Difference between Continental and Analytic Philosophy?

Plato v Aristotle

Guess what?

Fuck you.

Dawkins has interesting takes on his own field but should not have "left" it for mainstream. What you read in blind watchmaker and selfish gene is not like his recent ramblings.

Dawkins is a petty New Atheist faggot too.

Krauss is unequivocally the worst though.

this is the closet thing to an answer which is not completely retarded.

I'm starting to get why Veeky Forums users hate the idea of permanent id's. They wouldn't want anyone to be able to constantly go back and read all the stupid crap they said, people would judge them for their statements.

Why are ex-trotskyists always the worst fucking people?

Analytic = NEET autistic fun time over shit no-one cares about

Continental = Basically the chads of philosophy, will steal your girl, intelligent and in touch with emotions

Reality check:
Analytic = Employed, respected, impactful, >150 IQ, polymath (great at math, logic, history, science,...)

Continental = Useless, 110 < IQ < 130 (pseudo range), only looked up to by college kids, couldn't make up their minds between writing fiction and philosophy so they just write a deformed mix of box, will in the long run have no impact in philosophy

analytic philosophy is essentially the cleaning of Kant's work

This is the truth that Veeky Forums doesn't want to hear. There's a reason continental philosophy is discussed here way more often and that reason is that it's no different than any other sort of literary fiction.

Your butthurt is showing. Pretty much noone outside the field cares about analytic philosophers, while continentals are full of public intellectuals interacting with normal people.

>Pls explain in easy terms so my dumb brain can comprehendo
Continental is the dreamer
Analytic is the autist

Go back to watching youtube videos of Zizek, brainlet undergraduate

>Analytics create modern logic
>Shape the study of language
>Shape computer science
>Establish the foundations of mathematics
>All this in just a couple of years
>Continentals...?

>Continentals allow you to sound smart and profound and pat yourself on the back
Remembered it

I'd say ordinary language is a big camp within contemporary analytic philosophy. Analytics are definitely more rationalist than empiricist though. They're more interested in a priori systems of thought than examination of empirical evidence, despite their hype over being 'scientific'.

False dichotomy. Anglocentric bullshit.

Especially because continental philosophy is dead and only lives in tiny pockets in the US and Belgium

While ordinary language philosophy certainly remained influential in analytic philosophy far past the decline of positivism, I'd say even that has been on the wane since Kripke's monumental defense of semantic externalism

In the late 18th century Kant modelled his transcendental philosophy on the idea that human consciousness is typified by rational judgment, judgments made about objects, within a mind, by a subject, who presides over them. Kant's philosophy stressed the possibility of the subject being in error about its judgments. Kant was very impressed by 18th century science, like Newton.

Then Hegel came along, gelled Kant and his major successors together into his own thought, and said that the concepts that the subject has access to, that he uses to make judgments, are inherently historical, and therefore developing historically. He wrote a lot of very insightful philosophy on this subject, but no one is quite sure how systematic he was about it. Many nowadays interpret him as a social philosopher of history. But in the 19th century he was mostly taken to be a metaphysical idealist, not a social idealist, whose "ideal" realm (the realm of the mind, or Spirit) was a collective, semi-divine mind whose thought was developing toward pure rationality. (This remains the common perception of him now, as well.)

Much of the 19th century was dominated by "left" (think Marx) and "right" (divine mind) Hegelians, and by Kantian thinking generally on how subjects rationally know their world. In the late nineteenth century, a bunch of guys got tired of the Hegel bullshit, which by then had also spread to Britain and the USA as a very Christian, very religious interpretation of Hegel's (alleged) divine mind idea. Science by this time was exploding, as everyone knows, and German theoreticians were in the lead. They took essentially Kantian ideas of rationality and naturally extended them to "apodictic" certainty, the ideal of self-evident certainty as in a geometrical proof. Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill were very influential as well, both around the same time advocating a "positivist" conception of science that would gradually describe laws explaining all of reality (including, in their minds, biology, culture, human thought, etc.).

