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Analytic philosophy is the dominant academic philosophical movement in English-speaking countries and in the Nordic countries. It is distinguished from Continental Philosophy which pertains to most western non-English speaking countries. Its main founders were the Cambridge philosophers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. However, both were heavily influenced by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, and many leading philosophers in the analytic tradition have come from Germany and Austria. Logic and philosophy of language were central strands of analytic philosophy from the beginning, although this dominance has diminished greatly. Several lines of thought originate from the early, language-and-logic part of this analytic philosophy tradition. These include: logical positivism, logical empiricism, logical atomism, logicism and ordinary language philosophy. Subsequent analytic philosophy includes extensive work in ethics (such as Philippa Foot, R. M. Hare, and J. L. Mackie), political philosophy (John Rawls, Robert Nozick), aesthetics (Monroe Beardsley, Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto), philosophy of religion (Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne), philosophy of language (David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, Nathan Salmon, John Searle), and philosophy of mind (Jaegwon Kim, David Chalmers, Putnam). Analytic metaphysics has also recently come into its own (Kripke, David Lewis, Salmon, Peter van Inwagen, P.F. Strawson). The term analytic philosophy The term analytic philosophy is slightly ambiguous and generally has three meanings: doctrine, method, and tradition. Relation to continental philosophy The term "analytic philosophy" in part denotes the fact that most of this philosophy traces its roots to the early 20th century movement of "logical analysis"; in part the term serves to distinguish "analytic" from other kinds of philosophy, especially "continental philosophy". The latter denotes mainly philosophy that has taken place on continental Europe after (and partially in response to) Hegel. Analytic philosophy developed, in part, as a reaction against the strong influence of Hegel's obscure and neologistic way of writing. One term (analytic) conventionally indicates a method of philosophy, while the other (continental) indicates, rather, a geographical origin. The distinction is, for this reason, quite misleading. Analytic philosophy's founding fathers, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Logical Positivists (the Vienna Circle), the Logical Empiricists (in Berlin), and the Polish logicians were all products of the continent of Europe. Much philosophy in Germany and Italy today, most of that in the Nordic Countries, and a great deal scattered over the rest of the continent and in Latin America, is likewise analytic. The European Society for Analytic Philosophy * holds continental-wide conventions every third year. Conversely, continental philosophy is pursued today perhaps by more people in English-speaking countries than anywhere else, if primarily in comparative literature or cultural studies departments. Many now claim that the distinction is worthless: that the subject matter of continental philosophy is capable of being studied using the now-traditional tools of analytic philosophy. If this is true, the phrase "analytic philosophy" might be redundant, or maybe normative, as in "rigorous philosophy". The phrase "continental philosophy", like "Greek philosophy", would denote a certain historical period or series of schools in philosophy: German idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis qua philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. The split between the two began early in the twentieth century. The logical positivists of the 1920s promoted a systematic rejection of metaphysics, and a generalised hostility to certain metaphysical concepts that they considered meaningless or ill-conceived: for example, God, the immaterial soul or universals such as "redness". This was at the same time that Martin Heidegger was dominating philosophy in Germany, and becoming influential in France, and his work became the object of frequent derision in English-speaking philosophy departments. Analytic philosophy, under one interpretation, failed by its own systematic lights to demonstrate the meaninglessness or fictitiousness of the concepts it attacked. At least, few analytic philosophers today would agree that they have anything like an exact and proven theory of which terms are meaningful and which meaningless. Contemporary analytic philosophy journals are — for good or ill — as rich in metaphysics as the work of any continental philosopher. Formalism and natural languages The aim of the analytic approach is to clarify philosophical problems by examining and clarifying the language used to express them. This has led to a number of successes: modern logic, recognizing the primary importance of sense and reference in the construction of meaning, Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions, Karl Popper's theory of falsificationism, Alfred Tarski's Semantic Theory of Truth. Two major threads weave through the analytic tradition. One seeks to understand language by making use of formal logic. That is, in one way or another it seeks to formalise the way in which philosophical statements are made. The other thread seeks to understand philosophical ideas by a close and careful examination of the natural language used to express them – usually with some emphasis on the importance of common sense in dealing with difficult concepts. These two threads intertwine, sometimes implacably opposed to each other, sometimes virtually identical. Famously, Wittgenstein started out in the formalism camp, but ended up in the natural language camp. Logical atomism Analytic philosophy has its origins in Gottlob Frege’s development of predicate logic. This permitted a much wider range of sentences to be parsed into logical form. Bertrand Russell adopted it as his primary philosophical tool; a tool he thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” can be parsed in three distinct ways: The Tractatus As a young Austrian soldier, Ludwig Wittgenstein expanded and developed Russell's logical atomism into a comprehensive system, in a remarkable brief book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The world is the existence of certain states of affairs; these states of affairs can be expressed in the language of first-order predicate logic. So a picture of the world can be built up by expressing atomic facts in atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators. One