Analytical philosophy, The three main foundational planks

1. Analytical Philosophy
M.Vijayalakshmi
Assistant Professor

2. • Analytic Philosophy (or sometimes Analytical
Philosophy) is a 20th Century movement in
philosophy which holds that philosophy
should apply logical techniques in order to
attain conceptual clarity, and that philosophy
should be consistent with the success
of modern science.
• For many Analytic Philosophers, language is
the principal (perhaps the only) tool, and
philosophy consists in clarifying how language
can be used.

3. • Analytic Philosophy is also used as a catch-all
phrase to include all (mainly Anglophone)
branches of contemporary philosophy not
included under the label Continental
Philosophy, such as Logical
Positivism, Logicism and Ordinary Language
Philosophy.
• To some extent, these various schools all
derive from pioneering work at Cambridge
University in the early 20th Century and then
at Oxford University after World War II,
although many contributors were in fact
originally from Continental Europe.

4. • Analytic Philosophy as a specific movement was
led by Bertrand Russell, Alfred North
Whitehead, G. E. Moore and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
• Turning away from then-dominant forms
of Hegelianism, (particularly objecting to
its Idealism and its almost deliberate obscurity),
they began to develop a new sort of conceptual
analysis based on new developments in Logic,
and succeeded in making substantial
contributions to philosophical Logic over the first
half of the 20th Century.

5. The three main foundational planks of Analytical
Philosophy are:
• that there are no specifically philosophical truths and
that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification
of thoughts.
• that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be
achieved by analysis of the logical form of
philosophical propositions, such as by using the formal
grammar and symbolism of a logical system.
• a rejection of sweeping philosophical systems
and grand theories in favour of close attention to
detail, as well as a defence of common
sense and ordinary language against the pretensions
of traditional Metaphysics and Ethics.

6. • Early developments in Analytic Philosophy arose
out of the work of the German mathematician
and logician Gottlob Frege (widely regarded as
the father of modern philosophical logic), and
his development of Predicate Logic.
• Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead,
particularly in their groundbreaking "Principia
Mathematica" (1910-1913) and their
development of Symbolic Logic, attempted to
show that mathematics
is reducible to fundamental logical principles.

7. • From about 1910 to 1930, Analytic Philosophers
like Russell and Wittgenstein focused on creating
an ideal language for philosophical analysis (known
as Ideal Language Analysis or Formalism), which
would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary
language that, in their view, often got philosophers into
trouble.
• In his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" of
1921, Wittgenstein suggested that the world is merely
the existence of certain states of affairs which can be
expressed in the language of first-order predicate
logic, so that a picture of the world can be built up by
expressing atomic facts in atomic propositions, and
linking them using logical operators, a theory
sometimes referred to as Logical Atomism.

8. • G. E. Moore, who along with Bertrand
Russell had been a pioneer in his opposition
to the dominant Hegelianism (and its belief
in Hegel's Absolute Idealism) in the British
universities of the early 20th Century,
developed his epistemological Commonsense
Philosophy, attempting to defend the
"commonsense" view of the world against
both Skepticism and Idealism.

9. • In the late 1920s, 1930s and
1940s, Russell and Wittgenstein's Formalism was
picked up by the Vienna Circle and Berlin
Circle which developed into the Logical
Positivism movement, which focused on universal
logical terms, supposedly separate from
contingent factors such as culture, language,
historical conditions.
• In the late 1940s and 1950s,
following Wittgenstein's later philosophy, Analytic
Philosophy took a turn toward Ordinary Language
Philosophy, which emphasized the use
of ordinary language by ordinary people.

10. • Following heavy attacks on Analytic Philosophy in
the 1950s and 1960s, both Logical
Positivism and Ordinary Language
Philosophy rapidly fell out of fashion.
• However, many philosophers
in Britain and America after the 1970's still
considered themselves to be "analytic"
philosophers, (generally characterized
by precision and thoroughness about a narrow
topic), although less emphasis on linguistics and an
increased eclecticism or pluralism characteristic
of Post-Modernism is also evident.

11. • More contemporary Analytic Philosophy has
also included extensive work in other areas of
philosophy, such as in Ethics by Phillipa
Foot (1920 - ), R. M. Hare (1919 - 2002)
and J. L. Mackie (1917 - 1981); in Political
Philosophy by John Rawls (1921 - 2002)
and Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002);
in Aesthetics by Arthur Danto (1924 - 2013);
and in Philosophy of Mind by Daniel
Dennett (1942 - ) and Paul Churchland (1942 - ).

12. Thank you