What Can Analytic and Continental Philosophers Learn From Each Other? (Part 5 of 5)

the final part of my invited talk on the Analytic-Continental divide

This is the fifth and final portion of the invited talk I gave at Virginia Commonwealth University to their Philosophy Club in 2016. The topic I was invited to address was the question in the title. You can watch or listen to the full talk in the videorecording. The talk itself runs nearly two hours, so I am breaking the transcript up into multiple parts, which I will post here sequentially. You can also read the already published first, second, third, and fourth parts of the transcript of the talk.

The Problem Posed By Available Time

Now what is the biggest obstacle [to bridging the analytic-continental divide]? I mentioned time. When you’re studying in a particular place, you have to look to the people that you’re studying with. If you want to broaden your horizons about that, how do you know who to go to? Any choice you’re going to make is going to be something arbitrary. And every bit of research that you do requires that you pay out some time, and your time is limited.

I was talking about this with Joseph earlier. For younger people — and if I was saying this to my younger self — it feels like you have a lot of time. And actually students do have in general more time than professors do, because you don’t know how much nonsense professors have to put up with, quite frankly! Once you start having families and things like that, that takes more time. But there’s, you might say, a horizon that kind of shifts around. We’re not going to live forever!

So when you’re deciding who you’re going to read (I know I think about it this way), if somebody proposes I should read some new text, I think: Well I could read this, or I could re-read some Kant, or I could re-read some Aristotle, or I could actually get to the Hegel stuff that I’m supposed to do, or I can read some . . .” and keep going on and on and on. You can’t do it all.

So in terms of overcoming this divide, in theory, if we had infinite time, we could all be on both sides of the divide, and doing all kinds of philosophy. But that’s not really a practical option for us. So we have to do something, almost like triage. We have to decide what we want to put our our time into. So that’s actually one reason why I came up with this this reading list which is, I think, more for the students than anyone else.

This is if you wanted to get a decent, not a great but decent, smattering of fairly typical continental approaches with some works that are seen as being pretty important, and are also short for the most part and fairly accessible (some of them less than others). This might be where you would start. I picked 20, because 20 is a convenient number. You have it cut off somewhere. But I thought these these would be useful.

The List I Provided At The Talk

Students in predominantly Analytic philosophy departments who desire to develop decent ideas of what Continental philosophy has to offer — and what some of the key recurring themes, topics, thinkers, and approaches are — might benefit from the following list.

• Soren Kierkegaard — The Present Age (1846)

• Karl Marx — The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Friedrich Nietzsche — The Genealogy of Morals (1887)

• Max Scheler — Ressentiment (1915)

• Edmund Husserl — Cartesian Meditations (1931)

• Martin Heidegger — What Is Metaphysics? (1929)

• Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno — The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

• Jean-Paul Sartre — Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)

• Alexandre Kojève — Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947)

• Simone de Beauvoir — The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

• Georges Bataille — Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957)

• Jacques Lacan — Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1960)

• Hannah Arendt — On Violence (1970)

• Jacques Derrida — Writing and Difference (1967)

• Giles Deleuze — Difference and Repetition (1968)

• Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)

• Jean-François Lyotard — The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)

• Julia Kristeva — Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980)

• Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

• Luce Irigaray — An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984)

Back To The Talk

You notice I don’t have anything by Hegel in there. We do have Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. I think when you read Kojeve, you’re getting more Kojeve than Hegel, but you’re at least getting some Hegel in a digested form. You notice also Jacques Lacan. I don’t recommend anybody reads the Ecrits to start with, because he’s deliberately obscure and he said so! He said he’s going to make people work as hard as they could to understand that stuff. That doesn’t strike me as a virtue of his work Seminar Seven, like many of his seminars, is pretty straightforward. There’s some challenging stuff in there but it’s it’s much more straightforward than his deliberately difficult Ecrits.

So this could be what you would want to do. But now imagine to yourself, let’s say you did say: “okay i’m going to do this.” How long will this take, just to go through these 20 works? Could you do it in a semester? Maybe if you didn’t have anything else to do — if you’re just if you’re just reading these

So you have to make choices about what you would want to draw upon. And when we ask“what can analytic and continental philosophers learn from each other?” that’s going to be somewhat limited by this factor of time, more than anything else, I think. More than the existence of a divide. More than the history of squabbles between people. We are in a situation where that’s the toughest factor for us to deal with, and Ithink for those of us who are older, and especially those of us who’ve passed the point where we say “well more than half my life is probably done, statistically,” it becomes very pressing.

Maybe I’m generalizing too much from my own experience, but that’s that’s that’s all I have as far as that that issue goes. If you want, I can tell you a little bit about sort-of reflections on this historical approach, or we could just do general Q&A if that’s more interesting. I know that I’d said I’d talk for about 90 minutes, and I’ve done that. You’ve been very patient listening for 90 minutes. That’s a long time!

