may, t. (2002) - on the very idea of continental (or for that matter anglo-american) philosophy

ON THE VERY IDEA OF CONTINENTAL (OR FOR THATMATTER ANGLO-AMERICAN) PHILOSOPHY

TODD MAY

ABSTRACT: For most of the past century, philosophers on the Continent andthose in the United States and Britain have taken themselves to be working in verydifferent, even mutually exclusive, philosophical traditions. Although that mayhave been true until recently, it is no longer so. This piece surveys ten differentproposed distinctions that have been offered between the two traditions, and itshows that none of them works, as there are major thinkers on both sides of eachproposed distinction that do not neatly fit the proposal. The upshot of this is that itno longer makes sense to uphold the idea of two traditions, and that it is time weall dropped the mutual suspicion and denigration that have characterized relation-ships between us for the past hundred years.

Keywords: Anglo-American philosophy, Continental philosophy, foundational-ism, politics, postmodernism, relativism, science.

For much of the past century, philosophers have found it convenient todistinguish between the philosophical texts written in the United Statesand Britain on the one hand and Continental Europe, primarily France andGermany, on the other. Of course, the term convenient is a euphemism. Formany philosophers, the distinction between what used to be calledanalytic philosophy and is now more often (and more accurately)called Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophymarks the most fundamental distinction in Western philosophy. Situatingoneself on either side of this divide still lends a philosopher a sense ofidentity and, lets face it, superiority. Philosophers, after all, like everyoneelse, need to feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, this particular mechanism of self-esteem is anachronis-tic. The division between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy hasbecome completely superficial. It is, as we Francophile philosophers say,pass. There simply is no interesting distinction to be drawn between thephilosophical work of the European Continent and that of Britain and theUnited States. Or, as we Anglo-American philosophers say, so I shallargue. (There is an uninteresting and unhelpful distinction between them,however, that I shall consider below.) I know this position creates someproblems for those who think of themselves as either Continental or

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Anglo-American philosophers. But here, as in many other things, what ishappening on the ground has run ahead of our ability to conceptualize it.Or, otherwise put, there has recently been much cross-fertilization betweentraditions, although as yet no overarching story has emerged about thatcross-fertilization or the blurring of boundaries that it has caused.

For the bulk of this piece, I would like to consider the most prominentcandidates for a distinction between Anglo-American and Continentalphilosophy, and to show that all of them fail to capture the work beingdone on either side of this so-called divide. Then I would like to turn towhat I consider the one defensible distinction between the two, and toargue that this distinction is little more than a lingering effect of nearly acentury of mutual suspicion, and that it should be and in much recentphilosophical work is becoming effaced. The upshot of this is that theterm Continental philosophy and the corresponding term Anglo-Americanphilosophy should be abandoned. They are two halves of a distinctionwithout a (worthwhile) difference.

At the outset, I should concede that the vapidity of this distinction wasnot always such. During the first half of the twentieth century, and even upto the 1960s, there were stark differences between the approaches of thoseon and those off the Continent. That period, to which the term analyticoften appropriately applies to the philosophy done in the United States andBritain, saw a difference in philosophical scope and subject matter that didindeed make communication difficult. The narrow scope of analytic philo-sophical reflection, its dismissal (in many quarters) of the value of philo-sophical reflection on normative issues, its overriding debt to science allcontrast sharply with the broad brushstrokes, the political and ethicalorientation, and the suspicion toward science that characterized muchprominent Continental work. (There are exceptions here, such as the workof Merleau-Ponty, but the exceptions stand out against the background ofthe rest of the work of the period.) But with the reintroduction of largerissues and normative concerns on the Anglo-American side and thedetailed linguistic and empirical work of the structuralists on theContinental side, these differences gradually diminished, to the pointwhere it does more harm than good to continue to insist on a distinctionbetween the two traditions.

In turning to the proposed distinctions, let me start first, and verybriefly, with the distinction that once seemed to impose itself upon Westernphilosophy: between those who cut wide swathes with their philosophicalstories and those who cut narrow ones, that is, the wild-eyed speculatorsand the logic choppers. This proposal needs no more than a brief look,because I am not sure anybody actually believes in it any more.

On the Anglo-American side, the narrowness of scope was abandoned,it seems, through two related philosophical developments. In the first,stemming from the work of philosophers like Thomas Kuhn and W. V. O.Quine, and especially Ludwig Wittgenstein, the epistemic differences

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between scientific practices and other practices began to be called intoquestion. It could no longer be held as incontrovertible that scienceprovides the model for all epistemic claims, and that language should bestyled on the verificationist model ascribed (wrongly, as it turns out) toscientific claims. Relatedly, the resurgence of normative work in Anglo-American philosophy, exemplified perhaps most importantly in RawlssTheory of Justice,1 helped reawaken moral and political concerns amongAnglo-American philosophers. These developments turned Anglo-American philosophy away from the narrow analytic concerns that hadpreoccupied it for much of the first half of the century and widened itsfocus of attention.

The sharpening of focus on the Continental side has not been asdramatic as the widening of focus on the Anglo-American one. Certaintrends are worth noting, such as the introduction of empirical research(starting with the writings of Claude Lvi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan andcontinuing through the work of Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, and PierreBourdieu), and more recently the appeal to Anglo-American linguisticphilosophy.2 Continental philosophy, however, remains preoccupied withbroader philosophical problems.

This treatment is brief, but as I mentioned earlier, there seems no reasonto linger over a position that nobody who has followed the trends in recentWestern philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy in particular, would betempted to hold.

What, then, might be considered candidates for perspectives leadingone to think that there is a distinction to be drawn between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy? I propose to consider nine differ-ent candidates, none of which will, in the end, work. After that, I shallpoint to a tenth, which does still distinguish between the two but not in anyway worth preserving. The first four candidates I shall group under thegeneral idea of postmodernism. I do this for three reasons. First, one of thedistinctions sometimes offered to distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philosophy is that the former, but not the latter, either endorses

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1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. To avoid burdening this piece withnotes, I shall reserve footnotes for citing quotations or specific texts mentioned in the pieceand for citing exemplary texts of writers who might be less familiar to readers familiar withonly one side of this purported divide.

2 Cf., for example, Habermass use of the works of J. L. Austin in chapter 3 of TheTheory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans.Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), originally published in 1981; Lyotardsappeal to Saul Kripkes discussion on naming in his discussion The Referent, the Namein The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988), originally published in 1983; Karl-Otto Apels use of Peirce and Wittgensteinin Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, trans.Georgia Warnke (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), originally published in 1979; andErnst Tugendhats articulation of Heidegger and Anglo-American philosophy of languagein Traditional and Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press,1982).

or is at least preoccupied with postmodernist themes. Second, postmod-ernism itself is a grab bag of diverse themes, and sorting out the relationof each tradition to them will show that neither has a particular hold on oravoidance of postmodernity. Finally, no self-respecting review of an acad-emic field would be complete without reference to postmodernism, so Imight as well get it out of the way.