In the late 19th century, the other tradition of German thought, the "historicism" of the German historical school (on which modern history-writing is founded) clashed more and more with this positivism. It said, in a somewhat Hegelian way, that life and consciousness cannot be reduced to positive laws. A list of sociological descriptions would not give an adequate account of what life is. You could not write history positivistically - every life was unique. A major figure in this line of thinking was Dilthey.

Earlier on, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had also rejected the RATIONALISM of the Kantian and Hegelian view. Nietzsche rejected it on the grounds that "subjects" are psychologically complex, confused entities, who do not have divinely perfect and crystal-clear access to their own thoughts and to transparent truth. Human beings live in a constant swirl of projects, emotions, values, and ideas that were created by other people and simply inherited by them, before they were even born, often for non-transparent reasons (like resentment of a more powerful person). Kierkegaard fiercely rejected Hegelian rationalism on very much the same grounds.

Around this time, also, "logic" was we know it began to be theorised and founded on the basis of apodictic certainty, often by people who rejected the kind of "psychologism" rejected by Nietzsche. It was conceived positivistically: If you know two axioms (laws) to be true, apodictically, you can be certain that their third term will be true when used in a proposition. Frege, Russell, and others are important here, and in the German neo-Kantian tradition, several like Natorp and Cohen. Many of the people interested in logic were not very aware of recent philosophical developments, and were much more influenced either by ancient ideas of self-evident truth (like Brentano, who was an Aristotelian), or by the aforementioned craze for all-conquering science and the perfectibility of human knowledge. In other words, they were very Kantian in their enthusiasms.

Out of this milieu came Husserl, who proposed a method for studying the contents of consciousness "as they appear," called phenomenology. What this means, roughly, is the study of consciousness in its actual workings. Husserl was not interested in whether the statement "The chair is red" "corresponded" to an "outside" reality (or in how to prove this). He was interested in how our mind actually does things, like:
>picking out sense data and deciding "That's a chair"
>correctly identifying and describing new chairs
>adding new information to concepts already created (like, THIS particular chair is BLUE)
He was interested in how the mind constitutes its contents.

But the logicists, who were now even more interested in scientific truth and logical self-certainty. Russell and Frege had begun to develop a very enticing language for describing necessary truths by extensively FORMALISING the process, by making it a symbolic logic. The rejection of Hegelian ideas and the incomprehension of German developments caused a general shift in Britain toward this new paradigm. In general, Britishers had been bad at philosophy to begin with - their readings of Hegel were of no interest to continental Hegelians, and their readings of Kant were mainly sophomoric and isolated from the German tradition. Philosophy in Britain had no strong native movement, so it was ripe for one.

A student of Husserl's, who was also influenced by Dilthey, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, emerged and said (unsurprisingly): "I agree about studying the contents of consciousness as they appear, and not presupposing an outside world. We should begin with our minds and how they work, first. But I don't agree with this whole subject-object split and 'apodictic' rationality thing we've been doing since Kant. With Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, I think that life is lived, first and foremost, at a 'pre-rational' level, and with Nietzsche and Dilthey, I think this pre-rational existence is historical and we are 'thrown' into it without making any initial rational choices. It still involves 'truth', but this is truth of a different kind, truth-as-lived-in or truth-as-revealed. To do science, or this new-fangled logic thing, is to build a castle out of our existing ways of being-in-the-world, and to climb to the highest room of that castle. That's interesting, but it's not what humans primordially do. The ground floor of consciousness is everyday life, not scientific certainty about 'objects'. In fact, even the idea of 'objects' is not primordial enough, and to presume it is presuming too much at the outset!"

The logicists around this time were congealing with several related movements of "realists." The exact opposite of Heidegger and Husserl, these realists took the subject-object divide VERY MUCH for granted, and were mainly interested in how we (subjects) ought to describe the world of objects outside ourselves. You can't fully appreciate this period until you read some of its literature and realise just how naive their realism could be sometimes. The new and exciting symbolic logic still had a lot of work to be done, and, it was felt, a lot of potential. This was the key to building perfect scientific consensuses, the key to dissolving any conceptual problem before it wriggled away and became a real problem. Logic was the key to correct thinking.

