In Our Time newsletter: The Continental-Analytic Split

One point which could have been made in the helpful but broad-brushed contrast of Analytic and Continental, maybe needing no more than two minutes of the forty-two, would be the all-inclusive tendency of the latter, compared with the narrower focus of the former.

It would then be a short step to mention and define a distinctive feature of much Continental philosophy - dialectical thinking. Given its influence on billions of people world-wide, its most famous practitioner, the elephant in the room, deserved more than a single passing reference.

If possible I always allow myself a lie-in on Thursdays to listen in to IOT. However, this is often a mistake as for some reason, the more interesting and absorbing I find the content, the more I am comforted, and so sent back to sleep.



On this occasion the suggestion that the Continentals would be concerned with questions such as "what is the meaning of life?" sent me down a mental road, stumbling over like structures, such as "what is the pH value of a train journey?" and "what is the protein content of a poem?".



Unfortunately, that's all I can remember until the start of "Book of the Week". Again...

I thought the panel did very well, considering time constraints and difficulty of the subject. Of all people, philosophers ought to be the best at constructing categories. But “Continental Philosophy” seems to have no better definition than “philosophy practiced on the Continent of Europe beginning with Hegel”. As such it is a fruit salad of different things, but the name implies there is a commonality – maybe a system or a school – which there is not. A second problem is that Analytic philosophy begins a century later, so the panel sometimes seemed to be comparing 19th Century Continental philosophers with 20th Century Analytical ones. I do not think this worked very well.



Worse yet is the impression that all of philosophy beginning with Hegel falls into Continental and Analytic. That there were a lot of other things going on should have been stated up front by the panel, although these other things might be less popular. Worst of all is that together Continental and Analytic Philosophy have robbed the common man of so much. Three choices were offered at the end of what philosophy today could be – the handmaiden of natural science; part of belles letters; or some attempt at system of knowledge. Traditional philosophy had at least tried to offer ordinary people practical guides to “the Art of Reason” to help them navigate their everyday lives. Today, perhaps largely thanks to Continental and Analytic Philosophers, philosophy is practiced exclusively in Academia by self-referential groups who do not want to offer anything practical, nor add to important conversations of the day – say metaphysical problems that underlie the current financial crisis. What a pity.

If the toast falls are you a toast up or a toast down person,are you a glass half-full or glass half-empty person,are you a fly or a fly bottle?Are you for rigor or for sweep?Melvyn was clear in his no-nonsense approach to keep things simple,once or twice he cut speakers short, because he had not only to move but move on.Some of the speaker’s

explanations left him no clearer or able to follow up what had just been said.Each speaker covered their part of the subject of the split superbly in the time allowed.Hans even noticed Melvyn’s waving hand as if to cut him off from a 3 part summary,just managing to elicit enough sympathy to go ahead.Melvyn ran out of time so couldn’t allow Beatrice,a CP advocate to give her end summary after the other two gave theirs.

This didn’t matter anyway as she had to admit that Continental Philosophy is not even dominant on the Continent and has ‘no home’ on the Continent. Although she gave a good account of Being and Time,the major work of CP,there were notable omissions about

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,Ricouer's hermeneutics,Foucault,and Kristeva as well as the contribution to CP of Freud’s psychoananlysis.But what about Husserl a major figure influencing Heiddeger and Merleau-Ponty?He like Freud considered his subject scientific,considered his method rigorous science.His concern with consciousness was epistemological in nature,taking Brentano’s thesis that consciousness is intentional. The ‘activity’ of AP is always stressed like good plumbing,vs.the historicity and synthesis of CP.AP is seen by some philosophers as a problem-dissolving activity,empty of ideas and content.Wittgenstein from Freud’s Vienna saw philosophy as a therapeutic activity,ironing out the confusions in language to get release.Hence his disdain from theory.

We clean the tools using analytic techniques.Russell thought his later philosophy a betrayal of his earlier.However AP had the major scientific brains of Frege,Russell and Wittgenstein and the programme was heavily tipped in its favour.Nevertheless existential issues are not solved by empirical facts and Heiddeger’s approach to prelogical primordial reality kicked CP into place,freeing philosophy from logic.After the division

of the noumenal from the phenomenal realms by Kant,Hegel’s backlash was the precursor to traditional grand meta-narratives and the inclusion of all reality(literature,history,art,etc.)into philosophy’s quest.FromHegel to Sartre has been a totalizing enterprise.After the great idealism of Hegel

I have listened to nearly all editions of IOT since its beginning. I found this edition on analytical / continental philosophy to have been one of the most satisfying. Like any conversation, the individual and collective qualities of the contributors and the obtrusiveness or not of the host provide much of the enjoyment. Of course the subject is partial and incomplete. The comments made are apt reminders of the limitations to the format. Without entering any thoughts about the content, because that would take longer than the 45 minutes the programme was allotted, I would like to make a practical suggestion: that the programme be offered (if the subject calls for it) in two parts. The second part would be second thoughts and filling in some of the gaps and oversights. There is a precedent: a recent IOT was delivered in two parts. It would be interesting if the second part sometimes called upon the same contributors as the first, and sometimes a second team who might then almost constitute a second first team.

