Anlaytic vs Continental Philosophy

[evolvedForm]

It seems that many posters on here, ones who disregard many thinkers like Nietzsche, Kant and others, do so because they were schooled (perhaps unwittingly) in the analytic tradition. They claim, like Russel did, that these thinkers were not really philosophers. I'm not aware of all the issues, but I heard that one reason for this is that they didn't write in the proper form for it to be considered philosophy. I have even heard that Foucault's use of quotation marks on certain words invalidates his entire project from the analytic tradition.

I also understand that there is a huge chasm between analytic and continental philosophy that has resulted in a bitter rivalry. Most English speaking schools prefer analytic (mine not included, thankfully /images/graemlins/smile.gif)while most mainland European schools prefer continental. These are two disctint branches of thought that for the most part exclude each other, so that whole strains of discourse are largely being ignored.

This is sad to me /images/graemlins/frown.gif. I'm wondering if we can get a debate going on here and perhaps attempt to tighten the gap, at least among twoplustwoers.

[guesswest]

Kant???

And I really don't think they're all that disparate, it's just a case of explicit vs implicit. There's a lot of talk of this divide but I've never actually met anyone who's claimed that only one approach represents 'real' philosophy.

[evolvedForm]

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Kant???



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Yes, I also gawked when I heard this; not sure if it's true, just something I was told.

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There's a lot of talk of this divide but I've never actually met anyone who's claimed that only one approach represents 'real' philosophy.



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Maybe not but there's a whole lot of intellectual arrogance surrounding the issue.

[guesswest]

I'm really not sure there is. I think it's very rare to find someone in philosophy who rejects one of these particular schools out of hand.

What you will sometimes find is people (correctly or incorrectly) arguing that certain approaches are incompatible. I don't believe that to be the case with anglo vs continental philosophy, but I was making a similar argument for analytic phil vs mysticism on here the other day.

That's a very different thing to saying one isn't valid, or useful. Sometimes when you look at a problem that one area of philosophy is solving with endless symbolic logic and the other with a novel, it's hard to mix and match. But a divide where it does occur I think just takes the form of not knowing how to reconcile the two, as oppose to viewing one as 'superior'.

It's also very unfashionable in philosophy at the moment to suggest that all these approaches can't be weaved together, so I suspect if anything the social pressure is the opposite.

[bearly]

i'm sure you have heard all this but: phil. is not a thing one studies, it is a thing one does. some sort of logic is the "infrastructure" so to speak for this endeavor. so much of what philosophers do today involves discoveries in science and technology. it's hard to turn the clock back. the graduate school i attended was one of the earliest to simply accept this fact and offer 2 seperate doctorates. 1 in the traditional study of the "great thinkers", another in what takes this broad topic "philosophy of mind" and mathematical and modal logics as the starting points and works on traditional and non-traditional problems w/ these "tools". when i was there the second choice had become virtually the only choice. here's an interesting excercise: go back to descartes' "d'optrique" and enjoy the elegant solution he arrives at relative to the central questions posed by the study of optics. it is still excellent reading for those who like to "get into the heads" so to speak of those who are gifted and able to think deeply..........................b

[Philo]

The analytic/continental distinction is, like many distinctions within philosophy, a rough-and-ready one. Many historical thinkers feature in the canons of both schools.

Kant is a cornerstone of the analytic tradition. It's true that Russell himself didn't think as highly of Kant as the tradition places him (which is no surprise since Russell was a staunch British empiricist), but even Russell remarked in A History of Western Phil that many philosophers considered Kant the greatest figure in the tradition.

An analytic philosopher will tell you that the difference between the two traditions is in the rigor of argumentation, as analytic philosophy is usually loosely defined in terms of its methodological reliance on rigorous argumentation. I'm schooled in the analytic tradition but there are certainly thinkers whom I appreciate who are not in that school, including Nietzsche.

I tend to think of Foucault as more of a social critic/revisionist historian than a philosopher.

If you want to read an amusing anecdote about a meeting between an analytic thinker and a non-analytic thinker find Quine's autobiography "The Time of My Life" and read about when he met Jacques Lacan.