Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy has been the the dominant academic philosophical movement in English-speaking countries and in the Nordic countries from about the beginning of the 20th Century up to about the 1970s or '80s. It is distinguished from Continental Philosophy, which takes its name from the European continent and is the dominant philosophy in most non-English speaking countries.

The main founders of analytic philosophy were the Cambridge philosophers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Perhaps its strongest impetus came from their reaction against British Idealism and Hegel and Hegelianism. However, both Moore and Russell — especially Russell — were heavily influenced by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege and many of analytic philosophy's leading proponents, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, and Carl Hempel have come from Germany and Austria.

In Britain, Russell and Moore were succeeded by C. D. Broad, L. Susan Stebbing, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, R. B. Braithwaite, Paul Grice, John Wisdom, R. M. Hare, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, William Kneale, G. E. M. Anscombe,Peter Geach, and others.

In America, the movement was led by many of the above-named European emigres as well as Max Black, Ernest Nagel, Charles L. Stevenson, Norman Malcolm, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, and others, while A. N. Prior, John Passmore, and J. J. C. Smart were prominent in Australasia.

Logic and philosophy of language were central strands of analytic philosophy from the beginning, although this dominance diminished greatly in the latter part of the 20th century. Several lines of thought originate from the early, language-and-logic part of this analytic philosophy tradition. These include: logical positivism or logical empiricism, logical atomism, logicism and ordinary language philosophy.

It is possible to divide analytic philosophy into two strains or camps: ordinary language philosophy, led by John L. Austin and carried on by his followers — this has sometimes been known as "Oxford philosophy" — and the other camp containing everything else. This break comes over the question whether analysis should be carried on primarily through and on ordinary language, or whether it should have a component of formal logic and formal language.

Subsequent analytic philosophy includes extensive work in ethics, such as carried out by Philippa Foot, R. M. Hare, J. L. Mackie, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others; political philosophy as done most notably by John Rawls and Robert Nozick; aesthetics as investigated by Monroe Beardsley, Richard Wollheim, and Arthur Danto; philosophy of religion as studied by Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne; philosophy of language carried out by many philosophers including David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Nathan Salmon, and John Searle; and philosophy of mind as studied by Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, Hilary Putnam and others. Analytic metaphysics also came into its own with the work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Nathan Salmon, Peter van Inwagen, P.F. Strawson, and others.

The term analytic philosophy

The term analytic philosophy is slightly ambiguous and generally has three meanings: doctrine, method, and tradition.

1. The doctrines most often called "analytic philosophy" are logical positivism and logical atomism. More loosely, the term can also refer to ordinary language philosophy, common sense philosophy, or some amalgam of the above. This usage made some sense until the 1950s, when most prominent "analytic" philosophers were commonly engaged in a few related research programs and committed to similar basic theses; but it is increasingly misleading, as very few contemporary analytic philosophers adhere to any of these schools, let alone all of them. To equate modern analytic philosophy with logical positivism or to assume that it is substantially like logical positivism is a common mistake.
2. The method of Analytic philosophy is a generalized approach to philosophy. Originally associated with the projects of logical analysis, it nowadays emphasizes a clear, precise approach with particular weight being placed upon argumentation and evidence, avoidance of ambiguity, and attention to detail. This has made many philosophical subjects more suited to specialization and precision work, and also made many writings more technical than they were in the past. Arguably it has also resulted in philosophy having less of the sweeping "meaning of life" scope that is popularly associated with the term, and the critics of analytic philosophy sometimes level this point against it. On the other hand, it has arguably added focus and rigor, allowing for debate and a reduction in philosophers talking past each other.
3. The tradition of Analytic philosophy began with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore at the turn of the twentieth century, and, just over a decade later, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and includes all those who work in their vein and on the various projects that have emerged out of the work of other analytic philosophers since. It is characterized, normally, by its effort to clarify philosophical issues by analysis and logical rigor — i.e., by method (2), above.

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 largely in response to, Hegel. Analytic philosophy developed as a reaction against the strong influence of Hegel's obscure and neologistic way of thinking and writing, and especially against the aggressive and oppressive obscurantism, obfuscation, and opacity of Martin Heidegger. Most analytic philosophers considered themselves to be empiricists, and they took Hume as their greatest and most important philosophical ancestor.

The term "analytic" conventionally indicates a method of philosophy, while the term "continental" indicates, rather, a geographical origin. The distinction is, for this reason, somewhat 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 [1] 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 people 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 generalized 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 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. As early as 1959 John passmore declared that "logical positivism ... is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes." ("Logical Positivism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, Ed., Vol. 5, p. 56) 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 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: Symbolic logic and other aspects of modern logic, recognizing the primary importance of sense and reference in the construction of meaning and the distinction between syntax and semantics in the study of language, Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions, Karl Popper's theory of falsificationism, and Alfred Tarski's Semantic Theory of Truth.

Ordinary Language Analytic Philosophy

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. This philosophical movement or motif can be traced back at least partly to the work of G.E. Moore, and is usualllyheld to have had its greatest exponent in John L. Austin and his work at Oxford, especially after WWII until his untimely death at the age of 59 in 1960. In fact, ordinary language analytic philosophy has frequently been called "Oxford philosophy." Besides Austin, ordinary language philosophy has been associated with such philosophers Ryle, John R. Searle, and others. The later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein was also especially important and seminal for this form of analytic philosophy.

The Oxford movement was carried on by Austin's successors, but none of them were as skilled or accomplished as he in carrying it out, and it has mostly disappeared as a separate and clearly distinguishabble branch of analytic philosophy. But, at the time it came into prominence, for those philosophers who were attracted to analytic philosophy but who deplored what they saw as being the mistakes and narrowness of logical positivism or logical empiricism, the work of Austin and his fellows was often seen as a breath of new and invigorating air.

Rather than viewing philosophical problems through the lens of formal logic, ordinary language philosophy attempts to deal with the ordinary usage of the linguistic terms germane to such problems. While ledogical positivism focus on logical terms and logical relations, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary language philosophy emphasized 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 lingusitic terms. Indeed, this is apparent in Ryle (who attempted to dispose of "Descartes' myth"), as well as Wittgenstein, among others.

In addition to the work done at Oxford in the '50s to the '70s, the semantics of ordinary language has been investigated by MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, and th philosophersDonald Davidson , P. F. Strawson, Michael Dummett, John McDowell, and others.

These two threads — formal language vs. ordinary language philosophy — intertwine, sometimes implacably opposed to each other, sometimes virtually identical. Wittgenstein, most famously, 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:

• in 'the cat is asleep: the is of predication says that 'x is P': P(x)
• in 'there is a cat”: the is of existence says that there is an x: ∃(x)
• in 'three is half of six': the is of identity says that x is the same as y: x=y

Russell sought to resolve various philosophical issues by applying such clear and clean distinctions, most famously in the case of the Present King of France.

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.

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

One branch of analytic philosophy has been especially concerned with what is usually known as philosophy of mind or cognitive science. Some of the prominent figures here have been Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett.

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, philosopher Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and others advance a critique of liberalism — especially the libertarian form of liberalism —that uses analytic techniques to isolate the key assumptions of liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then goes on to challenge 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.

External links

• An Introduction to Analytic Philosophy by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.

• Analytic Philosophy; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• European Society for Analytic Philosophy

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford, 1992). Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, 1990).

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