Continental Philosophy: What is it, and why is it a thing?
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- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- Dr. Ellie Anderson (co-host, Overthink podcast) explains the historical origins of the continental/analytic divide in philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, and why we need to mobilize the term "continental philosophy" in order to overcome the sway Analytic philosophy has over contemporary anglo-American universities--and ultimately, overcome the divid altogether.
For more on this, see Dr. Anderson's appearance on the Unmute podcast (episode 54), "The Divide in Philosophy," as well as a forthcoming publication :)
Edited by Jeffrey Murray
Selection of works discussed in the video:
Gary Gutting, "Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide" archive.nytimes.com/opinionat...
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
John McCumber, Time in the Ditch
Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Years ago I found myself saying to a colleague, "If you think you have no ideology, that just means that you have the dominant one."
I feel like you could arrive at this conclusion from an analytic perspective as well. Everyone always needs to start with some basic, unprovable, illogical assumptions about their ideals. Logic makes sure that your beliefs are consistent, but it can't tell you how to create those beliefs in the first place. Those basic axioms are ideology.
It's literally impossible to get away from ideology because sooner or later, you have to hit the end of a chain of justifications. It can't extend infinitely far.
@@sparshjohri1109 I'm not quite an expert on philosophy, but what your saying is kinda like logic is the instrument and the song is the ideology.
If you have no ideology, then you have no ideology lol
@@johnmarks9994 That's literally impossible. Here, I'll demonstrate with a single case.
"Murder is wrong"
"Murder is not wrong"
"Murder is not significant enough for me to consider whether it is right or wrong"
None of these three positions can be defended through facts or evidence, but a person just by sheer logical necessity needs to pick one of these three positions (since there is no other option). If you have any sort of opinion on murder, you have an ideological leaning.
You can debate the nature of the ideology that one should follow (and to what degree one should get other people to follow one's ideology), but it is an inherent contradiction to say that a person has no ideology. Any rational being capable of cognition will necessarily have one.
Yes yes, believe this is the Geist of the NPC memes
This was great! I really enjoyed this, especially the parts where some of your frustrations shone through. You mentioned something about us needing to be strategic in mobilizing the term. I'd like to hear more about that.
The suggestion made at the start of this vid, that analytic philosophy, with its focus on conceptual analysis, the truth of propositions/statements, refinement of formal logics, et al., was a retreat from "the dangers" of political movements during the McCarthy era, is an interesting one. I'm not sure it holds up under scrutiny, though. Many of the leading lights in the analytic approach were themselves activists-- often socialists-- from the continent who ended up here (or in England) often for political and historical reasons during the wars. Russell, who never stopped writing on the need for major political reforms, was too radical for CUNY where he lost his job on political grounds. Wittgenstein, a cultural and political malcontent, visited the Soviet Union to become a "true worker," but they wanted to use his intellectual celebrity promotionally, which turned him off.
In terms of the positivist from the Vienna Circle, Carnap, was a committed socialist and pacifist who came to the US in the 30s to escape Nazism. Moritz Schlick stayed in Vienna and was shot (possibly for political reasons) in the mid 30s, also a pacifist and fervent anti-nationalist. He wrote, for example:
"When the simple fact of living on the same territory is made the principle of unity, it is likely that this causes all the evils that lead to conflicts that beset the world, fragmented into many states....[and] the highest aim of politics is Peace....What are the principles that should govern the political union of individuals so that the purpose of the state, peace on earth, may be achieved?...Race, religion, political conviction, interest, and occupation, none of these is right for being the foundation of great peace, but the only reliable basis is the character of the individuals, their ethical qualities (not "convictions)." (see www.panarchy.org/schlick/state.html )
His assassin defended himself on ideological grounds, believing as he did in a metaphysically justified ethnostate as so many at the time did in Germany and Austria. Others in the Vienna Circle had different views, but few if any were apolitical, nor did they set out to evade the political in their thought. Indeed, the positivists' rejection of metaphysics was itself still threatening on political and cultural grounds by the masses. It seemed to undercut religious justifications for cultural and political projects, and made ethical hierarchies based on racial "science" very hard to defend given the severe epistemological standards LPs were applying to far more established theories such as those in physics at the time. Though many had strong ethical and political views, they did not think "technical philosophy" (based on conceptual analysis, epistemology and the use of formal logics) could shed much light on these matters. (Of course, with the demise of Verificationism and similarly prohibitive methodological principles, we've seen, as you say, a much more varied body of work under the aegis of "Analytic Philosophy" including aesthetics, ethics, political philosophy, etc. )
If Schlick was a humanistic critic of the modern nation-state, Otto Neurath was a dedicated communist, and did work in political economy, some of which advocated economic planning done not with money, but calculations of goods and services *without* the use of money. He debated such ideas with Karl Kautsky and others. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Neurath#Economics He also explicitly linked the rise of positivism (as Comte had done) with the demise of speculative metaphysics so central to just about all logical positivism/empiricism.
AJ Ayer was also involved in politics, supporting early Labour and then the Social Democratic Party, chairing the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Sports, serving as president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society when homosexuality was still a crime and a taboo. He was an anti-war activist, as well.
So, I think that because Anglo-American philosophy of the analytic bent is so typically taught without regard to autobiographical and socio-political context, focusing only on logics, propositional knowledge/espistemology, philosophy of science, and the like, we tend to know little of the rather colorful and diverse characters in these movements and the various linkages they saw between their philosophical world-views and particular doctrines for which they are known. Many were (in different ways) committed leftists; none that I can think of were fascists; many were, of necessity, politically aware of their own vulnerability as Jews in interwar Germany and Austria; several championed rights for women, homosexuals, pacifists/conscientious objectors et al. *Some* of their American students and imitators were far more conventional, and perhaps conservative. In that connection Quine comes to mind. But Russell, Wittgenstein, and the LPs were certainly not running away from politics and cultural concerns. They were not timid about expressing their views on these things, "Red Scare" or not.
i am so pumped for this video. i love all of the continental philosophy videos on this channel
This is the best modern day practice of philosophy video I've seen, so well done! 👌👍
Thank you for explaining all this. It is such a privilege to hear you explain these things. I do think truth is a correspondence and sometimes the thing is mysterious and beautiful.
