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Analytic philosophy (or analytical philosophy) is a term used in two main senses. First, it can be used to denote a specific movement in early 20th century philosophy, led by Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,^[1] which made substantial contributions to philosophical logic, held that philosophy should apply these logical techniques to the attainment of conceptual clarity, and sought to be consistent with the success of modern science. Second, “analytic philosophy” can be used as a catch all phrase that includes all branches of contemporary philosophy not focusing on a certain group of European continental philosophers.

These two senses of "analytic philosophy" are related. Most of the branches of "analytic philosophy" in its broader sense owe an intellectual debt to the methods and style of the analytic movement proper, and some argue that the diverse fields of contemporary analytic philosophy are unified by a common style,^[2] deriving from pioneering work at Cambridge in the early 20th century. However, the relation between these two senses of “analytic philosophy” should not be overemphasized. Many branches of contemporary philosophy--for example, philosophy of mind and political philosophy--bear remarkably little resemblance to the work of Russell and Moore and make little use of the concepts, methods, and tools they developed. Furthermore, most philosophers since 1960 have rejected the basic precepts that underlay the analytic movement proper, precepts that were decisively challenged by the influential critiques of W.V. Quine and the later Wittgenstein.

The Analytic Movement: 1900 - 1960

In its first sense, "Analytic Philosophy" is used to refer to a specific philosophical program that is ordinarily dated from about 1900 to 1960.

Key Traits

As a historical program, "Analytic Philosophy" can be summarily characterized in three broad strokes:^[3]

History

The analytic program in philosophy is ordinarily dated to the work of English philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in the early 20th century. They turned away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism (objecting in particular to its idealism and purported obscurity)^[10]^[11], and began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis, based on new developments in logic.

Origins: Frege

Russell in his early career, along with collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was deeply influenced by Gottlob Frege. Most importantly Gottlob Frege helped to develop predicate logic. This permitted a much wider range of sentences to be parsed into logical form. Frege was also a key figure in philosophy of mathematics in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, which attempted to show that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them,^[12] Frege sought to show that mathematics and logic have their own validity, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians (which were the foundation of arithmetic in Husserl's "psychologism"). Frege's own work, the Begriffsschrift, developed the concepts of a specific form of modern logic by making use of the notions of the sense and reference. Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic where he provides an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.

Like Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to fundamental logical principles. Their Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) encouraged many philosophers to take a renewed interest in the development of symbolic logic. In addition, Bertrand Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic 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:

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.

Ideal Language Analysis

From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein focused on creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their view, often got philosophers into trouble. This philosophical trend can be called "ideal-language analysis" or "formalism." In this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language, and hence philosophical problems, by making use of formal logic. That is, in one way or another they sought to formalize the way in which philosophical statements are made. Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in a brief book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The argument therein suggests that the world is the existence of certain states of affairs and 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.

Logical Positivism

In the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism was picked up by a group of thinkers in Vienna and Berlin, who formed the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle and developed a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logical tools to underpin an empiricist account of our knowledge of the world.^[13] Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, held that the truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and that tautologies, together with verifiable empirical claims, constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was, strictly speaking nonsense (including, for example, the claims of ethics, aesthetics and theology). Karl Popper's insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical positivists.^[14] With the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany and Austria, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles were forced to flee Germany, on account of their leftist sympathies. Most commonly, they fled to Britain and America, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone world.^[15]

Logical positivists typically saw philosophy as having a very narrow role. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. The positivists typically adopted some type of verificationism, according to which every meaningful non-analytic statement is capable of being verified in terms of more basic statements about experiences or observables. This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.

Ordinary Language Analysis

After war in the late 40s and 50s, analytic philosophy took a turn toward ordinary-language analysis. This movement followed in the wake of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which totally departed from his earlier work. In contrast to earlier analytic philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) who thought philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages, ordinary language philosophers held that ordinary language already reflected a large number of subtle distinctions that had gone unrecognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or 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. The most prominent ordinary language philosophers in the 1950s were Austin and Ryle. In some ways, this movement also marked a return to common sense philosophy, which had long been emphasized by G.E. Moore.

