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ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY: EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES
Author(s): NEIL LEVY

Source: Metaphilosophy, Vol. 34, No. 3 (April 2003), pp. 284-304
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© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003.
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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 34, No. 3, April 2003
0026-1068
ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY:

EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES
NEIL LEVY
ABSTRACT: A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the

differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. I suggest that these
attempts have indeed captured the most important divergences between the two
styles but have left the explanation of the differences mysterious. I argue that
analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy within a paradigm,

conducted
in Kuhn's sense of the word, whereas Continental philosophy assumes much less
in the way of shared presuppositions, problems, methods and approaches. This
important opposition accounts for all those features that have rightly been held to
constitute the difference between the two traditions. I finish with some reflections
on the relative superiority of each tradition and by highlighting the characteristic
deficiencies of each.
Keywords: analytic; Continental; Kuhn; paradigm.
Since the early twentieth century, Western philosophy has been split into
two apparently irreconcilable camps: the "analytic" and the "Continen
tal." Philosophers who belong to each camp read and respond to their
fellows almost exclusively; thus, each stream develops separately, and the
differences become more entrenched. Relations between the camps are
characterized largely by mutual incomprehension and not a little
hostility. But because few philosophers are well acquainted with both
sides, the nature of the split is not well understood. This essay is intended
to contribute to understanding this split and perhaps, in a small way,
even to overcoming it. Now, at the dawn of a new century, it is time to
put the divisions within philosophy behind us. Although, as I shall
suggest toward the end of the paper, we have cause to temper our
optimism at the prospects for imminent reconciliation, understanding the

differences is a first and indispensable step toward overcoming them.
A few caveats about the ambitions and limitations of the essay are in
order before we turn to an examination of the differences. First, I only
intend to characterize general trends and tendencies. Thus a single
counterexample will not serve to falsify my view; only a sufficient weight
of counterexamples could accomplish this. Second, I do not claim that all
philosophers working in contemporary academia, not even all of those
© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003
ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 285
working in what is clearly the Western tradition, fit neatly into these
categories. Some philosophers work between the traditions, as it were, in
ways influenced by both: Alasdair Maclntyre and Charles Taylor come to

mind here. Others work wholly or partially in traditions never entirely
assimilated into one stream or the other: this is true of American
pragmatism to some extent, and of philosophers whose work developed

primarily through the reception of ancient philosophy. Apart from the
intrinsic interest of their work, these philosophers serve a salutary
function: they remind us that valuable philosophy can be done by those
who do not owe allegiance to either side of the divide. However, their
existence does not alter the fact that our philosophical landscape is
dominated by the split.
The essay will fall into two parts. In the first, I shall examine some
recent attempts to characterize analytic and Continental philosophy
(hereafter, AP and CP, respectively). I shall suggest that all fail to state
necessary and sufficient conditions that could function as criteria by
which to classify particular philosophers or their works. Indeed, there are
no such criteria, or so I shall contend.
Ought we to conclude, then, that AP and CP are Wittgensteinian
cluster - that that different
concepts is, concepts lump together many
elements, elements that share no common core? I suggest that this
approach would be more fruitful. But I do not want to stop there. I want
to see if something more can be said concerning AP and CP, something
over and above "characteristically, each tends to possess such and such
features." I want to see, in fact, if it isn't possible to account for these
characteristic features. If my suggestion is on the right track, I shall
account not merely for the positive features of AP and CP but also for the
difficulty I have experienced when I have attempted to bring them into
dialogue with each other, and the unsatisfactory nature of most other
such attempts at such ecumenicalism.
Characterizing the Traditions

I turn, then, to characterizing the differences. One way of approaching
the topic immediately suggests itself: taking our cue from the word
Continental, we might attempt to classify each camp on the basis of
geography. CP will thus be that kind of philosophy practiced in mainland

Europe, or taught in philosophy departments there. But it is evident that
this approach will fail. For one thing, AP itself has its roots on the
Continent as much as CP does (Dummett argues that it would more
appropriately be called Anglo-Austrian than Anglo-American [Dummett
1993, 1-2]). For another, there are currently plenty of analytic
-
philosophers on the Continent Jacques Bouveresse and Pascal Engel
in France, for example - and even more Continental philosophers in
English-speaking countries. "Continental" cannot, therefore, refer primarily
286 NEIL LEVY
to a place, anymore than "analytic" can be entirely synonymous with
"Anglo-American."1
If not geography, then perhaps style will provide us with the criterion
we seek. So Bernard Williams suggests, in the preface to Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy.
What distinguishes analytical philosophy from other contemporary philoso

phy (though not from much philosophy of other times) is a certain way of
going on, which involves argument, distinctions, and, so far as it remembers to
try to achieve it and succeeds, moderately plain speech... it distinguishes
sharply between obscurity and technicality. (Williams 1985, vi)
There are, I think, two claims at issue here. The first concerns the place of
argument in the two traditions. It is often said that what distinguishes
analytic from Continental philosophy is the greater place and respect for
argument in the former. Dagfinn F0llesdal, for example, characterizes the
difference between analytic and nonanalytic philosophy as essentially a
difference in the place given to arguments, rather than rhetoric (F0llesdal
1997). The claim here is that CP is not rigorous. Perhaps the best-known
example of this claim is the letter sent to the Times in 1992 to oppose
Cambridge's proposal to grant an honorary doctorate to Derrida:
In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading
departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not

meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor... his writings... seem to consist
in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns ("logical phallusies" and the like)
and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what
we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar
to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets. (Derrida 1995, 420)
The letter is signed by, among other people, David Armstrong, Ruth
Barcan Marcus, Keith Campbell, Kevin Mulligan, Barry Smith, and no
less a figure than Quine.
I think it is not simply prejudice - though it is also prejudice - that can
lead thinkers like Quine to this conclusion. There are really positive
features of CP that give the impression to those trained in the analytic
school that it is argument free. The proof of this is that the difference in
the role of argument in the two traditions is recognized by the
Continentals too. This recognition comes out in the counteraccusation
heard: that AP is a new scholasticism, where the concern for
frequently
technique overwhelms the very problems that the techniques had
originally been designed to solve. An adequate characterization of the
1 is not a place, but a
As David Cooper says, "The continent, for our purposes,
tendency" (Cooper 1994, 2). Bernard Williams has suggested that the very terms in which
the distinction is drawn are "absurd." Because one term refers to geography and the other to
- rather as
method, they involve "a strange cross-classification though one divided cars into
front-wheel drives and Japanese" (Williams 1996, 25).
© Metaphilo ophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003
differences between the two traditions will allow us to account for both
these accusations.
I said there were two issues at work in my original quotation from
Williams, and for that matter in the letter to the Times as well. The first
issue concerned the place of argument. The second, more promising,
places the burden of differentiating the two traditions on style in a
broader sense. It has often been noted that CP is more "literary" than is
AP; perhaps that is all the difference consists in. This approach would
have the advantage of supplying us with the means to account for the
apparent lack of arguments in CP. Sometimes, we might conclude, this
school lets its concern for style override its concern for ideas, allowing the
coloring of sentences to take precedence over their clarity.
Of course, there are important stylistic differences between the two
tendencies, but if that were all the difference amounted to, the difficulty
in bringing the two schools into dialogue with each other would be
inexplicable. Merely stylistic differences are superficial, and such surface
differences ought to yield relatively easily.
Perhaps we might try to account for the difference simply in terms of
historical origins and reference points. Indeed, there is no doubt that an
immediately striking difference between the two involves the standard
thinkers that each refers to. If an article cites, on the one hand, Frege,
Russell, Quine or Davidson and, or on the other, Husserl Heidegger,
Derrida or Gadamer, it is usually clear which tradition the work is in. But
more than this needs to be said. Noting this fact simply pushes the
question back one step: it is now in order to ask in what the differences
between these thinkers consist.
If the differences cannot be characterized solely in terms of the place of
argument or of style, what of content? David Cooper has made a
persuasive case for the difference lying on this level. Cooper claims that
three themes "run through the writings of the most influential continental
thinkers... which have no similar prominence in the analytical tradition";
they are "cultural critique, concern with the background conditions of
enquiry and...'the fall of the self' (Cooper 1994, 4).

I agree with Cooper that these themes are of special concern for the
Continental tradition, but I doubt they can serve as criteria to distinguish
analytic from Continental philosophy. Cultural critique is a necessary
concern of all political and social philosophers; to say that it is
characteristic of CP is just to say (rightly) that political and social
philosophy are more important in the Continental tradition than in the
analytic. This, in turn, is at least in part the result of the relative lack of
specialization by Continental philosophers, among whom the myriad
subdisciplines into which AP divides itself (ethics and metaethics,
philosophy of mind, of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and so
on) are relatively unknown. Because Continental philosophers are not
engaged in specialized subdisciplines, they do not partition the potential
288 NEIL LEVY
ethical and political implications of their work off from its other aspects.
They thus engage in cultural critique at the same time as they develop
their philosophy of language, or whatever else they happen to be working
on.2 To explain this phenomenon, then, requires the prior explanation of,
on the one hand, the presence and, on the other, the relative lack of such
subdisciplines.
The relative lack of specialization also goes some way to explaining
Cooper's second theme, the "concern with the background conditions of
enquiry." Because Continental philosophers typically tend to be
politically engaged, they are more interested in the political stakes and
conditions of knowledge, and thus in laying bare the nonrational factors
that condition knowledge. This feature of CP is one with which many
analytic philosophers are especially impatient, since they see in it a
confusion of the context of discovery with the context of justification, or
a commission of the genetic fallacy. Nevertheless, it is not an approach
shared by all Continental thinkers, or only by Continental thinkers. I
think much the same could be said of Cooper's third theme - Parfit shows
as great a delight in dismantling our common-sense picture of the subject
as does any poststructuralist.
More fruitful, I suspect, is another suggestion of Cooper's: that "anti
scientism" characterizes Continental thought (Cooper 1994, 10). Con
tinental thinkers have often objected to the hegemony of science in
modern culture, insisting that it represents neither the only kind of
knowledge nor even the most basic kind. Instead, they have tended to
hold that scientific knowledge is secondary or derivative: derived, that is,
from our more primordial existence in the Lebenswelt. This has been a
theme common to Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and
it reappears - much transformed - in and Foucault. In
though Lyotard
contrast, and as Cooper notes, "analytical philosophy has generally
proved more friendly and sympathetic to science" (10).
I said that I thought this suggestion was a fruitful one. I do not believe,
however, that it is sufficient to serve as a criterion to distinguish between
- not unless we
analytic and Continental philosophy classify John
McDowell as a Continental. Moreover, I find Cooper's "explanation" for
the contrast unhelpful. Cooper argues that, although both traditions took
linguistic turns, AP turned toward a systematic explanation of language,
which is conducive to a scientific approach, whereas CP turned instead
toward a conception of language that cannot be made systematic, since it
holds that language exists only as embodied in linguistic practices
(Cooper 1994, 13-15). But if these turns are indeed characteristic of our
two traditions, they are part of the data to be explained, not the
2
As Vincent Descombes says, the tracing of its political implications is regarded as the
"decisive test, disclosing... the definitive meaning of a mode of thought" - no matter how
apolitical the content of that thought might seem to be (Descombes 1980, 7).
explanation. This line of thought is promising, but it awaits further

development.
Much the same can be said for Simon Critchley's position. Critchley
contends that the essential difference lies in the two traditions' attitudes
to history. CP, he argues, approaches its problems "textually and
contextuallyit holds that "philosophical problems do not fall from the

sky ready-made and cannot be treated as elements in some ahistorical
fantasy of philosophia perennis" (Critchley 1997, 353-54). Because there
are no such things as the eternal problems of philosophy - no problem of
universals, for example, which might be traced from Aristotle to
-
Armstrong problems can only be approached in their historical
context. Thus, the history of philosophy is almost isomorphic with
philosophy sans phrase for the Continental philosopher. For her, the
notion that there are such perennial problems is hopelessly naive.
This, too, is a promising suggestion, one that captures much that is
characteristic of the Continental approach. I suspect, however, that it too
cannot serve as a necessary and sufficient condition to define the
Continental (John McDowell would once again serve as a counter
example). More important, it leaves the differing attitudes of the two