As a layperson living in Berlin, this surprised me because I had a naive notion that analytical philosophy had been superseded. Had no idea that it is so well entrenched over there in the US. Even hearing "Continental Philosophy" described as a "sub-discipline" seems strange, given that Analytical is a smaller slice of the length and breadth of philosophical thought! Concerning the NYT, I subscribe because it only costs 4 euros, but the cultural pages are mostly just about entertainment nowadays. Philosophy is too highbrow. Speaking of dumbing down, I read recently that currently only 4% of American degrees are in the humanities. And, in the UK, funding for the arts has been slashed by 50%, while universities are being forced to justify courses that aren't a form of job-training. Germany and France, countries where post-secondary education is still free, have seen no such consolidation. Thus, it could be argued that there is an Anglo-American, continental divide in more ways than one -- though, what underlies the contrast is a difference of...philosophy.
thank you for these really interesting thoughts!
In Germany, you have Markus Gabriel, who - for a philospher - is extremely popular, and who also tries to bridge the gap(s) between Analytic and Continental Philosophy.
Also concerning the NYT, the weekly book review section covers philosophy less over the years.
I love watching these. This seemed very much from the heart; Thankyou.
I got more than what I was expecting from this video. This is so life-giving.
another fantastic video, thank you. my ba was in an interdisciplinary faculty of religious studies, that followed a U of Chicago phenomenological approach in the field of religionswissenschaft (flowing from Eliade, Boas, etc.). even with that immersion i'm learning new things in the first few minutes of this video. very nice to see scholarship shifting, deepening, and refining!
Great vid. Please make that vid about your ideas on how to overcome the divide! Enjoyed your "insider baseball" talk about academic philosophy and would like to see more
Thank you, so much! I really hope that you feel that for people like me -- completely uneducated in the field(s) of philosophy -- what a difference these pieces make. I may not have understood whole swaths of what you were discussing. But I came out, in the end, where I could AT LEAST describe to someone some of the fundamental differences between Continental and Analytic Philosophies are, and why they may be that way.
Again, thank you. :)
This is really fascinating, thank you for the breakdown
I appreciate the clarity of your summary! ;)
I posted an off-the-cuff comment about driving myself nuts looking at your bookshelf and trying to identify the Routledge logo … and I’ve just realized-as I listen to your presentation for the THIRD time-that I was remiss in not also commenting on *how much I learned from this presentation!! and how utterly I’ve enjoyed it!!* I studied heaps of continental philosophy in college, and although my goal was to study the social sciences (which is where I also kinda wound up working … for a time … albeit not in a prestigious think tank, or foundation, or government office, but in social science’s slutty little popper-huffing brother: market research) my fondest academic memories are all either of reading history or of reading philosophy, or else of writing papers on either philosophy or political science. So I’m really glad you’ve reawakened these long-dormant feelings of being both curious about the world and actively engaged with it. I know from my friends in academia that it’s gotten super corporate, and kinda intellectually unrewarding (unless you try _really really hard_ to fight the ennui), but gadzooks, does your channel ever make me want to figure out the finances and give grad school a try. Anywho. Thanks so much for uploading these talks!
In short: British people wanted to show how much they where not like (mainly )French and German people (except Wittgenstein, Frege and their followers, they can stay)
Its really odd how continental phil is significantly more popular than analytic phil, angsty teenagers all over the world read Kierkegaard and you can find copies of Gender Trouble in the dorms of queer people in just about every large city. Good luck finding many people reading Quine or Kripke for their own pleasure in the same way.
Anyways I hope I live to see the divide being overcome, would love to see genuine comparative studies between Carnap and Deleuze for example. With both of them insisting that having a kind of creation / creativity is the most important part of philosophy (for Carnap conceptual engineering and for Deleuze concept creation) also with both of them at times doing that through math in some very interesting ways.
I dont think its odd that continental works are more popular. An analytic work most likely focuses on being rigorous which can lead to exhaustive writing. If you eventually want to claim D, you need to go through A to B to C to get there. Something like that. If a work is less focused on being rigorous, it'll be briefer in simply stating D. Just looking at this small example, it probably takes less focus and energy to read the latter, so you might feel like you are getting more conclusions from the latter more quickly
I've also found that while ambiguity is always a problem, a lot of attention and care seems to be put out in analytic works on terms being introduced, explained, and then used, whereas other works are more open to how they go about bringing up terms or arguments, or even leaving the terms or arguments ambiguous. I think this allows for more "flowery" language as well as again, being brief, since you are not as bogged down as the former in making sure all your terms are not overlapping if you dont want them to
I think what’s being omitted from this analysis is the traumatizing effect W.W.I and W.W.II had on … well, the whole world. We’ve sadly grown desensitized to it (I’m old enough to have watched it happen, governments deploying propaganda which re-normalized and even valorized warfare as something not horrific but instead something between humdrum, necessary, and noble), but the photos from W.W.I of dead teen soldiers’ desiccated corpses, all tangled up in barbed wire, having choked on mustard gas, affected people, and the palpable magnitude of the slaughter was inescapable. Then heap onto that the exponentially worse slaughter of W.W.II, whole cities leveled, millions of men and boys vanished from families, the horrors of the Nazi death camps photographed, the whole civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki each slaughtered entirely with a single bomb, the real and constant prospect of instant global annihilation… So British philosophers thought “Cripes, if all of art and science and philosophy couldn’t avoid this, and could even be seen to have contributed to this, then maybe we need to ‘fix’ philosophy,” and they felt examining the ambiguities of language in a context of formal logic might achieve that. So I’d opine that everything in this video holds true, but I would add the above context to how Russell et al. kinda veered their work in a direction we now call analytic philosophy.
Also, here’s a connection: there’s a strong parallel between universities leaning into “analytic philosophy” and away from “continental philosophy” (as is described in the video) and what occurred at the U.S. State Dept. and at U.S. embassies around the world from around the 1980s through today, which is that posts which had traditionally been filled by humanities graduates-who were versed in the languages and ways of other countries-were either filled instead by what are derisively called “quants” (students with a very narrow orthodox economics background) or else were eliminated altogether. In other words, foreign policy which had once been driven by mutual understanding and by humane (or liberal humanist) goals has been replaced by an approach which only measures production figures in the most blinkered and inhuman way possible. And there is still a direct Ivy-League-to-State-Department pipeline, but the model has been altered to serve only the ends of corporate capital divorced from ordinary human aspirations.
