Contemporary Philosophy: Analytic, Continental & Beyond

"The present King of France is bald." Is that true, false, or neither? France has had no king since 1848, so you might say it is false. But then "the present King of France is not bald" sounds false too, and a logic in which a sentence and its denial are both false is in trouble. In 1905 Bertrand Russell published a short paper that solved this, and it is often called a paradigm of philosophical analysis. Forty-five years later, Peter Strawson said Russell had misunderstood what ordinary speakers do with such a sentence.

That is the twentieth century's philosophy in miniature: a precise tool, a clever result, a reply that says the tool changed the question. Across the same decades, on the other side of the Channel and the Rhine, others argued that the question should start with lived experience, or with history, or with power. And from about 1950 the picture widened again: Japanese, African, Latin American and feminist philosophers joined the conversation in their own voices.

The labels "analytic" and "continental" are shorthand, and they blur. Analytic philosophy is a tradition (not a method) that grew from Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein and prizes clarity and argument; "continental" is a catch-all for a set of European traditions with different methods, from phenomenology to critical theory. Plenty of philosophers cross the line. This piece tours six places where the argument went, and ends with what philosophers say they believe.

Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein: logic, descriptions and language-games

Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift (1879) invented modern logic with quantifiers ("for all", "there is"), which let him write arguments that the old syllogisms could not. In "On Sense and Reference" (1892) he asked a puzzle: "the Morning Star is the Evening Star" is informative, though both names refer to the planet Venus. So a name has a sense (a way the object is given) as well as a reference. In 1902 Russell wrote to Frege that his system contained a contradiction (about "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves"). Frege replied with grief; set theory had to be rebuilt.

Russell's own tool was the theory of descriptions. "The present King of France is bald" is, he said, not a subject-predicate claim about a king; it is shorthand for three claims: (1) there is a present King of France; (2) there is at most one; (3) whoever it is is bald. If (1) fails, the whole sentence is false, no mystery needed. His analysis explains the puzzle about negation by scope: "the King is not bald" can mean "there is exactly one king and he is non-bald" (false) or "it is not the case that there is exactly one king who is bald" (true). Strawson (1950) answered that ordinary speakers presuppose a king exists; if none does, the sentence misfires and is neither true nor false. Philosophers still divide on which is right.

Without JavaScript: if there is no king, Russell makes "the King is bald" false, "the King is non-bald" false and "it is not the case that the King is bald" true. Strawson says all three lack a truth value, since the presupposition fails.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) shaped the field twice, against himself. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German 1921, English 1922) held that a proposition is a picture of a possible state of affairs; what cannot be pictured cannot be said ("whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"). The Vienna Circle of the 1920s–30s took him up: only claims that are verifiable by experience or true by logic have meaning (A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 1936). The standard objection is that the principle itself is neither, and today most philosophers reject naive verificationism.

Wittgenstein's later work, published after his death as Philosophical Investigations (1953), turned away from pictures. Meaning, he said, is use in a practice: words belong to "language-games" in which they have jobs. The famous example is the word "game". There is no one feature all games share; there are overlapping similarities, like the resemblances among members of a family (§§66–67). He also argued (§§243 ff.) that a purely private language, whose words refer to sensations only the speaker can know, could not have a standard of correctness.

Without JavaScript: in a table of chess, poker, football, patience, ring-a-ring-o'-roses and a ball thrown at a wall, no feature is shared by all six, though neighbouring games overlap. Wittgenstein calls this a family resemblance.

Quine and the web of belief: what to revise when the evidence disagrees

In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), W. V. O. Quine attacked the Vienna Circle's two supports: the clean split between claims true by meaning ("bachelors are unmarried") and claims true by fact, and the idea that each sentence can be tested alone. Our beliefs, he said, face experience together, as a web: a clash between prediction and observation tells you that something in the web must change, not what. We can revise a physical theory, an auxiliary assumption, a measurement, or even a law of logic. We usually revise what costs least. This is holism, and it goes back to Pierre Duhem; it is often called the Duhem–Quine thesis.

History supplies a clean test. In the 1840s the orbit of Uranus did not match Newton's predictions. The French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier (and, independently, John Couch Adams) concluded that an unseen planet was pulling on it, and calculated where. Johann Galle in Berlin found Neptune on 23 September 1846, within about a degree of the prediction. In 1859 Le Verrier found that Mercury's orbit also did not match Newton: its closest point to the Sun advances faster than the theory allows (the modern value is about 43 arcseconds per century). He did the same thing, proposing an unseen planet, Vulcan, inside Mercury's orbit. No one found it. In 1915 Einstein's general relativity explained the excess exactly.

