Anyone who works within academic philosophy is familiar with the (claimed) distinction between analytic or Anglo-American philosophy and its so-called continental or European counterpart. On the standard view, a divergence has been under way since at least since the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, emphasized by differing interests, specializations and attitudes to the common philosophical heritage. Indeed, many would agree with Michael Dummett's assessment that “we have reached a point at which it's as if we're working in different subjects” (1993: 193).

Yet what does the distinction actually amount to? It is occasionally given a geographical tilt (analytic philosophy as a creation of the English-speaking countries; continental philosophy as a creation of France, Germany, Italy and other non-English-speaking countries) but this, at least, is a grotesque oversimplification. Some of the early influences on analytic philosophy are to be found in Austria and Germany: consider, for instance, Ernst Mach's positivism, Einstein's invocation of questions of meaning in his 1905 paper on special relativity, the philosophical logic of Bernard Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre, the mathematical work of Kurt Weierstrass, Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind, and Franz Brentano's conception of intentionality. Many of the heroes of early analytic philosophy were themselves Austrian or German (most notably Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap). These connections are extremely well known, but they tend to be viewed through the filter of the subsequent migration to the anglophone world of many of the philosophers involved, and/or the first translation of their work into English.