Continental philosophy is more sexy I think. It makes sense for young socially conscious people to gravitate towards existentialism or capital T Theory. Analytic philosophy is nerdy. Probably helps that continental philosophy has better representation in pop culture (movies, books, etc). I think the average person’s idea of philosophy is probably closer to the Continental side even in places like the U.S. where institutionally the Analytic traditions are dominant.
Dr. Anderson has a great reservoir of words and presents them like a conductor knowing every note of the symphony. I, the elder statesman here ( retired art teacher nearing seventy), always looked at philosophy as being a war with words finding it no coincidence the word is contained in the word sword. She energetcally uses words as her sword and can clash swords with anybody to present her point. What is admirable about it is that it is learned rather than intuitive. Indeed, a paradigmn for students to follow.
On a philosophical note, I may be overthinking here; but I observed that Dr. Anderson,I is in keeping with her area of specialty, being that of Derrida. Meaning the presentation follows the Derrida model ( not concept), where a binary is presented where the lesser is favoured over, the more popular reigning hierarchy. This is through the deconstructive process.
Would definitely appreciate more specific videos on - Methods in Continental Philosophy.
P.S: Really learnt a lot from this video. Thanks for your work.
This was absolutely fantastic! Thank you 👏🏿
Thanks for this video - I found really helpful. I'm just just a philosophy hobbyist (not the most satisfactory way of describing what I mean, but can't think of anything better - I love reading philosophy but don't have the inclination or time to formally study it), and I find it really helpful to have a clearly described non-combative comparison between "continental" and analytic philosophy. I find Wittgenstein insightful and meaningful, but with a huge emphasis/leaning on being definitive, solved, and black and white. The strict requirement of "making sense" can become so limiting if you are unwilling to explore shades in between for insisting on certainty. If I leaned anywhere, in terms of a preferred read, it would be on the continental side. Some of the sections of Being and Time really chime with me in terms of my experience of living (being!) in the world, and I would presume that this would be one of the exemplar pieces of "gibberish" from the viewpoint of an analytical philosopher! But love to explore philosophy as a whole - and this channel is a good learning tool for me!
Thank you Dr. Anderson. I am a molecular biologist and my limited training In philosophy consists of the likes of Bertrand Russell and Noem Chomsky.
I look forward to diving into the books that you’ve recommended. I just got Beyond Good and Evil from the library.
You rock 😊
a) This is so good--thank you for doing public philosophy like this
b) I kept getting distracted looking at what's on your bookshelf! Solid selections
c) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about the colonization (for lack of a better word) of some continental figures by analytic philosophers. E.g. I know there's now a mini-industry of analytical philosophers studying Nietzsche
It’s very difficult to read Continental Philosophy when you’ve already trained in Anglo/American analytical methodology. I really struggled. I wanted to come to it in a totally open minded and inquisitive manner, but it was very hard not to ‘translate’ it and then dismiss many of the assertions. I made headway eventually but it wasn’t easy. I wish I’d studied both at the same time and learnt to understand the concepts and methods in comparison and a complementary way. Once you learn one method it’s hard to lay it aside.
It is equally hard to read analytic philosophy, IMHO. I occasionally delve into metaethics and I cannot unpack the jargon without huge amounts of background research and lots of caffeine and acetaminophen. That's not to say it isn't worth doing: just that the difficulty is real.
I really struggled with analytic philosophy. But what had me give up was my impression that they reinvented metaphysics. 😚
I might suggest beginning with Kant's Critique of Judgment. That is sort of the origin of the divide, in that it matters a lot to Continental philosophy but not so much in Analytic philosophy. While it is not easy reading, it is certainly more clear than post-war French Philosophy. I think most German philosophy is reasonably coherent. After Kant, Hegel would be the next stop. In the case of a lot of French philosophy after WWII, I find it to be a bit too avant-garde, and am not certain if what they are saying is even coherent.
@@TheLabecki Poststructuralism want to show that meta physics is not coherent. In some way it can be compared to Gödel.
Analytical philosophy wants to found a new meta physics based on logic. Poststructuralism is undermining logic in the process of showing the history of language and the language of history.
Not that logic is not useful but a fundamental truth build on logic is a fundamentalism.
Who benefits?
Thank you for another brilliant and lucid lecture. What you say about analytic philosophy reinventing the wheel is so true.
As a fellow academic philosopher I'd like to commend Dr. Ellie for her Overthink podcasts. She's providing high quality content and displays a thorough command of the topics she presents in each video. Her explanations are clear and to the point, considering the complicated subject matter. I'm sure a lot of hard work goes into making each one of these videos. If philosophy is to survive in the XXIth century, it'll have to be easily available on social media platforms. Having said that, I'd like to just add a few points to what she says here about divides in philosophy. In the history of the subject, there were many such divides. The most important was that between esoteric (for initiates) and exoteric (public) philosophy. For example, Rudolf Steiner, Max Heindel and Many Palmer Hall were significant XXth century thinkers in the esoteric tradition. Other divides were created between philosophy/theology, ancient/modern, natural philosophy/science, academic/non-academic, philosophy/scientific psychology (cf. Piaget's important book on _Insights and illusions of philosophy_). The continental/analytic divide emerges from a background of robust national philosophical traditions in France, England, Scotland, Germany, as an outgrowth of Protestant religious freedom. In Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, Poland, etc. philosophy, particularly of the Enlightenment type, which had a popular genre, remained a rather risky activity. Latin remained a common language till the late XIXth century, but was gradually overtaken by French, English, and even German. All of this affected communication. It's fair to assume that Kant remained unintelligible to most people even after having been translated. This linguistic divide was compounded by national prejudices, conflicts, hatreds, wars, not to forget attempted cultural (mis)appropriations. The history of philosophy isn't such a pretty harmonious story and who knows if it'll have a happy ending at all. One possible definition of philosophy is that it's a risky attempt by individuals or small groups of people to reflect about their own condition and their relation to humanity as a whole. That's what gives it a universal flavor that transcends other genres. But the analytic/continental divide arose within academic philosophy, which is itself product of the exoteric/esoteric, the philosophy/theology/psychology divides, and is moreover t(a)inted by Anglophone perceptions and anxieties regarding philosophy of a general, speculative, foreign origin. Last but not least, it's important to note that, during my undergrad years in the late 1980's, Rorty, Habermas, Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Searle, and several other philosophers did what they could to build a bridge between these two camps. From what I can gather watching Ellie's video, their efforts do not seem to have succeeded in changing the landscape of academic philosophy in the US. Tristan Torriani
Thank you for the expos! This is a difficult topic
thank you for this video honestly. i’m a South African philosophy student and i’ve barely had the words to articulate how much of this divide is present within our philosophy department in my varsity. i’ve only been studying for 2 years and i can already tell just how deeply embedded this appeal to analytic philosophy is within the whole of philosophy as a field of knowledge.
