Is the life of a philosopher just to sit around talking about triangles and bachelors all day? And here's his point. Might there be another type of true statement that can be made that we're all forgetting about here? This is where kant introduces his idea of a synthetic a priori proposition. Or simply put, there are some things out there that we're capable of reasoning to an understanding of that don't just have to do with thedefin ons of things like statements about triangles and bachelors, but that aren't the kinds of things we can experience empirically or measure with a science experiment. Well, here's where the split between continental and analytic philosophy starts to emerge. We have, on one hand, through the work of people like g e moore, quickly under bertrand russell ernst moch, then on to a group of thinkers tht would eventually become known as the vienna circle, which we'll talk about soon. On one hand, thinkers like these started taking issue with kant's concept of a synthetic a priori proposition. This branch would eventually develop into what's known as the analytic tradition of philosophy. While on the other hand, an entirely different group of thinkers took issue with what they saw as problems in kant's concept of there being two distinct worlds that exist, a world of things in themselves and a world of human experience. This branch would eventually develop into what's known as the continental tradition within philosophy. Put other way, we have one major approach to philosophy at this time that primarily takes issue with kant's epistemology, that's the analytic tradition, and another major approach that takes issue with kant's metaphysics, the continental tradition. Now, as you can imagine, as thinkers start giving their responses and then the responses to the responses and so on, what's actually being talked about starts to resemble kant less and less. But many historians of philosophy still trace the origins of these disagreements back the work of kant. Now, as you can also imagine, as these two different approaches to what philosophy should be spending its time on continue to develop, both camps come up with their own unique, individual methods of conducting philosophy, for example, if you're a member of the analytic tradition, and what you think philosophy should be focusing on is getting philosophy out of the business of making sweeping metaphysical claims, as it has in the past, and in the business of following up philosophy's long history questioning what we can know, how we can know it. In other words, linguistic analysis, formal logic, how our thoughts work. What's wrong with con synthetic a priori? What exactly are we engaging in when we say something like, all triangles have three sides? Now, if these are the kinds of things you think philosophy should be focusing on, well, these are very clearly defined problems to deal with, and your solution is probably gongtot involved being very analytic, breaking propositions down into their component parts and understanding the relationship between the parts. Now, why is this an important thing to focus on for us as a species? Well, language and the way we make propositions about things in the world is, again, not some method that was handed down by a deity or some philosopher king in the form of webster's dictionary. Now, language is a massively flawed, totally imprecise, messed up collection of agreement made by a bunch of people in the past. Just consider the fact that in the past, whenever we've used reason to arrive at ideas that are hopefully going to make the world a better place, sometimes it made the world a pretty horrible place. We're ultimately communicating those rational thoughts through the filter of language. So if youre an analytic philosopher, like a witkenstein, for example, the thinking is, we have to figure out this language thing and this formologic thing a lot better than we do right because what if most of the problems we run into with the ideas that we're coming up with just come down to people using language imprecisely, or, even worse, trying to use language to talk about subject matters that language is completely incapable of describing. Now if you're a continental philosopher, it's often said that analytic philosophy focuses on analysis. Continental philosophy focuses on synthesis. We've aready seen examples of this in the work of sartra, and some on de bauvoir and marcusa and many others. What this is is any set of ideas that attempts to look at a wide array of things that have to do with existence, for example, history and people and art and literature and economics. They look at all these things and they try to find some way that all of these can be synthesized together and understood by relating to some grand philosophical narrative. Consciousness is freedom, the ambiguity of existence, historical forces of domination and liberation. The study of ontology. If you're high digger, questions in the continental tradition sound more like, what does it mean to be me?