Continental/Analytic Philosophy

IdleRich

IdleRich
This is something that I thought about when reading the “K-Punk on Weed” thread when an argument developed about the relative merits of science and philosophy. It occurred to me that the distinction was more to do with the divide between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy (theory).
Obviously I know nothing about this but as far as I can see (I’m waiting to be corrected) the former seems to depend on logical argument and values clarity of expression while the latter is more to do with feelings and ideas that are not necessarily argued in a rational fashion (and even seems to be deliberately difficult to understand at times) as there is a belief that some things transcend logical treatment. My girlfriend (studying philosophy at present) says that this divide is very pronounced and that the analytic side don’t consider the other lot as philosophers at all.
I notice that a lot of people on this board regularly quote names that I believe are related to theory and that is normally where my ability to follow the thread ends so I look to you lot for insight. I would like really to get some handle on what this divide is about, whether the continental philosophers have a similarly low opinion of the analytic philosophers and what riposte would be made to people who say that theory is just pseudo-philosophy made wilfully obscure so that no-one notices?
Cheers.
 

D7_bohs

Well-known member
The divide definitely exists, and while, in a lot of philosophy departments there are people doing both, and therefore enforcing a modicum of politeness, it is undoubtedly true that many people on each side have a low opinion of the other.

Firstly, though, 'continental philosophy' is about as useful as 'black music' as a term; just as the latter means everything from New Orleans jazz to Grime, so CP generally means any or all of Phenomenology, critical Theory, Deconstruction/Post- structuralism and hermeneutics, along with whatever it is Zizek and Badiou do - disciplines which have as little in common with each other as any of them do with Analytic Philosophy; the only thing they do have in common is that they are not Analytic Philosophy.

So what is AP? is it all anglo- american philosophy? Strictly speaking I don't think it is; I think it is a fairly tightly defined tradition running in two parallel streams from Carnap and the Vienna Circle, on the one hand, and Russell and Wittgenstein on the other (you will note that only one of these is a native english speaker) - Nevertheless, other streams in English speaking philosophy, such as pragmatism, and the distinctively american philosophy of mind that runs from Sellars to McDowell, Rorty and Brandom tend to get lumped in with "Analytic Philosophy'

If there is a defining difference it's probably encapsulated in two things; one in Quine's sniffy comment 'you either do philosophy or history of philosophy' and two, in attitudes to Hegel. From the AP side, philosophy is more valuable the more it approaches scientific method and scientific truths are supposed to be timeless; thus AP considers truth to be discernable by the analysis of concepts; CP more often by a genealogical approach. For AP, Hegel is where it all goes wrong; for most CP, he is an essential starting point.

All that said, there are signs of tentative rapprochement; Brandom, McDowell and Rorty have all started a move from Kant to Hegel in Anglo- American thought, and Badiou and others, impatient with the retreat from politics and the return to ethics in the later Derrida and in Marion and others, have instituted a return to universalism and to science.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Thank you D7_Bohs (by the way I notice that you - or else someone with the same name - has recently started posting on vinylvulture), that was pretty helpful, though obviously it leads on to a lot more questions.
What do you mean by a genealogical approach? What does Quine's comment mean?
I think that (part of) the problem that my girlfriend has with continental philosophy is that it is so hard to pin practitioners down to what they actually mean that it is perfectly possible for charlatans to exist and indeed be successful simply by bamboozling people with meaningless arguments (like that hoax that someone linked to in the K-Punk thread) whereas in "proper" philosophy that cannot happen because it is more intellectually rigorous. She would say that there are a lot of "emperor's new clothes" type philosophers around in universities, all quoting each other and building an edifice of nonsense.
 

johneffay

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
in "proper" philosophy that cannot happen because it is more intellectually rigorous. She would say that there are a lot of "emperor's new clothes" type philosophers around in universities, all quoting each other and building an edifice of nonsense.

