nature Event Context.” Though he briefly discussed Husserl,
Derrida’s emphasis was on the work of Austin, one of the
ancestors of what has become known as analytical philosophy.
(Many prefer to think of Austin as an ordinary language
philosopher rather than an analytic philosopher; the two
schools are related, but the ordinary language philosopher is
less influenced by logical method and more committed to con-
versational evidence than the analyst.)
Since the early seventies, if not earlier, the study of phi-
losophy has been divided into two camps. One of them is the
group of Continental philosophers (including Derrida) who
base their work on an intense familiarity with European
philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Heidegger,
and Husserl. The other is the analytic school; their approach is
sometimes called Anglo-American philosophy, since it first
took root in the English-speaking world.
Analytic philosophers devote themselves with precision
to a series of problems, frequently definitional ones. What is a
person? and what is an action? are typical subjects for the an-
alytic philosopher, who often adopts an iconoclastic attitude
toward the centuries-old tradition of metaphysical specula-
tion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a central figure for analytic and or-
dinary language philosophy, insisted that he was incapable of
reading Aristotle, because Aristotle was simply wrong. Such a
stance toward a classic philosopher would be unthinkable in
the Continental school. Though Derrida makes Plato’s Phae-
drusshallower and more one-sided than it is, he still regards it
as central: such a canonical text demands discussion. Conti-
nental philosophy pores over the tradition, regarding it as the
necessary, inevitable home of thought. Austin, by contrast,
often suggests that he wishes to dispel a confusion caused by
the mistaken ideas of earlier philosophers, ideas that Austin
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 157