In The Idea of Continental Philosophy (2007), Simon Glendinning makes a strong case for the 1950s as the decade in which the divide became truly substantial. In 1958, in an attempt to institute a British–French philosophical dialogue, Ayer, Ryle, Quine, J. L. Austin, Hare, Peter Strawson, Bernard Williams and J. O. Urmson were invited to a joint conference at Royaumont, with French philosophers such as Jean Wahl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and H. L. Van Breda (a Husserlian) in the audience. The conference was described by all involved as a failure, a sterile set-piece affair. It has therefore acquired a certain significance as a symbol of the sheer pointlessness of debate between the traditions, although some have suggested that the appearance of radical difference between the phenomenologists and the ordinary-language philosophers is misleading and, in fact, ultimately not the case.

Perhaps the most polemical of the papers presented at Royaumont was Ryle's, subsequently published as “Phenomenology vs. The Concept of Mind”, Ryle had previously taught on Husserl and published a review of Heidegger's Being and Time; his engagement, although critical, was extremely unusual in pre-war British analytic circles. However, at Royaumont, as Glock remarks, “Ryle seemed interested less in establishing whether there was a wide gulf between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy than in ensuring that there would be” (2008: 63). The burden of Ryle's paper is that there is a chasm between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, which is attributable to the development of logical theory (including non-formal matters, and perhaps the general theory of meaning) on the one hand, and its neglect on the other.