Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy,[1] which was coined as a catch-all term for other methods that were prominent in continental Europe,[h] most notably existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism.[i][j][k][l] The distinction has also been drawn between "analytic" being academic or technical philosophy and "continental" being literary philosophy.[m] There is now widespread influence and debate between the analytic and continental traditions; some philosophers see the differences between the two traditions as being based on institutions, relationships, and ideology, rather than anything of significant philosophical substance.[22][23][n]
Emergence in Germany and Austria
Austrian realism
Franz Brentano introduced the problem of intentionality.
Analytic philosophy was deeply influenced by what is called Austrian realism in the former state of Austria-Hungary, so much so that Michael Dummett has remarked that analytic philosophy is better characterized as Anglo-Austrian rather than the usual Anglo-American.[28]
For Brentano, all mental events or acts of consciousness have a real, non-mental intentional object, which the thinking is directed at or "about".[30] Intentionality is "the mark of the mental." Intentionality is to be distinguished from intention.
Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was a German geometry professor at the University of Jena, logician, and philosopher who is understood as the father of analytic philosophy.[35] Frege proved influential as a philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. He advocated logicism, the project of reducing arithmetic to pure logic.
Logic
As a result of his logicist project, Frege developed predicate logic in his book Begriffsschrift (English: Concept-script, 1879), which allowed for a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic. An example of this is the problem of multiple generality. Frege also unified the two strains of ancient logic: Aristotelian and Stoic.[p]
Number
Realism
Neo-Kantianism dominated the late 19th century in German philosophy. Husserl's book Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them.[37]
In contrast to this "psychologism", Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (German: Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893–1903), argued that mathematics and logic have their own public objects, independent of one's private judgments or mental states.[38] Following Frege, the logicists tended to advocate a kind of mathematical Platonism.
Frege also proved influential in the philosophy of language and analytic philosophy's interest in meaning. Dummett traces the linguistic turn to Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and his context principle.[39] Frege writes "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition."[40] As Dummett explains, in order to answer a Kantian question, "How are numbers given to us, granted that we have no idea or intuition of them?" Frege finds the solution in defining "the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs."[41] Thus a problem, traditionally solved along idealist lines, is instead solved along linguistic ones.[39]
Sense and Reference
Frege's paper "On Sense and Reference" (1892) is seminal, containing Frege's puzzles about identity and providing a mediated reference theory.[42] Frege points out the reference of "the Morning Star" and "the Evening Star" is the same: both refer to the planetVenus.[q] Therefore, substituting one term for the other doesn't change the truth value (salva veritate). However, they differ in what Frege calls cognitive value or the mode of presentation. One has to distinguish between two notions of meaning: the reference of a term and the sense of a term. As Frege points out "the Morning Star is the Morning Star" is uninformative, but "the Morning Star is the Evening Star" is informative. So the two expressions must differ in a way other than reference.
Thought
His paper "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry" (1918) reflects both his anti-idealism and his interest in language.[44] In the paper, he argues for a Platonist account of propositions or thoughts. Frege claims propositions are intangible, like ideas; yet publicly available, like an object. In addition to the physical, public "first realm" of objects, and the private, mental "second realm" of ideas, Frege posits a "third realm" of Platonic propositions, such as the Pythagorean theorem.
Analytic philosophy in the narrower sense of 20th and 21st century anglophone philosophy is usually thought to begin with Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore's rejection of Hegelianism for being obscure; or the "revolt against idealism."[48][s][t] Russell summed up Moore's influence:
"G. E. Moore...took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. Bradley had argued that everything common sense believes in is mere appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and that everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or theology, supposes real. With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas."[51]
An important aspect of Hegelianism and British idealism was logical holism—the opinion that aspects of the world can be known only by knowing the whole world. This is closely related to the doctrine of internal relations, the opinion that relations between items are internal relations, that is, essentialproperties of the nature of those items. Russell and Moore in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the belief that the world consists of independent facts.[54][55][u]
Ideal language
Inspired by developments in modern formal logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions.[5]Logical form would be made clear by syntax.
For example, the English word is has three distinct meanings, which predicate logic can express as follows:
For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x)).
For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x).
