Jeffrey White wrote:

Can you imagine a responsible Cont phil student spouting this:
Heidegger was basically wrong - he neither attempted to rigorously describe the whole of the mind nor completely did so on any level; psychologically, phenomenologically or ontologically.
And not getting trounced for it?

Which seems to me to encapsulate a number of problems, including with the way this discussion has developed and with discussions of analytic/continental divide more generally.

What of value is to be gained by putting up weakly formed arguments just to shoot them down?

The Question Jeffrey poses can be simply either answered in the affirmative or otherwise and nothing useful is learned in the process. If we restrict ourselves to an inquisitive implication in it:


 Can you imagine a responsible Cont phil student spouting that Heidegger was basically wrong - he neither attempted to rigorously describe the whole of the mind nor completely did so on any level; psychologically, phenomenologically or ontologically?
The answer must be "no" because the 'statement' is so ill-defined that to answer "yes" can't possibly be speaking responsibly. To say that Heidegger is basically wrong for what he didn't attempt to do, nor even to be wrong because he didn't do it completely, is such twaddle that it deserves to be trounced on argument formation grounds alone.



I have a similar problem with other parts of the chat on this thread. If someone comes out and says "I think x, y or z" with out any recognition of the fact that "x", "y" and "z" have been the subject of considerable historical debate among philosophers, what is the point? Even the words themselves lose all meaning, as Wittgenstein would argue. The analytics' proclivity for reasoned argument doesn't make their assumptions correct, but it is certainly makes reading them a more mindful activity than engaging in the naive or mischievous tracings of undisciplined spoutings. The extent to which people engage "continentally" as a license to do the latter is not a weakness of that tradition, simply of those who accept such methodology as having any validity within the discipline of philosophy as a whole.