Recall Dummett's suggestion that contemporary communication between analytic and continental philosophers requires a revisiting of the work of Husserl and Frege. Husserl and Frege are both remarkably influential in their respective traditions at present, but the point behind Dummett's remark is that, in the period from about 1884 to 1896 (i.e. between the publication of Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and Husserl's first version of the “Prolegomena to Pure Logic”) the two are to some extent on the same philosophical page. They communicate both privately and publicly; they do not always disagree when they do so; and when they do disagree they nonetheless hold to sufficiently common argumentative standards to allow for shifts of position in the face of objection and counter-argument. We can see some important similarities in their philosophies, and yet the differences between them have nonetheless set in place much of what we come to associate with analytic and continental philosophy.

It is worth flagging at the outset the curious place of Frege within the analytic pantheon. Whether or not he is regarded as its founder, Russell is often seen as the most vigorous promoter of the analytic movement at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The story is told in detail in Russell's own autobiography, and in later biographies of himself and Alfred North Whitehead. Russell's embrace of the method of analysis followed an earlier (Hegelian) commitment to the methods of synthesis and dialectic in philosophy (he appears to have been unusually alive to questions of philosophical method at this time).