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> I think any English language post about philosophy majors should be assumed to be about analytics.

I don't think this is true at all. To start with, there's roughly 2000 years between the earliest known philosophers and the analytic-continental split. Plenty of philosophy majors can and do get really into the ancients or medieval philosophers or whatever and complete their degrees without doing much more than a cursory read of the major thinkers post-Kant. And anecdotally, my own undergraduate degree was in philosophy, from one of the more prestigious schools in Anglo-Canada, and we had plenty of opportunities to dive into the continental stuff.

Once you get to the graduate level and academia folks focused on Derrida or whatever are going to gravitate towards the universities that prioritize the schools of thought they're interested in, and those have always been on the continent for the continentals naturally. But for run-of-the-mill philosophy majors in the Anglosphere, IMO you should just assume they have a reasonably broad and just-deep-enough knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and make no particular assumptions about their interests.

by DiscourseFan1 days ago|

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I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”

by joshinkler21 hours ago|

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by viccis14 hours ago|

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The average American philosophy undergrad gets very little of any philosopher pre-Russell other than a very skewed review of Aristotle. I have no idea about Canada, and there are some exceptions in the US, but average philosophy undergrad will get a very cursory skimming of pre-analytic thought, with basically none I've ever met having read Kant's first Critique, much less Hegel or any 20th century continental philosopher. Instead they are mostly moved into the only things analytics care about: logic and ethics. The former because they are always temporarily embarrassed mathematicians and the latter because teaching students the sophistry needed to morally justify building bombs for Raytheon that kill thousands of poor people is the bread and butter that keeps American philosophy departments funded. About metaphysics, ontology, etc., they care not at all. Those fields tend to try their best at ambitious answers to unanswerable questions whereas the analytics strive for unusable answers to banal questions.

td;dr: I think you give Anglo philosophy students FAR too much credit. In my experience they aren't well read at all and their departments are staffed by professors who aren't well read.