Continental Philosophy Quotes

“Miracles enable us to judge doctrine, and doctrine enables us to judge miracles.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page.

They’ll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang.

By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They’ll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before.

It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher ‘you are speaking gibberish’ and the continental philosopher responds with ‘exactly.”
― Dr. Chester Elijah Branch, Lecture Notes

“Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.”
― Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher

“Theory," recall, is the term for bad philosophy in literature departments.”
― Brian Leiter

“Pragmatism, by its very name, poses above all as a 'pholosophy of action'; its more or less avowed assumption is that man only has needs of a practical order, material ones and, together with these, sentimental ones. It means, then, the doing away with intellectuality; but, if this is so, why go on wanting to evolve theories? That is rather hard to understand; and if pragmatism, like skepticism, which it only differs from with regard to action, wished to conform to its own standards, it would have to limit itself to a mere mental attitude, which it cannot even seek to justify logically without giving itself the lie; but there is no doubt that it is very difficult to keep strictly within such bounds.”
― René Guénon, East and West