In Our Time - The Continental-Analytic Split

Episode Date: November 10, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Continental-Analytic split in Western philosophy. Around the beginning of the last century, philosophy began to go down two separate paths, as thinkers from Continental Europe explored the legacy of figures including Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, while those educated in the English-speaking world tended to look to more analytically-inclined philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. But the divide between these two schools of thought is not clear cut, and many philosophers even question whether the term 'Continental' is accurate or useful.The Analytic school favours a logical, scientific approach, in contrast to the Continental emphasis on the importance of time and place. But what are the origins of this split and is it possible that contemporary philosophers can bridge the gap between the two? With:Stephen MulhallProfessor of Philosophy at New College, University of OxfordBeatrice Han-PileProfessor of Philosophy at the University of EssexHans Johann-Glock Professor of Philosophy at the University of ZurichProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, about 100 years ago, the discipline of philosophy seemed split into two main camps. One is known today as the Analytic School,

the other as the Continental. The founders of the analytic tradition, who included Bertrand Drussel and Ludwig Wittgenstein, believed it should be as impersonal and exact as the sciences. For them it was logic and language, rather than human experience, who would answer the important questions. Continental philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, rejected this approach,

and commonly they were not just using different methods, but asking different questions. For much of the last century, philosophers have been categorised as either analytic or continental, and there have been some bitter exchanges between the two camps. But what are the differences between them? How deeper divide really exists, and could the two traditions ever really exist,

two traditions ever reunite. With me to discuss the continental analytic split, Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy at New College, University of Oxford, Beatrice Han Han Pyle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, and Hans-Johann Glock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. Stephen Mulhole, let's start with the analytic tradition. When did it begin and who were its founding figures? It began in the early decades of the 20th century in Cambridge, when Bertrand Russell and Ludwiggenstein put to very creative philosophical use a revolution in logic that was in effect brought about by the work of Gottlob Frege, a German.

And it really was a revolutionary development in logic. The tools that Frege came up with allowed logicians to clarify and provide a sort of formal presentation of much more complex forms of reasoning and much more of the internal logical complexity of the propositions that we use in reasoning. Can you give us a taste of what that was? Well, for a long time before Fregeur, logic was built around a basically sort of Aristotelian model where subject-predicate structure,

which was very close to the ordinary surface grammar of language, was taken to be the main model for logical structure. What Frege did was use some concept, that he took primarily from mathematics, a distinction between function and argument, which has a specifically mathematical significance when one's interested in numbers. And then he generalized the notion of a function,

and used that to represent predicate structure in ordinary propositions. And what that allowed him to do was to capture forms of reasoning and forms of structure in propositions, particularly ways in which we use general ideas, ideas of generality, in a way that wasn't possible with the resources of Aristotelian logic. So where did Russell and Gittgenstein and others, but let's stick with them

because otherwise we'll get too cluttered up with names. Where did they take it? What they did with it was apply it to specifically philosophical problems. Frege's primary concern was a project of his to try and reduce mathematical propositions to logic. Russell was also interested in that, but he had a much more general eye for philosophical. philosophical problems. And what he used the resources of Phrygian logic to do was to show that

many of the problems that philosophers had grappled with for a very long time were generated by the surface appearance of propositions in ordinary language, where, for example, one has expressions in ordinary sentences which look as if they're working in the way names do, picking out objects in the world. Well, the classical example that Russell used was of the following proposition. The present king of France is bald. The problem with that sentence is that the present king of France looks like it's a name. It picks out an object in the world. And of course, there is no object in the world corresponding to that name. So that created a problem about how one understands the meaning of the sentence. You mean because there wasn't a king of France? Yes, that's right. Yeah. The question is,

how do you give meaning to names? How are they supposed to be functioning if there's nothing in the world corresponding to them. And what the resources of Frigian logic allowed Russell to do is to show that there's a way of presenting the structure of that proposition, which removes the appearance that there's a referring expression in

the proposition. In the mid-30s to park Cambridge for a moment, the logical positivists arrived, they'd arrived already, but I'd please excuse my simplicity, right? That can be the motto for this programme. There's a group called the logical positivist

