Largely thanks to Ryle and his colleagues, by the 1950s Oxford had ascended to a commanding position in philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world. On the European continent, things were different: German and French philosophers had run headlong down another path. The two broad traditions that emerged from the split after World War I are known as analytic and continental philosophy. The gap between the two styles is vast. Most continental philosophy requires translation from the original gibberish. It’s arcane and cryptic, obsessed with power—raw or disguised—and sadly, is the origin point of postmodernism, most justifications for Communism, critical race theory, DEI, and therefore, all the woke slogans you’ve ever encountered on social media.
The analytic tradition is mainly Anglo-American. To this day, virtually all philosophy departments in America pursue research in this vein, but it began at Oxford in the 1920s. It started with a youthful rebellion against abstractions emitted by the descendants of Hegel and Kant. All the argle-bargle metaphysics had to go; sobriety and clarity would replace intoxicating confusion. Authority was also out; the new style rejected appeals to the great thinkers. Commentaries on commentaries on the thoughts of long-dead humans could prove helpful, but they were not the point. The point, instead, was to attack the mysteries and riddles of existence head-on. The new philosophy would build on the formal power of mathematical logic and the undeniable success of science to develop a new method for reaching the truth about great questions: What is the deepest reality? Is there any knowledge that is beyond all doubt? What is the nature of consciousness? Is there a single true morality?
In grappling with these mysteries, Oxford philosophers developed and refined old and new techniques. Reasoning, deduction, explanation, more care and precision in language, crisper concepts, deeper distinctions, elaborate models, thought experiments, devastating counterexamples, intuitive principles that press to surprising conclusions—on all of these things, Oxford led the way, and the rest of the Anglosphere followed. Its legacy is less a set of ideas or even a series of sacred tenets and Delphic sayings than it is a devotion to rigor, clarity, truth, and a very practical British revulsion to nonsense.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/chariots-of-philosophical-fire
Know Thyself 