The four postmodern themes are: loss of grand narratives; relativism;death of the subject; and consumerism, media dominance, and the rise oftransnational capitalism. The five nonpostmodernist candidates for distin-guishing the two traditions are (Continental side first): a rejection versusan embrace of science; a leftist versus a liberal orientation; a concern withversus a rejection of the history of philosophy; creating perspectivesversus limning reality; and obscurity versus clarity.

In treating these candidates I cannot, of course, offer an exhaustiveanalysis. At points I shall be little more than suggestive. My goal is not toclinch the idea that there is no worthwhile distinction to be maintainedbetween Anglo-American and Continental philosophy that would take abook but to shift the burden of proof onto anyone who would like tomaintain such a distinction. Of course, philosophers do not argue for themaintenance of such a distinction in any formal way; but the distinctionbetween the traditions is maintained both in hiring practices, where posi-tions for Continentalists are seen as distinct from other positions, and inthe hallways and offices of academe. (We know who we are here, Iassume.)

A final note before embarking. In order to make my case more plausi-ble, I shall discuss only major figures in each tradition. My claim is notsimply that one can discover somebody, somewhere, in Continental orAnglo-American philosophy who does not fit the mold being cut for them.Rather, it is that the proposed molds just do not fit, and, as a consequence,that there are significant reasons for people writing in many areas in onetradition to read similarly situated people writing in the other. In order topress that point, it seems best to stick to philosophers who have set theparameters for much recent discussion in the two traditions.3

Postmodern Candidate 1: Loss of Grand NarrativesOne of the peculiar features ascribed to our theoretical situation, a featurein virtue of which it is called postmodernist, is that we have lost our faithin grand narratives. As Jean-Franois Lyotard writes, in probably the mostsignificant postmodern text to date, The Postmodern Condition, I define

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3 Moreover, I shall avoid discussion of philosophers writing on the Continent whomnobody would ever consider calling Continentalists, such as Wolfgang Stegmuller andJacques Bouveresse, and philosophers in the United States who have gone under the nameContinentalists.

postmodern as the incredulity toward metanarratives.4 By metanarrative,Lyotard means a covering narrative, a narrative under which all othernarratives might be subsumed. In short, a grand narrative.

Grand narratives can be grand for at least two reasons: they are founda-tional and/or they are encompassing. Foundational narratives are epistemicstories that try to offer the (indubitable, apodictic, not-to-be-surpassed)grounding of all our other epistemic claims. Husserl offered foundationalnarratives; early on, so did Russell. Encompassing narratives, by contrast,do not necessarily try to burrow beneath our knowledge toward its foun-dations but instead stretch out to its limits, trying to tell a single coherentstory within which all our claims fit. Those who think science offers theonly example of epistemically respectable claims and also think that therecan be a unified theory in science would embrace the idea of an encom-passing grand narrative, but not a foundational one.

The question, then, is whether Continental philosophers are joinedagainst their Anglo-American counterparts in embracing the idea that welive in an age in which grand narratives have been lost. The answer to thisquestion is twofold: Continental philosophers are not as one in thinkingthat grand narratives are lost; and Anglo-American philosophers are notas one in thinking that there are still grand narratives to be told. Of course,many thinkers on the Continental side are well known to have rejected theidea of foundational or encompassing narratives, particularly in France(Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard). It is not entirely clear, however,that Habermas has done so. In his recent work in discourse ethics, heclaims, drawing on the work of Karl-Otto Apel,5 that at least the form, ifnot the content, of communicative discourse can be transcendentallygrounded. His principle U of universalization, roughly that the norms ofconversation must be acceptable to all participants, receives a transcen-dental-pragmatic grounding to the effect that a violation of U, while nota logical contradiction, is a performative one.6 Although this is not a tradi-tional foundationalism, it shares with traditional foundationalism theattempt to establish commitments that must be embraced by, if not allrational beings, at least all communicative ones in their capacity ascommunicators.

On the Anglo-American side, it would be difficult to see grand narra-



4. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington andBrian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), originally published in1979, xxiv.

5 Most influential in this regard is Apels seminal essay The A Priori of theCommunication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of a RationalFoundation of Ethics in the Scientific Age, in Toward a Transformation of Philosophy,trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), originallypublished in 1972, 1973.

6 On this, see especially Discourse Ethics: Notes on Philosophical Justification, in TheCommunicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmyer (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 60110.

tives as holding much more sway than on the Continental side. Perhapsone of the seminal articles in this respect is Wilfrid Sellarss Philosophyand the Scientific Image of Man,7 in which Sellars discusses the tensionbetween the scientific image of human beings and what he calls the mani-fest image, where we treat others as fellow beings, and where he calls fora joining of the two images that would be neither a reduction of one to theother nor a melding of the two. But recent Anglo-American work is repletewith evidence of the rejection of grand narratives. Take, for instance, JohnRawlss revisiting of his political ideas in Political Liberalism.8 One of thecentral clarifications (modifications?) Rawls offers of his original work isthat the commitments to be derived from the original position depend, inpart, on the cultural conditions under which the exercise is to beperformed. Or again, take the work of Richard Rorty. Philosophy and theMirror of Nature,9 one of the ground-breaking works of recent Anglo-American philosophy, maintains that the driving idea of the grand narra-tive in philosophy, both Anglo-American and Continental, is obsolete andshould be replaced by the more supple idea of conversation.

We can see, then, that the idea of a loss of the philosophical project ofgrand narratives is not a central idea of Continental thought, nor is itsrejection a central idea of Anglo-American thought.

Postmodern Candidate 2: RelativismSo maybe the idea of a grand narrative does not distinguish the two fromeach other. But perhaps what makes Continental rejectors of grand narra-tives different from their Anglo-American counterparts is thatContinentalists are relativists where Anglo-Americans are not.

In approaching this claim, we need first to ask what kind of relativistswe are talking about. The relativism in question cannot be just any kind ofrelativism. Gilbert Harman, for instance, would probably be surprised todiscover that he was not a relativist.10 I suspect the relativism in questionwould be an epistemological relativism. Even then, we need a furtherdistinction. Are we talking about relativism of knowledge, of truth, or ofjustification? If the relativism is a relativism of justification, thenContinentalists are in the company of some seminal philosophers in theAnglo-American tradition. Wittgenstein, for example, thinks that reasonsare relative to the language games in which they are given (an idea that canbe taken as the starting point for Lyotards reflections in The Differend).More recently, Robert Brandoms Making It Explicit11 argues that the epis-temic commitments to which one ought to be held are inferentially relative

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7 In Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 140.8 New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.9 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

10 Cf. Moral Relativism Defended, Philosophical Review 84 (1975): 322.11 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

to those epistemic commitments that one has explicitly endorsed. In fact,the idea of justification as relative is not a terribly controversial one. Inorder to reject it, one would have to offer a nonrelative justificatory prac-tice, which would seem to land us back into grand narratives of the foun-dational kind.

