Continental philosophy is a term that arose after the Second World War in English-speaking countries as a name for philosophical approaches that take as their point of departure the work of certain nineteenth and twentieth centuries figures from Continental Europe, especially Germany and France, whose themes and methods were different from those of the analytical philosophy common at most leading British and American philosophy departments at that time. As a general term it includes movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, hermeneutics, psychoanalytically oriented philosophy, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism as well as feminist theory, race theories, and other critical social theories to the extent that they draw on one or more of these other movements. Its themes can range across all of the traditional philosophical areas—from epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics to aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and studies in the history of philosophy, to name just a few.
General comparisons between the intellectual life in Britain and Continental Europe go back at least to the nineteenth century. However, the current opposition between analytical and continental philosophy can be traced back above all to polemical attempts on the part of leading English analytical philosophers, in particular those at Oxford, to justify their own approach to philosophy and distinguish it from the predominant philosophical movements in France and Germany during the 1950s such as phenomenology and existentialism. Gilbert Ryle (1971) and R. M. Hare (1960), for instance, were outspoken in contrasting the way they and their colleagues approached philosophy from philosophy as practiced in the rest of Europe, with a decidedly negative assessment of continental philosophy's Germanic roots. The primary targets at the time were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, although it is not clear that their attackers had read many of their works closely.
The term became fairly common, however, only during the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was embraced, first in the United States and then later in Great Britain and other English-speaking countries, as a positive term by philosophers who used it as a name for their own work Continental philosophy was still defined in opposition to analytical philosophy, but without necessarily carrying the negative connotations it had for British and American analytical philosophers. Though discussions about the differences between analytic versus continental philosophy and the relative merits of each are still common, the term has increasingly become more of a commonly accepted, though still somewhat vague descriptive term used by both proponents and opponents of the different ways of doing philosophy that have been grouped together under the general heading of "continental" (often with a capital "C") in contrast to "analytical" philosophy.
From the outset, even though it suggests a geographical reference, the term "continental philosophy" has referred only to those figures from continental Europe whose approaches were not consistent with those of the project of earlier analytical philosophy. It specifically excluded thinkers such as Frege, Carnap, and Wittgenstein, whose work was viewed in a positive light by the English opponents of continental philosophy, because they were seen rather as precursors to or representatives of analytical philosophy. Moreover, even though the original point of difference goes back primarily to differences in philosophical work being conducted in Britain as opposed to continental European countries after the Second World War, these differences were projected backwards into the history of philosophy. Most observers agree that there were no clearly identifiable differences along geographic lines in philosophy as practiced in England and on the continent before the twentieth century. However, because analytic philosophy as practiced after World War II excluded idealistic philosophy and some other nineteenth-century movements that were originally from Germany or France from its lineage, the term continental philosophy soon came to include not only postwar and earlier twentieth-century philosophical movements from the continent, but also philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy whose approaches were not consistent with the historical development of analytical philosophy.
Toward the end of the twentieth century it became common to speak of a "continental tradition" instead of simply referring to "continental philosophy." One reason for this is that many of the adherents and leading practitioners of these directions in philosophy come from countries all around the world instead of just Europe. Another reason is that, from the outset, the fate of this term has been tied to that of its opposite, namely "analytical philosophy," and critical developments within the latter movement led many of its adherents to refer to a "postanalytical" phase that is still part of an analytical tradition of philosophy. As philosophers from both traditions became increasingly familiar with each others' work and many of the original claims in both traditions have had to be modified, it became increasingly difficult to provide a simple characterization of what continental philosophy is and hence also of how it is and is not different from analytical philosophy. Increasingly, some scholars, especially those outside of English-speaking countries, have begun to draw on ideas and resources from both traditions to address philosophical problems across the differences that had previously divided them, so that it makes good sense to think of both continental and analytical philosophy as competing traditions of philosophy and less as two clearly delineated camps situated in different geographic locations.
Critchley, Simon. "Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy?" In A Companion to Continental Philosophy, edited by Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder, 1–17. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1998.
Glendinning, Simon. "Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy?" In The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, edited by Simon Glendinning, 3–20. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Hare, R.M. "A School for Philosophers." Ratio 2 (1960): 107–120.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Ryle, Gilbert. "Phenomenology versus The Concept of Mind." In Collected Papers. London: Hutchinson, 1971.
Sallis, John, Hugh Silverman, and Thomas M. Seebohm, eds. Continental Philosophy in America. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983.
West, David. An Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1966.
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