Just passing through at the moment, so I chuck this point in as for consideration/inflammation before I get really stroppy ;)

I agree in the main with D7_bohs, however one of the major distinctions between analytic and continental philosophy is that analytic philosophers think that it is somehow a bad thing that many continental philosophers are taken seriously by people outside their discipline, i.e. that people who are not philosophers find value in what they have to say. Conversely, continental philosophers see analytical philosophy as so viciously reductionist that it hardly merits the name 'philosophy'.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just found this article...

http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.htm

Which is quite relevant and pretty much contains the points you have just mentioned as below:

Joheffay said "many continental philosophers are taken seriously by people outside their discipline, i.e. that people who are not philosophers find value in what they have to say."

Article says "whereas analytic philosophy has proved of little or no interest to the humanities other than itself, the impact of Continental philosophy has been enormous."

Although the next line (and I think that this is the bit that analytic people really have problems with) is:

"But there is also a great deal of humburg in the Continental tradition"

And regarding your other point

Johneffay said "Conversely, continental philosophers see analytical philosophy as so viciously reductionist that it hardly merits the name 'philosophy'"

Article says "Criticisms of "analytic" philosophy are familiar: arid, insular, boring, obsessed with logic-chopping, irrelevant. The criticisms are not without some truth."

But then this

"Whatever the limitations of "analytic" philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world's bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history....When compared to the sophomoric nonsense that passes for "philosophizing" in the broader academic culture--often in fields like English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History--one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers"

I think this "sophomoric nonsense" is exactly what my girlfriend hates and what we get a lot of on dissensus. I do find it quite frustrating when people are quoting all these names as if it somehow demonstrates that they have attained a higher level of understanding (is that what he meant about "either study history or study philosophy"?), yet in many cases these quoters are unable to spell common words or construct the simplest sentences (I have to be careful myself now of course). It is this that makes me suspect that people are making a deliberate attempt to "blind me with science" rather than actively engage.
 

johneffay

Well-known member
one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers"

Except that most of what passes for analytic philosophy is regarded by other anlaytic philosophers as specious (the same is true of continental philosophy infighting). I'm not going to go into detail (you can easily verify this if you can be bothered) but, broadly the only thing that 'analytic philosophers' agree on is that continental philosophy is nonsense.

Anyhow, my main point is that the best continental philosophy is easily as rigorous as the best analytic philosophy. However, both camps have their fair share of people talking ill thought out rubbish.

In my experience, analytic philosophers who criticize continental philosophy fall into two camps:
1. People who have never enagaged properly with the material and who claim that it is ill thought out gibberish.
2. People who claim that it deals with a set of problems which are either uninteresting or badly posed (and therefore non-problems).

It is only the second group who are worth engaging.

Obviously this whole thing is heading in the direction of straw men at an alrming rate, but you will find these arttitudes in UK universities.
 
D

droid

Guest
johneffay said:
1. People who have never enagaged properly with the material and who claim that it is ill thought out gibberish.

I think Chomsky vs Lacan/'Post everything' falls into that camp... and whilst I have sympathy with his thoughts on the use of 'technical language' and that if an idea cant be expressed without resort to vague and complex terminology and self-reference it probably isnt worth expressing, I also feel that theres a whole world out there: aesthetics/literature etc, which are very diffcult to verbalise, and can only be described through the use of self made concepts and abstract theories...
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
johneffay said:
I agree in the main with D7_bohs, however one of the major distinctions between analytic and continental philosophy is that analytic philosophers think that it is somehow a bad thing that many continental philosophers are taken seriously by people outside their discipline, i.e. that people who are not philosophers find value in what they have to say. Conversely, continental philosophers see analytical philosophy as so viciously reductionist that it hardly merits the name 'philosophy'.
A big problem with this is that you tend to end up with a whole bunch of people who sat a critical theory module at university and then start using big words to make their personal opinions sound more important, and giving the whole thing a bad name.

However, there do seem to be[1] an adequate range of contradictory views in continental philosophy, all of them meticulously argued, that you can pick your school of philosophy to justify your existing prejudices. I come from a scientific background, so I've got kind of high expectations for this sort of thing, but if you're arguing that we should follow a course of action based on the conclusions of your argument I sort of like to see something resembling scientific method, ie falsifieability, peer review and so on.

