AnalyticPhilosophy

Quora Answer : What are criticisms of the analytical approach to philosophy?

Jun 12, 2014

It rests on a bunch of fairly lumpen assumptions that it can't justify.

In contrast Continental philosophy knows and acknowledges that it rests on shaky grounds ... that words are slippery and can change their meanings with every new context; that obvious, "self evident" truths change throughout history; that the disinterested rational philosopher is actually a psychological organism engaged in unconscious power struggles.

In contrast, the Analytic philosopher dismisses such concerns, naively assuming that his words always mean exactly what he takes them to mean, that logic works exactly the way it was described in his undergrad textbooks, that every intuition he has is pure and uncorrupted by his material being.

Analytics think that they just have to follow the rules of "good thinking" but they don't stop to worry how or whether those rules actually work, or why we might want them.