ABSTRACT
The distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is very crude, but it does provide a rough-and-ready way to start sorting out the philosophy professors. The main reason such ambidexterity is rare is that student trying to shape themselves into plausible job candidates for teaching positions in philosophy only have time to read so much. They can please only so many potential employers. In most European countries, candidates for such positions have to learn quite a lot of intellectual history before they go on the market. The academic study of philosophy has, like the academic study of literature and unlike that of the natural sciences, always been fairly parochial. Most analytic philosophers feel a vague contempt for continental philosophy without ever having read much of it. Many continental philosophers sneer at analytic philosophy without trying to figure out what the analytic philosophers think they are doing.