for most of my course there has been this rigorous methodology of analysing logical propositions and attempting to translate what continental philosophers have argued in their ideologies. i’ve often asked questions relating to the context behind the philosophers we’re studying (who have mostly been white males) and been told that it’s not entirely relevant and would make philosophy political. i honestly think that helps us more than we realise. but then again, i’m studying anthropology so i guess that’s what gives me space as a continental philosopher to really understand my personal philosophy.
overall i really appreciate this breakdown. i understand that i’m not alone in what i see and that there’s so much more work to do in how we address bureaucratisation and the dismissal of cultural dominance within the field of philosophy. your work is brilliant and important!
I feel like I"m literally getting free Philosophy lectures from your class. I love it so much :)
Thanks. This helped. I learned philosophy reading analytic guys like Russell and Plantinga and others, yet at times I've really enjoyed, if not fully understood, Heidegger. I never could "mesh" the two streams. I do like reading Husserl, so this sort of helps me keep an open mind. Just discovered your channel.
loved this video!
18:56 - "Continental methods by contrast recognize that intuitions say more about the accepted parameters of thought whitin a given context than they do about truth". This is why I love studying "continental philosophy" although my field is within the "analytical" umbrella.
❤
Excellent vidéo thank you!
I graduated from Emory’s undergraduate program in 2019 & I found what you said about continental philosophy being an area of thought which is forced to be translated particularly resonant. I majored in Political Science & Spanish and found that my philosophy classes in political science were really analytical (though I didn’t know what that meant) & that my during my classes in Spanish we would discuss the same philosophers but in ways I had never before encountered. For instance, I had never heard the term hegemony used in my political science classes, but in my Spanish classes I found the language (through Gramsci) to critique political systems in ways that were more powerful than the “empirical methods” deployed by the political science department. In turn, I ended up finding the Spanish classes more rewarding as every piece felt deeply connected- maybe this is because I was encouraged to read much more. As I was graduating, my roomate (who majored in philosophy) asked who Derrida was & I was really confused because he had studied Hegel & Foucault & Rawls but had spent very little time with post-structuralist philosophers.
Why were you reading Gramsci in a Spanish language class? Other than for the purposes of the “long march through the institutions” of course
I thought he was Italian ...
This was great!
Love this video! ❤
The main difference I’ve understood to be between the two “schools”, is that of logical notation. I’m in that camp, even when presenting argumentation to those outside the philosophical spectrum, for logic sake, and elegance. But I’ve always appreciated a heavy dose of Heidegger, personally his Being and Time & Introduction into Metaphysics stay with me.
Thank you, Dr. Anderson, I really enjoyed your video, particularly the section on Alcoff but I have some minor difficulties with some parts of the video.
2:44 I think it is difficult to say that the work of people like Carnap or Popper was apolitical, when it was very politically motivated. 8:10 Similarly, here the difficulty with regard to focusing on literature and art on both sides, so it would be odd to say people like Habermas or Levinas focus on art. But also analytic philosophers did focus on literature and art, for example people like Wittgenstein, or Nelson Goodman. Strauss would probably do what you describe with regard to Plato here. 19:00 Similar here with regards to intuitions or common sense, we see people like MacIntyre challenging them to be the result of socio-historical processes that need to be challenged. Which also again runs into the issue from around 30:00 with regard to the history of philosophy. So again people like MacIntyre, or Bernard Williams, or Richard Rorty, or Robert Brandom, or Barry Stroud who said that "philosophy is inseparable from the history of philosophy."
I was surprised by this American perspective on continental philosophy. I always thought of continental philosophy as broad, open, and general, with analytic philosophy as a narrow and specialised school.
maybe that was true at the start of the 20th century, but today analytic philosophy encompasses probably every part of philosophy. Metaphysics, ethics, metaethics, epistemology, philosophy of religion/science/math/language etc
Thank you for addressing this directly, because, given the precarious state of academia most especially since 2007 (when I started in a MA program *sigh*), it always seemed that my peers and I studying continental philosophy were doing so somewhat esoterically through language departments that studied "literature" and "film" and practiced "criticism." I started in a religion department, with some very radical thinking ordained ministers, and then went onwards to "English Lit" where my peers and I took a surprising amount of courses with "French" and "Film" professors who seemed to include "modernism" in the name of a lot of their courses, with "texts" that included lots of French, German and Austrian sociologists, semioticians, psychoanaly... I am sure you get the picture, but it was a constructive route from my perspective that put an enormous emphasis on grafting (as you term it) and exposed the nom du pere you allude to... while very much reflecting it. However, we never addressed your topic directly, because, in a way, that would have reified that we were there, what we were doing (which would have surprised some of our peers), and that we didn't have an "official" department.
I can only speak from my own experience, but the idea that the divide begins between empiricism and rationalism seems problematic, if only by the virtue that it is difficult to imagine (outside of monads and rhizomes) how one travels from the poetics of tragedy, to perspectivalism, to difference and becoming without empiricism.
Our lack of delineation within the academic structure prioritized the theory we were studying to ally with the arts, as continental philosophy and the related humanities and soft sciences are wont/forced to do to remain engaged and at play with/in the human project. This tended to get occasionally wild (and always interesting) when you have to apply aspects of this theory to things such as 18th century English literature (even if it is to undermine Ian Watt's attempt to colonize the novel as a form of original English art to attempt to shore up the fading practical hegemony of the British Empire through cultural hegemony).