If it is not a relativism of justification that distinguishes Anglo-American from Continental philosophy, perhaps it is a relativism ofknowledge or of truth. These would be problematic relativisms, for theythreaten self-referential paradox. (Are the claims All knowledge/truth isrelative to X themselves relative claims or not? Either way, they do notgo through.) There are no prominent Anglo-American philosophers whoembrace them. Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated when itcomes to Continental philosophy, because some of the objects of the claimor charge of relativism do not distinguish among truth, justification, andknowledge. In particular, the work of Foucault and Derrida is particularlyelusive in this regard. Neither Foucault nor Derrida (nor, for that matter,Lyotard or Deleuze) distinguishes among justification, truth, and knowl-edge, at least as those terms are used in Anglo-American thought.12 Whatdo we do, then? Should we think of them as engaged in self-refutingclaims or not?

It seems to me a good rule of thumb in coming to grips with the thoughtof other philosophers to restrain oneself from ascribing silly positions tothem if there are better interpretive options available. In this case, whatthat amounts to is recognizing that some of the terms they use, if inter-preting in Anglo-American fashion, would be self-refuting; and, since theydo not make the same distinctions among these terms as Anglo-Americanphilosophers do, substituting the appropriate Anglo-American term (oftenthe term justification for the terms truth and knowledge)13 when it seemsthat would give a more plausible reading of the text. How and when thisshould be done is, of course, beyond the scope of this essay.14 But, at thevery least, the opening of that interpretive strategy should give pause tothose who want to distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philoso-phy by ascribing to one a set of self-refuting positions that the otheravoids.



12 I discuss this issue in Foucaults case in chapter 5 of my Between Genealogy andEpistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

13 Moreover, the term knowledge is often used to translate the distinct French termssavoir and connaissance, which themselves are often terms of art among different philoso-phers.

14 I do this for Foucault in chapter 6 of my Between Genealogy and Epistemology andbegin to lay out some similar terrain for Derrida although I ultimately critique him inchapter 2 of my Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

Postmodern Candidate 3: Death of the SubjectThe idea of the death of the subject has been an attractive one inContinental circles since Roland Barthess discussions of the death of theauthor15 and Michel Foucaults reflections on the demise of the figure ofman in the final pages of The Order of Things.16 Perhaps this idea, whichhas also been associated (correctly, in my view) with Derrida, Lyotard, andHabermas, provides a way to distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philosophy. In order to tell if it does we shall have to flesh outthe idea a bit more.

One thing the death of the subject clearly does not mean is that every-one has died (although in my conversations with some Anglo-Americanphilosophers, I have found this obvious fact elusive for them). What it hasto do with is the idea that the conscious perspective of the interpretingsubject, whether it concern an interpretation of a text, social relations, orones own mental state, can no longer be considered an unsurpassable hori-zon for appropriate interpretation. The subjects perspective on what isgoing on is not necessarily the right take on what is going on. In short,Cartesianism is dead.

This idea is appropriated differently by different philosophers in theContinental tradition. For Barthes, it is the authors perspective on his orher work that has to be overcome. For Foucault, it is the idea of man as theinterpretive centerpiece of the world. For Habermas, it is the methodolog-ical primacy of subjective consciousness over communicative interaction.For Derrida, it is the subjects self-presence as a guarantor of the stabilityof linguistic meaning. In each case, though, there has been a move awayfrom the epistemic and linguistic privileging of the reflecting subjecttoward other perspectives that are held to be more accurate or importantepistemically and/or lingustically.

If the death of the subject were not a commitment of Anglo-Americanthought, then we would surely have an important distinction between thesetwo traditions. Philosophy that occurs from a first-person, subject-centeredperspective differs significantly from philosophy that sees the subject asdetermined as well as determining, and therefore rejects the subject as aninterpretive center. Put this way, however, it is immediately clear that thedeath of the subject, the rejection of Cartesianism, is also a tenet of muchof Anglo-American philosophy.

Dating the emergence of this tenet can be a matter of some dispute. Butsurely, since the linguistic turn of Anglo-American philosophy in the1920s and 1930s, it would be absurd to hold that it is the subjectsconscious perspective that dominates Anglo-American philosophy. Untilrecently, language as determining system of thought would be a better

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15 Cf., for example, The Death of the Author, in Image Music Text, trans. StephenHeath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142148. Essay originally published in 1968.

16 New York: Random House, 1970. Originally published in 1966.

candidate than subjective consciousness to play that role. More recently, inpart because of the influence of Wittgenstein, the concept of social prac-tices has, in many quarters, started to play the same role.17 (The focus onsocial practices is also a hallmark of the work of Foucault and Lyotard, liesnascent in Gadamers treatment of the hermeneutic focus on tradition, andcan be glimpsed in Habermass and Apels discussions of communicativeaction.) Moreover, the re-emergence of naturalism in Anglo-Americanphilosophy has reinforced the idea that the appropriate starting point forphilosophical understanding is not the individuals own reflections but thenatural order. There are, of course, still places in which the primacy ofconsciousness is maintained, in both Anglo-American and Continentalphilosophy (among followers of Chisholm and Husserl, for example). Butthe death of the subject, or at least its demise as an analytic centerpiece, iscommon to both traditions.

Postmodern Candidate 4: Consumerism, Media Dominance, and theRise of Transnational CapitalismNestled within the final postmodern candidate is a view of what hashappened to our society that is influential to many, a view that, whateverits final merit, surely has cottoned on to some important changes that havetaken place in the contemporary world. In order to address it, let me givea quick overview of how the story associated with the fourth candidateruns and then say a few words about it.

The story starts with the idea that the emergence of large transnationalcorporations over the past thirty years or so has fundamentally changed thecharacter of the society in which we live. There are, perhaps, three changesthat are most important. First, capitalism has replaced the role formerlyplayed by nationalism in giving people a sense of their own identity.Whereas once we thought of ourselves as (among other things) membersof a certain country with certain traditions who spoke a certain language,now we think of ourselves more in terms of participants in a system ofworld capitalism, purchasing various items from various places with vari-ous (and fading) national characters. This is not to say that we no longerthink of ourselves as, for example, Americans or Indonesians; rather, it isto say that those aspects of our identities are becoming less important tous.

Second, and related, people are thinking of themselves more asconsumers and less as either producers or active participants in a publicorder. The dominance of advanced capitalism has removed us from ourcapacities as determiners of the features of the world we live in, whether bymaking things or by contributing to national or even local discussion



17 Cf., for example, Robert Brandoms monumental study Making It Explicit (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

about the proper character of our society, and has turned us primarily intoconsumers of produced goods and services. This is not to say that nobodymakes things anymore or talks about the state of the world (although, withthe rise of mall culture, the forums for public discussion are narrowing).Rather, it is to say that peoples lives are gaining more significance andtaking more focus from their roles as consumers than as producers ordiscussants.

Third, and again related, the rise and suffusion of various media havecontributed to the passivity, isolation, and consumer-orientation of peoplein technologically advanced societies, and in many societies not so tech-nologically advanced. The dominance of television, videos, and morerecently the Internet has reduced the public space almost to nothing andhas turned people into passive spectators of the world they inhabit. Werespond individually and passively to what is before us on a screen in theisolation of our homes and offices, rather than participating in some formof world making.

