Abstract

The opposition between analytical and continental philosophy has something in common with that other, more worldly and now obsolete opposition between East and West. The observer of politics quickly realizes that ‘East’ and ‘West’ are ideological rather than geographical terms. The West is free and prosperous and celebrates human rights and the American way; the East has been totalitarian, stagnant and oppressive. Japan and Australia are for most purposes in the West, Cuba in the East. Similar anomalies beset our more philosophical dichotomy. There are obvious difficulties in the path of any straightforwardly geographical interpretation. Frege played a seminal role in the development of analytical philosophy despite being German; so did the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein. On the other hand, there are obvious affinities between such British idealists as Bradley, Collingwood and Oakeshott and their colleagues across the Channel. Contemporary figures like Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor develop ‘continental’ themes in an idiom more congenial to analytical philosophy. Again, there are growing schools of analytical philosophy in France, Germany and elsewhere as well as recurrent waves of a neo‐Kantianism which, in its fundamental claims, is not so very different.