My latest immersion is one of the Great Courses series: Argumentation: the Study of Effective Reasoning presented by David Zarefsky. And I would start with a confession: much of the appeal of it to me involves some (maybe a lot of (confirmation bias. I have always questioned the analytic approach to philosophy because it never seemed capable of actually addressing the very real situations we are dealing with.
And Zarefsky goes right to this point by pointing out that while formal logical (that which the analytic approach rests its juice on (can achieve certainty and even seem scientific, it cannot possibly begin to deal with the very real situations that most people use argumentation to do so. We can get a better sense of what I’m getting at through a point in either Joe Hugh’s reader guide to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition or Buhcannan’s guide to The Anti-Oedipus, the three means by which we confirm and assertion:
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The syntactic: since A is B and B is C; C must be A
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The semantic which is the primary M.O. of the syllogism (all men are not women; joe is a man; therefore Joe is not woman (and paradox: think Zeno’s Arrow which plays on words and is hardly cause to go prancing around between an archer and their target.
And finally, 3. The Existential that addresses the very real messiness of life
It is in the existential (and to some extent the semantic (that we see the role that resonance and seduction can play in an argument, what Zarefsky referred to and defended as rhetoric –a generally derided term. And you can dismiss it all you want, but it certainly seems to work. And if Trump is not proof of that, I don’t know what is.
That said, my main point is that, given the above (as well as the increasing influence of corporate funding on universities), we can easily see how the analytic approach to philosophy generally tends to act in the capacity of (as Deleuze & Guatarri put it: state philosophy. The analytic approach (just like formal logic (tends to get along by going along as well as not challenging the very forces of oppression that producer/consumer Capitalism presents. Only the continental approach can do that while the analytic approach stays out of trouble.
I mean think about it: what does 1+1=2 or because of A, B; because B, C; therefore, because of A, C (as certain as it may seem (really challenge?