Hi Phil55,

You say: "By contrast, after 7 or more years of graduate training in continental philosophy you will still find yourself struggling to decipher the obscure texts written by the "big names" in the field. 
After  all those years you will not be in a position even to judge whether what they've written is really intelligible or not, far less to decide whether their statements (if they made any at all) are true or false. Of course, you can make yourself believe that you understand them, but that would be no more than a kind of self-deception or self-conceit. To see that it is the case indeed you only have to look to the vast amount of secondary literature that abounds with wildly diverging interpretations of any of the classic and contemporary figures in the continental tradition. Who is to decide which is the correct one?"

How is this not judging continental philosophy by a standard that is alien to it. This is an external critique, it takes the standards of a certain intellectual praxis and applies them to another intellectual praxis without asking about the standards internal to the praxis that is being criticised. Now there is some room for this, but it is an extremely limited endeavor. You have basically got to be in a position whereby you have already decided that you are in possession of the only set of criteria for judging to say this sort of thing. Personally I can see how both analytic and continental philosophy keep some faith with the Greeks. One crude and simple way that one might do this (so a way that would require much further thinking and development because its just too crude) is to say that while Analytic philosophy is orientated more by the attempt to give an account of the construction of the world and by asking 'What is X?' type questions, continental philosophy is more interested in a criticising the norms of the social world.


Phil