traditions toward history unexplained. This too is an explanandum, not
an explanation.
Let me now consider, finally, one of the best-known attempts to
characterize analytic philosophy, that of Michael Dummett. Dummett
argues that analytic philosophy is defined by its concern with language:
What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from

other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be
attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a
comprehensive account can only be so attained. (Dummett 1993, 4)
Now, I doubt neither that Dummett's characterization accurately reflects

certain tendencies in AP nor that this tendency is central to the self-image
of the school. But this concern with language that he finds definitive of
the school is in fact neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not sufficient
because the concern for language is shared with many, perhaps most,
Continental philosophers, at least some of whom share the conviction
that thought is reached only via language. Derrida's obsession with the
limits of language, for example, is a consequence of his conviction that
they are the limits of thought. And the concern with language is not
necessary because a number of philosophers who are indisputably
analytic are little concerned with language: Rawls, for example, and most
of political philosophy - or, if political philosophy is felt to be too
peripheral, we could point to the relatively small role that linguistic
analysis plays in contemporary metaethics, where its importance has
decreased over the past decades.
290 NEIL LEVY
Another aspect of my disagreement with Dummett's views is

concerned with his implicit characterization of CP. Throughout Origins
Dummett talks of "the phenomenological school" (1993, ix, 26). Now, I
suspect that there is no such school. Or at least if there is such a school, it
is very far from being isomorphic with CP. Husserl was and is an
important figure in CP, and a training in phenomenology is considered
important in Europe. But it is hard to find even a trace of Husserl's
influence in Foucault or the mature Lyotard (despite Lyotard's having
written an introduction to phenomenology). Even in the mature work of
many figures who stem from the phenomenological tradition - Levinas
comes to mind - few of Husserl's methods and concepts find a place.
I think, in fact, that CP does not form a school, and that this fact is of
more than marginal importance. CP is not an ongoing research program,
in the sense in which AP takes itself to be. Account for this difference,
and I think we have the explanation we seek.
Accounting for the Differences
It would be possible to go on multiplying the cliches concerning AP and

CP. I suggest, though, that we would continue to fail to locate any
necessary and sufficient conditions definitive of the two traditions. To be
sure, we might be able to isolate sufficient conditions. We might, that is,
think that our list of cliches, perhaps supplemented by others, would
serve as a set of characteristics, the possession of a sufficient number of
which would allow us to classify a philosopher into her correct category.
Though this may well be the case, it nevertheless falls far short of an
explanation of the differences.
What, then, could explain the division? I suggested earlier that the
attitude of each tradition toward science, though not by itself definitive of
it, would be a promising starting point. For AP, we noted, science
occupies a central position. This is true with regard both to its subject
matter - AP is more often even materialist3 - and to its
realist, reductively
style. AP, in Pascal Engel's words, "mimics the scientific style of inquiry,
which proposes hypotheses and theories, tests them in the light of data,
and aims at widespread discussion and control by the peers" (Engel 1999,
222). In contrast, CP is closer to the humanistic disciplines and to
literature and art. Once again, this is the case with regard both to content
and to form. Derrida's infuriatingly "literary" style has already been
remarked upon; as regards content, a list of books by major Continental
philosophers that focus on art and artists would include:
3
This is not to say that all work in AP is realist. This is far from being the case.
Nevertheless, AP has a realist orientation. We might best express this by saying that the
consensus in AP is that the burden of proof is on those who would deny realism. If anything,
the burden of proof in CP is on those who would uphold it.
What Is Literature? (Sartre)

Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari)
This Is Not a Pipe (Foucault)
Signe Malraux (Lyotard)
The Truth in Painting (Derrida)
The list could very easily be extended. It is, to be sure, a very French list,
and I suspect that this emphasis on art and literature is more pronounced
on the French side of the Rhine. Nevertheless, important strands of
German philosophy have been similarly concerned with art - witness
Heidegger's preoccupation with Holderlin, Trakl, and George, as well as
his famous "On the Origin of the Work of Art," or the idea propagated
by the Frankfurt School that only the avant-garde artwork can resist
commodification.
I suspect that this contrasting emphasis runs deeper than most
philosophers have realized, and that the place of science in the two
traditions is the most important element in any explanation of their
differences. I think, though, it is not the contrasting objects of AP and CP
that are central here but the formal analogy it is possible to construct
between, on the one hand, AP and the physical sciences and, on the other,
CP and the arts. Analytic aesthetics is, after all, still analytic. It is
therefore to the formal analogy that I now turn.
I propose to develop this analogy by comparing AP, as a self
reproducing discipline, to the image of science we find in Kuhn's
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Kuhn's text we shall find not only
many of the characteristic features of AP repeated in his description of
science but also the tools we need to explain those characteristics.
My suggestion is this: AP has successfully modeled itself on the

physical sciences. Work in it is thus guided by paradigms that function in
the way Kuhn sketches, and the discipline is reproduced in something
akin to the way in which the sciences are reproduced. CP has a quite
different approach to its subject matter, a quite different model of what
philosophy is, which guides its characteristic concerns and shapes its
methods.
Analytic Philosophy as Normal Science

The evidence for this claim rests upon the number of features of AP that
Kuhn's model explains. I shall give a brief account of "normal science,"
following Kuhn, and then turn to the parallels between it and AP.
Normal science is a research program that is guided by a paradigm.
Paradigms are "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a

time provide model problems and solutions to a community of
practitioners" (Kuhn 1970, viii). It is the common acceptance of a
paradigm, Kuhn argues, that accounts for the rapid progress made by
292 NEIL LEVY
mature sciences. Two features of paradigms explain this rapidity.

