Philosophical arguments

One of my courses is compulsory. It is on philosophical skills and methods. It carries 20 European credits (=28 hour study load per EC) and runs over two semesters. Just to put things in perspective: the entire Research Master is 120 EC, so it is a substantial part. Because of that, I thought it would be something like the compulsory statistics in Experimental Psychology: long and heavy. But it is nothing of the sort. It teaches research master student necessarily life skills. It has taken me a while to find this out, but that really is what it does.

Apparently it is a huge problem to get funding to do a PhD, and fewer and fewer students get financed. So the university is stepping in to help their brightest to jump through the hoops of the funding process. The funding process is heavily regulated. Decisions about funding are no longer taken at university but at national or international level. As I have my one leg firmly rooted in the non-academic world, I cannot help but think how similar this looks to a commercial process. Particularly because to succeed, you need to learn to write a proposal, present it, navigate your way around rifts in Philosophia which might you prevent from being chosen, even do a two-minute pitch, oh horror of commercial inventions. Then there are the skills which every modern PhD researcher must master: the writing of reviews, popularising article (no, that is not a typing error) and articles according to exacting standards. Because articles get published in journals, and this works as a CV to which you add all your researching life.

I was oblivious to the above when I started the ReMa. It only sank in yesterday when in a private conversation I learned from the professor teaching the course how 21st century academic funding works. He expressed a great deal of worry about what he called “these kids”, the students of this course, his best and brightest. I suppose he is about my age. He told class about how he became a professor because he was asked to fill the position, as he ‘happened to be“ around, as he put it. Things would not work that way today.

This, then, is the reason I get to learn about current rifts in Philosophia. The conflict between the “analytics” and the “continentals”  was on in the second week: we had to read up on it and subsequently discuss it in class. Supposedly this is the rift that every philosopher had been talking about for the past 100 years. Well, not at Oxford, I can tell you. I had never heard of continental philosophy and was utterly amazed to hear about it. Now I have learned that there is a reason for that: When I was at Oxford, this was the home base of the analytic philosophers, and they ignored everybody else. Stiff British upper lip. Amazing.I had to write an assignment about this as a preparation for the class discussion. I will include it for your amusement. By now I have recovered from my amazement, and I am thinking this argument between philosophers is not much more than a pissing contest. But perhaps I will learn to rephrase that.

To my mind there is a connection there with Brexit which really got under the skin of the professor: that this analytic-continent divide is part of what is at the root of Brexit. During a break he even went to look up the plausibility of what I claim on the internet, he wanted to disagree with this so much. He was still referring to it in the weeks after.

Is there an unbridgeable gap between continental and analytic philosophy?

The controversy between continental and analytic philosophy started at the turn of the 20^th century. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell came up with a novel approach to Philosophy which emphasised the notion of “meaning” of terms and propositions in natural language. This linguistic conception of philosophy revolutionised not only British philosophy. It also threw a very large stone in the pond of traditional Western philosophy, the teachings of Kant and Hegel particularly.

Analytic philosophy developed in fits and starts. After the early days of proportional realism, Moore embraced common sense philosophy, whilst Russel and Wittgenstein came up with logical atomism.  Next came Ayer, another British philosopher who in collaboration with the Vienna Circle, developed  logical positivism. After the war, philosophers from Cambridge (Wittgenstein and Wisdom) and Oxford (Ryle, Austin, Strawson and Grice) invent ordinary-language analysis. In the 1960s, another shift: linguistic philosophy turns into the philosophy of language, then metaphysics and then yet another set of philosophical sub-disciplines. During its development, analytical philosophy found itself many new opponents: Husserl’s classical phenomenology and after, existentialism (Sartre, Camus), and postmodern philosophers (Heidegger, Foucault en Derrida).

Analytical philosophers may have changed their beliefs and direction several times, they do possess a unifying characteristic in having a very precise and thorough style. They are also willing to explore narrow topics, rather than the great scheme of things as continental philosophers are prone to. They undertook much philosophical work, particularly in the fields of language and mind, which may have been neglected otherwise. Hans-Johann Glock says: “analytic philosophy is a respectable science or skill; it uses specific techniques to tackle discrete problems with definite results.”

Clearly, a debt of gratitude is owed to analytical philosophy, but not without misgivings. There is something infuriating, about a group of philosophers claiming the exclusive right to “proper thinking” and denouncing the work of any opponent as sloppy and irrational.  The famous British stiff upper lip furthermore shows itself by ignoring the other side. From my personal experience as a philosophy student at Oxford in the 1980s, I can report that neither continental philosophy nor its philosophers were ever mentioned. What influence might this general disdain for ‘all things continental’ have exerted on those now sitting on the benches of the British House of Commons and debating Brexit?  Mostly educated at Oxford and Cambridge, they will have read classics, history or politics; courses which to this day contain an obligatory philosophy component.

How then, to mend the rift? Not by using the time-honoured instrument of philosophical debate. The famous clash between Derrida (continental) and Searle (analytic) may serve as an example. This ended with both parties denouncing each other without either party making an effort to establish common ground.

Indeed, what rift is there? As Bernard Williams points out, the distinction between continental (geographical) and analytical (methodological) is strange:  it is like dividing cars into “four-wheel-drive” and “made-in-Japan”. Let us have a Japanese four-wheel-drive. After a century of bandying hurts and insults, it is time to harvest achievements. To treat the gap that has engulfed both sides, not as philosophical in nature, but as psychological and historical in origin. If philosophers cannot set such an example, who can?