 I stayed in a hotel for a couple days and every morning I found myself thinking about the cultural, historic, and economic context of the free croissants and coffee I was enjoying. It was a real continental breakfast. The Enlightenment was a noteworthy period in European history where many of the established norms of society and culture were being upended, with a number of intellectuals attempting to reevaluate some of the underlying assumptions of their respective societies from first principles. Rather than relying on ancient texts or prevailing dogma, they probed the world using their own faculties. What came out the other side was much different – politics, theology, economics, natural philosophy, also known as science. All these disciplines exited the Enlightenment with a significantly different style and focus than they had prior to it, favoring natural explanations over supernatural ones, individual rights, and facts that any person could verify for themselves over proclamations issued from on high. Even better, that science thing turned out to be really, really useful, spawning much more accurate and actionable information about how the world works than had ever been available before. There are a couple ways to interpret these changes and advances. We could take it as evidence that the Enlightenment worked, that when we applied careful skepticism and found these new values of individual reason and scientific thinking, we corrected the problems that had been holding society back. With that framework in place, we were finally free to deduce important truths about the world. On the other hand, we might view the success as a result of the process that led to the Enlightenment, the rejection of dogmatism and a pervasive skepticism, a critical evaluation of the fundamental assumptions of philosophy and society. We can see the clear value of that deconstructive effort in how it allowed us to replace mindless preconceptions with much more careful and deliberate thinking. These two interpretations broadly line up with two, let's call them taxonomic families of philosophy. In one case, philosophers took the conclusions of the Enlightenment and ran with them, seeking to develop a thorough understanding of the universe through that newfangled conceptual framework. Analytic philosophers treat science and logical analysis as the de facto epistemic agents, as the yardsticks by which we should measure truth and knowledge. They see philosophy as an extension or complement of those disciplines, a sort of companion to understanding them by clarifying concepts and dissolving things that might seem like contradictions. The branch tends to take after those fields stylistically, too. If you pick up an analytic paper, odds are you'll find numbered paragraphs, dry language, and logical symbols used in highly abstract proofs. The continental approach instead takes the attitude of the Enlightenment as its guide, continuing its tradition of critical analysis of social, ideological, and cultural norms, including the norms generated by the Enlightenment itself. Continental philosophers tend to focus more on broad issues that have real-world consequences, things like politics, culture, and the subjective experience, aiming to continue the work of bringing assumptions of our worldview to our attention and questioning their validity, often with an eye towards affecting meaningful change in the world rather than juggling abstractions. Now, the academic continental distinction is fuzzy at best and totally misleading or stagnating at worst, sometimes used as an excuse for ignoring the work of a particular group of philosophers, as in, oh no, I don't read any Hegel, I'm only about analytic philosophy. But interestingly, the divide between analytic and continental responses to the Enlightenment, between looking outward and looking inward, crops up in many discussions that don't seem explicitly philosophical. As with a lot of philosophy, there are serious practical ramifications for what mental lens is being used to parse the world, causing people with the same information to arrive at very different conclusions, and the analytic continental split echoes in many modern debates. Let's take a look at the history of science, indisputably the golden child of the Enlightenment, a framework for inquiry that has granted humankind greater control of the universe and its fundamental forces. The moon landing, plastic polymers, antibiotics, genetic engineering of crops, if you're listening to this episode, you owe a debt to the scientific process for yoking the cosmos to your will. However, when we look at the arc of scientific inquiry, there are a disturbing number of instances where the interpretation of scientific observations has led smart people to seriously wrong, dangerously wrong, even heinously wrong conclusions. For example, women's brains are, on average, less massive than men's brains, therefore they must not be as intelligent, and are unsuited to difficult mental tasks. White people's foreheads tend to be less sloped, which means that they're more evolved and should rule over other races. I mean, Rudolf Hess claimed that being a Nazi was nothing more than applied biology. Now, there are at least two ways of interpreting these colossal injustices visited on certain groups of people in the age of scientific thinking. In one interpretation, the occasional misstep perhaps colored by cultural norms of the period is to be expected. These theories were tested and were eventually disproven and replaced with more accurate ones. This is an example of the laudable, self-correcting nature of the scientific process. Scientists thought one thing, they gathered more data, now the consensus is something closer to the truth. In another interpretation, science was and is wielded in very much the same fashion as papal decrees or appeals to ancient sages as a tool of epistemic authority. But the shape is scientific rather than political, historical or religious, is just a detail of implementation. It's still operating on the same underlying principle. Historically, power structures maintain and reinforce themselves using whatever epistemic implements are used or respected at the time, and you can bet your last dollar that a society run by, for example, white men, will come up with science to show that white men deserve to be in charge. This is why we need to be diligently critical of the scientific findings that reinforce those power structures. Those are both totally valid ways of looking at things like scientific racism and sexism. Different scales, different focuses, but neither is inaccurate. People who lean toward one interpretation or the other might well find themselves disagreeing about certain topics, but only because the philosophical lens they're using to evaluate the evidence is tuned differently. Let's look at a practical example of this phenomenon. Many authors have noted that certain groups which claim enlightenment values, like atheist communities, skeptics, rationalists, and the like, seem to regularly clash with other groups of a particular flavor. Social justice advocates, feminists, that sort of thing. On the one hand, we have groups invested in the idea that science can be used to effectively describe reality, establishing what's objectively true through experiment and skepticism, following the golden light of reason, even, or especially, if it means disturbing those who don't approve of its conclusions. This often carries harsh criticism for ideas and ideologies that can't be fully characterized in scientific terms. Trying to drag in things like identity, subjective experience, or politics is sometimes painted as a distraction from the more concrete and important facts of the matter. On the other hand, social justice movements often view science as just another moving part in the complex mechanisms of society, power, and culture, mechanisms which historically tend to favor particular groups. There's no denying the role of science in discovery, but it's not nearly as important as who gets to dictate which facts are important, what interpretation of those facts will be held as the correct one, and what will ultimately happen to the people who are caught on the wrong side of that narrative. Tables and charts are fine and all, but the context in which they're used in the social, political, and individual effects of that use are what really matter. This might just seem like a difference in emphasis, but you'll notice that both views implicitly suggest that the other's standards of truth are incomplete in some way. The continental social justice side of the split carries with it a judgment call that scientific justification is just a detail of much larger systems. The analytic, skeptic side of the split tacitly asserts that it doesn't really matter who you are or what your subjective experience of the world is like. Your claims need to be objectively verified by evidence to be valid, that is, they have to be scientific. It almost seems inevitable that people who subscribe to these views would talk past each other and feel threatened by the other's epistemic ideals. It's never reassuring to hear that how you measure truth is inadequate. Still, there's room for both schools, even in the same head. They're fan clubs nonwithstanding, professional scientists tend to look at even very robust scientific findings with an attitude of dubious skepticism for the narratives being pushed by their authors. A critical eye for what the evidence says versus what it can be said to mean. The most effective advocates for social justice movements, martial scientific findings in service of their praxis, harnessing objectively verifiable facts to demonstrate the need for change and to convince others that it's necessary. The problems only really occur when someone respects one of the lessons of the Enlightenment without heeding the other. Is the stereotypical analytic continental divide a useful way of looking at some of the competing philosophies of today? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share and don't stop thunking.