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Analytic philosophy
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Analytic philosophy (sometimes, analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments.
The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to
(a) A tradition of doing philosophy characterised by an emphasis on clarity and argument, often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language, and a respect for the natural sciences.
(b) Certain developments in early twentieth century philosophy, such as the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, and logical positivism.
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Encyclopedia
Analytic philosophy (sometimes, analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments.
The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to
(a) A tradition of doing philosophy characterised by an emphasis on clarity and argument, often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language, and a respect for the natural sciences.
(b) Certain developments in early twentieth century philosophy, such as the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, and logical positivism. In this sense, analytic philosophy makes specific philosophical commitments (some or all of which are rejected by many contemporary analytic philosophers), in particular:
- The positivist view that there are no specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. (This may be contrasted with the traditional foundationalism, deriving from Aristotle, that views philosophy as a special sort of science, the highest one, which investigates the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. As a result, many analytic philosophers have considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences.)
- The view that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions. (The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it (often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system) to display its similarity with all other propositions of the same type. However, analytic philosophers disagree widely about the correct logical form of ordinary language.)
- The rejection of sweeping philosophical systems in favour of close attention to detail, common sense, and ordinary language.
The Analytic Movement: 1900 - 1960
In its narrower sense, "analytic philosophy" is used to refer to a specific philosophical program that is ordinarily dated from about 1900 to 1960.
History
The analytic program in philosophy is ordinarily dated to the work of English philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in the early 20th century. They turned away from then-dominant forms of Hegelianism (objecting in particular to its idealism and purported obscurity) and began to develop a new sort of conceptual analysis, based on new developments in logic.
Origins: Frege
Russell in his early career, along with collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was deeply influenced by Gottlob Frege. Most importantly Gottlob Frege helped to develop predicate logic. This allowed a much wider range of sentences to be parsed into logical form. Frege was also a key figure in philosophy of mathematics in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, which attempted to show that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them, Frege sought to show that mathematics and logic have their own validity, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians (which were the foundation of arithmetic in Husserl's "psychologism"). Frege's own work, the Begriffsschrift, developed the concepts of a specific form of modern logic by making use of the notions of the sense and reference. Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic where he provides an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.
Like Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to fundamental logical principles. Their Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) encouraged many philosophers to take a renewed interest in the development of symbolic logic. In addition, Bertrand Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical tool, a tool he thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” has three distinct meanings in predicate logic:
- in 'the cat is asleep: the is of predication says that 'x is P': P(x)
- in 'there is a cat”: the is of existence says that there is an x: ?(x)
- in 'three is half of six': the is of identity says that x is the same as y: x=y
Russell sought to resolve various philosophical issues by applying such clear and clean distinctions, most famously in his analysis of definite descriptions in "On Denoting," in Mind 14 (1905): 479-493. .
Ideal Language Analysis
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein focused on creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their view, often got philosophers into trouble. This philosophical trend can be called "ideal-language analysis" or "formalism." In this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language, and hence philosophical problems, by making use of formal logic to formalize the way in which philosophical statements are made. Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He there argued that the world is the existence of certain states of affairs and these states of affairs can be expressed in the language of first-order predicate logic. So a picture of the world can be built up by expressing atomic facts in atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators.
Logical Positivism
In the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism was developed by a group of thinkers in Vienna and Berlin, who formed the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle into a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logical tools to underpin an empiricist account of our knowledge of the world. Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, held that 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. The claims of ethics, aesthetics and theology were, accordingly, pseudo-statements, neither true nor false, just meaningless nonsense. Karl Popper's insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical positivists. With the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany and Austria, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles were forced to flee Germany, on account of their leftist sympathies. Most commonly, they fled to Britain and America, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone world.
Logical positivists typically saw philosophy as having a very narrow role. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. The positivists typically adopted some type of verificationism, according to which every meaningful non-analytic statement is capable of being verified in terms of more basic statements about experiences or observables. This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.