It also required a lot of training to use properly. So began a century of British, and eventually American, "philosophy" students being trained in manipulating an intentionally mathematical, highly formal symbolic language called logic, for manipulating elemental expressions (like propositions) which were felt to possess apodictic certainty. Heidegger would have found the whole thing curious at best, because language can never be apodictic. The truths of language are revealed in life as a holistic lifeworld, not as atomised, platonistic "truths" that "refer" or "correspond" to reality. In Heidegger's eyes, the error that Greek philosophy had imparted on Western civilisation was in its most advanced and uncritical stage in Britain, and worse, it was in service to a technocratic and scientistic view of reality.

On that note, continental philosophy also absorbs the extremely abstruse, pseudo-Hegelian critiques of Marx, and of his successors, like the Frankfurt School, who critiqued capitalism and "Enlightenment thought" (roughly, Cartesian subject-object, rationalist-positivist scientism) in ways similar to Heidegger. In fact, this critique is a very German thing, and is impossible to pin to one thinker or school. Max Weber is another figure. The important thing is to understand that German philosophy sort of took it for granted, had it always in their eye somewhere, and often resorted to Marx, Heidegger, and others to make sense of it.

The USA and Britain continued along their merry way for a long time, as did the Germans. The Germans had a post-Heideggerian, historicist heyday for a generation or two (look up Gadamer), and the Brits and Americans really loved logic and positivist philosophy of science (look up Carnap, Hempel, Popper). America became an industrial superpower and had the Fordist era of scientific management, which emboldened their positivist and logicist tendencies, and caused their (belated compared to Germany) social scientific disciplines to be extremely positivistic and quantification-crazy. They loved computers and numbers and graphs. Just as much as Germany was innately suspicious of that sort of thing, America took it completely for granted.

France went through a similar positivistic phase in its own social sciences in the period 1890-1960. Never too up on German philosophy, they took in some of its "existential" components, without being terribly good at the phenomenology. Sartre's _Being & Time_, written under the influence of Heidegger's _Being & Time_, is philosophically a very bad book, but psychologically and existentially extremely interesting.

The big moment in France, aside from that existentialist phase, was structuralism. Structural linguistics, and then structural everything (anthropology with Levi-Strauss, history with Braudel, etc.) was an attempt to (surprise!) scientifically analyse language, society, culture, history, and so on. Somewhat like the logic of the Brits, the French were briefly very confident that structuralism was a "scientific" analysis of society and the key to understanding everything.

As above, the French were never very good at German philosophy. They had a little bit of bootleg (but interesting) Hegel through Kojeve's lectures, in the '30s, and bits and pieces of Husserl and Heidegger were available (and properly exploited by guys like Merleau-Ponty). But most of them were fairly Sartrean in their half-understandings. In the reaction against structuralism, that all changed, as France rapidly took up the core of the German philosophical outlook, even if they didn't quite get all the details down.

Sartre's dominance over Parisian intellectual life, where he was a celebrity on par with movie stars in America, was eclipsed by the structuralists, who had similar fame. The new kids on the block, the post-structuralists, now wanted to do the same to the structuralists, and have the opportunity to be interviewed while smoking cigarettes and wearing cardigans. They did a lot of good social philosophy, and essentially rehashed Heidegger's point about lifeworlds and disliking the Cartesian subject. The French are always better at overstating things and making rhetorical flourishes with flashes of insight than they are at tidy thinking (a strength and a weakness), so they often rejected the same things Heidegger rejected, but in very bombastic and sloppy ways. What for Heidegger was the philosophical inappropriateness of the subject was for Foucault "the death of man." They got so into doing this that the ones who only did it a little bit, relatively speaking, would talk shit about the ones who dialed it up a little too much.