Acceptance of a paradigm is simultaneously the acceptance of an
ontology and a methodology. It thus puts an end to debate about such
fundamentals. This has the result of allowing scientists to concentrate
their attention on problems rather than methodology. Just as important,
it changes the character of that attention itself:
In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for a paradigm, all the facts
that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to
seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly
random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes
familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular
form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted
to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand. (Kuhn 1970, 15)
The second
important feature of paradigms concerns the kind of
problems they delineate. A paradigm dramatically narrows the field of
possible problems. The postparadigm scientist is concerned only with
those problems that are sufficiently similar to those the paradigm has
already successfully solved. As a result, science is transformed into a
-
puzzle-solving activity. These two factors the one focusing the attention
of the scientist upon problems and away from fundamentals, the other
-
restricting the scope of problems and transforming them into puzzles
explain the appearance of swift progress that characterizes postparadigm
science. This progress is exactly what one should expect from an activity
whose practitioners "concentrate on problems that only their own lack of
ingenuity should keep them from solving" (Kuhn 1970, 37).
Once scientists have a relatively clear standard to which to refer in
judging relevance, once their field of vision is narrowed by a shared

paradigm, they are enabled to achieve in-depth, rather than broad,
knowledge of nature. Prior to the establishment of a paradigm, scientists
work upon whatever features of the natural world seem most interesting,
or upon whatever seems related to practical matters, whereas acceptance
of a paradigm enables scientists to perform painstaking research upon
arcane and obscure features of reality, features that would not even have
come to light without the work the paradigm permitted: "The confidence
that they were on the right track encouraged scientists to undertake more
precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work" (Kuhn 1970, 18).

The acceptance of a paradigm has one significant drawback, however
- or at least what seems at first
sight to be a drawback. That is, the
paradigm encourages the suppression of novelty. Novelties are
suppressed for two convergent reasons. On the one hand, they "are
necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (Kuhn 1970, 5). Since

no place can be found for them within the paradigm, acceptance of
novelties is rejection of the paradigm. But the scientist cannot reject the
paradigm, unless it is to move to an alternative paradigm, on pain of
ceasing to be a scientist. She is, therefore, bound to suppress the isolated

novelty. In fact, very often she will simply fail to notice it altogether:
"Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a
background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and
usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to
be observed" (Kuhn 1970, 64). Moreover - and here we move to the
second reason for the suppression of novelty - when anomaly is observed,
the scientist is committed to believing that further research within the
paradigm will succeed in explaining it. That, ultimately, is what
acceptance of a paradigm amounts to: commitment to the belief that
the paradigm will be able to account for all the features of the realm to
which it applies.
As is well known, this last feature of paradigms is the most
controversial, and it leads to Kuhn's difficulties with explaining paradigm
change. It is not this feature that concerns me here, however, but the
parallels between the practice of AP and Kuhn's picture of normal
science.
AP, I suggest, is the philosophy built upon acceptance of the work of
Frege and Russell as a paradigm. Reassess the features of AP in the light
of this suggestion, and all those features we noted suddenly fall into
place. AP is, as we have seen, essentially a problem-solving activity:
indeed, it is this feature of their work that its defenders are most proud of:
Continental philosophy... is problemarm. "Ask me what I'm working on, and

I'll reply with the name of a problem," the Analytical Philosopher will proudly
say, "ask them, and they'll reply with a proper name." (Mulligan 1991, 115)
[Analytic philosophy] aims to solve particular problems, puzzles and

paradoxes, and to build theories in answer to them. It prefers to work upon
details and particular analyses, rather than to produce general syntheses.
(Engel 1999, 222)
I am suggesting that the difference noted here is genuine, and that it stems
from AP's being (something akin to) a normal science.
If I am right, and AP is a problem-solving activity, we should expect
precisely that proliferation of subdisciplines which characterizes the
discipline. Normal scientists need precisely delineated puzzles upon which
to exercise their skills. Accordingly, the analytic philosopher cannot
address herself to the meaning of life, or to discovering the good life.
Instead, she focuses on cognitivism versus noncognitivism, or refining the
utilitarian calculus, or the mind-brain identity question, and so on.
Of course, to the extent that these are her problems, the work of
Russell and Frege will be relatively unhelpful to her. That paradigm
cannot inform her work as directly as it does that of a logician, or a
philosopher of language. Instead, she will be guided in her subdiscipline
by what Kuhn calls an exemplar. Exemplars are "concrete problem
294 NEIL LEVY
solutions" (Kuhn 1970, 187). Unlike paradigms, however, exemplars

need not be shared by the scientific community as a whole. Instead, each
- albeit - set. It is
subdiscipline may possess its own partially overlapping
the differences between sets of exemplars that, more than anything else,
"provide the community fine-structure of science" (187). All physicists,

for example, share a large number of symbolic generalizations, as well as
a number of exemplars. As their training develops and the young
physicist specializes in one or other branch of the science, "the symbolic
generalizations they share are increasingly illustrated by different
exemplars" (187).
In the same way, I suggest, the metaethicist and the logician, the
philosopher of language and the philosopher of mind, possess a set of
shared and a number of divergent exemplars. All may have had the
distinction between sense and reference impressed upon them, but
Kripke's and Putnam's extensions of this work will matter much more to
some of them than to others. These others might find their major
exemplar in the new riddle of induction, for example, or in A Theory of
Justice4
When a body of knowledge makes the transition to becoming a
science, we can predict on the basis of Kuhn's work that not only the
substance of its research but even the manner of its presentation will
undergo important changes. As a result of the acceptance of a normal

scientific paradigm, the scientist's "research communiques" begin to
change:
No longer will his researches usually be embodied in books addressed... to
anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the field. Instead they
will usually appear as brief articles addressed only to professional colleagues,
the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who
prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them. (Kuhn
1970, 20)
Once a paradigm is accepted, the scientist can simply assume it: she does
not have to rehearse previous findings, nor need she defend much of her
methodology. Moreover, the kind of puzzle she will typically be

addressing will be relatively discrete. It will lend itself to treatment in a
few - albeit dense - pages.
As these remarks would lead us to expect, AP and CP present their
research in differing forms. As Kevin Mulligan notes, "The book, not the
paper, is the preferred philosophical genre on the continent" (Mulligan

1991, 116). It is easy to think of important philosophers in the analytic
tradition whose reputation rests on journal articles alone, or whose books
4
The way in which A Theory of Justice revitalized political philosophy is an especially
striking instance of the way in which AP requires an exemplar to stimulate research in its
subdisciplines. Prior to its publication, political philosophy had been moribund, a result of
the difficulty in transferring the analytic paradigm to the political and social arenas.
tend to consist of collections of previously published articles - Frank

Ramsey, Bernard Williams, and Donald Davidson spring to mind.
Gettier would be an extreme example. In CP, by contrast, considerable
reputations always rest upon considerable books.

