Analytic Philosophy

The school of analytic philosophy has dominated academic philosophy in
various regions, most notably Great Britain and the United States,
since the early twentieth century. It originated around the turn of
the twentieth century as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell broke away
from what was then the dominant school in the British universities,
Absolute Idealism. Many would also include Gottlob Frege as a founder
of analytic philosophy in the late 19th century, and this
controversial issue is discussed in section 2c. When Moore and Russell
articulated their alternative to Idealism, they used a linguistic
idiom, frequently basing their arguments on the "meanings" of terms
and propositions. Additionally, Russell believed that the grammar of
natural language often is philosophically misleading, and that the way
to dispel the illusion is to re-express propositions in the ideal
formal language of symbolic logic, thereby revealing their true
logical form. Because of this emphasis on language, analytic
philosophy was widely, though perhaps mistakenly, taken to involve a
turn toward language as the subject matter of philosophy, and it was
taken to involve an accompanying methodological turn toward linguistic
analysis. Thus, on the traditional view, analytic philosophy was born
in this linguistic turn. The linguistic conception of philosophy was
rightly seen as novel in the history of philosophy. For this reason
analytic philosophy is reputed to have originated in a philosophical
revolution on the grand scale—not merely in a revolt against British
Idealism, but against traditional philosophy on the whole.

Analytic philosophy underwent several internal micro-revolutions that
divide its history into five phases. The first phase runs
approximately from 1900 to1910. It is characterized by the
quasi-Platonic form of realism initially endorsed by Moore and Russell
as an alternative to Idealism. Their realism was expressed and
defended in the idiom of "propositions" and "meanings," so it was
taken to involve a turn toward language. But its other significant
feature is its turn away from the method of doing philosophy by
proposing grand systems or broad syntheses and its turn toward the
method of offering narrowly focused discussions that probe a specific,
isolated issue with precision and attention to detail. By 1910, both
Moore and Russell had abandoned their propositional realism—Moore in
favor of a realistic philosophy of common sense, Russell in favor of a
view he developed with Ludwig Wittgenstein called logical atomism. The
turn to logical atomism and to ideal-language analysis characterizes
the second phase of analytic philosophy, approximately 1910-1930. The
third phase, approximately 1930-1945, is characterized by the rise of
logical positivism, a view developed by the members of the Vienna
Circle and popularized by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer. The
fourth phase, approximately 1945-1965, is characterized by the turn to
ordinary-language analysis, developed in various ways by the Cambridge
philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Wisdom, and the Oxford
philosophers Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, Peter Strawson, and Paul
Grice.

During the 1960s, criticism from within and without caused the
analytic movement to abandon its linguistic form. Linguistic
philosophy gave way to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of
language gave way to metaphysics, and this gave way to a variety of
philosophical sub-disciplines. Thus the fifth phase, beginning in the
mid 1960s and continuing beyond the end of the twentieth century, is
characterized by eclecticism or pluralism. This post-linguistic
analytic philosophy cannot be defined in terms of a common set of
philosophical views or interests, but it can be loosely characterized
in terms of its style, which tends to emphasize precision and
thoroughness about a narrow topic and to deemphasize the imprecise or
cavalier discussion of broad topics.

Even in its earlier phases, analytic philosophy was difficult to
define in terms of its intrinsic features or fundamental philosophical
commitments. Consequently, it has always relied on contrasts with
other approaches to philosophy—especially approaches to which it found
itself fundamentally opposed—to help clarify its own nature.
Initially, it was opposed to British Idealism, and then to
"traditional philosophy" at large. Later, it found itself opposed both
to classical Phenomenology (for example, Husserl) and its offspring,
such as Existentialism (Sartre, Camus, and so forth) and also
"Continental"' or "Postmodern" philosophy (Heidegger, Foucault and
Derrida). Though classical Pragmatism bears some similarity to early
analytic philosophy, especially in the work of C. S. Peirce and C. I.
Lewis, the pragmatists are usually understood as constituting a
separate tradition or school.

1. The Revolution of Moore and Russell: Cambridge Realism and The
Linguistic Turn

"It was towards the end of 1898," wrote Bertrand Russell,

that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led
the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. … I felt…a great
liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot house onto a windswept
headland. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve
realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass really is green.
(Russell 1959, 22)

This important event in Russell's own intellectual history turned out
to be decisive for the history of twentieth-century philosophy as a
whole; for it was this revolutionary break with British Idealism—then
the most influential school of philosophical thought in the British
universities—that birthed analytic philosophy and set it on the path
to supplanting both Idealism and philosophy as traditionally conceived
and practiced.

To understand Russell's elation at the rebellion, one needs to know
something about him and also something about British Idealism. Let's
begin with the latter.

At the end of the 19th century, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and
J.M.E. McTaggart were the leading British Idealists. They claimed that
the world, although it naively appears to us to be a collection of
discrete objects (this bird, that table, the earth and the sun, and so
forth), is really a single indivisible whole whose nature is mental,
or spiritual, or Ideal rather than material. Thus, Idealism was a
brand of metaphysical monism, but not a form of materialism, the other
leading form of metaphysical monism. It was also a form of what we
would now call anti-realism, since it claimed that the world of naïve
or ordinary experience is something of an illusion. Their claim was
not that the objects of ordinary experience do not exist, but that
they are not, as we normally take them to be, discrete. Instead, every
object exists and is what it is at least partly in virtue of the
relations it bears to other things—more precisely, to all other
things. This was called the doctrine of internal relations. Since, on
this view, everything that exists does so only in virtue of its
relations to everything else, it is misleading to say of any one thing
that it exists simpliciter. The only thing that exists simpliciter is
the whole—the entire network of necessarily related objects.
Correspondingly, the Idealists believed that no statement about some
isolated object could be true simpliciter, since, on their view, to
speak of an object in isolation would be to ignore the greater part of
the truth about it, namely, its relations to everything else.

Analytic philosophy began when Moore and then Russell started to
defend a thoroughgoing realism about what Moore called the "common
sense" or "ordinary" view of the world. This involved a lush
metaphysical pluralism, the belief that there are many things that
exist simpliciter. It was not this pluralism, however, nor the content
of any of his philosophical views, that inspired the analytic
movement. Instead, it was the manner and idiom of Moore's
philosophizing. First, Moore rejected system-building or making grand
syntheses of his views, preferring to focus on narrowly defined
philosophical problems held in isolation. Second, when Moore
articulated his realism, he did so in the idiom of "propositions" and
"meanings." There is a noteworthy ambiguity as to whether these are
linguistic items or mental ones.

This terminology is further ambiguous in Moore's case, for two
reasons. First, his views about propositions are highly similar to a
view standard in Austro-German philosophy from Bolzano and Lotze to
Husserl according to which "propositions" and "meanings" have an Ideal
existence—the kind of existence traditionally attributed to Platonic
Forms. It is likely that Moore got the idea from reading in that
tradition (cf. Bell 1999, Willard 1984). Second, despite strong
similarities with the Austro-German view, it is clear that, in Moore's
early thought, "propositions" and "meanings" are primarily neither
Ideal nor mental nor linguistic, but real in the sense of
"thing-like." For Moore and the early Russell, propositions or
meanings were "identical" to ordinary objects—tables, cats, people.
For more on this peculiar view, see the article on Moore, section 2b.

The deep metaphysical complexity attaching to Moore's view was largely
overlooked or ignored by his younger contemporaries, who were
attracted to the form of his philosophizing rather than to its
content. Taking the linguistic aspect of "propositions" and "meanings"
to be paramount, they saw Moore as endorsing a linguistic approach to
philosophy. This along with his penchant for attending to isolated
philosophical problems rather than constructing a grand system, gave
rise to the notion that he had rebelled not merely against British
Idealism but against traditional philosophy on the grand scale.

Though Moore was later to object that there was nothing especially
linguistic about it (see Moore 1942b), the linguistic conception of
Moore's method was far from baseless. For instance, in a famous paper
called "A Defense of Common Sense" (Moore 1925), Moore seems to argue
that the common sense view of the world is built into the terms of our
ordinary language, so that if some philosopher wants to say that some
common sense belief is false, he thereby disqualifies the very medium
in which he expresses himself, and so speaks either equivocally or
nonsensically.

His case begins with the observation that we know many things despite
the fact that we do not know how we know them. Among these "beliefs of
common sense," as he calls them, are such propositions as "There
exists at present a living human body, which is my body," "Ever since
it [this body] was born, it has been either in contact with or not far
from the surface of the earth," and "I have often perceived both body
and other things which formed part of its environment, including other
human bodies" (Moore 1925; in Moore 1959: 33). We can call these
common sense propositions.