in Austria. Can you briefly tell us how they took up or developed the analytic case? They took up the analytic case not so much through Russell's work but through Ludwig Wittgenstein's work because the kind of final stage of that early first phase

in analytical philosophy is really centred around Wittgenstein's first book the tractatus logico-philosophicus where he radicalized some of the ideas that Russell and Frege brought to bear and gave a particular kind of story about the different ways

in which different kinds of propositions function. And in particular, he made two claims. One was that the propositions of logic were tautologies, by which he meant that they were kind of degenerate cases of genuine propositions. I mean, if I say it's raining, then I make a claim about the world

that might be true or might be false. Look through the window and you'll see which it is. But if I say either it's raining or it's not raining, I'm not telling you anything about the weather. That's a tautology. That's the kind of proposition that Wittgenstein was interested in clarifying.

So he makes this claim, which is a very original claim at that point, that we have to think about the propositions of logic as tautologies or contradictions. The other important idea that the Inner Circle developed was the claim he made about metaphysical and philosophical propositions. His argument in the tractatus, was that they were nonsensical, that they weren't genuinely significant propositions at all, and hence the problems of philosophy, which are supposed to find expression in metaphysical propositions,

were not genuine problems at all, that they would disappear when the logical structure of propositions was properly clarified. And that was the key idea that the Inner Circle picked up. Thank you very much. Beatrice Han Pahl, we've had some introduction to analytic philosophy. Can you give us a similar survey of the continental tradition? Is that possible? I know it's come from different reaches, and I know you said that when you came to this country in 1997, is it? It was the first time you'd heard the phrase,

but still can we just for the purposes of this programme talk about continental philosophy? It's been recognised in the work of coleroy, so the phrase has got a bit of a history. Yes, well, early proponents of continental philosophy would be people like Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Marx, and for the 19th century and Husserl, for the earlier, early part of the 20th century, and then people like Haidegro, like Sartre,

and later on post-structurist thinkers like Derrida, like Foucault, like Deleuze and so forth. So it's a very, very wide tradition, or well, if it can be called a tradition, because one important thing to note, I think, is that the people I mentioned, for Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. None of them thought that they were doing continental philosophy, because continental is a term that was used roughly in the 1950s by analytic philosophers to refer to the sort of philosophy they didn't want. So there is something very retrospective about talking about continental philosophy in general.

And precisely for that reason, it's very, very difficult to give a unified definition because there never was a continental program, so to speak, or a continental idea of philosophy that people would have rallied to and they would have tried to develop around it. So if I try to give a very wide characterization, but you know, anything I say, somebody could point to someone and say, look, that doesn't apply to that person. So it's a real minefield.

So it's more of individuals than a school, whereas the analytical philosophers became in Austria a school and there were a group at least in this country. Yes, I think that's fair to say. But quite often people tend to say that one of the distinctive features of at least some continental philosophers is that they're interested in what Chopin Haar called the problem of existence. And what this is trying to capture is the core intuition

that it's very hard to be a human being and at least for two reasons. One is that we're finite, so we're born, we're born, we do, die. We're faced with suffering, with loss, all these things. So we're faced with constraints which are inescapable and which are perceived as painful. And the other is that we're aware of this, which of course makes things worse. So it's this combination between finitude and self-awareness or awareness of finitude that gives rise to questions which simply do not arise for other animals such as what's the meaning of life, you know, why is their suffering, why is beauty

important, what sort of person should I be, all these questions which can be roughly gathered under the umbrella of existential. And many continental philosophers were interested in these. And to say that they were existential, they are existential, one way to cash this out is to say, well, it's not the sort of question that are best looked at from a detached third person point of view, as if the problem of existence was something like a mathematical problem. The thought is that if you understand the problem of existence in a theoretical way, you've already somehow failed to understand it. You have to feel this first person involvement with it,

which is certainly true of people like Chopin Haan Nietzsche and so forth. So in relation to that brings me to the methods, and here it's even worse. But I'll try and pick out maybe three aspects. one is that generally continental philosophy is harmonetic in approach and contextualists. So the thought is that the primary job of a philosopher is to understand a problem rather than dissolving it through logical analysis, for example, or providing causal explanations to it. And to understand the problem means to look at its various aspects, its ramifications, its historical. conditions and take all that into account in the sort of answer you're trying to give. So just to give a very brief example, when Nietzsche asked the question of, you know, the meaning

