Relevant Links:
“Babich and Bateman: Last of the Continental Philosophers” (November 29, 2016)
“Terence Blake: Very interesting discussion on Continental Philosophy between @babette_babich and @SpiralChris“
“The “Analytic Co-opting” and Death of the Continental Tradition”
I think that what Prof. Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes, in his explications concerning the differences encountered between global traditions of thought that can be considered as ‘philosophical’, apply, mutatis mutandis, to the so-called Anglo-American Analytical/Continental Divide.
A lot could be said concerning the Anglo-American Analytical/Continental Divide; about the historical forking from Kant onwards, vis a vis, acceptance or rejection of Hegel, etc.; about sociopolitical styles of the background cultures involved; yes, one can differentiate endlessly about these things. Do the approaches involved, reflect tactical considerations of those background cultures? Are there political agendas involved? No doubt, cases can be made for such views.
As to the figure of the ‘philosopher’, moreover, the professional ‘philosopher’; cultural insularity can be said to be the very byproduct of professional inculcation,, as Ben-Ami Scharfstein outlines here:
“Introduction
Soon, after this introduction is done, each of us, the authors, will be speaking for himself; but before we arc reduced to almost unrepentant individuals, we should like to express the attitude that thc five of us, who are colleagues and friends, hold in common towards the subject of comparative philosophy. We can begin to express it by stating the implications of the title (including the subtitle) we have chosen for our book. The title, as we see it, has three major implications. It implies that philosophy is not confined to the West; it Implies that the Indian, Chinese, European, and European-allied Islamic traditions are worth comparing and are similar and different enough to make the comparison intellectually profitable; and it implies that the comparison ought to be critical, by which we mean, factually careful, and as intelligent as its authors are able to make it.
This justification of our title may be more persuasive if each of its three is itself explained or justified. Take the first point, which may not seem worth arguing. It is true that there have been Western philosophers with a serious interest in Chinese, Indian, or Islamic philosophy. The Interest in Islamic philosophy was mostly confined to the Middle Ages, when Chinese & Indian philosophy could only have been. Later, however, in the seventeenth century, there was a moment when Leibnitz hoped that China would give him the universal logic for which he was searching. During the eighteenth century, French thinkers half-invented an ideal China, the kingdom of philosophers, the better to criticise a Europe that appeared to them as absurd as it was cruel. Still later, Kant and Hegel, though they may not have given the Chinese and Indians a high cultural rank, studied what they could of their thought, while Schopenhauer, who read the Upanishads every night before going to sleep, made his own synthesis of Indian certainties and Kantian doubts. In the twentieth century, the American philosopher, Santayana, more than once compared his own so-to-speak Platonic naturalism with Indian mysticism. Still more recently, Jaspers devoted a good many pages of his book, The Great Philosophers, to Buddha, Confucius, and Nagarjuna.
Yet these and the other examples that could be cited have never been enough to convince very many Western philosophers that philosophy, in the sense they most appreciate, exists outside the Western tradition. By and large, they seem to have believed that Eastern thought was either pre-philosophical or extra-philosophical, that is to say, either composed of traditional, perhaps superstitious rules of conduct, or of formulas for mystical salvation. They seem to have found it incredible that non-Westerners should have engaged in the constructive intellectuality, adventurous reasoning, and logical analysis that is identified with philosophy in the West.
They are wrong, of course. The reason for their error, if we may speak bluntly, Is either cultural myopia or personal ignorance. Both stem from an insufficient education. Western education, whether that of philosophers or others, has never been seriously concerned with the thought of anyone or anything not long assimilated into the Western tradition.’ Consider the education of the professional philosopher, which we, along, we suppose, with some of our readers, have enjoyed or been subjected to. The professional philosopher may have studied logic and philosophy painstakingly, he may have read and practised linguistic analysis, which is nothing if not painstaking, and he surely has read, with painstaking attention, such books and articles as his teachers have regarded as essential. He has probably learned a second and perhaps a third European language. And he has, in addition, studied a number of the great philosophers—Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, not to speak of the contemporaries who interest him. At this stage he may well begin to attempt serious original philosophizing, or, if his Interests run that way, serious scholarship relating to philosophy. Absorbed in his attempt, he can no longer spare the time or summon up the desire to study philosophers from other traditions. What, at this stage, could inspire him to sit down again like the callow student he once was, who learned with a sense of revelation what Plato meant by an Idea and Aristotle by Substance, and study the strange concepts, transliterated from unknown languages, of philosophers from puzzling, distant cultures? Out of curiosity, he might leaf through the Analects of Confucius or through a paperback edition, in pseudo-Biblical English, of some Upanishads, and he might even find rational ethics or poetically stimulating religion in them; but these would no longer have the power to transform him as a philosopher. He would be likely to assume that the rest of Chinese and Indian thought was approximately the same, and so he would not attempt the later, more complex books. For now he would be feeling. not the student’s curiosity, but the professional’s mastery, and he would be unlikely to delay or humiliate himself by becoming a student again. A young philosopher on the verge of his career is apt to assume that what his teachers never required of him cannot be of any importance. Then, when he himself becomes a teacher, he perpetuates the attitude he has learned, the beginning is never made.
