What Can Analytic and Continental Philosophers Learn From Each Other? (part 1 of 5)
the first installation from an invited talk on the Analytic-Continental divide
Back in 2016, I flew down to Virginia Commonwealth University to give an invited talk to their Philosophy Club. The topic my host, the president of the club, wanted me to discuss is the question asked in the title. As someone who views analytic and continental philosophy as just two among multiple sets of traditions and approaches, I took that question more as a starting-point for delving into a number of connected topics, than as a limit or boundary for discussion.
I recorded the talk, and if you’d like, you can watch or listen to it in this video. But I also thought it was about time I took the transcript, cleaned it up, and provided it here for my readers. The talk itself runs nearly two hours, so I am breaking the transcript up into multiple parts, which I will post here sequentially. You’ll find the first portion below.
The Transcript Of The Talk
I was asked to talk about the analytic-continental divide as a general topic, and what what analytics and continental philosophers can learn from each other more specifically. I do intend to talk about that.
But I think I should probably lay my cards on the table from the beginning. I don’t have a dog in the fight. I’m neither an analytic nor a continental, although Ido work on some some figures in continental philosophy. I’m more of a historian of philosophy, so Ido a lot of my work on historical figures, and I look at things in a historical way. so I’m going to do some talking about that, more towards the end.
What I’m going to suggest is that one of the things many philosophers who identify as analytics or continentals could learn — although not so much just from each other — is that there’s a much vaster and richer world of philosophical approaches out there that they can draw upon.
So what I was thinking I would do is is lecture for about 90 minutes or so, and have 30 minutes of Q&A at the end. When I say lecture, I don’t mean that I’m just going to talk straight for 90 minutes, which I think would be rather boring and tiresome. But I’ll raise some points, and I’m sure we’ll have some questions. And maybe we will, you know, take a break every so often when we need to for general discussion. So feel free to ask questions at any time. If you take if you take me off course i’m pretty good at getting back on course — so don’t don’t worry about that.
The structure of the the talk. What I wanted to do first, is actually talk about — and I’ve created a handout as a sort of launching point for this — talk about the ways in which we tend to think about this divide, and some of the ways that analytic philosophers think about continental philosophers, and vice versa. Or at least the way they’re represented.
And then I want to talk about my my own background in this, which is a bit unusual, and how that led me to this focus on the divide leaves out.
And then I want to talk about how we might define or characterize different kinds of philosophy in general — not just analytic and continental, but other movements as well.
Then we’ll focus in on trying to answer the question which we won’t actually completely do, i.e. “What is analytic philosophy?” We’ll also do that for continental philosophy.
Then we’ll talk about the notion and the history, and really the ongoing reality, of a divide, along with a few examples of people who bridge or talk across that divide.
And I’d like to finish by talking about what else there is for what analytic and continental philosophers have to learn from each other. We’ll talk quite a bit about that. But i also want to talk about what they can learn from other philosophies. I’m going to put in a plug for thinking about philosophy in a more historically oriented way which we often associate with continentals. But I don’t think continentals on the whole actually do a very good job at that. I think they’re very selective in their their use of history some of them not not all of them so.
Beginning From Common Conceptions
If we think about one of the things people typically say, you can look at this chart and see whether you think this is a fair representation of how analytic philosophy and continental philosophy get contrasted:
In your own experience, in the literature that’s out there (a quite vast literature), comparing analytic and continental philosophy — it’s something that will crop up every so often in blog columns, in the New York Times in part because it seems to be a perennial interest — what do you think? Is this a fairly accurate depiction of what’s good, and also perhaps what’s maybe blind spots or or problems with the two different modes of doing philosophy?
What do you say? I mean most of you are analytically trained, right? Is there anybody in here who would say that they’re continentally trained, where that was the main focus? No. . . okay, so one person. So it’s primarily analytics and and what they would say about continentals?
Does this work? I mean, continental philosophy, we know that it’s coming from the continent. That one’s, I think, pretty uncontroversial.
Ideals of critique? At least they use that word quite a lot. Subjectivity? Imagination as opposed to other ideals of clarity, objectivity, rationality? (Rationality is even a dirty word among some continental philosophers)
More aligned with the humanities? Would you agree that that’s true? It’s interesting if you think about the social sciences. We can say that analytic philosophy traditionally historically has been associated more with the natural sciences and mathematics. The social sciences are in a interesting spot where some of the some of their practitioners have much more in common with analytic philosophy, some much more with continental philosophy.
What do you think about the being criticized as incomprehensible, relativist trendy or faddish? Obscure, polemical, poetic, and so on. Say that’s accurate as far as what they get criticized for.