This story is not, of course, a conceptually seamless one. One can, forinstance, argue that the rise of the media is a product not of transnationalcapitalism but of a technological development that would have occurredwhether or not capitalism went transnational. The issue, however, is not somuch the seamlessness of the story as the general picture it presents. And,for our purposes, the question is whether this picture, which is perhaps themost popular picture of what a postmodern society is like, is one that canbe used to distinguish Continental from Anglo-American philosophy.

There certainly are Continental thinkers for whom this picture is acenterpiece of their work. The two most prominent thinkers in this regardare Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.18 For Baudrillard, the peculiar char-acteristic of our postmodern situation is not only that the media haveburied our everyday reality with their images but also that those imageshave indeed replaced it. For him, we live in a situation in which reality issimulated by the capitalist media, and any attempt to discover a referenceoutside this simulated reality would prove not only nostalgic but alsofutile. Virilio does not go quite so far as Baudrillard, but he retains thecentral idea that the spread of worldwide capitalist technology and mediahave fundamentally altered our place in the world, and that we are largelysubject to the reality that they have developed.

I should note in passing a similarity between this line of thought and

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18 For representative samples of their work, see Baudrillards Simulations, trans. PaulFoss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and Virilios LostDimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), originally publishedin 1984. In Baudrillards earlier work, he was not nearly as radical ontologically. There heintroduces the idea that we need to shift the focus of political theorizing from the traditionalMarxist category of production to that of consumption. Cf. Consumer Society, in JeanBaudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1988), 2956.

that of another thinker not usually associated with the excesses of thelikes of Baudrillard: Jrgen Habermas. Habermas, too, worries about thecolonizing effect of advanced capitalism on our ability to maintain alifeworld independent of capitalist appropriation.19 Unlike Baudrillardboth in positing a modernist alternative to this capitalist appropriationand in refusing to ratify that our reality has become simulated by themedia, Habermas nevertheless embraces the concern that we are livingin a world in which the globalization of a technologically advancedmarketplace is the greatest threat to our personal relationships (for him,our communicative practice) in the current world. (Oddly, this worry alsolinks Habermas with another thinker often cited as an opponent of his Lyotard, who in some of the final pages of The Differend pens similarconcerns.)20

While these thinkers are focused on this theme of postmodernism,other major Continental thinkers are not. In particular, Foucault andDerrida do not place themselves within the broad picture I have justsketched. Although they are concerned with the effects of capitalism oncontemporary life (who isnt?), they do not work from within the frame-work of a postmodern situation defined by the media and the technologyof advanced capitalism. In fact, many of their themes run counter to thedominance of such a framework. Foucault eschews the embrace of asingle explanatory framework in his genealogical approach to politicalself-understanding, preferring instead to see power exercised from and ina variety of irreducibly different practices. For his part, Derrida rejects anunderstanding of our current situation that would focus so exclusively onrecent developments. For him, we need to trace the history of Westernthought and culture if we are to arrive at an understanding of our currentsituation, and in doing so we find that this history is more continuous thandiscontinous.

On the Anglo-American side, no major thinkers I am aware of embracethis framework for understanding our recent historical situation. This isnot to say that lessons cannot be drawn from their work for approachingthese features of advanced capitalism. (For instance, Dworkins promo-tion of a rights-based defense of the individual against the utilitarian goalsof the social and political structure might be fruitfully brought to bearupon current economic relationships.) There are, however, no influentialtheorists in this tradition who have recently theorized from within thatframework. One might speculate as to why this is, given how much talkis in the air about this framework as the condition of our postmodern



19 He does this especially in chapter 6 of The Theory of Communicative Action.20 Esp. pp. 17481. I should hasten to add here that, although in league in having this

worry, their proposed solutions to the problem diverge sharply. For Habermas we need torecover or remake an undistorted communicative practice, while for Lyotard we need toreject the idea of a single practice altogether, in favor of a profusion of many nonmarketpractices.

situation.21 But the important point for our purposes is not why it is butthat it is.

Thus, we can conclude that there is no real distinction betweenContinental and Anglo-American philosophy as regards a preoccupationwith the dominance of transnational capitalism and related media, technol-ogy, and consumerism. There is a strain of Continental thought that takesthis as a central theme, but it is only one of the strands of recent Continentalphilosophy. Combining our rejection of this proposal with our rejection ofthe previous postmodern proposals, we can arrive at the tentative conclu-sion that there is no distinction to be drawn between Anglo-American andContinental philosophy along the lines of postmodernism. Let us turn, then,to other proposals for distinction to see how poorly they fare.

A Rejection Versus an Embrace of ScienceA cursory glance at this purported distinction might suggest that I amreviving an old positivist approach in Anglo-American philosophy in orderto force a distinction that will then be discredited. Actually, I am not. WhatI am interested in here is what Philip Kitscher has described as the returnof naturalism in recent Anglo-American philosophy.22 Of course, the termnaturalism takes its meaning from its contrast with whatever it is that is notsupposed to be naturalism: supernaturalism, nonessentialism, noncogni-tivism, and so forth. I take Kitschers use of the term to contrast with an apriori approach to philosophy that gives philosophy a special realm inwhich its claims are immune to evidence from nonphilosophical areas ofstudy, most especially the sciences. This view of naturalism is, in fact,opposed to the traditional positivist approach, since it rejects the idea ofphilosophy as a logical clarification of the sciences. That idea of philoso-phy already holds that philosophy is applied to, rather than interacts with,scientific practices.

On the view I am interested in here, whatever the role philosophy mighthave, it does not play that role by standing outside our empirical knowl-edge but rather by engaging with it. There are, of course, many ways to seethat role and to see the implications of that engagement. For my purposes,though, the question is whether a rejection or an embrace of science asinteracting with philosophy is a way of distinguishing Anglo-Americanphilosophy from Continental.

Kitscher is concerned most with the return of naturalism in epistemol-ogy. It should be noted, however, that naturalism in one form or another isalso prevalent in more purely normative areas in philosophy, such as moral

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21 My own speculation is that Anglo-American philosophers and intellectuals generally tend to be more remote from concrete political developments than do their Continentalcounterparts. There are, of course, exceptions, of which Noam Chomsky would provide astriking example.

22The Naturalists Return, Philosophical Review 101, no. 1 (January 1992): 53114.

theory. Owen Flanagans Varieties of Moral Personality23 and, to a lesserextent, Samuel Schefflers Human Morality24 are concerned to articulateadequate moral positions that reflect realistic approaches to our psycho-logical lives. The common thread in all these attempts is a recognition thatphilosophy must answer to our empirical knowledge just as our empiricalknowledge must answer to philosophy. Philosophy does not dictate toempirical knowledge, but neither are its claims immune from interrogationby it. (Whether philosophy is wholly subject to empirical knowledge is anissue I shall leave aside here.)

The obvious underpinning for this form of naturalism is a rejection oftraditional epistemological foundationalism. If philosophy does notprovide a foundation for empirical knowledge, and if the reason philoso-phy does not provide this foundation is that there is no special a priorirealm from which it could do so, then there is no reason to believe that theclaims of philosophy, like the claims of other disciplines, should beimmune to evidence or influence from more straightforwardly empiricaldisciplines.