of life, he didn't do that in a timeless perennial fashion. He linked that to a very specific phenomenon, the rise of nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values, a place, Germany, a time, at the end of the 18th century. And the sort of solution he tried to find for it was incorporating. all these factors. So hominetic, contextualist, possibly a second common feature is the rejection

of the thought that the methods of the natural sciences are the most appropriate to settle existential issues. And here, the thought is certainly not that the sciences are wrong or that they're useless or anything like that, but it's more that

although they may help, existential issues are not settled by empirical facts. And so I'll give you another example. If you try to understand what anxiety is or depression, well, it may help to know facts about the neurophysiology of the brain, and in particular it may explain why some people are depressed if they have a serotonin imbalance, for example.

But what it won't tell you is what it feels like to be depressed or what it means to the depressed person that they are depressed and so forth. And these are the sort of issues that continental philosophers at least some of them would try to understand. And one final common aspect, if one can talk about these things, I think it's fair to say that most continental philosophies are also, to some extent, social critics. And it's easy to understand.

If you're going to ask questions such as, why is their suffering or and so forth, well, you're bound to look at societal conditions that either emphasize or decrease the phenomenon. And if you happen to find, like Nietzsche did, for example, that we live in a society that makes certain existential issues worse, then in the way you analyze the problem and the answers you try to make, you will come up with a criticism of certain aspects of societal life

and suggestions for improvement. Well, thank you very much. Having started with such a disclaimer, but my heart sank you ended with this wonderful portrait. So we know where we are. Hans Johann Glock. Now, do you want to take that on?

Do you want to talk a bit more about the continental philosophy? Why, and the analytic, can we talk about why they were at each other? Why they didn't say, well, you go your way, I'll go mine? Well, the first thing to mention is that while the label analytic philosophy is accurate, at least for the early members of the tradition who all try to analyze statements or concepts, the label continental philosophy is a complete misnomer. And the most important point here is that

many of the pioneers of analytic philosophy, the movement with which continental philosophy is supposed to contrast, came from the continent of Europe. In fact, the label analytic philosophy was first used by American philosophers in the 1930s to refer to a phenomenon that they regarded explicitly as European. Now, most analytic philosophers were driven out by fascism from the continent of Europe. And they went to here or to America.

Exactly. And the label continental philosophy then came up in the 1950s used by British philosophers. they still regarded themselves as European, believe it or not, but they realized that what they were doing was very different from current movements in France and Germany, and therefore they hit upon the label Continental philosophy to refer to the movements they disliked very intensely. So we can start there.

At least we've got your grip on it, is that they did use the term, and it was about movement status like. It's not a bad thing. starting point if you're defining another movement to take the one you dislike to define yourself against, is it? Well, I mean, as I said, the label is a misnomer.

It was not universally used as a term of abuse. In fact, the label was institutionalized ironically enough in the 1960s in North America by people who were craving continental philosophy in inverted commas. There was a

clamoring for courses on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadama. Derrida and often these courses included continental in their names and so from a term of abuse it had been turned into the label of a recognised academic field well I'm enjoying this but I don't think we're taking the argument forward very much

there is a distinction made in the papers that I've read from all three of you in the bits I've read about it that somewhere other there is a distinction here that we can talk about Now, can you just describe, from your point of view, what the may, if, I'm not talking about which nation, it doesn't seem to be less a national thing than an individual thing, the Austrians move to America, that for the Americans, and all that's fine. But what are the distinctions that matter? If there are any, if there aren't, we can. I would certainly think there are distinctions that matter. I think in terms of philosophical views, whether or not you can solve problems by way of natural science, there isn't a clear cut. distinction because many analytic philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, were very hostile to the idea that philosophical problems could be solved by natural science. But I do think there are differences in terms of method. So, for instance, I would say that it's analytic philosophers

who try to get clear about questions and problems by clarifying the concepts which occur in these questions. So more, for instance, he thought that before you can worry about, what the good life or a good action is, you have to get clear about what action means, the term. And they also try to get clear about what arguments are valid and what arguments are invalid. So there is a greater emphasis on logical rigor, I reckon, and on clarity of exposition.

