Analytic vs Continental
General readers interested in philosophy might be surprised to learn that, in the world of “professional” philosophy, a longstanding antagonism has existed between two different camps often described as “analytic philosophy” vs “continental philosophy.” You’ll notice that these are strange comparatives: one term is descriptive, the other is geographical. The distinction is notoriously fuzzy, often pilloried as a ham-fisted fiction, or resisted as unnecessarily divisive—and yet everyone recognizes the difference when they see it.
When I talk to normal people about my profession, I—somewhat provocatively, admittedly—articulate the distinction something like this:
“Analytic” philosophy, or “Anglo-American” philosophy, is a form of philosophy that aspires to be math. It is primarily animated by the endeavor to reduce (i.e., break down, analyze) philosophical questions to a clarification of terms. With terms clarified, the terms can then be run through the machine processing of logic to secure conclusions. It tends to be ideologically a-historical and interested in the “history” of philosophy only as a mine for propositions and “intuitions.” This is the legacy of philosophers like G.E. Moore, W.V.O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Lewis, and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. (In my experience, the “normal” person I’m talking to, who might be an avid reader of philosophy, has never heard of many of these names.)
“Continental” philosophy is sexier and edgier—think Sartre and Beauvoir in cafés on the Left Bank. It is loosely related to philosophy emerging from continental Europe, especially Germany and France. But it is also a style of philosophy that is pretty much inseparable from the history of philosophy. Constructive, generative work in continental philosophy is almost always a conversation with—and explicitly indebted to—the history of philosophy. But, post-Hegel, it is also nourished by a historicism that recognizes the material and social conditions of thought. For the general reader, this is the philosophy they know as “existentialism” or “deconstruction.” It is a form of philosophy that often aspires to literature. It is associated with names like Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Slavoj Žižek. (Cards on the table: if we accept these terms as heuristic, then I am a “continental” philosopher.)
Now, while this can be painted as a deep-seated antagonism between rival “camps” in professional philosophy, that doesn’t quite capture the reality on the ground. Because the fact is, analytic philosophy is the dominant mode of professional philosophy in the United States, the UK, and increasingly, around the world. So these are less like warring “camps” and more like the analytic metropolis with a continental tent city pitched in Zuccotti Park.
I should also note that the world of philosophy of religion and “Christian philosophy” is dominated by analytic approaches (think: Alvin Plantinga). That legacy shaped the default ethos of the storied philosophy department I joined at Calvin College almost 25 years ago. While continental philosophy was present as a kind of minority report, the default assumptions were analytic. (I used to have a senior colleague who, in seminars, would sometimes respond to my papers by wryly commenting, “I thought I understood what you were saying but then you went all Merleau-Ponty on me.”1)
I’m not complaining. I have often said that, as the product of a decidedly continental graduate program, coming to Calvin was an opportunity for a continuing education in the dominant form of professional philosophy. I learned to “talk analytic.” One way that continental philosophers try to find space in the analytic hegemony of professional philosophy is to effectively “talk analytic” about the generative German and French philosophers that really animate their interests. But through engagement with analytic philosophy, I think I have also acquired some virtues with respect to clarity, precision, and argumentation. And some of the puzzles posed by analytic philosophers elicit genuine curiosity.
Continental philosophy also deserves its own criticism. I’m not here as a simple apologist for continental philosophy. Indeed, I have been critical of continental philosophy of religion as a subdiscipline in my recent book, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology (see chapter 3). Like any academic field, it can become incestuous, self-involved, and jargony, absorbed by abstract puzzles and play. In its worst moments, continental philosophy is a kind of conceptual onanism. But that is not baked-in to continental philosophy per se.
A Social History of Analytic Philosophy
This all a personal preface to some notes on Christoph Schuringa’s engaging new book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso, 2025). Given my own focus and research, I’m indebted to Schuringa as the editor of the Hegel Bulletin, but in this book he ventures into very different territory. With journalistic verve and a remarkable mastery of arcane debates in analytic philosophy, Schuringa endeavors to concretize “analytic” philosophy not just as some vague “style” but as a hegemonic program in professional philosophy with a distinct history (a history that differs from analytic philosophy’s own myths about its history2).
Critically, Schuringa’s history of analytic philosophy is a social history. The forces that produced the hegemony of analytic philosophy are not simply internal to professional philosophy. Analytic philosophy arises and grows to dominance because of external—social, material, economic, political, historical, non-philosophical—factors that both encourage and reward a form of philosophy that largely gives comfort to the hegemony of U.S. interests in the twentieth century, viz., liberal capitalism.
When analytic philosophers derive intuitions from “common sense” and so-called “ordinary language,” this is cover for naturalizing the status quo. Thus Schuringa suggests that 20th c. analytic philosophy is “a continuation of a basically eighteenth-century mindset marked by bourgeois ideology’s twin face—liberal and empiricism” (15). This is why analytic philosophy is rooted in an evasion and dismissal of post-Kantian philosophical tradition (Hegel, Schelling, Marx, et al). As Schuringa notes, analytic philosophy “circumvents” this post-Kantian philosophical development “in order to take things up where David Hume left them” (154).