Put solely as a matter of rejecting epistemological foundationalism,there is nothing to distinguish Anglo-American philosophy fromContinental. There are very few foundationalists left on either side of thatpurported divide. It is slightly more complicated, however, when we turnto the reasons for rejecting epistemological foundationalism. But onlyslightly. One good reason to reject such a foundationalism is that attemptsto provide it have proven futile. Quine at least the Quine of the TwoDogmas of Empiricism would seem to fall into this category. So wouldDerrida.25 (This is a good strategy because by resisting the attempt to givean a priori reason for rejecting foundationalism, it does not risk falling intoproblems of self-reference.) Alternatively, one might reject it because oneprefers to hold at the center of ones philosophical perspective the seem-ingly important truth that humans are natural, biological creatures. Thisview seems to inspire many recent Anglo-American epistemologists. Italso inspires Foucault. Yet again although not finally one might wantones moral viewpoint to be responsive to the world in which we actuallycarry out our lives, rather than dictate to us from on high. This certainlyseems to be the motivation in works like Flanagans and Schefflers cited



23 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.24 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.25 I do not want to suggest here, heaven forfend, that Quine is a Derridean or Derrida a

Quinean. My point is more modest. Derrida looks at the history of philosophy, sees the fail-ure of foundationalist projects, and draws conclusions concerning the operation ofdiffrance from the ways those failures occur. Quine looks at the notion of analyticity, seesthe failure of attempts to locate its difference from syntheticity, and draws conclusions bothabout the failure of positivist projects of offering a foundationalist epistemology and aboutthe structure of an appropriate scientific epistemology. But both philosophers draw theirconclusions concerning the failure of foundationalism from a survey of the attempts of itsproponents.

above. It is also an important motivation in Habermass discourse ethics,although Habermas carries that motivation out in a different way. (Thatdifferent way puts him in dialogue with more contractualist approaches tomorality, such as those of Scanlon26 and Rawls.)

Perhaps, if we move away from the core issue of the rejection of epis-temological foundationalism, we might find evidence of a distinctionbetween Continental and Anglo-American philosophy in this realm. Itseems that Anglo-Americans, rather than merely acknowledging the vari-ous impingements of empirical knowledge on philosophical work, activelyappropriate empirical findings in their philosophical discussions. Do theContinentalists? Michel Foucault was interested in the findings of history,and he appropriated them in his work. Pierre Bourdieu, although an impor-tant figure in recent Continental philosophical discussion, is by training asociologist and anthropologist, and he buttresses his arguments with hisown empirical work in those fields.27 Paul Virilio cites and analyzes vari-ous contemporary developments in such far-flung fields as militaryresearch and media studies.28 Not all Continentalists by any means areconcerned with empirical issues. Deleuze, Gadamer, and Derrida certainlyare not. But neither are all major figures in contemporary Anglo-Americanphilosophy, especially in moral and political theory. Rawls, Nozick, andScanlon, among others, leap to mind in this regard.

Maybe we should revise the view yet again. Maybe it is not recourse toempirical knowledge per se that distinguishes Anglo-American fromContinental philosophers but recourse to and an embrace of natural scien-tific empirical knowledge. Maybe it is that Anglo-American philosophersrely on the natural sciences in a way that Continental philosophers do not.

There is, I believe, some truth to this idea, but only very little. To seehow little, notice first that philosophers like Scheffler, who, in HumanMorality, appeals to psychoanalysis, and perhaps even Flanagan, most ofwhose appeals are to psychological theory and cognitive science, woulddrop out of the Anglo-American tradition if this were the distinguishingcriterion. Note as well that too close an embrace of this position might welllead us to the positivist position that we saw Anglo-American theory rejectat the outset of our discussion of this candidate for distinction. For ifhewing to the results of natural science were criterial for Anglo-Americanphilosophy, then the more purely normative fields of morality, political

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26 Esp. Contractualism and Utilitarianism, in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. JohnRajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

27 Perhaps most well-known in this regard are Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), originally published in 1972,and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), originally published in 1979.

28 For Virilios work in military history and research, see Speed and Politics, trans. MarkPolizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), originally published in 1979. For some of hisrecent work in media studies, see Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), orig-inally published in 1995.

theory, and aesthetics would have to be abandoned as properly philosoph-ical.29 Although one need not embrace a verificationist theory of meaningor a sense-data view of observational sentences, the unwelcome sectariannarrowness of the philosophical approach associated with the termanalytic would certainly return as the metaphilosophical yardstick on sucha criterion.

If we loosen the idea a bit, though, there may be a truth to be glimpsedhere. Anglo-American philosophy of the twentieth century has beenanimated by an ideal of science in general and physics in particular that hasnot been evident in Continental philosophy. (There are exceptions here,most notably Georges Canguilhem in biology and Gaston Bachelard inphysics. It is perhaps interesting that much of their work emerged duringthe period of positivism in the Anglo-American tradition.) Anglo-American philosophy has leaned more heavily on natural science, whileContinental philosophy has leaned more heavily on the arts, literature inparticular. This leaning is not so much a criterion of distinction betweenthe two traditions as it is a loose orientation of interests (as well as animpetus to philosophical idiom an issue I shall address later). During thepositivist period in Anglo-American philosophy, it might have beenconsidered more criterial. But, as is well known, the fact that Anglo-American philosophy has changed in its relation to natural science fromconsidering its incorporation criterial to considering it orientational indi-cates a metaphilosophical change in Anglo-American philosophy itself.That change was one I referred to above as the widening of philosophicalconcerns. Given this widening, and given that many Continental philoso-phers are open to empirical knowledge generally, and further given thatthose openings are confluent with a shared epistemological antifounda-tionalism, it seems that what we are faced with here is less a criterion fordistinguishing the two traditions and more an opportunity for each to learnfrom the other in areas that have been relatively neglected by the hometradition.

Leftist Versus Liberal OrientationContinental philosophers are knee-jerk leftists; Anglo-American philoso-phers are knee-jerk liberals. That seems to be the purported distinctionhere. This candidate would be, in one sense, at the opposite pole of the onejust considered. Instead of trying to find a distinction through the realmsof ontology and epistemology, one turns to more purely normative fieldsto discover it. What cannot be found in science can perhaps be found inpolitics.



29 A possible exception here might be those who think that evolutionary biology can yieldreasonable norms. But even in that case the ability to argue for such a position, inasmuch asit presupposes a full moral vocabulary, would be radically restricted.

It cannot. And it will not take many words to see why. First, the recentlyascendent political theorists in France are not the theorists of the genera-tion of the 1960s those formed by the events of May 1968 but the theo-rists of the generation after that. In France, perhaps the most ascendentpolitical theorists are liberals, especially Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut.30There has been a backlash against the failure of Althusserian Marxism, theperceived excesses of more radical theorists like Foucault, and also againstthe perceived totalitarian tendencies of Heideggers thought (broughtabout by a renewed recognition of Heideggers personal involvement withNazism). This has led to a reinvigorated embrace of liberalism amongcontemporary political philosophers in France. In Germany, Habermassown evolution from critical theorist to contractualist has already put himin dialogue with Rawls concerning the proper approach and scope ofcontractualist theories of justice,31 and has landed him squarely in the campof Anglo-American-style contractualism.

