[D66] Ph.Schism

[A.OUT]

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-the-untimely-death-of-rg-collingwood-changed-the-course-of-philosophy-forever-gilbert-ryle-ray-monk-analytic-continental

How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed the course of
philosophy forever


The passing of this eclectic and questioning man in his prime allowed
the narrower and more imperious Gilbert Ryle to dominate British
philosophy. Had Collingwood lived, could the deep and damaging schism
with continental thought have been avoided?

by Ray Monk	/ September 5, 2019 / Leave a comment


In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between
the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied
the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the
British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very
characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by
its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between
four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing
the line between them. Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the
continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,
and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the
existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de
Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the
deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. The analytic school, meanwhile,
has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig
Wittgenstein and has been until fairly recently much more narrowly
focused, concentrating mainly on logic and language.

The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the
less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy
at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any
of the continental philosophers mentioned.

This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many
philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great
schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the
most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died
prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by
Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade.
And a man who did more than his fair share to entrench the gulf.

[...]