George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
In the philosophy of language, a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning, and it has become a central problem in analytic philosophy. The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it". This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary or nonexistent entities, without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same sense, so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
Saul Aaron Kripke was an American analytic philosopher and logician. He was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Kripke is considered one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, he has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory.
Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy and especially anglophone philosophy, focused on analysis. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a style of clarity of prose and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It is further characterized by an interest in language and meaning known as the linguistic turn. It has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, nature, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
Peter Thomas Geach was a British philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.
Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. It holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" that cannot be broken down any further, each of which can be understood independently of other facts.
Charlie Dunbar Broad, usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English epistemologist, historian of philosophy, philosopher of science, moral philosopher, and writer on the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy.
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.
Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
The aspects of Bertrand Russell's views on philosophy cover the changing viewpoints of philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), from his early writings in 1896 until his death in February 1970.
Remarks on Colour was one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's last works, written in Oxford in 1950, the year before he died.
The Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, founded in October 1878, is a philosophy discussion group that meets weekly at the University of Cambridge during term time. Speakers are invited to present a paper with a strict upper time limit of 45 minutes, after which there is discussion for an hour. Several Colleges have hosted the Club: Trinity College, King's College, Clare College, Darwin College, St John's College, and from 2014 Newnham College.
Martha Kneale was a British philosopher.
(Elsie) Helen Knight was a British philosopher. She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics.
Hidé Ishiguro is a Japanese analytic philosopher and emeritus professor at Keio University, Tokyo. She is considered an expert on the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on whom she has published many papers. She is also a Wittgenstein scholar.
