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    List of crossover departments?

    As I've started to work through Alain Badiou's thought, it's really struck me how destructive the analytic-continental split has been to his English language reception. Even though Badiou says nasty things about French (post)structuralism and analytic philosophy, it's nearly impossible to really understand him unless you have less than trivial familiarity with both traditions.

    I'm really interested how many existent PhD programs even come close to helping students achieve this fluency. Ideally there would be regular graduate level course work in core analytic (mind, langauge, epistemology, metaphysics, logic) and core continental* (German Idealism, 19th century post German Idealism (including the big three hermeneuts of suspicion and the twentieth century traditions that two of them spawned), phenomenology, and French (post)structuralism).

    I typically send students interested in graduate work to Leiter's specialty rankings, Leiter's comments on M.A. programs, the Pluralists's Guide, and the CDJ rankings. Taken holistically, these give students a very good starting off point for researching particular schools. But there's no list of good crossover** departments where a student could come out with enough mastery in core analytic and continental to be able to easily read someone like Badiou (or Frederic Nef, for that matter). Any suggestions would be helpful to my students. I can think of University of New Mexico, Northwestern, and Notre Dame off the top of my head. I'm sure there must be others though.

    [*I realize this is highly contestable, in part because continental philosophers tend to be more critical of the idea of a canon. I'll be happy approving comments for anyone who wants to take issue with me on this. For me, a philosophical area counts as core if work outside that area needs to take it into account. For example, you can't do decent meta-ethics without knowing quite a bit of philosophy of language. From a purely anthropological perspective, the areas/traditions of continental philosophy I listed above serve the same purpose. Nearly everything English langauge speakers call continental philosophy is parasitic on oner or more of them in some way.***

    **Notice I didn't say "pluralist." I used to use that word to denote this kind of thing, but too many other people are using it differently in important contexts now. Since "crossover" hasn't been used in this context, I can stipulateively define it in terms of involving core areas of both analytic and continental.

    ***The idea of core areas is to be distinguished from the sense that philosophy has certain core problems such as the epistemology and metaphysics of deontic and alethic modalities, the problem of the external world, etc.]

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    13 responses to “List of crossover departments?”

    1. Michael Kremer Avatar
      Michael Kremer

      I would say at Chicago, while we are mainly analytic in orientation (and a bit quirkily Wittgensteinian), we are coming close to what you are looking for…

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    2. Carl Sachs Avatar
      Carl Sachs

      Since neither “Continental philosophy” nor “analytic philosophy” are natural-kind terms, identifying a cross-over school is going to be tricky.
      For example, are UCSD and Georgetown ‘cross-over’ departments or ‘pluralistic’? UCSD has people who work in 19th-century idealism and Nietzsche; GU has people who work in 19th-century idealism and phenomenology. A student from one of those schools could certainly understand what was at stake in Frege’s criticism of Husserl, or what is correct and incorrect in Carnap’s critique of Heidegger.
      However, there are many departments in which coverage of “Continental philosophy” stops in the 1940s or 1950s. University of New Mexico, Northwestern, and Notre Dame are all exceptions to that generalization and also teach core analytic philosophy. So ‘cross-over’ becomes something like, ‘which departments don’t have a blind-spot about Continental realism?’

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    3. RC Avatar
      RC

      For what it’s worth, Andrew Cutrofello at Loyola-Chicago is offering a seminar this semester that’s reading “Logics of Worlds” alongside David Lewis’ “On the Plurality of Worlds.” I’m currently wading through Badiou (my masters was heavily analytic, so I’m finding it tough sledding to get into Badiou).

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    4. Sara L. Uckelman Avatar
      Sara L. Uckelman

      I don’t (yet) have first-hand knowledge of the programme, but on paper (or rather, on website: https://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy) Durham University certainly fits the bill: “We are an open and friendly department, which accommodates work in ‘analytic’, ‘Continental’ and non-Western philosophical traditions.” I’ll be joining the faculty there in October, andlook forward to seeing how this plays out in practice.

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    5. Martin Shuster Avatar
      Martin Shuster

      Although I obviously have reason to, I would wholeheartedly endorse the program where I did my Ph.D., the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins. In combination with the JHU philosophy department, the Center is about at crossover as you can get.

