I'm on record as favoring a sociological perspective on the question of the relation of analytic and continental philosophy. In other words, I think it's much more useful to focus on hiring and citation networks than on questions of style or of content or method. That's because I do not think we can produce a finite list of necessary and sufficient condition to create a clean distinction between the two groups. In other words, there's no essential definition that wouldn't produce easy counter-examples, so that figures usually associated with one side or the other would be mis-classified.
But, if we switch to a family resemblance or broad tendency approach, the question of the priority of identity to difference or of difference to identity does seem a promising one for a content distinction, with AP favoring the former and CP the latter. That brings me to this passage from Adrian Moore's new book, which we've discussed before.
Another facet of the break between them [Hegel and Nietzsche] is interestingly reflected in one of the contrasts between analytic philosophy and [continental] philosophy.... Both Hegel and Nietzsche have a particular concern with difference and specifically with change.... In analytic philosophy, by contrast, there is typically a greater emphasis on identity.* But not only that; there is also typically a prioritization of identity. It is extremely difficult for analytic philosophers to think of difference in anything other than negative terms; that is, to avoid thinking of what is different as what is not the same, or as what does not have some feature that some given thing does have.** The philosophers whose work we shall be exploring later [e.g., Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze] reverse this prioritization. And in this respect Hegel is closer to the former. He too construes difference negatively. Not so Nietzsche. Nietzsche fully anticipates what is to come. The positive construal of difference, as something that betokens affirmation and something that is itself to be affirmed, is profoundly Nietzschean.*** (399; italics in original)
Moore is, I think, exactly right in pointing to Hegel's "identitarian" line as the target for the philosophy of difference both Derrida and Deleuze were after. (I think there are ontological differences between Derrida and Deleuze -- see here for an early attempt at sketching them out -- but on the "logical" point of the priority of difference to identity I think they agree.)
* Moore here provides a note with references to work by Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Lewis, and Dummett.
** Moore here provides a note that reads in part: "Among the reasons for this are the fact that it would be impossible to recast the standard logic of numerical identity in terms of difference without the use of negation."
*** Moore here provides a note which puts Spinoza in the affirmation of difference camp.
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