From an interview conducted by Stanford faculty and students with Beatrice Longuenesse, the scholar of Kant and German Idealism, who now teaches at NYU:
I have never been all that convinced by the so-called division between “two” traditions. As a student, one of my first ground-breaking experiences was reading Kant and becoming interested in Kant’s philosophy of science and transcendental philosophy. This experience was probably a major factor in my skepticism about the relevance of such a division: Kant is obviously a common ancestor to both “traditions.”
But of course your question does not concern the Kantian legacy, but more broadly the different styles of philosophy and what they might have to bring to one another. I think the strong point of the “continental” tradition is a greater attention to history: both to the ways in which philosophy itself has a tradition, and to the ways in which philosophical arguments can be influenced by factors beyond the philosopher’s rational control or even awareness. The strong point of the “analytic” tradition is its attention to logic, conceptual clarity, and argument. I suppose one could name many philosophical issues about which the two approaches could learn from one another. The area in which they most strikingly converge today, I think, is precisely the one I am currently interested in (so maybe I am being partial here!): problems concerning consciousness and self-consciousness, self-reference, personal identity.
I'm curious what people, especially philosophers of mind, think about this, especially the last claim about where "analytic" and "Continental" traditions converge. (What Longuenesse has in mind presumably has more to do with German Idealism, and perhaps some of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, than with Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Foucault, etc.)
