analytic philosophy

analytic philosophy an umbrella term currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical techniques and tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively easy to identify analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say with any precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes called Oxford philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at least, misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. Analytic philosophers tend largely, though not exclusively, to be English-speaking academics whose writings are directed, on the whole, to other English-speaking philosophers. They are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, philosophers who self-consciously pursued ‘philosophical analysis’ in the early part of the twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore, concerned not language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes, while it did not exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital tool for laying bare the logical form of reality. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), contended, though obliquely, that the structure of language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful sentence is analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the finegrained constituents of reality. This ‘Tractarian’ view was one Wittgenstein was to renounce in his later work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and in the subsequent development of logical positivism in the 1930s and 1940s. Carnap and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that the task of philosophy was not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to provide analyses of scientific sentences. (Other sentences, those in ethics, for instance, were thought to lack ‘cognitive significance.’) Their model was Russell’s theory of descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away apparent commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former proponents of analysis, influenced by Wittgenstein, had taken up what came to be called ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on the role of words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape long-standing philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from a natural tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the grammatical form of sentences in which those questions were posed. (A classic illustration might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate something, though a very peculiar something.) Today, it is difficult to find much unanimity in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an implicit respect for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal agreement as to what problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that philosophy is in some sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic philosophers to address one another rather than the broader public has led some to decry philosophy’s ‘professionalization’ and to call for a return to a pluralistic, community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers respond by pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well represented in the history of philosophy. See also CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY , ORDI- NARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY , PLURALISM , VIENNA CIRCL. J.F.H.

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