Question and Answer — Women, Feminism, and Philosophy

Host: Do you guys have questions? Do you want to post them?

Audience member: I do. Characteristically I want to fall into one of the subgroups you mentioned, and you have this emphasis on time. We can only study so much. Why is it not more so an interest — despite the kind of sexist beginnings of philosophy — to study more feminist philosophy? I mean it would be in your interest to study half the population that you share.

Yeah! I’m actually a fan of that. I do work on Mary Wollstonecraft. You know, if you look at the list that I’ve got here, there’s quite a few women philosophers in there.

Audience member: So it’s like a general question of life philosophy Do you think that the problem is because of the beginnings, and women were seen as more so inferior, and not the rational sex? Or do you think it’s just . . .

What are you asking me?

Audience member: In general because what at least from what I’ve observed feminist philosophy isn’t, I would arguably say it’s not given its two cents.

Yeah, I’d say that’s generally true yeah at this point in time. Now you’re asking why that’s the case?

Audience member: Yeah — would you say that it’s the historical implications of philosophy, that well women can’t do philosophy? Or would you say . . .

Well, there’s some of that. That was certainly an impulse for a long time, and there is still some sort of “old-boyism” that goes on. With that, I have to say that I myself, in the places where I’ve worked, haven’t seen much of that, which is kind of nice. But I’m sure that you know we still have these these big scandals that show up in the New York Times every once in a while more at the level of institutions.

I think that in part one of the issues is that feminist theory, and works by women doing let’s call it philosophy writ large, rather than just in one particular area, have often been pushed off to other departments like Women’s Studies: “Well, we don’t have to have a discussion of this, because they can go take a class over there”, or to english departments in particular.

I teach Wollstonecraft when I teach Intro and Ethics classes, sometimes. I’m probably pretty unusual in doing that, including among my female colleagues. Usually she’ll get taught in a class on feminism, or women and gender (or whatever it’s named). And then she’s just one example among many.

What else? You asked if there’s some historical basis for it? Yeah. I mentioned that I do a lot of work on Aristotle. And I teach Aristotle. Every time I teach an ethics class, and usually when I’m teaching it most places that I’ve taught, it’s to a class that includes more women than men. So when when we get to talking about his remarks about women, which are pretty poorly informed, and historically have done some great damage in setting back equality, because of the way that he was used, I say this.

I say: If you think about Aristotle and his method in general, what would he do if we brought him into the classroom? He’d have some real culture shock to begin with. And then what if you pointed out to him that we’re reading this this text, and it’s primarily the female students that are actually raising their hands? Outcomes are worse in most college settings for for male students. Retention rates are lower. Women tend to be doing better. “What do you make of that buddy? What do you think about that?” I think Aristotle would probably say: “Well I think I need to reconsider some of my my statements and the premises that I was drawing them from, because clearly they’re not well-founded.” So it’s probably going to take several generations just to, say, defang Aristotle let alone others.

But you know you’ve got somebody receptive here to having more women in the curriculum. When I teach Descartes, I include the correspondence with with Elizabeth, who he treated as an equal. Yo u know it’s interesting too, because i’m doing a piece on Wollstonecraft as a virtue ethicist. Even in the virtue ethics community, and in the history of philosophy of moral philosophy community, there’s almost no mention of her. So, that’s that’s a bit of a digression. Any other questions or did that answer

Question and Answer — Meta-Philosophy

Audience member: Do you think there’s need for — this kind of builds off what you were discussing — do you think that there’s some kind of need for almost a meta-philosophy to sort of start the conversation on what works from the different disciplines — continental, even eastern philosophy — are worth delving into? To start building sort of a more global philosophical school? Or do you think that we should just let it happen more naturally, and let the the bridging of the divide happen as it does over time?

I think it’s good to have efforts that are set in place to do that, and there are some going on. Some of that gets done under the rubric of comparative philosophy, and there are even grant programs. There’s money to take philosophers from from the States and then bring them over to China, and have you know some interaction, but it’s a pretty small proportion of people that that’s affected.

A meta-philosophy. Any meta-philosophy is always going to be from somebody’s perspective, so anytime you try to have some overarching thing, somebody’s gonna run it. I’m s very very much influenced by somebody like Alasdair MacIntyre in that respect. You’re never going have some sort of clean, pure meta-philosophy, where it’s a level playing field. Every philosophy actually is, every philosophical tradition is already a meta-philosophy, because they’ve got a notion of what counts as philosophy or incoherent, and why those other guys over there aren’t doing philosophy you know. So in some sense they are.

Now should it be. . . We can ask two questions here.