Moore argues that each common sense proposition has an "ordinary
meaning" that specifies exactly what it is that one knows when one
knows that proposition to be true. This "ordinary meaning" is
perfectly clear to most everyone, except for some skeptical
philosophers who

seem to think that [for example] the question "Do you believe that
the earth has existed for many years past?" is not a plain question,
such as should be met either by a plain "Yes" or "No," or by a plain
"I can't make up my mind," but is the sort of question which can be
properly met by: "It all depends on what you mean by 'the earth' and
'exists' and 'years'…." (Moore 1925; in 1959: 36)

Moore thought that to call common sense into question this way is
perverse because the ordinary meaning of a common sense proposition is
plain to all competent language-users. So, to question its meaning,
and to suggest it has a different meaning, is disingenuous. Moreover,
since the bounds of intelligibility seem to be fixed by the ordinary
meanings of common sense proposition, the philosopher must accept them
as starting points for philosophical reflection. Thus, the task of the
philosopher is not to question the truth of common sense propositions,
but to provide their correct analyses or explanations.

Moore's use of the term "analysis" in this way is the source of the
name "analytic philosophy." Early on in analytic history, Moorean
analysis was taken to be a matter of rephrasing some common sense
proposition so as to yield greater insight into its already-clear and
unquestionable meaning. For example, just as one elucidates the
meaning of "brother" by saying a brother is a male sibling or by
saying it means "male sibling," so one might say that seeing a hand
means experiencing a certain external object—which is exactly what
Moore claims in his paper "Proof of an External World" (Moore 1939).

The argument of that essay runs as follows. "Here is one hand" is a
common sense proposition with an ordinary meaning. Using it in
accordance with that meaning, presenting the hand for inspection is
sufficient proof that the proposition is true—that there is indeed a
hand there. But a hand, according to the ordinary meaning of "hand,"
is a material object, and a material object, according to the ordinary
meaning of "material object," is an external object, an object that
isn't just in our mind. Thus, since we can prove that there is a hand
there, and since a hand is an external object, there is an external
world, according to the ordinary meaning of "external world."

These examples are from papers written in the second half of Moore's
career, but his "linguistic method" can be discerned much earlier, in
works dating all the way back to the late 1800s—the period of his
rebellion against Idealism. Even in Moore's first influential paper,
"The Nature of Judgment" (Moore 1899), he can be found paying very
close attention to propositions and their meanings. In his celebrated
paper, "The Refutation of Idealism" (Moore 1903b), Moore uses
linguistic analysis to argue against the Idealist's slogan Esse est
percipi (to be is to be perceived). Moore reads the slogan as a
definition or, as he would later call it, an analysis: just as we say
"bachelor" means "unmarried man," so the Idealist says "to exist"
means "to be cognized." However, if these bits of language had the
same meaning, Moore argues, it would be superfluous to assert that
they were identical, just as it is superfluous to say "a bachelor is a
bachelor." The fact that the Idealist sees some need to assert the
formula reveals that there is a difference in meanings of "to be" and
"to be perceived," and hence a difference in the corresponding
phenomena as well.

Moore's most famous meaning-centered argument is perhaps the "open
question argument" of his Principia Ethica (Moore 1903a). The open
question argument purports to show that it is a mistake to define
"good" in terms of anything other than itself. For any definition of
good—"goodness is pleasure," say—it makes sense to ask whether
goodness really is pleasure (or whatever it has been identified with);
thus, every attempt at definition leaves it an open question as to
what good really is. This is so because every purported definition
fails to capture the meaning of "good."

All of these cases exhibit what proved to be the most influential
aspect of Moore's philosophical work, namely his method of analysis,
which many of his contemporaries took to be linguistic analysis. For
instance, Norman Malcolm represents the standard view of Moore for
much of the twentieth century when he says that "the essence of
Moore's technique of refuting philosophical statements consists in
pointing out that these statements go against ordinary language"
(Malcolm 1942, 349). In the same essay, he goes on to tie Moore's
entire philosophical legacy to his "linguistic method:"

Moore's great historical role consists in the fact that he has
been perhaps the first philosopher to sense that any philosophical
statement that violates ordinary language is false, and consistently
to defend ordinary language against its philosophical violators.
(Malcolm 1942, 368)

Malcolm is right to note the novelty of Moore's approach. Although
previous philosophers occasionally had philosophized about language,
and had, in their philosophizing, paid close attention to the way
language was used, none had ever claimed that philosophizing itself
was merely a matter of analyzing language. Of course, Moore did not
make this claim either, but what Moore actually did as a philosopher
seemed to make saying it superfluous—in practice, he seemed to be
doing exactly what Malcolm said he was doing. Thus, though it took
some time for the philosophical community to realize it, it eventually
became clear that this new "linguistic method," pioneered by Moore,
constituted a radical break not only with the British Idealists but
with the larger philosophical tradition itself. To put it generally,
philosophy was traditionally understood as the practice of reasoning
about the world. Its goal was to give a logos—a rationally coherent
account—of the world and its parts at various levels of granularity,
but ultimately as a whole and at the most general level. There were
other aspects of the project, too, of course, but this was the heart
of it. With Moore, however, philosophy seemed to be recast as the
practice of linguistic analysis applied to isolated issues. Thus, the
rise of analytic philosophy, understood as the relatively continuous
growth of a new philosophical school originating in Moore's
"linguistic turn," was eventually recognized as being not just the
emergence of another philosophical school, but as constituting a
"revolution in philosophy" at large. (See Ayer et al. 1963 and
Tugendhat 1982.)
2. Russell and the Early Wittgenstein: Ideal Language and Logical Atomism

The second phase of analytic philosophy is charaterized by the turn to
ideal language analysis and, along with it, logical atomism—a
metaphysical system developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Russell laid the essential groundwork for both in his
pioneering work in formal logic, which is covered in Sections 2a and
2b. Though this work was done during the first phase of analytic
philosophy (1900-1910), it colaesced into a system only toward the end
of that period, as Russell and Whitehead completed their work on the
monumental Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead 1910-13), and
as Russell began to work closely with Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein seems to have been the sine qua non of the system.
Russell was the first to use the term "logical atomism," in a 1911
lecture to the French Philosophical Society. He was also the first to
publicly provide a full-length, systematic treatment of it, in his
1918 lectures on "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (Russell
1918-19). However, despite the centrality of Russell's logical work
for the system, in the opening paragraph of these lectures Russell
acknowedges that they "are very largely concerned with explaining
certain ideas which I learnt from my friend and former pupil Ludwig
Wittgenstein" (Russell 1918, 35). Wittgenstein's own views are
recorded in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. First published in
1921, the Tractatus proved to be the most influential piece written on
logical atomism. Because of its influence, we shall pay special
attention to the Tractatus when it comes to presenting logical atomism
as a complete system in Section 2d.

Though Russell and Wittgenstein differed over some of the details of
logical atomism, these disagreements can be ignored for present
purposes. What mattered for the development of analytic philosophy on
the whole was the emergence in the second decade of the twentieth
century of a new view of reality tailored to fit recent developments
in formal logic and the philosophical methodology connected to it, as
discussed in Section 2b. This was the common core of the Russellian
and Wittegensteinian versions of logical atomism; thus, blurring the
lines between Russell and Wittgenstein actually enables us to maintain
better focus on the emerging analytic tradition. It will also make
convenient a brief word on Frege, to see why some have wanted to
include him as a founder of analytic philosophy (Section 2c).
a. The Theory of Descriptions

Much of Russell's exuberance over Moore's realism had to do with its
consequences for logic and mathematics. Like so many philosophers
before him, Russell was attracted to the objective certainty of
mathematical and logical truths. However, because Idealism taught that
no proposition about a bit of reality in isolation could be true
simpliciter, an apparently straightforward truth such as 2+2=4, or If
a=b and b=c then a=c, was not so straightforward after all. Even
worse, Idealism made such truths dependent upon their being thought or
conceived. This follows from the doctrine of internal relations; for,
on the natural assumption that knowledge is or involves a relation
between a knower (subject) and something known (object), the doctrine
implies that objects of knowledge are not independent of the subjects
that know them. This left Idealism open to the charge of endorsing
psychologism—the view that apparently objective truths are to be
accounted for in terms of the operations of subjective cognitive or
"psychological" faculties. Psychologism was common to nearly all
versions of Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism (including British
Idealism). It was also a common feature of thought in the British
empirical tradition, from Hume to Mill (albeit with a naturalistic
twist). Moore's early realism allowed Russell to avoid psychologism
and other aspects of Idealism that prevented treating logical and
mathematical truths as absolutely true in themselves.

A crucial part of this early realism, however, was the object theory
of meaning; and this had implications that Russell found unacceptable.
On the object theory, the meaning of a sentence is the object or state
of affairs to which it refers (this is one reason why Moore could
identify ordinary objects as propositions or meanings; see Section 1).
For instance, the sentence "that leaf is green" is meaningful in
virtue of bearing a special relationship to the state of affairs it is
about, namely, a certain leaf's being green.

