6 responses to “Gutting on “Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy”

1. David Vessey

   December 21, 2005 at 9:13 am

   Gutting makes a similar distinction in his "Introduction" to the Blackwell reader in continental philosophy of science. There he emphasizes that continentalists tend to hold (and only tend, as it's easy to find counter-examples on both sides; no one should expect necessary and sufficient conditions to mark the division) there are philosophically significant aspects of life which are "inaccessible to merely logical analysis." His two comments link up, I take it, in that he would see reason functioning as intellectual imagination as being able to access those philosophically significant aspects of life. Here is the relevant paragraph from his Introduction:

   "We still do not understand how the [analytic-continental] division arose, but, as Michael Friedman has suggested, its root is in two opposing views of the role of logic in philosophical thought. On the one hand, there was the idea that logic, particularly the new mathematical logic of Principia Mathematica, was the privileged tool for formulating and resolving philosophical problems. On this view, most fully and powerfully developed by Carnap, philosophical questions could be resolved (or dissolved) by insisting on the highest standards of logical clarity and argument. On the other hand, there was the idea that logical categories and techniques are themselves abstractions from the fullness of lived experience and therefore are severely limited for the purpose of understanding concrete experience. This, for example, was the view of Heidegger in Being and Time, where he deployed Husserl's phenomenological method to describe aspects of the human situation regarded as inaccessible to merely logical analysis. Adapting some of Derrida's terminology, we might formulate the analytic-continental division as one between logocentric and nonlogocentric philosophy. It is, however important to emphasize that the continental rejection of logical analysis as the privileged instrument of philosophical understanding is not equivalent–as some analytic philosophers seem to think–to a rejection of logical principles (e.g., non-contradiction) as a necessary condition for the intelligibility of discourse. Nor is it–as some continental philosophers seem to think–an abrogation of the philosopher's duty to be as logically clear and rigorous as the subject at hand presents" (2).

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2. steve latham

   December 21, 2005 at 9:23 am

   Stanley Cavell points to another kind of analytical/continental difference: the Anglo-American tradition, he claims, "inherits" philosophy as a set of problems to be solved, whereas the European tradition inherits it as a set of texts to be read. This is not itself a difference in style, but it leads (generally) to some differences in style. Cavell jokes somewhere that contintental philosophers try to write as though they've read everything, while analytical philosophers try to write as though they've read nothing. The continental wants to be seen wrestling with a canon, while the analytic wants to be seen wrestling with a question. Cavell has one early essay touching on this entitled, I think, "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy" in Themes out of School, and some similar comments in an essay called (I think) "The Philosopher in American Life" in Emerson's Transcendental Etudes.

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3. Kevin S.

   December 21, 2005 at 1:30 pm

   I appreciate David Vessey's comment that there is a tendency among analytical philosophers to sort of frolic in the reduction of philosophical problems to logical formulation, and where a problem can't be reduced by logic, to say that no intelligible problem exists.

   Gary Gutting picks up on the same point where he says, analytic philosophers understand "reason in terms of formal logic." I think that's where the claim to a more rigorous approach by analytics comes from. This is not to say that Continentalists don't also have their ways of asserting intellectual superiority, and surely those methods also require of Continentalists that they frolic. But I never really studied with any hardcore Continentals (expect for maybe Linda Alcoff, but I consider her to be a moderate).

   I have found some analytics to be very receptive to my more Continental views and uses of experience. I was an undergraduate in the philosophy department at Syracuse for a number of years. Tamar Gendler and Robert Van Gulick were extremely receptive to my attempts and seemed desirous of "plugging holes" in standard approaches through inquiring about what those holes look like from a less logically-grounded vantage point. (BTW, congratulations to Tamar and her husband on the twin offers extended by Yale.)

   But it should be added that not all analytic philosophers take the same attitude toward the work. Bob and Tamar seem more concerned with using the sharpest tools to create the best theories. Many others are sort of religious about the primacy of logic. I later studied at Oxford and found it necessary to specifically seek out instructors who would be more receptive to the difference.

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4. Greg R.

   December 21, 2005 at 2:47 pm

   I find Gutting's way of stating the distinction helpful. There are indeed discernably different assumptions about just what reason and experience are, assumptions that underwrite widely different approaches and define the field of appropriate topics differently. The best work on both "sides," I think, is done by authors who are alive to the ways those assumptions shape their expectations and judgments. The worst is done by those who are so benighted as to fail to recognize the determinate choices and histories behind the terms and forms of inference they employ. For them, problems, terms of art, and all manner of "-isms" have dropped fully formed from heaven or are directly readable off the face of experience.

   In Plato's Republic, dialectic is distinguished from mere technê in part by its "treating hypotheses as hypotheses." To me, this still seems a good way of articulating the difference that makes philosophy what it is. Gutting's distinction helps us recognize the existence and plurality of hypotheses about the very things with which we do philosophy: our lives and thoughts.

