Continental Philosophy

In his Oxford “very short introduction” to Continental philosophy, Simon Critchley suggests that Continental philosophy is “a professional self-description” and a “cultural feature.” The former is “a necessary – but perhaps transitory – evil of the professionalization of the disciple.” The latter is not so much a geographic conflict as “the expression of a conflict (and moreover a sectarian conflict) that is internal to ‘Englishness.” The opposition of Continental-analytic is “the expression of a deep cultural divide between differing and opposed habits of thought – let’s call them Benthamite and Coleridgean, or empirical-scientific and hermeneutic-romantic.” Citing John Stuart Mill, he suggests that it is a mistake to choose either, since that might be a matter of “mistaking a part for the whole.”