Why It Is (Maybe) Safe To Conclude Some Legendary Thinkers Are Charlatans Without Reading Much Of Their Work

There’s an annoyingly young and talented writer and philosopher named Matthew Adelstein, a.k.a. Bentham’s Bulldog, who is worth reading, even — perhaps especially — when you think his arguments are weird.

Recently, he stuck his hand into a hornet’s nest called continental philosophy. First came a post titled “How Continental Philosophers ‘Argue.’ ” Here’s a key early bit:

For those who don’t know, continental philosophy is a particular strain of philosophy that grew out of Europe and was tragically imported to America. Prominent authors include Hegel, Sartre, Butler, and Heidegger. While analytic philosophers strive to be clear, continental philosophers don’t; as Michael Huemer says “Continental writers are generally much less clear about what they’re saying than the analytic philosophers. They won’t, e.g., explicitly define their terms before proceeding. They use more metaphors without any literal explanation, and they use more idiosyncratic, abstract jargon.”

If you read continental philosophy, you’ll notice something strange about the jargon. The prose will be unintelligible; the stylistic equivalent of tar. While you suspect that the author is under the impression that they’re making an argument, and there are some words present that suggest that they are engaged in the arguing enterprise (e.g. thus, therefore, etc), you have no clue what the argument is supposed to be, and suspect that if the author was forced to put their argument in premise conclusion format, they could not do so. You suspect similarly that if you got five different readers, and asked them the number of premises in the argument, you may very well get five different answers.

Adelstein argues that

while continental philosophy doesn’t really make arguments, what it does isn’t altogether different from making argument[s]. It’s a hideous admixture of literary analysis, gibberish, and argument. They start by saying some things, then say other things that they suggest follow from the earlier things, and have orderly norms governing the relationship between premises and conclusions. The only problem is that the norms don’t involve the use of either logic or any other sound inference rules.

Naturally, Adelstein’s post annoyed the sorts of continental (or pro-continental) philosophers who spend time on social media and who read Substack. You can find some links in his latest response to the response to the re — I’m not sure exactly where we are in this sequence, to be honest. The responses to his first post shouldn’t be surprising. While