Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries. 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 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 programmes and commited 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.
2. The method of Analytic philosophy is a generalized approach to philosophy. Originally associated with the very limited projects of logical analysis, it nowadays emphasizes (merely) 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 less accessible 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.
3. The tradition of Analytic philosophy began with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein at the turn of the twentieth-century 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. As a consequence, logic and philosophy of language were central strands 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 Phillipa Foot or J. L. Mackie), political philosophy (John Rawls, Robert Nozick), aesthetics (Arthur Danto), and philosophy of mind (Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland)

Relation to continental philosophy

The term "analytic philosophy" in part denotes the fact that most of this philosophy traces its roots to the movement of "logical analysis" at the beginning of the century; 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 (but not including) Kant. One term indicates a method of philosophy and the other indicates a range of subject matter; and the "distinction," prevalent as it is, reflects painfully many inaccuracies: Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Logical Positivists (the Vienna Circle), the Logical Empiricists (in Berlin), and the 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 France, and his work therefore often became the object of derision in English-speaking philosophy departments. Analytic philosophy, in the end, failed by its own lights ever to systematically demonstrate the meaninginglessness 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--and 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: 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.

Formalism

Logical atomism

Analytic philosophy has its origins in Gottlob Frege’s development of first-order 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 equivalence 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 build up by expressing atomic facts in atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators.

The Tractatus is a dense and thought-provoking work; but perhaps its most interesting utterance from the point of view of the method of analytic philosophy is

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

This shows clearly the reason for the close relationship between philosophy of language and analytic philosophy. Language is the principal – or perhaps the only – tool of the philosopher. For Wittgenstein, and for analytic philosophy in general, philosophy consists in clarifying how language can be used. The hope is that when language is used clearly, philosophical problems are found to dissolve.

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 local 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.

Natural language

Reaction against idealism

G. E. Moore, Common Sense philosophy. Rejection of British Post-Hegel Idealism.

Language as use

Oxford School. Austin, Ryle, Searle. Teachings of later Wittgenstein. "Ordinary Language Philosophy."

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. Behaviourism. See the separate article on Logical Positivism for further information.

Philosophy of mind, cognitive science

Turing, 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 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 releance 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 Rawl's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defence of free-market libertarianism.

Communitarianism and Liberalism