It should be said that the SEP makes a bona fide effort to cover continental philosophy as well. There are entries on, e.g., Heidegger (two of them, actually), Gadamer, Ricoeur, Deleuze, existentialism, postmodernism, and many other key thinkers and topics.
It’s not so much that they ignore continental philosophy, but rather apply an analytic view to everything. Their articles on Nietzsche and Marx are like this.
I am curious why you'd say that. As in, legitimately curious, it's unclear to me why.
But maybe it's possible you're using the general word "analytic" and not the specific way it's being used here, to describe a particular tradition and approach?
The idea of an encyclopedia is based on the idea that paragraphs and sentences express ideas which can be reduced to their logical essence and put very simply. This is exactly what "continental philosophers" reject and so I don't think it makes sense to summarize them in this way.
With continental philosophy, most of the value is in how it makes you, the reader, feel, and not in the ideas that it expresses. This is not to say that there are no ideas (of course there are) but that, when those ideas are extracted and added to an entry in an encyclopedia, the result is a denaturing of the work. Some continental philosophy is very explicit in its hostility to being expressed analytically (particularly feminist philosophy like Kristeva and Irigaray).
Downthread you summarized what Derrida meant by difference. But if that's what Derrida wanted to do (transmit the idea you posted), why wouldn't he just have written what you wrote? That's what philosophers do. Plato, Hume, Kant, etc all write as clearly as possible. Derrida is explicitly rejecting this approach and therefore he is as much literature as he is philosophy (he was up for the Nobel in literature and is mainly influential in literary studies). This also means that, with Derrida, most of the point is how he says things, and so you should not summarize his ideas in an encyclopedia entry. Summarizing Derrida would be like summarizing Shakespeare, the plot is only a small part of the value.
I see, thanks. I am not sure I agree with your characterization of an encyclopedia, nor the continental approach to things, but I do at least grok your argument now.
> why wouldn't he just have written what you wrote?
For one, because it simply wouldn't have been as good at expressing the idea, but also, I'm writing for a very different audience than he was, so it's gonna come out a bit differently.
> etc all write as clearly as possible.
We'll have to agree to disagree :) Also, the "as possible" does a lot of work here, I would imagine that many people would say they're expressing themselves "as possible," and that's where a lot of the argument comes in.
(And yes, what "clear" even means is like, one of the differences between these traditions, for anyone else reading this discussion.)
> With continental philosophy, most of the value is in how it makes you, the reader, feel, and not in the ideas that it expresses.
That's a definition of mysticism, not philosophy. Reformulation of earlier ideas is key to any serious philosophical endevor, we can see this as far back as Plato/Aristotle and the early Chinese and Indian philosophers.
I think it is sophistry when you pass it off as philosophy. I don't think Derrida saw himself as a philosopher though. His disciples on the other hand...
Continental philosophers generally fall in line behind Heidegger who said "philosophy ended with Hegel". They saw the philosophical tradition running from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, where it ended, and they wanted to do something different.
