Humanities and Social Sciences

Philosophy Program

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ARC DISCOVERY PROJECT

Analytic and Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy
2008-2010

CHIEF INVESTIGATORS:

Dr Jack Reynolds (La Trobe) – jack.reynolds@latrobe.edu.au
Dr James Chase (University of Tasmania) – james.chase@utas.edu.au
Partner Investigators:
Prof. James Williams (University of Dundee) – j.r.williams@dundee.ac.uk
Prof. Edwin Mares (Victoria University at Wellington) - Edwin.Mares@vuw.ac.nz

FUNDING
The project is fully funded by the Australian Research Council under a 3 year Discovery Grant for $230,000

AIMS AND BACKGROUND
Analytic and continental philosophy have become increasingly specialised and differentiated fields of endeavour. Historically defined by having been practiced in Anglo-American English-speaking countries and Continental European countries respectively, these days the geographical differentiation has become far less reliable. Nonetheless, academic philosophers, postgraduate and undergraduate students, journals, conferences, publication series, and even entire publishing houses, all now often live entirely within one or the other tradition. In some respects each tradition now has more ongoing connections to disciplines outside of philosophy than it has with its internal ‘other’. And indeed the divide has now ramified throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is familiar wherever a confirmation theorist meets a constructivist, or a poststructuralist meets a positivist, in myriad debates about the significance of Foucault, or the scope of covering law explanation. Arguably, the analytic/continental divide has helped to yield methodological incomprehension and rejection between different camps in sociology, history, anthropology, literary theory, archaeology and many other fields.

No doubt there are many causes of this philosophical divide. A list of them might include matters of philosophical heritage, the development of different philosophical conversations in different countries, the increasing professionalisation of philosophy over the twentieth century, the snowballing nature of mutual disinterest or distrust. But what are the ongoing reasons for the divide? What philosophically defensible justification can any analytic or continental philosopher offer for ignoring work carried out on the other side of the fence? This project seeks to answer this question, by systematically examining some of the most important methodological and philosophical differences that have separated (and continue to separate) these traditions.
While literature devoted to this question has begun to proliferate in recent times, and while comparative books on specific representative authors from these traditions abound, there has, as yet, been no sustained treatment of analytic and continental philosophy in monograph form. It is hence difficult to get a feel for what is at stake in this distinction – despite it being so frequently employed – or to develop an informed understanding of the limits and possibilities of the methods employed in each tradition. Indeed, this research project is motivated by the unsatisfactory nature of most of the existing attempts to do this. They tend to fall into one of two main camps: an essentialism about the differences between these two traditions that by implication denies the possibility of any meaningful rapprochement; and a deflationary response that wants to call into question any value that this distinction, and these terms, might have. The former is clearly a risky business. Not only will there inevitably be myriad thinkers that cannot be encapsulated by any neat summary of the traditions, but by describing philosophy’s ‘divided house’ in this manner one runs the risk of thereby making it even more real and oppressive than it already is. Nevertheless, a deflationary attitude to this distinction is also not a satisfactory response. It seems a bit like burying one’s head in the sand and hoping that the differences (which are both philosophical and socio-political) will dissipate of their own accord.

A better strategy, and one that we intend to employ, is to compare and contrast the traditions in detail on certain issues and in regard to certain particular methodologies and the different uses that have been made of them. By proceeding in this manner, this research project minimises the risks of meaningless or trivial generalizations, shows the topical and doctrinal consequences of each tradition’s methodological preferences, and offers prospects for achieving greater insight into the nature of this divide. Our goal is to provide the basis for enhanced understanding, dialogue, and perhaps even rapprochement, between these sometimes antagonistic adversaries, sometimes silent and ignored 'others', whichever side of the divided house one finds oneself in. The three key fronts of our proposed research are as follows:

1. HISTORY OF A DIVIDE: RECONSTRUCTIVE AND DECONSTRUCTIVE
In the first part of our research, we propose to explore the significance of the key engagements between canonical representatives of these two traditions, and to use these analyses to outline a middle way between deflationary and essentialist accounts of the differences. In terms of output, the research team intend to stage a workshop and publish one essay devoted to an analysis and a deconstruction of the key historical encounters, highlighting that which has been foreclosed in the adversarial tenor of these initial formative engagements between Bergson and Russell, Popper on Freud and Marx, Heidegger, Ryle and Carnap, and more recently, the sometimes vitriolic debate between Derrida and Searle. It will be argued that these encounters performatively reinforced the analytic/continental distinction and also covered over some important philosophical problems. In the formative years of the twentieth century the antagonistic analytic ‘versus’ continental framework may have largely been promulgated by analytic philosophers, but we will also examine the manner in which continental projects concerned with a reworked first philosophy have often cleared the ground with a wholesale rejection of other philosophical traditions or ideas (a common trope in the writing of Heidegger, for example, that arguably still persists in both phenomenology and post-structuralism). In general, our reconstruction and deconstruction of this history hopes to illuminate philosophical options that were foreclosed by these key encounters, and to renew some important debates that remain live today concerning reason, clarity, the value and role of ‘first philosophy’ and transcendental argumentation more generally.

2. PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY
The most fundamental aspect of the proposed research is to examine the key methodological differences between the two traditions. Analytic and continental philosophy employ distinct methods, and disagree as to their worth and proper field of application. Moreover, each tradition exhibits distinct stylistic preferences, norms of engagement and discussion, and harbours distinctly different attitudes as to what are the more significant philosophical issues and questions. We will look at internal criticisms and debates surrounding common methods employed in each tradition, and seek to engage each tradition’s respective philosophical ‘other’ (whether analytic or continental) in an expanded dialogue about the use and value of these methods. Too often, it is assumed that there is something wrong with the alternative tradition’s methods, without any sustained arguments towards that conclusion, let alone arguments that would be regarded seriously by those working in the other tradition.

Notwithstanding the various attempts to unify analytic philosophy as concerned with linguistic analysis, reason-giving, etc., as it is practiced today it is arguably disparate rather than univocal, united by an attitude to philosophy that itself is perceived as having arisen from the early twentieth century project of analysis undertaken by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among contemporary analytic philosophers self-identified norms include a respect for clarity in setting out and treating philosophical issues; a commitment to argumentation conforming to various logical or probabilistic norms as the way to do philosophy; perhaps an engagement in linguistic analysis; and a partial agreement that in some sense philosophy is continuous with the sciences. Each of these norms validates particular methods of philosophizing in turn, from thought-experiment, logical modeling and conceptual analysis to reflective equilibrium, conditionalisation and empirical data-fitting. Of course, the value of the norms associated with analytic philosophy is itself a matter for disagreement and discussion in analytic philosophy, with the third and fourth features being rather more controversial than the first and second. Nonetheless, this broad picture is helpful in identifying methods of philosophical investigation that are typical of the analytic movement.

Reflections on philosophical method have also undergirded continental philosophy, although there is also a history of criticism of the very idea of a philosophical method despite it being simultaneously difficult to deny that methods are employed. Deleuze, for example, rejects the possibility of any satisfactory philosophical method because something always provokes us to think and genuine creativity in thought cannot follow existing methods. Derrida also argues that deconstruction is a strategy rather than a method, and we will consider his implication that there is something problematic about the institution of a philosophical method – roughly, that it presupposes a subject/object divide, a detached consciousness observing brute facts about the world (a concern that is also found in the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty). Nonetheless, this aspect of our research examines some of the main methodological strains to be found in continental philosophy, including the continental reinventions of the dialectic (from Hegel to Deleuze, from Adorno’s ‘negative dialectic’ to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyper-dialectic’), as well as the reliance of large parts of continental philosophy upon transcendental argumentation, and the more general ways in which epistemic concerns are often given an ontological twist (and hence extended beyond the domain of epistemology).

A preliminary list of specific methodologies to be considered in the planned workshops and conferences in 2008-9 includes: the use of thought experiments in debates about epistemology, personal identity, moral philosophy; semantic ascent and other methods of conceptual and linguistic analysis (in Carnap, Quine, Ryle and others); reflective equilibrium in normative fields (such as the political philosophy of Rawls and the epistemology of Nelson Goodman); formal methods arising from logic, probability theory, decision theory etc; the phenomenological method in its various instantiations (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty); transcendental argumentation (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze); and the hermeneutic, genealogical and deconstructive methods (Nietzsche, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida).

We will also examine the background norms surrounding each tradition. The analytic tradition, for instance, adopts many of the tropes of the sciences. It is paradigmatic (in the sense that ongoing research clusters around philosophical work seen in the field as an achievement), and it involves group work among members who share a common agenda and sense of the right way to go about analysis or theorising. The fact that much analytic work is seen as part of a communal project of problem identification and resolution has immediately identifiable effects on style (and more generally on norms of communication). It also underwrites the need for stylistic indicators of common reference or content. That there are particular dangers in such an approach is itself a topic for debate within the analytic community (for instance, a bias toward problems of the ‘right size’ – and so to necessary and sufficient condition conceptual analysis, say, rather than more diffuse exploration).

