Analytic-Continental Split

thanks for downloading the nighttime podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk 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 Russell 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 to answer the important questions continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and there now and rejected this approach and commonly they were not just using different methods but asking different questions but much of the last century philosophers have been categorized as either analytic or continental and the mean some bitter exchanges between the two camps but what are the differences between them how deep a divide really exists and could the two traditions ever reunite with me to discuss the Continental analytic split a Stephen Mulhall professor of philosophy at New College University of Oxford matrix and pile professor philosophy at the University of Essex enhance your own block professor philosophy at the University of Zurich Stephen Mull ha let's start with at the analytic tradition when he did begin and who were his farming figures it began in the early decades of the 20th century in Cambridge when Bertrand Russell and the rubicon Stein put two very creative philosophical use a revolution in logic that was in effect brought about by the work I've got lobbed Frager the German and it really was a revolutionary development in logic the tools that Frager 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 a new recently give us a taste of what that well um for for a long time before Frager logic was built around a basically sort of our state alien 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 Fraga did was used some concepts 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 our Stettin Ian logic so when in Russell and grid consign 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 and 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 problems and what he used the resources of rügen 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 a 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 rügen logic allowed Russell to do was 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 the in the mid-30s to Park Cambridge for a moment the logical positivists arrived at arrive area but please excuse my simplicity right that that can be the motto for this program and there's a group called the logical positivists in Austria they can you briefly tell us how they took up or develop the analytic case they took up the analytic case not so much through Russell to work but through Ludwig Wittgenstein's work because the kind of final stage of that early first phase in analytical philosophy has is really centered around Vic and Stein's first book the Tractatus logico-philosophicus we're here addict alized some of the ideas that Russell and Frager 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 Vic and Stein 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 vienna circle are developed was the claim he made about metaphysical and philosophical propositions his argument in the Tractatus with it was that they were nonsensical that they weren't genuinely significant propositions at all and hence that 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 the vienna circle picked up thank you very much Beatrice hand pal we've had some introduction to an innate philosophy can you give us a similar survey the Continental tradition is that possible merits come from different reaches and I know you said when you came to this country in 1997 is it the first time you know the phrase but still can we just for the purposes of this program talk about continental philosophy was Tims been recognized in the work of Coleridge so it's got a the phrase has got a bit of a history uh yes well early proponents of continental philosophy would be people like Hegel Nietzsche Schopenhauer or Marx and for the 19th century and who self example for the earlier early part of a 20th century and then people like Heidegger like salt and later on post structuralist thinkers like there he done like fugu like Deleuze and so forth so it's it's a very very wide and tradition or well if it can be called a tradition because one in one important thing to note I think is that the people I mentioned before Hegel Nietzsche Schopenhauer etc none of them thought that we were doing continental philosophy because continental is a term that was used in profit in the 1950s by analytic philosophers to refer to a sort of philosophy they didn't want so there is something very read perspective about talking about an anniversary 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 an idea continental idea philosophy that people would have rallied to and they would have tried to develop around it so if I try to give a a very wide characterization but you know anybody any thing 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 well analytical philosophers became in Austria school and they were a group at least in this country and yes I think that's that's fair to say but quite often people tend to say that one of the distinctive features of at the some continental fuel cells is that very interested in one what Schopenhauer called the problem of existence and that 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 die we're faced with suffering we've lost all these things so we're faced with constraints which are inescapable and which are perceived as painful and the other is that we are aware of this which of course makes things worse so it is 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 suffering why is beauty important what sort of person should I be all these questions which can be roughly gathered under under the umbrella of existential and many continental philosopher interested in these and to save it than say that we were existential they are it's essential one way to cash miss out is to say well it's not a sort of question that our best looked at from a detached third person point of view as if a 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 Schopenhauer Nietzsche and so forth so in relation to that brings me to the methods and here it's it's even worse but I shall try and pick out maybe three aspects one is that generally continental philosophy is how menu taking approach so and contextual East so the thought is that the primary job of a philosopher is to understand a problem rather than sort of dissolving it through logical analysis for example or providing calls on 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 nudism for devaluation of the highest values a place Germany a time with a V&O v8s or even 19th century and a sort of solution he tried to find for it was incorporating all these factors so how many you take contextual mists possibly a second common feature is the rejection of a thought that the methods of a 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 move that over there 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 what may help to know facts about the neurophysiology of a 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 the continental forces at least some of them would try to understand and one final common aspect if you know one we can talk about these things I think it's fair to say that most continental forces are also to some extent social critics and it's easy to understand if you're gonna you know ask