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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 34, No. 3, April 2003
0026-1068
NEIL LEVY
Since the early twentieth century, Western philosophy has been split into
two apparently irreconcilable camps: the analytic and the Continen-
tal. Philosophers who belong to each camp read and respond to their
fellows almost exclusively; thus, each stream develops separately, and the
differences become more entrenched. Relations between the camps are
characterized largely by mutual incomprehension and not a little
hostility. But because few philosophers are well acquainted with both
sides, the nature of the split is not well understood. This essay is intended
to contribute to understanding this split and perhaps, in a small way,
even to overcoming it. Now, at the dawn of a new century, it is time to
put the divisions within philosophy behind us. Although, as I shall
suggest toward the end of the paper, we have cause to temper our
optimism at the prospects for imminent reconciliation, understanding the
differences is a rst and indispensable step toward overcoming them.
A few caveats about the ambitions and limitations of the essay are in
order before we turn to an examination of the differences. First, I only
intend to characterize general trends and tendencies. Thus a single
counterexample will not serve to falsify my view; only a sufcient weight
of counterexamples could accomplish this. Second, I do not claim that all
philosophers working in contemporary academia, not even all of those
There are, I think, two claims at issue here. The rst concerns the place of
argument in the two traditions. It is often said that what distinguishes
analytic from Continental philosophy is the greater place and respect for
argument in the former. Dagnn Fllesdal, for example, characterizes the
difference between analytic and nonanalytic philosophy as essentially a
difference in the place given to arguments, rather than rhetoric (Fllesdal
1997). The claim here is that CP is not rigorous. Perhaps the best-known
example of this claim is the letter sent to the Times in 1992 to oppose
Cambridges proposal to grant an honorary doctorate to Derrida:
In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading
departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derridas work does not
meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor . . . his writings . . . seem to consist
in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (logical phallusies and the like)
and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what
we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar
to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets. (Derrida 1995, 420)
The letter is signed by, among other people, David Armstrong, Ruth
Barcan Marcus, Keith Campbell, Kevin Mulligan, Barry Smith, and no
less a gure than Quine.
I think it is not simply prejudice though it is also prejudice that can
lead thinkers like Quine to this conclusion. There are really positive
features of CP that give the impression to those trained in the analytic
school that it is argument free. The proof of this is that the difference in
the role of argument in the two traditions is recognized by the
Continentals too. This recognition comes out in the counteraccusation
frequently heard: that AP is a new scholasticism, where the concern for
technique overwhelms the very problems that the techniques had
originally been designed to solve. An adequate characterization of the
1
As David Cooper says, The continent, for our purposes, is not a place, but a
tendency (Cooper 1994, 2). Bernard Williams has suggested that the very terms in which
the distinction is drawn are absurd. Because one term refers to geography and the other to
method, they involve a strange cross-classication rather as though one divided cars into
front-wheel drives and Japanese (Williams 1996, 25).
differences between the two traditions will allow us to account for both
these accusations.
I said there were two issues at work in my original quotation from
Williams, and for that matter in the letter to the Times as well. The rst
issue concerned the place of argument. The second, more promising,
places the burden of differentiating the two traditions on style in a
broader sense. It has often been noted that CP is more literary than is
AP; perhaps that is all the difference consists in. This approach would
have the advantage of supplying us with the means to account for the
apparent lack of arguments in CP. Sometimes, we might conclude, this
school lets its concern for style override its concern for ideas, allowing the
coloring of sentences to take precedence over their clarity.
Of course, there are important stylistic differences between the two
tendencies, but if that were all the difference amounted to, the difculty
in bringing the two schools into dialogue with each other would be
inexplicable. Merely stylistic differences are supercial, and such surface
differences ought to yield relatively easily.
Perhaps we might try to account for the difference simply in terms of
historical origins and reference points. Indeed, there is no doubt that an
immediately striking difference between the two involves the standard
thinkers that each refers to. If an article cites, on the one hand, Frege,
Russell, Quine or Davidson and, or on the other, Husserl Heidegger,
Derrida or Gadamer, it is usually clear which tradition the work is in. But
more than this needs to be said. Noting this fact simply pushes the
question back one step: it is now in order to ask in what the differences
between these thinkers consist.
