Can someone explain the continential vs analytical split for me?

What are the basics of each group? Their history? Their ideas? Why are they in conflict if at all?

Also post maymays on the subject

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Essentially if math and natural science can be applied to philosophy or not.

Protip: it can't gödel

Which one purports that?

You're asking an extremely broad question, but in a nutshell the split in Analytic philosophy is more or less considered to be a direct consequence of how Kant left philosophy and what post-Kantian philosophy turned into.

On the one hand, following Kant was a tradition of German Idealism that was taken up by Hegel, whose interpretations of Kantian philosophy called for a philosophy that combined the rationality of philosophy with the sensuousness and wider appeal of poetry. Hegel's interpretation of Kant was revolutionary for doing what no one since the Greeks had dared to do: To attempt at an understanding of the Whole, through historical idealism. Hegel's introduction of history into the framework of post-Kantian philosophy is probably the biggest point of divergence between the two. For Kant, everything is more or less static; for Hegel, metaphysics develops for us, for Spirit, historically and is ultimately proceeding towards Absolute Spirit, absolute self-knowledge. This and the tradition of political awareness started by Hegel would later be taken up by Marx and the other Young Hegelians, who interpreted Hegel from a revolutionary socialist standpoint.

Schopenhauer, Hegel's contemporary, went in the opposite direction of Hegel in a sense (and was rather anti-Hegel for disappointly superficial reasons) by interpreting and criticizing Kant on a variety of points. I think the biggest one is that, again, Kant's philosophy is very static, while Schopenhauer placed great emphasis on the nature of subjectivity. His analysis of human psychology lead him towards philosophical pessimism, unsurprisingly IMO. I would say that Schopenhauer's Marx is Nietzsche, roughly speaking, who took great influence from Schopenhauer but also radicalized him by asserting that the passive nihilism of Schopenhauer is not merely where subjectivity ends. Humans don't passively will endlessly for things, but rather are active agents who assert their will to power over the world and create their own values. Nietzsche extends this politically to a critique of Christianity and most European values and politics.

Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche are pretty much the foundational figures of Continental philosophy, but Continental philosophy itself begins with Phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and Existentialism (Sartre and De Beauvoir, with Heidegger being the link between Phenomenology and Existentialism), though both contained elements of each other. As shit as Sartre is, he was highly influential on future Continental philosophers, especially Foucault, who is probably the main figure of the following movement in Continental philosophy: Post-structuralism.

This is of course a huge oversimplification of the history of Continental philosophy, but that more or less covers it.

Analytic philosophy is a whole different, and much less interesting story - much like their philosophy.

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To simplify quite a bit, the split has become apparent during the 20th century, though it can be traced back to the immediately post-Kantian period (with Kant himself often depicted as straddling the two).

Analytic philosophy refers to a style of doing philosophy characteristic of the contemporary British empiricists, like G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, with an emphasis on argument, logical analysis, and language, and it is what one finds practiced in many (though by no means all) philosophy departments in the United States and the UK.

Continental philosophy—the name deriving from the fact that its leading figures have been German or French thinkers—is seen as a more discursive, even polemical, way of doing philosophy, often characterized by not exactly an extremely transparent way of exposing one’s ideas, and more concerned with social issues than its analytic counterpart. Continental philosophy typically holds that human agency can change these conditions of possible experience, usually considering these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins.

If I have made one side seem more superior than the other than I have not done them justice. Instead of taking my word for it…read a book.

So basically one more reason why I should read and study Kant.very interesting, thank you for the detailed response.

Where do the analytical philosophers gets their ideas from? What happened to the Max/Nietzsche split?

Analytic philosophy, to my knowledge, formed as a reaction against Kant that took up his continued reliance on Empiricism and ran with it.

Analytic philosophy comes out of Positivism, which came out of a tradition of British philosophy that I know absolutely nothing about because it's basically entirely irrelevant like most of British philosophy except for Hume, Adam Smith and Locke's political philosophy. It started with Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead, the latter of whom's correspondences with the logician Gottlob Frege basically gave birth to modern Analytic philosophy.