This may seem plausible at first glance; problems emerge, however,
when one recognizes that the class of meaningful sentences includes
many that, from an empirical point of view, lack objects. Any
statement referring to something that does not exist, such as a
fictional character in a novel, will have this problem. A particularly
interesting species of this genus is the negative existential
statement—statements that express the denial of their subjects'
existence. For example, when we say "The golden mountain does not
exist," we seem to refer to a golden mountain—a nonexistent object—in
the very act of denying its existence. But, on the object theory, if
this sentence is to be meaningful, it must have an object to serve as
its meaning. Thus it seems that the object theorist is faced with a
dilemma: either give-up the object theory of meaning or postulate a
realm of non-empirical objects that stand as the meanings of these
apparently objectless sentences.

The Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong took the latter horn of the
dilemma, notoriously postulating a realm of non-existent objects. This
alternative was too much for Russell. Instead, he found a way of going
between the horns of the dilemma. His escape route was called the
"theory of descriptions," a bit of creative reasoning that the
logician F. P. Ramsey called a "paradigm of philosophy," and one which
helped to stimulate extraordinary social momentum for the budding
analytic movement. The theory of descriptions appears in Russell's
1905 essay, "On Denoting," which has become a central text in the
analytic canon. There, Russell argues that "denoting phrases"—phrases
that involve a noun preceded by "a," "an," "some," "any," "every,"
"all," or "the"—are incomplete symbols; that is, they have no meaning
on their own, but only in the context of a complete sentence that
expresses a proposition. Such sentences can be rephrased—analyzed in
Moore's sense of "analyzed"—into sentences that are meaningful and yet
do not refer to anything nonexistent.

For instance, according to Russell, saying "The golden mountain does
not exist" is really just a misleading way of saying "It is not the
case that there is exactly one thing that is a mountain and is
golden." Thus analyzed, it becomes clear that the proposition does not
refer to anything, but simply denies an existential claim. Since it
does not refer to any "golden mountain," it does not need a Meinongian
object to provide it with meaning. In fact, taking the latter
formulation to be the true logical form of the statement, Russell
construes the original's reference to a non-existent golden mountain
as a matter of grammatical illusion. One dispels the illusion by
making the grammatical form match the true logical form, and this is
done through logical analysis. The idea that language could cast
illusions that needed to be dispelled, some form of linguistic
analysis was to be a prominent theme in analytic philosophy, both in
its ideal language and ordinary language camps, through roughly 1960.
b. Ideal-Language Philosophy vs. Ordinary-Language Philosophy

Russellian analysis has just been just identified as logical rather
than linguistic analysis, and yet it was said in a previous paragraph
that this was analysis in the sense made familiar by Moore. In truth,
there were both significant similarities and significant differences
between Moorean and Russellian analysis. On the one hand, Russellian
analysis was like Moore's in that it involved the rephrasing of a
sentence into another sentence semantically equivalent but
grammatically different. On the other hand, Russell's analyses were
not given in ordinary language, as Moore's were. Instead, they were
given in symbolic logic, that is, in a quasi-mathematical, symbolic
notation that made the structure of Russell's analyzed propositions
exceedingly clear. For instance, with the definitions of Mx as "x is a
mountain" and Gx as "x is golden," the proposition that the golden
mountain does not exist becomes

~((∃x)(Mx & Gx) & ∀y((My & Gy) → y=x))

Equivalently, in English, it is not the case that there is some object
such that (1) it is a mountain, (2) it is golden, and (3) all objects
that are mountains and golden are identical to it. (For more on what
this sort of notation looks like and how it works, see the article on
Propositional Logic, especially Section 3.)

By 1910, Russell, along with Alfred North Whitehead, had so developed
this symbolic notation and the rules governing its use that it
constituted a fairly complete system of formal logic. This they
published in the three volumes of their monumental Principia
Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead 1910-1913).

Within the analytic movement, the Principia was received as providing
an ideal language, capable of elucidating all sorts of
ordinary-language confusions. Consequently, Russellian logical
analysis was seen as a new species of the genus linguistic analysis,
which had already been established by Moore. Furthermore, many took
logical analysis to be superior to Moore's ordinary-language analysis
insofar as its results (its analyses) were more exact and not
themselves prone to further misunderstandings or illusions.

The distinction between ordinary-language philosophy and
ideal-language philosophy formed the basis for a fundamental division
within the analytic movement through the early 1960s. The introduction
of logical analysis also laid the groundwork for logical atomism, a
new metaphysical system developed by Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Before we discuss this directly, however, we must say a word about
Gottlob Frege.
c. Frege: Influence or Instigator?

In developing the formal system of Principia Mathematica, Russell
relied heavily on the work of several forebears including the German
mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege. A generation before
Russell and the Principia, Frege had provided his own system of formal
logic, with its own system of symbolic notation. Frege's goal in doing
so was to prove logicism, the view that mathematics is reducible to
logic. This was also Russell's goal in the Principia. (For more on the
development of logic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see
the article on Propositional Logic, especially Section 2). Frege also
anticipated Russell's notion of incomplete symbols by invoking what
has come to be called "the context principle:" words have meaning only
in the context of complete sentences.

Frege's focus on the formalization and symbolization of logic
naturally led him into terrain that we would now classify as falling
under the philosophy of language, and to approach certain
philosophical problems as if they were problems about language, or at
least as if they could be resolved by linguistic means. This has led
some to see in Frege a linguistic turn similar to that perceivable in
the early work of Moore and Russell (on this point, see the article on
Frege and Language).

Because of these similarities and anticipations, and because Russell
explicitly relied on Frege's work, many have seen Frege as a founder
of analytic philosophy more or less on a par with Moore and Russell
(See Dummett 1993 and Kenny 2000). Others see this as an exaggeration
both of Frege's role and of the similarities between him and other
canonical analysts. For instance, Peter Hacker notes that Frege was
not interested in reforming philosophy the way all the early analysts
were:

Frege's professional life was a single-minded pursuit of a
demonstration that arithmetic had its foundations in pure logic alone
… One will search Frege's works in vain for a systematic discussion of
the nature of philosophy. (Hacker 1986: 5, 7)

There is no doubt that Frege's views proved crucially useful and
inspiring to key players on the ideal-language side of analytic
philosophy. Whether or not this qualifies him as a founder of analytic
philosophy depends on the extent to which we see the analytic movement
as born of a desire for metaphilosophical revolution on the grand
scale. To the extent that this is essential to our understanding of
analytic philosophy, Frege's role will be that of an influence rather
than a founder.
d. Logical Atomism and Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein came to Cambridge to study mathematical logic
under Russell, but he quickly established himself as his teacher's
intellectual peer. Together, they devised a metaphysical system called
"logical atomism." As discussed at the beginning of Section 2, qua
total system, logical atomism seems to have been Wittgenstein's
brainchild. Still, this should not be seen as in any way marginalizing
Russell's significance for the system, which can be described as a
metaphysics based on the assumption that an ideal language the likes
of which was provided in Principia Mathematica is the key to reality.

According to logical atomism, propositions are built out of elements
corresponding to the basic constituents of the world, just as
sentences are built out of words. The combination of words in a
meaningful sentence mirrors the combination of constituents in the
corresponding proposition and also in the corresponding possible or
actual state of affairs. That is, the structure of every possible or
actual state of affairs is isomorphic with both the structure of the
proposition that refers to it and the structure of the sentence that
expresses that proposition–so long as the sentence is properly
formulated in the notation of symbolic logic. The simplest sort of
combination is called an atomic fact because this fact has no
sub-facts as part of its structure. An atomic fact for some logical
atomists might be something like an individual having a property—a
certain leaf's being green, for instance. Linguistically, this fact is
represented by anatomic proposition: for example, "this leaf is
green," or, in logical symbolism "F(a)." Both the fact F(a) and the
proposition "F(a)" are called "atomic" not because they themselves are
atomic [that is, without structure], but because all their
constituents are. Atomic facts are the basic constituents of the
world, and atomic propositions are the basic constituents of language.

More complex propositions representing more complex facts are called
molecular propositions andmolecular facts. The propositions are made
by linking atomic propositions together with truth-functional
connectives, such as "and," "or" and "not." A truth-functional
connective is one that combines constituent propositions in such a way
that their truth-values (that is, their respective statuses as true or
false) completely determine the truth value of the resulting molecular
proposition. For instance, the truth value of a proposition of the
form "not-p" can be characterized in terms of, and hence treated as
determined by, the truth value of "p" because if "p" is true, then
"not-p" is false, and if it is false, "not-p" is true. Similarly, a
proposition of the form "p and q" will be true if and only if its
constituent propositions "p" and "q" are true on their own.

