the master pt 1
Back home in Lancaster, I was fortunate that there was a university where I could undertake an MA in philosophy. However, like most UK philosophy schools, the orientation of my first encounter with philosophy was through the perspective of the so-called ‘analytic’ philosophy.
As I was about to discover, apparently, the other so-called ‘continental’ philosophical approach is quite looked down upon within the echelons of the ‘real’ philosophical world: the heirs of Hume, Russell and Wittgenstein. I remember it was in one of my first seminars when the lecturer referred to this other philosophical tradition which, according to him, was not a real philosophical tradition. Maybe this was a kind of provocation or a joke, but I was quite shocked to receive this attitude. A little later I chose to take a research module and look into this divide between the “analytic (Anglo-Saxon)” and “continental” philosophical worlds, and I was really surprised to discover that my research supervisor was that same professor! Finally, I learnt that he was not so resentful towards the philosophers from the other side of the Channel.
In my opinion, the clear distrust between the two sides of the philosophical world remains a rather curious phenomenon. There is both a historical aspect, rooted in the conflicts of the two world wars, and also perhaps a perennial rivalry between the British Empire and the continental European powers, especially the Germans and the French. But in addition, there is a real conceptual divide, partly due to the ascendancy of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the empirical maternalism of modern science had shown, so it seems, that the metaphysical questions were now out of date, philosophy had only two paths open take: either to become the servant of the scientific method, or to try to look beyond science and to attempt a metacritic of the project of modernity. The question of science therefore seems to be a recurring theme, a protagonist that hides in its ubiquity.
If you would like to know more about “the divide” here is the bibliography of my essay on this theme.