The first point will not be argued any longer. Like the others, its plausability rests on the evidence we bring in the body of our book. The second point, that the traditions we have chosen are worth comparing and similar and different enough to make the comparison intellectually profitable, must be worked out slowly and by example. We shall try to characterise each of these more or less self-sufficient cultures so that each becomes more visible by way of contrast with the others. Over and again, we think, a clearly analogous technical device will be seen to serve a different cultural end; and at least somewhat analogous cultural purposes will be seen to be served by different technical devices. Each of these traditions has its sacred writings and revered philosophers, and, during long periods of time, everything that is said in them appears to be said by reference to such writings and philosophers; but sometimes there is open denial of the writings and always there is a process of surreptitious change from them., conscious or not. Arguments become more keen and better elaborated, paradoxes are raised, and scepticism or sophistry begins to flourish. It has often been noted that the great philosophical systems of China, India, and the West (to which Islamic philosophy may be said to belong) were all in part developed in answer to the potentially destructive paradoxes of men who seem to have taken pleasure in wielding the instruments of the logic they had discovered. The great systems all incorporate something of the scepticism they combat. Sankara is something of a Buddhist, and so is Chu Hsi; and the Buddhist himself has a touch of philosophical nihilism. Likewise, Plato incorporates Gorgias, Descartes incorporates Montaigne, and Kant incorporates Hume.
If you continue to compare, you find formal or at least formalizable logic in India, including a Buddhist theory of syllogisms, which looks not un-Aristotelian, except that it has an existential qualifier. You find elaborate lists of fallacies and discussions of modes of sound and unsound argument, including Indian analyses of the types and the validity of evidence. It is possible that Sankara, the ancient Indian, depending in this upon the ‘school’ of Mimamsa, has a view of evidence like that of Karl Popper, namely, that no hypothesis can, in the positive sense, be proved to he true, but can only be shown to have successfully resisted the attacks levelled on it. Incidentally, one branch of the Mimamsa (that led by Prabhakara) teaches a Kant-like morality, for it contends that religious precepts should be carried out, not for possible reward or punishment, which are morally irrelevant, but for the sheer consciousness of duty performed. Furthermore, In Indian and Islamic philosophy, matter, time, and space are atomized, in both familiar and unfamiliar ways, while the Chinese, we are told, unify the world by means of quasi-field theories. The European problem of causality, which will be compared with the Islamic, receives a hundred Indian and a few Chinese forms, reminiscent, respectively, of the Epicurean, Stoic, Neoplatonic, Humean, Kantian, and Hegelian forms. Bertrand Russell appears to be anticipated and answered. The great Scholastic debaters of Nominalism and Realism have their peers.Briefly, there is a wealth of thought and experience concentrated in philosophical abstractions.
We now come to our third point, that the comparison we are undertaking should be factually careful and analytically close. Even though five of us are collaborating on this book, we are, individually and collectively, aware of how much there is that we ought to know but do not. But we take our relative ignorance to he a cause, not for despair, but for the attempt to be explicit about our evidence and careful in interpreting it. Too much of the study of comparative philosophy has been motivated by nationalistic pride or shame, too much of it has assumed just what it ought to have found evidence for, and too much of it has been intellectually slack. We hope that we are taking a genuine step out of our own provincialism and towards the world in which the different philosophical traditions exist as equals and together express the single humanity of them all.”
(“Philosophy East/Philosophy West: A Critical Comparison of Indian, Chinese, Islamic, and European Philosophy” Ed. Ben-Ami Scharfstein; Basil Blackwell, Oxford; 1978: pp. 1-5)