Over the last couple of days, I’ve been in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, for an ‘author-meets-critics’ symposium on my forthcoming book on formal languages. It is a real privilege for me to have my work be put under the scrutiny of such careful readers prior to publication, while there is still time to incorporate suggestions and comments to the final result. The discussions have been extremely fruitful, and the commentators – Alexandre Machado, Luis Carlos Pereira, Eros Carvalho and Paulo Faria – have done a great job at ‘deconstructing’ the text (in a constructive way, of course!). The philosophy department at UFRGS is perhaps the most ‘analytic’ of all philosophy departments in Brazil, with an impressive group of excellent philosophers. It is also one of the most congenial philosophy departments I’ve ever encountered; hardly any internal animosity, people are extremely nice and pleasant, and absolutely wonderful hosts (Alfredo Storck in particular). Should you ever be invited to pay them a visit, you must absolutely accept the invitation!
But anyway, this post is not only meant to be a bit of shameless self-promotion and to thank everybody in Porto Alegre for the lovely welcome; I actually have a point to make on one of the recurring themes here at New APPS, namely the analytic-continental divide. The four ‘critics’ were each assigned different chapters of the book to discuss, and besides raising questions and objections, they each also offered a summary of the chapters assigned to them for the audience (we couldn’t possibly assume that everybody would have read the whole thing). I was struck by the extreme accuracy of their accounts of the ideas and theses presented in the book; it was truly flabbergasting.
At first I thought, ‘I must be an amazingly clear writer!’ :) But then, it dawned on me: all of them had the ‘continental’ (broadly construed) training of reading philosophical texts very, very carefully. It is the same kind of training I received as an undergraduate at the University of São Paulo, inspired by the French ‘structuralist’ tradition in philosophical historiography. And while there is also a certain tendency not to really engage with the text as a ‘philosophical interlocutor’, so to speak (to whom objections can be raised, criticism can be made etc.), the skill of close reading of philosophical texts is clearly a great asset (one that I realize has served me very well up to now, and not only when I’m doing historical work).
I do not want to endorse a simplistic dichotomy of analytic philosophers being good at arguments but bad at reading texts, and continental philosophers being good at reading texts and bad at arguments; but purely as a matter of training, it does look like there is at least some truth in this simplistic account. I’ve had several experiences of being read by analytically trained philosophers (quite often, anonymous journal reviewers…) who rather than first trying to come to grips with what I am actually saying in the text (or at a presentation), immediately project their own commitments and presuppositions, and engage critically with the text even before attaining a proper understanding of it. In contrast, over the last couple of days in Porto Alegre, I felt my text was being truly understood, thanks to very close readings.
The moral I draw from all this is that being good at arguments and being good at reading texts is a false dichotomy: the truly excellent philosopher is the philosopher who can combine both skills. As it turns out, the typical analytic training emphasizes attention to arguments but downplays attention to the text, while the typical continental training seems to reverse the priorities. On other occasions here at New APPS, I have defended the idea that the continental/analytic divide is to a great extent a methodological divide, but not an essential one: there is no real incompatibility between the two approaches. Attention to arguments and careful reading of texts can and should be combined, as illustrated by my sharp commentators in Porto Alegre.
A silly novel I’m reading right now had a funny description of one of the characters: “He nevertheless had many charming and redeeming qualities, some of which were quite noticeably absent in the architecture of my personality. In fact, I often thought that between the two of us, we’d just about make up one fairly adequate human being.” Seems like a fitting quote in the present context.
UPDATE - This has been going around in the blogosphere: there will be a radio show on BBC 4 airing tomorrow on the analytic-continental split. The promotional text doesn't strike me as particularly insightful, but maybe the show will be good.
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