Analytic Philosophy

Few philosophers have written two works so different that one seems to refute the other — and yet have seen both become classics. Ludwig Wittgenstein is the paradigm case. The young man who in 1921 published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, convinced he had definitively solved the problems of philosophy, is the same man who, three decades later, left in the Philosophical Investigations a meticulous critique of his own early theses. Between the two works lies not only a theoretical turn but one of the most singular intellectual stories of the twentieth century. To understand Wittgenstein is to understand two opposed ways of thinking about what language is and what philosophy can do. ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

Bernard Williams Bernard Williams was one of the most important British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and one of the most penetrating critics of the ambition to ground ethics in a single, impersonal theoretical system. He taught at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. Against both utilitarianism and Kantianism, Williams insisted on the irreducible complexity of moral life, on the importance of the first-person perspective, of personal commitments and emotions, and on the inability of grand theories to capture everything that matters ethically. His writing combines classical learning, psychological sensitivity, and an elegant distrust of philosophical oversimplification. ...

Bertrand Russell Born in 1872 into an influential British aristocratic family — he was the grandson of a prime minister — Bertrand Russell had one of the longest and most varied careers in philosophy: he was a logician, mathematician, essayist, educator, and political activist, spanning nearly a century of history. He studied at Cambridge, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and, faithful to his pacifism, was imprisoned during the First World War and led, in his nineties, the campaign against nuclear weapons (the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). He is, with Frege and Wittgenstein, one of the founders of analytic philosophy. ...

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett was one of the most influential and provocative philosophers of mind and cognitive science of recent decades. A professor at Tufts University, where he co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies, he defended throughout his career a thoroughgoing naturalism: mind, consciousness, and free will can be fully integrated into a scientific, Darwinian worldview, leaving no mysterious residue behind. A writer of remarkable clarity and wit, Dennett engaged closely with artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, and also became a prominent public figure known for his criticism of religion. He died in April 2024. ...

David Chalmers David John Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers of mind of the past three decades. Born in Sydney, Australia, and trained in mathematics before turning to philosophy, Chalmers became a professor at the University of Arizona and later at New York University (NYU), where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. His debut book, The Conscious Mind (1996), redefined the terms of the debate on consciousness and placed what he named the “hard problem” at the centre of the philosophical and scientific agenda. ...

Donald Davidson was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981, following positions at Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller, Davidson constructed a philosophical system remarkable for its internal coherence: his philosophy of mind, theory of action, semantics, and epistemology are closely interconnected, articulated around the themes of events, causation, truth, and interpretation. Key Concepts Anomalous Monism (Mental Events, published in Experience and Theory, 1970): Davidson argues that mental events are identical to physical events, but that this identity does not entail the existence of strict psychophysical laws. The central argument distinguishes three theses: (1) there is causal interaction between mental and physical events; (2) causally related events are covered by deterministic laws; (3) there are no strict laws connecting mental and physical descriptions. Davidson’s solution is to hold that a single event can be described in both mental and physical terms — but that mental properties are anomalous: there are no psychophysical laws enabling reduction of the mental to the physical. This is a form of monism (physics is the only causal domain) combined with anomaly (the mental is not reducible to physical laws). ...

Elizabeth Anscombe Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001) was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. A student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, she became one of his literary executors and translated his Philosophical Investigations (1953) into English — a rendering that remains canonical. A devout Catholic, she fused the rigour of the analytic tradition with an Aristotelian-Thomist sensibility that shaped her entire body of work. Her monograph Intention (1957) is widely regarded as the founding text of contemporary philosophy of action, while her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) is commonly identified as the starting point of the virtue ethics revival in the Anglophone world. She taught at Oxford and, from 1970, held the chair of philosophy at Cambridge once occupied by Wittgenstein. ...

G.E. Moore British philosopher, co-founder — alongside Russell and Frege — of analytic philosophy. His critique of British idealism and his work in ethics decisively influenced the entire analytic tradition of the 20th century. Key Concepts Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining the good in terms of natural properties (pleasure, evolution, desire). The good is simple, indefinable, and non-natural — it cannot be reduced to any empirical property. A central critique of utilitarianism and ethical naturalism Open question argument: for any natural property X, it always makes sense to ask “Is X good?” — if the good were identical to X, the question would be absurd. This proves that good ≠ X Moral intuitionism: fundamental moral values are known by direct intuition, not by inference or definition. Ethics is an autonomous science, not reducible to natural sciences Common sense realism: against the idealism of Berkeley and Hegel — the external world exists independently of the mind. Defense of common sense realism as the philosophical starting point Proof of the external world: “here is a hand, here is another” — he argues that we can prove the existence of the external world with more certainty than any abstract philosophical premise that denies it Conceptual analysis: the central task of philosophy is analysis — decomposing complex concepts into their simpler, more precise components; the program that defines analytic philosophy Intrinsic goods: certain states are good in themselves (friendship, beauty, knowledge) — independently of any consequence. A critique of hedonistic utilitarianism Influenced by Kant — deontological ethics and moral autonomy Russell — analytic program (mutual influence) Sidgwick — British moral intuitionism Influenced Russell and Wittgenstein — analytic philosophy Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Keynes) — ethics and aesthetics Contemporary metaethics (intuitionism, moral realism) Karl Popper — theory of knowledge Works Principia Ethica (1903); Ethics (1912); Philosophical Studies (1922); Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953). ...

Gottlob Frege A German mathematician born in 1848, Gottlob Frege spent almost his entire career as a professor at Jena, in relative obscurity — his genius would be fully recognized only after his death, in 1925, above all thanks to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Today he is regarded as the founder of modern logic and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. His first great achievement was the creation, in the Begriffsschrift (1879), of a predicate logic that retired the old Aristotelian syllogistic: with quantifiers (“for all,” “there exists”), variables, and functions, Frege gave logic the precision and expressive power it needed to analyze mathematics. His larger aim was logicism — to demonstrate that arithmetic reduces to pure logic. The project, set out in the Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was struck head-on by a letter from Russell (1902) revealing a contradiction in the system; Frege never fully recovered from the blow. ...

H.L.A. Hart British legal philosopher, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford (1952–1968); The Concept of Law (1961) is the most influential work of 20th-century legal positivism and reshaped the terms of debate over the nature, validity, and bindingness of law. Key Concepts Primary and secondary rules: the central distinction of The Concept of Law. Primary rules impose duties of conduct (do not kill, keep contracts). Secondary rules are meta-rules about primary rules, subdivided into: (a) the rule of recognition — the criterion that identifies which norms belong to the legal system; (b) rules of change — procedures for creating, altering, and repealing primary rules; (c) rules of adjudication — confer authority on officials to settle disputes Rule of recognition: the norm that defines the criteria of legal validity in a given system — it is not itself valid or invalid but exists as a social fact, accepted by officials from an “internal point of view.” It answers “what is law?” without appealing to morality Internal point of view: whoever accepts a rule as a standard of conduct and criticism — not merely from fear of sanctions — adopts the internal point of view. Understanding law requires grasping this standpoint, not merely describing external behaviour (as Austinian behaviourism did) Open texture: general language inevitably has clear cases of application and a penumbra of uncertainty where the norm does not determine the outcome. In hard cases judges exercise discretion — they choose, within limits, which interpretation to adopt. Hart denies that law always has a ready-made answer (the criticism Dworkin will level against him) Conceptual separation of law and morality: unlike natural law theory, the legal validity of a norm depends on formal criteria (membership in the system), not on its moral content. An unjust norm may be valid; a morally correct norm may not be law. This does not imply that law ought not to be criticised morally — only that such criticism operates on a distinct plane Minimum content of natural law: despite the separation, Hart concedes that any legal system that aspires to survival must incorporate a nucleus of norms (protection of life, property, keeping of promises) imposed by the contingencies of human nature — the “minimum content of natural law” Hart–Fuller debate (1958): in the Harvard Law Review, Hart and Lon Fuller conducted the most celebrated exchange in 20th-century anglophone legal philosophy. Against Fuller’s thesis that law has an “inner morality,” Hart insists that validity and morality are conceptually distinct Influenced by Jeremy Bentham — precursor of legal positivism, critic of natural law John Austin — command theory and the notion of law as the sovereign’s command (Hart critiques and supersedes Austin) Ludwig Wittgenstein — philosophy of language, meaning as use, open texture J.L. Austin — Oxford ordinary-language philosophy Hans Kelsen — normativist positivism (Hart engages critically with the Grundnorm) Influenced Ronald Dworkin — Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and Law’s Empire (1986) are the principal philosophical response to Hart Joseph Raz — The Concept of a Legal System (1970) and the authority thesis Neil MacCormick — institutional positivism The entire tradition of anglophone analytical jurisprudence Works Causation in the Law (1959, with Tony Honoré); The Concept of Law (1961; 2nd posthumous ed. 1994, with “Postscript”); Law, Liberty, and Morality (1963); The Morality of the Criminal Law (1964); Punishment and Responsibility (1968); Essays on Bentham (1982); Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983). ...