The logic of Principia Mathematica is entirely truth-functional; that
is, it only allows for molecular propositions whose truth-values are
determined by their atomic constituents. Thus, as Russell observed in
the introduction to the second edition of the Principia, "given all
true atomic propositions, together with the fact that they are all,
every other true proposition can theoretically be deduced by logical
methods" (Russell 1925, xv). The same assumption—called the thesis of
truth-functionality or the thesis of extensionality—lies behind
Wittgenstien's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

As mentioned previously, Wittgenstein's Tractatus proved to be the
most influential expression of logical atomism. The Tractatus is
organized around seven propositions, here taken from the 1922
translation by C. K. Ogden:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An
elementary proposition is a truth function of itself.)
6. The general form of a truth-function is…. This is the general
form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The body of the Tractatus consists in cascading levels of numbered
elaborations of these propositions (1 is elaborated by 1.1 which is
elaborated by 1.11, 1.12 and 1.13, and so forth)—except for 7, which
stands on its own. Propositions 1 and 2 establish the metaphysical
side of logical atomism: the world is nothing but a complex of atomic
facts. Propositions 3 and 4 establish the isomorphism between language
and reality: a significant (meaningful) proposition is a "logical
picture" of the facts that constitute some possible or actual state of
affairs. It is a picture in the sense that the structure of the
proposition is identical to the structure of the corresponding atomic
facts. It is here, incidentally, that we get the first explicit
statement of the metaphilosophical view characteristic of early
analytic philosophy: "All philosophy is a 'critique of language' …"
(4.0031).

Proposition 5 asserts the thesis of truth-functionality, the view that
all complex propositions are built out of atomic propositions joined
by truth-functional connectives, and that atomic propositions are
truth-functional in themselves. Even existentially quantified
propositions are considered to be long disjunctions of atomic
propositions. It has since been recognized that a truth-functional
logic is not adequate to capture all the phenomena of the world; or at
least that, if there is an adequate truth-functional system, we
haven't found it yet. Certain phenomena seem to defy truth-functional
characterization; for instance, moral facts are problematic. Knowing
whether the constituent proposition "p" is true, doesn't seem to tell
us whether "It ought to be the case that p" is true. Similarly
problematical are facts about thoughts, beliefs, and other mental
states (captured in statements such as "John believes that…"), and
modal facts (captured in statements about the necessity or possibility
of certain states of affairs). And treating existential quantifiers as
long disjunctions doesn't seem to be adequate for the infinite number
of facts about numbers since there surely are more real numbers than
there are available names to name them even if we were willing to
accept infinitely long disjunctions. The hope that truth-functional
logic will prove adequate for resolving all these problems has
inspired a good bit of thinking in the analytic tradition, especially
during the first half of the twentieth century. This hope lies at the
heart of logical atomism.

In its full form, Proposition 6 includes some unusual symbolism that
is not reproduced here. All it does, however, is to give a general
"recipe" for the creation of molecular propositions by giving the
general form of a truth-function. Basically, Wittgenstein is saying
that all propositions are truth-functional, and that, ultimately,
there is only one kind of truth-function. Principia Mathematica had
employed a number of truth-functional connectives: "and," "or," "not,"
and so forth. However, in 1913 a logician named Henry Sheffer showed
that propositions involving these connectives could be rephrased
(analyzed) as propositions involving a single connective consisting in
the negation of a conjunction. This was called the "not and" or "nand"
connective, and was supposed to be equivalent to the ordinary language
formulation "not both x and y." It is usually symbolized by a short
vertical line ( | ) called the Sheffer stroke. Though Wittgenstein
uses his own idiosyncratic symbolism, this is the operation identified
in proposition 6 and some of its elaborations as showing the general
form of a truth-function. Replacing the Principia'splurality of
connectives with the "nand" connective made for an extremely
minimalistic system—all one needed to construct a complete
picture/description of the world was a single truth-functional
connective applied repeatedly to the set of all atomic propositions.

Proposition 7, which stands on its own, is the culmination of a series
of observations made throughout theTractatus, and especially in the
elaborations of proposition 6. Throughout the Tractatus there runs a
distinction between showing and saying. Saying is a matter of
expressing a meaningful proposition. Showing is a matter of presenting
something's form or structure. Thus, as Wittgenstein observes at
4.022, "A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things
stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand."

In the introduction to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein indicates that his
overarching purpose is to set the criteria and limits of meaningful
saying. The structural aspects of language and the world—those aspects
that are shown—fall beyond the limits of meaningful saying. According
to Wittgenstein, the propositions of logic and mathematics are purely
structural and therefore meaningless—they show the form of all
possible propositions/states of affairs, but they do not themselves
picture any particular state of affairs, thus they do not say
anything. This has the odd consequence that the propositions of the
Tractatusthemselves, which are supposed to be about logic, are
meaningless. Hence the famous dictum at 6.54:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions,
and then he will see the world aright.

Though meaningless, the propositions of logic and mathematics are not
nonsense. They at least have the virtue of showing the essential
structure of all possible facts. On the other hand, there are
concatenations of words, purported propositions, that neither show nor
say anything and thus are not connected to reality in any way. Such
propositions are not merely senseless, they are nonsense. Among
nonsense propositions are included the bulk of traditional
philosophical statements articulating traditional philosophical
problems and solutions, especially in metaphysics and ethics. This is
the consequence of Wittgenstein's presumption that meaningfulness is
somehow linked to the realm of phenomena studied by the natural
sciences (cf. 4.11 ff). Thus, as he claims in 6.53:

The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to
say nothing except what can be said, that is propositions of natural
science—that is something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and
then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to
demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain
signs in his propositions.

In the eyes of its author (as he avers in its Introduction), the real
accomplishment of the Tractatus was to have solved, or rather
dissolved, all the traditional problems of philosophy by showing that
they were meaningless conundrums generated by a failure to understand
the limits of meaningful discourse.
3. Logical Positivism, the Vienna Circle, and Quine
a. Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle

Logical positivism is the result of combining the central aspects of
the positivisms of Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach with the
meta-philosophical and methodological views of the analytic movement,
especially as understood by the ideal-language camp. In all its forms,
positivism was animated by the idealization of scientific knowledge as
it was commonly understood from at least the time of Newton through
the early twentieth century. Consequently, at its core is a view
called scientism: the view that all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

As twentieth-century philosophy of science has shown, the definition
and demarcation of science is a very difficult task. Still, for
several centuries it has been common to presume that metaphysics and
other branches of philosophy-as-traditionally-practiced, not to
mention religious and "common sense" beliefs, do not qualify as
scientific. From the standpoint of scientism, these are not fields of
knowledge, and their claims should not be regarded as carrying any
serious weight.

At the heart of logical positivism was a novel way of dismissing
certain non-scientific views by declaring them not merely wrong or
false, but meaningless. According to the verification theory of
meaning, sometimes also called the empiricist theory of meaning, any
non-tautological statement has meaning if and only if it can be
empirically verified. This "verification principle" of meaning is
similar to the principle maintained in Wittgenstein's Tractatus that
the realm of meaning is coextensive with the realm of the natural
(empirical) sciences. In fact the logical positivists drew many of
their views straight from the pages of the Tractatus (though their
reading of it has since been criticized as being too inclined to
emphasize the parts friendly to scientific naturalism at the expense
of those less-friendly). With Wittgenstein, the logical positivists
concluded that the bulk of traditional philosophy consisted in
meaningless pseudo-problems generated by the misuse of language, and
that the true role of philosophy was to establish and enforce the
limits of meaningful language through linguistic analysis.

Logical positivism was created and promoted mainly by a number of
Austro-German thinkers associated with the Vienna Circle and, to a
lesser extent, the Berlin Circle. The Vienna Circle began as a
discussion group of scientifically-minded philosophers—or perhaps
philosophically minded-scientists—organized by Moritz Schlick in 1922.
Its exact membership is difficult to determine, since there were a
number of peripheral figures who attended its meetings or at least had
substantial connections to core members, but who are frequently
characterized as visitors or associates rather than full-fledged
members. Among its most prominent members were Schlick himself, Otto
Neurath, Herbert Feigl, Freidrich Waismann and, perhaps most prominent
of all, Rudolph Carnap. The members of both Circles made contributions
to a number of different philosophical and scientific discussions,
including logic and the philosophy of mind (see for example this
Encyclopedia's articles on Behaviorism and Identity Theory); however,
their most important contributions vis-à-vis the development of
analytic philosophy were in the areas of the philosophy of language,
philosophical methodology and metaphilosophy. It was their views in
these areas that combined to form logical positivism.

