Continental/analytic debate: what's up with it?

I'm in a typical "analytic" department (although we do have 2-3 continental faculty), and I have a pretty exclusively "analytic" training (I specialize in mathematical logic, so that was kind of inevitable).

From my perspective, it never really came across as a "debate" between analytic and continental philosophy. It's just more like...two non-overlapping (or barely overlapping) literatures. I haven't read Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Husserl, Heidegger, etc., not because I'm ideologically opposed to them, but just because they never come up. They aren't mentioned in the articles I read, or in my discussions with other grad students, or in discussions with my advisors (probably, I imagine, because none of them have read those authors either.)

Since I don't know anything about continental philosophy, I don't make any judgments about it, and I have nothing against people who pursue it. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" and all that. That's pretty much the same attitude of all the other philosophers I know personally. They don't go around bashing continental philosophers: they're barely even paying attention, to be honest.

I don't know what it's like on the continental side, but I assume it's fairly similar. Yes, you'll find some rants by analytic philosophers bashing continentals, and some rants by continentals bashing analytics, but I suspect that the majority of philosophers on both sides barely give it any thought.

If you search through the subreddit for threads on analytic vs continental philosophy you'll find a number of responses by people much more qualified than myself.[Edit: Here's a great example of such a thread] Some find it meaningful, others find it arbitrary.

Take my opinion with a massive grain of salt.

Speaking as a mostly self-taught layman within Philosophy, I personally don't think much of significance rests on the analytic/continental divide. While there are a set of loose characterizations of each 'side', there doesn't seem to be any non-controversial way of delineating which side is continental and which side is analytic beyond vague accusations of clarity or 'rigor'. Those types of accusations tend to have more to do with one's familiarity with the technical vocabulary of a given tradition than anything else.

Some might draw the distinction purely on which tradition or figures one follows or is interested in on a given topic, but even then that doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction beyond saying one is interested in x, y, or z. People who don't like or reject those figures or approaches will reject them anyway. Drawing a line in the sand like that seems more like an arbitrary way of separating which approaches one does or doesn't like.

That said, you should read 'Analytic' philosophers if you're interested in them. Quine, for example, is an extremely important figure in 20th century philosophy worth reading regardless of which 'side' you take on the continental/analytic distinction.

is this just me, feeling all this hostility towards "continental" philosophy in general (I am aware this hostility is not total, since I know a lot of you guys are educated on Kierkegaard, Foucault, Derrida and whatever else), or is the "analytic" approach really generally hostile to most forms of continental philosophy?

Analytic philosophers are often quite hostile to continental philosophy, but more some sources than some other. For instance, few people will hate on Foucault, but Derrida? Better not mention Derrida.

That said, I've experienced the other side of the issue too: people that favour continental philosophy dismissing analytic philosophy as shallow, boring, dry, or otherwise not saying anything really worthwhile.

Nonetheless, I'd say there's more continental-hate from analytics than analytic-hate from continentals.

You can search r/askphilosophy for this question and find some fairly extensive responses. I'll just make a few remarks.

First, like u/clqrvy, I never sat down and said, 'Okay, I'm going to be an analytic philosopher.' I studied the philosophy I wanted to study, and no one ever cited most Continentals, so they never came up. Now, someone could accuse me of myopia, and someone could accuse the philosophers I was reading of myopia, for not citing Continentals. But that could be applied to all the analytic philosophers that don't come up in what I read, either. And as scholars, we can at least hope that if some Continental made a really important point about something I was reading, I would have heard about it. We can't read everything, ourselves.

Second, one of the best, published answers to this question, in my experience, comes in Neil Levy's "Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences." Basically, analytic-style philosophy is Kuhnianly paradigm-bound, and Continental-style philosophy is pre-paradigm. (This is not pejorative to either side.) Some have described Anglophone-style philosophy as 'philosophy as an extension of science,' which is consonant.

Third, in my experience, Continental philosophy is much more history- and exegesis-focused than analytic-style, at least in the journals. There's no "official" ranking of philosophy journals, of course, but according to SPEP, about half of the "top" Continental journals are focused on specific philosophers (not even just on history per se). And even if you look at (e.g.) Continental Philosophy Review (which doesn't name a philosopher in the journal-title), most articles (at least in the issues I glanced at) mention particular philosophers in the article-titles. In contrast, a history-focused journal only shows up at number 20 according to analytic-style philosophers. (Perhaps this has led to the belief that Continental philosophy is more difficult to read, since the majority of Continental philosophers' work seems to be dedicated to understanding and evaluating what their "big names" have written.)

Finally, if you're wondering which one is better, some philosophers will have strong opinions here and some won't. Presumably there's a reason that analytic-style has grown to dominate Anglophone departments, but of course people don't always choose their philosophy rationally. You might pick up a classic of Continental philosophy (e.g. Heidegger, Being and Time), and a classic of analytic-style (e.g. Parfit, Reasons and Persons), and decide whether one seems to surpass the other in terms of the criteria you care about. (Then again, maybe I subconsciously chose books that would bias someone toward my side.)

I would like to know: is this just me, feeling all this hostility towards "continental" philosophy in general (I am aware this hostility is not total, since I know a lot of you guys are educated on Kierkegaard, Foucault, Derrida and whatever else), or is the "analytic" approach really generally hostile to most forms of continental philosophy?

It's hard to generalize without the statistics. But here is how it strikes me:

The hostility for continental philosophy from analytic philosophers has been diminishing for a while now. There are lots of analytically trained philosophers who have a live-and-let-live or otherwise neutral (or minimally negative) attitude towards it. Quite a few also have a positive attitude towards continental philosophy.

That said, there are still a number that are hostile to continental philosopher (or at least a significant subjection of it). Here is what I want to say most directly about your question: the analytic style as historically practiced is not hostile to continental philosophy. There is nothing inherent in the approach of analytic philosophers that would explain their hostility. At most there is a tension between analytic philosophy's inclination towards plainer prose and continental philosophy's lack of inclination in that regard. But that is a weak tension owing to variability on both sides.

However, the analytic philosophers that are hostile tend to reify certain tendencies in analytic philosophy (like the tendency towards plainer prose) as constitutive values of philosophy in general. So they think there is a normative 'analytic' approach that is also normative for all philosophy. For those philosophers and that sense of 'analytic approach', there is indeed a hostility to continental philosophy.

So, to answer your second question: The story is that these philosophers see what is going on in continental philosophy as not really philosophy, and so bad for philosophy and probably also bad in general. They have a strongly normative conception of philosophy (it must be rigorous or scientific, and so must be clear, disinterested, ahistorical etc...) and they see continental philosophy as ignoring those requirements and potentially leading people astray or corrupting philosophy.

That's not the whole story, as there are almost certainly some people who are hostile because it is nice to feel like one is smarter than all those people who think Derrida is actually saying something meaningful are just idiots being fooled by a charlatan. But I think the actual historical basis of the hostility lies more in the former kind of hostility (continental philosophy is bad, misleading, etc...) than the latter (continental philosophers are just a bunch of idiots taken in by obscure writing).

I hope that helps answer your second question as well. I am with you: I do not see the need for hostility. But that's the best story I have for what is going on.