The heart of Schuringa’s history is a series of regional histories: Cambridge, home to G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell (ch. 2); Vienna, home of the Vienna Circle that bequeathed a misbegotten positivism to Anglo-American philosophy (ch. 3); Oxford, site of the rise of “ordinary language philosophy” (ch. 4); and then a chapter that traces the migration of analytic philosophy’s center from the UK to the U.S., particularly Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton (ch. 5).
I can’t possibly do justice to Schuringa’s careful documentation of these histories which draws not only on published works but also correspondence, archived lectures, and other ephemera that capture the ethos of these institutions at crucial periods in the 20th century. In Cambridge, rejecting the (Hegel-tinged) “idealism” of F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green, Russell and Moore effectively oversaw a retreat of philosophy from any sort of endeavor that might impinge on the world. As Schuringa summarizes (27), G.E. Moore’s project
shows just how deeply analytic philosophy could be implicated in the reproduction of the status quo: here, that of a world whose appeal has now become entirely unfathomable, marked by the superior aestheticism of an upper layer of Edwardian society whose thin veneer of modernism masks an insecure conformism.
In Oxford, this retreat hits ethics, too. “Moral philosophy retreated into a ‘meta’ mode. The game became of the analysis of moral discourse, abnegating the defence of any (‘first-order’) moral views themselves” (108). In this vein, Schuringa’s analysis echoes Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of moral philosophy in the 20th century.
Philosophers at War
Given his journalistic profiles, Schuringa provides some fascinating vignettes along the way. The Vienna Circle, for example, is often perceived as the simple progenitor of Ayer’s positivism (“verificationism”). But Schuringa notes the underdetermination of what was happening in Vienna in the first part of the 20th century, including a very different, socially attuned “Red Vienna” that generated early sympathy between Neurath and Horkheimer. If you only know the received history, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School were in fruitful conversation (and Paul Tillich was at one of the early meetings, p. 84). Schuringa also highlights “a significant connection,” in the 1920s, between the Vienna Circle and the Bauhaus (74). Roads not taken.
But Schuringa’s account of the Cold War history of analytic philosophy is the most sobering. This is where his material and social history impinges on analytic philosophy’s own mythology. Any “adequate explanation of the rise of analytic philosophy in the post-war United States must consider the highly specific political and social conditions which obtained, and how they shaped the activities of those subject to them” (121). In this respect, Schuringa notes the radical difference between the pre-war 1930s and the post-war 1950s. In the '30s, in light of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, communism and socialism were live options even in the American context.3 After the war, given revelations of the show trials in the Soviet Union and the fomenting of the Cold War, the pendulum swings wildly right to enshrine liberalism and capitalism.
It’s not just that professional philosophy was not immune to this; professional philosophers were explicitly enlisted in this ideological battle. Perhaps one of the most shocking pieces of evidence Schuringa unearths is the fact that influential analytic philosophers “Hans Reichenbach, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson and Nicholas Rescher were all employed by RAND. Another, John Rawls, began in the same period to develop a political philosophy grounded in game theory [developed out of RAND]” (122). Alongside, and not unrelated, were the pressures of McCarthyism that directly affected the philosophical academy, casting those with “continental” sympathies as suspect. The result? “Its chilling effect encouraged conformism and severely hampered those with the most radical agendas in philosophy” (140).4
“The Accents of Infallibility”
Part of the social history emerging from this British context is a history of class and the legacies of Oxbridge elitism and the postures of the tutorial system. Along the way, Schuringa is attentive to what I’d call a tic of the analytic style of philosophizing that has always driven me crazy. I guess you have to appreciate how much analytic philosophers pride themselves on being the guardians of “rigor” in professional philosophy. And yet when you scratch below the surface of analytic style and posturing, you start to realize that this “rigor” is dependent on a rhetorical device that substitutes for analysis and argumentation.5 John Maynard Keynes, who rubbed shoulders with G.E. Moore in Bloomsbury, described this already in his memoirs, which Schuringa cites (45):
In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was the master of this method—greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that this hair shook.
I have seen such performances countless times. (It is also a famous trope for lazy liberals to dismiss socialism as just bonkers—see anything in the NYT about Zohran Mamdani.) Schuringa names the inconsistency here:
“Officially, it is supposed to be argumentation that wins the day; often, however, objectors rest their demurral on such statements as ‘That strikes me as false.’6 Objections the speaker feels incapable of dealing with are dismissed with the declaration, ‘I don’t know what you mean’—the implication (sometimes voiced) being that the objector is ‘confused’, not that the speaker needs to listen more attentively or learn something new.”
He later hints at the substitution of charisma & power for argumentation: “The profession ‘I do not understand this,’ if aimed by the right person at the right target, counts as a powerful objection in analytic philosophy” (158).
