The analytic / continental divide was an invention of 20^th century Anglo-American philosophy. And while analytic philosophy and the English language have become dominant in academia, continental philosophy is increasingly accepted within analytic circles. The hope is that a new configuration will eventually emerge, a universal philosophy beyond the strictures of any one tradition or language. The very question “what is philosophy?” is open to a variety of answers, beyond those any one model could give, writes Simon Glendinning.

In a lecture delivered at UNESCO in 1991, Jacques Derrida reflected on a situation in which “two competing models” had succeeded in becoming the “hegemonic references” for what we call philosophy right across “the entire world”. Derrida identified them as “the so-called continental tradition…and so-called analytic or Anglo-Saxon philosophy”. However, he was also sensitive to the fact that these two models were linked to “national and linguistic histories”, and that this had to be taken into account given the current “hegemonic extension” of English as “an almost all-powerful” world language. Derrida did not suggest that an acknowledgment of a historical link here meant that philosophical traditions were merely “effects of a nation or a language”. Moreover, he stressed that the global extension of English, anglobalisation, held out the chance for something radically nonparochial: “the universal penetration of the philosophical and of philosophical communication”. Nevertheless, he also wanted to acknowledge that it raised the threat that certain forms of “dogmatism and authority” that are linked to particularities of nation and history could impose “an axiomatic of philosophical discourse without any possible discussion”.