If the differences cannot be characterized solely in terms of the place of
argument or of style, what of content? David Cooper has made a
persuasive case for the difference lying on this level. Cooper claims that
three themes run through the writings of the most inuential continental
thinkers . . . which have no similar prominence in the analytical tradition;
they are cultural critique, concern with the background conditions of
enquiry and . . . the fall of the self (Cooper 1994, 4).
I agree with Cooper that these themes are of special concern for the
Continental tradition, but I doubt they can serve as criteria to distinguish
analytic from Continental philosophy. Cultural critique is a necessary
concern of all political and social philosophers; to say that it is
characteristic of CP is just to say (rightly) that political and social
philosophy are more important in the Continental tradition than in the
analytic. This, in turn, is at least in part the result of the relative lack of
specialization by Continental philosophers, among whom the myriad
subdisciplines into which AP divides itself (ethics and metaethics,
philosophy of mind, of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and so
on) are relatively unknown. Because Continental philosophers are not
engaged in specialized subdisciplines, they do not partition the potential
ethical and political implications of their work off from its other aspects.
They thus engage in cultural critique at the same time as they develop
their philosophy of language, or whatever else they happen to be working
on.2 To explain this phenomenon, then, requires the prior explanation of,
on the one hand, the presence and, on the other, the relative lack of such
subdisciplines.
The relative lack of specialization also goes some way to explaining
Coopers second theme, the concern with the background conditions of
enquiry. Because Continental philosophers typically tend to be
politically engaged, they are more interested in the political stakes and
conditions of knowledge, and thus in laying bare the nonrational factors
that condition knowledge. This feature of CP is one with which many
analytic philosophers are especially impatient, since they see in it a
confusion of the context of discovery with the context of justication, or
a commission of the genetic fallacy. Nevertheless, it is not an approach
shared by all Continental thinkers, or only by Continental thinkers. I
think much the same could be said of Coopers third theme Part shows
as great a delight in dismantling our common-sense picture of the subject
as does any poststructuralist.
More fruitful, I suspect, is another suggestion of Coopers: that anti-
scientism characterizes Continental thought (Cooper 1994, 10). Con-
tinental thinkers have often objected to the hegemony of science in
modern culture, insisting that it represents neither the only kind of
knowledge nor even the most basic kind. Instead, they have tended to
hold that scientic knowledge is secondary or derivative: derived, that is,
from our more primordial existence in the Lebenswelt. This has been a
theme common to Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and
it reappears though much transformed in Lyotard and Foucault. In
contrast, and as Cooper notes, analytical philosophy has generally
proved more friendly and sympathetic to science (10).
I said that I thought this suggestion was a fruitful one. I do not believe,
however, that it is sufcient to serve as a criterion to distinguish between
analytic and Continental philosophy not unless we classify John
McDowell as a Continental. Moreover, I nd Coopers explanation for
the contrast unhelpful. Cooper argues that, although both traditions took
linguistic turns, AP turned toward a systematic explanation of language,
which is conducive to a scientic approach, whereas CP turned instead
toward a conception of language that cannot be made systematic, since it
holds that language exists only as embodied in linguistic practices
(Cooper 1994, 1315). But if these turns are indeed characteristic of our
two traditions, they are part of the data to be explained, not the
2
As Vincent Descombes says, the tracing of its political implications is regarded as the
decisive test, disclosing . . . the denitive meaning of a mode of thought no matter how
apolitical the content of that thought might seem to be (Descombes 1980, 7).
The list could very easily be extended. It is, to be sure, a very French list,
and I suspect that this emphasis on art and literature is more pronounced
on the French side of the Rhine. Nevertheless, important strands of
German philosophy have been similarly concerned with art witness
Heideggers preoccupation with Holderlin, Trakl, and George, as well as
his famous On the Origin of the Work of Art, or the idea propagated
by the Frankfurt School that only the avant-garde artwork can resist
commodication.
