The paper is devoted to the study of the controversy between analytical and continental philosophies in contemporary France. Being far from becoming a problem of history, this controversy in the contemporary French philosophy gains the form of debate of postmodernists (J. Derrida, F. Liotard) and French admirers of the analytical philosophy (J. Bouveresse, P. Angel, S. Logier). The paper investigates the historical origins of the controversy reaching the first half of the 20th century, when the basic subjects of French philosophy were formed as such that excluded any attention to the problems raised by English-Austrian and then by English-American thought. The French philosophy has gone through the “linguistic change” only in the 60’s of the 20th century, but semiologic version of the language philosophy differed radically from the semantic and further linguistic philosophy developed by the analytic tradition. The author studies the attempt of French philosophers of the analytical trend of the 80—90’s of the 20th century to renounce the ideas of philosophy and style of the thought used by the “vanguard philosophers” of the 60—70’s and the differences between the “continental” and analytical philosophy articulated by them which rather belong to the stylistic level (clearness, argumentation, dialogue), than the content level of the theses and methods.