Without JavaScript: Uranus's anomaly was resolved by a new planet (Neptune, 1846). Mercury's anomaly, treated the same way (Vulcan), was resolved by revising Newtonian gravity (general relativity, 1915).

The logic was the same in both cases. Only further evidence could say which move was right. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) built a larger story on this, and Karl Popper's falsifiability (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934/1959) is the main alternative. Philosophy of Science (36/06) takes them up. Meanwhile Saul Kripke (Naming and Necessity, lectures 1970) argued that some truths are necessary yet known only through experience (water is H₂O), another blow to the old neat categories. And Edmund Gettier's three-page paper of 1963 showed that justified true belief is not enough for knowledge.

Phenomenology and existentialism: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Beauvoir

On the European continent the start was different. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) wanted a rigorous science of experience. His key idea is intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. His method is the epoché, "bracketing" the question of whether the world exists in order to describe how things show up. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), in Being and Time (1927), turned this into a study of the being who asks about being (Dasein): we are always already in a world of tools, other people and projects, "thrown" into a situation we did not pick, and finite. It is among the most influential and most difficult books of the century. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933–34. The Black Notebooks, published from 2014, contain antisemitic remarks. How far this affects his philosophy is disputed, and scholars of all positions have written on it.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) took the method into freedom. In Being and Nothingness (1943) and the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945), he held that "existence precedes essence": a person has no fixed nature to follow and is responsible for what they make of themselves. Bad faith is the attempt to deny this, either by treating yourself as a thing with a fixed nature (a waiter who is nothing but his role) or by pretending your situation doesn't limit you at all.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a philosopher in her own right, not Sartre's disciple. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argued that we are both free and situated, and that freedom is only real when others are free too. In The Second Sex (1949) she applied it to gender: "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". Her point was that what a woman is has been made by a history of situations in which men were treated as the universal and women as the Other. Her account of oppression differs from Sartre's: she said that having far fewer options is not a failure of will. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) put the body at the centre, and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) described what racialised experience does to the sense of self.

Without JavaScript: bad faith means denying either your freedom (I'm just made this way) or your situation (nothing limits me). Deliberating and accepting the costs of a choice is not bad faith. Beauvoir adds that real constraints are not self-deception.

Critical theory, Arendt and Rawls: the political turn

The Frankfurt School grew from the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 and directed by Max Horkheimer from 1930; the Nazi takeover sent its members into exile. Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (written 1944, published 1947) argued that the Enlightenment's drive to master nature turned into domination of people, and that the "culture industry" of film, radio and advertising trained people to accept it. Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) said similar of consumer society. Critics called this elitist and pessimistic. Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) answered with a more hopeful theory: language contains a built-in demand for reasons, and a legitimate society is one where laws could be accepted by all through free discussion (The Theory of Communicative Action, 1981).

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is hard to place. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she described the new form of rule that destroys the public sphere. In The Human Condition (1958) she distinguished three activities: labour (the cyclic work of staying alive), work (making a durable world of objects) and action (speaking and acting with others, starting something new). Politics is action. Reporting on Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961, she coined "the banality of evil": the evil lay not in a monstrous character but in a failure to think. It is among the most debated phrases of the century. Critics said she underrated Eichmann's active antisemitism, and later research (Bettina Stangneth, 2011) supports that; defenders say she meant that his motives lacked depth, not that he was ordinary.

In the English-speaking world, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy. His argument: a just society is one you would choose from an "original position" in which you do not know your own place in it (the veil of ignorance). He argued that the parties would choose two principles: equal basic liberties, and inequalities only if they open to all and benefit the least advantaged (the difference principle). John Harsanyi had argued earlier that a rational chooser behind the veil would maximise average utility. The tool below does the arithmetic of the dispute: how a choice among four invented societies depends on how much you fear ending up at the bottom.

Without JavaScript: if you only care about the average, the unequal society with a very rich top wins. As you fear the bottom more, a gentle inequality that lifts the worst-off beats it; at the extreme, the society with the highest minimum wins, which is the difference principle's choice.

Critics came from every side. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) said redistribution violates individual rights over what one has legitimately acquired. Communitarians such as Michael Sandel said the "unencumbered self" behind the veil ignores that we are formed by our communities. Susan Okin pointed out that Rawls left the family out of the scope of justice. Charles Mills (The Racial Contract, 1997) argued that actual social contracts have been contracts among a racial few. Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) argued for comparing real situations instead of describing a perfect one. Rawls's later Political Liberalism (1993) tried to find principles that people with different comprehensive views could share.