For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their opinion, often made philosophers incorrect.[57]
During his early career, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, thinking it could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. This was done most famously in his theory of definite descriptions in "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905.[60] The essay has been called a "paradigm of philosophy."[61]
In this essay, Russell responds to both Meinong and Frege on language. He argues all proper names (aside from demonstratives like this or that) are disguised definite descriptions, for example "Walter Scott" can be replaced with "the author of Waverley",[v] using this theory to solve ascriptions of nonexistence, such as with "the present King of France". This position came to be called descriptivism.[62]
The essay also illustrates the concept of scopeambiguity by showing how denying "The present King of France is bald" can mean either "There is no King of France" or "The present King of France is not bald". Russell quips "Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig."[60]
The book starts "The world is all that is the case."[70] Wittgenstein claims the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed and mirrored by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus, a picture of the universe can be constructed by expressing facts in the form of atomic propositions and linking them using logical operators.[71][72]
Wittgenstein has been labeled a mystic who believed in ineffability by some readers.[76] The Tractatus further ultimately concludes that all of its propositions are meaningless, illustrated with a ladder one must toss away after climbing up it.[77] The book ends "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."[78]
Logical positivism
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Members of the Vienna Circle: (1) Moritz Schlick (2) Otto Neurath; (3) Hans Hahn (4) Rudolf Carnap
During the late 1920s to 1940s, a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, and another one known as the Berlin Circle, developed Russell and Wittgenstein's philosophy into a doctrine known as "logical positivism" (or logical empiricism).[79][80]
Verification principle
Logical positivists used formal logical methods to develop an empiricist account of knowledge. They adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or synthetic.[81] The truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense.
This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy. The verification principle rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless.[77] Logical positivists therefore typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own.
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.[82][83]
Epistemology was still discussed. Schlick was a foundationalist, believing knowledge was like a pyramid, built on prior layers of knowledge except for the first layer.[86] Neurath was an anti-foundationalist, coherentist who famously gave the analogy of reconstructing a ship while on the open sea.[86][87]
Friedrich Waismann introduced the concept of open texture to describe the universal possibility of vagueness in empirical statements.[88] Waismann never finished a book titled Logik, Sprache, Philosophie intended to present the ideas of logical positivism to a wider audience.[89]
Carnap and Reichenbach started the journal Erkenntnis.[90] Carnap formalized the internal–external distinction in ontology.[91] In works like Der logische Aufbau der Welt (translated as The Logical Structure of the World, 1967), sometimes simply the Aufbau, and The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language (1959), Carnap believed the way to resolve philosophical problems is by logical, linguistic analysis.[92][93][x]
Several logical positivists were Jewish, such as Neurath, Waismann, Hans Hahn, and Reichenbach. Others, like Carnap, were gentiles but socialists or pacifists. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the United States, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.[95]
After World War II, from the late 1940s to the 1950s, analytic philosophy became involved with ordinary-language analysis. This resulted in two main trends.
Later Wittgenstein
One strain of language analysis was Wittgenstein's later philosophy, from the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), which differed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus.[98] Philosophers refer to them like two different philosophers: "early Wittgenstein" and "later Wittgenstein".
In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein develops a therapeutic approach. Prior to the publication of the Philosophical Investigations, philosophers like John Wisdom and Rush Rhees were some of the few sources of information about Wittgenstein's later philosophy, for example Wisdom's work Other minds (1952) on the problem of other minds.[96][99][100][y]
A notion found in both early and later Wittgenstein is that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."[101] Philosophers had been misusing language and asking meaningless questions, and it was Wittgenstein's job "to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle."[102]
Language-games
He introduces the concept of a "language-game" as a "form of life". Wittgenstein used the term "language-game" to designate forms of language simpler than the entirety of a language itself.[103] Wittgenstein argued that a word or sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.
Meaning as use
Rather than his prior picture theory of meaning, the later Wittgenstein advocates a theory of meaning as use.[98] According to this theory, words are not defined by reference to the objects they designate, or by the mental representations one might associate with them, but by how they are used within the language-game.
Family resemblance
The notion of family resemblance sees things thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the classic example of a group that is related by family resemblances.[98]
Private language
Philosophical Investigations also contains the private language argument. Another point that Wittgenstein makes against the possibility of a private language involves the beetle-in-a-box thought experiment.[104] He asks the reader to imagine that each person has a box, inside which is something that everyone intends to refer to with the word beetle. Further, suppose that no one can look inside another's box. Under such a situation, Wittgenstein says the word beetle is meaningless.
Seeing that vs. Seeing as
The duck-rabbit illusion became famous when Wittgenstein used it to distinguish "seeing that" from "seeing as".
The criticisms of Frank Ramsey on the "color-exclusion problem," on color and logical form in the Tractatus, led to some of Wittgenstein's first doubts with regard to his early philosophy.[105][106] Wittgenstein held the only necessity is logical necessity, yet that no point in space can have two different colors at the same time seems a necessary truth but not a logical one.[69][107] Wittgenstein responded to Ramsey in "Some Remarks on Logical Form" (1929), the only academic paper he ever published.[108] Ramsey died of jaundice the next year at the age of 26.[109]
Sraffa's gesture
Norman Malcolm also famously credits Piero Sraffa for providing Wittgenstein with the conceptual break, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:[110][111]
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and what it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'
Oxford philosophy
The other trend was known as "Oxford philosophy", in contrast to earlier analytic Cambridge philosophers (including the early Wittgenstein) who thought philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages. Influenced by Moore's common sense and what they perceived as the later Wittgenstein's quietism, the Oxford philosophers claimed that ordinary language already represents many subtle distinctions not recognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or problems.