Armed with predicate logic and a very British empiricism and love of "common sense" philosophy that eschewed the 2hard2read philosophy of Hegelianism, Analytic philosophy thenceforth is basically a bunch of British and American philosophers who placed great emphasis on using formal logic and science and mathematics - and especially linguistics - to solve puzzles that they believed encapsulated timeless, ahistorical problems in philosophy. If they could solve these problems, they believed that they would "solve" philosophy and provide a basis for science to be done; philosophy could pack up its shit and be done with it after having cleared the way for science to do stuff.

A significant part of the Analytic project involved cashing out mathematics and language in logic. But as this user has already noted the Analytics have been destroyed by Godel for the most part, and modern developments in linguistics have left them more or less philosophically bankrupt.

I'm not even exaggerating or being biased when I say that a significant amount of the lasting relevance of Analytic philosophy has to do purely with the fact that there just happens to be Analytics who hold prominent positions in universities in the US and UK. That's literally it.

So basically one more reason why I should read and study Kant.very interesting, thank you for the detailed response.

Where do the analytical philosophers gets their ideas from? What happened to the Max/Nietzsche split?

see

The Marx-Nietzsche split is kind of hard to talk about, because Nietzsche has often existed alongside Marx but with conditions.

Nietzsche has had a rather unusual history in philosophy, kind of like Stirner except without being as criminally ignored as much. Nietzsche's popularity after his lifetime was such that German soldiers in WWI were given copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra basically as standard-issue, if I recall correctly. But his undue association with the Nazis and anti-semitism - thanks to his bitch sister and the Nazis' ability to inject their ideology into pretty much anything like all reactionaries have always done - sullied his reputation quite a bit, though he was also a big influence on Heidegger, who is probably the most important Continental philosopher of the 20th century. He also greatly influenced Existentialism, but it died out in the 50's thanks to Sartre.

Deleuze and Foucault were also hugely influenced by Nietzsche, but Foucault was still a Marxist to my knowledge.

I think that the political potential of Nietzsche has yet to be realized because Marxism has dominated Continental philosophy for a long time now. Nietzsche has existed alongside him as long as he didn't pollute Continental philosophy's precious Marxism.

So basically sensory information, history, psychology and social conditions

Vs

Logic, maths, british political science and strict empiricism.

Interesting, what have we discovered in language that makes the analyticals incorrect? (I guess I could just read Gödel)

Does anyone else notice Analytic phil has origins in the rise of the bourgeois thought from the British empiricists and that the fact Analytic philosophy is the most popular in the centres of capitalism, most analytic philosophers are liberals or conservatives too.

What's annoyed me is that no one has written a whole history of western philosophy with a historical materialist framework from the greeks to today.

That's a shame, id like to see Nietzsche developed more. Would you say all the people that you've mentioned count as continentals?

Perhaps there is a fundamental split in economics along those lines. I wonder why, although j guess most people here havnt read into analytical philosophy very closely

Question for the whole board, were does old man Chomsky fit into this?

I haven't studied very much linguistics, but as I understand it, it comes down basically to: We've discovered that humans ain't fuckin logical.

At least, certainly the "logic" of the meta-language - if such a thing exists - is far beyond anything that Russel and Frege were capable of imagining.


Unless specified otherwise, everyone I've mentioned is a Continental.

"Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Nietzsche and accept that his genealogical method was the most highly-evolved theory the continent has ever known, even greater than Hegel's dialectics!"

At this moment, a brave, rational, positivist analytic philosopher who had read more than 15000 pages of Popper and Wittgenstein and understood the raison d'être of empiricism and fully supported all modern hard sciences stood up and held up the constitution.

”How universal is this text, frenchfag?"

The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied "It's not universal at all, fucking positivist, its 'truth' is rooted in our shared understandings about culture, the subject and the nexus of power and knowledge"

"Wrong. It’s been 225 years since human reason created it. If it was not universal, and post-modern relativism, as you say, is real… then it should be regarded as a myth now"

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of On Grammatology. He stormed out of the room crying those ironic post-modern crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Michel Foucault, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an AIDS ridden sadomasochist interested in fisting. He wished so much that he had some kind of truth to hold on to, but he himself had written to disprove it!

The students applauded and all rolled into American universities that day and accepted Wittgenstein as the end of philosophy. An eagle named "Formal logic" flew into the room and perched atop the copy of "Principa Mathematica" and shed a tear on the hardcover. The last sentence of "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was read several times, and Karl Popper himself showed up and demonstrated how dialectics is nothing but a means of justifying contradictions.

