Continental/Analytic Philosophy

Ned said:

(I wasn't trying to attribute anything to anyone in particular?) Anyway logic has to be independent of, and prior to, our empirical knowledge of the universe. The only things we can be sure of before we start making observations are - ignoring the Kantian hinterland for a moment because I don't know much about it - things that are tautologous/true by definition, like A=A (which is just like 'a bachelor is an unmarried man'), and anything derived from a tautology is also a tautology. But the important thing to note is that just because something's a tautology, that doesn't mean it can't be a surprising truth, because once you start manipulating tautologies in complex ways you get non-obvious results.

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This from Kant on the limitations of the domain of formal logic;
'That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting ..... from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form (....) logic, therefore, as a propaedeutic, forms as it were only the vestibule of the sciences; and when we are concerned with specific modes of knowledge, while logic is indeed presupposed in any critical estimation of them, yet for he actual acquiring of them we have to look to the sciences properly and objectively so- called' (KRV B.ix)


Kant wants philosophy to move out of the vestibule and into the light of being a science on a firm footing and for that its requires knowledge of objects and their differences - in this case the 'objects' being the conditions of the possibility of objects and the experience of objects - knowledge which must be guided by logic but cannot be build exclusively from such material.

And later ' what I call applied logic .... is a representation of the understanding and of the rules of its necessary employment in concreto, that is, under the accidental subjective conditions which may hinder or help its application ...... it treats of attention, its impediments and consequences, of the source of error, of the state of doubt, hesitation and conviction etc' (A 54/ B 79)

I don't want to bludgeon anyone with quotes, but i think that sets out a lot better than i could do the point i was trying to make about the limits of the domain of formal logic without doubting its validity within that domain.

OK. Taking a hint from discussion on other threads (gasp ack) let me be a bit confrontational. Maybe before I do I should say a bit about my background; I am not a philosopher but use tools from analytic work daily in my research. With analytic work I can see what the goal is and I can see that there are useful results being obtained---though some would surely see these as dry and uninteresting (probably the vast majority of undergraduate philosophy majors cited above, who by the way are probably shocked at what people have them doing by the time they have got through their degrees). I can't say I feel the same about CP. I don't know if the reason is that I'm ignorant (though surely this is part of it) or wilful obscurantism. But I am sure that it's fairly easy to find statements by analytic people of what the project is, and i don't know that it's so easy to find similar things by the CP types people love so much here. So my question is: what is the goal anyway??? What are people trying to do? And I hope that people won't tell me that I have to slog through Derrida or Bizet or something for 10 years to come close to being able to understand the answer. If the project is worthwhile it should be statable and explainable to outsiders. IMO.

As with AP, there is no one goal that CP aims at. In fact, most of the big questions which CP addresses are the same as those of AP (or the Anglo-American tradition at any rate). Here are a few:
Is there such a thing as objective reality which we can access?
What is truth and can we successfully test for it?
Are there such things as persons?
How do we recognise and judge art?
How can we live a moral life?

I could multiply the examples, but I'm sure you get the point. Where AP and CP differ is in how one approaches these questions, or (sometimes) whether they are well formed in their specifics, or in fact answerable by philosophy. You should bear in mind that whilst some Analytic philosophers will often make claims to the effect that their discipline is much more modest than CP and addresses specifics rather than 'big questions', they are certainly not saying that they have ignored these questions; rather that they have thought about them and concluded that philsophy is not equipped to answer them (if they can be answered at all).

It might also be worth pointing out that AP and CP a have lot more in common than not. If this were not the case, I doubt you would see all the mud-slinging, etc. I have never seen the same venom expended upon Eastern philosophy, for example.

By the way Foret yes I am at Cambridge, it's a nice university but really not the place to study philosophy.

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is that what you are studying (i assume....)

Yes I am, for another few weeks. In the middle of finals at the moment.

Rorty is nothing if not patronising, nearly all of the time (though he can be funny with it)

re your quote at the end; this would seem as good a summary of the methods of such redoubtable AP figures as Wittgenstein and Austin as anything else - I wouldn't think it's necessarily a CP tactic - more likely to just ignore the question and introduce a lot of terms you don't understand....

I think there's a divide within AP between people who want to reduce the number of philosophical puzzles (e.g. Wittgenstein) and people who want to increase them (practically everyone else).

IdleRich said:

I was just surprised that he admits, or actually is proud of, the fact that when he is asked a question (which I would say is what he means when he says "set a puzzle") his response is automatically to question the terms in which it is proposed - presumably whatever they are - and then say "you can't ask that question". That seems intellectually dishonest to me.

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Well, not necessarily. Questions have implied premises and if those premises are contradictory then the question isn't meaningful - it's common practice to examine the terms of any proposition in order to see what assumptions are being smuggled in and whether they are valid. If I ask you "what kind of fish is a raven?", you're perfectly justified in saying that the question can't meaningfully be asked.

IdleRich said:

I agree that it is valid to question the assumptions made in "setting a puzzle" and sometimes it is valid to reject them (as in your example) - what I take exception to is that from reading Rorty's quote it seems that he will always (this is what I meant by automatically) try and reject them whatever they are, in another words to treat every question as "what kind of fish is a raven?". This is what I mean by intellectual dishonesty.

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Well, sometimes there are some assumptions that are so fundamental that they are the premise for any question you could ask within, for instance, the framework of AP.

I'd say something like the assumption of subject/object distinction...

IdleRich said:

One criticism my girlfriend always makes of continental philosophy is the way that when someone can't answer a question they try and get out off the hook by denying that the question can be asked in that way (in fact she read some of this thread and got frustrated by what she saw as some people's attempts to do just that).

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I don't think anyone here speaking for CP "can't answer" the questions asked - it's just that they can become meaningless within the premises of CP.

This is a pretty prime example of why there's a conflict - AP says "answer these questions on my terms", CP says "sorry I can't, those terms arn't valid" and you're locked into stalemate. I'm sorry if she's frustrated by that, but as I said before, I'm starting to find it equally frustrating that she insists on demanding her questions be answered - especially when it's implied that any attempt to question the premises of said questions is "intellectually dishonest" or seen as wriggling out the challenge.