Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a broad movement or style within contemporary Western philosophy, especially anglophone philosophy, focused on: analysis as a philosophical method; clarity of prose; rigor in arguments; and making use of formal logic, mathematics, and to a lesser degree the natural sciences. It is further characterized by the linguistic turn, or a concern with language and meaning. Analytic philosophy has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.

The proliferation of analysis in philosophy began around the turn of the twentieth century and has been dominant since the latter half. Central figures in its history are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history include Franz Brentano, the logical positivists (especially Rudolf Carnap), the ordinary language philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics.

Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, which was coined as a catch-all term for other methods that were prominent in continental Europe, most notably existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism. The distinction has also been drawn between "analytic" being academic or technical philosophy and "continental" being literary philosophy. There is now widespread influence and debate between the analytic and continental traditions; some philosophers see the distinction as based on philosophically insignificant ideological differences.

Austrian realism

Franz Brentano introduced the problem of intentionality.

Analytic philosophy was deeply influenced by what is called Austrian realism in the former state of Austria-Hungary, so much so that Michael Dummett has remarked that analytic philosophy is better characterized as Anglo-Austrian rather than the usual Anglo-American.

Brentano

University of Vienna philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano—in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) and through the subsequent influence of the School of Brentano and its members, such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong—gave to analytic philosophy the problem of intentionality or of aboutness.

For Brentano, all mental events or acts of consciousness have a real, non-mental intentional object, which the thinking is directed at or "about". Intentionality is "the mark of the mental." Intentionality is to be distinguished from intention and/or intension.

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

— Franz Brentano

Meinong

The Graz School followed Meinong, who is known for his unique ontology of real nonexistent objects as a solution to the problem of empty names, sometimes known as Meinong's Jungle. According to this view, objects like flying pigs or golden mountains are real and have being, even though they do not exist.

Twardowski

The Polish Lwów–Warsaw school, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski in 1895, was also influenced by Brentano. It was closely associated with the Warsaw School of Mathematics. Twardowski emphasized "small philosophy" or the detailed, systematic analysis of specific problems.

Frege

Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy

Gottlob Frege was a German geometry professor at the University of Jena, logician, and philosopher who is understood as the father of analytic philosophy. Frege proved influential as a philosopher of mathematics. He advocated logicism, the project of reducing arithmetic to pure logic.

Logic

As a result of his logicist project, Frege developed predicate logic in his book Begriffsschrift (English: Concept-script, 1879), which allowed for a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic. An example of this is the problem of multiple generality. Frege also unified the two strains of ancient logic: Aristotelian and Stoic.

Number

Neo-Kantianism dominated the late nineteenth century in German philosophy. Husserl's book Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them.

In contrast to this "psychologism", Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (German: Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893–1903), argued that mathematics and logic have their own public objects, independent of one's private judgments or mental states. Following Frege, the logicists tended to advocate a kind of mathematical Platonism.

The modern study of set theory was initiated by the German mathematicians Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor. Frege extended their work in an attempt to reduce arithmetic to logic, developing naive set theory and a set-theoretic definition of natural numbers.

Language

Frege also proved influential in the philosophy of language and analytic philosophy's interest in meaning. Dummett traces the linguistic turn to Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and his context principle. Frege writes "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition." As Dummett explains, in order to answer a Kantian question, "How are numbers given to us, granted that we have no idea or intuition of them?" Frege finds the solution in defining "the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs." Thus a problem, traditionally solved along idealist lines, is instead solved along linguistic ones.

Sense and Reference

Frege's paper "On Sense and Reference" (1892) is seminal, containing Frege's puzzles about identity and providing a mediated reference theory.

Frege points out the reference of "the Morning Star" and "the Evening Star" is the same: both refer to the planet Venus. Therefore, substituting one term for the other doesn't change the truth value (salva veritate). However, they differ in what Frege calls cognitive value or the mode of presentation. One has to distinguish between two notions of meaning: the reference of a term and the sense of a term. As Frege points out "the Morning Star is the Morning Star" is uninformative, but "the Morning Star is the Evening Star" is informative. So the two expressions must differ in a way other than reference.

A related puzzle is also known as Frege's puzzle, concerning intensional contexts and propositional attitude reports. Consider the statement "The ancients believed the morning star is the evening star." This statement might be false. However, the statement "The ancients believed the morning star is the morning star" is trivially true. Here again, the morning star and the evening star have different meanings, despite having the same reference.

Thought

His paper "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry" (1918) reflects both his anti-idealism and his interest in language. In the paper, he argues for a Platonist account of propositions or thoughts. Frege claims propositions are intangible, like ideas; yet publicly available, like an object. In addition to the physical, public "first realm" of objects, and the private, mental "second realm" of ideas, Frege posits a "third realm" of Platonic propositions, such as the Pythagorean theorem.

Revolt against idealism

British philosophy in the nineteenth century had seen a revival of logic started by Richard Whately, in reaction to the anti-logical tradition of British empiricism. The major figure of this period is English mathematician George Boole. Other figures include William Hamilton, Augustus De Morgan, William Stanley Jevons, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, Hugh MacColl, and American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce.

However, British philosophy in the late nimeteenth century was dominated by British idealism, a neo-Hegelian movement, as taught by philosophers such as F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green. Bradley's work Appearance and Reality (1893) exemplified the school.

G. E. Moore led the revolt against idealism.

Analytic philosophy in the narrower sense of twentieth century anglophone philosophy is usually thought to begin with Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore's rejection of Hegelianism for being obscure; or the "revolt against idealism." Russell summed up Moore's influence:

"G. E. Moore...took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. Bradley had argued that everything common sense believes in is mere appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and that everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or theology, supposes real. With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas."

Russell and Moore contributed to the philosophy of perception a naive realism, and sense-data theory. For Russell there was knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance.

An important aspect of Hegelianism and British idealism was logical holism—the opinion that aspects of the world can be known only by knowing the whole world. This is closely related to the doctrine of internal relations, the opinion that relations between items are internal relations, that is, essential properties of the nature of those items. Russell and Moore in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the belief that the world consists of independent facts.

Russell

Bertrand Russell in 1907

In 1901, Russell famously discovered the paradox in Basic Law V (also known as unrestricted comprehension), which undermined Frege's set theory and logicist project. However, like Frege, Russell argued that mathematics is reducible to logical fundamentals, in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He also argued for Meinongianism.

On Denoting

During his early career, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, thinking it could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. This was done most famously in his theory of definite descriptions in "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905. The essay has been called a "paradigm of philosophy."

In this essay, Russell responds to both Meinong and Frege on language. He argues all proper names (aside from demonstratives like this or that) are disguised definite descriptions, for example "Walter Scott" can be replaced with "the author of Waverley", using this theory to solve ascriptions of nonexistence, such as with "the present King of France". This position came to be called descriptivism.

Russell presents his own version of Frege's second puzzle. "If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute “Scott” for “the author of Waverley” and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe.”

The essay also illustrates the concept of scope ambiguity by showing how denying "The present King of France is bald" can mean either "There is no King of France" or "The present King of France is not bald". Russell quips "Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig."

Principia Mathematica

Later, Russell's book written with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), the seminal text of classical logic and of the logicist project, encouraged many philosophers to renew their interest in the development of symbolic logic. It used a notation from Italian logician Giuseppe Peano, and a theory of types to avoid the pitfalls of Russell's paradox. Whitehead developed process metaphysics in Process and Reality.

Ideal language

Inspired by developments in modern formal logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions. Logical form would be made clear by syntax.

For example, the English word is has three distinct meanings, which predicate logic can express as follows:

• For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x)).
• For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x).
• For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).

From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their opinion, often made philosophers incorrect.

Early Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Russell's student Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism with a picture theory of meaning in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921) sometimes known as simply the Tractatus. Wittgenstein thought he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus.

The book starts "The world is all that is the case." Wittgenstein claims the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed and mirrored by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus, a picture of the universe can be constructed by expressing facts in the form of atomic propositions and linking them using logical operators.

The Tractatus introduced philosophers to the term tautology, and also to the truth table method and truth conditions. Wittgenstein believed tautologies or logical truths say nothing, but show the logical structure of the world.

Wittgenstein has been labeled a mystic who believed in ineffability by some readers. The Tractatus further ultimately concludes that all of its propositions are meaningless, illustrated with a ladder one must toss away after climbing up it. The book ends "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Logical positivism

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Members of the Vienna Circle:
(1) Moritz Schlick
(2) Otto Neurath;
(3) Hans Hahn
(4) Rudolf Carnap

During the late 1920s to 1940s, a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, and another one known as the Berlin Circle, developed Russell and Wittgenstein's philosophy into a doctrine known as "logical positivism" (or logical empiricism).

Verification principle

Logical positivists used formal logical methods to develop an empiricist account of knowledge. They adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or synthetic. The truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense.

This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy. The verification principle rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless. Logical positivists therefore typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function, concerning the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own.

The logical positivists saw themselves as a recapitulation of a quote by David Hume, the closing lines from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle

The Vienna Circle (previously the Ernst Mach Society) was led by Moritz Schlick and included Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. The Berlin Circle was led by Hans Reichenbach and included Carl Hempel and mathematician David Hilbert.

Epistemology was still discussed. Schlick was a foundationalist, believing knowledge was like a pyramid, built on prior layers of knowledge except for the first layer. Neurath was an anti-foundationalist, coherentist who famously gave the analogy of reconstructing a ship while on the open sea.

Friedrich Waismann introduced the concept of open texture to describe the universal possibility of vagueness in empirical statements. Waismann never finished a book titled Logik, Sprache, Philosophie intended to present the ideas of logical positivism to a wider audience.

Carnap and Reichenbach started the journal Erkenntnis. Carnap formalized the internal–external distinction in ontology. In works like Der logische Aufbau der Welt (translated as The Logical Structure of the World, 1967), sometimes simply the Aufbau, and The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language (1959), Carnap believed the way to resolve philosophical problems is by logical, linguistic analysis.

Several logical positivists were Jewish, such as Neurath, Waismann, Hans Hahn, and Reichenbach. Others, like Carnap, were gentiles but socialists or pacifists. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the United States, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.

In 1936, Schlick was murdered in Vienna by his former student Hans Nelböck. The same year, A. J. Ayer's work Language Truth and Logic introduced the English speaking world to logical positivism.

Ordinary language

After World War II, analytic philosophy became involved with ordinary language philosophy, in contrast to ideal language philosophy. While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, which are supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary-language philosophy emphasizes the use of language by ordinary people.

Ramsey

The criticisms of Frank Ramsey on the "color-exclusion problem," on color and logical form in the Tractatus, led to some of Wittgenstein's first doubts with regard to his early philosophy. Wittgenstein held the only necessity is logical necessity, yet that no point in space can have two different colors at the same time seems a necessary truth but not a logical one. Wittgenstein responded to Ramsey in "Some Remarks on Logical Form" (1929), the only academic paper he ever published. Ramsey died of jaundice the next year at the age of 26.

Sraffa's gesture

Norman Malcolm also famously credits Piero Sraffa for providing Wittgenstein with the conceptual break from his earlier philosophy, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:

Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and what it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'

Later Wittgenstein

One strain of ordinary language philosophy was Wittgenstein's later philosophy, from the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), which differed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. Philosophers refer to them like two different philosophers: "early Wittgenstein" and "later Wittgenstein". Prior to the publication of the Philosophical Investigations, philosophers like John Wisdom and Rush Rhees were some of the few sources of information about Wittgenstein's later philosophy, for example Wisdom's work Other minds (1952) on the problem of other minds. A notion found in both early and later Wittgenstein is that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Philosophers had been misusing language and asking meaningless questions, and it was Wittgenstein's job "to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle."