Going back to the the 1950s-1960s in America and Britain, people were clearly beginning to realise that logic and rational thinking do not provide unfettered access to reality, and that apodictic certainty is a sham idea. The controversy emerged first in the philosophy of science, where people like Thomas Kuhn, N.R. Hanson, and Michael Polanyi talked about how what we know is not purely rational and self-conscious - we operate on assumptions, we are immersed in a lifeworld at all times, truth is "lived" before it is asserted, and formal languages can only create the illusion of consensus. Sound familiar?

As a general reaction to this, American and some British philosophers began to be more open to dabbling in German and French ideas (as indeed some few always had been willing). At the same time, the logical tradition attended to account for it by switching gears and doing more theory-crunching on how assertions actually work, as opposed to how we assume they simply and transparently correspond to reality. (Sound similar to Husserl?) Many analytic philosophers in this era replicated some of the insights of the continental tradition, but usually in a vacuum or in a system still distorted by other analytic preconceptions.

Also around the same time, or a little earlier, Wittgenstein came along and, pretty much sui generis and just by ponderin' stuff and being autistic, came to nearly the exact same conclusions as Heidegger (and later the French) in many, many ways. The analytic tradition took about fifty years to understand what he was talking about, and in the meantime, kept to smush his philosophy into their own analytic preconceptions (see: Saul Kripke) without realising it was an undermining of those very preconceptions.

Also around the same time, many British and American philosophers began to study the American philosophy pragmatism, roughly contemporary with Husserl, which also came very close to phenomenology and to Heidegger in many ways, but which had only been sorta understood. Husserl once said of William James that if America had really understood him, it would have had a native phenomenological movement on par with Germany's.

And now we're here: America has been studying and contributing to French and German philosophy since the '80s, when they became really big in the States, though not really within Philosophy departments proper. French and German philosophy are in complete dialogue with one another, and with the rest of Europe, creating a real continental tradition. Britain is a little less happy about it, but many Brits are in dialogue with continental traditions too.

The analytics are increasingly isolated and still haven't undertaken the fundamental critique of their discipline's preconceptions that the Germans and French did, however haphazardly. To continentals, they just look weird, cut off from the philosophical tradition as a whole. Analytics have notoriously terrible knowledge of the history of philosophy. They do a lot of weird things because of this - they are notorious for platonizing concepts, hypostatizing objects, assuming the subject-object divide, assuming apodictity, deifying mathematics, creating ultra-formal descriptions of axiomatic conditions that are inherently mercurial, sophomoric and rigidly stereotyped and ahistorical understandings of major thinkers without putting them in dialogue with their contemporaries, scientism in general.

Meanwhile, analytics look at continentals and think "What the fuck does 'the death of man' mean?"

It's two traditions isolated by nature of their complex training, but isolated for different reasons. Continentals would have next to no interest in learning formal logic, and look at analytic philosophy as extremely brittle. Analytics look at continental philosophy as taking 15 years to be able to decode the jargon.

TL;DR of user's above posts: Hegel is the Prince of Sophists.

Analytic philosophy = the heirs of Plato and Aristotle.
Continental philosophy = the heirs of the Sophists. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist

>All progress in philosophy that has been made has been made by analytic philosophers.

I am always surprised that since Wittgenstein became mandatory reading for philosophers that discussions like this still exist.
>language games and so on

Thanks buddy. Did you study philosophy at uni, or are you self-taught?

1. Gettier cases decisively refute the position that knowledge is justified true belief

2. Kripke's "discovery" of a-posteriori necessity splits the a-priori/a-posteriori distinction into metaphysical and epistemological components

3. Experimental realization of Bell's Theorem rules out a local realist philosophy of physics and seriously undermines mechanism philosophies of nature

4. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems end the logicist and formalist programs in the philosophy of mathematics while also dealing a blow to mechanism

What have continentals done?

developed western civilization

Quality contribution! Thanks for being you.

>Goedel
>analytic philosopher
>Quantum Mechanics
>analytic philosophy
...

