This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
No philosopher grouped under the label continental philosophy ever called their own work that. Martin Heidegger did not describe Being and Time as a contribution to continental philosophy, and Jean-Paul Sartre did not file Being and Nothingness under that heading either, because the term is not a description any of these thinkers used for themselves, it is a name given from outside. John Stuart Mill had already used continental philosophy as a contrast term for English empiricism as early as 1840, but the term's modern sense, naming the family of traditions this atlas groups under it, was first widely used by English-speaking philosophers only in describing university courses in the 1970s, and Bertrand Russell had done much to popularize the underlying contrast in 1945 when he wrote of two schools of philosophy, broadly distinguished as the Continental and the British. That origin explains a feature of the term that puzzles people encountering it for the first time: it is not the name of a doctrine, a method, or even a single historical movement, the way phenomenology or existentialism actually are. It is a boundary drawn from one side only, grouping together German Idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism and critical theory, traditions that often disagreed sharply with each other, under the single organizing fact that none of them worked in the analytic style of translating philosophical claims into formal logical notation. Some scholars, tracing this history, have argued the label was originally more pejorative than descriptive, a name for kinds of philosophy analytic philosophers rejected or disliked rather than a neutral geographic sorting, which is why there was no manifesto and no single founding text, no one set out to found continental philosophy, the category was assembled afterward, by its critics as much as by its sympathizers, to name everything analytic philosophy was defining itself against. That does not make the traditions grouped under it philosophically indistinct from each other, Heidegger and Adorno read each other's work with real hostility, but it does mean that continental philosophy, read carefully, tells a reader more about the history of a disciplinary boundary than about any single set of philosophical claims.