Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy is a term best defined as what "analytic philosophy" is not (although analytic philosophy is not, itself, very much more rigorously defined); it includes a wide variety of thinking about language, meaning, political economy, social relations, cultural studies, critical theory, the meaning of life, etc. (Glibly, one might describe it as comprising most polysyllabic fields and disciplines ending with the word "theory".)

While it is too broad an assortment of disciplines to withstand detailed analysis as a cohesive "philosophy", the concept (if not always the term) gets used in a few different ways. First, critics of one or another of the various trends often conflate fields and critiques of fields. For instance, conservative literary critics might critique a work of criticism for its Marxism and its feminism, treating the two as related in ways they might not be. Second, the naming of the field itself may have had a certain reifying effect; certainly, as various fields of social studies, political economy, and cultural studies have grown over the years, there has been significant cross-pollination amongst the various fields.

It may be best to think of continental philosophy as modern (19th and 20th century) dialog about social and cultural relations and human understanding of the world.

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