Despite the ongoing philosophical concerns with intersubjectivity, alterity, the other, Mitsein (being-with), etc., it seems that the continental tradition generally (tacitly) views the philosopher as more iconoclast and individualist. Continental philosophers tend to be more preoccupied with monographic works and diachronic appreciation of tradition than with synchronic dialogic work on commonly identified problems. Deleuze and Guattari interestingly remark at one point that philosophy is syntagmatic whereas science is paradigmatic; a diagnosis that seems to assimilate analytic philosophy to science. For them, it is culture that provokes and inspires the philosopher, but there is little hope for disciplinary progress through the open communication of assumptions and results.

Projected essays to be submitted to journals and incorporated into the contracted monograph include essays on: Analytic philosophy and the ‘intuition pump’: The Scope of Thought Experiment; Reflective Equilibrium: Common sense or Conservatism?; The Nature of Logical Modelling; Phenomenological Method: On Returning to the ‘things themselves’; The Fate of the Transcendental in Analytic and Continental Philosophy; Hermeneutics, Genealogy, and Deconstruction: Logic.

3. TOPICAL AND DOCTRINAL CONSEQUENCES This third section of the proposed research will explore the topical consequences of the two tradition’s methodological preferences, paying particular attention to some of the most substantive philosophemes that separate the traditions, including the topics of time, truth and objectivity, subjectivity and the unconscious, the nature of reason or rationality, first philosophy, body and mind, language and meaning, and ethics, politics and action.
The intention here, however, will not be merely to point to the very different perspective these traditions have had in regard to these major philosophical topics, or even to show the manner in which these topical commitments closely correspond to the methodological priorities of the respective traditions. While that is a major part of this project, it will also be important to examine in detail the ways in which analytic and continental philosophers have (and have not) engaged in meaningful dialogue on these particular themes. By examining the level and qualities of their interaction in these different areas at workshops involving philosophers of very different persuasions, the research team will pinpoint areas where analytic and continental philosophy have been able to dialogue usefully and productively, and areas where this has not yet happened. We then intend to examine structural reasons as to why that may be the case (including the possibility that the questions motivating their inquiry are very different), and suggest how these problems might be made to be more amenable to debate.
While this aspect of our project may seem to beg the question by assuming that rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy is inherently valuable, we will argue that what is required is not necessarily agreement or consensus between the traditions (some kind of implausible overcoming of the divide), but simply the recognised possibility of both reasonable disputation and ongoing engagement. Debate might rarely yield agreement (at least between these two traditions of philosophy, where the governing paradigm is contested), but it can help to free both traditions of a methodological insularism that can distort theorising.
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SIGNIFICANCE AND INNOVATION
The project is both innovative and highly significant. On the basis of it, we propose to write the first monograph to consider the methodological relation between continental and analytic philosophy in detail (as opposed to edited collections and monographs that consider just two or three philosophers as representative examples). This research will show the close relationship that obtains between the divergent methodological preferences of these two traditions of philosophy and some of their key topical or doctrinal positions. As such, we will show that methodological decisions are not neutral, and that they require sustained reflection. This will also highlight the potential and the limits of both traditions and illuminate the potential for rapprochement (but not necessarily unity) between the two. Indeed, we argue that some kind of conversation (even if antagonistic) is necessary for philosophy to avoid some of the weaknesses that can be associated with the methods of both traditions when they become insulated from engagement with their respective philosophical ‘others’. If analytic philosophy is methodologically paradigmatic (i.e. it assumes the validity of a shared group of methods, even if different groups of analytic philosophers contest what these methods might be), and large parts of contemporary continental philosophy have an a priori rejection of certain philosophical methods without being able to justify such decisions and preferences, then each needs the other. Without this synergy, there are certain risks and weaknesses associated with both analytic and continental philosophy that threaten to become more entrenched. The risks involved with analytic philosophy are of an excessive preoccupation with reasoning and the calculable that ignores important background considerations and simplifies problems in order to attain solutions (or procedures for solutions) that remain at a distance from, or epiphenomenal to, the affective dimensions of the problem itself. On the other hand, the risks at the heart of continental philosophy are of degenerating into an eternally patient moral perfectionism, which eschews calculation in favour of stylised prophesies and dreams of the disruptions of the future that might never really get its hands dirty.