While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, which are 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. The most prominent ordinary-language philosophers during the 1950s were Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, and John L. Austin.[112]
Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Ordinary-language philosophers often sought to resolve philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of misunderstanding ordinary language. Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), criticized Cartesiandualism, arguing in favor of disposing of "Descartes' myth" via recognizing "category errors".[113]
Strawson
Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring" (1950), a criticism of Russell's theory of descriptions explained in the latter's famous "On Denoting" article.[114] On Strawson's account, the use of a description presupposes the existence of the object fitting the description.[114] In his book Individuals (1959), Strawson examines our conceptions of basic particulars.[115]
The school known as Australian realism began when John Anderson accepted the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1927.[118] American philosopher David Lewis later became closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.[119]
John's elder brother was William Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at Auckland University College from 1921 to his death in 1955, who was described as "the most dominant figure in New Zealand philosophy."[120]J. N. Findlay was a student of Ernst Mally of the Austrian realists and taught at the University of Otago.[121]
One difference with respect to early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing during the second half of the 20th century. The revival of metaphysics came due to the demise of logical positivism, which was first challenged by the later Wittgenstein. Subsequent philosophers continued to question elements of logical positivism, and metaphysics remains a fertile topic of research. Although many discussions are continuations of old ones from previous decades and centuries, the debates remain active.[124]
Sellars
Kant scholar Wilfrid Sellars "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".[125]
Myth of the Given
Sellers's criticism of the "Myth of the Given", in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), challenged logical positivism by arguing against sense-data theories and knowledge by acquaintance.[126]
Synoptic philosophy
In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars's critical realism distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world.[127] Sellars's goal of a synoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the basis of what is sometimes called the Pittsburgh School, whose members include Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland.
Quine
W. V. O. Quine helped to undermine logical positivism.
Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine shaped much of subsequent philosophy and is recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century".[128] He is regularly cited as the greatest philosopher of the second-half of the twentieth century,[129] or the next great philosopher after Wittgenstein.[130]
Naturalized epistemology
Quine was an empiricist who sought to naturalize philosophy and saw philosophy as continuous with science, distinguished only by philosophy being the most general science.[131][z]
Semantic holism
However, Quine doubted usual theories of meaning, and, instead of logical positivism, advocated a kind of semantic holism and ontological relativity, which explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world.[133][134]
The gavagaithought experiment tells about a linguist, who tries to find out what the expression gavagai means when uttered by a speaker of a yet-unknown native language upon seeing a rabbit. At first glance, it seems that gavagai simply translates with rabbit. Quine points out there is no way to tell that the speaker did not mean, for instance, "undetached rabbit-part" (such as its ear) as well as several other scenarios.[136]
On What There is
Quine's essay on ontology, "On What There Is" (1948) elucidates Russell's theory of descriptions.[137] Quine uses Pegasus instead of "the present King of France" and dubs the problem of nonexistence Plato's beard. The essay contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable". One is committed to the entities his theory posits by use of the existentialquantifier, like 'There are some so-and-sos'. Other parts of speech do not commit one to entities and so for Quine are syncategorematic.
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Also among the developments that resulted in the decline of logical positivism and the revival of metaphysical theorizing was Quine's attack on the analytic–synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), published in The Philosophical Review,[138][139] a paper "sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy".[140][aa] The paper made Quine the most dominant philosopher in America before Kripke.[142]
Kripke
Saul Kripke helped to revive interest in metaphysics among analytic philosophers.
Saul Kripke is widely regarded as having revived theories of essence and identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion.[143] He was influential in arguing that flaws in common theories of descriptions and proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of modality, or of necessity and possibility.[143]
Especially important was Kripke's book Naming and Necessity (1980). According to one author, Naming and Necessity "played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language."[146]
Rigid designators
Kripke argued proper names are rigid designators, or designate the same thing in all possible worlds, unlike descriptions. For example, an election may have turned out differently, so the description "winner of the 1968 US presidential election" might have designated Hubert Humphrey instead of Richard Nixon. However, the name "Richard Nixon" designates the man Richard Nixon, regardless of the election results.[147]
A posteriori necessity
Kant stated in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that necessity is the criterion for a priori knowledge.[148] Kripke argued that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H2O, or gold is atomic number 79.[145][143]
According to Lewis, "actual" is merely an indexical label we give a world when we are in it. Lewis applied Quine's dictum of ontological commitment to the statement "There are other ways things could have been;" committing Lewis (by his lights) to the real existence of other ways things could have been.[154]
Frege questioned standard theories of truth, and sometimes advocated a deflationary, redundancy theory of truth, i. e. that the predicate "is true" does not express anything above and beyond the statement to which it is attributed.[44] Frank Ramsey also advocated a redundancy theory.