questions such as why is there suffering all and so forth well you're bound to look at societal conditions that either emphasize or decrease for phenomenon and if you happen to like Nietzsche did for example that we live in a society that makes certain existential issues worse then in the way you analyze a 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 well so we know we are that well Hans your hand lock now new do you want to take that on you want to talk a bit more about the the Continental there also why the analytic can we talk about why there were at each other why they didn't say will 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 when the most important point here is that many of the pioneers of analytic philosophy the movement with which continental philosophies 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 you know most analytic philosophers were driven out by fascism from the continent of Europe and remembering to here or to America exactly and you know 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 you know they realized that you know what they were doing was very different from current movements in France and Germany and therefore they hit upon the label continental philosophy to you know refer to the movements they disliked very intensely so we can start the at least we've got we've got your great unit is that they did use a term is about movement status like it's not a bad 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 you know Nietzsche Heidegger Sartre gaddama Derrida and often these courses included with you know continental in their names and so from a term of abuse it had been turned into you know the label of a recognized 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'm read about it but 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 on my which in a she doesn't it seems to be less a national thing than an individual thing the Austrians move to America therefore the Americans then read all that's fine what are the distinctions that matter if there are any there aren't we can I would certainly think there are distinctions that matter I think in terms of philosophical views you know whether or not you can solve problems by way of Natural Science there isn't a clear-cut distinction because many analytic philosophers notably Vidkun Stein 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 saw 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 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 then 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 it concerns writings eyes obscure as anything some of Nietzsche's writings are very clear but on the whole it's 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 - well I write I have my own take on this but I'm you know 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 Hague aliens and the Marxists who said perhaps exaggerated hopes in the power of human reason to improve life for the better and you know these exaggerated hopes are liable to be disappointed and to leads to pessimism and perhaps equally unwarranted rejection of the idea that reason can you know make our thoughts clearer and that it can improve our social conditions so you know one one title in which this is neatly summarized is a book written by two German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the United States in 1947 called the dialect dialectics of reason and they are no they come from a he galleon back which thinks that reason will move guides history to a better end and they were completely disillusioned of this and then they fell for a more hostile a description of reason and enlightenment that its dialect over the Enlightenment infant fine well we've got I think we've got quite a lot of the clarity and quite a little the confusion so there's plenty to go out and let's say that there are these two different areas Steven model 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 Hagel has been mentioned is he as it were Seminole I dizzy 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 two different ways in which the project of Immanuel 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 Hagane Ian 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 had to tell in order to guarantee the possibility of knowledge left him having to impose a whole series of dualisms or opposition's in his own system of thinking actually they also involve 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 positivist inge ssin within the subject between the empirical psychology of the subject and what he called the transcendental aspect of the subject which was actively involved in constituting the world of our experience and the german idealists viktor shelling and then Hegel were fundamentally concerned to try to overcome those dual isms 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 opposition's 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 is in coming back to Beatrice and pile his Nietzsche scene as another possible Godfather to these movements I mentioned him in your opening remark 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 eva continent let's say a reference point for the Continental tradition and in 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 he at least he felt he saw that the highest values were devaluing themselves as he put it and read the question why had no answer anymore so that became until the end of the 19th century that's right and that became encapsulated in the very famous proclamation in 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 also so in nihilism as the consequence the final consequence if you like of the influence of Christianity in the West so varies definitely a sense in which were rosy hey Gillian well it's not all rosy but some say optimistic aspects of the Hegelian view all really brought back to - of by by nature so to speak it Hansy unblock the enters politics strongly in the middle of the century and muscley new perspective admire nature so did Hitler Heidegger was a strongly associated with the Nazi regime and it was this obviously not what you said earlier of fascism the introduction of fascism in the thirties meant that a lot of people from Vienna went from Austria and another part of Germany to England and the United States of America can you was that political element inside the philosophy or did it just happen that they were caught up in a political Ferrari there was a political element to the thinking of many of the logical positivists for instance no right one of the leading logical positivists was an unorthodox but very committed exist 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 you know face the prospect of being killed somewhere killed so you know 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 you know there are many currents in continental philosophy that are you know explicitly left-wing whereas others I think the philosophy of life of Nietzsche and Heidegger lends succor 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 you know a characteristic feature of you know analytic philosophy Stephen Heymann Mulhall there was there was something interestingly paradoxical about the politics or ethics of the Vienna circle because on the one hand as Andy was saying they conceived themselves explicitly as representatives of modernity they founded they had international congresses they found 