What Can Analytic and Continental Philosophers Learn From Each Other? (part 2 of 5)
distinguishing the two sides of the Analytic-Continental "divide"
This is the second 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 here. 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 first part of the transcript of the talk, already published, here.
You’ll notice in this part that I engage in some discussion with audience members, who I invited to break into my lecture when they had questions to ask, objections to make, or points that they wanted to stress.
Distinguishing Analytic and Continental Philosophy
. . . So all that said, what about these two important ways of doing philosophy in the present? Does that mean that it’s hopeless? We can’t say anything about them? Well that would be that would be extraordinarily strange, wouldn’t it? Because we know there is something distinctive to analytic philosophy, and presumably there’s something distinctive to continental philosophy. So how might we go about characterizing them and differentiating them like this?
One thing we could do is focus on national or cultural or linguistic spheres — that’s one thing.
We can also focus on canons of literature — you know, who should be read.
We can focus on what other disciplines are typically engaged or become allies.
We can focus on characteristic methods that are employed, including attitudes towards arguments and tests
And we can also focus in on ideals or aims for philosophy itself
This is not an exclusive and exhaustive list. There’s other things, I think we could do as well. But I think that’s quite a lot to work with already.
So I want to set these out and then discuss why, although initially promising in our present time — particularly in our present time — they’re not really adequate for telling us what analytic and continental philosophy are, Although they may be all that we have.
Geography and Language
So let’s start with the easiest: national and linguistic spheres. Where is analytic philosophy done primarily? There’s some people doing it in France and Germany. But the work is primarily done by English-speaking — the “Anglo-sphere” we can call it. Where else? There’s another area where you find it, where it’s the predominant way of doing philosophy — Scandinavia. Isn’t that a weird thing? Shouldn’t they go with the rest of the Europeans? Culturally they’ve been sort of in the orbit for a while, and you know English is a very common second language. So there’s that.
Continental philosophy, you know, the European continent of course. So France, Germany, Italy, Spain — but it’s also a big concern in South America. You know it’s hard to to say exactly where else, because you can find it all around the world. There’s also massive colonies here, you know. There are continental departments here as well.
Now it’s good to note that different areas did develop different philosophical approaches and literatures. But that’s really more of a starting point. It doesn’t answer any questions for us, I think. We can perhaps point to sociological features of French culture as opposed to English culture. But I don’t know that we get that much mileage out of that.
And it’s important to note that we’re having this conversation at all because presumably some analytic philosophers would like to know what they can learn from continental philosophers, not just because they’re they’re over there in Europe but because you can find them here at Florida or Duquesne, or you know — where else would we go? There’s a lot of other pockets where you can you can find people doing it, so you could be in other places as well.
What about canons of literature? Can we identify analytic philosophy or continental philosophy with who they read? Well, think about why a canon is important. Or you might say, how is a canon important? It tells you whose ideas, or approaches or systems, are worth looking into, worth paying attention to, worth studying. Maybe also worth reacting to — who do you need to take seriously as an adversary, and who can you just totally dismiss? Who should you borrow from?
I’m going to return to this issue of canon later, but I think it’s not a particularly promising one in the present. I think it could have been useful around 1960 for characterizing continental and analytic philosophy, or maybe even 1980. I don’t think it’s as useful now, and I’ll tell you why in just just a bit.
Philosophy and Other Disciplines
Maybe another way we can think about it is: how does philosophy situate itself in relation to other disciplines? Because philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You guys are fortunate enough to have your own building here on campus, but that’s not the norm. In most places, you know, you’re stuck usually with somebody else.
We can say that analytic philosophy historically, and probably even in the present, gets along better with the sciences, and continental philosophy with the humanities. Would you say that’s a fair assessment? In quite a few places where where the philosophy department is analytic, much of the continental philosophy will actually get done in the other humanities departments, like the English department, History department, Political Science.
What about social sciences? I brought that up a little bit earlier. Psychology, anthropology, economics — do they fall out on one side or the other neatly like that? It really depends on where you are, doesn’t it, and which one you’re looking at. Anthropology? It depends on you know how you’re doing it. Some of the major contributors are continental philosophers. They’re part of the canon, e.g. Levi-Strauss. So it’s a little bit harder to characterize it, but perhaps there’s some merit to that.
Philosophical Methods and Approaches
What about characteristic methods? This is probably getting us closer to the heart of the the difference. So these include basic attitudes towards arguments and texts. Maybe that is closer to the heart of the difference between continental and analytic philosophy. It would reflect how philosophy gets done. Not only in its its publications, but also how it gets done in the classroom, in formation — which, is I think, perhaps even more important than publication — you know, how do you show people what philosophizing or doing philosophy looks like?