Anyway, the program director at the time used to joke (rather darkly and multifariously) that our department was The Island of Misfit Toys, and we took in all the disciplines (and students) of the Humanities that had been lost or set adrift and washed up on our shore. While this professor was a solid teacher and had enough experiential reasons to be a bit twisted, most of us saw our project as a more optimistic movement toward a potential for liberation, dwarves on giants' shoulders though we were and are.
The only ways we did directly address the divide was by intuitively recognizing that any-one/thing beyond Wittgenstein was outside the boundary of our continent... and, with a bad joke: How does a positivist philosopher answer a question? He answers the question with the answer. How does a continental philosopher answer a question? S/he deconstructs the question and answers with who asked it.
Love ur content
This was really helpful, and clarified many confusions for me, coming from a person who was educated in a very analytic department but whose tendencies are very continental. I particularly resonated with what you said about how modern analytic departments are trying to translate continental philosophy into analytic terms. This is so annoying. They boring-ify the language and traduce the concepts to fit scientistic propositions and lose the point in the process.
I think of 'continental philosophy' as a term for a methodology or approach which just happens to be more prevalent in Europe. It is, as you say, more nearly related to literature - mostly fiction - and deals with larger questions and issues. Analytic philosophy seems to be in the Socratic tradition according to which philosophy which yields knowledge, or at least useful beliefs, is considered to be most exceedingly difficult, so much so that we must address very small problems individually in the hope we can fit them together for bigger beliefs. Probably this is why a lot of continental philosophy, which is more wide-open and unrestricted, seems obscurantist or obtuse, whereas with analytic philosophy, it is much more often the case that when a writer presents his idea, you can see a way to evaluate or attack it. Analytic philosophy, in my experience, is characterized by conversations which often involve appeal to sets and to hypothetical (often outlandish) states of affairs which are then differentiated on some narrow and understandable property. Wittgenstein's brilliant thought seems pretty much in the middle without concern for which "school" it falls into. I value both schools and approaches, but find a lot of continental thought to be very difficult to understand; all philosophy uses special terms-of-art, but those in continental philosophy sometimes seem to require you to understand everything before you can understand anything.
I understand that you are describing the situation in us that I'm not familiar with. In my experience as an undergraduate I find it a lot of times helpful to put up some form of restrictions on methodology of the teaching program. For example, our course on Hegel was very helpful because the teacher was good at "translation" as you say. With the vagueness of Hegel's prose i wouldn't be able to get into the actual content.
great lecture 😇
I’m merely an autodidact with little formal training beyond a 101 undergrad course I took years ago, but it seems to me that in attempting to trim the fat from philosophical inquiry, the analytic tradition drained much of the flavor from it as well.
Of course there’s arrogance and a certain sense of quixotic folly in the approach of many continental greats, especially the ones like Kant and Hegel, who made plays at grand unified theories which appear sound until you poke at the mystical bits. I also think there’s a fine line between attacking sacred cows like “clarity” and “common sense” and communicating your ideas unintelligibly - de Beauvoir seems to me a much stronger communicator of her ideas than Heidegger is of his, at least in English translation. But the recognition of irreducible ambiguity which permeates much of the continental work I’ve read (which isn’t a ton, and mainly consists of existentialists) feels truer and more attractive to me in its lack of textual resolution than the scrupulously limited scope of the analytic work (of which I’ve read even less) you describe here. I’d rather a philosopher risk sounding silly and give me room to dream than read a cautious accounting of verifiable propositions at all times.
Thanks for the video - it gave me a lot to think about!
At Johns Hopkins, where I went to grad school, people interested in Continental Philosophy tended to concentrate in departments other than Philosophy, such as English, Political Science, and the now extinct Humanities Center. A number of my colleagues in English where there not to talk about English-language literature at all, but to pursue research projects on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School. My impression is that there was very little conversation between this group of grads and the students at the actual Philosophy department. I attended a few talks in Philosophy because I was doing research on Hume, but that was exceptional. I assume that's a pattern that repeats itself at other universities as well.
This is totally right. We have some JHU friends here from some of those departments! :)
I would love to see a dialogue between you and someone like Ben Burgis, who focuses on analytic philosophy (but likes continental philosophers like Zizek) and is overall pretty interesting
Thank you! I'm curious if you have any thoughts about the connection between analytic's insistence on the "tip of the iceberg" common sense or probing of intuition and the reliance on "dogma of clarity" or the correspondence of Truth? There's something about these two relations but I don't know how to articulate it?
Lol I was just wondering today what made continental and analytic philosophy different. Perfect timing!
Hi Ellie, I would be interested in knowing some of your thoughts on the American pragmatist/experimentalist traditions (both classical, Peirce, James, Dewey, and more contemporary, Rorty, Brandom, etc.) in how they relate to the analytic vs continental divide. James' influence on philosophy across the spectrum (and beyond) is well known, and in his day Dewey was recognized as the foremost American philosopher, hence they are eminently representative of the US rather than "the continent", yet none of these thinkers fit neatly into either side of this divide. I might even go so far as to say that Kuhn has been labelled a pragmatist by some, though it seems to me the primary basis for this is also simply that he also doesn't fit neatly into either the analytic or continental categories.
In the meantime, keep up the great work! :)
Thank you Dr. Anderson for yet another interesting entry. I recently read Laurent Binet’s “La Septième Fonction du langage”, which is a murder-mystery novel around the death of Roland Barthes and has as characters the whole French intellectual elite of the late seventies/early eighties (Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.). The conflict of continental vs. analytical philosophy plays a major role as shown by a hilarious fictionalize fight to death between Searle and Derrida. The book is a sarcastic and absurdist take on the philosophy of language and the individuals behind it. I highly recommend it!
Did you read it in French/do you know if it's any good in English?
@@willowjavery4652 I read it in English! (my french is not quite there yet 😅). I had a Penguin Books edition and it was quite clear.
