engaging diary called "spurious" by lars iyer, lecturer in philosophy at newcastle:

"When I worked in Analytic departments, it was a great struggle to be able to teach Husserl – teaching Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty would have been unthinkable; ‘continental’ thought was not deemed philosophical. It was worse when I was as an undergraduate: we were presented with no post-Kantian ‘continental’ thinkers at all, which means no Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty let alone Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others. Most courses drew on papers written in the Analytic tradition published, for the most part, in the last twenty years. Some were interesting, some were dull, but the approach to philosophy was narrow. As students, several of us campaigned to be able to study what we knew under that vague word existentialism. There was no chance of this, however. What about the philosophies of the East? There was no chance to come into contact with the great traditions of India and China – there was a course on Indian philosophy taught elsewhere in the university, but we were not allowed to study it.

I feared I was not philosophical enough and, retreating to my room, began to read literature, listen to classical music and look at art; when my degree was over, I got rid of all the philosophy books I owned. Thereafter, I found myself totally unable to read books like Discipline and Punish or The Concept of Anxiety let alone Being and Time and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Everything, of course, has changed. But having switched sides, I am ever conscious of the superficiality of my grounding in the Continental tradition and the paranoia which puts me always on the defensive with respect to what I take myself to be doing. And what am I doing? Trying to catch up, to read what I should read even as I churn out articles and books. Five years off when the current book is done, I tell myself. Study Aristotle, the Scholastics, take a look at British Idealism and reread the classics of Analytic philosophy I came across as an undergraduate. Understand the relationships between Husserl, Frege, Meinong and others; read Mach, Duhem and other neglected philosophers of science; study Whitehead. It is endless, of course."