Polish philosopher Stanisław Leśniewski, along with Nelson Goodman, established mereology, which is the formal study of parts and wholes. Mereology was originally a variant of nominalism arguing that one should dispense with set theory. However, the subject arguably goes back to the time of the pre-Socratics.[161]
David Lewis introduced the term 'atomless gunk' for something not made up of simples, which instead divides forever into smaller and smaller parts.[162]
Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) defends a kind of bundle theory of personal identity.[168] Parfit issues the thought experiment of a case of fission, where one person splits into two, say surviving with half of their brain, while the other half is put into a new body.[169]
Eternalism holds that past, present, and future are equally real. In contrast, presentism holds that only entities in the present exist.[179] The moving spotlight theory is a kind of hybrid view where all moments exist, but only one moment is present.[180]Growing block holds that only the past and present exist, but the future does not (yet) exist (there is also the reverse, a shrinking block).[180] Charlie Broad advocated growing block.[181]
Edmund Gettier helped to revitalize analytic epistemology.
Owing largely to Edmund Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963),[184] and the so-called Gettier problem, epistemology has ever since enjoyed a resurgence as a topic of analytic philosophy. Using epistemic luck, Gettier provided counterexamples to the "justified true belief" model of knowledge, found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus.[185]
A large portion of analytic epistemology is intended to resolve the problems that arise from Gettier's examples. These include developing theories of justification to deal with Gettier's examples, or giving alternatives to the justified-true-belief model.
While a problem since antiquity, Chisholm, in his Theory of Knowledge (1966), details the problem of the criterion with two sets of questions:
What do we know? or What is the extent of our knowledge?
How do we know? or What is the criterion for deciding whether we have knowledge in any particular case?[194]
An answer to either set of questions will allow us to devise a means of answering the other. Answering the former question-set first is called particularism, whereas answering the latter set first is called methodism. A third solution is skepticism, or doubting there is such a thing as knowledge.[194][195]
Closure
"Here is one hand"
Epistemic closure is the claim that knowledge is closed under entailment; in other words epistemic closure is a property or the principle that if a subject knows , and knows that entails , then can thereby come to know .[196] Most epistemological theories involve a closure principle, and many skeptical arguments assume a closure principle. In Proof of An External World (1939), G. E. Moore uses closure in his famous anti-skeptical "here is one hand" argument.[197] Shortly before his death, Wittgenstein wrote On Certainty in response to Moore.[198][199]
In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955), Nelson Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction.[203] Goodman's famous example was to introduce the predicates grue and bleen. "Grue" applies to all things before a certain arbitrary time t, just in case they are green, but also just in case they are blue after time t; and "bleen" applies to all things before time t, just in the case they are blue, but also just in case they are green after time t. So the inductive inference "All emeralds are grue" will be true before time t but "All emeralds are bleen" will be true after t.
Other topics
Other, related topics of research include debates over cases of knowledge, the value of knowledge, the nature of evidence, the role of intuitions in justification, and abduction.
Ethics
Early analytic philosophers often thought that inquiry in the ethical domain could not be made rigorous enough to merit any attention.[204] It was only with the emergence of ordinary-language philosophers that ethics started to become an acceptable area of inquiry for analytic philosophers.[204] Philosophers working within the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major types of moral philosophy.
Meta-ethics, which investigates moral terms and concepts;
Normative ethics, which examines and produces normative ethical judgments;
Applied ethics, which investigates how existing normative principles should be applied to difficult or borderline cases, often cases created by new technology or new scientific knowledge.[205]
Meta-ethics
As well as Hume's famous is/ought distinction, twentieth-century meta-ethics has two original strains.
Principia Ethica
The first is G. E. Moore's investigation into the nature of ethical terms (e.g., good) in his Principia Ethica (1903), which advances a kind of moral realism called ethical non-naturalism. The work is known for the open question argument and identifying the naturalistic fallacy, major topics of investigation for analytic philosophers. According to Moore, goodness is sui generis, a simple (undefinable), non-natural property.[206][207]
The second is founded on logical positivism and its attitude that unverifiable statements are meaningless. As a result, they avoided normative ethics and instead began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments.
