The Analytic-Continental Divide

I use the technical term ‘agglomeration’in what follows to designate those totalities of entities that a divide–in the sense that is of concern to us here–divides. Examples of agglomerations in this sense are the Afrikaaner in South Africa, the Song Dynasty, the Russian army. Divides are then a phenomenon akin to traditional boundaries, for example between nations. But as I have attempted to illustrate in Smith (1997a; 1999a), the divide–agglomeration relation takes many different forms which go beyond those we are accustomed to dealing with in the realm of post-Westphalian national borders. As is well known, the analytic/Continental divide had its roots in an opposition between two kinds of activities emanating, respectively, in the English-speaking world on the one hand and in the German-speaking world on the other. One is reminded here of the famous passage in Dummett’s book Origins of Analytic Philosophy–which Ferraris himself cites in his most recent book Hysteresis (2023) 2–to the effect that although Frege and Husserl were founders of two radically different philosophical movements, they would have appeared in 1903 to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both ‘as remarkably close in orientation’.