The fact is, on the Continent, as in so many other places, liberal theoryis currently without an influential philosophical rival. And the upshot ofthat fact is that we can no longer assume that the Continent is dominatedby leftist political thinkers while liberalism is left to the Anglo-Americans.

A Concern with Versus a Rejection of the History of PhilosophyIt has been a staple of those who believe in the split between Anglo-American philosophers and Continental ones that the latter still workwithin a framework that endorses appeal to major figures in the history ofphilosophy, whereas Anglo-Americans, under the influence of positivistapproaches to philosophy, have largely jettisoned those figures. (Therehas, of course, always been a respectful nod toward Hume; but that respecthas rarely been translated into a positive philosophical engagement or rein-terpretation.) The claim about Continental philosophy is surely right.There are exceptions Sartre and, to a lesser extent, Merleau-Ponty leapto mind here32 but by and large Continental thinkers situate themselveswithin the broad tradition of the history of philosophy and articulate theirthought within and against members of that tradition (or, in the case ofDerrida, within and against the tradition as a whole). To cite just a fewexamples: Gadamer traces his lineage back through Heidegger to earlierhermeneuticists, such as Schleiermacher; Deleuze relies largely on theStoics, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson; Habermas articulates his early

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30 For their critique of the generation of 1968, see French Philosophy of the Sixties, trans.Mary Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). For a positive engage-ment with liberalism and its history, see Luc Ferrys three-volume Political Philosophy,trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19901992).

31Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls Political

Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3 (1995): 10931.32 And there have been exceptions on the Anglo-American side, such as Strawson.

work over and against Hegel and Marx and his later work in dialogue withKant; Apels acknowledged influences include not only Wittgenstein butalso Peirce.

Given the source of the Anglo-American jettisoning, however, onemight expect that, with the waning of positivisms grasp, there would be acorresponding openness to rethinking and reappropriating the historicaltradition of philosophy. And this has indeed been the case. In fact, aninstructive example here is a philosopher many of whose works were writ-ten during the decline of positivism, not during the more contemporaryphase of post-positivist Anglo-American philosophy: Wilfrid Sellars.Sellars always saw his work as articulated with and, at moments, againstthe larger canvas of philosophical tradition. To take the most extendedexample of his appropriation of historical figures, Science andMetaphysics (subtitled Variations on Kantian Themes),33 Sellars weaves abroad philosophical framework within the context of a reinterpretedKantianism. What is instructive about Sellarss example is that he was,along with Quine, the most influential force in removing Anglo-Americanepistemology and philosophy of language from the grip of positivism. Itcould, I believe, be argued that his familiarity with historical themes in thehistory of philosophy and his construction of a post-positivist perspectivewere, at least in part, mutually determining.

Sellarss use of the history of philosophy, and of Kant in particular, hasbeen extended in Robert Brandoms Making It Explicit. But perhaps themore influential reappropriation of historical figures has been in ethics,where the rediscovery of Aristotle by Alisdair MacIntyre, BernardWilliams, and John McDowell has spawned an entire third force inethics to stand beside consequentialism and deontology. Recounting thedetails of this third force would take us too far afield, but the basic idea isthat rather than seeing morality as a set of codes of behavior, divorcedfrom other areas of our lives, to which we have only or primarily a cogni-tive relation, we need to see morality woven into our other attitudes andeven our perception in short, to take up morality as a way of being ratherthan merely a way of acting. Thus the substitution of the broader termethics for that of the narrower term morality.

The most commonly cited philosophical predecessor for this position is,as I mentioned, Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle is not merely cited as a namebut is used as a philosophical resource for developing recent philosophicalpositions.34 Thus, in a large and influential stream in recent Anglo-American philosophical thinking, the history of philosophy has figured inan articulation of the issues in much the same way as it often does for thosephilosophers associated with the Continental tradition.



33 Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1967.34 Cf., for example, chapter 3 of Bernard Williamss Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); or John McDowells Virtue and Reason,Monist 62 (1979): 33150.

There are, of course, other positions in Anglo-American philosophy thatarise out of a dialogue with philosophys historical tradition. Let two moreexamples suffice: Rortys appeal to Dewey in developing his neopragmaticmetaphilosophical position and the ongoing historical engagement withcontractualism that was revived in Rawlss writings.

It is, perhaps, true that Anglo-American philosophers whose concern ismore with natural science are less concerned with issues in the history ofphilosophy. (Although those influenced by the works of Thomas Kuhnmight be less than ready to concede the appropriateness of that diminishedconcern.) On that basis, one might be tempted to draw a distinctionbetween the less overtly normative philosophical work concerned withnatural science and all other philosophical work, allowing the history ofphilosophy to be relevant to the latter but not to the former. That would befine with me, but it would certainly be a curious way to draw the distinc-tion between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy.

Creating Perspectives Versus Limning RealityIt is often said that what divides Continentalists and their Anglo-Americancounterparts is that the Continentalists are concerned not so much with, inQuines phrase about science, limning the true and ultimate structure ofreality35 as with creating useful or interesting perspectives by means ofwhich to offer different takes on the world, while Anglo-Americanphilosophers are driven by the idea of truth, truth conceived of here asarticulating things or at least some of them as they really are. One saysof a Continental text what Merleau-Ponty says of painting: It is moreaccurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.36Although this distinction is, I believe, often offered as a denigration ofContinental philosophy, it is worth taking seriously, because of what wemight see according to it.

The first thing to note in this regard is that this distinction is related to,but does not mirror exactly, the distinction offered earlier thatContinentalists are more concerned with art and literature, while Anglo-American philosophers are more concerned with science. The reason thedistinction between creating perspectives and limning reality does notmirror the earlier one is that there seems to be no bar to creating a morepurely philosophical perspective that takes itself to be a perspective, butdone in the idiom and inferential structure of philosophy rather than of liter-ature or the plastic arts. I take it that this is precisely what Deleuze and hiscollaborator Felix Guattari envision in their work What Is Philosophy?37

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35 Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 221.36

Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 164.

37 Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchel (New York: Columbia University Press,1994), originally published in 1991.

That said, there is much to ask after in trying to untangle what thisdistinction is all about. One way, surely unpromising, to take the distinc-tion is to render it as a distinction between those philosophical positionsthat do not seek our assent and those that do. However, philosophical posi-tions that anyone would bother to write down must seek our assent in somefashion or another. So let us sharpen the distinction a little. Perhaps thedistinction runs this way: Continental work does not seek our epistemicassent, whereas Anglo-American work does. If we go in this direction, weneed to ask, of course, what epistemic assent amounts to.