The later Wittgenstein develops a therapeutic approach. He introduces the concept of a "language-game" as a "form of life". By "language-game" he meant a language simpler than an entire language. Wittgenstein argued that a word or sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication. Rather than his prior picture theory of meaning, the later Wittgenstein advocates a theory of meaning as use, according to which words are defined by how they are used within the language-game.

The duck-rabbit illusion became famous when Wittgenstein used it to distinguish "seeing that" from "seeing as".

The notion of family resemblance sees things thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the classic example of a group that is related by family resemblances.

Philosophical Investigations also contains the private language argument. Another point that Wittgenstein makes against the possibility of a private language involves the beetle-in-a-box thought experiment. He asks the reader to imagine that each person has a box, inside which is something that everyone intends to refer to with the word beetle. Further, suppose that no one can look inside another's box. Under such a situation, Wittgenstein says the word beetle is meaningless.

He also famously uses the duck-rabbit, an ambiguous image, as a means of describing two different ways of seeing: "seeing that" versus "seeing as".

Oxford philosophy

The other trend of ordinary language philosophy was known as "Oxford philosophy", in contrast to the earlier analytic Cambridge philosophers. Influenced by Moore's common sense and what they perceived as the later Wittgenstein's quietism, the Oxford philosophers claimed that ordinary language already represents many subtle distinctions not recognized in traditional philosophy. The most prominent Oxford philosophers were Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, and John L. Austin.

Ryle

Gilbert Ryle

Ordinary-language philosophers often sought to resolve philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of misunderstanding ordinary language. Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), criticized Cartesian dualism, arguing in favor of disposing of "Descartes' myth" of the ghost in the machine via recognizing "category errors". Ryle sees Descartes' error as similar to saying one sees the campus, buildings, faculty, students, and so on, but still goes on to ask "Where is the university?"

Strawson

Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring" (1950), a criticism of Russell's theory of descriptions explained in the latter's famous "On Denoting" article. On Strawson's account, the use of a description presupposes the existence of the object fitting the description. In his book Individuals (1959), Strawson examines our conceptions of basic particulars.

Austin

Austin, in the posthumously published How to Do Things with Words (1962), articulated the theory of speech acts and emphasized the ability of words to do things (e.g. "I promise") and not just say things. This influenced several fields to undertake what is called a performative turn. In Sense and Sensibilia (1962), Austin criticized sense-data theories.

Spread to other countries

Australia and New Zealand

The school known as Australian realism began when John Anderson accepted the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1927. American philosopher David Lewis later became closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.

John's elder brother was William Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at Auckland University College from 1921 to his death in 1955, who was described as "the most dominant figure in New Zealand philosophy." J. N. Findlay was a student of Ernst Mally of the Austrian realists and taught at the University of Otago.

Sweden and Finland

In Sweden, Axel Hägerström broke away from Christopher Jacob Boström's idealism, founding the Uppsala School of Philosophy.

The Finnish Georg Henrik von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1948.

Metaphysics

One difference with respect to early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing during the second half of the twentieth century. The revival of metaphysics came due to the demise of logical positivism, which was first challenged by the later Wittgenstein. Subsequent philosophers continued to question elements of logical positivism, and metaphysics remains a fertile topic of research. Although many discussions are continuations of old ones from previous decades and centuries, the debates remain active.

Sellars

Kant scholar Wilfrid Sellars "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Sellers's criticism of the "Myth of the Given", in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), challenged logical positivism by arguing against sense-data theories and knowledge by acquaintance. In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars's critical realism distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world. Sellars's goal of a synoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the basis of what is sometimes called the Pittsburgh School, whose members include Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland.

Quine

W. V. O. Quine helped to undermine logical positivism.

Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine shaped much of subsequent philosophy and is recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He is regularly cited as the greatest philosopher of the second-half of the twentieth century, or the next great philosopher after Wittgenstein.

Quine was an empiricist who sought to naturalize philosophy and saw philosophy as continuous with science, distinguished only by philosophy being the most general science. However, Quine doubted usual theories of meaning, and, instead of logical positivism, advocated a kind of semantic holism and ontological relativity, which explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world.

In his magnum opus Word and Object (1960), Quine introduces the idea of radical translation, an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the inscrutability of reference.

The gavagai thought experiment tells about a linguist, who tries to find out what the expression gavagai means when uttered by a speaker of a yet-unknown native language upon seeing a rabbit. At first glance, it seems that gavagai simply translates with rabbit. Quine points out there is no way to tell that the speaker did not mean, for instance, "undetached rabbit-part" (such as its ear) as well as several other scenarios.

On What There is

Quine's essay on ontology, "On What There Is" (1948) elucidates Russell's theory of descriptions. Quine uses Pegasus instead of "the present King of France" and dubs the problem of nonexistence Plato's beard. The essay contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable". One is committed to the entities his theory posits by use of the existential quantifier, like 'There are some so-and-sos'. Other parts of speech do not commit one to entities and so for Quine are syncategorematic.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Also among the developments that resulted in the decline of logical positivism and the revival of metaphysical theorizing was Quine's attack on the analytic–synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), published in The Philosophical Review, a paper "sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper made Quine the most dominant philosopher in America before Kripke.

Kripke

Saul Kripke helped to revive interest in metaphysics among analytic philosophers.

Saul Kripke is widely regarded as having revived theories of essence and identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion. He was influential in arguing that flaws in common theories of descriptions and proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of modality, or of necessity and possibility.

Modal logic was developed by pragmatist C. I. Lewis to deal with the paradoxes of material implication. Carnap also contributed to modal logic with Meaning and Necessity (1947). Saul Kripke provided a semantics for modal logic. Kripke argued identity is a necessary relation.

Naming and Necessity

Especially important was Kripke's book Naming and Necessity (1980). According to one author, Naming and Necessity "played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language."

Kripke argued proper names are rigid designators, or designate the same thing in all possible worlds, unlike descriptions. For example, an election may have turned out differently, so the description "winner of the 1968 US presidential election" might have designated Hubert Humphrey instead of Richard Nixon. However, the name "Richard Nixon" designates the man Richard Nixon, regardless of the election results.

