Via Matthew Yglesias, I came across this rather old Richard Rorty article about the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy. I’m not much of a historian, so normally I wouldn’t even link to something from the last millenium, but there were some moderately interesting points there. For one thing, Rorty was a little more sympathetic towards my side than I would be towards his. A little. That probably shows how he’s basically a nicer person than I am. But there were some fairly cheap shots mixed in, of which the cheapest was probably this:
Among anglophone philosophers, sheer argumentative ability—of the sort typical of forensic litigators–matters most. It is still most important to be what my Princeton colleagues used to call “quick in the head”. Elsewhere, on the other hand, it is still most important to be learned—to have read a lot, and to have views on how to pull the various things one has read together into some sort of story, a story which draws a moral. That is why non-anglophone students of philosophy on the Continent usually have little problem chatting up, and being chatted up by, students of literature and history. Philosophy graduate students in the US often have a problem doing this.
There’s something to the factual claim here, that philosophers aren’t as good at chatting up English Lit grad students as we used to be. But on the other hand, we’re getting much better at chatting up workers in other disciplines in our curious not-quite-in-the-humanities not-quite-in-the-traditional-sciences boat, especially linguistics but also political science, cognitive science and even psychology. All things considered, this is a pretty fair trade in my opinion. Sometimes fairer than fair.
The presuppositions that people bring to philosophy can be surprising sometimes. Rorty thinks it is a sign of regress that philosophy now considers great books like Counterfactuals that one can read without being even tempted to change one’s life. But you know, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax doesn’t lead its readers to existential transformation either, but that doesn’t diminish one whit its importance.