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”.

Running parallel to this extension of English, the model of philosophy that dominated the twentieth century is being reconfigured: from the model of two models of philosophy toward one where the worldwide extension of one language – English – carries both the welcome dissemination of philosophy beyond its currently hegemonic two-model formatting and a threatening tendency toward the imposition of a single philosophical model – the so-called analytic one. It is in the light of this complex chance and threat that I want to rethink two predictions I made back in 2006 about the future of these two models, and the possibility of moving beyond them.

I was never comfortable with the idea of the normalization of so-called continental philosophy. It is a process that, for now, masks rather than reduces competitive hostilities within the philosophical culture that still dominates philosophy in our time.

Two Predictions

In the closing pages of my book The Idea of Continental Philosophy, I made two predictions. The first was to do with the emerging trend of what I called “the normalization of continental philosophy as a specialism in British philosophy”.[AP1] [ELM2It would appear that a growing number of departments in Britain want to be able to provide their students with some experience of what has been called continental philosophy, and are recruiting people with a research interest or specialism in this area or in some generally recognized sub-area thereof.

I predicted that this trend would continue, and I think it has. In university philosophy departments which had been more or less exclusively staffed by people who do what anglophone philosophers have called analytic philosophy, space is now quite often given for some provision of what anglophone philosophers have called continental philosophy. The normalization of so-called continental philosophy as a specialism in philosophy in Britain is becoming increasingly, erm, normal.[AP3]

However, my hopes went beyond this change, and I made a second prediction: