Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries, although one of its founders, Gottlob Frege, was German, and another, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was Austrian.

Formalism

Logical atomism

Analytic philosophy has its origins in Gottlob Frege’s development of first-order predicate logic. This permitted a much wider range of sentences to be parsed into logical form. Bertrand Russell adopted it as his primary philosophical tool; a tool he thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” can be parsed in three distinct ways:

Related Topics:
Gottlob Frege - Predicate logic - Bertrand Russell

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• 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 equivalence 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 the case of the Present King of France.

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The Tractatus

As a young Austrian soldier, Ludwig Wittgenstein expanded and developed Russell's logical atomism into a comprehensive system, in a remarkable brief book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The world is the existence of certain states of affairs; 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.

Related Topics:
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Logical operator

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The Tractatus is a dense and thought-provoking work; but perhaps its most interesting utterance from the point of view of the method of analytic philosophy is:

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:5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

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This shows clearly the reason for the close relationship between philosophy of language and analytic philosophy. Language is the principal—or perhaps the only—tool of the philosopher. For Wittgenstein, and for analytic philosophy in general, philosophy consists in clarifying how language can be used. The hope is that when language is used clearly, philosophical problems are found to dissolve.

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Wittgenstein thought he had set out the 'final solution' to all philosophical problems, and so went off to become a school teacher. However, he later revisited the inadequacy of logical atomism, and further expanded the philosophy of language by his posthumous book Philosophical Investigations.

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Natural language semantics

Davidson. Oxford in 1970s. Strawson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans.

Related Topics:
Davidson - Strawson - Dummett - McDowell

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