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5. Horacio Arlo-Costa

   December 21, 2005 at 4:33 pm

   Some scattered comments on the previous posts. Gary Gutting points out that analytic philosophers understand "reason in terms of formal logic." And Vessey mentions Friedman’s excellent essay where some clarifications are provided as how `formal logic’ should be understood:

   `On the one hand, there was the idea that logic, particularly the new mathematical logic of Principia Mathematica, was the privileged tool for formulating and resolving philosophical problems. On this view, most fully and powerfully developed by Carnap, philosophical questions could be resolved (or dissolved) by insisting on the highest standards of logical clarity and argument.’

   Frege’s influence through Carnap is without a doubt important but the implication of an alleged `logocentric’ way of understanding reason in the analytic tradition seems to me limited or at least not completely representative of the best work in the field. At least, and perhaps surprisingly for many, it hardly applies universally to contemporary philosophers interested in `formal’ epistemology, for example. As a matter of fact it does not describe well even the interests of the later Carnap who spent a fair amount of time and effort studying various forms of induction and `ampliative inference’ to use Peirce’s terminology.

   Our historical insight of the internal debates in, say, Russell’s Cambridge are still imperfect, but it is clear that many of Russell’s colleagues, like Keynes and to some extent Ramsey argued that the Russellian form of logical consequence was too impoverished and dry to tackle issues related to modeling expert inference in, say, jurisprudence (this was Keynes’s example). He argued for developing a richer notion of `argument’ in a probabilistic setting. Ramsey made decisive contributions that were crucial to develop various branches of the decision sciences, and which offered very insightful vistas as to how to understand valid patterns of inference not captured by first order logic. Wittgenstein’s ideas about language games and reasoning in what he called `technical languages’ (in the Blue Book) inspired some of his students like G. von Wright to develop various of the formalisms that today we call `philosophical logics’ (logics of norms, of knowledge, of action, etc). All of these developments go far beyond what can be formalized or understood in first order logic, and the seeds for them were already present in Cambridge during the first half of the XX century.

   Perhaps the first attempts to develop `artificial intelligence’ were also `logocentric’, and many philosophers like Hubert L. Dreyfuss invoked Husserl to criticize these attempts. One of his points was that these models overlooked the important role played by expectations in reasoning (stressed by Husserl in many of his writings). Since then our understanding of the notion of inference has incorporated sophisticated models of expectations, and the appeal to neuroscience has as well provided a more sophisticated account of perception and representation of knowledge that can fit these accounts.

   Gutting’s also appeals to commonsense intuitions:

   `Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic.’

   There might be more potential conflicts in this phrase than one might be able to detect at first sight. Understanding commonsense inference was one of the goals of philosophers like Grice, for example, and many members of the Oxford school at that time. Commonsense intuitions were often used by these philosophers to carry out their work. But some the concrete notions that Grice proposed, like the notion of implicature, clearly go beyond what can be formalized or understood in terms of first order logic alone. As a matter of fact there is today a very interesting and lively debate about how to accommodate the notion of implicature in either some of the logics for AI developed in the 80’s and 90’s (Stalnaker for example has tried that) or in richer inferential environments capable of representing choice, games and interacting epistemic agents (the field that the Nobelist Robert Aumann calls `interactive epistemology’). Moreover, these attempts might potentially provide nice insights about the notion of meaning, or at least he notion of speaker meaning. JPL is publishing two interesting essays in this area in the coming months. All this is, of course, clearly independent of the value that one would like to assign to the recourse to commonsense intuitions and `mental experiments’ in analytical philosophy (many analytical philosophers are more than averse to them). Even if you do value these tools this need not mesh well with the idea of understanding "reason in terms of formal logic."

   Although some of the previous posts might be able to characterize an attitude that perhaps faithfully represents the work of a subset of analytic philosophers, I do not see it as sufficiently universal. Paradoxically perhaps I suspect that the characterization will be particularly inaccurate to describe the activities and interests of philosophers with some real interest in either pure or applied logic and/or formal (or traditional) epistemology.

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6. David Vessey

   December 21, 2005 at 9:07 pm

   Prof. Arlo-Costa make some good points about the way some epistemologists have developed theories of meaning that go beyond anything "formalized or understood in terms of first order logic alone;" and here perhaps my adding Gutting's continental philosophy of science quotation cluttered rather than clarified the issue. I've looked more widely into his writings and I think the relevant discussion is the "Metaphilosophical Coda" to his book _Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity_. There he defines analytic philosophy as "the effort to attain maximal clarity about the content and basis of our intuitions" (184)—a description he says includes Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Habermas—while continental philosophy (analytic philosophy's "essential counterpart") seeks to challenge our intuitions "by the creation of new and (at first) highly counter-intuitive vocabularies" (190). Here you can see why a doctrine might be evaluated not by its logical rigor, but by its intellectual imaginativeness. He approvingly quotes Deleuze, "Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts," and claims the mistake made by both analytic and continental philosophers (in the sense he means the terms) is to think what they are doing suffices for philosophical inquiry, when in fact both (and historical critique) are necessary. This last point aside, it helps to know that when Gutting is speaking of continental philosophy he has in mind philosophers like Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and not philosophers like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Habermas.

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