Kant stated in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that necessity is the criterion for a priori knowledge. Kripke argued that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H₂O, or gold is atomic number 79.

Kripke and Quine's colleague Hilary Putnam argued for realism about natural kinds. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment is used to argue water is a natural kind.

David Lewis

David Lewis

David Lewis defended a number of elaborate metaphysical theories. In works such as On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) and Counterfactuals (1973), Lewis argued for modal realism and counterpart theory – the belief in real, concrete possible worlds, and argued against any "ersatz" conception of possibility.

According to Lewis, "actual" is merely an indexical label we give a world when we are in it. Lewis applied Quine's dictum of ontological commitment to the statement "There are other ways things could have been;" committing Lewis (by his lights) to the real existence of other ways things could have been.

He also defended what he called Humean supervenience, and a counterfactual theory of causation, another view of Hume's.

Truth

Alfred Tarski has an influential theory of truth.

Frege questioned standard theories of truth, and sometimes advocated a deflationary, redundancy theory of truth, i. e. that the predicate "is true" does not express anything above and beyond the statement to which it is attributed. Frank Ramsey also advocated a redundancy theory.

Alfred Tarski put forward an influential semantic theory of truth, that truth is a property of sentences. Tarski's semantic methods culminated in model theory, as opposed to proof theory.

In Truth-Makers (1984), Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith introduced the truth-maker idea as a contribution to the correspondence theory of truth. A truth-maker is contrasted with a truth-bearer. A truth-bearer's truth is grounded by the truth-maker.

Universals

In response to the problem of universals, Australian David Armstrong defended a kind of moderate realism. David Lewis and Anthony Quinton defended nominalism.

Mereology

Polish philosopher Stanisław Leśniewski, along with Nelson Goodman, established mereology, which is the formal study of parts and wholes. Mereology was originally a variant of nominalism arguing that one should dispense with set theory. However, the subject arguably goes back to the time of the pre-Socratics.

David Lewis introduced the term 'atomless gunk' for something not made up of simples, which instead divides forever into smaller and smaller parts.

According to mereological nihilism, there are no (say) chairs, just fundamental particles arranged chair-wise. Peter Van Inwagen believes in mereological nihilism, except for living beings, a view called organicism.

Personal identity

Since John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), philosophers have been concerned with the problem of personal identity. Locke thought psychological continuity or memory made one the same person over time. Bernard Williams in The Self and the Future (1970) takes the opposite view, and argues that personal identity is bodily identity rather than mental continuity.

Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) defends a kind of bundle theory of personal identity. Parfit issues the thought experiment of a case of fission, where one person splits into two, say surviving with half of their brain, while the other half is put into a new body.

David Lewis defends perdurantism, where people are four-dimensional, so a person at any one time is only a part or slice of the whole person.

Free will and determinism

Peter van Inwagen's monograph An Essay on Free Will (1983) played an important role in rehabilitating libertarianism, with respect to free will, in mainstream analytic philosophy. In the book, he introduces the consequence argument and the term incompatibilism about free will and determinism, to stand in contrast to compatibilism—the view that free will is compatible with determinism. Charlie Broad had previously made similar arguments.

Principle of sufficient reason

Since Leibniz philosophers have discussed the principle of sufficient reason or PSR. Van Inwagen criticizes the PSR. Alexander Pruss defends it.

Philosophy of time

Analytic philosophy of time traces its roots to the British idealist J. M. E. McTaggart's article "The Unreality of Time" (1908). In it, McTaggart distinguishes between the dynamic or tensed A-theory of time (past, present, future), in which time flows; and the static or tenseless B-theory of time (earlier than, simultaneous with, later than). Arthur Prior, who invented tense logic, advocated the A-theory of time. The theory of special relativity seems to advocate a B-theory of time. So does David Lewis's perdurantism.

Eternalism holds that past, present, and future are equally real. In contrast, presentism holds that only entities in the present exist. The moving spotlight theory is a kind of hybrid view where all moments exist, but only one moment is present. Growing block holds that only the past and present exist, but the future does not (yet) exist (there is also the reverse, a shrinking block). Charlie Broad advocated growing block.

Logical pluralism

Many-valued and non-classical logics have been popular since the Polish logician Jan Łukasiewicz. Graham Priest is a dialetheist, denying the law of non-contradiction, seeing it as the most natural solution to problems such as the liar paradox. JC Beall, together with Greg Restall, is a pioneer of a widely-discussed version of logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one correct logic.

Epistemology

Edmund Gettier helped to revitalize analytic epistemology.

Owing largely to Edmund Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963), and the so-called Gettier problem, epistemology has ever since enjoyed a resurgence as a topic of analytic philosophy. Using epistemic luck, Gettier provided counterexamples to the "justified true belief" model of knowledge, found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus.

A large portion of analytic epistemology is intended to resolve the problems that arise from Gettier's examples. These include developing theories of justification to deal with Gettier's examples, or giving alternatives to the justified-true-belief model.

For example, Timothy Williamson argues in Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) that knowledge is sui generis and indefinable.

Theories of justification

American philosopher Roderick Chisholm defended foundationalism. Quine defended coherentism, a "web of belief". Quine thought all beliefs are open to revision; some are just held stronger than others, and so hold come what may. Ernest Sosa proposed virtue epistemology in "The Raft and the Pyramid" (1980). Alvin Goldman developed a causal theory of knowledge.

The debate between internalism and externalism still exists in analytic philosophy. Alvin Goldman is an externalist known for developing a popular form of externalism called reliabilism. Most externalists reject the KK thesis, which has been disputed since the introduction of the epistemic logic by Jaakko Hintikka in 1962. Fallibilists often deny the KK principle.

Problem of the Criterion

While a problem since antiquity, Chisholm, in his Theory of Knowledge (1966), details the problem of the criterion with two sets of questions:

1. What do we know? or What is the extent of our knowledge?
2. How do we know? or What is the criterion for deciding whether we have knowledge in any particular case?