Could you give an introduction to Phenomenology and what are some of its practical influences on our society or way of thinking? Where do you see these influences making some life style changes? You talked about Heidegger’s anxiety and nothingness as a means for creative longing- that was helpful.
Thanks!
The claim about Husserl feels very validating. I have always liked his ideas summerized, but found his writing impenenrable
Would you please make a video on Affect theory in philosophy? Great appreciation!
Perfect!
Great video. I've been having some trouble finding the quote you reference from Nietzsche @25:05. Are you using a specific translation of the text?
I'm writing a paper for an education journal and thought this quote would be relevant to what I'm talking about. I'd like to read the entire section though, could you point me to the page number if that's not too much work?
gosh yeah me too ! have you been able to find it?
well best I've found is 296 of IX
Continental Philosophy, if not strong withing the philosophical departments, plays a great role, I think, in several other departments - such as literature and theology. And, not to mention anyone, but some will claim that CP is strong within the academic culture of political correctness - you could be said to have touched this point when you mentioned that CP is (has become?) pretty acceptable within academic feminist studies.
Anyway. When you said (roughly) that CP has a tendency to be literature rather than philosophy, I was reminded about something I read in a book on phenomenological method: There it was stated that very few nowadays present phenomenological analysises of anything - for the most part, work on phenomenology nowadays tends to be literary analysises of classical phenomenological texts. (How ironic, then, that one of the critiques against Husserl is that he put too much weight on method [and too little weight on thinking].) Perhaps more focus on method and experimentation could make CP more attractive?
May be the fate of CP is comparable to the fate of Freud: Freud has ended up as being viewed as unscientific - and this despite that he himself considered himself scienfitic and was critical about unscientific perspectives. (Fresh video on the topic: ua-cam.com/video/J_aJb8TTf5E/v-deo.html ) Freud's (literary) works these days sometimes seems to be treated more as works that belongs to the canon of CP (rather than as the canon of Psychology).
CP often operates on the meta level - e.g. on the level of «power». However, the (meta) critique is sometimes of such a kind that while it - given enough power and focus - can relatively easily be implemented politically, it is not necessarily as implementable in science. Take Husserl and Derrida: what can we «use» their critique of the origin of geometry for? It can easily be implemented as a (political) critique of the removal of human beings from the perspectives of science. But it cannot be used for - and is not meant as basis for - the removal of geometry. (It is tempting to add that the conlusions drawn by CP thinkers, are sometimes pretty sweeping.)
When Phenomenology became attractive in Germany - in the golden days of Husserl - it was because one felt that this was a kind of philosphy that brought us further, past the deadlock of Kant and various isms. Phenomenlogy also had uniting and bridging power. For instance, Edith Stein, after her conversion to Catholicism, once wrote she felt the world of philosophy was divided between thomistic and academic philosophy - between which there were no dialogue. And she expressed the hope that phenomenology could become that much needed brigde. Eventually she paved that way herself, with her later works, and phenomenology has ever since been a productive method within theological philosophy.
Finally, in order to make way for itself, I think CP needs to strenghten its selfdialogue about Post Modernism. After all, the luminaries of postmodernism are also continental philosophy’s most prominent philosophers.
Given that the continental philosophy is described as artistic, there is some itch that I can't exactly point my finger at, but still, I feel the itch when I hear about the job market problems in relation to the continental philosophy. It's as if, I expect continental philosophers to emerge outside of academia and job markets, just like every now and then artists emerge outside of the academia and job markets who produce far more fun and interesting arts, than those within the market which mostly try to answer the market demands
This is what I've been saying - thanks
Thank you ❤ I am quite struggling on this distinction, or I should ignore it
I have a phil PhD and was trained very much in the analytic tradition in the UK and US. I left philosophy almost 30 years ago and have had a career in law. I find myself drawn back to it by the continental tradition, and I wonder if perhaps that is because my original interest was heavily on the history of philosophy and digging into the underlying texts (my dissertation was on Descartes). That approach seems more consistent with what Prof Anderson
describes here. Inspired by this I just now purchased Deleuze and Guattari « Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » to dip my toe into the actual texts.
Its a great book! Not easy but great
I think Derrida’s Grammatologie and Being and Nothingness or something by Husserl would be a good starting point, you might also want to read Wittgenstein’s later work, not exactly continental but he touches on the same ideas as a lot of the post structuralists in language that is much more accessible to analytic philosophers.
@@Karamazov9If you start with Derrida I really recommend Limited Inc.
would love if these episodes could be available on the spotify
All of our audio podcasts are :)
This was so good, so smart, so helpful. But, because one of your central points is the unhelpful distortions that flow from naming and delimiting schools of philosophy (& thus bestowing artificial and reductive identities for each philosophical "camp"), I kind of wanted to hear more nuance viz the ranges of topics/interests (and influences) that drive continental philosophers, especially the French. I'm coming from a literature and critical theory angle, and would have liked to hear you give a nod, say, to the paradigm-shifting influence of Freud (and Lacan) (and Saussure, for good measure....semiotics, structuralism, cultural anthropology, etc...) all of whom/which have filtered implicitly into, and often helped shape, many of the the ideas of many of the C.P. names you referenced in your wonderful(!) talk. I personally find fascinating the confluence and mutual influencing of western philosophy-psychoanalysis-linguistics-literary theory-etc. Mid-century French thinkers had a field-day with that stuff! I guess in fairness that's why continental philosophy can get so "messy" and is susceptible (arguably unfairly, as YOU would say) to accusations of lacking the rigor of Anglo-American philosophy...? (sorry, this was scribbled quickly)
Critchley's book is very good, highly recommended.
Danke!
I would love to watch one of your short intro videos on Levinas.
We have one :)
in a lot of math texts, "obviously" is often used to appeal to intuition, without questioning the norm of mathematical clarity
Let me just clarify briefly using a movie as being connected to the Professor’s spoken words. The words as spoken emerge in roughly less than a second each. How does seeing the Professor connect up to that time frame? Or to the content of the words? If I am not mistaken that sort of flow of images would look drastically different from looking at the Professors face.
Weird question but do you have a list of the 60 books you read for your PhD? Just curious to see which were considered the most important in the history of Phil.