I suspect that this contrasting emphasis runs deeper than most
philosophers have realized, and that the place of science in the two
traditions is the most important element in any explanation of their
differences. I think, though, it is not the contrasting objects of AP and CP
that are central here but the formal analogy it is possible to construct
between, on the one hand, AP and the physical sciences and, on the other,
CP and the arts. Analytic aesthetics is, after all, still analytic. It is
therefore to the formal analogy that I now turn.
I propose to develop this analogy by comparing AP, as a self-
reproducing discipline, to the image of science we nd in Kuhns
Structure of Scientic Revolutions. In Kuhns text we shall nd not only
many of the characteristic features of AP repeated in his description of
science but also the tools we need to explain those characteristics.
My suggestion is this: AP has successfully modeled itself on the
physical sciences. Work in it is thus guided by paradigms that function in
the way Kuhn sketches, and the discipline is reproduced in something
akin to the way in which the sciences are reproduced. CP has a quite
different approach to its subject matter, a quite different model of what
philosophy is, which guides its characteristic concerns and shapes its
methods.
I am suggesting that the difference noted here is genuine, and that it stems
from APs being (something akin to) a normal science.
If I am right, and AP is a problem-solving activity, we should expect
precisely that proliferation of subdisciplines which characterizes the
discipline. Normal scientists need precisely delineated puzzles upon which
to exercise their skills. Accordingly, the analytic philosopher cannot
address herself to the meaning of life, or to discovering the good life.
Instead, she focuses on cognitivism versus noncognitivism, or rening the
utilitarian calculus, or the mind-brain identity question, and so on.
Of course, to the extent that these are her problems, the work of
Russell and Frege will be relatively unhelpful to her. That paradigm
cannot inform her work as directly as it does that of a logician, or a
philosopher of language. Instead, she will be guided in her subdiscipline
by what Kuhn calls an exemplar. Exemplars are concrete problem-
refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as
contributions to the statement and solution of the texts paradigm problems.
Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of an earlier age are
implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of xed problems
and in accordance with the same set of xed canons that the most recent
revolution in scientic theory and method has made seem scientic. (138)
5
This is even clearer with regard to Aristotelian virtue as contrasted to the virtue of the
virtue ethicists: kindness, as has often been pointed out, has no place in the Aristotelian
view. Notice, too, that here the many techniques which AP has evolved to limit or eliminate
Kuhnian incommensurability hardly get a grip at all. For the causal theory of reference to
come into play, for example, we would need to be sure that we were referring to entities or
phenomena that exist independently of our views and attitudes toward them which is at
least not obviously the case with regard to human virtues and weaknesses.
6
Thus Critchley has things exactly backwards in his characterization of CP: CP is not
antiscientistic because it is so historical; it is historical because it is antiscientistic (though no
doubt the tendencies are mutually reinforcing).
7
To the extent that analytic philosophers do address practical questions engaging in
what they call applied ethics, for instance they risk nding themselves in the position of the
scientist who writes books: More likely to nd his professional reputation impaired than
enhanced (Kuhn 1970, 20). There is something of a paradox here. Applied ethics is
paradigm AP, in as much as it is one more relatively well-dened subdiscipline. Yet the
philosophers who engage in it are looked down on by others in AP. No such problem arises
for those working in CP, who tend to engage with practical questions as part of larger
projects.
These are, it goes without saying, the years of the owering of modernism
in the arts, the years of Mallarme and Eliot, Picasso and Joyce. These are
also the years in which the seminal texts of CP are written:
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)
Logical Investigations (1900)
Ideas (1913)
Being and Time (1927)
The Transcendence of the Ego (1937)
sought, not suppressed. The most able painter hopes, not to perfect an
already existing style, but to produce his or her own. As has often been
noted, continuous revolution is characteristic of the avant-garde. This, I
suspect, is not because it is looking for something that it has not yet been
able to nd but because revolution is its very goal.
I suggest, therefore, that CP models itself on modernist art, just as AP
models itself on modern science. Hence the dizzying succession of
revolutions in philosophy that characterize its progress: phenomenology,
existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, nouveau phi-
losophie, each attempting, not to build on its predecessors, but to replace
them.