Ordinary Language Analysis
After the War in the late 40s and 50s, analytic philosophy took a turn toward ordinary-language analysis. This movement followed in the wake of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which totally departed from his earlier work. In contrast to earlier analytic philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) who thought philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages, ordinary language philosophers held that ordinary language already reflected a large number of subtle distinctions that had gone unrecognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or problems. While schools such as logical positivism focus on logical terms, 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. Some have argued that ordinary language philosophy is of a more sociological grounding, as it essentially focuses on the use of language within social contexts. The most prominent ordinary language philosophers in the 1950s were Austin and Ryle. Some say that this movement marked a return to the common sense philosophy advocated by G.E. Moore.
Ordinary language philosophy often sought to disperse philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of misunderstanding ordinary language. See for example Ryle (who attempted to dispose of "Descartes' myth")) and Wittgenstein, among others.
1960 and Beyond
In the early 1950s, logical positivism was critically challenged by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism, and Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Following 1960, both logical positivism and natural language philosophy fell rapidly out of fashion. and Anglophone philosophy began to incorporate a wider range of interests, views, and methods but most philosophers in Britain and America still consider themselves to be "analytic philosophers." Largely, they have done so 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, characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic and opposed to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics." This interpretation of the history is far from universally accepted, and its opponents would say that it grossly downplays the role of Wittgenstein in the sixties and seventies. Peter Hacker, reflects the view of Wittgensteinians when he contends that much contemporary philosophy that calls itself analytic does not deserve the title. According to him , in the mid 1970s, partly for economic reasons, philosophy’s centre of gravity shifted from Britain to the US, where Wittgenstein’s influence had never been well rooted. There, under the influence of the growing prestige of certain exciting scientific and technological developments, like computers, neurophysiology and Chomskyan linguistics, his powerful arguments were simply disregarded. “What from Wittgenstein’s perspective were diseases of the intellect, to many of which he had succumbed as a young man and which he had laboured long to extirpate, broke out afresh in mutated virulent forms.’ (Hacker p272).
Contemporary analytic philosophy
Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests, assumptions, and methods--and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic movement before 1960--analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics." A few of the most important and active fields and subfields in analytic philosophy are summarized in the following sections.
Philosophy of mind and cognitive science
Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century. Behaviorists tended to hold either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways or that mental states were equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave. Behaviorism later became far less popular, in favor of type physicalism or functionalism, theories which identified mental states with brain states. During this period, topics in the philosophy of mind were often in close contact with issues in cognitive science such as modularity or innateness. Finally, analytic philosophy has featured many philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence, with David Chalmers as perhaps the most prominent representative.
John Searle suggests that the obsession with linguistic philosophy of the last century has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind, in which functionalism is currently the dominant theory. In recent years, a central focus for research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness. And while there is a general consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, there are many views as to how the specifics work out. The best known theories are Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology, Fred Dretske and Michael Tye's representationalism, and the higher-order theories of either David M. Rosenthal — who advocates a higher-order thought (HOT) model — or David Armstrong and William Lycan — who advocate a higher-order perception (HOP) model. An alternative higher-order theory, the higher-order global states (HOGS) model, is offered by Robert van Gulick.
Ethics in analytic philosophy
The first half of the twentieth century was marked by the widespread neglect of ethical philosophy and the popularity of skeptical attitudes towards value (e.g. emotivism). During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical approach to ethics to remain popular. However, as the influence of logical positivism began to wane mid-century, contemporary analytic philosophers began to have a renewed interest in ethics. G.E.M. Anscombe’s 1958 Modern Moral Philosophy sparked a revival of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach and John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice restored interest in Kantian ethical philosophy. At present, contemporary ethical philosophy is dominated by three schools: utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and Kantianism.
Another major development in the latter half of the twentieth century (c. 1970), has been contemporary ethical philosophy's overwhelming concern with practical applications, especially in relation to environmental issues, animal rights and the many challenges thrown up by advancing medical science.