I wanted to say something concerning your criticism of the value clarity is given in contemporary analytic philosophy. When I study philosophy, I am often, although not always concerned with evaluating a set of claims in terms of their truth value (weather they are true or false). It seems to me that in order to evaluate weather or not a claim is false or not I have to first understand the meaning of what is being said. What else is clarity other than coming to an understanding of what is said or written? To me the practice of evaluating truth claims is central to philosophy and since I just don't have a very good idea of either how to evaluate the truth of something that is unclear or how to arrive at truth by other means I think that clarity is a philosophical virtue. Other ways at arriving at truth might involve aesthetics (what is pleasing, beautiful, in good taste, ext) in which case unclarity might be a good thing (here I am thinking of Kants idea of the play of aesthetic judgements). Another way might be through religious or spiritual revelation. In the case of religious-spiritual revelation, the contents of such revelation is often believed to be beyond the ability of reason to grasp and it is often considered impious and arrogant to attempt to do so. Here I am thinking of christianity and in particular Paul's claim that knowledge puffs up and the notion that there are many gifts of the spirit and apostleship is quite a rare one. I am also thinking of Augustine's claim in the confessions that the law of God is beyond our ability to judge. Near the section in the confessions where Augustine says this he undergoes quite a long discussion and analysis of the opening of genesis "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". His analysis mostly concerns what is meant by 'beginning' and 'heavens'. What is interesting is that Augustine believes the claim is true on the basis of the testimony of Mose who he believes both wrote genesis and that God revealed himself to but Augustine believes the claim is true without understanding the meaning of the claim. In other words, he believes a claim is true whose meaning is unclear to him. I think something similar can be said of aesthetic experiences. Many experience pieces of art that they love because such pieces are "true" but when asked what is meant by this it is usually something beyond words and hence unclear. One final thought. Petrarca, in his letter entitled "Petrarca on his own ignorance”, during his discussion of Aristotle’s ethics criticized Aristotle not for getting virtue and vice wrong i.e. saying something about them that isn’t true but rather for not writing about them in a way that would make the reader fall in love with virtue and hate vice. It is this Petrarcian strong emotional investment and personal commitment to subject matters that I most admire in continental philosophers. You have a video on Kirkegaard’s concept of anxiety. I would certainly put this author in this category. He is not writing about anxiety in an objective, disinterested way but rather as a christian who is working out his salvation in fear and trembling and is reflecting on this personal transformation through his writing as he is going through it. Or perhaps he is even effecting this transformation by writing about it in the way he does. This aspect of self-transformation and self-creativity perhaps puts philosophy in a register where the subject matter, because it is oneself in its becoming rather than being, that can never reach the ideal sort of clarity that Descartes, and many philosophers natural and otherwise after him, valued so much. I wonder what you would think of this if you have the time to read it and reply.
How about grafting vs starting from seed
Dr. Anderson, when is your book (publication) on this subject expected out?
Needed.
I can't believe it's come this : 10pm on a Saturday night and I'd rather listen to this woman lecture on philosophy than do anything else
Such a magnificent person
It's amazing to me that any prominent philosopher told you they got into philosophy because it required the least amount of reading of any of the humanities. It seems comprehensiveness was lacking in that person's programs, due strictly to the number of concepts from, and extended history of, the numerous philosophers throughout time (not to mention their verbosity).
Of course, this is a difficulty of the field. As we keep building upon the information of the past, and demand of ourselves a comprehensive understanding of it all, along with constructing new information which must be added to the collection of works future philosophers must assess, the mountains are growing. How can this be addressed?
- The use of technology to assist learning, organization, and concept location is helpful, but where are the limitations?
- Modernizing the cluttered and verbose outdated translations of philosophers from previous eras. On the point about idolization, my experience with philosophy in academia so far has reflected this. Many of the philosophers from previous eras are already accused of being terrible writers, yet professors insist upon (or rely upon) assigning reading that consist of translations from archaic classic languages, to outdated forms of English which maintain the verbosity and convoluted structure; this seems to be a barrier to entry for many, and does not seem like an efficient process for a constantly expanding and complexifying catalog of concepts. Many of these ideas are not difficult to understand; when simply reading the words (learning how to decode the alienating syntactic structures and semantic obscurities) is vastly more difficult than understanding the concepts, there is a problem.
- What else?
Can you cite Nietzsche's butterfly quote? I can't find it. THX!!
The distinction seems to map very much to McGilchrist's left/right hemisphere thinking, I'm wondering what you think about this. Maybe talk to him on your show?
Where would you place Wittgenstein’s later work, eg Philosophical Investigations, within the analytical and continental divide?
While some people in the Continental tradition are interested in late Wittgenstein, my understanding is PI still gets most engagement within analytic philosophy.
Dr Anderson, has it not occured to at least some of the analytic philosophers that, precisely by taking the truth to be the relationship of equality between statements and state of affairs they refer to/describe, one finds oneself in the realm of myth? Myth is a plenum, where no negativity is possible and everything is full to the brim. The freedom in it is what I call the freedom of the shopping trolley: the freedom to choose among the items in the plenum, but not to refuse the plenum.
23:38 that dig at Husserl😅
This video was a task of translating the continental tradition into, a more or less, analytical idiom and try to argue that a philosophical minority (grad programs + students) should be included into the majority of philosophical institutions (tenure track Phil. Prof.) that happen to be analytical.
A noble, yet quixotic task.
Hi, Dr. Anderson here. I mean, this is partly why I thematize the "translation" idea...I'm more optimistic, and thus don't think it's a quixotic task.
Love it. I see myself participating in the pragmatist tradition that doesn’t all too well fit in either Analytic or Continental. The tradition, even if its origins start in the US, have not found root in any department and thus most pragmatists go under water with either continental or analytic departments and only come up for air during SAAP conference.
I’m so happy to see you found a great tenure position at a great school. Love the school and use to live down the street.
