The Analytic and Continental Divide in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Philosophy: A Reading Guide to Secondary Literature

Last week on Facebook I posted a brief summary of a class I've been taking this semester on the Analytic and Continental divide in philosophy: I've read around 6k pages devoted to the analytic/continental divide this semester (I'll post some of my favorites soon). Here are some broad conclusions I have tentatively come to so far as I sort through the mess (I am still super new to this so help me out if you can):

1.) All broad distinctions usually referenced as deep structural differences between the two either a.) fail to be universal or b.) turn out to be trivial or superficial and do not appear to be capable of sustaining the deep animus and lack of communication between the two sides.

1.a. All attempts to describe what unifies continental philosophy beyond the description "not analytic" fail.

1.b. The divide itself was created and sustained by self-described analytic philosophers in Britain and America.

1.b.i. the AvC divide was created primarily by Analytic thinkers in the 1950's moving in a generally positivistic atmosphere in order to promote what they took to be a scientific and democratic culture and oppose what they perceived as an atavistic and reactionary history of philosophical failures that were in the 20th century tending to favor fascism, McCarthyism, and were not strictly containable by scientific or logical discourse.

2.) In part 1) seems true because instead of any broadly true narrative, the AvC distinction comes down to a series of encounters that are taken as paradigmatic (Husserl v. Frege, Heidegger v Carnap, Sartre v Ayer, Bergson v Russel and Einstein, Derrida v Searle ...) but that in the end do not provide good evidence for generalizations since these oppositions are themselves oppositional to each other and do not create steady lines or schools of thought.

3.) In general, both A and C thinkers can be seen to be living and moving within broadly post-Kantian and neo-Kantian worlds, being anti-psychologistic, and trying to provide alternatives to them while nonetheless in some sense being reliant upon them. This applies to phenomena as broad as pragmatism, Marxism, and both Continental and Analytic thought. In this sense philosophically both sides of the divide are the children of Kant. Some of their differences can be accounted for by looking at which part of Kant's corpus they favor (an observation I am stealing from Simon Critchley)

3.a.) Despite differences, those thought to oppose each other (say Carnap and Heidegger) actually turn out to have both similar agendas and methods. For example, both A and C thinkers are broadly speaking anti-psychologistic and were shaped in large extent to their reactions against psychologism in the so-called psychologismusstreit

AS SUCH it seems the A/C divide is a largely political and rhetorical (and perhaps meta-philosophical) divide (rather than primarily philosophical) catalyzed and sustained by the political conditions created by the two world wars. The divide is enforced to attempt to enact philosophy's continued importance via its relationship to the sciences and public/democratic discourse which also maneuvers to distance itself from a perceived history of philosophical failures or at least non-progress, as well as critique a broad alignment with reactionary politics and in particular fascism. This not only creates contemporary lines in the sand, but has large retroactive and historiographic significance (paradoxically expressed at times by a firmly anti-historical stance of analytic philosophers) that, for example, highlights Hegel as arch villain precisely because the history of failure is integrated as a necessary component of his thought.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Additions?

IN ADDITION several people noted they would love a list of readings. I thought initially about publishing the syllabus, which is a remarkable collection. But instead I am going to post a few of the books and articles that I found the most helpful. So, in other words this is not an exhaustive list by any means. But they do represent the works that have stuck with me the most in a semester that was a whirlwind of reading (and coming from someone who typically reads as much as I do, that is saying something. It was A LOT of reading).

BOOKS:

Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, Heidegger. Illinois: Open Court, 2001. 144 pages.

--> Arguing for the neo-Kantian background of Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Parting is mercifully brief and remarkably clear treatment of what is considered one of the key episodes leading to the A/C split.

Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. 212pp.