[1] in my very limited experience
 

D7_bohs

Well-known member
Quine's comment is based on the thought that philosophy if it is real philosophy produces insights that are 'true' the way Newton's laws are 'true' - in other words, independently of the situation in which you hold it to be true, whereas he would think that philosophers - or 'philosophers' - from other traditions would hold that philosophical truth presupposes a wider cultural context , and that 'truth' is simply a name for the most plausible current description of a state of affairs, but one which has no claim to a-historical permanence; 'a mobile army of metaphors' in Nietzsche's phrase. This is not to say that Nietzsche or anyone else in the european tradition doesn't think there are judgments which are necessarily true;- 'bachelors are unmarried men' and so on - its just such judgments are not a model of philosophical truth, and further they aren't even interesting.

Quine would hold that most European philosophy is concerned with ever more tenuous exegesis of the history of philosophy - 'genealogy' - rather than rigorous examination of the truth content of concepts; the difficulty being of course, that as even most analytic philosophers can see, concepts only mean what they mean in a social or linguistic context. Nevertheless, even as Sellars and then McDowell reach towards an Hegelian Holism - but without the history - they refuse to abandon a concept of scientific truth that always trumps anything available within the 'space of reasons' (the place where most of us live).

As for Analytic philosophers having more efective bullshit detectors, that's probably true, but at the price of excluding perfectly valid human concerns from the domain of philosophy. Similarly, the migration of CP to the wider humanities does produce a lot of bad philosophy from people without any real training in the area, but its proliferation has more to do with academic ambition than with the discipline itself; good Continental philosophers are just as rigorous as the analytics.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
D7_bohs said:
Quine's comment is based on the thought that philosophy if it is real philosophy produces insights that are 'true' the way Newton's laws are 'true'
It's a side point, but Newton's laws aren't true. They're quite useable and give a very accurate description of what we observe in a fairly wide variety of situations, but they definitely aren't true. I suspect that most physicists who've thought about the matter wouldn't describe even their current best theory as 'true' - they'd only claim that it's an accurate model and has not yet been falsified.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers"

"Except that most of what passes for analytic philosophy is regarded by other anlaytic philosophers as specious"
I don't really how the second line relates to the first. Just because people disagree doesn't mean that they are not applying intellectual rigour. The point is that people can at least understand what each other are saying (or trying to say) and then can argue the merits or otherwise of the point - this is the case in any discipline surely?

"In my experience, analytic philosophers who criticize continental philosophy fall into two camps"
I would say that Louise (my girlfriend) doesn't fit into either of the groups that you have described. During her MA in Aesthetics she tried to engage with continental philosophy through her tutor and also through acquaintances who had recently graduated in the discipline. Her frustration with the subject grew due to their inability to articulate any of the ideas in a reasonable manner, or in fact, at all. Possibly this is due to the low calibre of the people in question or possibly it was down to the fact that the ideas they were trying to convey were simply "ill thought out gibberish". If it was indeed due to the people then that in turn raises the question of why people of such low calibre can be (relatively) highly regarded in the field.
It seems to me that the statement "It is only the second group who are worth engaging" smacks of an unwillingness, quite literally, to engage. You are pre-supposing the method that anyone may have used to reach the conclusion.

"Anyhow, my main point is that the best continental philosophy is easily as rigorous as the best analytic philosophy"
What I'm asking really is, if that is so then why don't the analytic philosophers think so? Why is it that all Philosophy departments in major universities in the UK and the US are overwhelmingly analytic whereas continental philosophy is taught more in departments such as film or sociology?
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
D7_bohs said:
All that said, there are signs of tentative rapprochement; Brandom, McDowell and Rorty have all started a move from Kant to Hegel in Anglo- American thought, and Badiou and others, impatient with the retreat from politics and the return to ethics in the later Derrida and in Marion and others, have instituted a return to universalism and to science.

There's also the Wittgenstienian take on Heidegger that Dreyfus, Blattner and Haugeland have been pushing for some time now, and more recently the moves from philosophers of cognitive science to embrace Husserlian phenomenology (Varela and Petitot). They seem to have the same problem as McDowell et al - so far but no further. Which can be deeply frustrating when reading them.

