Also on the Analtyic Continental Bridge
I am not sure if am being particularly sensitive to this issue -- therefore noticing it everywhere -- or if it is becoming a more widespread chat. Speaking of this issue of "situated knowledge", a guest-bloger on Leiter's blog has a post on this. His conclusion about styles is not either original or convincing (BL also put something on same note in the "Comments"). But I found the first paragraph, particularly the idea of "pragmatic encroachment" to be interesting.
Posted by Farhang Erfani on
Monday November 28, 2005 at 8:21am
As it turns out, there are lots of different philosophically relevant groupings which one might use to characterize the A/C split, if one limited the classes of figures to which one applies the distiction. So, for example, the particular stylistic distinction Jason Stanley mentions does apply when one fills the "continental" class with thinkers like the later Heidegger, later Merleau-Ponty, and Adorno (all of whom think, in some way, that straightforwardly propositional language is no longer adequate for philosophizing), and fills the "analytic" class with people who write in the style of, say, G.A. Cohen (whose works of "analytic Marxism" are an excellent example of a kind of writing that clearly parses out concepts and arguments into minutia). But, while that stylistic distinction is out there as a real philosophical/scholarly distinction in the 20th Century, Leiter is right to point out that it does not completely fit the A/C distinction. But that is, I think, because the A/C distinction is not a philosophical distinction at all.
I think that Joe's point about the key figures is important. There are subfields where there are clear overlaps (e.g., political philosophy, aesthetics, etc.). But even there we do not study/write on the overlaps enough. Had we had a different kind of training -- meaning professors who knew both traditions well and taught them together -- we would be able to overcome the gap. Often I find points and issues in analytic philosophy that I find fascinating but it is a daunting task to dive into a whole new secondary literature, where I am not often sure where to begin. For practical purposes, especially for publication purposes, we have to keep reading the same figures for a while and we get used to that.
Given all of these exceptions, one might be tempted to say that there is no C/A distinction, really, and that there are just various differing philosophical issues that differ in various ways (one of the comments on Stanley's post on BL's blog makes this point, for instance). The problem with that view, though, is that it overlooks the fact that the reality of the C/A distinction is manifest to all of us (and only someone who is accepted into the standard anglo-american circles would have the luxury of saying that it does not exist). The answer to this problem, I think, is that the distinction is "institutional" in the way I described above.
It also occurs to me that someone who has read McCumber's Time in the Ditch might have something pertinent to add to this discussion. I am pretty sure that Ammon fits this description...
what do you all think about this?
edited to remove my long quotation. i just transferred copyright of this essay to Philosophy Today. if anyone wants to see the argument, email me.
The main reason is that I think distinctions in hermeneutical strategies are far too numerous and varied. There is clearly no one "continental" way of reading philosophy, though there are ways of reading that get called continental (Heideggerian, Foucauldian, "deconstructive," etc...), and I doubt it is the case that everyone who gets called a continental philosopher has to fit into one of these categories.
There might, on the other hand, be a specific kind of reading that we could call "analytic": the kind of reading that trolls texts for arguments that can be put, generally, into syllogistic form. There are people who actually do this--my undergrad ancient phil professor read Plato and Aristotle this way--but I doubt that such a hermeneutic is really that prevalent. Even if it is, this meaning of "analytic" would have to refer to something narrower than the class of things commonly denoted by the term "analytic."
Furthermore, debates over acceptable hermeneutics stretches further than the C/A debate does. It would bring in Straussians, for interest, and historians of philosophy who are generally trained in the Anglo-American vein but would not exactly consider themselves analytics (like Frederick Beiser, I think). Furthermore, there are debates over what Robert Brandom would call "de dicto" (readings that put a primacy on placing authors in their broader context) and "de re" (readings that, I suppose, focus on putting authors in the midst of conceptual debates, rather than historical contexts)strategies...
and, so this doesn't sound one-sided, i'm fairly sure that the issue holds the other way, as well. i know there are things analytics are more attuned to in texts than i am. (the more chauvinistic analytics would probably say that those things are "arguments." ;) oh, and incidentally, my undergrad ancient teacher did something not quite as rigorous as what you're talking about, but analogous to it, with plato.
note too that the fact that *some* analytics or continentals don't read texts with as much of an attunement to the same particulars as most, would not falsify this claim, any more than the fact that some guys "throw like a girl" would falsify the claim that there are definite, distinct modes of body comportment that boys and girls as socialized into (just finished teaching iris marion young a few days ago).
Now, I bet I know what you are thinking: "They don't matter for my argument, though, because they would be outside of the C/A distinction (they don't count as either) that I am making, which still stands." (or, to put it another way: my claim that the hermeneutic distinction is broader than the C/A distiction doesn't matter, because the C/A distinction would still map onto that broader distinction as a smaller subset, with all of the people I have mentioned standing outside of it (if only I could draw a Venn diagram in these comments...)) And I would grant to you that you probably could narrow things such that you could make sense of the distinction you are trying to make. As I noted above, however, I think that would commit you to making the C/A distinction narrower than how it actually operates in everyday academic discourse, and it is in this discourse that the distinction really matter to us.
no, seriously, i think that the way i would respond might be pretty similar to what you suspect, but i would also point out something from my initial post, which is that, since these distinctions are in fact contingent, historically constituted unities of meaning, they are going to fade and blur into each other at some point, and there are going to be some sub-schools that look a lot more like the other "side" of the distinction when you consider certain characteristics, or may even look like they're off the map entirely... in the same way that philosophy and literature blur together in, say, nietzsche.
all of which is to say, the distinction has value to us up to a certain point, but in the end we have to remember that it's just as constructed as others are.