Response from Jyl Gentzler on October 15, 2005

Like others, I believe that this popular dichotomy is in many ways more pernicious than helpful. Nonetheless, it might be helpful to make the following observations. The Western philosophical tradition has its roots in Ancient Greece. After the European rediscovery of Aristotle during the Crusades, this tradition continued in Europe and eventually in the United States and Europe's other former colonies. In the early twentieth century, this tradition broke into two distinct styles of approaching philosophical questions: the so-called Analytic or Anglo-American tradition (influenced by philosophers Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore, Carnap, and Quine, some of whom, as has already been observed, are neither Anglo nor American) and the so-called Continental tradition that continued in continental Europe (whose foundational figure is the 19th century German philosopher Hegel, and which also includes such philosophers as Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre).