Analytics, Continentals, and Modern Skepticism

The Monist 82 (2):189-217 (1999)
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Abstract

By now “continental” philosophy has long since ceased to be a geographical term; there are “continental” philosophers in the Midwestern United States. Likewise, “analytical” philosophy is now widely practiced in most areas where academic philosophy is practiced. Moreover, many of the old jabs at each side have lost much of their force. The idea of a pox on both their houses—that analytical philosophers are a bunch of small-minded logic choppers, and continental philosophers are a bunch of wooly minded gasbags—has long since failed to carry the punch it once did. What I want to suggest here is that they are both the same type of philosophy in one crucial, determining aspect: That one of the key experiences of modern philosophy, maybe even the great motivating experience of modern philosophy, is that of a certain type of skepticism, the idea that “we” both collectively and individually are prone to fool ourselves, be misled by conclusions that are attractive but unsupportable, or be misled even by our own experience and ways of thought to come to conclusions that turn out later to be insupportable. Certainly something like this underwrites the motivational power in those parts of contemporary philosophy that can be called “analytic” or are at least inspired by the analytical philosophers of the first two thirds of the twentieth century. Why else the careful attention to argument, the constant recasting of theses so that their implications can be better viewed, the deep ethos of attacking papers given by colleagues with a barrage of counter-examples, and of subjecting our colleagues to ruthless, sometimes unforgiving examination? What often seems perhaps petty to those more irritated than enlightened by analytic philosophy—that it is only tedious logic-chopping or “academic in the worst sense” niggling—is inspired by a brooding sense of skepticism, a sense that without such very intensely rigorous policing of our arguments and our explications, we are simply too prone to slide off into assertions that feel good, that may even seem to some of us like really very deep matters, but which, alas, may on closer inspection or in the light of later hindsight just turn out to be dreadfully false. Better to jump on the arguments now than to be embarrassed by them later.

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Terry Pinkard
Georgetown University

Citations of this work

14. Analytische Philosophie: Die andere Seite der Rhetorik.Jörg Volbers - 2017 - In Gerald Posselt & Andreas Hetzel, Handbuch Rhetorik Und Philosophie. De Gruyter. pp. 333-352.
Rival Versions of Objective Spirit.Mark Alznauer - 2016 - Hegel Bulletin 37 (2):209-231.
Language or Experience? – That’s not the Question.Jörg Volbers - 2014 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (2):175-199.
Wittgenstein, Dewey, and the Practical Foundation of Knowledge.Jörg Volbers - 2012 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4 (2).

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