Analytic Philosophy

This room is being built. Here is its outline.

Around 1900, in Cambridge and Jena, a new way of doing philosophy began. Gottlob Frege invented modern logic and asked what meaning is; Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore rebelled against British Hegelianism in the name of logic, common sense and clarity; Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) — “The world is everything that is the case… Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — and later repudiated it in the Philosophical Investigations, arguing that meaning is use in a “language-game”. The Vienna Circle turned David Hume‘s Fork into the verification principle; Quine attacked the analytic–synthetic distinction; and in the second half of the century the tradition returned to the great questions — Rawls on justice, Anscombe, Foot and Murdoch on virtue, Kripke on necessity, Parfit on personal identity, Nagel on “what it is like to be a bat”.

The analytic–continental divide — symbolized by Carnap mocking Heidegger’s “the Nothing itself nothings” — is one of the great schisms of modern thought; this library refuses it, and links both sides.