One thing it cannot amount to is belief as true in the sense of corre-sponding to the world. The reason it cannot amount to this is that thereare many Anglo-American philosophers who do not subscribe to a corre-spondence theory of truth, and who would be surprised to discover thatthey were, for that reason, Continentalists. How about the more modestbelief as true in some sense of true? That seems a bit vague. One way toclarify it, perhaps, is to take it in an ontological direction: that the philo-sophical posits offered by Continentalists do not request our assent asreferring to items existing independent of our claims about them and thatthe philosophical posits offered by Anglo-Americans do request suchassent.

But that does not seem to work either. Leaving aside the older instru-mentalist/realist debate in the philosophy of science, we have the newerempiricist/realist debate,38 with writers like Bas van Fraassen and RichardBoyd lining up on opposite sides of the question of whether to take a real-ist understanding of scientific discourse.39 Now, one might argue here thatthese debates are irrelevant, because they concern the status of sciencerather than of philosophy. Granted, the debates do concern the status ofscience, but it is hard to see how they do not at least raise larger, as yetunsettled issues regarding the status of the posits of philosophicaldiscourse. In this sense, their debate may fruitfully be seen in the light ofGadamerian hermeneutics. For Gadamer, following Heidegger, the orien-tation of the epistemic tradition of inquiry one engages in at least partiallydetermines what one will discover as a result of that inquiry. Boyds viewis that intertheoretic fit offers evidence for a realist understanding of atheorys posits; van Fraassens claim is that because the project of scienceis to save the phenomena, all it requires of us is an acceptance of atheorys empirical adequacy. They can be seen as competing understand-ings of how to appropriate and situate the practices of science within ourepistemic tradition. (They can also be read as competing views about whatimportant aspects of that tradition amount to.)



38 Not to mention the realist/antirealist debate in semantics between Dummett andDavidson.

39 Cf. esp. van Fraassens Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); and BoydsRealism, Underdetermination, and a Causal Theory of Evidence, Nous 7, no. 1 (1973):112.

Seen this way, matters do not look so simple concerning the question ofthe posits of philosophical discourse. Neither Boyd nor van Fraassenaddresses the Gadamerian issue of the status of the epistemic traditionwithin which science has its role. It is, of course, not their project to do so.In order to assess whether Anglo-Americans and Continentalists aredivided on the metaphysical status of philosophical posits, however, onewould need to address the hermeneutic question of the epistemic status ofthe traditions of philosophical inquiry. And there is no agreement on thatwithin the two traditions. To cite just two examples from the range ofoptions that could be taken here, we could appeal to Putnams internal real-ism40 or to Derridas complicated stance that we have at once to commit toand to undermine our commitment to our philosophical posits.

From this perspective, we can notice two things. First, it is not a settledmatter within Anglo-American philosophy whether its philosophical positsare held to request our assent, or even what that assent would amount to.Second, it is not a settled matter in Continental philosophy either. It iscertainly the case that the Nietzschean influence on contemporary Frenchphilosophy has moved some thinkers, perhaps most notably Deleuze,toward creating perspectives as opposed to limning reality. But the storywithin Continental philosophy is more complicated than that. And, beforewe dismiss Nietzschean-influenced thinkers like Deleuze for simply creat-ing philosophical posits rather than endorsing their reality, let us recall thatJohn Rawls also saw several of his central philosophical posits as norma-tive rather than ontological. If there is a Nietzschean influence on histhought, it is not so readily apparent.

Obscurity Versus ClarityHanging around Anglo-American thinkers, I often hear it said that theproblem with Continentalists is that they are obscure, that they dont speakplainly. Hanging around Continentalists, I often hear it said that Anglo-American philosophers are obscure, that the point of their analyses, if theyhave one, is difficult to wring out of them.

I am tempted to close this section with the preceding paragraph, leavingits lesson plain for all to see. I suppose I could go on to list major recentphilosophers in each tradition whose writings are often consideredobscure, or at least turgid, even to those within the tradition. I shall spareyou. You know who you are. (Or, as we all fancy ourselves to be prettygood writers, you know who they are.) Underlying this mutual recrimina-tion, however, lies something deeper, which points to what I think is theonly justifiable distinction (or perhaps pair of related distinctions) leftbetween Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. It is a distinction

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40 Developed in chapter 2 of Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981).

that, once recognized, will immediately reveal itself as a distinction to beovercome rather than embraced: the idiom and reference points of eachtradition.

Idiom and Reference PointsBy idiom I mean the way a philosopher talks, the style he or she uses inaddressing his or her audience, whether in writing or in speaking. By refer-ence points I mean those other philosophers or nonphilosophical thinkersand their perspectives with whom a philosopher sees himself or herself asengaged. Reference points refer specifically to people and to the perspec-tives of those people, not to philosophical issues per se. I have been argu-ing that the two traditions cannot be distinguished by reference tophilosophical issues, and that those who think they can be are mistaken. Aphilosopher may see himself or herself as engaged with an issue specificto his or her tradition. With specific local exceptions, noted as I haveproceeded, he or she would be wrong. Many philosophers, however, seethemselves as engaged not simply by issues but also by the philosophicalperspectives on those issues articulated by specific philosophers. It is thosephilosophers and their perspectives that I mean when I use the term refer-ence points.

It is the idiom and the reference points of those working in Anglo-American and Continental philosophy that still divide them. I shall discusseach in turn.

It is not really accurate to say that Anglo-American philosophers work(largely) in one idiom and Continentalists work (largely) in another. Themore accurate characterization would be that while Anglo-Americanphilosophers work (largely) in an idiom, Continentalists do not. Therehave developed common terms such as supervenience and naturalismand type-token distinctions that can be found across the range ofdiscourses among Anglo-American philosophers. This is not to say that allAnglo-American philosophers mean the same things when they use thoseterms. On the contrary, in many debates what is at issue is what should bemeant by them. The fact of their common use, however, tends to fostercommunicative interaction of the sort that one does not see as much inContinental philosophy.

I am not, of course, claiming that Continental philosophers do notunderstand one anothers positions. Rather, I am making the more modestclaim that Continental philosophy is not woven together nearly as much bya common set of terms as Anglo-American philosophy is. There is a disad-vantage to this. Inasmuch as a common vocabulary promotes dialogue,there may be more monologue in the Continental community than thereneed be. In my experience, there probably is. Alternatively, however, thereis an advantage to fewer common terms among Continentalists. Inasmuchas a common vocabulary discourages thinking about issues in new and



different terms that might help delineate fresh perspectives, creativitysuffers when everyone is speaking in the same way. I want to be clear here,as I am treading on ground that will be sensitive to many. My claim is notthat Anglo-American philosophers are uncreative but rather that a commonset of terms makes more difficult whatever types of creativity can emergefrom the embrace of more fluid vocabularies.

One might ask here how this difference has come about. Although todiscuss it would take us far afield of the main point, I suspect it has some-thing to do with the relative embrace (touched on above) of Anglo-American philosophy with science and its linguistic strictures and ofContinental philosophy with art and literature and their linguistic open-ness. And, once again, as those relative embraces slacken, we can expectthat the differences will slacken with them.