Hence, too, what I take the goal of CP to be. The avant-garde artist, I
suspect, typically has the goal of leading us to see the world anew, from a
different perspective. Hence the constant need to revolutionize in art, to
overthrow ways of perceiving before they become sedimented into
habitual dispositions. Something like this is, I suspect, the goal of the
Continental philosopher. Hence her constant urge to begin again, to
question the foundations of philosophical systems, particularly of those
systems that, she believes, shape the common-sense and everyday
perception of her entire culture. Thus the problem of social transformation
is the constant horizon of her work. This demand that philosophy innovate,
that it allow us to think anew, is captured by Foucaults denition:
What is philosophy today . . . if it is not the critical work that thought brings to
bear on itself ? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know
how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently? (Foucault
1986, 89)
It is this conception of philosophy to which Lyotard subscribes when he
denes the most important task of the philosopher as being the search for
new vocabularies to express as yet unrepresented experiences. Equally, it
is this conception that is at stake in Deleuze and Guattaris recent
denition of philosophy not as the analysis but as the invention of
concepts. As a denition of philosophy in general, I suspect this fails
hopelessly. As a denition of CP, however, it may be spot on. New
concepts enable us to see the world anew, through eyes rejuvenated by the
revolutionary philosopher.8
8
This description of the goals of philosophy will, no doubt, put one in mind of Richard
Rorty. For Rorty, too, the aim of philosophy is to invent new vocabularies so as to enable us
to play new language games; not to solve puzzles so much as to invent new ones. It is no
coincidence that Rorty, like the Continentals he often appropriates for his own ends, also
sees philosophy as essentially a kind of writing. For him, AP is essentially the same sort of
discipline as we nd in the other humanities departments. . . . The normal form of life in the
humanities is the same as that in the arts and in belles-lettres; a genius does something new
and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers begin to form a school or
movement (Rorty 1982, 21718). It is because this is Rortys conception of philosophy that
he is so widely regarded as an apostate by analytic philosophers.
Thus, whereas AP sets itself the goal of solving its relatively well-
delineated problems, CP glories in the fact that it will not dene its pro-
blems in advance. To do so would be to foreclose too many possibilities,
to prevent the thinking of the radically new.
I can now sketch my worry. Normal science, as we have seen, does not
seek novelty. Indeed, it will often actually suppress it, until it becomes too
insistent to be ignored any longer. Nevertheless, and for that very reason,
it is, Kuhn claims, peculiarly effective in causing them to arise (1970,
64). For, just as Davidson showed that disagreement emerges only
against a background of agreement, so novelty only emerges with clarity
against the background of the expected:
Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what
he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.
Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The
more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator
it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. (Kuhn
1970, 65)
seeing into which she is being initiated. Thus, the kind of education
required to turn out normal scientists is antithetical to the kind of
education required to turn out people with a sense of history. To achieve
the rst, we expose the student to examples of the appropriate kind of
procedure, until she comes to share the intuitions of the group. Exposure
to alternative methods, to other ways of seeing the world, would here be
counterproductive. But to produce students with a historical sense, we
deliberately expose them to as wide a variety of ways of proceeding as
possible, inviting them to enter the thought styles of each. In this kind of
education the student has constantly before him a number of competing
and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must
ultimately evaluate for himself (165). Educating students in this way is
bound to produce thinkers who disagree among themselves, who share
not a paradigm but only a set of texts.
If this is correct, we have little reason to be optimistic that AP and CP
could overcome their differences and produce a new way of doing
philosophy that would combine the strengths of both. But we can
nevertheless hope that the situation is not as bleak as this application of
Kuhns work to it suggests. There may yet be a way to steer between this
particular Scylla and Charybdis. What the details of this middle way
might be, I do not know, but we can point to the increasing signs of a
historical consciousness among analytic philosophers evidenced by the
recent work of John McDowell and of Hilary Putnam, and the return to
Aristotle among analytic ethicists, for example as a sign that it is
possible.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Armen Marsoobian and an anonymous reviewer
for Metaphilosophy for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of
this article
References
Cooper, David E. 1994. Analytical and Continental Philosophy.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94: 118.
Critchley, Simon. 1997. What Is Continental Philosophy? International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, no. 3 (October): 34764.