• Would it be good for there to be more interchange?

• Should we as philosophers — speaking for other philosophers — should we be pushing that sort of thing?

I would say Yes. And then I would leave that up to the the people that are involved. Everybody’s pretty busy, and we have a lot to do. Maybe it’s enough to do it just in your own practice, if you think it’s an important thing to do. Or maybe it’s something that we we should try to promote when we can. I would think that one way we can do it in a very easy way is just through collegiality. And we seem to be in a much better position with respect to that than say 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, when people were forcing each other out of departments.

You know my mentor ended up teaching in prisons for a while, because there was a time when they were trying to phase out the continental philosophers in SIUC [Southern Illinois University Carbondale]. And the way they did it was just by assigning them all prison classes. He loved it, so it turned out great for him (I actually taught him prisons too and very much enjoyed it). He didn’t see it as a punishment. But it was intended as a punishment, an inducement to get the hell out of there! If we can avoid that sort of stuff, and call other people on it when they’re doing it, I think that advances this mutual understanding .

But it’s very tough — I mean that factor of time. We don’t have time enough to read everybody’s stuff, even assuming we wanted to. It’s not as if we have a duty — a moral duty — to do so. I think it’s supererogatory as they say, right?

Question and Answer — The Time Issue

Audience member: I have a question about the time. Couldn’t that give analytic and continental philosophers more reason not to try to bridge the divide? If you point out how little time there is?

Yeah! And you add in the fact that it takes time to write your articles, to get tenure, to do some service,

Audience member: Make sense of the other analytic philosophers as it is.

Oh so that the time would be better spent understanding the other people just within your own field? Sort of like . . . if you’ve already got a tough family situation, you should focus on, devote your activity to that. It’s not the best analogy. But focus your activity on that. Don’t worry about what’s happening on the other end of town. They’ll sort themselves out. Maybe after you get this taken care of, you can go. Yeah I guess one could say that.

Just with continental philosophy, it would be it would be nice to have the very unedifying activities of mutual recriminations and critiques that go on (just within continental philosophy) be a little bit more respectful and muted, which might be helped by actually reading each other’s works, rather than just saying “all those you know Marxists” or “those phenomenologists” or whatever.

Again I don’t think anybody has a duty to learn from bridging the gap or anything like that. But it is a good thing, you know. I mean, just as a historian, if I had never read Anselm, I would have missed out on so much. That may sound very strange to some of you, if you maybe just only read the Proslogion. Do you read the the corpus of his works? There’s so much rich thought there. And that was there was a “bridging a gap”, because nobody was training me to to read Anselm. It was something I had to decide to do, on my own, and then I found people who on the other side were supportive of that. The Institute for Saint Anselm Studies, for example. We could come up with lots of individual examples like that, I think. It’s probably not the best answer . . .

Question and Answer — Philosophy and Other Fields

Audience member: I think there’s another related need. My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, but I’m in the grad school for urban planning, and we talked about ethics for less than an hour in one class, and so I think it’s very necessary somehow to get it into those participants.

When I was at Fayetteville State University, I got involved in co-founding what we called the Ethics in Business Education Project. One of the reasons we did that was because they did not have a business ethics class at all, and they were being — I usually get this acronym mixed up: ASCB — they belong to that organization which is an elite thing among business schools. And that organization requires that for your four-year reaccreditation, you have to demonstrate that you’re actually teaching ethical theories and how to apply them to your students. So they brought it brought in us philosophers, and they’re like: “Hey! Can you take a look at our rubrics and maybe tweak them a little bit?”

And it was sort of like if you buy a house, and you think that maybe the front door needs to be fixed, and then you find the frame is messed up. And that’s nothing compared to the floor, and the furnace. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. So it turned into a project. And it was great, because what we ended up doing was developing a model where the goal was not to have the usual thing — where you bring in the philosophers as sort of hired guns to teach the content on ethics that the business students sit through, and then are like “Fine, now we can get to our real work”. Instead it’s across the curriculum, so it’s reflected in each class.

Business textbooks that that have sections on ethics (especially management) — sometimes it’s crazy stuff! You take a look at it, and you’re like: “I don’t know where they got these ideas from!” They usually get utilitarianism right, but the other stuff, it’s a little bit questionable. So you want to get that curriculum done well. And you also want to work with the educators themselves — the business professors — not to make them experts in ethics, but to bring them to an intermediary level so that they can talk about this stuff competently in classes. When their students say “Well isn’t that all subjective?” they know how to approach those things. And it makes such a huge impact on those students!

We can say similar things for all sorts of other programs as well. You know it’s interesting too from an institutional perspective. Philosophers — this is a total digression at this point, but this is one of the things I think about — philosophers are one of the best situated groups to participate in a whole bunch of collaborative activities.