What about the one for analytics criticized as ahistorical, myopic, superficial? Imperialistic is a popular one for a while. Unimaginative. Have you heard these complaints?
Okay, so we have a more or less agreed-upon starting point, and we’ll come back to that.
My Own Atypical Background In Philosophy
Now my own background — I had a strange introduction to all this stuff, in part because I didn’t go to a place that was primarily analytic or primarily continental, either for my undergraduate or for my graduate studies. And my undergraduate— you know, I don’t know what it’s like now these days, but if it’s like what I had I don’t think I would recommend it for undergraduates to study philosophy because they thought that there were really three kinds of philosophy living at the time. Those were
Analytic philosophy, which seemed to be dying out (we’re talking about the mid-1990s here clearly it wasn’t dying out, but that was their view!)
Existentialism (so it wasn’t all continental philosophy, just existentialism)
and Process philosophy
Those were the three main going concerns.
I managed to get introduced to contemporary continental philosophy by a fluke. There was a Japanese student in my modern philosophy class who wrote a 60-page paper for the class, in which he incorporated all sorts of contemporary continental theory, including you Deleuze, and Derrida, and Bakhtin. He had these books, and he felt that his English wasn’t good enough to present the paper, and he wanted me to do it. So he just gave me these books and said: “Why don’t you read these, and this will help you present them. I didn’t give the books back, and I kept them on my shelf, and then I started reading them, and I thought it was interesting stuff.”
I also majored in mathematics while I was an undergraduate, and so I did a lot of work in the intersections between philosophy and mathematics, specifically in logic and foundations of mathematics. I was getting very interested in in philosophy of language at the time, so I was reading a lot of stuff in Analytic journals (totally discouraged by my professors!) I would just go to the library, and kind of read around stuff that looked interesting — getting, you know, just a smattering of stuff.
Then I went to graduate school and I went to Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Southern is a particularly interesting place in that it’s a pluralistic department. So they have representatives of analytic philosophy there. They have representatives of continental philosophy. And then what they’re really known for is American philosophy — Classical American philosophy, including but not exclusively pragmatism. They have the John Dewey Center there. (I actually got kind of turned off on Dewey, because I heard about him so much at that place!)
But it was great because every class, there were — you know, if it was a primarily analytic, class it would be mostly the analytics students there, but there’d be a smattering of other people, so you’d always get challenges coming in. You needed to speak each other’s language at least to some degree. The relations were not always cordial. As a matter of fact there was a history at one time of some pretty tough battles between them, but it was it was good to see.
I also got interested in the history of philosophy there, not because SIUC had a strength in that in the philosophy department, but because I was studying languages. And so I did my my Plato and my Aristotle in graduate school with the classics department, you know just reading them in Greek. And I got interested in Anselm and Aquinas through through working on my Latin. And that that led me into to taking more and more historically oriented perspectives.
The philosophy departments that I’ve worked in — and organizations and conferences — also tend to be pluralists as well, and so there’d be some analytics, some continentals, and then a whole bunch of other people that that didn’t fall into that spectrum. And so when I think of “the divide,” I’ve always seen it as a little bit arbitrary. It got me interested why is this the case.
Making Sense of The “Divide”
I never really gave it an awful lot of thought until Joseph told me he wanted me to talk about it, and then since then I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the literature about that divide — and there is a huge literature out there! In general what I can say is this: that it is something that does exist but it represents a kind of limited, or limiting view on on philosophy, one that can interfere with getting getting a good grasp of some other areas in philosophy that one might miss.
I’ve got a couple analogies here.
It’s sort of like if we were — I’m a big metal head and so those of you who are into that genre can probably grasp this analogy — it would be like if in discussing heavy metal, one claimed that really all contemporary metal is either in the black or death metal range, or as a form of alternative metal. So there’s no classic metal — that’s not really “metal.” There’s no thrash. There’s no power metal. There’s no glam. There’s no nothing. It’s just those. Those are really all the the main going concern.
Another perhaps better metaphor would be like a long-standing feud — a feud in which most of the current feuders don’t really know how the feud got started, got continued, got renewed. And they don’t really know all that well many of the side that they identify with. They know some of them very very well, but the rest of it they’re a bit hazy on. And they know that those other guys over there are bad, or doing something wrong. But they’re not. They have some ideas of what it is. They’ve been told what it is But there’s a lot of haziness about it, you might say, and some rather global judgments and assumptions (usually based on hearsay or a few experiences)
Because, you know, if you if you want to have a bad impression of continental philosophers, it’s not hard to find. Just go to SPEP [the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy] and wander around into a few sessions, and you’re gonna hear some some goofy nonsense! But that’s not the whole of it, right? You can’t judge from those few experiences. And so it is sort of like like a long-standing feud.