The logical positivists opined that statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-cognitive; that is, they cannot be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted an emotivist theory, which was that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker.[209] It is also known as the boo/hurrah theory. For example, in this view, saying, "Murder is wrong", is equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of disapproval.
While analytic philosophers generally accepted non-cognitivism, emotivism had many deficiencies. It evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist theories, such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which was based on J. L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts.
Critics of two main strains
After Moore's work, not much was done in analytic philosophy with ethics until the 1950s and 1960s.[204] However, as non-cognitivism, the is/ought distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy were questioned, analytic philosophers showed a renewed interest in the traditional questions of moral philosophy.
Perhaps the most influential critic was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose monograph Intention (1957) was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle".[211][212] A favorite student and friend of Wittgenstein, her article "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) declared the "is-ought" impasse to be unproductive.[213]J. O. Urmson's article "On Grading" also called the is/ought distinction into question.[214]
The first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, normative ethics. However, as the influence of logical positivism declined mid-century, analytic philosophers had a renewed interest. Contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.
Consequentialism
During the early 20th century, consequentialism or utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical theory to remain popular among analytic philosophers. Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874) exemplified the common theory.[217] Robert Nozick criticizes utilitarianism with the utility monster.[218]
Since around 1970, a significant feature of analytic philosophy has been the emergence of applied ethics—an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues. The philosophers following this orientation view ethics as involving humanistic values, which involve practical implications and applications in the way people interact and lead their lives socially.[226]
Isaiah Berlin had a lasting influence on both analytic political philosophy and liberalism with his lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958).[233][234] Berlin defined 'negative liberty' as absence of coercion or interference in private actions. 'Positive liberty' Berlin maintained, could be thought of as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free from, but what we are free to do.
Rawls
Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who in a series of papers from the 1950s onward (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") and his book A Theory of Justice (1971), produced a sophisticated defense of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice.[219] Rawls introduced the term the veil of ignorance.
Another development of political philosophy was the emergence of the school of analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply techniques of analytic philosophy and modern social science to clarify the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is G. A. Cohen, whose book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), is generally considered to represent the genesis of this school. In that book, Cohen used logical and linguistic analysis to clarify and defend Marx's materialist conception of history.[236] Other prominent analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The work of these later philosophers has furthered 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.[237]
Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy to advance a socialist theory of justice that contrasts with both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he indicates Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas is another influential—if controversial—author in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.[238]
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 main assumptions of liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions.[221] In particular, communitarians challenge the liberal assumption that the individual can be considered as fully autonomous from the community in which he is brought up and lives. Instead, they argue for a conception of the individual that emphasizes the role that the community plays in forming his or her values, thought processes, and opinions. While in the analytic tradition, its major exponents often also engage at length with figures generally considered continental, notably G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Aesthetics
As a result of logical positivism, as well as what seemed like rejections of the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity from post-modern thinkers, analytic philosophers were slow to consider art and aesthetic judgment. British idealist R. G. Collingwood developed a theory of aesthetic expressivism.[239]
Goodman
Susanne Langer, Frank Sibley, and Nelson Goodman addressed these problems in an analytic style during the 1950s and 1960s.[240][241] Since Goodman and Languages of Art (1968), aesthetics as a discipline for analytic philosophers has flourished.[242] For Goodman, art is not so different from science, and is another branch of epistemology.[243]
George Dickie was an influential philosopher of art. Dickie states "a work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation."[246] Dickie's student Noël Carroll is a leading philosopher of art contributing to the philosophy of film.
Historical
An alternative to the institutional definition is the historical definition, best exemplified by Jerrold Levinson. For Levinson, "a work of art is a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art: regard in any of the ways works of art existing prior to it have been correctly regarded."[247] In the opinion of historian of aesthetics Władysław Tatarkiewicz, there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression, and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art.[248]
Social
Nicholas Wolterstorff emphasizes the social aspect of art, not as mere contemplation but as action.[249] Levinson and Wolterstorff have both contributed to the philosophy of music.
Anti-essentialist
Some art theorists have proposed that the attempt to define art must be abandoned and have instead urged an anti-essentialist theory. In 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics' (1956), Morris Weitz famously argues that necessary and sufficient conditions will never be forthcoming for the concept 'art' because it is an "open concept".[250]
Beauty
Guy Sircello's work resulted in new analytic theories of love,[251] sublimity,[252] and beauty.[253] For Sircello, beauty is an objective, qualitative property. One author claims Sircello's theory is similar to Hume's.[254]
Mary Mothersill sought to restore earlier conceptions of beauty in Beauty Restored (1984).[255]
Colin Radford and Michael Weston introduced the paradox of fiction in their paper "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?"[257] In it, Radford and Weston discuss the idea of emotional responses to fiction, drawing upon the titular character from Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.[257] Their central inquiry is how people can be moved by things that do not exist. In their paper, they concluded that people's emotional responses to fiction are irrational.[257] In 1978, American philosopher Kendall Walton published the paper "Fearing Fictions", in which he addresses Radford and Weston's paradox.[258][259] This paper served as the impetus for Walton's make-believe theory.
