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PB April-May 2025
April-May 2025 51
Continental divide
Philosophically, Trinity is Analytical while UCD
is Continental with some Analytical; but mostly
what sustains a divide is
funding
By Jes Paluchowska
The philosophical divide
20th Century mathematically-minded
philosopher-in-chief. Bertrand Russell,
divided philosophy into two. Most
Anglophone thinkers fell into the Analytic
tradition with a focus on truth and
argumentation, strong links to what we now
call STEM and a strife for clarity, others were
assigned the Continental tradition,
embracing style, creativity and political
engagement; and aligning with the
humanistic traditions, and with literature
and art.
Within this framework, Ireland is unusual.
Catholic, Celtic and continent-friendly, it was
the first adventure of the English empire. It
straddles the traditions. This is well
represented by the divide between Dublin’s
great universities.
The website for University College Dublin
(UCD) claims it is the highest-ranked for
philosophy, but the international QS analysis
places them both in the 51-100 range
globally, ranking Trinity College Dublin (TCD)
higher for “employer reputation” metric, but
lower on all academic criteria including
academic reputation and numbers of
citations.
Ultimately, however, the conflict is
philosophical (perhaps there is even some
ontological significance to the one being the
university of the place, The University of
Dublin, while the other is a college in that
place, University College Dublin)!
Anglophone thinkers fall into the Analytical
tradition with a focus on truth and
argumentation; others were assigned the
continental tradition, embracing style,
creativity and political engagement
TCD
Trinity, with its English and Protestant roots,
follows the Analytic tradition.
Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and Quine are
the most prominent figures on the syllabus.
Within the first two years of their degree, a
philosophy undergraduate at Trinity will study
half a semester each of philosophy of mind,
philosophy of science and epistemology, and a
semester each of logic and history of Analytic
philosophy. No continental philosophy classes
are oered, with the inexplicable exception of
a Modern European Philosophy module
featuring exclusively the French
phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty.
Trinity is, unsurprisingly, the stronger for
Analytic philosophy. Its two most prominent
logicians, Dr James Levine and Dr John Divers
(head of Department), are both international
stars in the field. The school, as one of the
oldest in the Anglosphere, has close ties with
both American (double BA program in
Columbia) and British (sister colleges in
Oxbridge) universities.
But its orientation creates an easy trap, when
it comes to the diversity of ideas. Few of its
academics write on topics even remotely
pertaining to post-Wittgenstein German or
French speakers. It was only within the last two
years that its History of Philosophy modules
started featuring Islamic thinkers.
The students, of course, make do. Trinity’s
Metaphysical Society (not to be confused with
the Philosophical Society which is in fact an
anomalously well-funded debate club) oers
under- and post-graduate students reading and
discussion groups centred primarily on
continental philosophy, diving into texts that
have fallen out of favour with the department.
Last semester they were doing Gilles Deleuze’s
and Fèlix Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’. Now they
are covering Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ and a
selection of texts by Allen Ginsberg.
UCD
UCD is not afraid of the big bad Continental
thinkers.
The school’s big beasts such as Joseph
Cohen (historical continental philosophy,
philosophy of art, Jewish philosophy), Katherine
O’Donnell (cultural theory, feminist and gender
philosophy) or Brian O’Connor (social
philosophy) stray from logic and sciences. UCD
oers both Analytic and Continental modules
at undergraduate level, though for post-
graduate students and researchers there may
be pressure to lean in the Continental direction.
From its launch as the Catholic University of
Ireland in 1854, UCD was determined to do
something dierent. It was, to start with, a
Catholic university, meaning fewer Anglo-Irish
students and significantly less love for Britain.
Bertrnd Russell
OPINION
52 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 PB
increases, it becomes impossible for any
academic to have more than a basic familiarity
with pursuits outside their own specific area.
The sheer number of articles available
including online, many translated into English,
is staggering. According to data published by
the Directory of American Philosophers, in the
United States alone papers per year increased
from approximately 5000 to over 12, 000
between 1975 and 2005, despite only a 20%
spike in the number of philosophers.
Hyper-specialisation makes it dicult for
undergraduates to actually build a useful base.
Newman, a father of modern ‘liberal
education’ was aware of the issue. In his series
of lectures ‘The Idea of a University’ delivered
in 1852 heralding the opening of the Catholic
University College in Dublin he said:
“A thorough knowledge of one science and a
superficial acquaintance with many are not the
same thing; a smattering of a hundred things
or a memory for detail, is not a philosophical or
comprehensive view”.