I think whatever you say, the most analytic philosophers write in a style which I personally find much more digestible than continental philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida. So to put it bluntly, you know, there is a difference in the way of going about philosophy and, you know, that I think is the point at which there is a notable contrast. It's not universal, you can't generalize it. Some of Wittgenstein's writings are as obscure as anything.

Some of Nietzsche's writings are very clear. But on the whole, I would say the premium on clarity of exposition and on logical rigor characterizes the analytic movement. And you can't do a similar characterization for the continental. You think it's too widespread vapor? I have my own take on this, but I am liable to be contradicted violently. I think one problem is that the continental tradition, as I see it, includes at least two. initially very different strands. On the one hand, you have the Hegelians and the Marxists

who set perhaps exaggerated hopes in the power of human reason to improve life for the better. And these exaggerated hopes are liable to be disappointed and to lead to pessimism and perhaps equally unwarranted rejection of the idea that reason can make our thoughts clearer and that it can improve our social conditions. So, you know, one title in which this is neatly summarized

is a book written by two German philosophers, Max Holkheimer, and Deodor Adorno, in the United States in 1947, called The Dialectics of Reason. And there, you know, they come from a Hegelian background, which thinks that reason will, you know, guides history, to a better end and they were completely disillusioned of this and then they fell for a more

hostile description of reason and enlightenment it's dialect of the enlightenment fine well we've got I think we've got quite a lot of the clarity and quite a lot of the confusion so there's plenty to go out let's say that there are these two different areas Stephen Mulhole

they're not clear cut there's overlapping it's individuals more than nations and so on but there are differences that I've got gathered from the way the three of you have spoken. And Hegel has been mentioned. Is he, as it were, seminal? Can we track back to him as a person out of whom flowed two different streams eventually? We certainly can.

I mean, one of the ways in which one can try to make some sort of sense of the development of these two labels and their sense of opposition is by tracing it back to different ways in which the project of Emmanuel Kant was inherited. that's particularly pertinent given the origins of analytic philosophy in Cambridge, as I mentioned earlier, because part of the immediate context that Russell was reacting against there was the dominance of Hegelian idealism in British philosophical circles. So Hegel does tend to be a sort of symptomatic figure. And what happened in Germany, very soon after Kant completed his critical project, was a whole series of critical engagements with his project,

which culminated in Hegel's project. And simplifying massively, Kant was trying to provide us with a way of legitimating the possibility of human knowledge, with establishing some kind of reliable connection between subjects and objects in the world, such that we could claim genuine knowledge of those objects. But the story he had to tell in order to guarantee the possibility of knowledge left him having to impose a whole series of dualisms or oppositions in his own system of thinking. Actually, they also involved divisions within both the subjects and the objects that he was talking about.

So he was led to posit the concept of a thing in itself that lay beyond any possible experience of objects. And he was also led to positive distinction within the subject between the empirical psychology of the subject and what he called a transcendental aspect of the subject, which was actively involved in constituting the world of our experience. And the German idealists, Fichter, Schelling, and then Hegel, were fundamentally concerned to try to overcome those dualisms, to find a way of telling a story about the development of human consciousness and spirit in such a way that the subject wasn't constrained or conditioned

by limits that they couldn't make any rational sense of. So what you got was a story about the subject, overcoming those oppositions, essentially through the process of history and the development of culture. So that's where you get at least one origin of the connection with social criticism or praxis that Beatrice was mentioning earlier, because now rationality is not just a capacity of the individual consciousness, it's something that finds expression in community life, in the way cultures develop and structure their existence, in the course of history. So it's a conception of the Enlightenment as a project which has a social, a fundamentally social dimension.