of the central movements within analytic philosophy is linked closely to the following statement from the Tractatus: 5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. This attitude is one of the reasons for the close relationship between philosophy of language and analytic philosophy. Language, on this view is the principal—or perhaps the only—tool of the philosopher. For Wittgenstein, and many other analytic philosophers, philosophy consists in clarifying how language can be used. The hope is that when language is used clearly, philosophical problems are found to dissolve. This view has come to be known as quietism. Wittgenstein thought he had set out the 'final solution' to all philosophical problems, and so went off to become a school teacher. However, he later revisited the inadequacy of logical atomism, and further expanded the philosophy of language by his posthumous book Philosophical Investigations. Natural language semantics Davidson. Oxford in 1970s. Strawson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans. Reaction against idealism G. E. Moore, Common Sense philosophy. This philosophy is a rejection of British Post-Hegel Idealism. Ordinary language philosophy Main article: Ordinary language philosophy Oxford School. Associated with such philosophers as Austin, Ryle, Searle, and, as well, the later teachings of Wittgenstein. Rather than viewing philosophical problems with respect to logic, ordinary language philosophy sets forth the notion of consideration with respect to the ordinary usage of the linguistic terms germane to such problems. While schools such as logical positivism focus on logical terms, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary language philosophy emphasizes the use of language by ordinary people. It may be argued, then, that ordinary language philosophy is of a more sociological grounding, as it essentially focuses on the use of language within social contexts. Ordinary language philosophy was often used to disperse philosophical problems, by exposing them as results of fundamental misunderstandings regarding the ordinary usage of the pertinent linguistic terms. Indeed, this is apparent in Ryle (who attempted to dispose of "Descartes' myth"), as well as Wittgenstein, among others. Logical positivism and logical empiricism Vienna Circle, Carnap, Verificationism. Analytic-synthetic distinction. Rejection of Metaphysics, Ethics, Aesthetics. "Emotivism." Immigration of logicians and scientists from Europe in the 1930s. Philosophy of science. Quine, who attempted to dispose of the supposed Two Dogmas of Empiricism, and especially the analytic-synthetic distinction. Behaviorism. See the separate article on Logical Positivism for further information. Philosophy of mind and cognitive science Paul and Patricia Churchland, Dennett. See philosophy of mind or cognitive science for further information. Ethics in analytic philosophy As a side-effect of the focus on logic and language in the early years of analytic philosophy, the tradition initially had little to say on the subject of ethics. The attitude was widespread among early analytics that these subjects were unsystematic, and merely expressed personal attitudes about which philosophy could have little or nothing to say. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, remarks that values cannot be a part of the world, and if they are anything at all they must be beyond or outside the world somehow, and that hence language, which describes the world, can say nothing about them. One interpretation of these remarks found expression in the doctrine of the logical positivists that statements about value--including all ethical and aesthetic judgments--are, like metaphysical claims, literally meaningless and therefore non-cognitive; that is, not able to be either true or false. Social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and various more specialied subjects like philosophy of history thus moved to the fringes of English-language philosophy for some time. By the 1950s debates had begun to arise over whether--and if so, how--ethical statements really were non-cognitive. Stevenson argued for expressivism, R. M. Hare advocated a view called universal prescriptivism. Phillipa Foot contributed several essays attacking all these positions, and the collapse of logical positivism as a cohesive research programme led to a renewed interest in ethics. Political philosophy Analytic philosophy, perhaps because its origin lay in dismissing the relevance of Hegel and Hegelian philosophers (such as Marx), had little to say about political ideas for most of its history. This was changed radically, and almost single-handedly, by John Rawls in a series of papers from the 1950s onward (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") which culminated in his monograph A Theory of Justice in 1971, adducing philosophical grounds for defending a liberal welfare state. This was followed in short order by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defence of free-market libertarianism. Analytical Marxism Another interesting development in the area of political philosophy has been the emergence of a school known as Analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply the techniques of analytic philosophy, along with tools of modern social science such as rational choice theory to the elucidation of the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best known member of this school, is Oxford University philosopher G.A. Cohen, whose 1978 work, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is generally taken as representing the genesis of this school. In that book, Cohen attempted to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defense of Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent Analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. All these people have attempted to build upon Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, like rational choice theory, to supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques, in the interpretation of Marxian theory. Communitarianism Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer advance a critique of Liberalism that uses analytic techniques to isolate the key assumptions of Liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, Communitarians challenge the Liberal assumption that the individual can be viewed as fully autonomous from the community in which he lives and is brought up. Instead, they push for a conception of the individual that emphasises the role that the community plays in shaping his or her values, thought processes and opinions. | |||||||
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