As a side-effect of the focus on logic and language in the early years of analytic philosophy, the tradition initially had little to say on the subject of ethics. The attitude was widespread among early analytics that these subjects were unsystematic, and merely expressed personal attitudes about which philosophy could have little or nothing to say. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, remarks that values cannot be a part of the world, and if they are anything at all they must be beyond or outside the world somehow, and that hence language, which describes the world, can say nothing about them. One interpretation of these remarks found expression in the doctrine of the logical positivists that statements about value — including all ethical and aesthetic judgments — are, like metaphysical claims, literally meaningless and therefore non-cognitive; that is, not able to be either true or false. Social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and various more specialized subjects like philosophy of history thus moved to the fringes of English-language philosophy for some time.
By the 1950s debates had begun to arise over whether — and if so, how — ethical statements really were non-cognitive. Charles Stevenson argued for expressivism, R. M. Hare advocated a view called universal prescriptivism. Phillipa Foot contributed several essays attacking all these positions, and the collapse of logical positivism as a cohesive research programme led to a renewed interest in ethics. Perhaps most influential in this area was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose landmark monograph "Intention" was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle", and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of moral psychology. A favorite student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the philosophical lexicon, declared the "is-ought" impasse to be a dead end, and led to a revival in virtue ethics.
Analytic philosophy of religion
As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy avoided the study of philosophy of religion, dismissing the subject as part of metaphysics and meaningless. The collapse of logical positivism renewed interest in philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers such as William Alston, John Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Robert Merrihew Adams, Richard Swinburne, David Alan Johnson and Antony Flew to not only introduce new problems, but to re-open classical ones, such as the nature of miracles and the arguments for and against the existence of God.
Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil. Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.
Analytic philosophy of religion has also been preoccupied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion. Using first-hand remarks (which would later be 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 tradition" and which includes Wittgensteinians such as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch and D. Z. Phillips, amongst others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was first coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's "Culture and Value." This interpretation was first labeled, "Wittgesnteinian Fideism," by Kai Nielsen but those who consider themselves Wittgensteinians in the Swansea tradition have relentlessly and repeatedly rejected this construal as caricature of Wittgenstein's considered position; this is especially true of D. Z. Phillips. Responding to this interpretation, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips became two of the most prominent philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.
Philosophy of religion is enjoying a rebirth after decades of neglect in academia. A significant portion of philosophy of religion is dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein's interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy, and whether there is such a thing as Wittgensteinian fideism. Wittgensteinians in the Swansea tradition, as well as so-called New Wittgensteinians, and postmodernists have participated in this discussion.
Political philosophy
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 1971 book A Theory of Justice, produced a sophisticated and closely argued defence of a liberal welfare state. This was followed in short order by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defence of free-market libertarianism. Isiah Berlin has had a notable influence on both analytic political philosophy and Liberalism with his lecture entitled : Two Concepts of Liberty.
Recent decades have also seen the rise of several critiques of liberalism, including the feminist critiques of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the communitarian critiques of Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre (though it should be noted both shy away from the term), and the multiculturalist critiques of Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor. Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas is another important — if controversial — figure in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.
Analytical Marxism
Another interesting development in the area of political philosophy has been the emergence of a school known as Analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply the techniques of analytic philosophy, along with tools of modern social science such as rational choice theory to the elucidation of the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is Oxford University philosopher G.A. Cohen, whose 1978 work, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is generally taken as representing the genesis of this school. In that book, Cohen attempted to apply the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defense of Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent Analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. All these people have attempted to build upon 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.
Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy in attempt to advance a socialist theory of justice that stands in contrast to both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he points to Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
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 key assumptions of Liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, Communitarians challenge the Liberal assumption that the individual can be viewed as fully autonomous from the community in which he lives and is brought up. Instead, they push for a conception of the individual that emphasizes the role that the community plays in shaping his or her values, thought processes and opinions.
Analytic metaphysics
One striking break with early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century. Philosophers such as David Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity, and abstract objects.