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is a topic that has decreased in activity in recent decades. While the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly influenced by earlier authors.
Semantics
In his book Naming and Necessity, Kripke challenges the descriptivist theory with a causal theory of reference.[145] According to one author, "In the philosophy of language, Naming and Necessity is among the most important works ever."[146]
Hilary Putnam used the Twin Earth and brain in a vat thought experiments to argue for semantic externalism, or the view that the meanings of words are not psychological.[149][150][262] Donald Davidson uses the thought experiment of Swampman to advocate for semantic externalism.[263]
Skepticism
Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language provides a rule-following paradox that undermines the possibility of our ever following rules in our use of language and, so, calls into question the idea of meaning. Kripke writes that this paradox is "the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to date".[264] The portmanteau "Kripkenstein" has been coined as a term for a fictional person who holds the views expressed by Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein.
Paul Grice and his maxims and theory of implicature established the discipline of pragmatics.[265] Austin and John Searle also influenced the field. Pragmatics focuses on deixis and presuppositions and other context-dependent features of language:[266][267] those aspects of meaning and understanding that require speaker intentions, listener inferences, and real-world knowledge.[268]
Philosophy of mind and cognitive science
John Searle
John Searle suggests that the obsession with the philosophy of language during the 20th century has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind.[269][ae] Two common notions in analytic philosophy of mind are intentionality, as above, and qualia, a term introduced by C. I. Lewis.
Physicalism
Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, logical behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind of analytic philosophy for the first half of the 20th century.[270] Behaviorism later became much less popular, in favor of either type physicalism or functionalism. During this period, topics of the philosophy of mind were often related strongly to topics of cognitive science, such as modularity or innateness.
Emergent materialism holds that mental properties emerge as novel properties of complex material systems.[271] It can be divided into emergence which denies mental causation and emergence which allows for causal effect. A version of the latter type was advocated by Searle, called biological naturalism.
The other main group of materialist views in the philosophy of mind can be labeled non-emergent (or non-emergentist) materialism, and includes philosophical behaviorism, identity theory (reductive materialism), functionalism, and pure physicalism (eliminative materialism).
Behaviorism
Behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner (or Wittgenstein, or Quine) tended to opine either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways or that mental states were directly equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave.
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam criticized behaviorism by arguing that it confuses the symptoms of mental states with the mental states themselves, positing "super Spartans" who never display signs of pain.[272]
Type physicalism or type identity theory identified mental states with brain states. Former students of Ryle at the University of Adelaide Jack Smart and Ullin Place argued for type physicalism.[273][274]
Functionalism remains the dominant theory, viewing mind in terms of inputs and outputs.[af]Computationalism is a kind of functionalism.
The view was first associated with Sellars.[278] Another functionalist was Jerry Fodor. Fodor's language of thought hypothesis describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure (sometimes known as mentalese).[279]
Searle's Chinese room argument criticized functionalism and holds that while a computer can understand syntax, it could never understand semantics.[280]
Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers.[286] Chalmers introduced the notion of the hard problem of consciousness. He has criticized interactionism and shown sympathy with neutral monism. Kripke also makes a notable argument for dualism.[145][287]
Epiphenomenalism is sometimes classed as a kind of property dualism. It's the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but they do not cause anything else in return.[284][288]
Panpsychism
Yet another view is panpsychism, or the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.[289] Panpsychism can be contrasted with idealism by still believing in matter.[ag]
Theories of perception and consciousness
In recent years, a central focus of research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness and the philosophy of perception. While there is a general consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness,[291] there are many opinions as to the specifics.
Since the beginning, analytic philosophy has had an interest in the philosophy of mathematics.