But that's a bad thing

Everyone listed was also a philosopher and each saw their work as having important implications for philosophy, whatever the crossover appeal

analytics drive like this

but u know a continental brotha be drivin like thiiiiiis

analytic philosophy is for people who want to figure shit out

continental philosophy is for people who want to reduce suffering in the world through currents of thought

>analytics
>establish the foundation of mathematics
>in a few years
who are descartes, euclid, leibniz, hell—even aristotle? not to mention pythagoras and all the goat fuckers in the desert inventing algebra, on top of vedic philosophers and their math boys.

sure, it was bertrand russell, he who got his shit pushed in by an autistic austrian, that laid the foundations for math. ok kid

The analytic philosopher accuses the continental of being insufficiently clear, the continental philosopher accuses the analytic of being insufficient.

>Everyone listed was also a philosopher
But not everyone listed was an analytic philosopher. You slow or something?

Analytic philosophy is for Chads like me,
Continental 'silly-sophy' is for cucks like thee.

Philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics are both part of the analytic tradition. Neither John Bell nor Godel were continentals. Are you sure YOU'RE not slow?

Whats Nietzsche then

analytic philosophy is shit like "a is a subset of b, therefore x y z blah blah blah"
continental is shit like "music is a direct manifestation of the will"

Analytic is like watching a robot trying to understand nuance and humanity while continental is like listening to the incoherent rants of your drunk uncle.

Wow, thanks for taking the time to write this. Its a pretty lucid account, and is probably the easiest introduction I'll ever get to the history behind the split.
>autist taking credit for the work of mathematicians
Only furthers the claim that analytic philosophers are just failed mathematicians.

analytic can't generate new information, it can only tell you what you already know

continental is wit-jousting unsupportable axioms against each other

Allowing analytic philosophy to exist in the first place
Also building western civilization as the other user said

How can I archive this power level?

wtf I hate continental philosophy now?

et al

This kind of thing happens on this board just enough to keep me from walking away from here
Sincere thanks user

You have a pretty narrow understanding of philosophy if you don't think mathematical philosophers should be considered as such

Please don't talk about what you don't know about, humanities faggot. Take a logic course and maybe then comment. Principia Mathematica is great evidence that all of math can be reduced to logic (read Quine's New Foundations) and nowadays all of mathematicians work under the implicit foundation of ZF set theory which was formalized due to Russell's paradox. Pythagoras and Aristotle's views of math are completely dated.
Face it, continentals have accomplished nothing. Because they are brainlet romantics with an ego complex. Even the biggest public intellectual nowadays (Chomsky) was educated in the analytic tradition.
TL;DR:
1) Continentals have literally accomplished nothing.
2) The only reason to read continental philosophy is to allow you to fool your pseud social circle into sounding smart and profound
3) Analytic philosophy was born a few years ago and already led to several revolutions (In logic, In language, In mathematics and in philosophy)

In a way continental philosophy led to Gender Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Queer Studies. You see the pseud tradition of writing gibberish and giving jobs to charlatan academics.

OP here. Thanks for all the great answers. I think I've got the gist of it now.

Analytic focuses on axiomatic thinking and formal logic to derive truth about things, then applies those axiomatic truths to make grander theories. They don't really care about the history of philosophy.

Continental does not rely on axioms and formal logic to solve their problems, but rather looks at reality holistically through a human lens, so to speak; their theories are based on culture, politics, history, psychology, sociology -- anything we can observe about humans as humans.

Coincidentally, I am reading a book called "A Guide to the Good Life" by William B. Irvine. It's a book on using Stoicism as a philosophy of life. Hours after I posted this thread, I found this passage, and it seemed to clarify everything that has been said in this thread so far regarding the Analytical vs Continental schools:

"One reason philosophers lost interest in Stoicism [post-19th century] was their insight, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that many traditional philosophical puzzles arise because of our sloppy use of language. From this it followed that anyone wishing to solve philosophical puzzles should do so not by observing humanity (as the Stoics were likely to do) but by thinking very carefully about language and how we use it...

