Ancient philosophy and analytic philosophy?

David Kuper: "Analytic" and "Continental" are names of traditions in philosophy. They only became distinct during WWII, when the Allied nations sought to somewhat distinguish themselves from German influenced thought. The Analytic tradition is the major tradition in the US and Britain, and focuses on logic and language analysis as the basis for philosophical training. it is grounded in the work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. The Continental tradition is the predominate tradition on the mainland of Europe, and focuses on experience as the basis of grounding claims. It can be traced back to the work of Franz Brentano, who taught Edmund Husserl. Husserl is the founder of phenomenology (though he finds his foundations in Descartes and Kant) which is the central influence of the Continental tradition. His work is continued as phenomenology through Heiddegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although some Existentialist thought predates Husserl - such as that of Kierkegaard and Nietzsch! e - Sartre's seminal work in Existentialism is a direct response to Husserl. Each uses it's focus to deal with every sub-field of philosophy - from epistemology through ontology. Philosophy of mind/consciousness studies seems to be one area where the ideas in both traditions come into contact the most....Show more

Russell Mckinzie: Socrates likely would say that a lot of it was a load of..bunkum. Plato likely would have taught that so-called modern analytic philosophy was an "inbred typical" school which suffers from a mistaken historic-ism and re-curring mistakes that do result from so-called math rationalization. And further, Plato likely would have apologized for his reasonable-but-wordy answer- but he wouldn't have "let on" that he himself was taught* about analytic bunkum by the philosopher, Socrates. And i think that they could both have correctly shown that modern so-called analytical philosophy has intimate connections with and to, such discredited 20th centur! y mainstream philosophy schools as bertrand Russel's .."class-! ism" (known as the theory of classes) and the equally influential but mistaken school known as .."Positivism"^ . In all both Plato and Socrates could well come to the agreement that the great oracle at Delphi would pronounce/fore tell that modern analytics was doomed to fail (not least because its teachers truly and mistakenly believed-in such quirky ideas as .."induction" and Eliminating metaphysics from philosophy!)....Show more