Logical positivism was popularized in Britain by A.J. Ayer, who
visited with the Vienna Circle in 1933. His book Language, Truth and
Logic (Ayer 1936) was extremely influential, and remains the best
introduction to logical positivism as understood in its heyday. To
escape the turmoil of World War II, several members of the Vienna
Circle emigrated to the United States where they secured teaching
posts and exercised an immense influence on academic philosophy. By
this time, however, logical positivism was largely past its prime;
consequently, it was not so much logical positivism proper that was
promulgated, but something more in the direction of philosophizing
focused on language, logic, and science. (For more on this point, see
the article on American Philosophy, especially Section 4).

Ironically, the demise of logical positivism was caused mainly by a
fatal flaw in its central view, the verification theory of meaning.
According to the verification principle, a non-tautological statement
has meaning if and only if it can be empirically verified. However,
the verification principle itself is non-tautological but cannot be
empirically verified. Consequently, it renders itself meaningless.
Even apart from this devastating problem, there were difficulties in
setting the scope of the principle so as to properly subserve the
positivists' scientistic aims. In its strong form (given above), the
principle undermined not only itself, but also statements about
theoretical entities, so necessary for science to do its work. On the
other hand, weaker versions of the principle, such as that given in
the second edition of Ayer'sLanguage, Truth, and Logic (1946), were
incapable of eliminating the full range of metaphysical and other
non-scientific statements that the positivists wanted to disqualify.
b. W. V. Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine was the first American philosopher of any
great significance in the analytic tradition. Though his views had
their greatest impact only as the era of linguistic philosophy came to
an end, it is convenient to take them up in contrast with logical
positivism.

An important part of the logical positivist program was the attempt to
analyze or reduce scientific statements into so-called protocol
statements having to do with empirical observations. This reductionist
project was taken up by several members of the Vienna Circle, but none
took it so far as did Rudolph Carnap, in his The Logical Structure of
the World (1928) and in subsequent work.

The basic problem for the reductionist project is that many important
scientific claims and concepts seem to go beyond what can be verified
empirically. Claiming that the sun will come up tomorrow is a claim
the goes beyond today's observations. Claims about theoretical
entities such as atoms also provide obvious cases of going beyond what
can be verified by specific observations, but statements of scientific
law run into essentially the same problem. Assuming empiricism, what
is required to place scientific claims on a secure, epistemic
foundation is to eliminate the gap between observation and theory
without introducing further unverifiable entities or views. This was
the goal of the reductionist project. By showing that every apparently
unverifiable claim in science could be analyzed into a small set of
observation-sentences, the logical positivists hoped to show that the
gap between observation and theory does not really exist.

Despite being on very friendly terms with Carnap and other members of
the Vienna Circle (with whom he visited in the early 1930s), and
despite being dedicated, as they were, to scientism and empiricism,
Quine argued that the reductionist project was hopeless. "Modern
Empiricism," he claimed,

has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief
in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or
grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths
which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma
isreductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is
equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to
immediate experience. (Quine 1951, 20)

"Both dogmas," says Quine, "are ill-founded."

The first dogma with which Quine is concerned is that there is an
important distinction to be made between analytic and synthetic
claims. Traditionally, the notions of analytic truth, a priori truth,
andnecessary truth have been closely linked to one another, forming a
conceptual network that stands over against the supposedly
contradictory network of a posteriori, contingent, and synthetic
truths. Each of these categories will be explained briefly prior to
addressing Quine's critique of this "dogma" (for a more extensive
treatment see the article on A Priori and A Posteriori).

An a priori truth is a proposition that can be known to be true by
intuition or pure reason, without making empirical observations. For
instance, neither mathematical truths such as 2+2=4, nor logical
truths such as If ((a=b) &(b=c)) then (a=c), nor semantic truths such
as All bachelors are unmarried men, depend upon the realization of any
corresponding, worldly state of affairs, either in order to be true or
to be known. A posteriori truths, on the other hand, are truths
grounded in or at least known only by experience, including both
mundane truths such as The cat is on the mat and scientific truths
such asBodies in free-fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s2.

Many (if not all) a priori truths seem to be necessary—that is, they
could not have been otherwise. On the other hand, many (if not all) a
posteriori truths seem to be contingent—that is, that they could have
been otherwise: the cat might not have been on the mat, and, for all
we know, the rate of acceleration for bodies in freefall might have
been different than what it is.

Finally, the necessity and a prioricity of such truths seem to be
linked to their analyticity. A proposition is analytically true if the
meanings of its terms require it to be true. For example, the
proposition "All bachelors are men" is analytically true, because
"man" is connected to "bachelor" in virtue of its meaning—a fact
recognized by analyzing "bachelor" so as to see that it means
"unmarried man". On the other hand, "All bachelors have left the room"
is not analytically true. It is called a synthetic proposition or
truth, because it involves terms or concepts that are not connected
analytically by their individual meanings, but only insofar as they
are synthesized (brought together) in the proposition itself. Such
truths are usually, and perhaps always, a posteriori and contingent.

Historically, philosophers have tended to try to explain necessity, a
prioricity and analyticity by appealing to abstract objects such as
Plato's Forms or Aristotle's essences. Such entities purportedly
transcend the realm of time, space, and/or the senses, and hence the
realm of "nature" as defined by science—at least as this was
understood by the scientific naturalism of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Consequently, devotees of scientific
naturalism required an alternative account of necessity, a priority,
and analyticity; and here analytic philosophy's linguistic turn seemed
to offer a way forward.

For obvious reasons, and as the above quotation from Quine hints,
analytic truths traditionally have been characterized as "true in
virtue of meaning." However, historically, "meaning" has been cashed
out in different ways: in terms of abstract, Ideal entities (Plato,
Aristotle, Husserl), and in terms of concepts (Locke, Hume), and in
terms of language (construed as a system of concrete, sensible symbols
with conventionally approved uses). In the context of analytic
philosophy's "linguistic turn," it was all too easy to take the latter
approach, and hence to treat analyticity as deriving from some
linguistic phenomenon such as synonymy or the interchangeability of
terms.

Such a view was highly amenable to the scientistic, naturalistic, and
empiricistic leanings of many early analysts, and especially to the
logical positivists. On the assumptions that meaning is fundamentally
linguistic and that language is a conventional symbol-system in which
the symbols are assigned meanings by fiat, one can explain synonymy
without referring to anything beyond the realm of time, space and the
senses. If one can then explain analyticity in terms of synonymy, and
explain both necessity and a prioricity in terms of analyticity, then
one will have theories of analytic, necessary, and a priori truths
consistent with scientific naturalism.

Given Quine's own commitment to scientific naturalism, one might have
expected him to join the logical positivists and others in embracing
this model and then striving for a workable version of it. However,
Quine proposed a more radical solution to the scientific naturalist's
problem with necessity, a prioricity, and analyticity: namely, he
proposed to reject the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, a
priori anda posteriori, necessary and contingent.

He begins undermining the notion that synonymy-relations are
established by fiat or "stipulative definition." On the naturalistic
view of language and meaning, all meanings and synonymy relations
would have to have been established by some person or people making
stipulative definitions at some particular place and time. For
instance, someone would have had to have said, at some point in
history, "henceforth, the symbol 'bachelor' shall be interchangeable
with the symbol 'unmarried man'." However, Quine asks rhetorically,
"who defined it thus, or when?" (Quine 1951, 24). The point is that we
have no evidence of this ever having happened. Thus, at the very
least, the naturalistic account of meaning/synonymy is an unverifiable
theory of the sort the positivists wanted to avoid. Moreover, what
empirical evidence we do have suggests that it is likely false, for,
as Quine sees it, "definition—except in the extreme case of the
explicitly conventional introduction of new notation—hinges on prior
relationships of synonymy" (Quine 1951, 27). In cases where it appears
that someone is making a stipulative definition—as in a dictionary,
for example—Quine explains that, far from establishing synonymy, the
stipulator is either describing or making use of synonymy relations
already present in the language. After exploring several kinds of
cases in which stipulative definitions seem to establish synonymy
relations, he concludes that all but one—the banal act of coining an
abbreviation—rely on pre-existing synonymy relations. The upshot is
that stipulative definition cannot account for the breadth of cases in
which synonymy is exemplified, and thus that it cannot be the general
ground of either synonymy or analyticity.

With its foundation thus undermined, the naturalistic theory of
analyticity, necessity and a prioricitycollapses. However, rather than
rejecting naturalism on account of its inability to explain these
phenomena, Quine rejects the notion that naturalism needs to explain
them on the ground that they are spurious categories. Prima facie, of
course, there seems to be a distinction between the analytic and the
synthetic, the a priori and the a posteriori, the necessary and the
contingent. However, when we attempt to get a deeper understanding of
these phenomena by defining them, we cannot do it. Quine explores
several other ways of defining analyticity in addition to synonymy and
stipulative definition, ultimately concluding that none work. To the
contrary, analyticity, synonymy, necessity and related concepts seem
to contribute to each other's meaning/definition in a way that "is not
flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively
speaking, of a closed curve in space" (Quine 1951, 29). Because none
of them can be defined without invoking one of the others, no one of
them can be eliminated by reducing it to one of the others. Rather
than concluding that analyticity, a prioricity, necessity, and so
forth are primitive phenomena, Quine takes their indefinability to
indicate that there is no genuine distinction to be drawn between them
and their traditional opposites.

