I'm off to Canberra for three days. Blogging may well be light, and as I may be rather busy, I may have to resort to posting some quotes.
This is an interesting article by Babette E. Babich on the 'Analytic-Continental' Divide in the philosophy institution. This is a nice quote:
"The story of the analytic mode of philosophy is currently being told by analysts from Michael Dummett and L. Jonathan Cohen but also Ronald Giere and Alan Richardson to the more recent efforts of Michael Friedman. In the Anglo-American context, what is called analytic philosophy grew out of the so-called language philosophy that aspired to match the logically empiricist claims of the Vienna circle (and its brand of logical positivism). It was this tradition, very much in the person of Rudolf Carnap and other refugees from fascism, that came to be poised against the vagaries (and the vagueness...) of the historical tradition of philosophy and all it was associated with - notably Nietzsche and Heidegger but it would also include Sartre and Merleau-Ponty...The distinction would turn out to be ensured by the fortunes of world history following the end of the second World War and determined by analytic philosophy's subsequent accession to power as the putatively neo-Kantian programme of deliberately redrawing philosophy in the image of science, or at least in the image of logical analysis."
"Problems of philosophy would henceforth be resolved by linguistic clarification and logical analysis. In other words, to use Skorupski's analytic contention: they would be "deflated" or unmasked as pseudo-problems. Any other philosophical approach would be misguided or erroneous, and in the light of the fortunes of the academy leading to the institutional dominion of analytic philosophy: simply a bad way to do philosophy....from an analytic perspective, it is routine to argue that there is no such thing as a merely, sheerly stylistic divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Instead, and again, one has only good and bad ways of doing philosophy. Good philosophy is well-written, well-formed and formulaic and that is of course, a matter of clarity and of arguments, judged as such and articulated from an analytic viewpoint---which is also to say, with the late Quine and Davidson--- from a logical point of view. Bad philosophy is thus anything that is not what is counted as "good" philosophy--- especially if it is reputed to be hard to read or understand."