Analytic Philosophy

Analytic Philosophy (or sometimes Analytical Philosophy) is a 20th Century movement in philosophy which holds that
philosophy should apply logical techniques in order to attain conceptual clarity, and that philosophy should be consistent
with the success of modern science. For many Analytic Philosophers, language is the principal (perhaps the only) tool, and
philosophy consists in clarifying how language can be used.
Analytic Philosophy is also used as a catch-all phrase to include all (mainly Anglophone) branches of contemporary
philosophy not included under the label Continental Philosophy, such as Logical Positivism, Logicism and Ordinary Language
Philosophy. To some extent, these various schools all derive from pioneering work at Cambridge University in the early 20th
Century and then at Oxford University after World War II, although many contributors were in fact originally from Continental
Europe.
Analytic Philosophy as a specific movement was led by Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, G. E. Moore and Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Turning away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism, (particularly objecting to its Idealism and its almost
deliberate obscurity), they began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis based on new developments in Logic, and
succeeded in making substantial contributions to philosophical Logic over the first half of the 20th Century.
The three main foundational planks of Analytical Philosophy are:
that there are no specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of
thoughts.
that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of
philosophical propositions, such as by using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system.
a rejection of sweeping philosophical systems and grand theories in favour of close attention to detail, as well as a
defence of common sense and ordinary language against the pretensions of traditional Metaphysics and Ethics.
Early developments in Analytic Philosophy arose out of the work of the German mathematician and logician Gottlob
Frege (widely regarded as the father of modern philosophical logic), and his development of Predicate Logic. Bertrand
Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, particularly in their groundbreaking "Principia Mathematica" (1910-1913) and their
development of Symbolic Logic, attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to fundamental logical principles.
From about 1910 to 1930, Analytic Philosophers like Russell and Wittgenstein focused on creating an ideal language for
philosophical analysis (known as Ideal Language Analysis or Formalism), which would be free from the ambiguities of
ordinary language that, in their view, often got philosophers into trouble. In his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" of
1921, Wittgenstein suggested that the world is merely the existence of certain states of affairs which can be expressed in the
language of first-order predicate logic, so that a picture of the world can be built up by expressing atomic facts in atomic
propositions, and linking them using logical operators, a theory sometimes referred to as Logical Atomism.
G. E. Moore, who along with Bertrand Russell had been a pioneer in his opposition to the dominant Hegelianism (and its belief
in Hegel's Absolute Idealism) in the British universities of the early 20th Century, developed
his epistemological Commonsense Philosophy, attempting to defend the "commonsense" view of the world against
both Skepticism and Idealism.
In the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Russell and Wittgenstein's Formalism was picked up by the Vienna Circle and Berlin
Circle which developed into the Logical Positivism movement, which focused on universal logical terms, supposedly separate
from contingent factors such as culture, language, historical conditions. In the late 1940s and 1950s, following Wittgenstein's
later philosophy, Analytic Philosophy took a turn toward Ordinary Language Philosophy, which emphasized the use
of ordinary language by ordinary people.
Following heavy attacks on Analytic Philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, both Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language
Philosophy rapidly fell out of fashion. However, many philosophers in Britain and America after the 1970's still considered
themselves to be "analytic" philosophers, (generally characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic),
although less emphasis on linguistics and an increased eclecticism or pluralism characteristic of Post-Modernism is also
evident.
More contemporary Analytic Philosophy has also included extensive work in other areas of philosophy, such as
in Ethics by Phillipa Foot (1920 - ), R. M. Hare (1919 - 2002) and J. L. Mackie (1917 - 1981); in Political Philosophy by John
Rawls (1921 - 2002) and Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002); in Aesthetics by Arthur Danto (1924 - 2013); and in Philosophy of
Mind by Daniel Dennett (1942 - ) and Paul Churchland (1942 - ).
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Analytic Philosophy (or sometimes Analytical Philosophy) is a 20th Century movement in philosophy which holds that

The three main foundational planks of Analytical Philosophy are:

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