Newman considered that the role of a
university was to facilitate a shaping of minds,
providing the community of students with
“principle of thought and action”. He believed
philosophy to be the necessary core of the
curriculum, the “perfection or virtue of the
intellect” with which students must become
familiar in order to be able to develop their
capacity for reason.
So what’s to be done?
Ideally, fresh-minded students should be able
to make their own minds up about whether in
the end they are dry Anglo-American analysts
or mad Continental metaphysicians, and
perhaps not be steered to reflecting tribal or
atavistic systems of thought. But that’s easier
said than done.
When asked about the problem of hyper-
specialisation, the UCD doctoral student,
Feenan, volunteers: “The problem emerges that
people know a lot about very little. It’s not a new
problem, but the social media are not helping
with their trivialisation of knowledge. It’s not
unique to humanities, but humanities suer the
most since they are essentially not-for-profit”.
UCD’s Philosophy department currently
employs 18 members of faculty, along with 3
teaching sta and 8 postdoctoral researchers.
In comparison, TCD’s department (which is only
a subsection of the School of Social Sciences)
has a total of only 14 employees on its website,
5 of them fellows. And this suggests the
solution, a materialist, non-philosophic one.
Because it’s not that the broader approach is
academically anathema, it just costs more
money.
Jes Paluchowska is studying English and
Philosophy in Trinity
Cardinal John Henry Newman was founder and
rector. As a high-Catholic Englishman, formerly
an Anglican, he was poised between the
traditions. This was a good start.
Today too, writers from the Anglosphere
complement the Continental tradition in the
philosophy curriculum and, instead of pushing
non-Analytic texts to other departments, the
school oers modules on interdisciplinary
studies within humanities, such as Philosophy
of Fiction, Philosophy of Interpretation or Love
as a philosophical subject.
Max K Feenan, a current doctoral student at
UCD who previously studied at TCD, oered a
measured appraisal:
“There are people who want the divide
broken”, he said. “The Analytic-Continental
divide is not as serious as it might be. It was
made into a problem. If anything could improve
it, it would be cooperation between the two —
acknowledging dierences rather than aiming
for a universal standard. They have worked
together in the past and, hopefully, will in the
future”.
Interdisciplinarity
As interdisciplinarity in humanities is a big
problem for the Analytic tradition, Feenan’s
aspiration is a challenge. Greek-American
philosopher Alexander Nehamas, speaks of it
going back as far as the 1940s in his paper
‘Trends in Recent American Philosophy’:
“Philosophy now had an indispensable
formal component, and logic was one of its
main concerns. In addition, philosophers
ceased to think of themselves… as part of the
enterprise to which their colleagues in literature
and history departments were devoted; they
started thinking of themselves instead as
participants in the enterprise of science”.
And indeed the postwar ethos saw a massive
displacement of non-Analytic thinkers to
English and History departments in the
anglosphere. Driven by civil rights movements,
anti-colonial struggles, feminism and the
emergence of psychoanalysis, post-war
humanities became political, starting with
Marxist readings and moving to structuralism,
post-structuralism, deconstruction, and
gendered critical studies.
It was anathama to Analytic traditionalists.
Postmodernism in particular stoked the fires
inciting Terry Eagleton, literary theorist and
critic, famously to call it “among other things a
sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-
gardism”. Even among French and German
thinkers many are weary of the destabilisation
it promotes.
And yet, many anglosphere students and
professors like it. In UCD, Jacques Derrida, a
postmodernist menace if there ever was one, is
a hot ticket in philosophy modules. Trinity also
acknowledges his importance, but only in the
English department where he joins other non-
Analytic refugees banished from philosophy
curricula.
English is not the only school to pick up the
slack. Marx and Hegel, absent from political
philosophy lectures in Trinity, make an
appearance in the History and Economics
departments.
Specialisation
The Analytic discomfiture with
interdisciplinarity described by Nehamas has
only worsened over time as improvements in
technology let Analytic philosophy dig itself
deeper into its trenches. Cooperation with
hard sciences has allowed for empirical
mapping of brain activity, big data analysis of
social trends, and tracing the biological
origins of behaviours.
Many areas which were previously purely
theoretical are flourishing, injected with fresh
blood.
This expansion, however, is not reflected in
individual thinkers. As the threshold of
knowledge and skill in each particular subfield
The postwar ethos saw
a massive displacement
of non-Analytic thinkers
to English and History
departments in the
anglosphere, anathema to
Analytic traditionalists
Newmn: UCD’s distnt progenitor