Coming back to Beatrice, Hanpile, is Nietzsche seen as another possible godfather to these movements? You mentioned him in your opening remarks. Yes, I did. Well, he's probably certainly one of the founding figures if there's such a thing. It's not a very good expression for the, say a reference point for the continental tradition. in relation to what Stephen was saying, I think that he was one of the first to really cast doubt about, you know,

Hegelian optimism about the possibility for freedom and reason to be realized through historical forms. And when he looked at the situation in Germany at his time, what he saw was very different. He saw, or at least he felt, he saw that the highest values were devaluing themselves, as he put it, and that the question why had no answer anymore. So that became...

Which is the end of the 19th century. That's right. And that became encapsulated in the very famous proclamation in the gay science that God is dead and we've killed him. And God here being a placeholder for these highest values that are losing their content. But more than a placeholder, because Nietzsche was also so nihilism as the consequence, the final consequence, if you like,

of the influence of Christianity in the West. So there is definitely a sense in which the rosy, Higelian, well, it's not all rosy, but some say optimistic aspects of the Higelian view are really brought back to have by Nietzsche, so to speak. Hans Eugen Glock, it enters politics strongly in the middle of the century. Mussolini was supposed to have admired Nietzsche so did Hitler. Heidegger was strongly associated with the Nazi regime.

And it was this obviously, not what you said earlier, the introduction of fascism in the 30s meant that a lot of people from Vienna went from Austria and other part of Germany to England and the United States of America. Was that political element inside the philosophy

or did it just happen that they were caught been a political ferrory? There was a political element to the thinking of many of the logical positivists. For instance, Neurat, one of the leading logical positivists, was an unorthodox but very committed Marxist.

Many of the other members of the Vienna circle were democratic socialists and pacifists. So, in my view, there is an explanation of why most Analytic philosophers were driven out of central Europe. Others were Jews and faced the prospect of being killed, somewhere killed. So there's an explanation to this geographic split, but I don't think that the divide between the two philosophical movements

is as such a political divide. For one thing, there are many currents in continental philosophy that are explicitly left-wing, Whereas others, I think, the philosophy of life of Nietzsche and Heidegger, lend Sucker to right-wing politics. But more than that, you know, although many of the proponents, politically committed proponents of analytic philosophy tended to be on the left, this is not a characteristic feature of, you know, analytic philosophy.

Stephen Mulholl. There was something interestingly paradoxical about the politics or ethics of the Vienna Circle. because on the one hand, as Hanu was saying, they conceived themselves explicitly as representatives of modernity. They founded, they had international congresses, they found an encyclopedia projects, they had a manifesto. And part of that manifesto was a certain kind of inheritance of the Enlightenment.

They took themselves to be trying to recover a certain set of values for modern culture with a certain ferocious irony given the coming political circumstances. but at the same time the content of their account of language was such that it removed any meaning from a evaluative discourse. It was a central part of the logical positivist story about language that only empirical discourse, discourse about the facts and primarily scientific discourse,

and the discourse of logic constituted genuinely significant uses of language. Beyond that, aesthetics, politics, morality, religion was meaningless. The core idea, as it was transported into the UK and America, was that of emotivism. The idea that moral discourse functions primarily as the expression of states of approval or disapproval, subjective feeling. So on the one hand, you have a kind of very substantial cultural and political manifesto that they wanted to implement. On the other hand, they tell a story about language in which, as it were, the vocabulary one needs to use to articulate such ideas is empty. Hans-Hion, you want to come in again, can briefly, because I want to go across to Beatrice. Well, I would agree with the fact that there are certain inconsistencies in the position of the Vienna Circle

to the extent that they couldn't provide a philosophical justification for their ethical and political stances. But there I'd have to say that this is not characteristic of analytic philosophy as such. After World War II, there were many positions. carefully developed within the analytic tradition that try to show precisely what parts of ethical questions we can resolve in a rational fashion by way of argument and what parts will just rest on fundamental convictions and attitudes and therefore you just have to agree to disagree on some fundamental assumptions.

Beatrice Handpile, a seminal text I'm told you in the continental religion is Heidegger's being and time first published in 1927. Why is that so important? People are still debating that now, but I think if I had to pick out one thing, I'd say that it's because that's the first time really that anyone proposed a phenomenology of the everyday, which reversed the traditional primacy of the theoretical or of a practical. So to give more content to this, traditionally philosophers have tended to focus on the obfutable. say ideal objects like Plato's forms or empirical objects like tables and chairs or conceptual objects. And they've asked all sorts of questions about these objects, you know, what their ontological status is, whether they're real, whether they're imaginary, what sort of properties they have and so forth.

