Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Norms

Is there any point in defending today “analytic” philosophy against “continental” philosophy? Many people are doubful about this, just because of the very use of quotation marks surrounding these names in the previous sentence. For what is “analytic philosophy”? At the time of Frege, Russell and Moore, or at the time of the positivists, and even in the late sixties, it may have been possible to find a set of criteria which could allow us to sort out the doctrines, concepts, methods and style of analytic philosophers from those of “continental” philosophers. Today it is much less easy to draw the distinction. This feeling is shared both by those ecumenists coming from the “continental” camp who find that, for instance, Habermas and Rawls, Derrida and Quine, Gadamer and Davidson, or Heidegger and Wittgenstein, share a lot of themes and doctrines in spite of superficial differences of style, and by a number of writers who would have been considered, some decades ago, as typical analytic philosophers”, but who do not have today this sense of their typicality. Bernard Williams, for instance, writes that