Well, I loved the programme. I'm currently reading Bertrand Russel's History of Western philosophy and this discussion really helped me understand where Russell was coming from. it also helps clarify the link from Wittgenstein/Russell to Chomsky and lingusitics.



What would seem like a good idea for further programme is the apparent drift in highly specialised, technical analytic philosophy and the more "holistic" philosophy flowing (mainly) from the existentialist

school?



Anyway, great stuff. Things can sometimes be all over the place and utterly wonderful at the same time. Look at King Lear!

(Part 2,got cut off!):-After the great idealism of Hegel and during the ontological discoveries of Heidegger,the rise of existentialism came about.Hegel’s utopian concepts had not seen WWII and the rise of fascism.CP then shows an emphasis on individualism,no longer engaged in a totalizing project.Nazism drove the AP users out of the Continent to the Anglo-American universities,Marxists,social democrats and Jews. Later the clamour for CP courses revived CP in America,but became a term of abuse by AP in England.Russell:

“The rise of analytical philosophy decisively marked the end of the century-long dominance of Kant’s philosophy in Europe”.

Methodology, precision were emphasised, not the unprofitable web of speculative metaphysics.CP was thought of as over assertive,

rhetorical,obscurantist,not sufficiently based on logical rigor or reason. Comment is more important than understanding.Because of its appeal to departments of literature,the humanities, psychology, sociology, anthropology,politics and other subjects,it appeals to many former Marxists,its factional inroads have fostered gang mentality vs. the teaching of the ability to think of AP.CP has made its advances due to the emptiness of AP,its inability to formulate fundamental problems or possible solutions to these problems The history of the subject has to be taught as well as an ability to think,real content as well as explanatory theories,the contribution of the thinking mind to our perception of the world.

By the way Melvyn,you have returned the programme to its former peak

by the quality of the speakers in a difficult subject.However this should have been split into 2 or 3 parts of 42 minutes each.

I liked Malcolm Chisholm’s very clear overview of the programme and the present climate into which it speaks…but surely better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. If greater philosophical luminaries than he or I are declining to elucidate the metaphysical problems underlying the current financial crisis, then it must be the time for lesser intellectual lights to come out from under their bushels.

And let them speak first of the Autonomy of Representation - of Signifiers without Signifieds, of Presentation, Presentation, Presentation, of Enron and of Northern Rock.

Let them not fear to use the name of the elephant in the room, if so be that his insights are true and valid. Ken Costa, charged by St.Paul’s to speak ethics to the City, was almost word for word Marx in his warning of what happens when money becomes separated from the moral and spiritual foundations that gave it its meaning and purpose.

And then let them scrutinise the culture that has been so eager to embrace the Autonomy of Representation in its many-varied forms – celebrity, marketing, consumerism, the aestheticisation of politics to name but a few – and why its allure has proved so irresistible for so many.

More difficult then, let them unearth, identify and express in contemporary language “The marred foundations we forgot” as Eliot called them in Little Gidding, at a time of crisis to which our present difficulties have been compared.

And let us see if philosophy has anything to say to 21st century Britain.

There is one philosopher who really did bridge the gap between Continental and Analytic approaches: the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray. He tackled the big existential issues whilst at the same time searching for the logic forms which could allow us to give expression to what it means to be human. He once quipped that language philosophers were all form and no content, whereas existentialists were all content but no form. Macmurray's approach to logic was highly original and little understood. This aspect of his work is only just beginning to be discovered!



Incidently, Macmurray was also the first philosopher ever to broadcast on the BBC - back in the 30s. He was the forerunner of this programme! He got peak audiences as well. Reith stopped him though.... a little too radical for the BBC! The subject for a future programme maybe?



The story is told here see https://johnmacmurray.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/JM-and-the-BBC-Philip-Hunt.pdf

A problem with analysis per se seems to me this:



There is no apparent basis to assert, that the components into which an entity is analysed will not each in themselves turn out to be more complex than the original thing.



An analogy in maths would be, that the number "one" can be represented as the negative of, the sum of an infinite series, "e": raised to the power of: the ratio of a circle's diameter to its radius, "pi", times the square root of minus one, "i".



This is often a problem I have with discussions of this kind, (even when unconstrained by any approach such as Analytic Philosophy) and would expect others to also, so I would have welcomed a note of caution to this effect early on in the discourse (assuming my concerns to be shared, if they are).

"We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, ..., is to say with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.... The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not."

Richard Rorty,'Contingency,Irony and Solidarity.'

The programme seemed to me to be a non starter as no one seemed to know what the continentals were about and the obvious answer to this is that the group or classification doesn't exist as a viable entity. Perhaps next time it should be more finely tuned.

Superb programme and so refreshing to hear a group of philosophers behaving so politely and calmly towards each other - rather like a group of bald men simply discussing whether combs exist or not.



No one waving a poker around for a change.

I listened to the first part just this morning in the Metro. Can't wait to go home and listen to the rest.