And Heidegger's thought was that, yes, all these questions are very well worth pursuing. But the existence of a world of objects, so to speak, is predicated on a more primary layer of engaging. with the world, which is not reflective and which does not work through interaction with objects. To give you a very practical example, I got this microphone in front of me. That's a physical object, and without it, no one outside of this room could hear me. But until I said that, the microphone as a physical object was just not part of my world, because even though I was adjusting my position, my voice, et cetera, to suit it. but that's because my world is organized by my activity,

what I do in this case talking to you, trying to say things that make sense. And that's also what determines what is relevant and irrelevant in my environment. So not having competing noises is relevant, whether the light is good isn't relevant. So the thought is that prior, if you like, to this explicit engagement with objects,

we have this non-reflective, practical interaction with the world, and it's out of that, so to speak, that the world of object emerges. But the main task of phenomenology, certainly, is to try to describe and understand this primary engagement with the world. Stephen Mulhall, can I push in another direction slightly? One of the criticisms that's been levelled against analytic philosophy is that it's devoid of ethics and politics. I'm putting it strongly, but there you are.

Well, I think there are various ways in which that's just mistaken. I mean, first of all, the story I was telling about the Vienna Circle makes it clear just how politically and morally committed those philosophers were. Secondly, Hanya is absolutely right that in later stages of the development of the analytical tradition, one gets progressively more sophisticated accounts of the way in which ethical and political and aesthetic aspects of language and judgment function. So how are they not going into the continental tradition with that? How are they not sort of one circle intersecting with another circle here?

Well, this is really. is why the problem with the opposition will keep on recurring in this discussion. I mean, it's taken us a long time just to get even the basic elements of analytical philosophy as a relatively distinct school on the table. Continental philosophy is functioning as a term used by analytical philosophers to tell us what they're not. And there are so many different things that they're not. But we're not going to be able to capture that by saying, look, there's an interest in say ethics and politics in the continental traditions that is absent in analytical philosophy

because there's a lot of very good, sophisticated work being done on the analytic side, particularly nowadays, in the areas of politics and morality. But what might be worth saying about continental ways of engaging with these issues is that they very often are interested in what you might call the ethical or political dimensions of philosophy. not what philosophers say about ethics and politics,

but rather what the ethical or political significance of the things philosophers say about the world might be. So, for example, Nietzsche, just to go back to him for a moment, is one of those continental philosophers who is basically a very suspicious interpreter of the tradition of philosophy. He finds lots of ways in which the way philosophers talk about apparently abstract matters like epistemology,

pontology and so on, to be deeply informed by a system of values. He thinks, for example, it's not just that the modern world is deeply structured by Christian conceptions of the world when we think about morality and religion. He thinks that the way philosophy goes about its business is just as much informed by these systems of values, because philosophers tend to want to privilege the abstract and the a priori and the conceptual over the material and the material. physical. So you get a privileging of certain aspects of experience and reality. So if one were a suspicious Nietzschean interpreter of analytical philosophy, what one would tend to focus upon

is the fundamental idea that the resources of Phrygian logic are capable of clarifying the underlying structure of most of the significant aspects. Hansi Angl, before this drift or split, I don't quite know what to call it now, anyway, this division, if we can use as brutal a term as that, took place that existed what might be called traditional philosophy. Where did that stand with these two groups?

Well, I think traditional philosophy would be the great Western philosophical tradition from the pre-Socratics to roughly Kant. He is important because he is the last figure who is part of

the canon of both continental and analytic philosophy. and he's also important to a phenomenon which I've called traditionalist philosophy. It's a widely shared prejudice among Anglo-Americans that most academic philosophers working on the continent of Europe today are what they would call continental philosophers. But that's wrong. For one thing, analytic philosophy is probably now the single most important movement,

even on the continent. But on the other thing, most academic philosophers on the continent don't do, I don't know, Derridao or Deleuze. They are just studying texts and, you know, writing histories of philosophy. But I'll come to you in a moment, Beatty's, but can I go back to my original question? Where does traditional philosophy? You mentioned pre-Socratic decanter. We're talking about Plato, right through Descartes. Where does that fit it?

