp, because there weren't a lot of Fodorians to challenge me. That's not the case in England and the States.

As I've already indicated, I don't think these distinctions amount to much. I certainly expect them to fall prey to myriad embarrassing counter-examples. I see no grounds for calling Habermas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty et al. analytic or continental. They're just philosophers.

And surely philosophers should worry more about the quality of their ideas than their sources?

[Neil]

Brian,

My characterization of CP is intended to capture what most people think of as CP. It works better for Derrida-Deleuze-Badiou than for, say, Gadamer. But I don't see that as a flaw at all. These are not natural kinds, they have very fuzzy borders, and characterizing central instances is the best we can hope for here.

What is the "agreement over methodology and approach" that explains why Fodor, Stich, McDowell, and Peacocke are all "analytic" philosophers?

Well, the first three are all interested in mental content and whether it is internal to the mind or not. They are recognizably participating in the same debate. But the claim that 'X is analytic' and 'Y is analytic' where X and Y are people does not entail that X and Y share methodology, problems, etc. It entails that X and Y share methodology, problems, with other thinkers. The finer-grained the unit of analysis, the less any random two analytics need share. I suspect that a lot of our disagreement reflects different paradigms of CP. You think that a characterization that does not capture, say, Habermas and his group, all that well (though I think it is somewhat illuminating even here) can't be right. I think that our paradigm has to be what most people mean when they say CP (I suspect you don't take this stuff seriously enough to want to count it as philosophy at all. I don't have a problem with that, but I intend my characterization to track use, not significance of the work).

[Matt Dunn]

I wonder where someone wanting to demarcate the analytic tradition from the continental would place the American pragmatists? Certainly hated by many an archetypal analytic philosopher (e.g. Russell) but not friends of the Hegelian tradition either.

Also, "truth relative to an evaluator" sounds awfully Peirce/James/Dewey to me. I might say that they were some of the most important contributors to the "relative truth" tradition (if not originators of it), but in a very different way from Derrida, but certainly not Quine.

How might they complicate the distinction?

[BL]

Neil, thanks for your additional comments, though it will not surprise you that I do not find this very persuasive, but I'll try to be brief about why.

You say, "My characterization of CP is intended to capture what most people think of as CP." What is your evidence for "what most people think of as CP"? It can't be, e.g., publications with "Continental Philosophy" in their titles, since these usually treat Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Habermas, and others as part of CP.

With respect to the putative "agreement over methodology and approach" that unites Fodor, Stich, McDowell, and Peacocke as "analytic" philosophers, you write: "the first three are all interested in mental content and whether it is internal to the mind or not. They are recognizably participating in the same debate." This, if true, doesn't show that they agree at all about "methodology and approach"; indeed, if one recalls Fodor's scathing review of McDowell's Mind and World in the TLS (1994), or notices the general neglect of Fodor by McDowellians, or the dismissive treatment of McDowell by those influenced by Stich (and so on), one might think that they are *not* participating in the same debates at all. I have it on rather good authority that when members of the Rutgers Department voted several years ago on the philosopher who had had the worst influence on the field, every member of the faculty but one voted for Wittgenstein (one voted for Kant, for rather oddball reasons). Obviously the vote would have been different at Pittsburgh or Berkeley. This might sugest that precisely what there is NOT is "agreement on methodology and approach" among English-speaking philosophers.

[Colin McLear]

There seems to be quite a bit of discussion on the analytic/continental divide lately. There was a good post on Certain Doubts about a month or so ago. What I don't really understand is why the distinction should really be seen as mattering at all any more. If the categories don't sort their members by the obvious geographical or lingusitic criteria then really why do we keep harping on a distinction? Perhaps one of the most pernicious aspects of the distinction is that it may tend to lull certain people, especially beginning students, into thinking that there is an algorithm available for doing good philosophy, or for doing bad.

