Continental Vs Analytical

bambaluci

hey there, im new to the boards, though id introduce myself by suggesting a discussion on the great divide in contempory philosophy, Continental Vs Analytical.

what do people feel is the major differences, why have these difference come into being, can they be overcome to creat a more harmonious discipline in other words can philosophy be sorted out and where to which side of the divide do you lean?

any thoughts??

DadaKopf

I dunno, can you tell us a little more or provide links?

davej

Yeah, tell us more.

Otherwise it just feels like you have an essay assignment and you want us to do your homework for you

davej

bambaluci

Okay-dokay,
Analytic philosophy is a cluster of philosophical traditions holding that argumentation and clarity are vital to productive philosophical inquiry. The central methodology is the analysis of concepts or language. The main philosophers would be Bertrand Russell, GE Moore, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The analytic tradition is the type of philosophy professionally practiced in the United States and Great Britain in the 20th century. It is more concerned with systematic understanding of the world, logical consistency and scientific investigation, and the analysis of language to uncover the problems of the system of understanding. analytic philosophy is analysing our world and systems of understanding it. Basically Analytic is the boring, knit picking go, nowhere type of philosophy.

Continental philosophy is a group of 20th-century European philosophical movements that view themselves as continuing the legacy of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger and mostly the movements phenomenology[investigating the give experience], existentialism[ investigating the give existence], hermeneutics [investigating the nature of interpretation], structuralism [ investigating the structures of our knowledge], and deconstructionism,[ destructuring our knowledge to see what it really is ] .But continental philosophy is mainly defined as contrasted with analytic philosophy.It is more conserned with the question of Meaning in all its forms, with political, social- interpersonal life and the experience of life as lived. So the human sciences and understanding human condition and its meaning centre the continental tradition. Id say it is more deconstructive. Tearing the systems down and trying to find its underlying structures and fundamentals of experience and existence. in short Continental is the pretentious, waffling gibberish type of philosophy.

these Only brief descriptions, much more multilayered and complex than that!

The divide originates in from the two different stands of thought that built upon Kants paradigmic contribution to philosophy. in a way I think Kants fundamental insight, his Copernican revolution by making ourselves the ground and source of our own knowledge gave European philosophy the security in ourselves to spring forth and encounter the world and ourselves with greater certainty and build the continental tradition, while the analytic philosophers are less accepting of this grounding in ourselves and our experience of the world and they continue to struggle with “real” philosophy and the questions Kant was trying to overcome.but that is just my idea why they split is an open question

But philosophy is both analysis and synthesis, deconstruction and reconstruction, so I would say that both contain valuable insights and perspectives. A frienc=dly co-operation and mutual understanding is needed not distrustr and confusion. This said while I love a good polemic and think some of continental stuff is great [Hegelis da man], at the moment I feel cl;oser to the analytic tradition, its concrete, you know what you are doing. Much less fashionable, but all the cooler for it!

Links, im not much good on the interweb, but wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

transperson

i think that the divison will take its course in the workings out of Wittgensteins legacy in the form of Analytic tradition and Heideggers in the Continental tradition. Husserl who gave started phenomonology which gave the continental tradition it impetus was a bridge between the two traditions if you could even divide them at that stage [the late 19th century], the strructuralist strand of continental is gradually dispersing and the critical theory strand that emerged from marx and thus Hegel can be reincorporated into a broader tradition in an engagment with the analytical tradition.
i would be confident in a more unified philosophy emerging in the next few decades.

Ghost Rider

By "more unified" can I take it you mean that the traditional gap between analytic and continental traditions will narrow? I don't think there's any danger of philosophy becoming unified in the sense in which, say, physicists use that term.

Even still, I think the persistence of this supposed gap has been somewhat over-stated. Since the 1970s a lot of bridges have been made between analytic and continental traditions. For example, the likes of Jacques Derrida (once with both feet firmly placed on "the continent") and Jean-Francois Lyotard did quite a bit of work on the pragmatics of language games, previously the territory of post-Wittgensteinian thinkers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle.

More generally, there is a current of philosophical pragmatism in which a lot of analytic and continental thinking finds much common ground. (Richard Rorty is quite good on this subject, whatever you might think of his work generally.) While it's true that much of this stuff takes its cue from the Wittgenstein of "Philosophical Investigations" rather than the much more analytic "Tractatus", it does still represent a kind of bridge. In the broadest possible sense, the whole idea that language itself is a valid object of philosophical reflection seems to me to be a huge area of convergence between continental and analytic traditions.

It would be easy yet unwise to oversimplify this convergence on philosophical pragmatism but I happen to think it is responsible for one of the more interesting philosophical developments in the late 20th century - more of a mood than a coherent set of beliefs or positions. I'm referring to a mood of modesty in relation to what can reasonably be expected from philosophy or philosophers. This is in stark contrast to much of what came before - not just Plato's idea of the philosopher king but the massively ambitious philosophical systems of the 18th & 19th centuries. I really think this mood of modesty is a healthy development. (And no, I'm not religious.)

transperson wrote:

i think that the divison will take its course in the workings out of Wittgensteins legacy in the form of Analytic tradition and Heideggers in the Continental tradition. Husserl who gave started phenomonology which gave the continental tradition it impetus was a bridge between the two traditions if you could even divide them at that stage [the late 19th century], the strructuralist strand of continental is gradually dispersing and the critical theory strand that emerged from marx and thus Hegel can be reincorporated into a broader tradition in an engagment with the analytical tradition.
i would be confident in a more unified philosophy emerging in the next few decades.

bambaluci

QUOTE]Even still, I think the persistence of this supposed gap has been somewhat over-stated.[/QUOTE]


yes i would agree, the gap can be exaggerated but there is still quite a divide in universities across Europe and America, many Analytic Philosophy departments will exclude continental leaning academics form employment and vice-versa. i think the politics can be as important as the subject matter indetermining how things evolve.

in any case is continental Philosophy reaching a dead end with the Lyotards "desert of the real", Deleuses "horror of discourses" and other such expression of the Post-modern condition.

it seems to my [in this matter largely uneducated] mind that the PostModern philosophers themselves are saying that they are lost in their own discourse