Gödel
Kurt Gödel, a student of Hans Hahn of the Vienna Circle, produced his incompleteness theorems showing that Principia Mathematica also failed to reduce arithmetic to logic, and that Hilbert's program was unattainable.[294] Gödel has been ranked as one of the four greatest logicians of all time, along with Aristotle, Frege, and Tarski.[295]
Akin to the medieval debate on universals, between realists, idealists, and nominalists; the philosophy of mathematics has the debate between logicists or platonists, conceptualists or intuitionists, and formalists.[137]
...analytic philosophy has been a very heterogeneous 'movement'.... some forms of analytic philosophy have proven very sympathetic to the philosophy of religion and have provided a philosophical mechanism for responding to other more radical and hostile forms of analytic philosophy.[307]
As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of religion, largely dismissing (as per the logical positivists) the subject as a part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless.[ah] The demise of logical positivism led to a renewed interest in the philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers not only to introduce new problems, but to re-study perennial topics such as the existence of God, the rationality of belief in God, concepts of the nature of God, the nature of miracles, the problem of evil, and several others.[308] The Society of Christian Philosophers was established in 1978.
Plantinga was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017 and was once described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".[309] His seminal work God and Other Minds (1967) argues that belief in God is a properly basic belief akin to the belief in other minds.[310] Plantinga also developed a modal ontological argument in The Nature of Necessity (1974).[311]
Orthodox convert Richard Swinburne wrote a trilogy of books, arguing for God, consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason. Swinburne is notable for his belief thatGod's existence is contingent rather than necessary (it is possible God does not exist), but that nonetheless He does exist as a brute fact.[319]
Wittgenstein and religion
The analytic philosophy of religion has been preoccupied with Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion.[320] Wittgenstein fought for the Austrian army in the First World War and came upon a copy of Leo Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. At that time, he underwent some kind of religious conversion.[321][322]
Contemplative philosophy
Using first-hand remarks (which were later published in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as "contemplative philosophy", a Wittgensteinian school of thought rooted in the "Swansea school", and which includes philosophers such as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, and D. Z. Phillips, among others.
The name "contemplative philosophy" was coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's Culture and Value.[323][ai][aj]
Philosophy of science
Science and the philosophy of science have also had increasingly significant roles in analytic metaphysics. The theory of special relativity has had a profound effect on the philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the free will debate.[124] The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to commitments of philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism. Others will see a commitment to using science in philosophy as scientism.
In reaction to both the logical positivists and Popper, discussions of the philosophy of science during the last 40 years were dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science. Following Quine and Duhem, subsequent theories emphasized theory-ladenness.
Philosophers like Tim Maudlin focus on the philosophy of physics. Maudlin argues in The Metaphysics Within Physics (2007) that philosophy must reflect on physics.[333]
The philosophy of social science has also received increased interest. Peter Winch takes a Wittgensteinian perspective in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958).[338]
Notes
↑"Without exception, the best philosophy departments in the United States are dominated by analytic philosophy, and among the leading philosophers in the United States, all but a tiny handful would be classified as analytic philosophers.[2]
↑Quote on the definition: "'Analytic' philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities."[1]
↑"This tradition emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, truth. It is not a tradition that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particularly concerned with 'philosophy of life', though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry—though it is neither science nor mathematics."[6]
↑According to Scott Soames, "an implicit commitment—albeit faltering and imperfect—to the ideals of clarity, rigor and argumentation" and it "aims at truth and knowledge, as opposed to moral or spiritual improvement [...] the goal in analytic philosophy is to discover what is true, not to provide a useful recipe for living one's life".[7]
↑One author states "[I]t is difficult to give a precise definition of 'analytic philosophy' since it is not so much a specific doctrine as a loose concatenation of approaches to problems."[8] "I think Sluga is right in saying 'it may be hopeless to try to determine the essence of analytic philosophy.' Nearly every proposed definition has been challenged by some scholar. [...] [W]e are dealing with a family resemblance concept."[9] Another author states, "Analytic philosophy is a tradition held together both by ties of mutual influence and by family resemblances."[10]
↑The 1950s saw challenges to much which had been taken for granted, and roughly by 1960 anglophone philosophy began to incorporate a wider range of interests, opinions, and methods.[15] Despite this, most philosophers in Britain and America still consider themselves "analytic philosophers".[1] They have done so largely 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,[1][15] characterized by mathematical precision and thoroughness about a specific topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics".[15]
↑"The distinction (between analytic and continental philosophy) rests upon a confusion of geographical and methodological terms";[16] "it is like classifying cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese."[17]
↑"Practitioners of types of philosophizing that are not in the analytic tradition—such as phenomenology, classical pragmatism, existentialism, or Marxism—feel it necessary to define their position in relation to analytic philosophy."[2]
↑"Analytic philosophy is mainly associated with the contemporary English-speaking world, but it is by no means the only important philosophical tradition. In this volume two other immensely rich and important such traditions are introduced: Indian philosophy, and philosophical thought in Europe from the time of Hegel."[18]
↑"So, despite a few overlaps, analytical philosophy is not difficult to distinguish broadly [...] from other modern movements, like phenomenology, say, or existentialism, or from the large amount of philosophizing that has also gone on in the present century within frameworks deriving from other influential thinkers like Aquinas, Hegel, or Marx."[19]
↑Steven D. Hales described analytic philosophy as one of three types of philosophical method practiced in the West: "[i]n roughly reverse order by number of proponents, they are phenomenology, ideological philosophy, and analytic philosophy".[20]
↑"The distinction which Russell sets up between 'technical' philosophy and 'literary' philosophy has had many incarnations, from Plato's 'ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy'..."[21]
↑The analytic tradition has also been criticized for excessive formalism, ahistoricism,[24][25] and aloofness towards alternative disciplines and outsiders.[26][27] Some philosophers have tried to develop a postanalytic philosophy.
