i keep thinking the analytic/continental split in philosophy just has to be over, but it just never seems to be. i do think the division is primarily not about ideas or philosophy, or about what is true, etc, or even about what truth is. it's primarily about institutional rivalries and the question of who gets what positions or who dominates what department. and then, i think it's a prose-style division, and among other things consists of rival jargons, each of which is impenetrable to people who know the other, and each of which irritates people who use the other in an extreme way. i have been caught in the absurd partisan political wars, for example at vanderbilt, where - honestly - i should have spent my career, and i think would have if the continental/analytic pissing match hadn't drenched me in urine. (well, that is simplistic. i also got pc-policed in a big way, which might not be surprising to readers of this blog: i'm always begging for it. you out there, julie klein? it's hard to know exactly why you didn't get the job, i suppose. maybe i sort of sucked or something, but i was teaching well and publishing articles in the journal of philosophy, etc.)
i have to say that i'm one of the few people i know who does both seriously, or does more than wave at a little slice on the other side. that was one great thing about rorty: he didn't do quine or heidegger as the quineans or heideggerians would have liked, but he did do both with everything he had and brought them together in the same articles and classrooms. he actually knew and was in serious interchange with both davidson and gadamer, e.g. oh plus he did american pragmatism: he didn't care what trad you came out of, what he cared about was whether he could use your ideas (i do hope to have other agendas, but maybe i don't). in entanglements i am completely indifferent to the distinction, and mix and match in the same paragraphs and discussions. this is not something i'm straining to do.
i do not think there is any difference of substance, though there are differences of methodology which could have substantive implications. even here, though, people on each side of have a crazily narrow view of the methods employed on the other; one symptom of the fact that they just do not read each other, like msnbc viewers can't even look at fox. like, the methods of carnap, austin, and timothy williamson: these are not the same method. or for that matter foucault and derrida, right? i propose that i could take any philosophical position and express it in either vocabulary.
continentals think that analytics are foundationalist, reductionist, scientistic, etc. they're not aware that the destroyers as well as the advocates of positions like that have been analytic philosophers. analysts think continentals are relativist, obscurantist charlatans. but calling foucault or heidegger a relativist is just ridiculous, whereas there are plenty of relativistic moments in analytic philosophy. i do think there are obscurantists in continental philosophy, but also many non-obscurantists groping for an adequate vocabulary. and the difficulty of the expression didn't make you not read frege or wittgenstein, did it?
but try getting either talking about the other and all they do is sneer, or sort of pretend not to sneer. i have tried to make the case many times to each for the other; no one listens; they just go back to their catch-phrases and derisive snickers. that is no damn way to be a philosopher, and i think people are more concerned with their little clique than with doing the best philosophy they can, or reading it.
perhaps someone has done a good sociology of the split? seems like the locus would be, say, moore/russell around 1900; their teachers were, by and large, hegelians like mctaggart and green, and they ripped that idealism to shreds (which it did deserve). they and their people quickly conquered oxbridge. after that we have two different lines of discourse and two professional paths, dominated irritatingly by analytics in the english-speaking world. (the analytics said the continentals were't doing philosophy at all, or even saying anything meaningful, and they tried to literally eliminate them from he academy. that will justifiably piss people off.) but maybe it is a distant echo of the empiricist/rationalist split? man russell or ayer did sound a lot like hume, and if you compared hume's prose style to spinoza's or kant's, you could understand a lot about the divergence. but then again you couldn't call saul kripke or david lewis an empiricist, or deleuze or baudrillard a rationalist. it'd be worth figuring out a long narrative though. maybe that would help wind this thing down.