Well, you know, it is the starting point. I mean, I think the starting point for the split, if I were to put it brutally, is, Kant. I mean, Kant realized that the revolutionary developments of the natural sciences really put pressure on philosophy to legitimize its existence as a fundamental, autonomous

subject. And then there are three ways to go here. Perhaps not if you wave me off. No, I'm not waving me off. I'm just, not gesture which is meaningless. Sort of says, if you can do three ways briskly, that would be great.

We haven't got much time there. So, Kant thought that, you know, there was a way of showing that philosophy was a non-emperical discipline, which in some sense, you know, provides foundations to science and human experience. The second way is to go the way of naturalism, as it's called, and to insist that insofar as there is any respectable philosophy, it better be part of natural science. This is the view propounded by the American philosopher Quine in particular.

And a third option, which I would say, underlies a lot of continental philosophy, so called, is the idea that philosophy should give up its claim to be a strictly academic discipline, that it's more a contribution to bell letter and is in fact closer to poetry than to academic, discursive writing. And so there's a certain playfulness, and there's therefore a certain, freedom from, you know, perhaps the unduly strict standards of science and logic. It was worth waiting for. Thank you very much. Beatrice, notice Anne Pyle, you were going to come in there. Oh, right. Okay, well, I just wanted to emphasize one of the things that Hanyo said before,

namely that continental philosophy is not dominant on the continent, which may come as a surprise. That's just another case of, you know, the categorical mistake using a geographical category to refer to a type of philosophy. But indeed, when I came to this country in 1997, the first time I heard of the term was when my colleagues asked me where I stood on the continental analytic debate, and I'd managed to live 35 years in France without having ever to take us down on that debate. And if you look at French universities now,

there aren't that many in which you'll be able to study, say the second half of the 20th century continental. thinkers. So it really, there's so much that is mythical about the notion and it doesn't even have a home on the continent. So before this subject disappears

deep into the ocean, Stephen, can you tell us the state of it now? I mean, it seems that everybody is now, or most people are now trained in and pursuing what we could call analytic philosophy. I'm still not quite clear how it links up with Plato

and Descartes and so on, but still, I don't think this time for that? Well, okay, the state of plays that matters are a great deal more diverse than they were in the first half of the 20th century, so that the analytic philosophical tradition insofar as it still exists contains a much greater variety of projects, a much greater degree of internal criticism than it did. Pretty much by the 70s, we were talking about a relative breakdown of that school. On the continent, a variety of of traditions still exists, although the really major figures in those traditions have gone, have died, and it's much harder to come up with the names of philosophers who inherit those

traditions, who have the same kind of weight or significance as philosophers. And institutionally, it's much more common now than it used to be for British and American departments to have philosophers working on continental traditions amongst their number than it used to be. So in that sense, the situation is rather more pluralistic. But there still remains some pretty fundamental worries about differences of method, differences of style, and different conceptions of what the rigour of a philosophical investigation ought to look like.

For all the sort of, they're coming together and they're mixed up and so on, there have been some fairly strong attacks made, particularly on Continental Philosophy by the logical, by the analytical philosopher. They're very strong public attacks at conferences in papers, not publishing in the same paper, and so on and so forth. That is perfectly correct. I tend to think that the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy will lose its significance,

but mainly because analytic philosophy is losing its distinctive identity. I'm more skeptical that there will be a really fruitful synthesis of the two. And one reason for thinking that is that if you look at the classical clashes between analytic and continental philosopher, I think it's fair to say that they have led to greater divergence and greater disagreement than at the end than what they started out with. And that makes me somewhat skeptical that we are in line for a synthesis. I know, Beatrice, there isn't time. I'm very sorry.

We'll have to do another program clearly. But thank you for taking us through that. Thank you, Beatrice Han Pyle, Stephen Milhall, Hansian Glock. Next week we will be talking about Ptolemy and ancient astronomy. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas. To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.