4 ms·

You have lots of metaphors and how analytical thinking is "narrow", but I didn't found your argument why continental philosophy would be better to study than an

• pmoriarty 10y ago
  I haven't made an argument for why I saw analytic philosphy as narrow or why I prefer Continental philosophy. And, really, it takes a lot more than a little post HN or a Wikipedia article to make that argument. It takes an education. Also, as much as I love Wikipedia, and use it every day for all sorts of things, it's not very strong on philosophy. There are tons of misrepresentations, and possibly because it's primarily an English-language encyclopedia and Analytic philosophy utterly dominates English-speaking academia, you're rarely going to get a fair or informed view of Continental philosophy from it. You really need to go to the primary sources, at the very least. And, if you're coming from the Analytic perspective, you'll probably also need guidance from a teacher who can break you out of the Analytic blinders that will tend to make you see all of philosophy from an Analytic perspective. Neverthelsess, here's really quick summary of what I find problematic about analytic philosophy: I see it as mostly full of mere language games and really trite analysis of various puzzles analytics prefer to focus on. And whenever they do happen to deal with issues I consider important, they do so on a superficial level (sometimes an exhaustively enumerated level, but rarely getting to the heart of the problem or addressing it as more than a puzzle). I have my own issues with Continental philosophy, and some of it (like Derrida, who, incidentally, most Analytics despise) have somewhat a similar language-game attitude towards philosophy. But Derrida doesn't play by the same rules as the analytics, so the latter usually opine that he's not doing philosophy at all. But be that as it may, I find both of the language-game approaches to be narrow and blinkered in that they rarely admit that there are other valid ways of approaching philosophy. It's really this exclusivist, small minded approach that I object to most, whether it comes from Analytics or Continentals. It's just most grating from the Analytics, as they are by far the most dominant and therefore usually manage to steer the discourse by just outnumbering and dismissing other perspectives. If Derridians ruled academia, I'd have many of the same objections against them. But at least most Continentals don't have assume the pretense of being "objective" or "scientific", which are sometimes used to justify the dominance of Analytic philosophy over other approaches. But these days Analytics rarely bother to justify themselves at all, as there often isn't anyone to justify themselves to (except maybe people not trained in philosophy, who are sometimes still impressed by the veneer of science). In the English speaking world Analytics are almost all there are, so they rarely feel the need to justify their approach to other Analytics. They all feel their approach is self-evidently correct and the only real way to do philosophy. They're like fish who are blind to the existence of water or the possibility of walking on land. It's really annoying to try to communicate with them if you do happen to be one of the few land-dwelling creatures left, as they'll either ignore your existence or deny that walking on land is possible or proper. </rant>