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Comment by evanwise | Hacker News Reader

For most people, yes, I'd agree. For me personally, not really. I grasp abstractions and formal stuff almost instantly, but it takes a lot of grappling with the text for me to come to terms with continental philosophy. Like, I had zero trouble with Kant's Critique, but I had to read Discipline and Punish 3 times before I felt like I "got it".

NOTE: This doesn't mean I disparage continental philosophy, just noting that the discursive/narrative mode is not intuitive for everyone.

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Foucault is actually, I'd say, one of the more analytically inclined continentals. He does have his fun with language, but underneath the robust terminology, narrativity, historical examples, and fun arrangement he is often describing some abstraction over social conditions and then drawing interconnections between these social abstractions. Of course, he highlights their complexity, and a great deal of his work has an intentional subversiveness or off-putting quality to it which can make the reading additionally difficult (structuralism denies subjectivity which already tends to make us uncomfortable).

I find a big difference between continental philosophers and analytics are the sorts of methods they feel comfortable employing. I find analytics take sequenced, bottom-up, and reductive approaches to explore an issue and try to get at a larger problem.

Continentals contrarily tend to rely on expansion instead of reductions (zooming into complexity instead of temporarily filtering out), approach issues from top-down, and are a bit looser with arrangement and structuring--though do so with particular purpose.

Of course this opposition is forced--plenty of philosophers from each camp mix a variety of methodologies and this binary opposition is itself just a reductive procedure to try to get at some sort of understanding and highlight certain attributes.

What has best helped my reading of philosophy from both sides is focusing on meta-issues; what techniques is this author using, can I create a summary of this, what do I find lacking, where are holes in my understanding, can I frame this person's experience to inform my knowledge of the approach, can I frame their references, what amount of this text is playing to the conventions the audience expects, how should I be changing my reading strategy to best comprehend this text?

Everyone is quick to judge the quality of a writer, yet we are far less reflective when it comes to our performance as readers--which is a shame. I think a lot of understanding is hampered by a lack of concern for one's own reading practices and in general a lack of emphasis on the importance of being a well-behaved reader. The work of a book is a shared struggle. Nietzsche understood this well, and I think his aphorisms on writing and reading are actually some of his best (I suppose that makes sense, given his background as a philologist)

Well, really focusing on meta-issues, my own manners and behavior as a reader, and reading Wittgenstein. Philosophy too, is a game.

> This doesn't mean I disparage continental philosophy, just noting that the discursive/narrative mode is not intuitive for everyone.

My problem with continental philosophy isn't the intuition (or lack thereof), but rather its lack of precision.

I've noticed I have a similar problem myself. What other authors have you found interesting and accessible?

If you are interested at all in continental philosophy, I'd say Lyotard is a really good place to start for folks coming from an analytic philosophy or hard science background. He engages with some of the same ideas as the rest of the continental milieu but his writing style is not nearly as dense and allusive as the rest. For more contemporary stuff, Badiou is really interesting. He's, among other things, trying to bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. If you want to dive deeper, I'd try to understand the historical development of contemporary continental philosophy from Kant through German idealism via Hegel. A lot of the stuff that is confusing in continental philosophy is confusing because we tend to teach it without regards to its historical development (I know my continental philosophy class was like this at least).

Not OP, but I find Hofstadter's later works are very accessible. Likewise I find much of Bertrand Russell's writing very easy to read, while not lacking in precision in the least.

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