I would say that Louise (my girlfriend) doesn't fit into either of the groups that you have described. During her MA in Aesthetics she tried to engage with continental philosophy through her tutor and also through acquaintances who had recently graduated in the discipline. Her frustration with the subject grew due to their inability to articulate any of the ideas in a reasonable manner, or in fact, at all. Possibly this is due to the low calibre of the people in question or possibly it was down to the fact that the ideas they were trying to convey were simply "ill thought out gibberish". If it was indeed due to the people then that in turn raises the question of why people of such low calibre can be (relatively) highly regarded in the field.

I would have thought trying to do aesthetics without a solid background in continental philosophy would be difficult...

But here the problem is that they failed to "articulate their ideas in a reasonable manner" - I'm guessing that here she meant "in a manner reasonable to an analytic philosopher". I would imagine that those on the other side were frustrated at the inability of an analytic philosopher to engage with the material in a reasonable manner, too.

I don't think it's to do with the calibre of the people - just the different yardsticks used to judge ideas in the two sub-disciplines. Continental philosophy is learnt and taught in a completely different way - "in my end is my beginning" and all that. I personally found the learning curve very steep, when I moved from doing mostly analytic to mostly continental. Hegel for weeks was terrible, awful - how could anyone write so badly when trying to get ideas across, I thought? The whole thing's just a mess, contradictory, wilfully obscure.

It's only once you've taken the time to really understand the ideas, and the terminology, and the arc of the project as a whole that it suddenly snaps into sense.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Brief reply to that one 'cause I've got to rush off to find somewhere to watch the footie but

I would have thought trying to do aesthetics without a solid background in continental philosophy would be difficult..."
Her first degree was philosophy, then Ma in aesthetics, now bphil or dphil or whatever it's called prior to phd. Without any background in CP she got a distinction in the Ma despite a total breakdown in relations with her tutor. The problem was that he was unable to answer her questions as he was unused to the level of philosophical rigour required when dealing with someone of her background. He was also young and (I think) too proud to admit when he didn't know something and would then seek refuge with replies such as "yes and no" or "in a sense" when this was not a worthwhile answer (if it ever can be). This came to an end when he (spitefully I would say) specifically wrote on her dissertation "I do not feel this deserves a distinction" but was fortunately overruled by the other marker and moderators (obviously this is nothing to do with a continental/analytic divide, I mention it merely because he was a wanker and it makes me angry).

"But here the problem is that they failed to "articulate their ideas in a reasonable manner" - I'm guessing that here she meant "in a manner reasonable to an analytic philosopher". I would imagine that those on the other side were frustrated at the inability of an analytic philosopher to engage with the material in a reasonable manner, too."
Well, obviously this is where the disagreement is but I don't think anyone ever accused her in not trying or being unable to engage, it's just that her constant questions revealed that they didn't really know anything and were trying to pull the wool over her eyes. The problem was probably the people, it seems as though you might (might!) do a better job. I'll get her to read this and see what she thinks.
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
IdleRich said:
Well, obviously this is where the disagreement is but I don't think anyone ever accused her in not trying or being unable to engage, it's just that her constant questions revealed that they didn't really know anything and were trying to pull the wool over her eyes. The problem was probably the people, it seems as though you might (might!) do a better job. I'll get her to read this and see what she thinks.

What I meant was that I thought this way too, that continental philosophy was a load of bollocks, without any substance, obfuscatory etc... being told you are "asking the wrong questions" and "yes and no" happened a lot to me too. But once I got to grips with it a bit better, I came to understand why those responses were sometimes appropriate.
 

