Analytic Philosophy

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 Rorty 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 eighteen, 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. ...

W.V.O. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century. A professor at Harvard for decades, his work revolutionised epistemology, philosophy of language, and ontology, while simultaneously dismantling the foundations of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Quine is the principal link between American pragmatism (Dewey, James) and contemporary analytic philosophy. Key Concepts Critique of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 1951, Philosophical Review; reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 1953): Quine attacks two dogmas of empiricism: (1) the belief in a sharp distinction between analytic propositions (true by meaning, e.g. “all bachelors are unmarried”) and synthetic ones (true by empirical fact); and (2) reductionism (each statement has an isolated empirical content). Quine argues that the notion of “analyticity” is circular — it presupposes “synonymy”, which presupposes “analyticity”. ...

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most profound and original American analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, though less widely read than his influence would warrant. Trained in a tradition that combined analytic rigor with a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy, he set out to articulate what he called the ultimate aim of philosophy: “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” His work seeks to reconcile a commitment to science and naturalism with recognition of the normative dimension of thought and knowledge. He taught above all at the University of Pittsburgh, where he formed an influential line of students. ...