The Kyoto school and philosophy beyond the West

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) is often called Japan's first modern philosopher. His An Inquiry into the Good (1911) began with "pure experience", the moment before the split between knower and known, drawing on William James, Zen practice and German idealism. Later he built a "logic of place" (basho) and a concept of "absolute nothingness": the place in which things appear without itself being a thing. His colleagues Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990, Religion and Nothingness, 1961) carried the project on at Kyoto University. The echo of Nāgārjuna's emptiness (see 36/10) is not a coincidence: they were talking with Buddhism and with Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger together. This is philosophy done across traditions, not a Western method applied to Eastern material.

The school's wartime record is contested. In 1941–43 several members took part in discussions on "the world-historical standpoint and Japan" published in a leading journal, which critics read as giving philosophical cover to Japanese imperial expansion; others read parts of them as attempting to criticise militarism from inside. Historians and philosophers disagree on how far each person went, and some members were barred from public posts after the war. Nishida himself died in June 1945. The case is a useful warning that a profound philosophy and a compromised politics can sit in the same person.

The wider "beyond" in this course includes women who changed analytic philosophy (G. E. M. Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch), philosophy of race (W. E. B. Du Bois, Fanon, Mills), African and Latin American philosophy (36/11) and the Chinese and Indian traditions (36/10). The demand to widen the canon is a live argument, and it comes with a methodological one: whether a text is read for what it said then, or for what it can still do now.

What philosophers think now: the PhilPapers 2020 survey

In 2020 David Bourget and David Chalmers ran the second PhilPapers Survey, after the first in 2009. Results were first reported in November 2021 from "target" respondents: professional philosophers, mostly at departments in English-speaking countries, with anywhere from a few hundred to about 1,800 answering each question. It is the best snapshot of the profession's opinions, with real limits: it samples mainly Anglophone philosophers, and a majority is not a proof.

Without JavaScript: about 19% of those answering accept theism; 52% accept physicalism about the mind against 32% non-physicalism; 62% are moral realists against 26% anti-realists; 63% would switch the trolley, and 56% would not push the man.

Some fair readings. On most questions no answer is a large majority: on normative ethics, the three big families sit within a few points of each other (virtue ethics 37%, deontology 32%, consequentialism 31%). On a few, a position leads clearly: more philosophers accept moral realism than reject it, and most say they would switch the trolley but not push the man. Compatibilism about free will has been the leading view in both surveys. In 2009 the proportion of those who accepted theism was close to 15% among faculty at leading departments; in 2020, among the broader target group, it was about 19%, so a slight rise should not be over-read, because the groups differ. The survey also tells us what philosophers think of philosophy: when asked how much progress philosophy has made, 42% said a lot and 47% said a little.

What a graduate just sees

• Many philosophical problems can be recast as a question about the logical form of a sentence, and sometimes that dissolves them. Sometimes it only moves them.
• "Meaning" is not a thing in the head: look at how a word is used, and be suspicious of a demand for a definition that covers every case.
• When a prediction fails, logic says something is wrong, not what; the choice of what to revise is a judgment, and history can go either way.
• Freedom and situation go together: you choose within a body, a past and a society, and denying either is a way of dodging responsibility.
• A theory of justice is a theory of what you could defend to someone in the worst-off position.
• A thinker's brilliance and a thinker's politics are two separate things to be weighed, as with Heidegger and the Kyoto school.
• "Analytic" and "continental" are historical labels. Good philosophy in both shows its work.
• The profession agrees much less than you would think. Check the survey before saying "most philosophers believe".

Where it shows up next

• Political Theory (35/12) and Medical Ethics & Law (35/60): Rawls's veil, Habermas on legitimacy, and consent and autonomy in clinical ethics.
• Foundations: Sets, Logic & Infinity (34/71): Frege's quantifiers, Russell's paradox and the road to Gödel.
• Philosophy of Language (36/07) and Philosophy of Mind (36/05): sense and reference, use, and the Chinese room.
• In the world: debates on AI and understanding, on gender, on justice in health care and tax, on whether a history of colonisation requires rewriting what universities teach.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2 vols., 2003), and Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (rev. ed. 1999), is the primary text for that section.
• 📘 Gentler. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (2016), a lively group portrait of Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger, Husserl and the rest.
• 🌐 Free text. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has entries on every thinker named here.
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 24.00 Problems of Philosophy (Fall 2019, Miriam Schoenfield).
• 🌐 The survey. The PhilPapers Survey 2020, with full results and methods.