Philosophy isn’t something, I think, where you can have an easy book for how to do it , that leads you through 10 easy steps. “Just do these”, right? It’s something that, it’s a skill that we we get, or a set of skills that we get introduced to as something like apprentices, and work our way towards something like mastery. But I’m not quite sure if we can specify what that is here.
We can talk about distinctive movements or schools, though, arising in continental and analytic philosophy. This is an important distinction. Let’s say we take continental philosophy because that one is a lot easier to focus on. Is there a continental approach? Is there is there one basic approach that undergirds, let’s not even say all, just most, continental philosophy?
Let’s say we don’t even worry about how it’s done today, just its key figures. I see some shaking heads — why not? Can’t we say: “Well they love texts”. They believe in doing critical reading of texts. Well not all of them do. I mean some certainly do. You don’t recognize the text after Hegel has digested it, I can tell you that! Because it is really interesting, works like the Phenomenology of Spirit, he doesn’t even name who he’s talking about. You have to figure out the allusions yourself. And in his lectures, some of what goes into Hegel’s mill comes out looking very different than the people he names. So you know, the Stoic as Hegel finishes with them don’t look that much like Stoicism. Heidegger certainly loves texts. He talks an awful lot about that. And people who are interested in Heidegger do.
What about Husserl? Was Husserl into reading texts? Husserl would begin each day by doing these extraordinarily detailed, and from my perspective — I’ll probably get in trouble with a few people saying this — incredibly boring analysis, the phenomenological descriptions that exist in the Husserl archive. And if you want to be a Husserl scholar, you go over there, you learn to read a shorthand, and then you study some of these that nobody else has read before, and you write a little monograph on it. That’s very different than than, say, Heideggerian hermeneutics of texts
I don’t think there is a one single approach that you can point to. There’s a lot of different movements within within continental philosophy. What about analytic philosophy then? Is there something that we can say today? Maybe in the past we could, but is there something today that we can say constitutes the analytic approach? You are analytic philosophers, or analytic philosophers in training — what would you say? I would say no, but I’m in a less qualified position to say anything about that.
Member of Audience: What you have here on the handout is a good place to start. Yet, on the analytics side, “provides analysis of concepts, arguments, intuitions, uses of language” — I feel like I can understand what that is. But when I look on the continental side, it says “provides descriptions of experience” “textual analysis, critique, or liberation” And on the analytics side, I recognize that as philosophical methods. But on the continental side, it looks you know we were talking about textual analysis. That strikes me as something either narrowly conceptualized, or something you would do studying literature, or more broadly it’s something that any academic would do.
Well, just not any academic, because you know, you’re not going to find that many people in the natural sciences doing that. But yeah, in general you’re right.
Member of Audience: What I mean is there’s a broad and a narrow way of thinking of textual analysis. I think I analyze texts when I read them, but I don’t know that I practice continental philosophy.
Well it’s interesting too because the different groups within continental philosophy don’t mean the same things by “analyzing texts”. A marxist is looking for certain things. Somebody who’s working within a broadly psychoanalytic tradition is looking for other things. Some of them didn’t analyze texts at all — they just wrote their own stuff.
Member of Audience: I guess what I wanted to ask you is actually, from my perspective I think I would like to admit my perspective is biased in some ways, but it strikes me that the methods of analytic philosophy as simplified here has a unity and coherence to it. But i don’t understand, if there is a method of continental philosophy . . .
I don’t think there is. I think there’s methods. And I’m not even sure that there is today a method for analytic philosophy. This is you know, this is a simplification. Because you look at the history of, you read the analytic texts, the core texts for their history, and often they don’t have that much in common with each other, as far as the method goes. We can say that they are broadly engaging in some kind of attempt to provide arguments, you know be clear about things, but that’s about as far as we get, I think.
And you know, it’s really interesting to me moving in the kinds of circles that I do that when I talk with my analytic friends and colleagues in one area, what I find about what they’re doing or interested in doesn’t carry forth into another area. That’s why some people talk about this being a post-analytic period, where even the vocabulary, although the same term will be used, like “externalism” and “internalism,” it means something very different in one one area, like philosophy of action, as it does in another area. And so from my perspective historically, it ends up looking a lot like some of the things we used to say about scholasticism, where concentration on working with terms that have been essentially neologisms coined in order to carry out work, and they don’t always translate from one side to the other.
