SPEP vs. Leiter Continental Philosophy?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm wondering what the difference is between SPEP Continental philosophy and Leiter Continental philosophy? I saw someone reference this distinction on a comment on this website. I can kind of intuit that there's a difference, but don't really understand what it is. For the record, I don't do continental, but I'm fairly sympathetic.

Also, in general, does anyone have any insight into what SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) is all about?

I'm not very well attuned to these issues. Do any readers have any helpful insights to share?

Comments

[of two minds]

SPEP is, de facto, the APA for continental programs (the name is just an artefact of the former interests of continental philosophers in the States). Like the APA, they are a membership association that organize the big-deal once-a-year conference for the whole discipline. While there are folks you might consider continental philosophers at all kinds of programs, at SPEP programs those working on continental philosophy make up the majority, and at many of them, the entirety of faculty and graduate students. Although it's a bit of a crude dichotomy, from here out I'm going to refer to the programs as SPEP-programs and APA-programs (though SPEP programs just think of themselves as continental simpliciter).

The most eminent PhD-granting programs in the SPEP world are probably DePaul, Emory, Oregon, Stony Brook, Penn State, and Villanova. Other SPEP-ish, but slightly more pluralist programs, also offering PhDs, are Fordham, Loyola, Marquette, the New School, Northwestern, Memphis, and New Mexico (among others). The Leiter rankings do not include these programs as a matter of habit (I think they literally do not have a single evaluator from one of these departments), and SPEP programs correspondingly do not rate the continental philosophy done in the kinds of programs Leiter polls highly if at all.

Sociologically speaking, SPEP-philosophy is largely disjunct from APA-philosophy, and so there are a variety of differences with regard to norms for training and research. But, I'll try to draw a few big picture ones to give you a sense of the difference as a whole, at risk of overgeneralising.
- As you might infer from the foregoing discussion, faculty at SPEP programs are unlikely to be members of the APA or have ever presented at the APA, but have all but certainly presented at SPEP. (Among graduate students the divisions have begun to blur somewhat). There are places where the two camps meet, but it's not the norm. SPEP faculty tend to not know which APA programs are thought to be good, and APA faculty likewise don't really know which SPEP programs are thought to be good.
- SPEP philosophy is a 'books discipline', like history or English. Journal publication is considered less important in the path to tenure, and most good PhDs in SPEP programs try to get a book deal, rather than lots of little papers, before getting a tenure-track job.
- SPEP programs have very different requirements for PhDs. Most still require proficiency in two non-English languages, and almost none, I think (maybe just the New School?) require PhD candidates to take a course or exam in formal logic. Coursework is oriented around the history of the canon; you'd probably never take a course called philosophy of mind, epistemology,
- In part because of higher proficiency in second and third languages, SPEP faculty tend to defer to German-language scholarship of the German idealists, French-language scholarship of the French, and so on. So instead of citations, for instance on Kant scholarship, to Hannah Ginsborg and Beatrice Longuenesse, you are more likely to see citations to Dieter Henrich (and likewise to go to conferences in Germany and France). SPEP Kant scholars read & publish in Kant-Studien, whereas APA people publish most Kant stuff in generalist journals. SPEP faculty do not really read generalist journals (save the intra-SPEP generalist journals, namely Journal of Speculative Philosophy and perhaps Continental Philosophy Review or Philosophy Today).
- Where they work on the same topics (e.g. Hegel, who is having somewhat of a renaissance in APA philosophy), the focus of SPEP scholarship tends to be to situate a thinker in their own time in a way that scans as bordering history of ideas to someone from an APA program. So, a book by a faculty member at a SPEP program on Hegel is likely to deal with G.E. Schulze and Karl Reinhold to some extent, who were pivotal influences, but have not yet seen the same resurgence of analytic interest and so have very little Anglophone scholarship. Contrastingly, the focus of APA scholarship tends to be to reconstruct a thinker as a plausible interlocutor to *us*, to our present debates. In SPEP programs, if contrast is drawn, it is more often to another historical thinker; for instance, a contemporary, or someone whom they influenced.

[a third mind]

While I appreciate some aspects of 'of two minds' take on the distinction, a couple of things they say are plainly off.

For starters, Northwestern is not strictly speaking an SPEP school. It's ranked in the PGR, and most of its European Philosophy faculty are trained in analytical philosophy: Zuckert, Alznauer, Brixel.
Next, as someone with an interest in the lesser idealists between Kant and Hegel, there's been as much written on them by 'APA continentals' than anyone else, which is to say: not much. I think it is misleading to write as if there's a bunch of SPEP folks writing about Reinhold and Schulze, for example.

Something that feels accurate enough to say is that at SPEP schools you will get a lot of phenomenology and French structuralism, whereas this may not be the focus at a Leiter continental school. It should also be noted that many SPEP schools are Catholic; that might lead them to present as if they care more about the history of European philosophy than someone at a Leiter continental, but that's plainly false.

If a future graduate student is reading this, and wants a contrasting take from what we get with the above comment, they should check out what Leiter himself says about SPEP/Leiter Continentals.

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/what-is-spep.html

[of two minds]

Hi there--you're right about Northwestern not being properly a SPEP school; that's why I broke it out in the 'adjacent but not quite' category. Nevertheless good catch as it is anyway somewhat of an exception, as I believe it is the only one to be the only one I listed ranked by the PGR.