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 becoming political circumstances but at the same time the content of their account of language was such that it removed any meaning from evaluative discourse it was a central part of the logical positivists story about language that only empirical discourse discourse about the facts and primary scientific discourse now 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 amount was that of emotivism the idea that moral discourse functions primarily is 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 is it where the vocabulary one needs to use to articulate such ideas is empty hey hon jion you want to come in again can briefly because I want to go across to Beatrice thank you well I 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 the analytic tradition that try to show precisely what part of ethical questions we can resolve in a rational fashion by way of argument and what parts you know will you know just rest on fundamental convictions and and attitudes and therefore you know you just have to agree to disagree on some fundamental assumptions major example a seminal text I'm telling the continent religion is heidegger's being and time first published in 1927 why is not 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 theoretical / practical so to give a bit more content to this traditionally philosophers have tended to focus on objects a 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 what their ontological status is whether they're real whether imaginary what sort of properties they have and so forth and highly against thought was that yes all these questions are well worth pursuing but the existence of a world of objects so to speak is predicated on a more primary layer of engagement with a 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 his 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 etc to suit it but that's because my world was or 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 sivan monarch I push in another direction slightly one of the criticisms has been leveled against analytic philosophy is that it's devoid of ethics and politics I'm putting it strongly bit daehwa 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 Hannah is absolutely right that in later stages at 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 so how are they not going to the Continental tradition with that how they're not sort of one circle intersecting with another circle here well this is really this 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 they're not we're 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 are a lot of 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 Oh for example Nietzsche just to go back to him for a moment is 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 ontology 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 physical so you get a privilege in a spectacle reality so if one were a suspicious nutrient 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 a Hanzhong dog before this this drift or split I has I don't quite know to call it I know I this division we can use as brutal terms that took place that exist in 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 can't 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 it in a Dairy Dow or de leurs they are just studying texts and you know writing histories of philosophy but I come to you in a moment [ __ ] but can I go back to my original question where does traditional philosophy you mentioned pre-socratic you can talk about Plato right through the code where does that fit it well denote that it is the starting point and I think the starting point for the split if I were to put it brutally is can't and can't realize that the revolutionary development 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 that's not if you wave me off na meant waving off I'm just I'm not gesture which is meaningless that sort of says can we if you can do three rise briskly that'd be great I haven't got much time so Kant thought that you know there was a way of showing that philosophy was a non-empirical 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 contribution to Bell letter and is in fact closer to poetry than to academic discursive writing and so there's a certain playfulness and as is therefore a certain freedom from you know perhaps the unduly strict standards of science and logic when is worth waiting for thank you very much Beatrice I notice an pal you're gonna come in now oh right okay well I just wanted to emphasize one of the things that Hannah said before namely that continental philosophy is not dominant on the continent which may come as a surprise that's just another case of in the vachetta guru mistake using a geographical category to refer to a type of philosophy but indeed when I came to this country in 1997 and 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 you know having ever to take us down on that debate so and if you look at French universities now they aren't that many in which you'll be able to study so you know save the second half of a 20th century continental thinkers so it really there's so much that is mythical about the notion and it doesn't even you know have a home on the continent sir but before this subject disappears deep into the ocean Steven can can you tell us the state of it now I mean it seems that everybody is now and that all 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 and the state of players 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 conduct contains a much greater variety of projects 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 traditions still exists although the really major figures in those traditions have gone have died and the 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 rigor of a philosophical investigation ought to look like for all the sort of they're coming together and they're mixed up and some they've been some fairly strong attacks made particularly on continent possibly by the logical by the analytical philosophy of their very strong public to act at conferences in papers not publishing in the same paper and so on 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 - and one reason for thinking that is that if you look at the classical clashes between analytic and continental philosophers I think it's fair to say that they have led to greater divergence and greater disagreement then you know at the end then what they started out with and that makes me somewhat skeptical that you know we are in line for a synthesis I know business on 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 hand pal Stephen Melville ants yawn clock next week we will be talking about Ptolemy an 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 BBC World Service comm slash forum

Channel: Gottfried Leibniz

Views: 96,163

Rating: 4.8945231 out of 5

Keywords: Analytic, Continental, Philosophy, split, difference, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, Wittgenstein, Hans, Johann-Glock, Beatrice, Han-Pile, Stephen, Mulhall, Melvyn, Bragg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Darwin

Id: xiISBhwxaY0

Length: 42min 6sec (2526 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2011

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How appropriate that the video be brought to us by Leibniz.