This brings us to the second dogma. When Quine criticizes
"reductionism," he has principally in mind the logical positivists'
tendency to pursue the reductionist project as if every and any
scientific statement, considered in isolation, could be reduced
to/analyzed into a small set of observational statements related to it
in such a way that they counted uniquely as that claim's verification
and meaning. Over against this "atomistic" or "isolationist" or
"local" conception of verification/reductive analysis, Quine argued
that scientific claims have predictive power, and hence verifiability
or falsifiability, and hence also meaning, only as parts of large
networks of claims that together form far-reaching theories that might
be called "worldviews." For this reason, one can never verify or
falsify an isolated scientific claim; rather, verification and
falsification—and hence also meaning—are holistic. Observations (and
observation sentences) that may seem to verify a lone claim actually
make a partial contribution to the verification of the total
theoretical network to which it belongs.

As the language here suggests, viewed holistically, verification is
never absolute. There is no manageable set of observations that will
verify a total theory or any of its constitutive claims once and for
all. By the same token, observations (and observation sentences) that
may seem to falsify a lone claim do not decisively falsify either it
or the theory to which it belongs. Rather, such observations require
only that some adjustment be made to the theory. Perhaps one of its
constitutive claims must be rejected, but not necessarily the one that
initially seemed to be falsified. On Quine's view, any constitutive
claim can be saved by making adjustments elsewhere in the
theory-network.

This holistic view of meaning and verification reinforces Quine's
rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction and its fellows.
Holism in these areas implies that no claim in one's total theory is
immune from revision or rejection in light of observational evidence.
This means that even claims traditionally thought to be necessary
and/or analytic, such as those of mathematics and logic, can be
revised or rejected in order to preserve other claims to which one is
more deeply committed.

Quine's assault on the analytic/synthetic distinction undermines not
merely the positivists' reductionist project, but also the general
practice of analysis which, from the beginning, had been understood to
involve the transformation of a sentence into another sentence
semantically equivalent (synonymous) but grammatically different. At
the same time, Quine's holism about the meaning of scientific claims
and their verification generalizes to become a theory of meaning
holism that applies to all meaningful claims whatsoever. However,
following Moore's practice, the analytic method was usually applied to
claims in isolation, apart from considerations of their connection to
other claims that together might constitute a philosophical
"worldview." Quinean meaning holism undermines this aspect of analysis
just as much as it does the logical positivists "isolationist" view of
verification.
4. The Later Wittgenstein and Ordinary-Language Philosophy
a. Ordinary-Language Philosophy

Thanks to G.E. Moore, ordinary-language analysis had had a place in
the analytic movement from the very beginning. Because of the
perceived superiority of ideal-language analysis, however, it dropped
almost completely out of sight for several decades. In the 1930s,
ordinary-language analysis began to make a comeback thanks mainly to
Wittgenstein—whose views had undergone radical changes during the
1920s—but also to a number of other talented philosophers including
John Wisdom, John Austin (not to be confused with the
nineteenth-century John Austin who invented legal positivism), Gilbert
Ryle, Peter Strawson and Paul Grice. Despite differences in their
reasons for adopting the ordinary-language approach as well as their
respective manners of employing it, these figures' common focus on
ordinary language was a substantial point of unity over against the
initially dominant ideal-language approach.

Ordinary-language philosophy became dominant in analytic philosophy
only after World War II—hence the dates for the ordinary-language era
given in the Introduction are 1945-1965. Indeed, with the exception of
several articles by Ryle, the most important texts of the
ordinary-language camp were published in 1949 and later—in some cases
not until much later, when the linguistic approach to philosophy in
all its forms was already on its way out.

Ordinary-language philosophy is sometimes called "Oxford philosophy."
This is because Ryle, Austin, Strawson and Grice were all Oxford dons.
They were the most important representatives of the ordinary-language
camp after Wittgenstein (who was at Cambridge). After Wittgenstein
died in the early years of the ordinary-language era, they lived to
promote it through its heyday.

Despite the strong connection to Oxford, Wittgenstein is usually taken
to be the most important of the ordinary-language philosophers. For
this reason, we will focus only on his later views in giving a more
detailed example of ordinary language philosophy.
b. The Later Wittgenstein

While logical positivism was busy crumbling under the weight of
self-referential incoherence, a larger problem was brewing for
ideal-language philosophy in general. After publishing the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein retired from philosophy and went to teach grade-school in
the Austrian countryside. Why wouldn't he leave academia—after all, he
believed he had already lain to rest all the traditional problems of
philosophy!

During his time away from the academy, Wittgenstein had occasion to
rethink his views about language. He concluded that, far from being a
truth-functional calculus, language has no universally correct
structure—that is, there is no such thing as an ideal language.
Instead, each language-system—be it a full-fledged language, a
dialect, or a specialized technical language used by some body of
experts—is like a game that functions according to its own rules.

These rules are not of the sort found in grammar books—those are just
attempts to describe rules already found in the practices of some
linguistic community. Real linguistic rules, according to the later
Wittgenstein, cannot be stated, but are rather shown in the complex
intertwining of linguistic and non-linguistic practices that make up
the "form of life" of any linguistic community. Language is, for the
later Wittgenstein, an intrinsically social phenomenon, and its
correct modes are as diverse as the many successful modes of corporate
human life. Consequently, it cannot be studied in the abstract, apart
from its many particular embodiments in human communities.

In contrast with his views in the Tractatus, the later Wittgenstein no
longer believed that meaning is a picturing-relation grounded in the
correspondence relationships between linguistic atoms and metaphysical
atoms. Instead, language systems, or language games, are unanalyzable
wholes whose parts (utterances sanctioned by the rules of the
language) have meaning in virtue of having a role to play—a use—within
the total form of life of a linguistic community. Thus it is often
said that for the latter Wittgenstein meaning is use. On this view,
the parts of a language need not refer or correspond to anything at
all—they only have to play a role in a form of life.

It is important to note that even in his later thought, Wittgenstein
retained the view that traditional philosophical problems arise from
linguistic error, and that true philosophy is about analyzing language
so as to grasp the limits of meaning and see that error for what it
is—a headlong tumble into confusion or meaninglessness. However, his
new understanding of language required a new understanding of
analysis. No longer could it be the transformation of some ordinary
language statement into the symbolic notation of formal logic
purportedly showing its true form. Instead, it is a matter of looking
at how language is ordinarily used and seeing that traditional
philosophical problems arise only as we depart from that use.

"A philosophical problem," says Wittgenstein, "has the form: 'I don't
know my way about'" (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶123), that is, I don't know
how to speak properly about this, to ask a question about this, to
give an answer to that question. If I were to transcend the rules of
my language and say something anyhow, what I say would be meaningless
nonsense. Such are the utterances of traditional, metaphysical
philosophy. Consequently, philosophical problems are to be solved, or
rather dissolved,

by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a
way as to make us recognize its workings: … The problems are solved,
not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always
known. (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶ 109)

And "what we have always known" is the rules of our language. "The
work of the philosopher," he says, "consists in assembling reminders
for a particular purpose" (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶ 127). These reminders
take the form of examples of how the parts of language are ordinarily
used in the language game out of which the philosoher has tried to
step. Their purpose is to coax the philosopher away from the misuse of
language essential to the pursuit of traditional philosophical
questions. Thus the true philosophy becomes a kind of therapy aimed at
curing a lingusitic disease that cripples one's ability to fully
engage in the form of life of one's linguistic community. True
philsophy, Wittgenstein says, "is a battle against the bewitchment of
our intelligence by means of language" (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶ 109). The
true philosopher's weapon in this battle is "to bring words back from
their metaphysical to their everyday use" (Wittgenstein 1953, ¶ 116),
so that "the results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or
another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding
has gotten by running its head up against the limits of language"
(Wittgenstein 1953, ¶ 119).

