Analytic Philosophy

Period: ~1879–present | Context: Crisis in the foundations of mathematics; reaction to Hegelian Absolute Idealism; rise of symbolic logic; debates over philosophical method

Overview

Analytic philosophy emerged at the end of the 19th century as a response to the dominance of British Idealism (Bradley, Bosanquet) and to the project of rigorously grounding mathematics and knowledge. It is defined less by doctrines than by a style: conceptual clarity, logical analysis of language, attention to distinctions.

I. Origins: Frege and the Logical Revolution

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)

German mathematician and logician, considered the founder of modern logic and the analytic philosophy of language.

Begriffsschrift (Concept Script, 1879): First formulation of a predicate logic calculus — a system of notation for formal deduction that supersedes Aristotelian syllogistic logic. Frege introduces quantifiers, functions, and the distinction between argument and function.

The Foundations of Arithmetic (Grundlagen der Arithmetik, 1884): The logicist project — arithmetic is reducible to pure logic. Frege seeks to define numbers without appealing to spatial or temporal intuition.

Sense/Reference Distinction (“Über Sinn und Bedeutung”, 1892): One of the most influential results in the philosophy of language. Frege distinguishes:

• Reference (Bedeutung): the object to which the term refers
• Sense (Sinn): the mode of presentation of the object

Example: “The Morning Star” and “The Evening Star” have the same reference (Venus) but different senses — which is why “The Morning Star is the Evening Star” is informative, not trivial.

Basic Laws of Arithmetic (Grundgesetze, 1893/1903): The logicist project suffers a fatal blow when Russell discovers a contradiction in Frege’s Axiom V (the set of all sets that do not contain themselves — Russell’s Paradox).

II. Russell: Logical Atomism and the Theory of Descriptions

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

British mathematician and philosopher; together with Moore, broke from British Idealism and founded the English analytic tradition.

Theory of Definite Descriptions (“On Denoting”, 1905): Russell analyses expressions like “the present King of France” — which seem to refer but refer to nothing existing. Logical analysis reveals that grammatical form is misleading: “The present King of France is bald” does not presuppose the king’s existence; it is simply false when no such king exists. The real logical form is: There is exactly one x such that x is the present King of France and x is bald.

Principia Mathematica (with A.N. Whitehead, 1910–13): Monumental attempt to reduce all mathematics to formal logic. The Theory of Types was developed to avoid paradoxes such as Russell’s.

Logical Atomism (1918–19): The world is composed of atomic facts (combinations of simple objects); true propositions mirror those facts; an ideal language would be isomorphic to the structure of facts. Philosophy must analyse complex propositions down to their atomic components.

III. Wittgenstein I: The Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) — First phase

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/22): A work of extreme concision and systematicity.

Pictorial Theory of Language: A proposition is a picture (Bild) of a possible state of affairs. Elementary propositions represent atomic facts by sharing the same logical form.

Limits of Language: What can be said are the propositions of natural science. Ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical questions cannot be said — they show themselves. The famous final sentence of the Tractatus (7): “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Tautologies and Contradictions: The propositions of logic are tautologies — true in every possible state of affairs; they say nothing about the world, but show the logical structure of language.

IV. The Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism

Gathered in Vienna from the 1920s around Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), the Circle included Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and, on the periphery, A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) in the British context.

Verification Principle: A proposition is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. Metaphysical statements — “God exists”, “The Absolute is eternal” — are meaningless, not false.

Anti-Metaphysics: Carnap in “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932) argues that metaphysical propositions violate logical syntax or are empirically uncontrollable.

Physicalism and Unity of Science: Neurath proposes that all scientific language be reducible to a physical observational language — a protocol of observation.

Collapse of the Programme: The verification principle itself is neither empirically verifiable nor analytic — a difficulty acknowledged by the members themselves. Quine, in the next generation, would formulate a more fundamental critique.

V. Ordinary Language Philosophy

After the Second World War, the centre of analytic philosophy shifted to Oxford and Cambridge. The focus changed: instead of constructing ideal languages, the aim became analysing the actual use of ordinary language.

Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976)

The Concept of Mind (1949): Ryle criticises Cartesian dualism as a “category mistake” — treating the mind as a ghostly entity inside the body (the “ghost in the machine”). Mental concepts describe dispositions to behaviour, not hidden internal states.

J.L. Austin (1911–1960)

Speech Act Theory: Developed in lectures published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962). Fundamental distinction:

• Locutionary act: the act of uttering words with sense and reference
• Illocutionary act: what one does in uttering (promising, ordering, asserting, questioning)
• Perlocutionary act: the effect produced in the hearer Austin had earlier distinguished constative utterances (describing facts, true or false) from performatives (performing actions — “I promise”, “I hereby christen”), but later recognised that every utterance has an illocutionary dimension.

Peter Strawson (1919–2006)

Criticises Russell’s theory of descriptions — in “On Referring” (1950) he argues that when the King of France does not exist, the question is not whether the proposition is true or false, but that the utterance lacks application (presupposition vs. assertion).

VI. Quine and the Critique of Logical Empiricism

W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000)

The article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951, Philosophical Review; reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 1953) dismantles two central presuppositions of positivism:

Dogma 1 — Analytic/Synthetic Distinction: There is no clear boundary between analytic truths (true by meaning, e.g. “all bachelors are unmarried”) and synthetic ones (true by fact). The notion of “truth by meaning” presupposes the notion of “synonymy”, which in turn presupposes “analyticity” — a circularity.

Dogma 2 — Reductionism: The idea that each proposition has an isolated empirical content. Quine proposes holism: beliefs face the tribunal of experience not individually but collectively (Duhem-Quine thesis). Faced with recalcitrant experience, we can revise any belief — including logical laws.

Word and Object (1960): The indeterminacy of translation — there is no fact that determines which of multiple translation manuals is correct. Translating “gavagai” as “rabbit” is only one of incompatible but equally empirically adequate alternatives.

Naturalized Epistemology (“Epistemology Naturalized”, 1969): Epistemology is not the foundation of science but a chapter of it. The question is how human beings actually arrive at science from sensory inputs — an empirical, not a transcendental, question.

VII. Davidson, Kripke, and Later Developments

Donald Davidson (1917–2003)

Truth-Conditional Semantics: The semantics of a language is given by a Tarski-style theory specifying the truth conditions of sentences. Anomalous Monism (“Mental Events”, 1970): Mental events are physical (monism), but mental properties do not reduce to physical properties by laws (anomalism) — dependence without reduction. Conceptual Scheme (“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, 1974): Criticises conceptual relativism — the idea of radically different conceptual schemes presupposes a basis for translation, which is incompatible with radical incommensurability.

Saul Kripke (1940–2022)

Naming and Necessity (lectures 1970; published 1980): Against Russell’s and Frege’s description theory: proper names are rigid designators — they refer to the same object in all possible worlds. “Aristotle” is not an abbreviation of a description; it refers directly. A posteriori necessity: “Water is H₂O” is necessarily true (water could not be something else in its essence) but is discovered empirically — refuting the Kantian equivalence of necessity and apriority.

VIII. Major Contemporary Debates

See also

• Twentieth-Century Philosophy
• Philosophy of Mind
• Rationalism and Empiricism