D7_bohs

Well-known member
Slothrop said:
It's a side point, but Newton's laws aren't true. They're quite useable and give a very accurate description of what we observe in a fairly wide variety of situations, but they definitely aren't true. I suspect that most physicists who've thought about the matter wouldn't describe even their current best theory as 'true' - they'd only claim that it's an accurate model and has not yet been falsified.

proof again that philosophers should never talk about science..(well, unless they're philosophers of science, i guess)
 
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johneffay

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
I don't really how the second line relates to the first. Just because people disagree doesn't mean that they are not applying intellectual rigour.
Indeed, but that isn't quite what I meant. You will find all too many disagreements within analytic philosophy [AP] which are based on the claim that one's opponents are not intellectually rigorous. This is not unique to AP, but the point is that, many of the arguments about language use, obfuscation, etc. which AP directs against CP, it also deploys internally. This goes right to the core of AP; for example the arguments about what it is exactly that is demonstrable via symbolic logic. I should stress that I'm not trying to slag off AP: It is neither better nor worse in this respect than many other disciplines in the humanities (sits back and awaits abuse from analytic philosophers who think they are doing science :p ). However it is the stance of some in witihin AP to CP that I find objectionable.

Your girlfriend's experience sounds very poor. Good continental philosophy tutors should be perfectly able to articulate their ideas in a reasonable manner even (and this is the key to all disciplines) if they have to spend some time making the specialised terminology, etc. accessible to their students. There is no denying that some tutors hide behind terminology because they cannot properly articulate the ideas, but this is not the fault of the terminology. I could supply you with horror stories about my own education in moral philosophy at the hands of analytic moral philosophers who had less engagement with the world at large than my dog, but I'm sure you get the point.

IdleRich said:
What I'm asking really is, if that is so then why don't the analytic philosophers think so? Why is it that all Philosophy departments in major universities in the UK and the US are overwhelmingly analytic whereas continental philosophy is taught more in departments such as film or sociology?

Jobs for the boys. University departments are little empires riven by power struggles. AP has philosophy departments in major universities as its strongholds (often tied to other subjects such as politics and economics). Some of the brightest stars in CP can't get jobs in them, and so migrate to other departments where they build their own strongholds.
 

Padraig

Banned
Idlerich: This came to an end when he (spitefully I would say) specifically wrote on her dissertation "I do not feel this deserves a distinction" but was fortunately overruled by the other marker and moderators (obviously this is nothing to do with a continental/analytic divide, I mention it merely because he was a wanker and it makes me angry).

But isn't this really an institutional issue, concerning which there are also a plethora of philosophies, from Foucault to Agamben: whether University departments are full of "wankers" or not is hardly relevant here as it deflects the larger problem onto some convenient "wanker" scapegoat. Is your anger directed at the wanker or at the institution? :)

I've also been surprised by the persistence of this "parallactic gap" or near-unbridgeable chasm between so-called analytical and continental philosophy, given that its largely rooted in ideological entrenchments that those who subscribe to such arbitrary distinctions are often reluctant to admit ...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"There is no denying that some tutors hide behind terminology because they cannot properly articulate the ideas, but this is not the fault of the terminology"
Of course. That whole episode was a digression from the main point really.
The reason I bring up CP being taught in film departments (or whatever) rather than philosophy departments is because I think that may be where the problem arises. Louise found that studying aesthetics with some people from an art background and some people from a philosophy background was problematic because of the pseudo-philosophy espoused by (a lot of) the people who had studied art. In general they had been able to make meaningless but clever sounding statements that didn't stand up when scrutinised (not meaningless simply because it was CP but because it didn't mean anything) because their tutors in the past had been unwilling or unable to subject it to any kind of scrutiny. They thought that they were doing philosophy but they weren't.
The effects of this are clear when you go to a gallery for some new artist and see the press-release explaining their work, nine times out of ten it is absolute nonsense. Why should they be able to get away with this? It's no wonder that people hate conceptual art when a lot of it really is chancers trying to see what they can get away with.
Who were the artists who "marked" press-releases like in an exam with condescending comments? That was a brilliant idea, but I'm straying off the subject.
 

D7_bohs

Well-known member
Weirdly had a conversation about this yesterday with someone who teaches in an art college and is doing a philosophy PhD; we both agreed that artists generally make an appalling mess of philosophy simply to spice up their catalogues, and further, that art educators are culpable, since they teach a hodge- podge of 'theory' because its easier to teach than either art history or aesthetics; and artists buy it because an art ignorant public finds it easier to read and parrot a pastiche of continental philosophy, than to look at a piece of art properly.
 
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