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.

1960 and Beyond

Following 1960, both logical positivism and natural language philosophy fell rapidly out of fashion. Many philosophers in Britain and America (although not all) began to move away from the distinctive linguistic analysis that had characterized analytic philosophy until this point. Far more than it had in the previous half-century, Anglophone philosophy began to incorporate wide range of interests, views, and methods, and has perhaps entered an age of eclecticism or pluralism, in which philosophers tend to specialize in very narrow and detached subfields.

Whether philosophy in general in this period should still be called "analytic" is a question of some dispute. Peter Hacker^[16], for one, contends that much contemporary philosophy that calls itself analytic does not deserve the title. As he argues, philosophy’s center of gravity shifted from Britain to the US in the mid 70s (mostly for economic reasons), where, under the influence of the growing prestige of certain exciting scientific and technological developments, like computers, neurophysiology and Chomskyan linguistics, Wittgenstein’s arguments against his original Tractatus position were disregarded in the face of a somewhat vulgarised revival of that very position. This now calls itself analytic philosophy, though writers such as Hacker dispute its right to that title. “What from Wittgenstein’s perspective were diseases of the intellect, to many of which he had succumbed as a young man and which he had laboured long to extirpate, broke out afresh in mutated virulent forms’.^[17]

However, in general, most philosophers in Britain and America (who do not specialize in continental philosophy) still consider themselves to be "analytic philosophers." ^[18] Largely, they have done so by expanding the notion of "analytic philosophy" from the specific programs that dominated Anglophone philosophy before 1960 to a much more general notion of an "analytic" style, characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic. Often the analytic style is thought to be opposed to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."^[19] The state of so-called "analytic philosophy" after 1960 will be the focus of the next section.

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

In Britain and America, most philosophers who do not specialize in continental philosophy still call themselves "analytic philosophers,"^[18] in spite of the many differences from the work that defined analytic philosophy before 1960 (see the previous section). In the way these philosophers are using the term, "analytic philosophy" is not unified by any particular interests, premises, or methods (in all three areas, analytic philosophers have widely divergent positions). Instead, analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style ^[2] characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."^[19]

Given this scope, it is difficult to identify non-trivial philosophical claims that would be common to all analytic philosophy. The term "analytic philosophy" may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views, or historical lines of influence.^[20]^[21] Insofar as broad generalizations can be made, analytic philosophy is defined by its emphasis on clarity and argument, often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language, and a respect for the natural sciences.^[22]^[23]^[24]

A few of the most important and active fields and subfields in analytic philosophy are summarized in the following sections.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science

Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century. Behaviorists tended to hold either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways or that mental states were equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave. Behaviorism later became far less popular, in favor of type physicalism or functionalism, theories which identified mental states with brain states. During this period, topics in the philosophy of mind were often in close contact with issues in cognitive science such as modularity or innateness. Finally, analytic philosophy has featured many philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence, with David Chalmers as perhaps the most prominent representative.^[25]

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 specialized 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. Charles 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. Perhaps most influential in this area was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose landmark monograph "Intention" was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle", and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of moral psychology. A favorite student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the philosophical lexicon, declared the "is-ought" impasse to be a dead end, and led to a revival in virtue ethics.

Analytic philosophy of religion

Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil.^[27] Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.^[28]

Analytic philosophy of religion has also been preoccupied with Ludwig Wittgenstein and his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion.^[29] Using first-hand remarks (which would later be published in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed a fideist interpretation of Wittgenstein.^[30] Responding to this interpretation, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips became two of the most prominent philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.^[31]

Political philosophy

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, such as rational choice theory, to supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques in the interpretation of Marxian theory.

Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy in attempt to advance a socialist theory of justice that stands in contrast to both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he points to Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Communitarianism

Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel 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 emphasizes the role that the community plays in shaping his or her values, thought processes and opinions.

Analytic Metaphysics

One striking break with early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century. Philosophers such as David Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity, and abstract objects.

Among the developments that led to the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, which was generally taken to undermine Carnap's distinction between existence questions internal to a framework and those external to it.^[32]

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