An answer to either set of questions will allow us to devise a means of answering the other. Answering the former question-set first is called particularism, whereas answering the latter set first is called methodism. A third solution is skepticism, or doubting there is such a thing as knowledge.

Closure

"Here is one hand"

Epistemic closure is the claim that knowledge is closed under entailment; in other words epistemic closure is a property or the principle that if a subject $S$ knows $p$, and $S$ knows that $p$ entails $q$, then $S$ can thereby come to know $q$. Most epistemological theories involve a closure principle, and many skeptical arguments assume a closure principle. In Proof of An External World (1939), G. E. Moore uses closure in his famous anti-skeptical "here is one hand" argument. Shortly before his death, Wittgenstein wrote On Certainty in response to Moore.

While the closure principle is generally regarded as intuitive, philosophers, such as Fred Dretske with relevant alternatives theory, and Robert Nozick's truth tracking theory of knowledge, in Philosophical Explanations (1981), have argued against it. Others argue it is true but only given a specific context.

Induction

All emeralds are "grue".

In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955), Nelson Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction. Goodman's famous example was to introduce the predicates grue and bleen. "Grue" applies to all things before a certain arbitrary time t, just in case they are green, but also just in case they are blue after time t; and "bleen" applies to all things before time t, just in the case they are blue, but also just in case they are green after time t. So the inductive inference "All emeralds are grue" will be true before time t but "All emeralds are bleen" will be true after t.

Other topics

Other, related topics of research include debates over cases of knowledge, the value of knowledge, the nature of evidence, the role of intuitions in justification, and abduction.

Ethics

Early analytic philosophers often thought that inquiry in the ethical domain could not be made rigorous enough to merit any attention. It was only with the emergence of ordinary-language philosophers that ethics started to become an acceptable area of inquiry for analytic philosophers. Philosophers working within the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major types of moral philosophy.

• Meta-ethics, which investigates moral terms and concepts;
• Normative ethics, which examines and produces normative ethical judgments;
• Applied ethics, which investigates how existing normative principles should be applied to difficult or borderline cases, often cases created by new technology or new scientific knowledge.

Meta-ethics

As well as Hume's famous is–ought problem, twentieth-century meta-ethics has two original strains. The first is G. E. Moore's investigation into the nature of ethical terms (e.g., good) in his Principia Ethica (1903), which advances a kind of moral realism called ethical non-naturalism. The work is known for the open question argument and identifying the naturalistic fallacy, major topics of investigation for analytic philosophers. According to Moore, goodness is sui generis, a simple (undefinable), non-natural property.

The second is founded on logical positivism and its attitude that unverifiable statements are meaningless. As a result, they avoided normative ethics and instead began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments. The logical positivists thought statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-cognitive; they cannot be verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted an emotivist theory, that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker. It is also known as the boo/hurrah theory. On this view, saying, "Murder is wrong", is equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of disapproval.

While analytic philosophers generally accepted non-cognitivism, emotivism was challenged. It evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist theories, such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which was based on Austin's philosophy of speech acts.

After Moore's work, not much was done in analytic philosophy with ethics until the 1950s and 1960s, when there was a renewed interest in traditional moral philosophy. Philippa Foot defended naturalist moral realism and contributed several essays attacking other theories. Foot introduced the famous "trolley problem" into the ethical discourse.

A student and friend of Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, wrote a monograph Intention (1957) called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle". Her article "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) called the is–ought problem into question. J. O. Urmson's article "On Grading" also did so.

Australian John Mackie, in Ethics: Inventing Right And Wrong (1977), defended anti-realist error theory. Bernard Williams also influenced ethics by advocating a kind of moral relativism and rejecting all other theories.

Normative ethics

Alasdair MacIntyre

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, normative ethics. However, as the influence of logical positivism declined mid-century, analytic philosophers had a renewed interest. Contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

At first, consequentialism or utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical theory to remain popular among analytic philosophers. Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874) exemplified the common theory. Robert Nozick criticizes utilitarianism with the utility monster.

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) restored interest in Kantian, deontological ethical philosophy. Thomas Nagel also defended deontology.

Anscombe, Foot, and Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue (1981) sparked a revival of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach. This increased interest in virtue ethics has been dubbed by some the "aretaic turn".

Similar to Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia, Władysław Tatarkiewicz proposed a conception of happiness as a full and lasting satisfaction with one's whole life.

Applied ethics

Since around 1970, a significant feature of analytic philosophy has been the emergence of applied ethics—an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues. The philosophers following this orientation view ethics as involving humanistic values, which involve practical implications and applications in the way people interact and lead their lives socially.

Topics of special interest for applied ethics include education, environmental ethics, animal rights, and the many challenges created by advancing medical science, such as abortion or euthanasia. Peter Singer wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism. In education, applied ethics addressed themes such as punishment in schools, equality of educational opportunity, and education for democracy.

Political philosophy

One of the most influential figures in the philosophy of law is H. L. A. Hart, who was instrumental in the development of legal positivism, which was popularised by his book The Concept of Law (1961).

Liberalism

John Rawls

Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). Isaiah Berlin had a lasting influence on both analytic political philosophy and liberalism with his lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958). Berlin defined 'negative liberty' as absence of coercion or interference in private actions. 'Positive liberty' Berlin maintained, could be thought of as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free from, but what we are free to do.

Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who in a series of papers from the 1950s onward (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") and his book A Theory of Justice (1971), produced a sophisticated defense of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice. Rawls introduced the term the veil of ignorance.

This was followed soon by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a defense of free-market libertarianism. It is notable for the Wilt Chamberlain argument.

Analytical Marxism

Another development of political philosophy was the emergence of the school of analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply techniques of analytic philosophy and modern social science to clarify the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is G. A. Cohen, whose book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978), is generally considered to represent the genesis of this school. In that book, Cohen defends Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The work of these later philosophers has furthered Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory.

Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas is another influential—if controversial—author in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.

Communitarianism

Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel advance a critique of liberalism that uses analytic techniques to challenge liberal assumptions. In particular, communitarians challenge whether the individual can be considered as fully autonomous from the community in which he is brought up and lives. Instead, they argue for a conception of the individual emphasizing the role the community plays in forming his or her values, thought processes, and opinions. While in the analytic tradition, its major exponents often also engage at length with figures generally considered continental, notably G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Other critics of liberalism

Other critics of liberalism include the feminist critiques by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and the multiculturalist critiques by Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor.

Aesthetics

As a result of logical positivism, as well as what seemed like rejections of the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity from post-modern thinkers. While British idealist R. G. Collingwood developed a theory of aesthetic expressivism, analytic philosophers were slow to consider aesthetics.

Susanne Langer, Frank Sibley, and Nelson Goodman addressed aesthetics in an analytic style during the 1950s and 1960s. Since Goodman and Languages of Art (1968), aesthetics as a discipline for analytic philosophers has flourished. For Goodman, art is not so different from science, and is another branch of epistemology.

Definitions of art

Arthur Danto argued for an "institutional definition of art" in the essay "The Artworld" (1964) in which Danto coined the term "artworld" (as opposed to the existing "art world", though they mean the same), by which he meant cultural context or "an atmosphere of art theory".

George Dickie was an influential philosopher of art. Dickie states "a work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation." Dickie's student Noël Carroll is a leading philosopher of art contributing to the philosophy of film.

An alternative to the institutional definition is the historical definition, best exemplified by Jerrold Levinson. For Levinson, "a work of art is a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art: regard in any of the ways works of art existing prior to it have been correctly regarded." In the opinion of historian of aesthetics Władysław Tatarkiewicz, there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression, and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art.

Nicholas Wolterstorff emphasizes the social aspect of art, not as mere contemplation but as action. Levinson and Wolterstorff have both contributed to the philosophy of music.

Some art theorists have proposed that the attempt to define art must be abandoned and have instead urged an anti-essentialist theory. In 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics' (1956), Morris Weitz famously argues that necessary and sufficient conditions will never exist for the concept 'art' because it is an "open concept".

Beauty

Guy Sircello's work resulted in new analytic theories of love, sublimity, and beauty. For Sircello, beauty is an objective, qualitative property. One author claims Sircello's theory is similar to Hume's. Mary Mothersill sought to restore earlier conceptions of beauty in Beauty Restored (1984).

Roger Scruton also advanced theories of beauty. According to Kant scholar Paul Guyer, "After Wollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Roger Scruton." Scruton contributed to the philosophy of architecture.

Paradox of fiction

Colin Radford and Michael Weston introduced the paradox of fiction in their paper "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?" (1975) In it, Radford and Weston discuss the idea of emotional responses to fiction, drawing upon the titular character from Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. Their central inquiry is how people can be moved by things that do not exist. In their paper, they concluded that people's emotional responses to fiction are irrational. American philosopher Kendall Walton published the paper "Fearing Fictions" (1978), in which he addresses the paradox. This paper served as the impetus for Walton's make-believe theory.

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is a topic that has decreased in activity in recent decades. While the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly influenced by earlier authors.

Semantics

According to one author, "In the philosophy of language, Naming and Necessity is among the most important works ever." Kripke challenged the descriptivist theory with a causal theory of reference. Ruth Barcan Marcus also challenged descriptivism with a direct reference theory. Keith Donnellan too challenged descriptivism.

Hilary Putnam used the Twin Earth and brain in a vat thought experiments to argue for semantic externalism, or the view that the meanings of words are not psychological. Donald Davidson uses the thought experiment of Swampman to advocate for semantic externalism.

Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language provides a skeptical rule-following paradox that undermines the possibility of our ever following rules in our use of language and, so, calls into question the idea of meaning. Kripke writes that this paradox is "the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to date". The portmanteau "Kripkenstein" has been coined as a term for a fictional person who holds the views expressed by Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein.

Alonzo Church pioneered intensional logic. Another influential philosopher, Pavel Tichý initiated transparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages—the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know, and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means.

Pragmatics

Paul Grice and his maxims and theory of implicature established the discipline of pragmatics. Austin and John Searle also influenced the field. Pragmatics focuses on deixis and presuppositions and other context-dependent features of language: those aspects of meaning and understanding that require speaker intentions, listener inferences, and real-world knowledge.

Philosophy of mind

John Searle

John Searle suggests that analytic philosophy's interest in the philosophy of language has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind. Two common notions in analytic philosophy of mind are intentionality, as above, and qualia, a term introduced by C. I. Lewis.

Physicalism

Motivated by the logical positivists, behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century. Behaviorism later became much less popular, in favor of either type identity theory or functionalism.

Emergent materialism holds that mental properties emerge as novel properties of complex material systems. It can be divided into emergence which denies mental causation and emergence which allows for causal effect. A version of the latter type was advocated by Searle, called biological naturalism.

The other main group of materialist views in the philosophy of mind can be labeled non-emergent (or non-emergentist) materialism, and includes philosophical behaviorism, identity theory (reductive materialism), functionalism, and pure physicalism (eliminative materialism).

Behaviorism

See also: Verbal Behavior § Chomsky's review and replies

Behaviorists believed either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways; or that mental states were directly equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave. Hilary Putnam criticized behaviorism by arguing that it confuses the symptoms of mental states with the mental states themselves, positing "super Spartans" who never display signs of pain.

Hilary Putnam

Type identity

Type physicalism or type identity theory identified mental states with brain states. Former students of Ryle at the University of Adelaide Jack Smart and Ullin Place argued for type physicalism. Type identity was criticized by Putnam and others using multiple realizability. The criticism spawned anomalous monism.

