Abstract

Minding the Gap offers a large-scale narrative in terms of which to locate the two dominant traditions in Western philosophy during the twentieth century. It highlights the common roots of so-called analytic and continental philosophizing, as well as the subsequent interplay between these traditions. While such a project could be undertaken as a primarily cultural or social-historical one, Norris’s account is largely silent about such “externalist” matters, preferring to concentrate almost exclusively on the explicit philosophical ideas and arguments of his protagonists. Indeed, the ultimate point of the narrative under construction turns out to be itself philosophical, for Norris wants to argue that the “gap” allegedly separating analytic from continental traditions in contemporary philosophy is anything but unbridgeable given his reading of what have been the philosophical issues central to each of the traditions themselves.