So I think that analytic philosophy is in a different condition than it was back when I was in my philosophical formation. And I don’t know — I have no idea — where it’s going to go myself, because you know I’m not really qualified to say that. But it does seem like it’s harder and harder to find a substantive common core to an analytic method or an analytic approach. You know, these generalities like “being clear” — what does it mean to be clear? You might say (if we want to be kind of joking) there’s a bit of obscurity about that.
Aims or Purposes of Philosophy
I brought up the aims of philosophy itself, and maybe maybe that’s a way to differentiate between them. I’m not really sure if it works well. Some of these are like what we’re talking about, you know clarity and presentation, mainly through focus on the structure of arguments. That’s that’s something the analytics seem to be particularly good at. Adequately setting up good authors’ positions and contributions before engaging in critique, and suggesting further lines to explore? Some continental philosophers are very good at that, but some of them are very, very bad at that!
Then there’s sort of “grander scale” things. And I think that these tend to be more associated with continental philosophy, like, you know, “overcoming western metaphysics” is a big project (which by the way, I don’t think anybody really knows what that that means at this point — it’s meant so many different things) But that’s very clearly something different than what many analytic philosophers would want to talk about.
But we can talk about things that pop up in analytic philosophy. In analytic philosophy of religion there’s a lot of work done by theistic philosophers that’s essentially what we used to call apologetics, aimed at demonstrating the rationality of religious faith or doctrines. Not so much of that in continental these days, in part because continental philosophy isn’t all European philosophy. It’s just sort of a some sector of it. But you see that it can be quite difficult to characterize these. But let’s let’s try a little bit more with the analytic philosophy.
Analytic Philosophy’s Origins and History
So maybe we put aside the you know location stuff. Maybe looking at its its history might prove useful. What’s sort of the doctrine about where analytic philosophy came from? Why did it emerge as a movement?
Member of Audience: My understanding is that it started with Frege and Russell creating basically predicate logic.
Yeah — now notice that by talking about it that way, you focused already on two of the key thinkers in it, and a very important movement within it. Russell wasn’t just motivated to do logic. He said Frege was, I think. And he had some interesting motives for what he was doing as it turned out later on. Why did Russell get into it? He didn’t love logic just for its own sake. It was a reaction against something.
Does anybody know what they were reacting against? No? British Idealism. Now what is it? What does that mean? These are people we kind of forget. You know Hegel. And — a total aside — continental philosophy is primarily coming from engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and primarily with one sub-section of it called the master-slave dialectic. Some thinkers like Slavoj Zizek actually read the whole text. Most read just just a portion of it. And in the 19th century that book wasn’t really read much. People weren’t that interested in that. They were much more interested in his Logic, and his System (capital-S) which was supposed to take in everything.
And so there were these British idealists who were doing similar projects. They’re very interesting people to read. Some of them had some interesting insights, but they would talk in pretty murky terms. You know, “the absolute” winds up being everywhere! Russell understandably wanted to know: what are they actually talking about? He thought a lot of what they were saying was kind of vacuous. And so the ideal behind focusing on logic is that we can rebuild things from the ground up, and that’s what you call the logicist project as Russell and and Whitehead originally conceived of it. That’s a very important beginning point in analytic philosophy.
The early Wittgenstein kind of fits into that, in a weird eccentric way. He’s sort of like a comet coming in and just going on his own orbit. There were advances in mathematics, and logic. and understanding of language that were underway. Great promise involved in that.
Another thing to understand historically is the importance of other philosophical movements in the background. It’s not as if they totally rejected all previous philosophy. The the positivist movement itself is going to show up again in logical positivism. Didn’t you know there’s a reason why why it’s “positivism”? The 19th century saw some pretty important thinkers in that respect. Analytic ethics? Think about G. E. Moore. Who is he primarily concerned in dealing with? The utilitarians. That whole thing provides a background.
And then, you know, in some ways analytic philosophy saw itself early on as a continuance of the empiricist project. So there’s references — not a lot of direct references — but you know, thinking out things in terms of Mill and Hume, an emphasis on on what can actually be empirically attested or verified as we see in the verificationist attempt. and all that. And it continues its development throughout the 20th century within a tradition. There’s very interesting work done. There’s a whole bunch of other, you might say, spin-off projects or ways of doing things.
Analytic Philosophy’s Canon?