↑Soames also states that analytic philosophy is characterized by "a more piecemeal approach. There is, I think, a widespread presumption within the tradition that it is often possible to make philosophical progress by intensively investigating a small, circumscribed range of philosophical issues while holding broader, systematic questions in abeyance".[7]
↑"Analytic philosophy opposed right from its beginning English neo-Hegelianism of Bradley's sort and similar ones. It did not only criticize the latter's denial of the existence of an external world (anyway an unjust criticism), but also the bombastic, obscure style of Hegel's writings."[50]
↑Russell once explained, "Hegel had maintained that all separateness is illusory and that the universe is more like a pot of treacle than a heap of shot. I therefore said, "The universe is exactly like a heap of shot."'[56]
↑The Waverley novels were not acknowledged by Scott and penned anonymously saying only "by the author of Waverley" on the title page.
↑Carnap famously criticized the continental philosopher Heidegger for saying "the nothing noths".[94]
↑The first recorded use of the term "analytic philosophers" occurred in Wisdom's 1931 work, "Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to Bentham's Theory of Definition", which expounded on Bentham's concept of "paraphrasis": "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity".[27] At first Wisdom referred to "logic-analytic philosophers", then to "analytic philosophers". According to Michael Beaney, "the explicit articulation of the idea of paraphrasis in the work of both Wisdom in Cambridge and Ryle in Oxford represents a definite stage in the construction of analytic philosophy as a tradition".[27]
↑In a 2020 PhilPapers survey, 33% of respondents were accepting or leaning towards it.[277]
↑While analytic idealism remains a minority position, one notable example is the work of Bernardo Kastrup.[290] It seeks to resolve the so-called hard problem of consciousness by taking experience as ontologically fundamental.[290]
↑A notable exception is the series of Michael B. Foster's 1934–36 Mind articles involving the Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of modern science.
↑"My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them."[324]
↑This interpretation was first labeled "Wittgensteinian Fideism" by Kai Nielsen, but those who consider themselves members of the Swansea school rejected this construal as a caricature of Wittgenstein's position; this is especially true of Phillips.[325] Responding to this interpretation, Nielsen and Phillips became two of the most prominent interpreters of Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.[326]
↑Ometiță, Mihai (2017). Logic and Phenomenology: Wittgenstein / Ramsey / Schlick in Colour-Exclusion. In Marcos Silva, Colours in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 127-158.
↑Longworth, Guy (2017), "John Langshaw Austin", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 21 July 2020
↑Borradori, Giovanna (1994). The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn. University of Chicago Press. pp.30–31. ISBN978-0-226-06647-9.
12Soames, Scott. 2005. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning. Princeton University Press. Cited in Byrne, Alex and Hall, Ned. 2004. 'Necessary Truths'. Boston Review October/November 2004.
↑Bird, Alexander; Tobin, Emma (2024), "Natural Kinds", in Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 22 April 2024
↑Ikuenobe, Polycarp (2006). Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions. Oxford: Lexington Books. p.104. ISBN978-0-7391-1131-4.
↑Brennan, Andrew and Yeuk-Sze Lo (2002). "Environmental Ethics" §2Archived 1 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine , in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
↑See Hursthouse, Rosalind (2003). "Virtue Ethics" §3, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Donchin, Anne (2004). "Feminist Bioethics" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
↑Carter, Ian (18 November 2022). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Positive and Negative Liberty. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
↑Korta, Kepa; Perry, John (2024), "Pragmatics", in Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 7 June 2025
↑For summaries and some criticism of the different higher-order theories, see Van Gulick, Robert (2006) "Mirror Mirror – Is That All?" In Kriegel & Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The final draft is also available here "Mirror Mirror – Is That All?"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 2 October 2008. Retrieved 23 September 2008.. For Van Gulick's own view, see Van Gulick, Robert. "Higher-Order Global States HOGS: An Alternative Higher-Order Model of Consciousness." In Gennaro, R.J., (ed.) Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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