This prompts an important question for our work: how are we to better proceed, with an eye on the excesses evinced by these two typologies that analytic and continental philosophers almost inevitably have at least some symptoms of? Acknowledging that different philosophers in both traditions will have different means for dealing with these problems than others (and some far more effectively than others), it nevertheless seems that a rapprochement that can bring these approaches together is called for. While substantive engagement between analytic and continental philosophers is increasingly rare, the research team hence intends to stage a workshop (and publish a resultant essay) examining the major contemporary proponents of ‘middle-ways’. There are perhaps two main existing candidates: what has been described as an ‘American-German alliance’ which gravitates around a renewed Kantianism and is concerned with communicative ethics; and an under-explored pragmatist option. We will examine the work of those philosophers who have been hailed as bridging the gap (e.g. Habermas, Rorty, Dreyfus, Zizek, McDowell, Brandom, etc.). However, we will argue that these claims for middle-way rapprochement are often not philosophically well-founded, and in any case are not in fact taken up by both sides of the divide. Our hypothesis, to be tested via statistical examinations of citations in the major analytic and continental journals, will be that their respective middle-ways have been far more one-sided than is generally supposed (or where regular citation is evinced in both camps, the citations primarily occur in regard to peripheral rather than ‘core’ philosophical issues). Moreover, we will argue that they also tend to simply redraw something akin to an analytic/continental divide rather than dispense with it entirely. These alliances, although productive, also occlude some of the major debates that this research team will bring to the fore due to the sustained engagement with the French poststructuralist tradition. The ‘middle-way’ cannot simply be a cluster that sets up ‘other others’, in this case the sometimes disparaged poststructuralist tradition, and we will suggest that more sustained methodological reflection is required to achieve their aims.

One of the major practical effects of this examination is the positive effect it can have on other fields in the humanities and social sciences. As we have noted above, the methodological disagreements between analytic and continental philosophy ramify throughout many other disciplines, in the sense that social scientific work is often carried out from a consciously constructivist, positivist, or other broad philosophical basis. While there is a sense in which social scientific assumptions and debates about method have hence provided a stage for ongoing debate by proxy between the analytic and continental traditions, because this has occurred at a time of decreasing direct philosophical engagement between the traditions such debates have not been as productive as they might have. They have often amounted to a statement of a methodological starting place within their respective social sciences rather than any kind of critical argument. Only where the two philosophical traditions have reined in each other’s excesses, so to speak, can the taking up of philosophical work elsewhere not amount to an announcement of a partisan starting point.
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APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY
Since this project is an examination of methodology, it obviously gives rise to a methodological question of its own, which has partly emerged in the last section. There is no evidently neutral ground for the project to begin from; nor is it at all satisfactory to carry the investigation out from completely within either the analytic or the continental traditions. How then to carry it out? When faced with reflexive foundational challenges of this kind, it seems to us the only viable strategy in seeking insight is to head for the particular, and then aim for a reflectively justifiable ‘semi-mutual’ coherence, before coming back to the larger issues. We will do this in this project in the following way.

(1) Exploration (January 2008-November 2009)
In the first half of the project, we will explore concrete differences in practice in the two traditions – particular methods of argument or assertion, commonly used tropes of reasoning or presentation, natural reactions, suspicions, endorsements and the like.

(i) January 2008-July 2008: We will return to the history of key encounters between major proponents of analytic and continental philosophy, trace the way in which each has become received in each tradition, and examine that which has been occluded and covered over in these formative conflicts. Initial work to be presented at AAP conference stream July 2008.

(ii) April/May 2008-February 2009: We will examine the different methodologies favoured by analytic and continental philosophers. By beginning with method we can ascertain prime examples of the disagreement between the two traditions, whereas if we simply began with a particular topical theme we run the risk of assuming that analytic and continental philosophers offer different answers to the same question when they are in fact often responding to different problems. We will focus upon methodologies that are in contemporary use and arguably play a foundational role in each tradition. Work here to be presented at 2008 conference, and for critical review in workshops 1 and 2 in Dec 2008/Feb 2009.

(iii) Jan/Feb 2009-June 2009: We will examine topical and doctrinal consequences of each tradition’s methodological preferences, particularly as they revolve around issues to do with truth and objectivity (themes on which analytic and continental philosophy appear to diverge). We will also ascertain the structural reasons why the engagement between the two traditions has been more productive in regard to certain themes rather than others, and thus establish a program for what is required in the areas where genuine dialogue is yet to occur. Work done here will be prepared for presentation and critical reaction at AAP and ASCP conferences and October 2009 workshop.

(iv) Through 2008, 2009: We will supplement the above by conducting detailed analyses of citation trends in the major analytic and continental journals, paying particular attention to ‘connective threads’ in the contemporary literature. This work will be presented at October 2009 workshop.

(2) Evaluation
In the second part of the project, we will attempt to build a standpoint that allows for a more detailed assessment of the divide between the two philosophical traditions.

