One of the the things that any aspiring philosophy student will eventually hear about the discipline is the divide between analytic and continental schools of philosophy. This divide can be presented a number of ways. It is my contention that none of them usefully and accurately delineate two separate philosophical traditions, and I'll consider them from "stupid" to "just bad history":

• Good philosophy vs. bad philosophy; clear and precise writing vs. obfuscating writing

Obviously, the first way of making the distinction begs the question against those of the alternative tradition; however, the second does so to nearly the same extent. One cannot claim that the technical language invented (for instance) by Carnap is intrinsically clearer than that developed by Heidegger. Both are technical languages, both aim at clarifying the central issue involved by introducing ways of getting around the imprecise and confusing natural language.

• Different areas of interest; analytic is more like science while continental is more like literature (or history)

There is some truth to the first, but it isn't like analytic philosophy is solely preoccupied by numbers or epistemology while continental is solely concerned with ethics (or vice-versa). Both have their share of philosophers who are interested in virtually all of the different subdisciplines one can think of. The second is equally problematic: virtually everyone sees themselves as perfecting their particular "science" as much as possible. Marxists of a certain stripe, for example, would claim that their analysis is motivated by an understanding of economic structures that is just as scientific as any work in analytic philosophy. This way of drawing the distinction also relies on a particular view of both science and philosophy that may or may not be accurate and is certainly heavily contested; at the very least, we would like to see some indication of a consensus about what is special about science before we claim that a particular discipline that shares almost no methodology or areas of focus with hard science is more scientific than another, similar, discipline.

• Geographical

Again, there is some truth to this characterization--"analytic" philosophy is mostly Anglo-American--but it is largely inaccurate. Many key figures in analytic philosophy have been German or Austrian. A number of key figures in various "continental" traditions lived in the United States (e.g., the entirety of the Frankfurt school, Michael Hardt, Hannah Arendt, etc.).

• Historical

This is where most people draw the distinction, and where I have as well in the past. There seems to be good reason to do so: after all, we Anglo-American philosophers are told about Frege and Russell and Moore and the famous overcoming of British Idealism. From there, we think, the roots of analytic philosophy stem.

The problem is that that story isn't really accurate. For one thing, it wasn't as though the break was decisive: McTaggart, for example, continued to interact with Russell and Moore for years after the latter published their allegedly revolutionary work. For another, the story (as normally told) traces analytic philosophy from Cambridge to Vienna, but that movement is much more complicated than it is often made out to be. For all the Vienna Circle was influenced by Wittgenstein, they were also heavily influenced by the neo-Kantianism that was prevalent in Germany at the time, the same neo-Kantianism that Heidegger, Cassirer, and Jaspers were reacting to.

Indeed, as Michael Friedman has argued, Heidegger and Carnap were largely concerned with the same phenomena couched in the same terms: for the latter, the promise of modern logic was that it promised to allow us to bypass traditional metaphysical questions and create new, scientific, languages that would fulfill our (neo-)Kantian needs and allow us to structure our experience in a new way. For Heidegger, this was the danger: too much, he argued, would be lost.

Finally, such a story ignores that idealism was not the most prevalent philosophy on the continent during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Various neo-Kantians had been arguing for types of realism much like what Russell and Moore ended up advancing for decades before the supposed break, positivism had a strong hold in both Germany and France, and--arguably--philosophy was more connected than it would ever be again with mathematics and science, with notables like Helmholz, Duhem, Poincare, and Hilbert contributing important philosophical positions.

In other words, up until WWII, the two different traditions were largely tied together. In the U.S., Britain, and across the Continent, there were a variety of Kantian and neo-Kantian traditions (Russell's rejection of Hegel was very much "back to Kant"; the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey was heavily influence by Kant and Hegel as well). These traditions interacted and debated with each other and often addressed many of the same problems.

• The best case

In other words, the best case to be made for an analytic / continental distinction is that two different philosophical traditions came out of the war: one that was largely conducted in English, and one that was largely conducted in French and German. These two traditions then appropriated various philosophers that had come before them: the French and German tradition was more willing to adopt Nietzsche than Frege, for example. But that distinction still wouldn't account for many of the philosophers that are typically labeled as falling into one category or another. The Frankfurt School and the ordinary language philosophers, for example, fit poorly even into this story, and Hegel is a "continental" mostly because the Anglo-American tradition is less honest about their debt (and thus rejection) of him.

I think a better, more sociological way of drawing the distinction would identify Quine and Sartre as the key figures and credit the divide to a perceived battle for the soul of philiosophy from mid-Century: a distinction born largely of the desire of American philosophers with certain pretensions to say "I don't do that sort of philosophy." As such, it unhelpfully jumbles together a number of different authors and traditions that often do not share positions and sometimes do not even share interests. If what we're searching for is clarity and precision, it would be best to abandon it.