Functionalism

Functionalism remains the dominant theory, viewing mind in terms of inputs and outputs. Computationalism is a kind of functionalism. The view was first associated with Sellars. Another functionalist was Jerry Fodor. Fodor is known for the proposing the modularity of mind, a theory of innateness. He also introduced the language of thought hypothesis, which describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure (sometimes known as mentalese).

Searle's Chinese room argument criticized functionalism and holds that while a computer can understand syntax, it could never understand semantics. A similar idea is Ned Block's China brain.

Eliminativism

The view of eliminative materialism is most closely associated with Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes; and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness (but not about intentionality) in works like Consciousness Explained (1991). Dennett coined the term "intuition pump."

Thomas Nagel's paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" challenged the physicalist account of mind. So did Frank Jackson's knowledge argument, which argues for qualia.

Dualism

David Chalmers

Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers. Chalmers introduced the notion of the hard problem of consciousness. He has criticized interactionism and shown sympathy with neutral monism. Kripke also makes a notable argument for dualism.

Epiphenomenalism is sometimes classed as a kind of property dualism. It's the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but they do not cause anything else in return.

Panpsychism

Yet another view is panpsychism, or the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Panpsychism can be contrasted with idealism by still believing in matter.

Perception and consciousness

In recent years, a central focus of research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness and the philosophy of perception. While there is a general consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, there are many opinions as to the specifics.

The homunculus argument is an objection raised against many older theories of perception. The best known theories in analytic philosophy are Searle's naive realism, Fred Dretske and Michael Tye's representationalism, Dennett's heterophenomenology, and the higher-order theories of either David M. Rosenthal—who advocates a higher-order thought (HOT) model—or David Armstrong and William Lycan—who advocate a higher-order perception (HOP) model.

Philosophy of mathematics

Kurt Gödel

Since the beginning, analytic philosophy has had an interest in the philosophy of mathematics. Kurt Gödel, a student of Hans Hahn of the Vienna Circle, produced his incompleteness theorems showing that Principia Mathematica also failed to reduce arithmetic to logic, and that Hilbert's program was unattainable.

Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel established Zermelo Fraenkel Set Theory (with the axiom of choice, abbreviated as ZFC). Quine developed his own system, dubbed New Foundations.

Physicist Eugene Wigner's seminal paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" poses the question of why a formal pursuit like mathematics can have real utility.

José Benardete argued for the reality of infinity. The Grim Reaper paradox stems from his work. Finitists reject infinity.

Akin to the medieval debate on universals, between realists, idealists, and nominalists; the philosophy of mathematics has the debate between logicists or platonists, conceptualists or intuitionists, and formalists.

Platonism

Gödel was a platonist who postulated a special kind of mathematical intuition that lets us perceive mathematical objects directly. Quine and Putnam argued for platonism with the indispensability argument. Edward Zalta devised abstract object theory. Crispin Wright, along with Bob Hale, led a Neo-Fregean revival with the work Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects. Physicist Roger Penrose is also a mathematical platonist, in works like The Road to Reality (2004).

Structuralist Paul Benacerraf has two well-known objections to mathematical platonism. One is about identification and the other epistemological. Predicativism is another alternative to platonism, utilizing Henri Poincaré's response to Russell's paradox. There are also Aristotelians in mathematics, such as Dale Jacquette.

Intuitionism

The intuitionists, led by L. E. J. Brouwer, are a constructivist school of mathematics that argues that mathematics is a cognitive construct rather than a type of objective truth. Brouwer also influenced Wittgenstein's abandonment of the Tractatus.

Formalism

The formalists, best exemplified by David Hilbert, considered mathematics to be merely the investigation of formal axiom systems. Hartry Field defended mathematical fictionalism in Science Without Numbers, arguing numbers are dispensible.

Philosophy of religion

In Analytic Philosophy of Religion, James Franklin Harris noted that:

...analytic philosophy has been a very heterogeneous 'movement'.... some forms of analytic philosophy have proven very sympathetic to the philosophy of religion and have provided a philosophical mechanism for responding to other more radical and hostile forms of analytic philosophy.

As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of religion, largely dismissing (as per the logical positivists) the subject as a part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless. The demise of logical positivism led to a renewed interest in the philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers not only to introduce new problems, but to re-study perennial topics such as the existence of God, the rationality of belief in God, concepts of the nature of God, the nature of miracles, the problem of evil, and several others. The Society of Christian Philosophers was established in 1978.

Reformed epistemology

Analytic philosophy formed the basis for some sophisticated Christian arguments, such as those of the reformed epistemologists including Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Alvin Plantinga

Plantinga was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017 and was once described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God". His seminal work God and Other Minds (1967) argues that belief in God is a properly basic belief akin to the belief in other minds. Plantinga also developed a modal ontological argument in The Nature of Necessity (1974).

Plantinga, John Mackie, and Antony Flew debated the use of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil. Plantinga further issued a trilogy on epistemology, and especially justification, Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief. Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism contends that there is a problem in asserting both evolution and naturalism.

Alston defended divine command theory and applied the analytic philosophy of language to religious language. Robert Merrihew Adams also defended divine command theory, and worked on the relationship between faith and morality. William Lane Craig defends the Kalam cosmological argument in the book of the same name.

Analytic Thomism

Catholic philosophers in the analytic tradition—such as Elizabeth Anscombe, her husband Peter Geach, MacIntyre, Anthony Kenny, John Haldane, Eleonore Stump, and others—developed an analytic approach to Thomism.

Orthodoxy

Orthodox convert Richard Swinburne wrote a trilogy of books, arguing for God, consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason. Swinburne is notable for his belief that God's existence is contingent rather than necessary (it is possible God does not exist), but that nonetheless He does exist as a brute fact.

Wittgenstein and religion

The analytic philosophy of religion has been preoccupied with Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein fought for the Austrian army in the First World War and came upon a copy of Leo Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. He subsequently underwent some kind of religious conversion.

Using first-hand remarks, philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as "contemplative philosophy", a school of thought influenced by Wittgenstein and rooted in the "Swansea school", including philosophers such as Rhees, Winch, and D. Z. Phillips, among others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's Culture and Value.

