https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magaz...ontinental
INTRO: In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.
Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing the line between them. Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. The analytic school, meanwhile, has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and has been until fairly recently much more narrowly focused, concentrating mainly on logic and language.
The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned.
This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade. And a man who did more than his fair share to entrench the gulf.
[...] Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. ... To invoke the old cliché about Germans lacking a sense of humour was bad enough, but talking about “Führership” at a time when memories of the Nazi regime were still raw was crass in the extreme. And yet, in this paper, Ryle did it, not once, but twice ... Unlike the Germans, he seemed to suggest, the British trusted in logic rather than leadership: “At least the main lines of our philosophical thinking during this century can be fully understood only by someone who has studied the massive developments of our logical theory.”
Awkwardly for Ryle, two out of the three founders of what he called “our logical theory,” namely Frege and Wittgenstein, were continentals. However, as Russell and Wittgenstein had both worked at Cambridge, he was able, at a stretch, to characterise it as “The Cambridge Transformation of the Theory of Concepts.” The jingoism of one scholar would, ordinarily, have been something the world of philosophy could have laughed off with a shrug. But unfortunately there was nothing ordinary about Ryle ... Ryle could strongly influence, and sometimes dictate, what subjects British philosophers discussed and how they discussed them.
[...] Throughout those departments, British philosophers propagated Ryle’s sense that he and his colleagues were doing philosophy in a way that broke sharply both with philosophers of the past, and with those from other countries. Their way was the better way, and philosophy from earlier times and other places wasn’t really worth bothering with. Ryle’s long-lasting dominance of British philosophy—and his contempt for that undertaken elsewhere—had many far-reaching consequences. But one was the unfortunate neglect of his immediate predecessor in the Waynflete chair, Robin George Collingwood.
Unless you’re a professional philosopher or a scholar of Roman Britain, you may never have heard of Collingwood. And yet he was one of the most interesting British philosophers of the last century. Unlike Ryle and his disciples in the analytic school, Collingwood took a deep interest in both the history of his subject and the work of philosophers from the European continent, being especially influenced by two Italians, Benedetto Croce and Giambattista Vico.
His intellectual range was astonishing. In philosophy itself, Collingwood made important contributions to aesthetics, the philosophy of history, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the understanding of philosophical method. He had important things to say about how each of these contributes to our understanding of ourselves. ... Outside philosophy, he did important work in archaeology and history ... In addition, he was an extremely accomplished musician, a talented painter and a gifted linguist, able to read scholarship in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin and Greek. He also wrote one of the most fascinating (if decidedly odd) autobiographies ever published. Thanks to Sartre and Derrida, an artistic and literary bent is common enough among philosophers of the continent, but much less evident among the analytic school.
[...] Traditional logic treats an individual proposition as the “bearer of truth.” Most philosophers of the analytic school would follow Frege in regarding the proposition also as the bearer of meaning. ... All this is abandoned by Collingwood. For him, you could never hope to understand what a person means simply by studying or analysing the sentences that they utter. Instead, you have to know something about the context in which those sentences are uttered. ... Every question contains a presupposition ... Many everyday presuppositions are relative: they can themselves be the answer to a question, and can therefore be shown to be either or true or false (relative to that question)...
[...] An absolute presupposition, by contrast, cannot be questioned, not because it is certainly true, but rather because, within the framework of question and answer to which it belongs, it does not make sense to question it. This is because its assumption is part of what gives the whole framework its meaning, so it cannot be questioned without collapsing into meaninglessness.
An example that Collingwood gives of this concerns the frameworks (he calls them “constellations”) provided by the Newtonian, the Kantian and the Einsteinian modes of scientific enquiry. Each of these assumes a peculiar notion of causation, and within any one of them, this notion cannot be questioned. It is not thought of as true; it is simply taken for granted. It is an absolute presupposition...
... To understand a work of art, a person, a historical epoch or a religion is, so to speak, to “get inside its mind,” to see the world through the eyes of people using a different set of presuppositions to our own. If we try to understand others using only our own presuppositions, we will always fail. Historical understanding, for example, “is the attempt to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times.” Again, if we insist on regarding Christianity as “false,” we will never understand it.
For Collingwood then, unlike philosophers in the Ryle mould, imagination and empathy play a crucial role in understanding. And here, perhaps, we have a tantalising glimpse of how British philosophy might have developed differently had Collingwood not died so early and if he had had the sort of influence that Ryle acquired... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.
Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing the line between them. Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. The analytic school, meanwhile, has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and has been until fairly recently much more narrowly focused, concentrating mainly on logic and language.
The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned.
This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade. And a man who did more than his fair share to entrench the gulf.
[...] Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. ... To invoke the old cliché about Germans lacking a sense of humour was bad enough, but talking about “Führership” at a time when memories of the Nazi regime were still raw was crass in the extreme. And yet, in this paper, Ryle did it, not once, but twice ... Unlike the Germans, he seemed to suggest, the British trusted in logic rather than leadership: “At least the main lines of our philosophical thinking during this century can be fully understood only by someone who has studied the massive developments of our logical theory.”
Awkwardly for Ryle, two out of the three founders of what he called “our logical theory,” namely Frege and Wittgenstein, were continentals. However, as Russell and Wittgenstein had both worked at Cambridge, he was able, at a stretch, to characterise it as “The Cambridge Transformation of the Theory of Concepts.” The jingoism of one scholar would, ordinarily, have been something the world of philosophy could have laughed off with a shrug. But unfortunately there was nothing ordinary about Ryle ... Ryle could strongly influence, and sometimes dictate, what subjects British philosophers discussed and how they discussed them.
[...] Throughout those departments, British philosophers propagated Ryle’s sense that he and his colleagues were doing philosophy in a way that broke sharply both with philosophers of the past, and with those from other countries. Their way was the better way, and philosophy from earlier times and other places wasn’t really worth bothering with. Ryle’s long-lasting dominance of British philosophy—and his contempt for that undertaken elsewhere—had many far-reaching consequences. But one was the unfortunate neglect of his immediate predecessor in the Waynflete chair, Robin George Collingwood.
Unless you’re a professional philosopher or a scholar of Roman Britain, you may never have heard of Collingwood. And yet he was one of the most interesting British philosophers of the last century. Unlike Ryle and his disciples in the analytic school, Collingwood took a deep interest in both the history of his subject and the work of philosophers from the European continent, being especially influenced by two Italians, Benedetto Croce and Giambattista Vico.
His intellectual range was astonishing. In philosophy itself, Collingwood made important contributions to aesthetics, the philosophy of history, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the understanding of philosophical method. He had important things to say about how each of these contributes to our understanding of ourselves. ... Outside philosophy, he did important work in archaeology and history ... In addition, he was an extremely accomplished musician, a talented painter and a gifted linguist, able to read scholarship in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin and Greek. He also wrote one of the most fascinating (if decidedly odd) autobiographies ever published. Thanks to Sartre and Derrida, an artistic and literary bent is common enough among philosophers of the continent, but much less evident among the analytic school.
[...] Traditional logic treats an individual proposition as the “bearer of truth.” Most philosophers of the analytic school would follow Frege in regarding the proposition also as the bearer of meaning. ... All this is abandoned by Collingwood. For him, you could never hope to understand what a person means simply by studying or analysing the sentences that they utter. Instead, you have to know something about the context in which those sentences are uttered. ... Every question contains a presupposition ... Many everyday presuppositions are relative: they can themselves be the answer to a question, and can therefore be shown to be either or true or false (relative to that question)...
[...] An absolute presupposition, by contrast, cannot be questioned, not because it is certainly true, but rather because, within the framework of question and answer to which it belongs, it does not make sense to question it. This is because its assumption is part of what gives the whole framework its meaning, so it cannot be questioned without collapsing into meaninglessness.
An example that Collingwood gives of this concerns the frameworks (he calls them “constellations”) provided by the Newtonian, the Kantian and the Einsteinian modes of scientific enquiry. Each of these assumes a peculiar notion of causation, and within any one of them, this notion cannot be questioned. It is not thought of as true; it is simply taken for granted. It is an absolute presupposition...
... To understand a work of art, a person, a historical epoch or a religion is, so to speak, to “get inside its mind,” to see the world through the eyes of people using a different set of presuppositions to our own. If we try to understand others using only our own presuppositions, we will always fail. Historical understanding, for example, “is the attempt to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times.” Again, if we insist on regarding Christianity as “false,” we will never understand it.
For Collingwood then, unlike philosophers in the Ryle mould, imagination and empathy play a crucial role in understanding. And here, perhaps, we have a tantalising glimpse of how British philosophy might have developed differently had Collingwood not died so early and if he had had the sort of influence that Ryle acquired... (MORE - details)