system
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Continental Texts to Read for an Analytic?

I mostly read and enjoy analytic philosophy. I have read some continental (Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Horkheimer, Kristeva, Marx), but not much. Little of what I've read has impressed me other than Marx, but I've been meaning to read more.

Thing is, I don't even know where to start. In analytic philosophy, it seems that we mostly think about philosophical topics and areas, so which topic I'm most interested in investigating at a given time guides what I read. Mereology? Scientific underdetermination? Epistemic injustice? Counterfactuals? I can just think of a question or area that I'm curious about, and at least start from the Stanford Encyclopedia and PhilPapers to see what the main positions are, what arguments for them are, what people have written about them, etc.

Continental philosophy has areas and topics, as well, but many of them being the same topics that exist in analytic (metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, etc.), but it seems that content is organized more around authors than it is in analytic. Like, many of the more important journals are devoted to interpreting specific philosophers, like Hegel or whomever, whereas in analytic philosophy, you're more likely to find "The Journal of Social Epistemology" or "Philosophy of Science." It makes it a bit more daunting to know where I want to start. If I at least knew "I find X interesting," then it would make sense to start there, and read responses to that text and other related texts. I have no idea what I would be most interested in with continental.

Is there a "Greatest Hits" or "Babby's First Conty" that most folks use as an introduction? I also tend to prefer papers to entire books. I'm hesitant, though, to read summaries of authors written by other authors. Because a lot of continental stuff seems to be about "interpretation," with philosophers not only debating the arguments of, say, Kirkegaard, but debating *what Kirkegaard even meant when he said X in the first place,* (this is rarer in analytic philosophy, as philosophers are expected to be clear an unambiguous, and if they did write something ambiguous, responses will point out the ambiguity and try to assess and respond to the most charitable readings) I feel that reading a "Kirkegaard sparks notes" written by somebody else would just have me absorb an interpretation that may possibly be a disputed one.
gpt
Well, none of Hegel, nor Marx, nor Kierkegaard are continental philosophers. And there's certainly lots of work on whether their arguments (or the arguments of continental philosophers) are sound. So you may be missing the mark a bit in your framing of what is going on.

But if you're interested in continental philosophy, and particularly if you're not sure about how even to get your bearings, secondary scholarship is probably a sensible source to turn to. Gutting's *French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century* and Young's two volume *German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century* give standard surveys to help people get their bearings. Another option would be to explore work situating the split between analytic and continental philosophy, like Friedman's *A Parting of the Ways*.