I have so far been explicating the features of AP in terms of its being a
paradigm-guided activity. CP has been characterized only insofar as it

has emerged from the discussion as the mirror image of AP. I now turn to
a more direct characterization of it.
There is an ambiguity in Kuhn's work with regard to practices that
aim at knowledge acquisition but are not normal sciences. Sometimes
Kuhn suggests that they are carried out in the absence of paradigms
(1970, 11); at others he suggests that they have their own kind of
paradigm, of a character different from that possessed by the sciences
(179). Whether the practitioners of these alternatives ways of seeking
knowledge should be regarded as being in possession of a paradigm or
not, it is clear that they do not agree on fundamentals to anything like the
same extent that the practitioners of "normal" science do. They do not
share a sense of which problems are important and tractable and which
not. Thus, they must justify their choice of problems, their methods of
approach, even their ontology, as well as putting forward solutions to
those problems. This is one reason they more frequently produce
than do scientists - able to take much less for granted,
monographs they
have to build their field from the ground up.
Since this is precisely the situation of the Continental philosopher,
work in CP proceeds in much the same manner as did work in physical
optics prior to Newton: "Being able to take no common body of belief
for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field
anew from its foundations" (Kuhn 1970, 13). In the absence of a
paradigm, we do not get the segmentation of the field of knowledge we
find in normal science, paralleled by the many subdisciplines of AP.
Instead, we get fragmentation: the division of the discipline into rival
schools. This is characteristic of preparadigm science (12), and it is, I
have argued, characteristic of CP. That is why it is misleading to speak, as
Dummett does, of "the phenomenological school." There is no such
school, if by that is meant an entity which would be isomorphic with the
extension of the concept CP.
Explaining the Explanation

That, then, is my suggested explanation of the differences between AP
and CP. The first took, not the linguistic turn - for that it shares with CP
- but the
paradigmatic turn, and it modeled itself on normal science. It
therefore turned itself into a number of highly specialized, technical
disciplines. The second did not take that turn, and it instead remained a
296 NEIL LEVY
more "literary" genre: more accessible, more concerned with practical

matters, and more historically orientated.
This, as it stands, has the virtue of accounting for a number of the

characteristic features of both AP and CP, but is not yet a fully satisfying
explanation. To achieve that, we need to go further, and explain why AP
took the paradigmatic turn, whereas CP did not. I confess that I do not
have a full explanation. But I do have one suggestion that will be part of
it. This explanation is sociological.
The fact that CP is characteristically advanced in the form of books
that are relatively accessible (if only in the sense that they have the room
to explain their specialized terminology), while AP is advanced in the
form of journal articles that are generally comprehensible only to other
specialists, is explained by the differences in the audiences to whom
Continental and analytic philosophers typically address themselves. As
normal scientists, analytic philosophers address themselves to fellow
specialists. But Continental philosophers commonly address themselves
to the educated public at large. This is no doubt due, in important part,
to the fact that philosophy is taught in high schools across Europe. An
unexpected consequence of this expansion of the potential audience of
philosophical texts is the relatively small part played in CP by detailed

research upon esoteric questions, as opposed to more wide-ranging
speculation. The analytic philosopher addresses specialists she knows will
share her technical vocabulary and her sense of what problems she ought
to be concerned with. The Continental philosopher addresses an educated
layperson she knows will possess at least an outline knowledge of the
history of Western thought.
That, I suspect, is part of the reason for CP's frequently noted
historical sense. In the absence of a shared paradigm, of a shared set of
problems and exemplary problem solutions, it is the history of

philosophy that binds CP together. It is the element shared by
philosopher and philosopher, philosopher and audience.
But history also plays a more positive role in CP. It does not simply
provide the unifying force; it is also the horizon within which all problems
are understood. For the Continental philosopher, the delineation by AP
of the perennial problems of philosophy is hopelessly naive: it is absurd,
for example, to treat Aristotle on akrasia as a response to the same set of
questions Donald Davidson addresses in his work in the philosophy of

action.
The explanation for this emphasis on history is, once again, to be found
in educational practices. And on this contrast Kuhn is illuminating once
again. His holism would, I suspect, lead him to side on this question with
CP: just as the Newtonian concepts of space, time, and mass only partially
-
overlap with their Einsteinian counterparts since concepts get their
from their in a network - 1 for Kuhn
meaning place so, suspect,
Aristotelian akrasia and Davidsonian weakness of the will are only
partially overlapping concepts.5 Why, then, does AP persist in treating the

history of philosophy essentially as a set of attempts to solve its problems?
Kuhn suggests that the parallel tendency in science is the result of a
retrospective illusion, caused by the manner in which science is taught.

