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Analytic philosophy underwent several internal micro-revolutions that divide its history into five phases. The first phase runs approximately from 1900 to 1910. It is characterized by the quasi-Platonic form of realism initially endorsed by Moore and Russell as an alternative to Idealism.
- Overview
- Nature of analytic philosophy
- The empiricist tradition
- The role of symbolic logic
analytic philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts. Although most work in analytic philosophy has been done in Great Britain and the United States, significant contributions a...
Analytic philosophers conduct conceptual investigations that characteristically, though not invariably, involve studies of the language in which the concepts in question are, or can be, expressed. According to one tradition in analytic philosophy (sometimes referred to as formalism), for example, the definition of a concept can be determined by unc...
In spirit, style, and focus, analytic philosophy has strong ties to the tradition of empiricism, which has characterized philosophy in Britain for some centuries, distinguishing it from the rationalism of Continental European philosophy. In fact, the beginning of modern analytic philosophy is usually dated from the time when two of its major figures, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and G.E. Moore (1873–1958), rebelled against an antiempiricist idealism that had temporarily captured the English philosophical scene. The most renowned of the British empiricists—John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill—have many interests and methods in common with contemporary analytic philosophers. And although analytic philosophers have attacked some of the empiricists’ particular doctrines, one feels that this is the result more of a common interest in certain problems than of any difference in general philosophical outlook.
Most empiricists, though admitting that the senses fail to yield the certainty requisite for knowledge, hold nonetheless that it is only through observation and experimentation that justified beliefs about the world can be gained—in other words, a priori reasoning from self-evident premises cannot reveal how the world is. Accordingly, many empiricists insist on a sharp dichotomy between the physical sciences, which ultimately must verify their theories by observation, and the deductive or a priori sciences—e.g., mathematics and logic—the method of which is the deduction of theorems from axioms. The deductive sciences, in the empiricists’ view, cannot produce justified beliefs, much less knowledge, about the world. This conclusion was a cornerstone of two important early movements in analytic philosophy, logical atomism and logical positivism. In the positivist’s view, for example, the theorems of mathematics do not represent genuine knowledge of a world of mathematical objects but instead are merely the result of working out the consequences of the conventions that govern the use of mathematical symbols.
For philosophers oriented toward formalism, the advent of modern symbolic logic in the late 19th century was a watershed in the history of philosophy, because it added greatly to the class of statements and inferences that could be represented in formal (i.e., axiomatic) languages. The formal representation of these statements provided insight into their underlying logical structures; at the same time, it helped to dispel certain philosophical puzzles that had been created, in the view of the formalists, through the tendency of earlier philosophers to mistake surface grammatical form for logical form. Because of the similarity of sentences such as “Tigers bite” and “Tigers exist,” for example, the verb to exist may seem to function, as other verbs do, to predicate something of the subject. It may seem, then, that existence is a property of tigers, just as their biting is. In symbolic logic, however, existence is not a property; it is a higher-order function that takes so-called “propositional functions” as values. Thus, when the propositional function “Tx”—in which T stands for the predicate “…is a tiger” and x is a variable replaceable with a name—is written beside a symbol known as the existential quantifier—∃x, meaning “There exists at least one x such that…”—the result is a sentence that means “There exists at least one x such that x is a tiger.” The fact that existence is not a property in symbolic logic has had important philosophical consequences, one of which has been to show that the ontological argument for the existence of God, which has puzzled philosophers since its invention in the 11th century by St. Anselm of Canterbury, is unsound.
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Among 19th-century figures who contributed to the development of symbolic logic were the mathematicians George Boole (1815–64), the inventor of Boolean algebra, and Georg Cantor (1845–1918), the creator of set theory. The generally recognized founder of modern symbolic logic is Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), of the University of Jena in Germany. Frege, whose work was not fully appreciated until the mid-20th century, is historically important principally for his influence on Russell, whose program of logicism (the doctrine that the whole of mathematics can be derived from the principles of logic) had been attempted independently by Frege some 25 years before the publication of Russell’s principal logicist works, Principles of Mathematics (1903) and Principia Mathematica (1910–13; written in collaboration with Russell’s colleague at the University of Cambridge Alfred North Whitehead).
generic title, ‘analytical philosophy.’ Such claims do not, however, impress the strong theorists of existence, the speculative philosophers. For speculative philosophy holds that existence is much more than the silent, featureless pendant of logical-functional structure.
- James Bradley
- 2004
Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy and especially anglophone philosophy focused on analysis. [a] [b] Analytic philosophy is characterized by a style of clarity of prose and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences .
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Speculative Philosophy Alfred North Whitehead SECTION I This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define ‘speculative philosophy,’ and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge. Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of
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Feb 8, 2022 · Publish with us. Policies and ethics. Traditionally, philosophy has utilized three methods: analysis, synopsis, and synthesis. The exclusion of synoptic and synthetic thinking from organization and management studies can leave us without the means to fully develop the discipline.
Speculative philosophy corresponds to philosophy as a worldview (1), and critical philosophy can take two forms, the analytic (2) or continental (3) philosophy. Analytic philosophy really needs something more than pure analysis; certainly a synoptic and synthetic point of view. Worldview construction, or speculative philosophy can precisely ...
