I hate analytical philosophy.
Analytical philosophy is such a disgrace to the flair of the philosophy. There is no absolute kind of philosophy, so it is extremely important that the philosopher explains their philosophy in their own way or you would misunderstand what they are saying. What if they are saying A is B, not A exists, therefore B exists. Those are two wholly different things. Analytical philosophy takes the soul out of philosophy. The aim of philosophy is to answer the questions of it. If a philosopher fails to do it well, that it would be up to another philosopher to criticise them. This has been the way since time immemorial, and yes I am appealing to tradition because I think it is the best way. The flair of philosophy is what interests more people to study it, not A E S nonsense. If you want more people to understand their life better, it is better to let them read Hume and Nietzsche, not ask them to try and understand complex Venn diagrams, that would dissuade people from learning. I think philosophy should reach as many people as possible, not just an elite group of people. By being so elitist, philosophers like Wittgenstein and Russell, coming from highly rich families get to do their analytics, but to the common man, continental philosophy is more appealing and should be. The human touch of philosophy is what makes it so special compared to any other subject like Math or Engineering, where things are absolute.
Welcome to the community. I like that you came out fists swinging but I think you might find other opinions here that aren’t so anti-analytic phil, such as my own 
There’s a hard line to interpret between the “common man” and the common man who understands what’s supposedly not-common.
If I can tell you the definition of a derivative, and don’t hold any special job, then am I common or am I “priestly”?
I suspect, given your acquiescence here:
That you’d say “No”.
I want to suggest that philosophy has answers and that science doesn’t answer it all.
Your argument is so narrow it becomes a strawman. Analytical philosophy does not function well for analyzing existential and experiential conditions of humans. But you are describing the whole of philosophy as only operating on existential questions, rather than a broad spectrum.
Analytical philosophy is basically fringe science. Where pure science fail to give answers, analytical reasoning helps contextualize through logic. For topics that rely on established scientific grounds, you have to do analytical philosophy, or else you end up in a lot of biased reasoning and fallacies of arguments.
Continental philosophy is better at dealing with the existential questions surrounding a topic. If analytical philosophy helps understanding something within a scientific frame of reference, continental philosophy deals with the experiential consequences of that topic onto humanity.
The question why something is the way it is, is not the same thing as what it means for our experience of it.
I’ve never understood why people deal with these two schools of thought as in opposition to each other. They are two sides of the same coin of how humans think in their existence.
This is a populist statement that has nothing to do with these schools of thought. To think analytically about something or existentially have absolutely nothing to do with any elites. They are both tools of thinking, and there’s no class differences between tools of thinking. Such description is anti-intellectual and has no room in philosophy.
It does not matter where ideas comes from, the ideas are ideas, their logic, reasoning and purpose are functions in of themselves, regardless of origin.
If you value ideas based on populist frameworks, you fail at philosophy before you’ve even begun.
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Someone around here once said that philosophy is about how to think, and what is important to think about.
Analytics makes science out of how we think, what can properly be said at all. Its purest form is logic itself. Someone says “the cat is on the mat” and analytics doesn’t have to care about cats or mats, but is deeply concerned about “on” and whether “cat is” plus “on” plus “mat” is coherent and how it could be used in a world of things like cats and mats.
If we didn’t have analytics, philosophy would be indistinguishable from other literature (and only guys like Nietzsche could compete for airtime).
But I hate analytics too! Because today it sucks all the oxygen out of any pursuit of what is important. “Importance” itself has been deemed unanalyzable. The popular analysts leave “what is true” and “what is important” to bar stool confessions that have no place in the philosophy classroom.
In the end, any rigorous thinker has to love analytics, because analysis has to be done logically, properly on anything philosophic, to confirm whether anything has been said and whether anything is really there to be found important. “Substances are matter, form, efficient and finally caused units.” You have to know how to think to dissect this, and behold something to judge important or not.
