Analytic philosophy
Traditions by region
Analytic philosophy is the branch & tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in a Western world as living as particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the remodel of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and remains today. There is, however, no relieve oneself distinction between continental and analytical philosophy.
Central figures in this historical coding of analytic philosophy are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history put the logical positivists particularly Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Saul Kripke, and Karl Popper.
Analytic philosophy is characterized by an emphasis on language, invited as the linguistic turn, and for its clarity and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It also takes things piecemeal, in "an try to focus philosophical reflection on smaller problems that lead to answers to bigger questions".
Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, nearly notably continental philosophies such(a) as existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism. The analytical tradition has been critiqued for ahistoricism.
History
The history of analytic philosophy taken in the narrower sense of "20th-/21st-century analytic philosophy" is normally thought to begin with the rejection of British idealism, a neo-Hegelian movement.
British idealism as taught by philosophers such as relations between items are internal relations, that is, properties of the sort of those items. Russell, along with Wittgenstein, in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the impression that the world consists of independent facts.
Russell, during his early career, along with his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was much influenced by Gottlob Frege 1848–1925, who developed predicate logic, which helps a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical earn than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic. Frege was also influential as a philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to Edmund Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik, which argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular pretend figure or combination. objects and counting them, Frege argued that mathematics and logical system have their own validity, self-employed person of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians which were the basis of arithmetic according to the "psychologism" of Husserl's Philosophie. Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic 1884 and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic German: Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893–1903, where he reported an selection to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.
Like Frege, Russell argued that mathematics is reducible to logical fundamentals in The Principles of Mathematics 1903. Later, his book result with Whitehead, Principia Mathematica 1910–1913, encouraged numerous philosophers to renew their interest in the developing of symbolic logic. Additionally, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method Russell thought could expose the underlying format of philosophical problems. For example, the English word "is" has three distinct meanings which predicate logic can express as follows:
Russell sought to decide various philosophical problems by applying such logical distinctions, nearly famously in his analysis of definite descriptions in "On Denoting" 1905.
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized devloping an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary Linguistic communication that, in their opinion, often portrayed philosophy invalid. During this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language and hence philosophical problems by using logic to formalize how philosophical statements are made.
Russell became an advocate of logical atomism. Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921. He thereby argued that the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed 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.
During the unhurried 1920s to 1940s, a office of philosophers of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle developed Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism into a doctrine call as "logical positivism" or logical empiricism. Logical positivism used formal logical methods to instituting an empiricist account of knowledge. Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, claimed 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 consequently reduced to pseudo-statements, neither empirically true nor false and therefore meaningless. In reaction to what he considered excesses of logical positivism, Karl Popper insisted on the role of falsification in the philosophy of science—although his general method was also part of the analytic tradition. With the coming to energy of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, numerous members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the US, which helped to reinforce the direction of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.
Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct transmitted matter of its own. The positivists adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful solution is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, particularly those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.
After World War II, during the behind 1940s and 1950s, analytic philosophy became involved with ordinary-language analysis. This resulted in two main trends. One continued Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which differed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. The other, known as "Oxford philosophy", involved J. L. Austin. In contrast to earlier analytic philosophers including the early Wittgenstein who thought philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages, ordinary-language philosophers claimed that ordinary language already represents many subtle distinctions non recognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or problems. While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors such as culture, language, historical conditions, ordinary-language philosophy emphasizes the usage of language by ordinary people. The most prominent ordinary-language philosophers during the 1950s were the aforementioned Austin and Gilbert Ryle.
Ordinary-language philosophers often sought to dissolve philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of ordinary misunderstanding language. Examples increase Ryle, who tried to dispose of "Descartes' myth", and Wittgenstein.