Among the developments that led to the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, which was generally taken to undermine Carnap's distinction between existence questions internal to a framework and those external to it.
Metaphysics remains a fertile area for research, having recovered from the attacks of A.J. Ayer and the logical positivists. And though many were inherited from previous decades, the debate remains fierce. The philosophy of fiction, the problem of empty names, and the debate over existence's status as a property have all risen out of relative obscurity to become central concerns, while perennial issues such as free will, possible worlds, and the philosophy of time have had new life breathed into them.
Science has also played an increasingly significant role in 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. The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to widespread commitments among philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism.
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is another area that has slowed down over the course of the last four decades, as evidenced by the fact that few major figures in contemporary philosophy treat it as a primary research area. Indeed, while the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly under the influence of those figures from the first half of the century: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Alfred Tarski, W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson.
Contemporary philosophy does retain its penchant for linguistic issues, however, as a topic underpinning all other areas of philosophy. In Europe, for example, philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard have all made significant contributions to poststructuralism and deconstruction, with language analysis constituting an important aspect of both their arguments and their conclusions. Similarly, the debate between Eternalists and Presentists — though still heavily influenced by the philosophy of science — has increasingly been put in linguistic terms and focused on linguistic issues.
Philosophy of science
Reacting against the earlier philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, who had suggested the falsifiability criterion on which to judge the demarcation between science and non-science, discussions in philosophy of science in the last forty years were dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science. Thomas Samuel Kuhn is one of the major philosophers of science representative of the former theory, while Paul Feyerabend is representative of the latter theory. Philosophy of biology has also undergone considerable growth, particularly due to the considerable debate in recent years over evolution. Here again, Daniel Dennett and his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea stand at the foreground of this debate.
Epistemology
Owing largely to a seminal paper of Gettier, epistemology has seen a rebirth in the analytic philosophy of the last 50 years. A large portion of current epistemological research aims to resolve the problems that Gettier's examples presented to the traditional justified true belief model of knowledge. Recent work has also investigated basic knowledge and the role of philosophical intuitions in epistemology.
Schools of thought
Contextualism
In epistemology, contextualism is the treatment of the word 'knows' as context-sensitive. Context-sensitive expressions are ones that "express different propositions relative to different contexts of use."
Epiphenomenalism
In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is a view according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world.
Functionalism In philosophy of mind, functionalism is a philosophical position holding that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, their causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be multiply realizable; in other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems, even perhaps computers, so long as the system performs the appropriate functions.
Logical atomism
The theory holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" (or "atoms") that cannot be broken down any further.
Logical positivism Logical positivism (or logical empiricism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism, the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation.
Naturalism Naturalism is the view that the scientific method (hypothesize, predict, test, repeat) is the only effective way to investigate reality. Most notably defended by W.V. Quine's with his work to reduce epistemology to psychology.
Neopragmatism
Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism, is a recent (since the 1960s) philosophical term for philosophy that reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. It has been associated with a variety of thinkers, among them Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Fish though none of these figures have called themselves "neopragmatists".
Non-cognitivism
In metaethics, non-cognitivism is the view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false. Examples of this view emotivism, prescriptivism, quasi-realism, and expressivism.
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approached traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by forgetting what words actually mean in a language.
Particularism
Moral particularism is the view that there are no moral principles and that moral judgement can be found only as one decides particular cases, either real or imagined.
Physicalism In philosophy of mind and metaphysics, physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. The term was coined by Otto Neurath in a series of early 20th century essays on the subject.
Quietism
In metaphilosophy, the view that the role of philosophy is therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive theses to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects.
Virtue Ethics
The contemporary revival of virtue theory is frequently traced to the philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe's 1958 essay, Modern Moral Philosophy and to Philippa Foot, who published a collection of essays in 1978 entitled Virtues and Vices.
Further reading
- The offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject:
- , by Johannes Hirschberger; edited by Clare Hay with new chapters on Analytical Philosophy; ISBN 9780718830922
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