Think about how different — if you’ve read Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Atomism, and then you compare that to Wittgenstein’s philosophical Investigations, they really are quite different stuff. Or you compare either of those to somebody like Ryle writing later on, continuing this analysis, focusing on ordinary language. Really quite distinct movements developing! And it continues, so by the time that I’m in graduate school, the whole discussion about possible worlds had become part of the parlance, and it was something that we were getting introduced to — very, very interesting stuff as well.
Now analytic philosophy effectively becomes dominant in in the Anglosphere and in Scandinavia, and you know, how does it identify itself? Is it is it by reference to this canon? How many of you would say — and I’m not trying to put anybody on the spot, so just think about this — how many of you would say that you really engage the canon, the classic analytic philosophical texts, on a continuing basis. That you see that as important? Do you see it as important, or is it something that can be successfully left behind like Wittgenstein’s old metaphor of the ladder that you pull up (which he got out of, if i remember right, some mystic text of the Christian tradition)? Now why wouldn’t a canon be important?
Member of Audience: If it’s more focused on natural sciences, natural logic, and these things we can observe. . . then it’s more on these than the works of the writers.
Although you know they they really did — if you look back on that literature — they did raise some really central issues and suggest some some trajectories, some of which they later on rejected. A.J. Ayer by the way is a great person for, you know, look at what he said in his later years about his earlier work. He said almost all of it was wrong, but it was great that he he did it.
Do they need, do you need reference points? Or maybe that’s no longer important.
Member of Audience: Yeah. You know the names attached to the ideas seem less important to me.
You mean like the movements?
Member of Audience: No the specific authors. I mean like knowing that an article I’m reading came from Russell might be useful for getting to understand exactly what he’s talking about, because Russell has a specific way of talking. More importantly, the central themes and the time period, the conversation going on in philosophy at the time. So yeah, the canon is important in so far as it’s useful to learn about what is happening in philosophy right now, what was happening previously, what ideas emerged But the ideas are more important to me than the actual text. Or the claims, the arguments, the concepts.
I think that makes sense. And we might be at a point too where some literatures have grown up — by the way too this is one of the things I’ll talk about towards the end — we’re in a different situation as well as far as time, where it’s not really possible to master some sort of comprehensive canon of contemporary analytic philosophy, because there’s so much stuff out there, any more than you could with continental. But I’ll talk about why that matters in a bit.
Analytic Philosophy and Historical Thinkers
What do you make of, you might say, that the — I’m not sure how to describe it — but there are many people working within analytic philosophy who are coming in from other substantive philosophical traditions, like analytic Thomists? The people who are coming out of [Elanore] Stumpf’s school, who take Thomas Aquinas (and sometimes some others), trying to put it into an analytic thing. Robert Brandom’s trying to do that with Hegel (I’m not sure how how successfully, because I haven’t really read his stuff). There’s analytic Marxists out there. There’s a big going project for a while. They want to take Marx who’s pretty obscure in points, and take his arguments and put them into an analytic framework.
It would seem that there then there must be something pretty definitive about the analytic framework in order to do.
Member of Audience: It’s a formula that you’re learning, and then you can take the formula and apply it to other places you said . . . I get the impression of logic, you can learn how to do logic. And then you take it, and you use it. Find out who the person was that taught you. . .
But analytic philosophy is much more than just the application of logic. You know there is the sort of having to parse out what what arguments are. I’m sure you can put arguments into a logical form. That used to be very popular, by the way, when I was in formation.
The analytics would spend a lot of time putting things into a formal logic notation, and then translating them back again, and saying “okay, this is what we did”. And we’d be like: “Well why did you do that?” I think nowadays it is still done. I’m going on very limited experience because I don’t read as much analytic philosophy, especially contemporary stuff as I’d like to. But I get the idea that there’s much more let’s try to make things clearer, and present them in a way that then we can see whether they stand up or not — not just putting them into a logical form
I can say this as somebody who studied Saint Thomas myself, I don’t really find what the analytic Thomists do to be very rooted in Thomas. After a while it looks much more like doing analytic philosophy, with a little bit of Thomas thrown in, than doing anything substantively Thomistic. But I’m sure they they see it very differently.
There’s one other thing too I’d like to say about analytic philosophy. There are some analytic philosophers who are excellent historians of philosophy, who have made some major contributions. Gregory Vlastos and Plato scholarship is a prime example. Some of the people who I read — and I do a lot of work on Anselm — have done some really interesting work as well
So that’s probably enough at this point about analytic, because you know, it’s sort of preaching to the the choir here.
That’s the end of the second portion of my talk. I hope you found it interesting, informative, and thought-provoking.
That’s the end of the second 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.