Re: Reinhold & Schulze, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. There's not much *in English* on them. But, there's a pretty sizeable German literature that handles them. The illustrative example I gave above is Dieter Henrich, who enjoys in Germany, and the SPEP world, the sort of reputation as does e.g. Longuenesse, but is not really read in the APA world (perhaps at times cited, but not on comps lists), because he mainly worked in German rather than English. The point is just that SPEP program people are more likely to read in the German language literature, and, I think, have a bias towards citing it, and a bias against keeping up with the Anglophone scholarship you read in generalist journals. Pros & cons.

Re: phenomenology & structuralism, I think it's right to say that most every SPEP continental department has someone who does both. But neither are going to be obligatory, nor do either really predominate among diss topics. The big trend in SPEP dissertations of late has been decolonial philosophy, which is probably not yet as substantial a current in the APA world.

With regard to their Catholicism, it is really across the board rather notional (I can think of several departments who do not even have any Catholic faculty in philosophy). The reasons the Catholic universities decided they were into phenomenology and thus went continental is traced in the interesting book 'Converts to the Real', but it does not really bear on the departments today. None even have majority Catholic student bodies.

For context, I am not a partisan of SPEP departments despite some experience in them--I do not work in one, and do analytic philosophy myself--so am not here to evangelise by any means. But I do think Leiter's piece is rather prejudicial. Calling distinguished scholars from SPEP departments 'the exception not the rule', claiming 'most distinguished continental scholars have nothing to do with SPEP', are, I think, not only inappropriate but just not really true. And the decision to exclude those departments from PGR rankings on fairly tenuous grounds (when several of them perform rather highly in e.g. placement data) reflects that prejudice in an unfortunate way. In my experience it's true that SPEP department affiliates not infrequently have equally silly beliefs about APA departments (nobody cares about the Greeks or German idealists, political philosophy is considered an unworthy object of study, everyone's a logical positivist still). But in this context I'm hoping to foster some mutual understanding.

[Continental Historian]

Probably the most specific history of Catholic universities and Continental philosophy in North America can be found in the book straightforwardly titled "The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America". You can see some of the first chapters on google books.

[pluralist]

I agree with most of what "of two minds" says. I do think Northwestern is much more of a hybrid department (but then so are the pluralist departments that tend to be taken seriously by e.g. the philosophical gourmet), I guess it is different from places like BU, Riverside, Georgetown, (maybe: Notre Dame, Columbia...) etc. in that there is more of a divide between the analytic faculty and the continental faculty (who I guess lean more SPEP-y than the continental faculty at these other kinds of places). I think the rest of the analysis is fairly accurate.

I will say though that the Catholicism connection seems stronger to me still than it does to of two minds--of course it varies from school to school but I am quite certain that the percentage of both faculty and graduate students who are Catholic at SPEPy schools is much higher than the average other type of department. And there are some departments that I guess are SPEP-y but maybe not, because they haven't moved much or at all in the kind of decolonial, political theory, etc. direction--BC and the Catholic U come to mind. But they are also squarely not at all analytic or even pluralistic in the sense that places like BU, Northwestern, etc. are. Also, there are places like Penn State that aren't as extensively historical/continental focused anymore (many of their grad students are doing phil of race, though maybe not the kind of thing analytically trained people would recognize) but maybe are paradigmatically SPEP-y. I'm not sure what the moral of all of this is except "these categories don't capture that much".

Also I'm not sure the APA is still a helpful contrast since I think their meetings have included more and more SPEPers--still a minority for sure, but I think the APA is becoming increasingly genuinely pluralistic (partly because of representation on committees from people at smaller schools who were trained in SPEP departments).

[grymes]

I don't think it's true in 2025 that SPEP history of philosophy is more contextualist than APA history of philosophy (which has been influenced by the history and philosophy of science in this regard). Maybe it was true 30 years ago.

[SPEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND]

In my experience, SPEP is now all politics, all the time, with very little real interest in history.

I'm a history person at a SPEP school and people see me as an analytic philosopher BECAUSE I actually do historical scholarship of the type mentioned by "of two minds" ... There might be some interest in history at SPEP but it's fairly name-droppy, not actual "let's dig into the context", for which one would require serious language training (not common at SPEP programs).

Look at the output at the solidly SPEP schools mentioned by "of two minds" and see if there's any serious history: DePaul, Emory, Oregon, Stony Brook, Penn State, and Villanova ... there's very little. It's all politics of a certain idealogical bent.

[One of the SPEPers]

We can be more specific about the lay of the land within SPEP (which is also the lay of the land in Continental philosophy broadly): there is an 'old guard' (classical phenomenology and hermeneutics, especially Heideggerian) and a large group with more political interest (including feminist philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial, etc.). That division mirrors itself in the present debates between classical phenomenology and critical phenomenology. The 'old guard,' while waning, is still quite influential, and if you attend SPEP you really have to know how to speak Heideggerese.

Programs that are more affiliated with that 'old guard' probably tend to be less interested in political philosophy, and (sometimes related) are often Catholic. Boston College, arguably one of the SPEPpiest programs out there, is a good example.

Re. SPEPPER'S, I don't think it's accurate to say that there is very little serious history of philosophy done in SPEP programs. The History of Philosophy Society (HOPS) has enormous overlap with SPEP, for example. When it is done, it is often ancient Greek or the Kantian / post-Kantian tradition, or more recent. Certainly it isn't "all politics of a certain ideological bent." But there are probably often methodological tensions between SPEPpy history of philosophy and the sort done in Anglo classics departments and the like.