[Brendan]

Colin's comments bring up a great question that I think is not touched upon by the previous discussions. Rather, than the style, methodology, or content of AP or CP, it seems to me that the main distinction is ideological and sociological. Clearly there is some distinction at work in our profession and there have been decisions made by prospective graduate students, conference selection committtees, and hiring committees upon the 'perceived' difference between the two 'types'. Job descriptions reflect this.
Of course job descriptions do not justify the categories they use any more than does the person casually referring to the analytic or continental tenor of a certain department. Rather than these concepts being justifiable in some deep conceptual and philosophical way, (which they are clearly not, as I think this discussion shows YET again) it seems to me they are mostly operative through their continued use in carving up institutional space and the distribution of resources. What any given individual means by analytic or continental and the differences between them is rarely , if ever, brought to the surface. When it is, we have an illuminating discusssion like the one above. However these discusssions end, these categories continue to do work in a social or political dimension, like a bad social pathology. Or a good one, depending on how you see the results of this intellectually untenable, but socially efficacious, distinction. I feel that when these concepts have come up in my discussion with other philosophers, grad students and professors allike, they could be replaced with the terms 'us' and 'them', depending on the perspective of the speaker, and nothing would really be lost. That would solve the mystery of their reference.
Also, Matt Dunn's question about pragmatism is spot on. But that's another story.

[Frank]

Brian: could you be a bit more specific about why you contend that there is a "Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh-Harvard nexus"? Is it just because all of these departments have a higher appreciation for the significance of the history of philosophy than the a-historical problem-solvers at Rutgers? Note that your postulation of such a nexus can hardly be a matter of substantive philosophical agreement. The (arguably) most eminent philosopher at Berkeley (Stroud) argues extensively against the views of (arguably) (one of the) most eminent philosophers at Pittsburgh (McDowell, e.g. with respect to the status of colours and values).

[Neil]

Brian,

Some evidence that when people say 'CP', they have in mind the kind of stuff I claim (ie, roughly, post-structuralism, postmodernism, Heidegger-inspired stuff and so on), and not so much Habermas or Husserl:

AP is distinguised from CP inasmuch as the former gives pride of place to argument, and not rhetoric (Føllesdal, Dagfinn. 1997. “Analytic Philosophy: What is it and why should one engage in it?”)

CP is “is inherently obscure and obscurantist, often closer to the genre of literature than to that of philosophy; it is devoid of arguments, distinctions, examples and analysis; it is problemarm” (Mulligan 1991 "On the History of Continental Philosophy.” Topoi")

"AP is the tradition of philosophical argument [...]In contrast, CP is problem free. It is done, as I said above, through the history of philosophy, and it seldom discusses a particular problem or philosophical argument in isolation. Problems, if there are any, are dealt with through their embodiment within texts, discourses, or systems of texts and discourses" (Engel, Pascal. 1999. “Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Norms.” The Monist, 82)

[JK]

I wonder if anyone has seen this yet: http://www.newleftreview.org/Issue35.asp?Article=04

It's Alain Badiou on the "adventure" of French philosophy. Badiou has done some interesting work in CP himself, I think.

Anyway, by no means does the article break new ground in defining continental philosophy (in this case, only the French variety I suppose), but it does foreground some of the ways people have talked about it in the past.

I'd point people especially to the section entitled "Path of greatness," where Badiou lists six characteristics of 20th century French philosophy. These two, especially, are interesting with regard to the discussion here:

1. To have done with the separation of concept and existence -- no longer to oppose the two; to demonstrate that the concept is a living thing, a creation, a process, an event, and, as such, not divorced from existence; ...

6. To create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer.

[Geoff]

Since McDowell has been mentioned a few times here as a problematic case and as a potential counterexample to the "stylistic" criterion, I thought it would be worth repeating for those who haven't seen it a fun exchange on this very question between him and Crispin Wright (from the Nicholas Smith-edited volume 'Reading McDowell'). First, Wright:

"If analytic philosophy demands self-consciousness about unexplained or only partially explained terms of art, formality, and explicitness in setting out of argument, and the clearest possible sign-posting and formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals, etc., then [Mind and World] is not a work of analytical philosophy. Any professional who sets him- or herself to work through it will rapidly conclude that, before one can assess, let alone appropriate its achievement, there will be a need for constructive exegesis -- for a reworking of the characteristic idiom of the book and the exploration of interpretative hypotheses -- to a degree which one normally associates only with the study of writers from the past, before the academic professionalization of the subject. At its worst, indeed, McDowell's prose puts barriers of jargon, convolution, and metaphor before the reader hardly less formidable than those characteristically erected by his German luminaries. Why is this? [...] ...the fear must be that the book will encourage too many of the susceptible to swim out of their depth in seas of rhetorical metaphysics. Wittgenstein complained that 'The seed I am most likely to sow is a certain jargon.' One feels that, if so, he had only himself to blame. McDowell is a strong swimmer, but his stroke is not to be imitated" (157-8).

And McDowell:

"Finally, I must comment on Wright's splendid conclusion, where he drums me out of the regiment of analytic philosophers. If analytic philosophy prohibits imagery except for rare special effect, and precludes letting the full import of a term (such as, perhaps, 'spontaneity') emerge gradually in the course of using it, as opposed to setting down a definition at the start, I do not care if I am not an analytic philosopher. Likewise if analytic philosophy requires the kind of argument that aims to compel an audience into accepting theses. In fact I see no reason why these should be taken to be marks of the genre. Of course explicitness and clarity are another matter. But I wrote as explicitly and as clearly as I knew how. As far as I can see, Wright's remarks about an extraordinary need for constructive exegesis largely reflect his point-missing and -- I have to say -- ill-tempered efforts to find coercive philosophy in my description of the oscillation. Wright is clearly galled by my work, perhaps particularly by my stance of not aiming to compel my readers into theses, and I think this has prevented him from seeing how straightforward my book really is" (291).

[BL]

Neil, not sure this is pertinent evidence: Follesdal and Engel are just taking a view like yours, which is open to the same objections I've been posing: it doesn't characterize large swaths of what most people call Continental philosophy, even it is apt with respect to parts of it. Mulligan, as I imagine you know, is just hostile to most of German and French philosophy of the 19th and 20th century, except the stuff in Austria and Germany that feeds into early analytic philosophy.

We could certainly have a stipulative definition of "analytic" and "Continental" along the lines you suggest, but then it will be both stipulative and revisionary of the way the terms are usually bandied about, and is evidenced in texts like The Blackwell Companion or Blackwell Guide to "Continental Philosophy."

[Neil]

Brian, how do you feel about this revision of the thesis? The view I (and the folk I cited) put forward is a good characterisation of a certain strand of CP (I still think it's the strand that people in AP think of first when they think of CP: as in the phrase "CP is a load of tosh", but set that aside). I agree it doesn't characterise everything that can appropriately be called CP - but that's because there is no one thing that can appropriately be called CP. Paradigm AP is characterised (inter alia) by a structure which includes shared standards for debate among a group of like-minded thinkers (no matter how small the group might be), the kind of stuff I'm thinking of doesn't have this structure. Other ways of doing philosophy on the continent might have more of this kind of structure (especially the kind of CP practiced in Germany).

[Jabot]

One option I don't see people exploring much above is the very arbitrary nature of these kinds of distinctions. If I name a cat and a dog differently I will have some pretty concrete items I can refer to. The case is not the same for "analytic" and "continental" philosophy because these things are not materialy defined by clear cut processes (like copulation for animals). These are ex post facto labels that have been applied to very vague sets. This means that as such they have no weight except as heuristic aids for individuals. Thus quoting articles that define the traditions is as irrelavent as creating lists of names. Ultimately philosophy is an open game, that is assuming you are truly commited to seeing something general in the vague sets being identified, you have to admit that no single paper by an individual author could capture the thought of one philosopher let alone whole groups. The problem with such situations is that the original problem was created by labels. The whole issue of the "division" of, and the "reconciliation" of these two "traditions" is quite artificial. This isn't to say that exploring traditions and trying to talk about influence and history is a bad thing at all. However insisting on rigid definitional labels is small minded and inevitably does more harm than good.