Though Wittgenstein developed these new views much earlier (mainly in
the 1920s and 30s), they were not officially published until 1953, in
the posthumous Philosophical Investigations. Prior to this,
Wittgenstein's new views were spread largely by word of mouth among
his students and other interested persons.
5. The 1960s and After: The Era of Eclecticism
a. The Demise of Linguistic Philosophy

By the mid-1960s the era of linguistic philosophy was coming to a
close. The causes of its demise are variegated. For one thing, it was
by this time apparent that there were deep divisions within the
analytic movement, especially between the ordinary-language and
ideal-language camps, over the nature of language and meaning on the
one hand, and over how to do philosophy on the other. Up to this
point, the core of analytic philosophy had been the view that
philosophical problems are linguistic illusions generated by violating
the boundaries of meaning, and that they were to be solved by clearly
marking those boundaries and then staying within them. It was now
becoming clear, however, that this was no easy task. Far from being
the transparent phenomenon that the early analysts had taken it to be,
linguistic meaning was turning out to be a very puzzling phenomenon,
itself in need of deep, philosophical treatment.

Indeed, it was becoming clear that many who had held the core analytic
view about the nature of philosophy had relied upon different theories
of meaning sometimes implicit, never sufficiently clear, and
frequently implausible. The internal failure of logical positivism
combined with the external criticisms of Wittgenstein and Quine
contributed to the demise of the ideal-language approach. On the other
hand, many, including Bertrand Russell, saw the ordinary-language
approach as falling far short of serious, philosophical work. For this
and other reasons, the ordinary-language approach also drew fire from
outside the analytic movement, in the form of Ernest Gellner's Words
and Things (1959) and W.C.K. Mundle's Critique of Linguistic
Philosophy (1970). The former especially had a large, international
impact, thereby contributing to what T. P. Uschanov has called "the
strange death of ordinary language philosophy."

The waning of linguistic philosophy signaled also the waning of
attempts to specify the proper philosophical method, or even just the
method distinctive of analytic philosophy. Quine's take on the
matter—that philosophy is continuous with science in its aims and
methods, differing only in the generality of its questions—proved
influential and achieved a certain level of dominance for a time, but
not to the extent that the linguistic conception of philosophy had
during its sixty-year run. Alternatives tied less tightly to the
empirical sciences soon emerged, with the result that philosophical
practice in contemporary analytic philosophy is now quite eclectic. In
some circles, the application of formal techniques is still regarded
as central to philosophical practice, though this is now more likely
to be regarded as a means of achieving clarity about our concepts than
as a way of analyzing language. In other circles meticulous expression
in ordinary language is seen to provide a sufficient level of clarity.

Partly because of Quine's view of philosophy as continuous with
science (which, of course, is divided into specializations), and
partly because analytic philosophy had always been given to dealing
with narrowly-defined questions in isolation from others,
post-linguistic analytic philosophy partitioned itself into an
ever-increasing number of specialized sub-fields. What had been
linguistic philosophy metamorphosed into what we now know as the
philosophy of language. Epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the
philosophy of science, ethics and meta-ethics, and even metaphysics
emerged or re-emerged as areas of inquiry not indifferent to
linguistic concerns, but not themselves intrinsically linguistic. Over
time, the list has expanded to include aesthetics, social and
political philosophy, feminist philosophy, the philosophy of religion,
philosophy of law, cognitive science, and the history of philosophy.

On account of its eclecticism, contemporary analytic philosophy defies
summary or general description. By the same token, it encompasses far
too much to discuss in any detail here. However, two developments in
post-linguistic analytic philosophy require special mention.
b. The Renaissance in Metaphysics

Metaphysics has undergone a certain sort of renaissance in
post-linguistic analytic philosophy. Although contemporary analytic
philosophy does not readily countenance traditional system-building
metaphysics (at least as a respected professional activity), it has
embraced the piecemeal pursuit of metaphysical questions so
wholeheartedly that metaphysics is now seen as one of its three most
important sub-disciplines. (The other two are epistemology and the
philosophy of language; all three are frequently referred to as "core"
analytic areas or sub-disciplines.) This is noteworthy given analytic
philosophy's traditional anti-metaphysical orientation.

The return of metaphysics is due mainly to the collapse of those
theories of meaning which originally had banned it as meaningless, but
later developments in the philosophy of language also played a role.
In the 1960s, the ordinary-language philosopher Peter Strawson began
advocating for what he called "descriptive metaphysics," a matter of
looking to the structure and content of natural languages to
illuminate the contours of different metaphysical worldviews or
"conceptual schemes." At the same time, and despite his naturalism and
scientism which pitted him against speculative metaphysics, Quine's
holistic views about meaning and verification opened the door to
speculative metaphysics by showing that theory cannot be reduced to
observation even in the sciences. In the 1960s and 70s, the attempts
of Donald Davidson and others to construct a formal theory of meaning
based on Alfred Tarski's formal definition of truth eventually led to
the development of possible worlds semantics by David Lewis.
Consistent with the Quinean insight that meaning is connected to
holistic worldviews or, in more metaphysical terms, world-states,
possible worlds semantics defines important logical concepts such as
validity, soundness and completeness, as well as concepts that earlier
logics were incapable of handling—such as possibility and necessity—in
terms of total descriptions of a way that some worlds or all worlds
might be/have been. For example, proposition p is necessary, if p is
true in all possible worlds. Thus, despite its formalism, possible
world semantics approximates some aspects of traditional metaphysics
that earlier analytic philosophy eschewed.

With the advent of possible worlds semantics, attention shifted from
the notion of meaning to that ofreference. The latter has to do
explicitly with the language-world connection, and so has an overtly
metaphysical aspect. In the 1970s, direct reference theories came to
dominate the philosophy of language. Developed independently by Saul
Kripke and Ruth Barcan Marcus, a direct reference theory claims that
some words—particularly proper names—have no meaning, but simply serve
as "tags" (Marcus' term) or "rigid designators" (Kripke's term) for
the things they name. Tagging or rigid designation is usually
spelled-out in terms of possible worlds: it is a relation between name
and thing such that it holds in all possible worlds. This then
provides a linguistic analog of a metaphysical theory of identity the
likes of which one finds in traditional "substance" metaphysics such
as that of Aristotle. With the restrictions characteristic of earlier
analytic philosophy removed, these positions in the philosophy of
language made for an easy transition into metaphysics proper.
c. The Renaissance in History

Because analytic philosophy initially saw itself as superseding
traditional philosophy, its tendency throughout much of the twentieth
century was to disregard the history of philosophy. It is even
reported that a sign reading "just say no to the history of ideas"
once hung on a door in the Philosophy building at Princeton University
(Grafton 2004, 2). Though earlier analytic philosophers would
sometimes address the views of a philosopher from previous centuries,
they frequently failed to combine philosophical acumen with historical
care, thereby falling into faulty, anachronistic interpretations of
earlier philosophers.

Beginning in the 1970s, some in the analytic context began to rebel
against this anti-historical attitude. The following remembrance by
Daniel Garber describes well the emerging historical consciousness in
the analytic context (though this was not then and is not now so
widespread as to count as characteristic of analytic philosophy
itself):

What my generation of historians of philosophy was reacting
against was a bundle of practices that characterized the writing of
the history of philosophy in the period: the tendency to substitute
rational reconstructions of a philosopher's views for the views
themselves; the tendency to focus on an extremely narrow group of
figures (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume in
my period); within that very narrow canon the tendency to focus on
just a few works at the exclusion of others, those that best fit with
our current conception of the subject of philosophy; the tendency to
work exclusively from translations and to ignore secondary work that
was not originally written in English; the tendency to treat the
philosophical positions as if they were those presented by
contemporaries, and on and on and on. (Garber 2004, 2)

Over against this "bundle of practices," the historical movement began
to interpret the more well-known problems and views of historical
figures in the context of, first, the wholes of their respective
bodies of work, second, their respective intellectual contexts, noting
how their work related to that of the preceding generation of
thinkers, and, third, the broader social environment in which they
lived and thought and wrote.

Eventually, this new historical approach was adopted by
philosopher-scholars interested in the history of analytic philosophy
itself. As a result, the last two decades have seen the emergence of
the history (or historiography) of analytic philosophy as an
increasingly important sub-discipline within analytic philosophy
itself. Major figures in this field include Tom Baldwin, Hans Sluga,
Nicholas Griffin, Peter Hacker, Ray Monk, Peter Hylton, Hans-Johann
Glock and Michael Beaney, among a good many others. The surge of
interest in the history of analytic philosophy has even drawn efforts
from philosophers better known for work in "core" areas of analytic
philosophy, such as Michael Dummett and Scott Soames.