If you had gone to Epictetus and said, "I want to live a good life. What should I do?" he would have had an answer for you: "Live in accordance with nature." He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this. If, by way of contrast, you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded... "The answer to your question depends on what you mean by 'a good' and 'life.'" He might then walk you through all the things you could conceivably mean in asking how to live a good life and explain why each of these meanings is logically muddled." (p. 222)

>Face it, continentals have accomplished nothing.

Define "accomplished."

Define "nothing."

What is the name of the book?

>fellas, you know that an analytic be fuckin like a white boi
>but you KNOW them continentals be eatin the pussy
>look at my man over there
>he laughin cause he KNOW

Even the importance of defining your terms is an analytic tradition, you absolute pleb.

No shit, Sherlock. That was the point of the post. Still doesn't negate the fact that I want you to define those terms.

Get a dictionary and learn the english language.

Define "define".

Great argument.

Define - In the case that user attempts to troll, tell them to go fuck themselves.

Fuck yoself

Funny, if the Analytics are the heirs to Plato, then why did it take them so long to figure out that they know nothim?

Define "in"
Define "the"
Define "case"
Define "that"
Define "user"
Define "attempts"
Define "to"
Define "troll"
Define "tell"
Define "them"
Define "go"
Define "fuck"
Define "themselves"
Define "yoself"

how dare you

Analytics...the map is not the territory.

>Comparing them

Stop it.

>For this purpose it may sometimes seem "detached" because there is little mention of ethics
Weren't most of last century's major ethicists analytics?

Every major philosopher of the last century was analytic.

>people are trying to argue which is 'better'

Even people I talk to now are trying to assert that philosophy is objective. Philosophy is a means for you to better understand the world around you, then come to your own conclusions based on what others might have said, coupled with you're own thinking. You're a fucktard if you think philosophy is objective, or has right answers

Either the guy has studied philosophical history his entire life, or he copy-pasted abbreviated a paper that he very may well have written.

Looks like it could've been a masters thesis

>Also around the same time, or a little earlier, >Wittgenstein came along and, pretty much sui generis and just by ponderin' stuff and being autistic
>Meanwhile, analytics look at continentals and think "What the fuck does 'the death of man' mean?"

Somehow I doubt it was his thesis.

thats why i said he abbreviated it. I just assumed that based on the sheer amount of content it covers, and the amount of research that would've had to go into that.

Assuming its all correct

If I had my way yudkoqaki NIGGER WOULD BE SHOT.

The easiest way to characterize them is that analytic philosophy is the sort that's done in the English language, and continental philosophy is the sort that's done in French and German. For the most part, the philosophers working in each tradition don't engage with the philosophers working in the other tradition. Because of this, you can't really cash out the differences in terms of answers to specific philosophical problems, or in terms of overall philosophical projects (like you could with empiricism and rationalism, for instance). It's safer just to say that although they share a common root, ever since WWII, the two traditions have diverged from one another to the point where the philosophers working in each tradition simply don't pay much attention to the work being done in the other tradition.

some do but not many

paul ricoeur was into analytic things

Give us the name of the book fags.

In image format, for the convenience of the Veeky Forums poster and archivist.

Thanks. I was just croping the same thing haha...

pls reply

shit, it was not perfect, but now it is

you are deep and smart as fuck brother, tell me a bit about yourself.

luc.edu/philosophy/andrewcutrofellophd.shtml

Good thread guise, thanks to those who put effort in their posts.

thanks brother.

As someone with a master's in mathematics who actually specialised in logic and metamathematics ("philosophy"): you're a brainlet and have no idea what you're talking about. Stop opining on the matter.

>Principia Mathematica is great evidence that all of math can be reduced to logic
WRONG!
Retarded posts like this is why Veeky Forums can't stand Veeky Forumsards.

>Even the importance of defining your terms is an analytic tradition
No, this has been a central aspect of philosophy since Socrates.