However that may be, assuming what I have said here is roughly right and if there is less difference in idiom than I am remarking, so much thebetter for my thesis the question arises: Does this mark a differencebetween the two traditions worth preserving as a difference? The answerseems clearly to be that it does not. I reckon that I can count on my read-ers to agree that both communicative skill and creativity are good qualitiesfor philosophers to have. Then why would we want to enact strategies forkeeping them ghettoized in one tradition or another? If we can learn tonavigate among different idioms Continentalists do it all the time, andAnglo-American philosophers do it often enough, particularly when thesame terms are often differently used by different thinkers then boththese qualities can, in their tension, be welcomed into both traditions.

One might raise the objection here, however, that these qualities aremutually contradictory, in a sense that I myself pointed out three para-graphs ago. There, I said that constraint by a common vocabulary candampen at least certain forms of philosophical creativity. If so, would wenot be better off keeping two traditions, one in which creativity is empha-sized and the other in which communication is emphasized (in the specificsense, I should stress, in which I am now using these terms)?

To this objection there is a modest answer and a bolder one. The modestanswer is that perhaps we would be better off with two traditions ifphilosophers in either tradition actually read, thought about, and discussedphilosophers in the other, and that as a matter of course. As it stands,however, there is still enough mutual suspicion that such reading, thinking,and discussion, although gaining ground, is still not done as a matter ofcourse. Inasmuch as the traditions encounter each other on the basis ofhostility, Continentalist philosophers are not gaining the benefit of certaintypes of communicative interaction, while Anglo-American philosophersare not gaining the benefit of certain types of creativity. I do not particu-larly like this reply, as it grants too much in the way of a differencebetween traditions, but it would still be an advance on our present situa-tion.

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The bolder reply, and by my lights the right one, is that there seems noreason to expect that the distinction between an emphasis on communica-tion and one on creativity should follow along national or regional lines.Why should those writing on the Continent have a corner on the form ofcreativity that comes with new vocabularies and those in the United Statesand Britain have a corner on the communicative flow that attaches to acommon vocabulary? For one thing, thinkers like Habermas and Lyotardalready do not fit the communicative/creative dichotomy I have positedhere. Habermas has taken pains to make his perspective more accessible toAnglo-American philosophers, and he has, as I pointed out above, incor-porated much of their work into his own projects. Lyotard, in turn, hastried to absorb much recent work in Anglo-American philosophy whilestill leaving room for the creative vocabulary associated with Continentalphilosophy.41 Alternatively, Anglo-American thinkers like Isaiah Berlinhave had a powerful influence on the Anglo-American tradition withoutassuming the vocabularly associated with that tradition.42

There seems to be no bar to having a tradition that has a dominantcommon vocabulary (or two) and yet recognizes rebels against that vocab-ulary as potential contributors to a discussion that has been framed withinthe vocabularys terms. All this in one country or across many.

Turning to the second difference between Anglo-American andContinental philosophy that we are considering in this section, differentreference points, the claim I want to make is an obvious one. People in theAnglo-American tradition read other Anglo-American philosophers morethan they read their Continental counterparts, even those counterparts whomight be working in the same area. And vice versa for the Continentalists.This would make sense if there was were other deep differences betweenthe two traditions. But, as I have argued here, there are not deep differ-ences. In fact, there are good reasons for people in one tradition to readpeople in the other, reasons having as much to do with the differentapproaches specific thinkers have to the same issue as with the fact that itis the same issue they are approaching. Let me point out briefly severalexamples of issues where this kind of cross-reading might be fruitful.

The first example has, as I mentioned, already begun to take place in thedialogue between Rawls and Habermas. Both philosophers are contractu-alist, in some sense of the term. They both recognize this, and on the basis



41 For Lyotards take on some of the differences in play here, see his article A BizarrePartner, in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1997), originally published in 1993.

42 It may seem at this point that, by citing these thinkers, I am conceding that there reallyis no idiomatic distinction between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy. I wouldbe happy to concede that, and I think things are moving in the right direction; but a glanceat the literature of the respective traditions reveals that, while slowly being effaced, theidiomatic distinction is still dominant. Journals that consider themselves to be Anglo-American journals resist non-Anglo-American idiom, and Continental journals resist theAnglo-American idiom.

of this recognition have begun to address each others work. Expandingthis dialogue would require that other discussants, such as Dworkin andNozick and Apel, find their way in.

A second example concerns hermeneutics. Both Davidson and Gadamerare, in different ways, hermeneutic thinkers. There might be much to learnin contrasting the formers concept of radical interpretation and its focusspecifically on language with the latters approach to the fusing of hori-zons between whole traditions. Again, it is not that Davidson and Gadamerare saying the same thing that would make dialogue interesting. On thecontrary, it is because they are different thinkers concerned with some ofthe same problems (as Davidson and Quine are, or as Gadamer andHabermas are) that there may be profit in a dialogue between the two orbetween those whose philosophical interests lie in either.

A third example concerns the rise of neopragmatist philosophicalconcerns in both traditions. Here the work of Wilfrid Sellars or RobertBrandom might be usefully contrasted with and appropriated by thoseworking on the thought of Michel Foucault.43 While Sellars and Brandomseem to provide some of the conceptual underpinning that Foucault needsin order to elude charges of a pernicious epistemic relativism, Foucaultprovides a political approach to practices that would help prevent Anglo-American neopragmatism from lapsing into an assumption one that oftenseems to characterize Rortys approach that the evolution of practices isalways an evolution from the unmitigatedly worse to the unmitigatedlybetter: an assumption that practices change when the change works betterfor everyone involved. (One way to see the potential Foucaultian influencewould be to see it as fostering a recognition that the term pragmatismought to be used to group those approaches that see the concept of practiceas the central unit of analysis, rather than to group those who think thatwhatever works will prevail in the end.)

These examples do no more than gesture at fruitful research programsthat could arise when we jettison the habit of reading only within our owntradition traditions at this point amounting to no more than those we aretold we should read and begin to see merit in reading the work of thosewho were not taught, or not particularly favored, in our respective gradu-ate schools. Of course, not every issue lends itself to reading across thetraditions. As I pointed out above, those whose interests lie primarily in thephilosophy of natural science may find Continental philosophy pretty slimpickings.44 Conversely, there is little in recent Anglo-American literaturefor those interested in consumer culture, media dominance, and transna-tional capitalism (although a change here would not be surprising). But

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43 This has been the thrust of my own work, examples of which are in the texts cited inthe footnotes above.

44 Although Joseph Rouse has written a fascinating book incorporating Foucaultsperspective into a philosophy of natural science, Knowledge and Power: Toward a PoliticalPhilosophy of Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

these are local distinctions that do not add up to a global one. Perhaps weshould abandon the distinction between Continental and Anglo-Americanphilosophy, since it is a distinction without a difference, and join thosewho have begun to engage in an activity that draws indifferently from thetwo.

What, then, shall we call this activity, an activity that is neither Anglo-American philosophy nor Continental philosophy? How about philoso-phy?

Department of Philosophy and ReligionClemson UniversitySuite 113 Holtzendorff HallClemson, SC [email protected]



may, t. (2002) - on the very idea of continental (or for that matter anglo-american) philosophy

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