(i) June 2009-June 2010: Our first goal is to uncover each tradition’s apologia – the claims and arguments it would need to offer if it were to take the other tradition’s criticisms seriously (as worth careful attention, understanding and reaction) but without in the process deferring to the authority of the other in settling the matter. In other words, we will examine the ways in which each tradition can (by its own lights) legitimately respond to criticism from the other tradition of the differing attitudes and methods located in the first part of the project. This semi-mutual coherence-seeking enterprise is more valuable than non-mutual coherence of the usual sort (in which each tradition ignores the other and, as it were, concerns itself only with criticism from within), and much more viable than mutual coherence (in which both traditions come to methodological agreement as a result of critical discussion). This work will be presented at workshop 4 in Feb 2010 and in Dundee, Sep 2010.

(ii) July 2010-December 2010: Finally, we will use the findings of (i) to return to larger questions concerning the nature of the divide, to assess its significance for the value of philosophy, and to explain the ways in which methodological discussions are difficult to conduct across this divide throughout the social sciences and humanities. Results to be presented at Dundee, Sep 2010, and at SPEP conference, Oct 2010.

2008 KEY EVENTS:
Research team organizes and presents at Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, La Trobe, July (stream on ‘Analytic and Continental Methodology’). Research team co-organizes and presents at Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Conference, ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy’, December. Workshop 1 in Melbourne (La Trobe), discussion of contracted monograph, preparing essays for publication, and producing edited conference collection, December.
Translate key essays (Bouveresse, Engel, Quine)

2009 KEY EVENTS:
Workshop 2 in Sydney, February. Workshop 3 in Wellington, New Zealand, ‘History of a Divide’, October. Presentation by both CIs at AAP and ASCP conferences, essays submitted to journals.
Research team submits co-edited collection to publisher.

2010 KEY EVENTS:
Workshop 4 in Melbourne, ‘Post-analytics and Post-continentals’, discussion of monograph and summary articles, February. Essays and monograph submitted. Research team organizes and presents findings at analytic/continental philosophy conference, University of Dundee, Scotland, September. Publish article on hypothesis regarding citations trends between the two traditions.
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NATIONAL BENEFIT
The most obvious benefits of this project will be academic in that no sustained and coordinated treatment of these often non-comprehending traditions has yet been done. As such, it will enrich the international philosophy community. By bringing international philosophers of both analytic and continental persuasion to Australia and staging at least three pluralist conferences, it will also contribute to what is an emerging movement to break down the oppositional thinking that has pervaded the Australian philosophical community, and, in different ways, the humanities and social sciences at large. Monash University currently has a big ARC Discovery Grant on the history of Australian philosophy and this project can be seen as complementary. Although the analysis will not seek to engage in detail with the history of Australian philosophy, major contemporary Australian philosophers will feature in our attempt to show the fault-lines of the divide and to intimate a more engaged way forward for the future of both Australasian and international philosophy.
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COMMUNICATION OF RESULTS
CIs Reynolds and Chase intend to write a co-authored monograph (contracted with Acumen Publishing, UK), publish multiple journal entries along the way in philosophy journals (some of which will be co-authored with the PIs), as well as publish a summative essay. CI Reynolds, CI Chase, PI Williams and PI Mares intend to edit a volume of conference proceedings on this topic. Presentations from all investigators will be made within Australia, the UK and the US, and at various major conferences of both analytic and continental persuasion. The results of the project’s citational analyses of analytic and continental journals will also be published. The research team will bring these results to the attention of the humanities at large by attending workshops from the wider humanities/social scientific community, and by presenting work through interdisciplinary seminar series at various universities.
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DESCRIPTION OF PERSONNEL
The project will be primarily driven by Reynolds and Chase who have a contract to produce the first monograph that considers analytic and continental philosophy in detail. One of the reasons that such a project has not been done before, however, is because of the breadth, size and significance of the project, especially where it considers the various methodologies characteristic of these traditions and examines the extent of analytic and continental interaction in regard to multiple different themes. As such, the CIs have involved two more senior Partner Investigators, Prof. Ed Mares (Victoria University of Wellington) and Prof. James Williams (University of Dundee). They will contribute to the project by attending and presenting at the planned conference events and workshops in Australia, soliciting the involvement of others in the research and co-editing the planned book, providing in depth advice on Reynolds and Chase’s monograph book project, and will also publish original work with the respective CIs in their own fields. Williams will also host a conference on analytic and continental philosophy at the University of Dundee (in association with the University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling), and Mares will host a workshop at Victoria University, Wellington, thus allowing the project to engage with a much greater array of philosophers and achieve international exposure. It is also for this reason that four workshops are planned. It is only this kind of concerted team-based approach that will allow the resulting publication to be more than the partial results of a juxtaposition between Reynolds and Chase’s interests.

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