-->Considered a modern classic of the genre, Dummett suggest that Analytic and Continental philosophy have a common origin in Frege and Husserl. He also suggests (less helpfully in my opinion) that a major factor of the split comes by way of Analytic philosophy taking the so-called "Linguistic turn" in a manner that Continental thought did not. Regardless of how useful that (non)distinction is, Dummett is to be commended for demanding that Analytic philosophy have an active understanding of its own past, without which progress cannot be made.

Andreas Vrahimis, Encounters Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan, 2013. 257pp.

-->Vrahimis is a name that constantly comes up in these discussions, and he is no doubt one of the premier philosophers in this area. Holding up a sequence of key encounters (hence the title) Vrahimis does not come to a definite conclusion so much as he hopes to complexify what are areas of disagreement and agreement all to susceptible to caricature due to vitriol.

James Chase and Jack Reynolds, Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Method and Value of Philosophy. New York: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010. 304pp.

--> Similar to Vrahimis, Chase and Reynolds open their book by dedicated the first third to key encounters. Beyond this, however, and quite helpfully, they continue on and brave some mid-level distinctions that may (with an emphasis on the hesitance of "may") constitute some structural differences and similarities between the two movements (style and clarity, form and content, hermeneutics and ontology, and so forth). An extremely helpful compendium, though not one that gives any definitive answers (if such even exist).

Wolfram Eilenberger, A Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. 432pp.

-->A bold title that is not totally lived up to, this is nonetheless a very interesting intellectual biography of four incredibly important geniuses. While not delving into the nitty gritty of the philosophies of each man, they way that some of their ideas are connected to their lives and their interactions with one another makes for compelling reading and puts some flesh on the bones of what is very often a dryly technical discussion.

Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 168pp.

-->An indispensable book that punches well above its weight. Critchley makes a number of incredibly helpful suggestions such as 1.) the distinction is actually a covertly historiographical assertion by Analytic thinkers and 2.) Analytic and Continental philosophies are both children of Kant, and can sometimes be differentiated based upon which part of Kant's corpus they prefer to go to.

Michael Beaney, Analytic Philosophy: A Very Brief Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 152pp.

-->A fascinating book that makes a wonderful pair to Critchley's offering just above, this takes a look at Analytic philosophy's birth from the viewpoint of a (seemingly) simple question: how many things are there? The story gets pretty wild pretty quickly, and ironically goes to show (in my opinion) that fine distinctions fall apart pretty quickly (or admit of indefinite variations) when we increase the granularity with which we look at things.

Tom Rockmore, In Kant's Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. 224pp.

--> A clear and concise introduction to twentieth century philosophy from the viewpoint of its propagation (and often subversion) of Kantian themes. Western philosophy might be a footnote to Plato, but modernity is just as much a Kantian ellipses.

Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006. 144pp.

-->A short and useful book that, in a nutshell, argues that Continental philosophy does not exist as a coherent category of thought and if you think it does, you're probably an Analytic philosopher getting cozy with the sciences. Ok, that'sa reduction of this book, but only slightly.

John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001. 213pp.

-->McCumber argues that Analytic philosophy both gained some of its most notorious characteristics and gained its dominance because of the abuses of the McCarthy era, the effects of which are still felt today in subtle (and not so subtle) but always disturbing manners. Controversial when first released (but what in philosophy isn't, really) its thesis has gained more adherents over the course of its life.

Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015. 480pp.

-->Possibly my favorite of the semester (it helped I had read it before and so could slow up and enjoy it a bit). While not strictly on the A/C divide, it goes a long way in showing how Bergson's (supposed) trouncing at the hands of Einstein led to the widespread notion of the irrelevance of (continental) philosophy in terms very similar to the caricatures that came to be attached to figures like Heidegger after his debate with Carnap.

Thomas L. Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe. New York: Continuum Books, 2011. 220pp.