What Doesn’t Fit Within The Divide?
There’s limits to what we can do with the analogies. But what have we left out? What what doesn’t fit into this this divide?
Well most of the main traditions or schools or movements of western philosophy. Ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy don’t fit neatly into it. There’s analytic readings of history of philosophy, and there’s continental readings. But that’s not quite the same thing as actually reading Plato for for Plato’s own sake, or reading Plato in light of Plato.
There’s also non-western philosophy — a huge, huge world out there on that! And comparative philosophy — some of that does get done by analytics and by continentals but not that much.
Classical American philosophy doesn’t fit into this divide. Where do pragmatists fit (just to pick one of the groups)?
African-American philosophy (or Africana philosophy, since it changes names from from time to time, in place to place).
Feminist philosophy. There are analytic feminist feminists, there are continental feminists there, and there are some who say that it’s a distinct tradition of its own. That probably does merit being taken seriously.
Philosophy as a way of life. Maybe some people in academic philosophy think that’s just pandering, but it’s interesting that it’s out there and that it’s got quite a lot of traction
So these are all worth thinking about. Where they fit in here? They’re not in the divide. How do they inform any of that?
Determining What Philosophy Is
Let’s then talk about how we would — let’s call it, not say, to define philosophy but to characterize philosophy. So when you look at your philosophy textbooks, or those of you who teach, when you teach your intro class (or probably a lot of your other classes), one of the things you have to do is say “well what is philosophy?” For the people who have that as a question, that’s a very difficult thing to do, isn’t it?
And there are reasons (I think good reasons) why it’s difficult, and why we’re not often happy with what we say. Some of the reasons have to do with the very nature of philosophy. And we can understand philosophy not just as, say, an activity, but also as a disciplinary field, and as a body of literature — as all three of these intersecting with each other.
And as a side note, this problem of adequately defining philosophy, and that distinction that I just made between three different ways of looking at philosophy — that came up in something I’ve done a lot of work on, this rather obscure debate that took place in France in the 1930s about the the possibility or nature of Christian philosophy. I ended up writing a book about it, mostly of translations.
They they hashed out these same issues, though — what is philosophy? — and it was interesting to see that they they weren’t on the same page. It was good for them to have to try to clarify to each other what exactly is philosophy, and what isn’t philosophy. But they never achieved a consensus, and if they didn’t achieve a consensus in that small community, we’re not going to achieve an overall consensus in in the entire philosophical community. It’s going to be a perennial issue.
Some of those reasons. On the one hand, there’s a genuine question that’s what we can call an outward facing one. It would be nice if we could give some sort of characterization of philosophy to people who were asking us from the outside: “Hey, what are you doing?” That would be good. And then, there’s an inward facing question. We’re ourselves interested in what are we doing, when we try to pause from this particular activity or that particular activity.
And nearly any way of describing philosophy ends up looking like a description from some particular point of view. Try it out, and see whether you’re not bringing in some assumptions about philosophy, coming from some particular way of doing philosophy. And I’m not saying that’s a terrible thing. It’s just one of the conditions that we work under.
Also, in the past, maybe not so much in the present, we have what we can call a “totalizing ambition”. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. Philosophy tried to extend itself to everything, you know, to have you might say, a theory of everything, or at least some systematic conception of it. Now in the 20th century, we’ve seen some efforts to try to prune philosophy down to something more manageable. Those all presume that philosophy first of all is able to do that. But even when you prune stuff away, you’re still taking a stance on what you’re pruning away, so there’s still kind of a totalizing to it which makes it difficult to define as well.
Not only that, if we if we really engage the past of philosophy — you know, the great thinkers that we have those pictures of up in the hallway, for example (and that’s just a few of them), and we don’t just sort of shoehorn them into reductive categories, but we really look through them, we find a multiplicity of ways in which philosophy has been done, and structured, and understood.
Even if we just look at the ancient period — you know the the Platonists had a pretty different conception of philosophy, in certain respects, than did, say, the Epicureans. Or when Plato’s academy goes skeptic, they have a somewhat different conception as well.
That’s the end of the first portion of my talk. I hope you found it interesting, informative, and thought-provoking. I’ll be providing the rest of it in a set of several shortly upcoming posts.
That’s the end of the first part of my talk. I hope you found it interesting, informative, and thought-provoking.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.
Very interesting, thank you Dr. Sadler.