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    6. Daniel Nagase Avatar
      Daniel Nagase

      One thing to consider when looking at these “crossover” departments, though, is how much interaction there really is between the faculty members. For instance, I consider my own department a kind of crossover department (I study in Brazil) – we have courses that range from, say, logical positivism to Deleuze -, but there isn’t much dialog between the two traditions. On the contrary, in part for political reasons, there’s actually a lot of animosity between the two “fields”, so to speak. There have been some timid attempts at a rapprochement, but nothing really resembling a real dialogue.

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    7. Anon Avatar
      Anon

      The University of Warwick (UK) ticks all those boxes well, except perhaps poststructuralism. I think it’d definitely be the best programme in the UK, and perhaps in Europe, for such purposes.

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    8. Paul Hammond Avatar
      Paul Hammond

      I think the University of Memphis, where I got my Ph.D., fits your idea of a “crossover” department pretty well, although the word “pluralism” still gets used there to describe it. There may be some small gaps, but I’d say no more than at UNM, Northwestern, or Notre Dame. If the metric is ebeing prepared to read Badiou, I think Memphis would stack up pretty well.

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    9. GradStudent Avatar
      GradStudent

      Why do you think you need analytic philosophy to read Badiou? He seems to despise it, and from his dismissal of it on one of the first pages of Being and Event, it sounds like the only analytic philosophy he’s read is Language, Truth and Logic. So he doesn’t seem to think reading analytic philosophy is necessary to understand his work.
      Is it his use of set theory? If so, you’d probably be best served by just reading a book or two on that, rather than analytic philosophy about it, no?
      I’m genuinly asking, by the way, rather than being snarky. I have only the most passing familiarity with the contents of his work.

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    10. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Jon:
      GU has regular graduate offerings in a very broad range of “analytic” – not just core, but applied ethics and politics, and some rather non-core approaches to lots of areas. We also have regular offerings in German philosophy plus a big strength in that. We also have, to respond to Daniel, active interaction across these. Many of us don’t know which side of this pernicious dichotomy we are supposed to be on. We are weaker in French and very recent continental, with only occasional graduate offerings in these, though several faculty have interest in relevant figures.
      To answer the question that grad student raised, I would assume that the reason to read “analytic philosophy” – assuming your characterization of Badieu is correct; I am not necessarily endorsing the claim that he dismisses and despises it on the basis of one book – is so as to approach the issues he raises from a less ignorant and dogmatic perspective. He may dismiss the majority of 20th c philosophy out of hand, but to be a serious philosopher, you should not.

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    11. Michel X. Avatar
      Michel X.

      I can’t speak to the level of collaboration across specialties, but at a glance it seems as though in Canada, at least some good candidates for crossover departments would be Alberta, Guelph, McGill, and Toronto.

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    12. Grad student who does crossover work Avatar
      Grad student who does crossover work

      I think this is actually asking the question at the wrong level and that in this instance we should be looking at which Universities give good undergraduate education in both traditions.
      I’ve been to two PhD granting institutions that earnestly tried to get its students well versed in both traditions through forcing its students to do proseminars where both traditions were taught as well as to force students to take at least 1 or 2 courses from the “other side” as a requirement to finish coursework. While the resources were certainly there for students to do work in both traditions, it seemed inevitable that where the analytically inclined students were forced to take classes in the other tradition, they left the course still thinking continental philosophy was mystical gobbledygook and the continentally inclined students left analytical courses thinking that analytical philosophy was dry and useless. I think that they already had these prejudices inculcated into them from their undergraduate institution. This is just speculation but I imagine analytic schools funnel analytically inclined students to analytically inclined PhD granting institutions and viceversa.
      In my experience, there were three major types of people who were willing to work on projects that crossed the divide: 1) The vast majority I encountered already came from schools in their undergrad and Masters from schools that encouraged their students to work in both traditions (Chicago, New Mexico and Georgia State to be specific)and so of course it wasn’t a surprise that they had applied in their PhDs to other institutions that would be balanced like their previous institutions 2) These were rarer and were a minority like me who began in one tradition, broke away and converted to the other and then realized they could take charitable attitudes to both traditions and that this was a good thing and could work in both. 3) Students whose interests meant that they did not just interact with philosophy but other disciplines (philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, political philosophy/theory)

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    13. anon Avatar
      anon

      In response to Anon above: Deleuze is very well represented at Warwick (Ansell-Pearson and Beistegui), Foucault is taught at the undergraduate and ma levels, and postgraduate students often work on Derrida. Seems like a good place to study poststructuralism!

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