He sketches an illuminating contrast between the way in which scientists
are initiated into their community and the way education is conducted in
other fields. In the humanities, Kuhn suggests, students are typically
taught, at least in important part, by way of exposure to the original texts
of a variety of authors from a variety of historical periods. They are not,
therefore, led to adopt one paradigm, one set of canonical puzzles as the
problems of their field, nor (typically) are they under pressure to adopt
one set of methods or one approach to tackle these problems. Instead the
student is confronted with a wide variety of problems, drawn from the
entire history of the discipline, and "has constantly before him a number
of competing and incommensurable solutions to tackle these problems,
solutions that he must ultimately evaluate for himself' (1970, 165).
When this approach characterizes philosophical education, we can
expect its students to be historically oriented, to disagree among
themselves as to what the most fundamental problems of philosophy
are, and therefore to turn to history itself and to its study to unify their
discipline. They will be acutely aware of historical differences and alive to
the subtleties that characterize the approach of individual philosophers.
Ask them what they are working on, and, as Mulligan remarks, they will
frequently reply with a proper name: Husserl, Hegel, Aristotle.6
But this is not the kind of approach to education we find in the natural
sciences. Instead, education there takes place largely through the
textbook, not the reading of the original texts of great scientists. And
textbooks, Kuhn says, are inevitably "systematically misleading" about
the history of the sciences (1970, 137); they
refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as
contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems.
Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of an earlier age are
implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems
and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent
revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. (138)
5
This is even clearer with regard to Aristotelian virtue as contrasted to the virtue of the
virtue ethicists: kindness, as has often been pointed out, has no place in the Aristotelian
view. Notice, too, that here the many techniques which AP has evolved to limit or eliminate
Kuhnian incommensurability hardly get a grip at all. For the causal theory of reference to
come into play, for example, we would need to be sure that we were referring to entities or
phenomena that exist independently of our views and attitudes toward them - which is at
least not obviously the case with regard to human virtues and weaknesses.
6
Thus Critchley has things exactly backwards in his characterization of CP: CP is not
antiscientistic because it is so historical; it is historical because it is antiscientistic (though no
doubt the tendencies are mutually reinforcing).
298 NEIL LEVY
A complete and accurate representation of the history of the sciences runs

counter to the aims of scientific education. The educational institution
aims to initiate the student into the scientific community. It seeks to lead
the student to share the reactions and dispositions of that community, to,
as Kuhn puts it, view "the situations that confront him as a scientist in
the same gestalt as other member of his specialists' group" (189). This
goal is most efficiently achieved when the student is able to trust her
teachers; when, that is, she has no doubt that the approach they are
imparting is uniquely definitive of science. To expose that student to a
variety of other approaches to science, then, to other and rival sets of
puzzles and interpretations of nature, is not simply functionless but might
actually serve to undermine the aims of scientific education. The
textbook, therefore, teaches little history, and what history it does
mention is simply the story of how scientists came to free themselves from
error and superstition on their way to building the viewpoint of normal
science.
I suggest that the approach to philosophical education which is
characteristic of AP is closer to this model than is the approach in CP.
Once again, I speak of tendencies; naturally the student of philosophy
can never be educated by way of textbooks to anything like the same
extent that the young scientist can be. Nevertheless, the tendency is clear.
Students of metaethics are regularly presented with just two or three
pages of Hume, for example. Once we have read that "reason is, and
ought to be, the slave of the passions," we have located his work as a
contribution to the articulation of a canonical problem - that of the
relation between the motivational and the cognitive aspects of morality.
It goes without saying that this reckless disregard for the historical and
cultural context of ideas is anathema to CP.
Assessing the Traditions

If this characterization of the differences between AP and CP is right, or
nearly so, it inevitably confronts us with the question as to which is the
better way of doing philosophy. The balance sheet is mixed.
Of course, as the application of a Kuhnian framework would suggest,
we are faced with the difficulty that the two traditions are unlikely to
agree on standards of evaluation. Instead, each is likely to possess its own
set of standards, standards by which it will do well while its opponents
score badly. We need, so far as possible, to find standards that are not
question-begging.
One such standard immediately suggests itself. If my description is
correct, we should expect AP to be capable of progress. As a normal
science, it should be able to make rapid progress on the problems it sets

itself. Perhaps this should be counted as a point in its favor, but we need
to be careful here. While it may indeed be the case that AP - and only
AP - that is to be and the

progresses, simply expected: progress
acceptance of a normal scientific paradigm are correlative notions. Not to
make progress within a discipline defined in relation to such a paradigm
is to fail, but outside such a discipline the notion of progress simply has
no application. As Kuhn himself notes, this kind of pattern is "not
unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible
with significant discovery and invention" (1970, 13).
On the other hand, if Kuhn's description of the systematically
misleading way in which history is represented in normal science is
accurate, we should expect CP to have a clear advantage when it comes to
the history of philosophy (and probably the philosophy of history as
well). I suggest that this is indeed the case. Even such a defender of AP as
Kevin Mulligan (for whom CP is "is inherently obscure and obscurantist,
often closer to the genre of literature than to that of philosophy; it is
devoid of arguments, distinctions, examples and analysis; it is problem
arm" [1991, 115]) finds analytic history of philosophy characteristically
marred by the failure to understand the context in which ideas were
developed (116). Though Mulligan wouldn't concede it, it is also possible

to believe that there is more than a little truth to the Continental
philosopher's claim that the lack of historical sense in AP renders the
treatment of at least some of its problems superficial.
Another point in CP's favor concerns the ability of the latter to
address practical questions. There is, I suspect, a trade-off at work here, a
trade-off whose existence we might have deduced from Kuhn's text. The
adoption of a normal scientific paradigm has as a consequence a greatly
increased specialization of science: a much greater concentration on a
much smaller area. As a result, science becomes increasingly divorced
from the day-to-day concerns of non-scientists. "Frequently... re
volution narrows the scope of the community's professional concerns,
increases the extent of its specialization, and attenuates its communica
tion with other groups, both scientific and lay" (1970, 170). With the
acquisition of a paradigm, AP acquired a set of relatively well-delineated
problems or puzzles,
upon which it was able to focus almost all its
attention and thus to make great progress in solving them. As a result,
it came - in my view - to be seen as less and less relevant
however, rightly,
to the kinds of pressing questions that often drive people to philosophy
in the first place.7
7
To the extent that analytic philosophers do address practical questions - engaging in
what they call applied ethics, for instance - they risk finding themselves in the position of the
scientist who writes books: "More likely to find his professional reputation impaired than
enhanced" (Kuhn 1970, 20). There is something of a paradox here. Applied ethics is
paradigm AP, in as much as it is one more relatively well-defined subdiscipline. Yet the
philosophers who engage in it are looked down on by others in AP. No such problem arises
for those working in CP, who tend to engage with practical questions as part of larger
projects.
300 NEIL LEVY
In CP, this situation is reversed: it addresses questions of greater