The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of the gay plague AIDS and his "books" were disregarded for all eternity.

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Damn cultural Marxism!

Like you don't know

No, he never really was nor claimed to be. Then he joined the neoliberal/third way "revolutions have failed" crowd together with Baudrillard and a few other May 68s.

We literally didn't even touch Hegel nor Feurbach, and Nietzche was barely mentioned. What the fuck? If anything, the study of religiosity is where continental philosophy should be at it's strongest.


Chomsky is an analytic.

can someone explain these concepts to me?
I'm actually trying to read hegel right now and all his talk of the absolute stumps me.
Is it kind of like spinoza's god?

It's self-determination.

Absolute Spirit is self-determining society. Absolute knowing is the knowing of the many ways we have known, and how we have come to know about knowing.

I don't think this is fair to say.

Foucault is pretty based in that essay.

'This is inseparable from another principle: the power that one man exerts over another is always perilous. I am not saying that power, by nature, is evil; I am saying that power, with its mechanisms, is infinite (which does not mean that it is omnipotent, quite the contrary). The rules that exist to limit it can never be stringent enough; the universal principles for dispossessing it of all the occasions it seizes are never sufficiently rigorous. Against power one must always set inviolable laws and unrestricted rights.'

toilets and pol pot

So is that why Marxists and others place a great emphasis on how we can CREATE societies for our benefit rather just accept them as is?

He was probably just cynical. After all, we more than anyone know how annoying college "revolutionaries" and lgbt "activists" (the two kind of people Foucault is probably most familiar with) can be. That doesn't necessarily mean he disagrees with Marx's economic theories or the other continental philosophers. Even though he could talk mad shit

Does Ayn Rand count as an analytic or continental philosopher?

I'd bet she's neither. She's more of a sophist.

Wants to be analytic, but even they won't have her

She tries to be both. She fails.

Oh, God, I just looked up more on Ayn Rand, and:

"In the history of philosophy, I only recommend the three A's: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand."

She said this about herself. She actually hated almost every philosopher besides herself.

The whole point of that statement is "THINGS ARE THINGS"

No shit, Sherlock.

Which she then goes on to explain that "measurements" in the empirical sense are completely rational and not relativistic at all. As if you could know what 1 inch was without a relation to all other inches.

Good intro to Hegel:
youtube.com/watch?v=m6sG1nw0m_w

Also, the A.V. Miller translation has a common sense analysis of the text at the end of the book. Check it out.

Repost for no autocorrections

Ayn Rand critiques philosophers for the same things she espouses without being aware at all of her contradictions. The entire A=A thing is puerile pedantry that alt-rights think enable them to make half ass conjectures about reality and muh human nature, aka "telling it like it is"ism.

There are based analytics like Godel,Davidson and Wilfrid Sellars.

But then again, alaytics can't fucking grasp Hegel. At least continentals have an actual dialogue about what can be applied by German Idealism into modern philosophy, and most discussions are by large questions regarding Kant and his contemporaries.

Analytics just went "nope, lets just merge logic and linguistics and everything will be solved with our pseudo-scientific method". They didn't even stop and take a look at Hegels works on logic, and considered everything he wrote as metaphysical claptrap. I think it was the negatve influence of Wittgenstein and Quine that turned modern analytic philosophy into the autistic language idealism, it is today.

Ayn Rand is to philosophy what perpetuum mobile fags are to science.

gödel's first incompleteness theorem basically means that there is no nice way to define a 'perfect' system of mathematics: there will always be a theorem you can't prove, as neither it nor its negation contradicts your system.
effectively this means the only way to answer such questions (if you believe they actually have an answer! gödel did, as do most modern mathematicians) is by philosophy, and thus philosophy is the heart of mathematics and not the reverse.

I'm a continentalfag as well but OP you should just look into the fields yourself, this board is clearly too biased to give a fair representation of both sides (and I doubt many of the posters ITT know anything about the analytic field outside of wiki articles).

Look up Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein.

The sort of Logical Positivism most of the posters ITT are accusing the analytics of hasn't existed for decades.

Based on what I've read on this thread I made pic related
How wrong am I?

It basically boils down to scientism vs humanism.

Both are full of shit. The difference is that the continentals admit it.