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the most versatile and intellectually honest philosophers of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, mostly at Harvard, Putnam pursued an unusual philosophical itinerary: he defended positions that he later criticised with the same energy with which he had established them. He was a functionalist and then rejected functionalism; a scientific realist and then proposed “internal realism”; a sympathiser with logical positivism and then its critic. This willingness for self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of his philosophical style. ...

John Rogers Searle, born in Denver (Colorado) in 1932, is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions span philosophy of language (speech act theory), philosophy of mind (the Chinese Room argument, biological naturalism), and social ontology (the construction of institutional reality). He is one of the most widely read and debated analytic philosophers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Key Concepts Speech Act Theory (Speech Acts, 1969): Developing J.L. Austin, Searle systematises the theory. Every speech act involves: ...

Kwame Anthony Appiah Kwame Anthony Appiah was born on 8 May 1954 in London, to a Ghanaian father (Joe Appiah, lawyer and politician) and a British mother (Peggy Cripps). He grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied philosophy at Cambridge (BA and PhD). He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton; he is currently professor at New York University. Appiah is one of the most versatile and influential philosophers in the contemporary anglophone world, with contributions to ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, racial theory, and political philosophy. He is one of the thinkers who has most systematically challenged the presuppositions of “racialism” — the belief that human races exist as biological entities endowed with moral and intellectual essences. ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein Born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the wealthiest and most cultured families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ludwig Wittgenstein began by studying aeronautical engineering, but reflection on the foundations of mathematics led him to logic and from there to Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. His biography is as singular as his thought: he fought in the First World War, gave away his inherited fortune, worked as a village schoolteacher, a gardener, and even an architect, before returning to academic philosophy. He is the most influential figure in twentieth-century analytic philosophy — and, very rarely, the author of two distinct and equally decisive philosophies, both centered on language. ...

Philippa Foot Philippa Foot (1920–2010) was one of the most influential British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the revival of virtue ethics. Educated and long based at Oxford, she also taught for extended periods in the United States. Her intellectual career amounts to a sustained challenge to the non-cognitivism and emotivism that dominated post-war Anglophone metaethics: against the thesis of a radical separation between fact and value, Foot sought to show that moral judgements have cognitive content and are rooted in facts about human life. Her work culminates in the neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Natural Goodness (2001). She was also a figure of civic conscience: she was among the founders of Oxfam, the organisation devoted to fighting hunger and poverty. ...

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. He began as an analytic philosopher formed in the Wittgenstein-Sellars tradition, but Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) projected him as one of the most radical critics of the Western epistemological tradition. Rorty is the principal representative of neopragmatism, which combines the American pragmatist heritage (Dewey, James) with elements of continental philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida) and late analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars). ...

Rudolf Carnap Rudolf Carnap was the most systematic and influential figure of the Vienna Circle and of logical empiricism, a movement that sought to refound philosophy on the rigor of modern logic and fidelity to experience. Trained in physics, logic, and philosophy in Germany, he studied with Gottlob Frege at Jena before joining the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. With the rise of Nazism he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Chicago and at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work spans the logical construction of knowledge, the syntax and semantics of language, the theory of confirmation, and inductive logic, always guided by the ideal of conceptual clarity. ...

Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke was arguably the most technically gifted analytic philosopher of his generation. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he showed extraordinary aptitude from adolescence: he published his first mature logical article — a completeness proof for modal logic — at seventeen, and corresponded with professional logicians while still in high school. A professor at Princeton and later at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kripke transformed metaphysics, philosophy of language, and modal logic to such a degree that virtually all analytic philosophy after the debates surrounding Naming and Necessity is, in some sense, a response to him. ...

Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected contemporary philosophers working in philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Born in 1937, he is a professor at New York University (NYU). His work returns obstinately to a single theme: the difficulty of reconciling the inner, subjective perspective of each conscious being with the external, impersonal, objective perspective that science and reason strive for. Known for his lucid prose and the intellectual honesty with which he exposes the limits of his own solutions, Nagel resists both easy reductions and mysticism, holding that certain philosophical problems are genuine and should not be dissolved prematurely. ...