This is why Schuringa’s chapter on the role of “intuitions” in analytic philosophy (ch. 9) is so crucial. Outside the profession, it is hard to describe how much the allegedly rigorous logical machine of analytic philosophy is fueled by the sketchy chaff of “intuitions.” Basically the whole operation gets off the ground on the basis of “armchair assumptions” about what “we” all tend to think—again, completely devoid of any sophistication about history or context. (Feminist philosophy has been an important source of critique in this regard.) Schuringa well summarizes (234):
The results are unsurprising: a ‘philosophy’ whose wheels spin idly in the service of well-entrenched patterns of thought. Here analytic philosophy wears its social function on its sleeve. Opting for ‘common sense’ as its ultimate basis, its practitioners speak with one voice in order to feed their own ideology back to themselves.
This makes his next chapter, “Colonizing Philosophy,” important, and perhaps his most controversial. In the 21st century, philosophers apprenticed to analytic procedures have nonetheless been awakened to big, systemic questions of justice and exclusion.7 And so we see the rise of analytic social philosophy, even an “analytic Marxism.” But Schuringa suggests that, ironically, this amounts to “philosophical Columbusing” (echoing Kevin Richardson): analytic philosophy “discovers” what Marx was already addressing in the 19th century. But now analytic philosophy appropriates it without taking on board the fundamentally historical and material conditions of such a critique. “The danger that attends analytic social philosophy,” he warns, “is not merely that of reinventing the wheel, and doing so badly, but of selling the wheel back to its original inventors after having subjected it to analytic refurbishment” (261). Analytic philosophy “colonizes even the anti-colonial” (283) and cherry-picks critique without reckoning with the more fundamental questions of philosophy’s relation to history.
The Alternative?
My only disappointment with Schuringa’s important, compelling book is that it ends abruptly and too soon—without even an epilogue that might hint at the alternative. It’s not that I don’t know what he has in mind; I’m pretty sure I do. But that’s because I’m immersed in the same professional world, and share (I suspect) many of his philosophical sources and assumptions. My concern is the missed opportunity to winsomely sketch a very different vision of what philosophy is for, especially for a wider audience.
Marx, part of the post-Kantian tradition evaded by analytic philosophy, already hinted at the alternative: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” But this was not license for emotivism or some anti-intellectual activism; Marx saw philosophy as crucial to this social endeavor.
Already in 1844, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx envisioned a collaboration between theory and practice that is attuned to history. “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat,” he wrote, “so the proletariat finds its 8intellectual weapons in philosophy.” Thus “philosophy cannot realize itself without the sublation [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichtung] of philosophy.” This is why philosophy is, fundamentally, the work of critique (as Hegel put it, “philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought”). Philosophy reads the signs of the times to discern how the Zeit is shaping (often mal-forming) our Geist. This—precisely the attunement to historical conditions eschewed by analytic philosophy—is the work of Marx’s Capital. But you can see the endeavor presaged in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The feat of consciousness comprehending these material conditions is the task and unending vocation of philosophy.
For my first two years, this colleague also called me “Jeremy.” And—long, hilarious story—called my wife, Deanna, “Candy.” But I have only the fondest memories of this colleague who was absolutely devoted to philosophy and often mentored our best students in an intense way that propelled them to the upper echelons of the profession. A consummate character. I miss him.
In particular, Schuringa argues that the invocation of Frege as the fount of analytic philosophy is a retroactive and revisionist history—a “retrospective myth” invoked to suggest an internal source for the analytic “tradition” (see pp. 25 and 173-196). This hinges on very different ways of understanding “the linguistic turn” in philosophy. “The genuine linguistic turn, as undertaken by Wittgenstein, holds the promise of a difficult and important insight: that there is no outside to the languages by mean of which we communicate. This has the potential to transform our social self-understanding” (177). In contrast, the “Davidsonian programme” that allegedly flows from Frege fundamentally retains an atomistic conception of language and self that animates liberalism and capitalism. In this regard, the trajectory of Robert Brandom is an intriguing study. Undoubtedly identified as “analytic,” Brandom’s absorption of the late Wittgenstein eventually led him back to Hegel! See Brandom’s monumental book, A Spirit of Trust (a key source in my own contemporary research program—and hopefully the focus of a senior seminar in spring 2026).
This summer I am also reading Robert Caro’s astounding biography of Robert Moses. You can see Schuringa’s point played out in the scale and scope of social investment in the 1930s.
Also not to be missed is this little gem about the Berkeley philosopher, John Searle, famous antagonist of Jacques Derrida, who, as a landlord, loudly and publicly protested California policies controlling rent increases. As Schuringa recounts: “Searle held forth, a wretched landlord of the earth: ‘The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South…” (165). [!]
The technical term for this is sophistry.
If I had a nickel for every time…!
One could spin out a similar analysis of the rise of “analytic theology,” but I’ll just leave that as a hint at this point.
This is really the germ of what Gramsci envisions as the vocation of “organic intellectuals.”