I haven't really been reading the "Stone" blog, but Professor Gutting was kind enough to send me a draft of this piece a couple of weeks ago, and it touches on a topic we've considered many times before, including in the context of his views. Gutting, as one would expect, makes a number of sound points, and I'm particularly glad to see him call out the nonsense about Anglophone philosophy propagated by people like Santiago Zabala, who are utterly ignorant of actual developments in philosophy in the last forty years. Gutting's most provocative claim, though, is about the alleged remaining "differences" between so-called "analytic" philosophy and so-called "Continental" philosophy:
These differences concern their conceptions of experience and of reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy appeals to experience understood as common-sense intuitions (as well as their developments and transformations by science) and to reason understood as the standard rules of logical inference. A number of continental approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience that penetrates beneath the veneer of common sense and science experience. For example, phenomenologists, such as Husserl, the early Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty try to describe the concretely lived experience from which common-sense/scientific experience is a pale and distorted abstraction, like the mathematical frequencies that optics substitutes for the colors we perceive in the world. Similarly, various versions of neo-Kantianism and idealism point to a “transcendental” or “absolute” consciousness that provides the fuller significance of our ordinary experiences.
Other versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these concepts.
Continental philosophies of experience try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the possibility of our concepts. By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.
There's no doubt there are philosophers on both sides of these two divides, though how well they map on to "analytic" and "Continental" philosophers is, it seem sto me, less clear.
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