--> Far from a detached, a-political, non-metaphysical approach, Analytic philosophy has in fact been shaped by a staggering array of sources that seem to clearly fall outside the "purity" that is so vaunted in their discourse. Akehurst analyzes in particular how fascism and Nazism in WW2 catalyzed the A/C divide, and provided it with the sad infrastructure to continue its existence in spit of repeated attempts by many to collapse the divide and cross it in earnest. A very useful read alongside McCumber's Time in the Ditch (above).

P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. 368pp.

-->Self-explanatory, but incredibly insightful nonetheless.

ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

Gregory Frost-Arnold, "The Rise of Analytic Philosophy: When and How Did People Begin Calling Themselves 'Analytic Philosophers'?" in Innovations in the History of Analytic Philosophy edited Sandra Lapointe and Christopher Pincock. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, 27-67.

Peter Simons, "Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic-Continental Rift," International Journal of Philosophical Studies vol.9 no.3 (2011): 295-311.

Thomas L. Akehurst, "The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of Continental Philosophy in Mid-Century Britain," History of European Ideas vol.34 no.4 (2008): 548-557.

Todd May, "On the Very Idea of Continental (Or, For That Matter, Anglo-American) Philosophy," Metaphilosophy vol.33 no.4 (July 2002): 401-425.

Linda Martin Alcoff, "Philosophy's Civil Wars," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association vol. 87 (Nov. 2013): 16-43.

Robert Piercey, "The Metaphilosophy of the Analytic-Continental Divide: From History to Hope," in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology ed. Guiseppina D'Oro (Cambridge: CUP, 2017): 274-293.

Michale Beaney, "The Historiography of Analytic Philosophy," in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy ed. Michael Beaney (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 30-61. (See also Beaney's intro to this volume).

Joel Katav and Krist Vaesen, "On the Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy," British Journal for the Historiography of Philosophy vol.25 no.4 (2017): 772-798.

Simon Critchley, "What is Continental Philosophy?" International Journal of Philosophical Studies vol. 5 no.3 (1997): 347-363.

Neil Levy, "Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences," Metaphilosophy vol.34 no.3 (April, 2003): 284-304.

David Bell, "The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?" Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement vol. 44 (March 1999): 193-209.

Andreas Vrahimis, "Russell's Critique of Bergson and the Divide Between 'Analytic' and 'Continental' Philosophy," Balkan Journal of Philosophy vol.3 no.1 (2011): 123-134.

Abe Stone, "Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics," in Martin Heidegger, ed. Stephen Mulhall. New York: Routledge, 2006. 217-244.

Gottfried Gabriel, "Carnap's Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language: A Retrospective Consideration of the Relationship Between Continental and Analytic Philosophy," Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations vol.8 (2009): 53-70.

Felipe G.A. Moreira, "Overcoming Metametaphysics: Nietzsche and Carnap," Nietzsche Studies. Gesamtegister Bande 47 no.1 (2018): 240-271.

Carl B. Sachs, "What is to Be Overcome? Nietzsche, Carnap, and Modernism as the Overcoming of Metaphysics," History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol.28 no.3 (July 2011): 303-318.

Anat Biletzki, "Wittgenstein: Analytic Philosopher?" in The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes ed. Anat Biletzki. New York: Routledge, 1998. 197-209.

Andreas Vrahimis, "Legacies of German Idealism from the Great War to the Analytic/Continental Divide," Parrhesia vol.24 (2015): 83-106.

Babette E. Babich, "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy." in A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy edited by C.G. Prado. New York: Humanity Books, 2003: 63-103.

Eli Friedlander, "Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein: Much Ado About Nothing," in The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and Heroes. New York: Routledge, 1998. 226-237.

Roberto Mordacci, "From Analysis to Genealogy: Bernard Williams and the End of the Analytic-Continental Divide." Philosophical Inquiries No.4 Vol.1 (2016): 71-84.

Andreas Vrahimis, "Sense Date and Logical Relations: Karin Costelloe-Stephen and Russell's Critique of Bergson," British Journal for the History of Philosophy vol.28 no.4 (Nov. 2019): 819-844.