Analytic Philosophy

Analytic philosophy is the dominant tradition of philosophy in the English-speaking world, and increasingly in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere, from the early twentieth century to the present. It is less a doctrine than a style: a commitment to clarity, to explicit argument, to the use of logic, and to the conviction that many of the deepest problems of philosophy arise from — and can be clarified by attending to — the logic of our language. Its founders were a German mathematician, Gottlob Frege, who invented modern logic; two Cambridge rebels, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, who overthrew the reigning British Hegelianism; and an Austrian engineer turned philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who twice reinvented the subject. Its history runs through the Vienna Circle and logical positivism, Oxford “ordinary language” philosophy, W. V. O. Quine‘s naturalism, and — after about 1960 — a great revival of metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy led by figures such as Saul Kripke, John Rawls, Elizabeth Anscombe and Derek Parfit.

Origins: logic and the revolt against idealism

At the end of the nineteenth century, the leading philosophers in Britain were idealists — F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, J. M. E. McTaggart — who held, in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, that reality is a single spiritual whole and that ordinary things, relations, space and time are mere “appearances”. Two young Cambridge philosophers who had been taught this doctrine turned against it. In 1903 Moore published “The Refutation of Idealism” and Principia Ethica; the same year Russell published The Principles of Mathematics. Russell later recalled the liberation: “we believed that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them”. Against the idealist claim that all relations are “internal” to a single whole, they insisted that the world is many things, really related, and that philosophy proceeds by analysis — breaking complex propositions into their simple constituents.

Meanwhile in Jena, Frege had already created the instrument the new philosophy would use. His Begriffsschrift (“Concept-Script”, 1879) invented quantificational logic — the logic of “all” and “some” with variables — which replaced the syllogistic logic of Aristotle after two thousand years. Frege’s aim was to show that arithmetic is a branch of logic (logicism); along the way he asked what it is for a sentence to have meaning, and distinguished the sense of an expression from its reference. Russell discovered a contradiction in Frege’s system in 1902 — the paradox of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves — and spent the next decade, with A. N. Whitehead, rebuilding logicism in the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910–13).

Russell’s theory of descriptions (1905), which analysed “The present King of France is bald” as a claim that there is exactly one present King of France and that he is bald — and so simply false, not about a non-existent object — became, in F. P. Ramsey’s phrase, “a paradigm of philosophy”. It showed how the grammatical form of a sentence can mislead us about its logical form, and that a philosophical puzzle can be dissolved by revealing the real structure underneath.

The Tractatus and the Vienna Circle

Wittgenstein came to Cambridge in 1911 to study with Russell, and within two years was teaching his teacher. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) argued that the world is the totality of facts; that a meaningful proposition is a logical picture of a possible fact; that the propositions of logic are tautologies that say nothing; and that ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life and philosophy itself lie beyond the limits of what can be said. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In Vienna, a group of scientists and philosophers gathered around Moritz Schlick from 1924 — Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, Friedrich Waismann, Kurt Gödel attended — read the Tractatus line by line and turned it into a programme. The Vienna Circle’s manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World (1929), proclaimed logical positivism (or logical empiricism): the meaning of a statement is its method of verification; statements that can be verified neither by logic nor by experience — the claims of metaphysics, theology and much of ethics — are not false but meaningless. Carnap’s essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932) took as its example Martin Heidegger‘s sentence “The Nothing itself nothings”, and so drew the battle line between analytic and continental philosophy that has lasted ever since. In Britain, the young A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) made the doctrine famous: moral judgments, he said, merely express feelings — “stealing money is wrong” means roughly “stealing money!!” spoken in a tone of disapproval.

The Circle was broken by Nazism. Schlick was murdered by a former student in 1936; Carnap, Feigl, Reichenbach and others emigrated to the United States, where logical empiricism shaped American philosophy of science for a generation.

Ordinary language and the later Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein himself returned to Cambridge in 1929 and gradually abandoned the Tractatus. In the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) he argued that language has no single essence; that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”; that our words are tools in countless “language-games” embedded in “forms of life”; and that philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday”. Philosophy’s task is not to build theories but to assemble reminders of how we actually use words, so as to “show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”.

At Oxford after 1945, ordinary language philosophy — Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. L. A. Hart — took a parallel path. Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) attacked the Cartesian “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine” as a “category mistake”. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) showed that many utterances are not descriptions but actions — “I promise”, “I do”, “I name this ship” — and founded speech-act theory. Strawson’s “On Referring” (1950) challenged Russell’s theory of descriptions, and his Individuals (1959) revived “descriptive metaphysics” in the manner of Immanuel Kant.

Quine and naturalism

The decisive American voice was Quine. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) he attacked the distinction between analytic truths (true by meaning, like “all bachelors are unmarried”) and synthetic truths (true by the facts), on which logical positivism rested; and he attacked reductionism, the idea that each statement can be confirmed or refuted on its own. “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.” Knowledge is a web; any belief can be revised, even logic, if we make adjustments elsewhere. Quine’s naturalism — philosophy as continuous with science, epistemology as a chapter of psychology — and his austere ontology (“to be is to be the value of a bound variable”) set the agenda for decades.

The return of the great questions

After 1960, analytic philosophy, which had once declared metaphysics and normative ethics meaningless, returned to them with formidable technical resources.

• Ethics. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) argued that the notions of moral “obligation” and “ought” were survivals of a divine-law ethics no longer believed, and urged a return to Aristotle‘s virtues; with Philippa Foot (who invented the trolley problem in 1967) and Iris Murdoch, she launched the revival of virtue ethics. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984) carried utilitarian reasoning into practical and population ethics.
• Political philosophy. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) revived the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant; Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered it from the libertarian right.
• Metaphysics. Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1970 lectures, 1980 book) revived talk of necessity and essence, arguing that names are “rigid designators” and that there are necessary truths known only through experience (“water is H₂O”). David Lewis defended the reality of possible worlds.
• Mind. After behaviourism and the identity theory, functionalism (Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor) treated the mind as a kind of computation; Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) and Frank Jackson’s “Mary’s Room” (1982) pressed the problem of consciousness, which David Chalmers named “the hard problem” (1995).
• Religion. Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne brought analytic rigour to the philosophy of religion, reviving versions of the ontological and cosmological arguments.

Style and its critics

Analytic philosophy prizes clarity, precision and argument; its typical form is the journal article that states a thesis, considers objections and replies. Its critics — from the continental tradition, from the later Wittgenstein himself, and from within — have charged it with scholasticism, with forgetting history, with a narrow focus on language and science, and with ignoring the questions of how to live that drew people to philosophy in the first place. Its defenders reply that clarity is a moral as well as an intellectual virtue: as Russell put it, philosophy should be pursued “not for the sake of any definite answers… but rather for the sake of the questions themselves”.

In conversation

• “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — the Tractatus’s limit of sense, and its later repudiation.
• The analytic–continental divide — Carnap against Heidegger’s “Nothing”.
• Analysis as therapy or as science — Wittgenstein’s fly-bottle versus Quine’s continuity with physics.