A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Like Michael Dummett before him, Critchley pays particular attention to the Frege-Husserl dispute. But what marks Critchley's work out as original is his identification of a peculiarly British dimension to the Continental-Analytic rift, dating back to the chasm between 'the two cultures' of Benthamite Utilitarianism and Coleridgean Romanticism. Here, Critchley invokes the sober words of J.S Mill: 'Whoever could master the premises and combine the methods of both [Bentham and Coleridge] would possess the entire English philosophy of their age'. 

This diagnosis Critchley finds echoed in C.P. Snow's later analysis of 'two cultures' at the heart of British intellectual life humanism and science and it is a framework which Critchley himself seeks to apply to the Continental-Analytic divide, at least in a British context. Thus, while the Oxford-Cambridge philosophers can be seen as direct descendants of the Utilitarians, the Warwick-Essex Continentalists can be seen as inheriting the Coleridgean ethos. 

Adopting the neutral stance of Mill, Critchley's solution to the conflict is to go beyond its twin perils, which he refers to as 'scientism' and 'obscurantism', the first view which would reduce all truth to empirical evidence and the second which would wilfully create confusion and obliqueness. 
At their worst, Continental and Analytic philosophers have both been guilty of these intellectual crimes. We are now reaching an era, consequently, where both paradigms of thought have reached near exhaustion: 'I think it is at least arguable that the present state of philosophy is interestingly marked by the exhaustion of a whole series of theoretical paradigms'. The future of philosophy, therefore, for Critchley must lie beyond the Continental-Analytic split. 

His analysis of the Continental tradition has led him to the paradoxical conclusion that such an epithet is in effect (no more than the term 'analytic') superfluous: 'My hope is that once this story has become clear and we have learned to overcome any lingering sectarianism, that we might begin to move on philosophically and face up to issues of deep and enduring intellectual interest'. 
For Critchley, these issues are the perennial ones of how to live a good life, how to produce questioning, the difference between knowledge and wisdom. 

In thus coming full circle, Critchley demonstrates the extraordinary continuity of the philosophical tradition, past and present. 

Reviewed by Jones Irwin