The difference to me is that, some people think the analytics itself is the most important part of philosophy. Philosophy is at most training for how to dissect sentences. Personally, I seek a broad, vague sense of what someone is saying, what is it they think is important, to determine whether I care enough about it to go back and do the analytics on it to determine anything. In other words, if the discussion is about how “I think therefore I am” is not a logical syllogism, that’s great for them, but I think misses the point of what’s been said, which is about how true belief or knowledge of an ontological fact can be. So, while it is important to understand how to be logical, and one can learn this by deconstructing a purported syllogism in “I think therefore I am”, if one concludes from this logical analysis that this sentence isn’t a valid or sound syllogism and therefore Descartes is overrated and isn’t important, to me, one has missed the wisdom and analyzed the wrong thing.
We need analytics to make philosophy a science, as method to dissect what we say; but we need something more wholistic, something laced with experience, to recognize the wisdom, and measure how important it may be to speak at all.
Analysis is basically just the groundwork. And then people can use the basic logic to a higher degree of sophistication and art.
People should learn the logic of fact and opinion in school, creationism. That’s about the only philosophy that should be taught in school. Then they can obtain whatever facts, and express whatever opinions, to a high degree of sophistication.
So you have to do the boring analysis school lesson first, the flair comes later.
I think as well that analytical philosophy is a wrong direction of philosophy, not out of hatred, but on a ground of criticism.
As I understand, analytical philosophy has been undertaken because continental philosophy was too exposed to ambiguity and confusion. Continental philosophy relied too much on some common understanding of certain concepts, such as “human”, “postmodern”, “existence”, “being”, “metaphysics”. Of course it gave lots of explanations of these concepts, but those explanations were based, in turn, on other concepts that were assumed as commonly shared and understandable.
Subsequent philosophical discussions, criticism and efforts to clarify the meaning of continental concepts revealed that those concepts were very exposed to ambiguity, in such a way that, for example, “human” can mean everything and the exact opposite of everything. In such a situation, philosophers felt a natural need for clarity, severe methodology, systematic procedures, precision of meaning. Since the problem involved concepts, words and their meaning, the natural consequence was to concentrate on language and to make it an instrument as precise as possible.
In stepping into this work, analytical philosophy has committed its fundamental oversight, which is my core accusation against it. Analytical philosophy has not realized that its stepping into philosophy of language is just another attempt to find a final hard, solid and stable certainty, this time disguised behind the mask of severe analysis of language. We can find this obstinate search for certainty all over the whole history of philosophy. A very good example of this obstination is Descartes’ attempt to finally defeat doubt, with his “I think, therefore I am”. Seeing that, ultimately, certainty cannot exist, for several reasons, continental philosophy was ultimately based on welcoming doubt, uncertainty, weakness, or we can say humanity.
In this context, we can observe that it is true that continental philosophy is strongly exposed to ambiguity and confusion, but it is also true that the remedy is not to create just another metaphysical certainty disguised behind the mask of severe analysis of language. This is particularly true because actually this pretended severity is not severe at all. Analytical philosophers are quick at diving into extremely deep analyses, but they do not explain why they decided to go deep precisely in that direction among the billions of alternatives available; what makes them think that their analysis is realiable; on what ground they justify the logic that they adopt.
In other words, once a deconstruction of analytical philosophy unmasks it as just another search for metaphysical certainty, the consequence is that analytical philosophy is exposed to all objections that postmodern philosophy had already raised against metaphysics of certainty. We can even say that analytical philosophy is just another version of “I think, therefore I am”. It can be translated into “I analyze, therefore I am severe, therefore what I find is solid”.
This way we can also notice that analytical philosophy, in its effort to build something solid, is not only a masked metaphysics, but also a masked science. Precise analysis of language does not need philosophy, because it already exists as science of language. In doing philosophy of language, analytical philosophy tries to mimic science, in an effort to be even more solid than science and beyond science, while actually proceeding without real severity and criticism about its own methods.
I think that the solution to the confusion of continental philosophy is not another metaphysics passed off as analytical philosophy, but a permanent work of clarification and discussion about the topics of continental philosophy.
For my money, existing (practice) without analysis (reflection) is as incomprehensible as poetry without grammar is unintelligible.
This strikes me as historically inaccurate. Analytic philosophy was not a reaction to continental philosophy and it did not seek certainty of meaning (Wittgenstein surely didn’t fix meanings to words). This also suggests the two camps are soundly distinct without overlap, which they’re not.
