These two categories I'm going to use as loose designations for a range of phenomena I'm trying to describe.
There seem to be historic shifts from the development of an analytical system with carefully defined terms and definitions, to an intuitive system of looser usage, and then back again, which seems to happen within the cultural milieu at the time.
It is curious to see many philosophers, especially in the 60s and 70s, very carefully defining their terms and developing a stable, systematized explanatory framework, a sign of underlying ontological stability. Whereas I really have no idea entirely what I'm doing; indeed I feel as if I'm flailing in the dark, that definitions are slippery and amorphous, and this is just as well. These are signs of an unstable ontology, and if you look around, perhaps you can forgive me for such.
I am inclined to label these stable systems of rigorous definitions as exercises in analytical philosophy, whereas continental philosophy has a more intuitive and almost literary quality to it. The blurry lines and shifting, amorphous quality of the continental analytical structure indicates the gradual formation, or at least articulation of a new ontological reality. And then with analytical philosophy, you have a sharpening and clarifying of this reality.
Doubtless these are broad categories, and there are all sorts of things happening within their umbrella. Marx for example is referred to as a continental philosopher, as well as Kant, who were both very rigorous and systematic in their approach, whereas Nietzsche was famous for growing impatient in his writings for being asked to systematize and recall, though he did do it.
This could be owed to the fact that continental philosophy was coined to describe philosophers doing work on the European continent, in contrast to the analytic schools which were popular in Britain at the time. And of course slowly over time a given category begins to take on the character of its aggregate, but which slowly drifts apart again as time passes. And then of course there is the simple insufficiency of my own definitions and characterizations.