We are the experts in critical thinking. Other people do critical thinking. Some of them call things “critical thinking” that aren’t critical thinking. We are the experts. If you look at the APA Delphi report (which is the gold standard, and what counts as critical thinking), who signed off on it? It’s mostly philosophers. We’re the ones who teach that. We can be participating by helping the rest of the curriculum. If they want to infuse critical thinking, we can help them do that

Ethics? We can help them do that as well, and should be doing that! Just engaging in practical reasoning on things. Sometimes bringing a philosopher in (this is one place too where it probably it’s better to bring in an analytic philosopher than a continental philosopher) — the philosopher asks questions that need to be asked.

I was just talking with Joseph about this. In continental philosophy, which often sort of overlaps with, literature or english departments, I would get into these. I was doing continental philosophy for a while, but I was also hanging out with a lot of English people, and they would go off and get upset with me. Because the way people would do things, they’d present something and then everyone said: “That’s really cool! Maybe you could take this a little bit further.” There wasn’t a lot of critical analysis, saying “I think you got this wrong, and here’s why. I think you got this right.” They they would see the philosophers as being kind of boorish, or particular, or things like that. But that’s a necessary function. Bringing in a philosopher will often get you somebody who can ask the right questions.

Philosophers want to be involved in academic administration. Philosophers will have to be involved in whatever you have here that does faculty development. Philosophers ought to be involved in that. Philosophers ought to be sitting on a whole bunch of committees because they can do so much really good work as philosophers but you don’t see a lot of that, unfortunately, It’s not just because philosophers aren’t volunteering to do it, and there’s a bit of a push back. But there’s so much potential for philosophers, because of the training that we have, to do great work in academic institutions and in outside institutions. So to make it relevant, more specifically to today . . .

Question and Answer — Analytic Philosophy

Audience member: You did mention it in there saying that the analytics side is probably more useful for translating, or moving outside of the discipline, specifically into other disciplines. Are those skills going to be more useful to broaden the exposure of philosophy to other disciplines. Are the skills of being able to ask the right questions and bring in clarity, I suppose, would be helpful for others . . . ?

Oh yeah, very much so! Pointing out when distinctions need to be made, noting ambiguous terms, that often can be helpful. Probably analytics do have an advantage on continental philosophers in general. I’d say there’s certain certain areas of continental philosophy where they’re very good at doing that sort of thing — hermeneutics, you know. I’d say historians are really good at doing that sort of thing as well.

Does that answer your question? I got up a bit on my soap box in that one! Any other questions or concerns?

Audience member: We need a similar question for the natural sciences. Like analytic philosophy is really important in the sciences and also kind of influenced computer science. What would continental philosophy offer for the natural sciences?

So that’s an interesting one. I don’t think an awful lot, quite frankly. Maybe thinking about conceptions of time, conceptions of matter. There’s this new movement of speculative realism, where they’re doing some bridge work between analytic and continental, talking a lot about ontology and objects and how you might actually use Heidegger to talk about science in any way. I think where continental philosophy has interesting stuff to say about the application of science, is in terms of societal thing — organization of institutions, power. That’s not the natural sciences themselves. In so far as we’re talking about just the practice of a physicist qua physicist, I don’t think continental philosophy has all that much to offer.

There’s a whole field of science “studies” out there that gives continental philosophy a particularly bad name, because a lot of that stuff is just not very good, but I don’t even know what it is. I can’t even say it’s not good work, because I don’t think it falls in the category of work (which I’m sure is going to raise somebody’s objection!) But you know, in terms of how we apply science, what we make of the sciences — I think there’s useful stuff. The question is whether it’s worth the opportunity cost that it requires to read through this dense literature, and I don’t know. I suspect not.

Audience member: So I’m curious as to what you think analytic philosophy has to offer the natural sciences. And I say this as an analytic philosopher. You know, if I think about what can I say to a physicist that would help a physicist do his work — nothing right? There’s some questions in the philosophy of science, but philosophy of science is clearly philosophy. It’s not doing physics. What have I got to offer a physicist, or a biologist, or any of these guys in the natural sciences? Nothing as far as I can see. It’s not like they’re itching for philosophers to come in and help them make distinctions. No, they’re usually telling us how philosophy is no good, and all that sort of stuff.

You’re probably right about that! I would say philosophers have a lot to contribute to. Do we want to consider this whole field of neuroscience, which is kind of a hazy field at this point, to be a natural science? I’d say so. It seems to be sort of an offshoot of biology, and I think there’s a lot of conclusion jumping that goes on in . . . [at that point the camera ran out of power]

That’s the end of the fifth and final portion of my talk. I hope you found it interesting, informative, and thought-provoking.

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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.