From Tokyo,
H
I really like Daniel Dennet's 4-page essay called "Higher-Order Truths of Chmess". He basically criticizes when analytic or continental philosophers are playing a game with plenty of jargon that doesn't really have abiding significance. He warns students about this. Perhaps this would be called an appeal to common sense. I don't think so though. You can question common sense without engaging in what Dennett was talking about. For instance, Dennett himself questions intuitions about consciousness in his book Consciousness Explained and he argues that philosophers of phenomenology are appealing to intuition too much. I agree with many of his points in that book, but I think the book doesn't live up to its title. To be fair, one of his books is about "intuition pumps" lol. Intuitive thinking can be prone to cognitive biases. I think cognitive psychology can help there (rather than cryptic philosophy based on armchair assumptions about thought). Intuition seems essential though (again, based on actually studying how people think). Philosophy that questions any objectivity and ecen intuition seems dangerous more dangerous than philosophy that appeals to intuition. It seems like continental philosophy can easily get you to not question a philosopher because they take away your ability to question them. Is easy to become an extremist in such a case. It's all power dynamics, no objective truth and what is said might seem crazy but it really isn't if your just think the right way (the way they want you to think).
Continental Philosophy is dangerous to the powerful because it is critical of them. Due to political and economic pressure, higher education has restricted it's scope to ”practical disciplines” even though reading, critical thinking, argumentation, history, and effective communication are THE kinds of skills most sought and "practical disciplines" tend to be weaker on. Perhaps this narrowing is intentional to make people unable to conceive of other ideas outside the paradigm of neoliberalism, or say Catholicism.
Hey
I wrote almost the same and then I saw your comment
Both analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are difficult for me , but i will choose the latter to study.
At this point it’s as if the divide seems to hinge on stylistic and aesthetic differences. In undergrad I’ve written essays arguing virtually the same positions for continental and analytic-focused professors in my department just translating between this literary metaphorical style and the straightforwardness the analytic guys like. It’s a shame that this seems to perpetuate a lack of dialogue or engagement between the philosophers considered to be part of the canon of one school or the other.
It is really hilarious for me the term "Continental Philosophy" because one of the fundamental structure for the consolidation of this analytic philosophy was The Vienna Circle.
The term didn’t come into popularity until after WWII though. By that point, pretty much all the analytic philosophers from Germany, Austria, and Poland had either fled their countries or were killed.
To me it just seems that analytic Philosophy is more in continuation with what Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume and Kant were doing. Yes, at the start of the 20th century they sometimes distanced themselves from what they called 'traditional' philosophy, but the reason was that they had new Logic and new ways to analyze language and arguments - the methodology has changed, and some problems were banished from philosophy as pseudo problems, but that is normal in philosophy - in a way all philosophical schools do that in moments of breakthroughs. E.g., Kant basically said that he ended philosophy and declared metaphysical 'dogmatism' senseless. For me It is the same kind of thing when Ayer says that old way of philosophizing is over and metaphysical statements aren't meaningful at all (he himself held that what positivists were doing was similar to Kant, but the methods with which they achieved getting rid of metaphysics were very different: Kant was interested in epistemology, positivists on meaning and language).
You can read Hume and Kant, then pick up Russell, Carnap or Quine and you will be in a mostly familiar territory. You just have to pick up new jargon along the way. But if you tried to read Heidegger, Adorno or Deleuze you would be really lost. In a weird way, it's like reading late James Joyce after John Locke or Descartes.
That said, I'm big fan of both and both seem to me to deserve the name of "Philosophy". And it is very interesting question to me what kind of philosophy phenomenology or post-structuralism are, it is itself a philosophical question on the scope of philosophy.
Would you discuss “philosophy” as such vs the practical application of philosophical ideas? Many philosophers seemed to love to think about thinking, talk about talking, but did so detached from the so-called “real world” and often seemed to come up short on application of their own philosophies. I.e. a LARPING Übermensch recluse philosophizing from your sisters lonely attic…etc
when something is named in an etymologically weird way, it's time to pause and reflect
It is a philosophy of a chaotic inner psychic life. It is emotionally relevant expositing
did you go to ucla? I just graduated there and loved it
studied analytic mostly
Hello, Dr Anderson! Thanks for the extremely informative video. In the video, it was mentioned "Words don't transparently express thought". Doesn't this presuppose there's a way to express thoughts more transparently than using words? I think such presupposition is a complex thought and it's improbable to conceive such a thought without the use of language.
Not really. It just presupposes that the meaning in that thought is complex enough to never be fully or adequately grasped through language.
@@fede2 Thanks for the clarification. What's the reason for accepting such a presupposition?
@@benjiewhorf7473 as an assumption, it's just more parsimonious than the one you propose, which implies more speculation.
Could you tell what the ground for making/accepting such an assumption is?
@@benjiewhorf7473 I just did. Not really sure what you expect...
Very descriptive and I thank you. But you interjected your opinions so much on how you felt about it, that it blurred the definition of Continental philosophy.
That's a similar situation in economics as well: Mainstream X Heterodox.
Which continental graduate programs would you recommend?
www.spep.org/resources/graduate-programs/
@@OverthinkPodcastPhilosophy thanks!
Great video! I was recently reading Gregory Desilet's new book "Enigma of Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, Language and Life" , which does a great job of revealing how much the analytical project, at least as far as its hero Wittgenstein goes, is really more about conformity than clarity.
What is most disturbing is that these biases are getting baked into the new AI systems. To combat this however, I think we need more than what "continental" philosophy has so far offered us, especially, as Dr. Anderson mentions above, continental thinkers end up so often just rehashing the tradition. I think if philosophers more creatively challenged and intervened in science, this would better challenge analytic philosophy and the scientism that is taking over the world.
13:30 is hilarious! : )
Trickle
Thoughts trickle down
From the summit
Melting ice
Like a glacier
The frost retreating
From the mind
That sees the peaks
And seeks to climb
The icebergs tip
But look beneath
The surface impressions
Raised atop ideology
How to surmount
Frozen rigidity?
The cold sea
Phenomena fluidity
Poetic form
In allusion
Interpretation
That we translate
Substance formed
By our own construction
The other writes
But do we know
What they would say
To all our questions
They may object
To our perspective
Icicle tears
Form on my cheeks
Fond illusions
Shattering
The edifice they raised me on
Hollow words that they taught wrong
Indoctrination
Transmits dogma
But what of foundations
To the reasoning?
Common sense
Not firmly rooting
Tearing down
Finding clearing
The ice cracks as it’s melting
Imposed truths like an avalanche