Introduction
pp. 1-13
in: Harold Durfee (ed), Analytic philosophy and phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1976Abstract
Philosophy is a discipline of fundamental diversities and extremely divergent modes of thought some of which occupy center stage in Western intellectual development. This book deals with such a central division. For centuries significant differences have developed between the philosophical reflections of the Western European (mainly French and German) and those of the Anglo-Saxon countries (especially Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States). These differences extend at least as far back in history as the major epistemological division between the early modern rationalism of Descartes and Leibnitz and the British empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. At certain periods there has been greater compatibility, as with the development of Hegelian Idealism in England and the United States or the development of Logical Empiricism in the Vienna Circle. In spite of such interesting exceptions, however, continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophers have frequently moved in different directions and have worked within different philosophical traditions, for example, the French tradition of Descartes and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of Hume.