Philosophy of science

Science and the philosophy of science have also had increasingly significant roles in analytic metaphysics. Ernest Nagel's book The Structure of Science (1961) practically inaugurated the field. The theory of special relativity has had a profound effect on the philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the free will debate. The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to commitments of philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism. Others will see a commitment to using science in philosophy as scientism.

Theories

Carl Hempel advocated confirmation theory or Bayesian epistemology. He introduced the famous raven's paradox.

Karl Popper

In reaction to what he considered excesses of logical positivism, Karl Popper, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), rejects the standard inductivist views on the scientific method in favor of a highly influential theory of falsification, using it to solve the demarcation problem.

Quine and French philosopher of science Pierre Duhem seemed to have similar views in certain respects. The Duhem–Quine thesis, or problem of underdetermination, posits that no scientific hypothesis can be understood in isolation, a viewpoint called confirmation holism.

In reaction to both the logical positivists and Popper, philosophy of science became dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science. Following Quine and Duhem, subsequent theories emphasized theory-ladenness. Significant for these discussions is Thomas Kuhn. In the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn formulated the idea of paradigm shifts and sparked a "revolt against positivism" known as the "historical turn" in philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend's book Against Method (1975) advocates epistemological anarchism; that there are no universal, methodological rules for scientific inquiry.

Branches

Philosophers like Tim Maudlin focus on the philosophy of physics. Maudlin argues in The Metaphysics Within Physics (2007) that philosophy must reflect on physics. Recently there has been work in the philosophy of chemistry. Eric Scerri is the founder and editor of the journal Foundations of Chemistry.

The philosophy of biology has also undergone considerable growth, particularly due to the considerable debate in recent years over the nature of evolution, particularly natural selection. Daniel Dennett and his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), which defends Neo-Darwinism, stand at the forefront of this debate. Jerry Fodor criticizes natural selection in What Darwin Got Wrong (2010).

The philosophy of social science has also received increased interest. Peter Winch takes a Wittgensteinian perspective in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958).

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• Berlin, Isaiah (1958). Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. Clarendon Press.
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• Quine, W. V. O. (1953). From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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• Amico, Robert (1995). The Problem of the Criterion. Bloomsbury.
• Baillie, James (1997). "Introduction to Bertrand Russell". Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. Prentice Hall.
• Beaney, Michael, ed. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-923884-2.
• Będkowski, Marcin, ed. (2020). Formal and Informal Methods in Philosophy.
• Berglund, Stefan (1995). Human and Personal Identity. Lund University Press.
• Bonjour, Laurence (2010). "Recent Work on the Internalism–Externalism Controversy". In Dancy; Sosa; Steup (eds.). A Companion to Epistemology, Second Edition. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 33.
• Cohen, L. J. (1986). The Dialogue of Reason: An Analysis of Analytical Philosophy. OUP.
• Cotnoir, A. J.; Varzi, Achille C. (2021). Mereology. OUP.
• Critchley, Simon (2001). Continental philosophy a very short introduction. OUP. OCLC 1200924441.
• Drayson, Zoe (2021). "Neurath's Boat". In de Cruz, Helen (ed.). Philosophy Illustrated: 40 Thought Experiments to Broaden Your Mind.
• Dummett, Michael (1993). The Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-64473-1.
• Glock, H. J. (2008). What is Analytic Philosophy?. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-87267-6. Retrieved 28 August 2023.
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2003). Theory and Reality. ISBN 0-226-30062-5.
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• Geuss, Raymond (1981). The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press.
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• Heyting, Frieda; Lenzen, Dieter; White, John (2002). Methods in Philosophy of Education. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-24260-8.
• Hitchcock, Christopher (2015). "Lewis on Causation". A Companion to David Lewis. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 295–311. doi:10.1002/9781118398593.ch19. ISBN 978-1-118-39859-3.
• Hylton, Peter (1990). Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. OUP.
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• Schwartz, Stephen P. (2012). A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-27172-8.
• Scruton, Roger (2012). Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey. Bloomsbury.
• Searle, John (2003). "Contemporary Philosophy in the United States". In Bunnin, N.; Tsui-James, E. P (eds.). The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Blackwell.
• Soames, Scott (2003). Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1, The Dawn of Analysis. Princeton University Press.
• Stalmaszczyk, Piotr, ed. (2021). The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
• Solomon, William D. (2018). "Early Virtue Ethics". The Oxford Handbook of Virtue. OUP. p. 303-335.
• Stroll, Avrum (2000). Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. Columbia University Press.

Further reading

• The London Philosophy Study Guide Archived 23 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein
• Beaney, Michael (ed.) (1997). Frege Reader. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Dennett, Daniel (ed.) (1978). Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books.
• Hirschberger, Johannes. A Short History of Western Philosophy, ed. Clare Hay. Short History of Western Philosophy, A. ISBN 978-0-7188-3092-2
• Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach. United Kingdom, Basic Books, 1979.
• Kymlicka, Will (2001). Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-878274-8.
• Layman, C. Stephen. Letters to Doubting Thomas: A Case for the Existence of God. United Kingdom, OUP USA, 2007.
• Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, revised ed. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
• Potter, Michael (2017). Early Analytic Philosophy: From Frege to Ramsey. Routledge.
• Putnam, Hilary (1987). The Many Faces of Realism. Open Court.
• Quine, Willard Van Orman (1941). Elementary Logic: Revised Edition. Boston, MA, USA: Ginn.
• Quine, Willard Van Orman (1987). Quiddities: an intermittently philosophical dictionary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Russell, Bertrand The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
• Russell, Bertrand (2004) [1945] History of Western Philosophy (Routledge Classics)
• Russell, Bertrand (1917). Mysticism and logic, and other essays. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble.
• Salmon, Nathan. Reference and essence
• van Heijenoort, Jan (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931
• Weitz, Morris, ed. Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition. New York: Free Press, 1966.
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.