What I wrote is not a historical analysis, but a free interpretation, otherwise it would be exposed to the same criticism that analytical philosophy is exposed to.
If your criticism of analytic philosophy is that you feel it has a stubborn fidelity to the facts, as opposed to your preference of “free expression,” which sounds like just making stuff up, then you’re not so much into philosophy as creative writing. The distinction though that I’d draw between what you propose and creative writing is that creative writing admits it’s fiction instead of pretending to be true and then coming up with some nonsense theory when it’s shown wrong.
Philosophy might be the scholar that informs the muse. She may find him unfuckable, like the hoary old Socrates, but the intense questioning turns something inside of her on.
One day Socrates hopes to hear the sacred words that may finally silence his mind: “Fuck me Socrates!”
Then he will drink the hemlock.
I didn’t say that analytic philosophy has a stubborn fidelity to the facts. It didn’t say that what I wrote is true. This makes your ideas quite creative as well.
I am very critical against the very concept of truth. As a consequence, as I said, you can’t show that what I wrote is wrong. You called what I said “some nonsense theory”. After considering your authority in determining who is “so much into philosophy”, I can only step aside.
I’m not an admirer of analytical philosophy. I took two years of undergraduate courses in philosophy much of which was informed from an analytic perspective, but found Comparative Religion offered greater horizons and switched to it for my major.
I noticed a recent critical book about the subject, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy:
How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, Christopher Schuringa, 2026.
From the book description:
To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo. It may seem arcane and largely removed from the real world, but it is a crucial component in upholding liberalism, through its central role in elite educational institutions. As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.
I don’t think liberalism needs any support from elite educational institutions. It has the world by the bawbags.
Mihi … simplifying the matter I’d say that what continental philosophers took to be real was revealed by analytical philosophers to be [philosophy is the battle against] the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language ~ Wittgenstein
I daresay a sociology/anthropology/literature student will mistakenly attend a lecture on continental philosophy and not know he’s in the wrong room.
Nietzsche et al were opining, not philosophizing but we must take care not to jump to conclusions - this was a reaction to the general failure of analytic philosophy and was a contemptus per violationem of philosophy as she is done.
There’s a time and a place for analytic philosophy, especially when it’s linked to the philosophy of mathematics.
Otherwise if you are philosophy student/enthusiast who isn’t excited about logic (or math), then any course or book in analytical philosophy can feel like trying to drink tar. A way for the professor to give low grades to some of the students who aren’t so good in logic and math I would say.
When we remember that philosophy means love of wisdom, we understand that there’s many totally different fields and issues where that wisdom can emerge from.
Yet Mathematics (and engineering) has it basis in philosophy. Just as basically all sciences have.
Perhaps the simple aspects of things like mathematics are indeed not only confined to us humans. I have always assumed that many of the not-so-smart mammals and birds etc. can have a simple mathematical system like “nothing, one, two, three, many”. A mathematical system like that is awesome for your situational awareness of your surroundings for your survival in the wild. Yet that simple mathematical system, the ability to count to three, gives instantly the philosophical question: what if there is more than three, but still a countable number? And when does that countable number go to uncountable? Our present mathematics cannot still answer the philosophical question about infinity as it just takes infinity as an axiom. Hence philosophical questions come around very easily.
Dean, to the physics department. “Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn’t you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.”
…Chalmers.
Taking an analytic stance is what brings the waste-paper basket back in to philosophy.
It also makes doing philosophy exponentially more difficult. Anyone can make shit up; it’s getting rid of the shit that doesn’t work that requires effort.
is that what analytic philosophy does? get rid of the shit?
I spent some time this past week going over Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
It’s definitely something that will appeal to a certain kind of thinker – but not all
Some thinkers will prefer a more human-centered type of philosophy.
Maybe something more speculative.
Also – why do we always rely so much on the Western tradition when it comes to philosophy?
As if they have the final say on what constitutes “genuine philosophy”
Not just analytic; it’s what good philosophy does, it sets out what’s wrong with bad ideas. Socrates didn’t set out to tell pleasant just-so stories.
If you see the Tractacus as not human-centred, you’ve missed its core.
Nothing here limits philosophy to the Western tradition.