relevance with a much greater frequency than does AP, but does so in a way
that is - from the perspective of AP - rather shallow. I suggest that there is,
in fact, a trade-off between relevance and depth, at least depth of the normal
scientific kind. (Of course, what I am indicating here is only a tendency.
Philosophy cannot follow the normal sciences and leave its own foundations
unexamined; not, at least, without ceasing to be philosophy. For the same
reasons, it cannot abandon the examination of the fundamental questions
that draw people toward it. What I am suggesting is that AP tends to
channel its students away from those questions, and in the direction of
detailed work on its puzzles, to a greater extent than does CP.)
Thus far, the scales seem finely balanced. AP can legitimately claim to
make progress, but only because it has set itself a relatively tractable set of
problems to deal with. If AP can claim greater depth and rigor, CP can
claim greater social relevance. And CP can claim a decisive edge when it
comes to writing the history of philosophy. If anything, it is CP that seems
to have the advantage. At this point, however, I would like to register a
concern with regard to CP. Since understanding that concern requires
understanding what I take its aim to be, I turn now to sketching that aim.
To characterize the contrasting goals of AP and CP, it is helpful to see
them as alternative responses to cultural modernism. A few landmarks in
the genesis of AP (their dates alone are suggestive):
Begriffsschrift (1879)
"Uber Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892)
"The Refutation of Idealism" (1903)
"On Denoting" (1905)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
These are, it goes without saying, the years of the flowering of modernism
in the arts, the years of Mallarme and Eliot, Picasso and Joyce. These are
also the years in which the seminal texts of CP are written:
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Logical Investigations (1900)
Ideas (1913)
Being and Time (1927)
The Transcendence of the Ego (1937)
- tentative -
My speculation is this: modernity is characterized by two
competing impulses, which find expression most distinctly in the natural
sciences, on the one hand, and in modern (nonrepresentational) art on
the other. In the one, research is an essentially cumulative enterprise, and,
when revolutions disrupt its continuous progress, it rewrites its own
history so as to represent even the revolutions as a particularly fruitful
part of the continuum. In the other, novelty and revolution are actively
sought, not suppressed. The most able painter hopes, not to perfect an
already existing style, but to produce his or her own. As has often been
noted, continuous revolution is characteristic of the avant-garde. This, I
suspect, is not because it is looking for something that it has not yet been
able to find but because revolution is its very goal.
I suggest, therefore, that CP models itself on modernist art, just as AP
models itself on modern science. Hence the dizzying succession of
revolutions in philosophy that characterize its progress: phenomenology,
existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, nouveau phi
losophie, each attempting, not to build on its predecessors, but to replace
them.
Hence, too, what I take the goal of CP to be. The avant-garde artist, I
suspect, typically has the goal of leading us to see the world anew, from a
different perspective. Hence the constant need to revolutionize in art, to
overthrow ways of perceiving before they become sedimented into
habitual dispositions. Something like this is, I suspect, the goal of the
Continental philosopher. Hence her constant urge to begin again, to
question the foundations of philosophical systems, particularly of those
systems that, she believes, shape the common-sense and everyday
perception of her entire culture. Thus the problem of social transformation
is the constant horizon of her work. This demand that philosophy innovate,
that it allow us to think anew, is captured by Foucault's definition:
What is philosophy today... if it is not the critical work that thought brings to
bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know
how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently? (Foucault
1986, 8-9)
It is this conception of philosophy to which Lyotard subscribes when he
defines the most important task of the philosopher as being the search for
new vocabularies to express as yet unrepresented experiences. Equally, it
is this conception that is at stake in Deleuze and Guattari's recent
definition of philosophy not as the analysis but as the invention of
concepts. As a definition of philosophy in general, I suspect this fails
hopelessly. As a definition of CP, however, it may be spot on. New
concepts enable us to see the world anew, through eyes rejuvenated by the
revolutionary philosopher.8
8
This description of the goals of philosophy will, no doubt, put one in mind of Richard
Rorty. For Rorty, too, the aim of philosophy is to invent new vocabularies so as to enable us
to play new language games; not to solve puzzles so much as to invent new ones. It is no
coincidence that Rorty, like the Continentals he often appropriates for his own ends, also
sees philosophy as essentially a kind of writing. For him, AP is essentially "the same sort of
discipline as we find in the other 'humanities' departments.... The normal form of life in the
humanities is the same as that in the arts and in belles-lettres; a genius does something new
and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers begin to form a school or
movement" (Rorty 1982, 217-18). It is because this is Rorty's conception of philosophy that
he is so widely regarded as an apostate by analytic philosophers.
302 NEIL LEVY
Thus, whereas AP sets itself the goal of solving its relatively well
delineated problems, CP glories in the fact that it will not define its pro
blems in advance. To do so would be to foreclose too many possibilities,
to prevent the thinking of the radically new.
I can now sketch my worry. Normal science, as we have seen, does not
seek novelty. Indeed, it will often actually suppress it, until it becomes too
insistent to be ignored any longer. Nevertheless, and for that very reason,
it is, Kuhn claims, peculiarly "effective in causing them to arise" (1970,
64). For, just as Davidson showed that disagreement emerges only
against a background of agreement, so novelty only emerges with clarity
against the background of the expected:
Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what
he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.
Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The
more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator
it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. (Kuhn
1970, 65)
My worry, therefore, is that CP's very insistence on always being open to

the radically other might prevent it from recognizing instances of the
alterity it seeks. Seeking alterity everywhere, it might fail to see where it
appears most massively. One must have expectations for them to be
disappointed. Or, to use Kuhn's language, one must have a paradigm in

