THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE ANECDOTE ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANALYTICAL AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The study interprets the anecdote (joke) about the difference between analytical and continental philosophy. The anecdote about the difference between analytical and continental philosophy is an original (metaphilosophical) verbal play for the right to signify the referent which is philosophy here in the anecdote by substituting the components (replacing philosophy with one philosophical tradition by another: there must be either analytical or continental philosophy in philosophy) within the fractional signs (here: the phenomenon of philosophy as a signified is distributed among the pseudo-signified ones (i.e. analytical and continental philosophies) which are meaningful only if they remain the integrated whole). The anecdote shows how one philosophical tradition (here it is analytical philosophy) appropriates itself the right to signify the entire philosophy, rejecting the other philosophical tradition as non-philosophical in general and thus preventing the right of continental philosophy to call itself a philosophy at least partially. In order to understand the play in the anecdote one has to have at least some idea of the existing difference between analytical and continental philosophies and the representatives of those philosophies, that is, to make a certain hermeneutical effort, to involve a factual hermeneutical awareness within meta-philosophy which the main question is “ What is philosophy?”