Just a quick note here, to make a point that I think most people getting into the study of philosophy at university need to hear sooner rather than later:
You don’t need to take sides in an ‘Analytics versus Continentals’ (AvC) fight.
When I went through undergrad there was a strong ‘feeling in the air’ that one must choose to follow an analytic or continental path. There was, and still is, a fair bit of animosity between people who have chosen different paths. Here are some reasons why this game is not worth playing:
- Like that other great conflict of the late 20th century, AvC provides a near-endless supply of excuses for bad behaviour, whether purely intellectual or otherwise. “He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole”: this has (allegedly) been said of a pro-American 20thC dictator. More recently, and instructively, it was said of Donald Trump by a US Republican leader. It could just as easily be said of a philosopher loyal to one’s own tribe when the AvC mentality has currency.
- That first point is not merely about our fallible, tribal, human psychology. We need a set of values to identify good quality academic work, but important values get crowded-out when academics are busy preserving their discipline or sub-discipline from some perceived external threat. This drive for purity has historically been pursued at terrible cost to analytic philosophy, though that seems to have eased a bit now.
- That second point brings us back the Cold War analogy. One ‘side effect’ of such a conflict, which might be better characterised as the central but under-acknowledged effect, is that attempts at a ‘third way’ are either stamped out or co-opted. This might be the sensible political tactic, but is also the logical consequence of adopting a defensive set of intellectual values which seek to limit deviance. It is true that some of the goepolitical ‘third ways’ crushed during the late 20th century did not show much promise anyway, but it is worth noting that they did not fail of their own accord, and rather the binary that was left, and that still seems to infect the public imagination to this day, was very much an artificial construction. (Joel Katzav has done some really interesting work looking at how analytic philosophy did this to its smaller ‘rivals’ in the intellectual sphere of the late 20th century.)
- Finally: If you think someone is making a mistake, taking sides against them is not going to help them avoid it. Uniting against one camp or another just provides a reason for that camp to unite more in defence of itself. We need some common ground, or at least the appearance of common ground, for a productive conversation to take place, and for people to be able to change their stance whilst saving face.
I don’t say this as someone who is neutral, or agnostic, or unaffected by it all – I do think that some of what goes on in universities has a very weak claim to belonging there, and my own efforts to work across disciplinary boundaries have sometimes been frustrated by a widespread, mistaken, belief that being a ‘philosopher’ makes me a ‘post-modernist’ or ‘anti-scientific’ or something like that. I just write this to point out that the traditional ‘Analytics versus Continentals’ disputes are a win-win game for all of the wrong ideas, and are exactly not the way to promote good philosophy or to cement a role for philosophers in the future of universities.
Happily, the recent demand for more representation of traditions from outside of Western Europe makes it harder for people to appeal to the binary anyway. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate consequences of this are, but I am optimistic.
Photo by Дмитрий Резван (Dmitriy Rezvan), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The ArachneanMetaxion Point 