order to experience its revolutionary overthrow. I see no way to steer a
middle course here, and no way to sublate the opposition either. It seems
that either our philosophy will seek novelty, and risk never being able to
see it, or it will work to suppress it (and perhaps grasp it all the more
clearly for that).
Whether or not CP does suffer from this fault, the fact that we have
identified strengths and weaknesses in both styles of philosophy suggests
an obvious course for philosophy to follow in the future. We could hope
to combine the strengths of each: to forge a kind of philosophy with the
historical awareness of CP and the rigor of AP. Is such a philosophy
possible? Kuhn's work implies that it is not: "The depreciation of
historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the
ideology of the scientific professions" (138).
If a student is educated historically, if she is exposed to a history that is
not systematically misrepresented, she will not become a normal scientist
or an analytic philosopher. If she is to become one, she must acquire the
appropriate dispositions. In particular, she needs to learn see her field in
the appropriate way, learning to see her problems "in the same gestalt" as
other members of her discipline (189). She must learn "to group objects
and situations into similarity sets" (200). Now, acquiring this ability to
see her field in the appropriate manner requires immersion in its world.
The student must be constantly exposed to exemplars of the kind of
seeing into which she is being initiated. Thus, the kind of education
required to turn out normal scientists is antithetical to the kind of
education required to turn out people with a sense of history. To achieve
the first, we expose the student to examples of the appropriate kind of
procedure, until she comes to share the intuitions of the group. Exposure
to alternative methods, to other ways of seeing the world, would here be
counterproductive. But to produce students with a historical sense, we
deliberately expose them to as wide a variety of ways of proceeding as

possible, inviting them to enter the thought styles of each. In this kind of
education the student "has constantly before him a number of competing
and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must
ultimately evaluate for himself' (165). Educating students in this way is

bound to produce thinkers who disagree among themselves, who share
not a paradigm but only a set of texts.
If this is correct, we have little reason to be optimistic that AP and CP
could overcome their differences and produce a new way of doing
philosophy that would combine the strengths of both. But we can
nevertheless hope that the situation is not as bleak as this application of
Kuhn's work to it suggests. There may yet be a way to steer between this
particular Scylla and Charybdis. What the details of this middle way
might be, I do not know, but we can point to the increasing signs of a
historical consciousness among analytic philosophers - evidenced by the
recent work of John McDowell and of Hilary Putnam, and the return to
- as a
Aristotle among analytic ethicists, for example sign that it is
possible.
Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics

Department of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Vic 3010
Australia
nllevy@unimelb.edu.au
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Armen Marsoobian and an anonymous reviewer

for Metaphilosophy for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of
this article
References
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Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94: 1-18.
Critchley, Simon. 1997. "What Is Continental Philosophy?" International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, no. 3 (October): 347-64.
304 NEIL LEVY
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Points ...Interviews, 1974-1994. Translated by

Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Translated by L.
Scott-Fox and L. M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London:

Duckworth.
Engel, Pascal. 1999. "Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Norms."
Monist 82, no. 2 (April): 218-34.
F0llesdal, Dagfinn. 1997. "Analytic Philosophy: What Is It and Why
Should One Engage in It?" In The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, edited
by Hans-Johann Glock, 1-16. Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. The Use of Pleasure. Translated by R. Hurley.
New York: Vintage Books.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second
edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mulligan, Kevin. 1991. "On the History of Continental Philosophy."
Topoi 10, no. 2: 115-20.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis:
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Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London:
Fontana/Collins.
. 1996. "Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look" In The
Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by Nicholas Bunnin and E.
P. Tsui-James, 25-37. Oxford: Blackwell.

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ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY: EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES

Author(s): NEIL LEVY

ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY:

ABSTRACT: A number of writers have tackled the task of characterizing the

analytic philosophy is usefully seen as philosophy within a paradigm,

Keywords: analytic; Continental; Kuhn; paradigm.

optimism at the prospects for imminent reconciliation, understanding the

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

categories. Some philosophers work between the traditions, as it were, in

ways influenced by both: Alasdair Maclntyre and Charles Taylor come to

pragmatism to some extent, and of philosophers whose work developed

Characterizing the Traditions

geography. CP will thus be that kind of philosophy practiced in mainland

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

to a place, anymore than "analytic" can be entirely synonymous with

What distinguishes analytical philosophy from other contemporary philoso

try to achieve it and succeeds, moderately plain speech... it distinguishes

sharply between obscurity and technicality. (Williams 1985, vi)

In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading

departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not

© Metaphilo ophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

enquiry and...'the fall of the self' (Cooper 1994, 4).

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

explanation. This line of thought is promising, but it awaits further

contextuallyit holds that "philosophical problems do not fall from the

example). More important, it leaves the differing attitudes of the two

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from

Now, I doubt neither that Dummett's characterization accurately reflects

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

Another aspect of my disagreement with Dummett's views is

Accounting for the Differences

It would be possible to go on multiplying the cliches concerning AP and

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

What Is Literature? (Sartre)

My suggestion is this: AP has successfully modeled itself on the

Analytic Philosophy as Normal Science

Paradigms are "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

mature sciences. Two features of paradigms explain this rapidity.

judging relevance, once their field of vision is narrowed by a shared

precise, esoteric, and consuming sorts of work" (Kuhn 1970, 18).

necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (Kuhn 1970, 5). Since

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

ceasing to be a scientist. She is, therefore, bound to suppress the isolated

Continental philosophy... is problemarm. "Ask me what I'm working on, and

[Analytic philosophy] aims to solve particular problems, puzzles and

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

solutions" (Kuhn 1970, 187). Unlike paradigms, however, exemplars

"provide the community fine-structure of science" (187). All physicists,

undergo important changes. As a result of the acceptance of a normal

methodology. Moreover, the kind of puzzle she will typically be

paper, is the preferred philosophical genre on the continent" (Mulligan

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

tend to consist of collections of previously published articles - Frank

reputations always rest upon considerable books.

paradigm-guided activity. CP has been characterized only insofar as it

Explaining the Explanation

© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

more "literary" genre: more accessible, more concerned with practical

This, as it stands, has the virtue of accounting for a number of the

philosophical texts is the relatively small part played in CP by detailed

problems and exemplary problem solutions, it is the history of