Some of these authors are responsible for discovering or
re-discovering the fact that neither Moore nor Russell conceived of
themselves as linguistic philosophers. Others have been involved in
the debate over Frege mentioned in Section 2c. All this has served to
undermine received views and to open a debate concerning the true
nature of analytic philosophy and the full scope of its history. (For
more on this, see Preston 2004, 2005a-b).
6. References and Further Reading

The main divisions of this bibliography correspond to the main
divisions of the article, which in turn correspond to the main
historical phases of analytic philosophy. In addition, there is at the
end a section on anthologies, collections and reference works that do
not fit nicely under the other headings.
a. The Revolution of Moore and Russell: Cambridge Realism and The
Linguistic Turn

Primary Sources

* Moore, G. E. 1899: "The Nature of Judgment," Mind 8, 176-93.
Reprinted in Moore 1993, 1-19.
* Moore, G. E. 1903a: Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
* Moore, G. E. 1903b: "The Refutation of Idealism" Mind 12,
433-53. Reprinted in Moore 1993, 23-44.
* Moore, G. E. 1925: "A Defense of Common Sense" in J. H. Muirhead
ed., Contemporary British Philosophy, London: Allen and Unwin,
193-223. Reprinted in Moore 1959, 126-148, and Moore 1993, 106-33.
* Moore, G. E. 1939: "Proof of an External World," Proceedings of
the British Academy 25, 273-300. Reprinted in Moore 1993, 147-70.
* Moore, G. E. 1942a: "An Autobiography," in Schilpp ed., 1942, 3-39.
* Moore, G. E. 1942b: "A Reply to My Critics," in Schilpp ed.,
1942, 535-677.
* Moore, G. E. 1959: Philosophical Papers, London: George Allen and Unwin.
* Moore, G. E. 1993: G.E. Moore: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas
Baldwin, London: Routledge.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1959: My Philosophical Development, London:
George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.

Secondary Sources

* Ayer, A.J. (ed ) 1971: Russell and Moore: The Analytical
Heritage, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Baldwin, T. 1990: G. E. Moore, London: Routledge.
* Baldwin, T. 1991: "The Identity Theory of Truth," Mind, New
Series, Vol. 100, No. 1, 35-52.
* Bell, David. 1999: "The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very
British Coup?" in Anthony O'Hear (ed.), German Philosophy Since Kant,
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
* Griffin, Nicholas. 1991: Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Hylton, Peter. 1990: Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of
Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Schilpp, P.A., ed. 1942: The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, Library
of Living Philosophers Vol. 4, La Salle: Open Court.

b. Russell and the Early Wittgenstein: Ideal Language and Logical Atomism

Primary Sources

* Frege, Gottlob. 1879: Concept Script, a formal language of pure
thought modeled upon that of arithmetic, tr. by S. Bauer-Mengelberg,
in J. van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in
Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1967.
* Frege, Gottlob. 1892: "On Sense and Reference" tr. by M. Black,
in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, P.
Geach and M. Black (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd ed., 1980.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1905: "On Denoting," Mind 14: 479-93.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1908: "Mathematical Logic as Based on the
Theory of Types," American Journal of Mathematics, 30, 222-262.
Reprinted in Russell 1956, 59-102.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1914: "On Scientific Method in Philosophy,"
in Russell 1918, 97-124.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1918-19: "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,"
The Monist 28:495-527 and 29:33-63, 190-222, 344-80; reprinted La
Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1918: Mysticism and Logic: and Other Essays,
New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1944a: "My Mental Development," in Schilpp,
ed. 1944, 3-20.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1944b: "Reply to Criticisms," in Schilpp, ed.
1944, 681-741.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1946: "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis,"
from A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen and Unwin; New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1946; reprinted in Dennon and Egner, eds.,
1961, pp. 301-307.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1950: "Is Mathematics Purely Linguistic?," in
Russell 1973, pp. 295-306.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1956: Logic and Knowledge, Robert Marsh, ed.,
London: Unwin Hyman Ltd.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1959: My Philosophical Development, London: Unwin.
* Russell, Bertrand. 1973: Essays in Analysis, Douglas lackey,
ed., London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
* Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, Alfred North. 1910-1913:
Principia Mathematica 3 vols. London: Cambridge University Press.
Second edition 1925.
* Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr.
C.K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Secondary Sources

* Kenny, Anthony. 2000: Frege: An Introduction to the Founder of
Modern Analytic Philosophy, Blackwell Publishers.
* Baker, G .P. and Hacker, P.M.S. 1983: "Dummett's Frege or
Through a Looking-Glass Darkly," Mind, 92, pp. 239-246.
* Baker, G .P. and Hacker, P.M.S. 1984: Frege: Logical
Excavations, Oxford: Blackwell.
* Baker, G .P. and Hacker, P.M.S. 1987: "Dummett's Dig:
Looking-Glass Archaeology," Philosophical Quarterly, 37, pp. 86-99.
* Baker, G .P. and Hacker, P.M.S. 1989: "The Last Ditch,"
Philosophical Quarterly, 39, pp. 471-477.
* Dummett, Michael. 1991: Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics,
London: Duckworth.
* Monk, Ray and Palmer, Anthony (eds.). 1996: Bertrand Russell and
the Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
* Reck, Erich (ed.). 2001: From Frege to Wittgenstein:
Perspectives on Early analytic philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
* Pears, D.F. 1967: Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in
Philosophy, London: Collins.
* Schilpp, P.A. 1944: The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Library
of Living Philosophers Vol. 5, La Salle: Open Court.
* Schrenmann, R. (ed.) 1967: Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the
Century, London: Allen and Unwin.
* Tait, William (ed). 1997: Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege,
Russell, Wittgenstein; Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky, Chicago:
Open Court.

c. Logical Positivism, the Vienna Circle, and Quine

Primary Sources

* Ayer, A.J. 1936: Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollantz;
second edition 1946; reprinted New York: Dover, 1952.
* Carnap, Rudolf. 1928: The Logical Structure of the World.
English trans. published by Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969.
* Carnap, Rudolf. 1934: "On the Character of Philosophical
Problems," tr. W.M. Malisoff, in Rorty (ed.) 1967, 54-62.
* Hempel, Carl. 1950: "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist
Criterion of Meaning." Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4:41-63;
reprinted in Ayer (ed.) 1959.
* Quine, W. V. "Truth by Convention." In O.H. Lee (ed.),
Philosophical Essays for A.N. Whitehead, New York: Longmans, 1936;
reprinted in Ways of Paradox: New York: Random House, 1966.
* Quine, W. V. 1951: "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Philosophical
Review 60(1951):20-43.
* Quine, W. V. Word and Object. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960.
* Quine, W. V. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969.

Secondary Sources

* Ayer, A.J. (ed ) 1959: Logical Positivism, Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1959.
* Schilpp, P.A. 1963: The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Library of
Living Philosophers, Vol. 11, La Salle: Open Court.
* Schilpp, P.A. The Philosophy of W.V. Quine, Library of Living
Philosophers, Vol. 18, La Salle: Open Court.
* Schilpp, P.A. 1992: The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, Library of
Living Philosophers, Vol. 21, La Salle: Open Court.
* Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) 1996: Science and Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century: Basic Works of Logical Empiricism, 6 vols., New
York & London: Garland Publishing.

d. The Later Wittgenstein, et al.: Ordinary-Language Philosophy

Primary Sources

* Austin, J.L. 1962: How to Do Things with Words, New York: Oxford
University Press.
* Austin, J.L. 1962: Sense and Sensibilia, London: Oxford University Press.
* Grice, Paul. 1989: Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
* Ryle, Gilbert. 1949: The Concept of Mind, New York: Barnes and Noble.
* Ryle, Gilbert. 1953: Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Strawson, Peter. 1950: "On Referring" Mind, 59: 320-344.
* Strawson, Peter and Grice, H. P. 1956: "In Defense of a Dogma,"
Philosophical Review, 65: 141-58; reprinted in Grice 1989.
* Wisdom, John. 1931: Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to
Bentham's Theory of Definition,London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner
&Co.
* Wisdom, John. 1952: Other Minds, Oxford: Blackwell.
* Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953: Philosophical Investigations, tr.
G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Secondary Sources

* Canfield, J.V. (ed) 1986: The Philosophy of Wittgenstein, New
York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
* Hacker, P.M.S. 1986: Insight and Illusion: Themes in the
Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Oxford: Clarendon.
* Kripke, Saul. 1982: Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Urmson, J. O. 1956: Philosophical Analysis: Its Development
Between the Two World Wars, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.

e. The 1960s and After: The Era of Eclecticism

* Hacking, Ian, 1975: Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Kripke, Saul. 1980: Naming and Necessity Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
* Mundle, C. W. K. 1970: A Critique of Linguistic Philosophy,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Gellner, E. 1959: Words and Things: A Critical Account of
Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London: Gollancz.

f. Critical and Historical Accounts of Analytic Philosophy

* Ayer, A. J., et al. 1963: The Revolution in Philosophy, London:
Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
* Ayer, A.J. (ed ) 1982: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century,
London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.
* Beaney, Michael. 2003: "Analysis," Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, URL= < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/>.
* Biletzki and Matar (eds.). 1998: The Story of Analytic
Philosophy: Plot and Heroes, London and New York: Routledge.
* Capaldi, Nicholas. 2000: The Enlightenment Project in the
Analytic Conversation, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
* Charlton, William. 1991: The Analytic Ambition: An Introduction
to Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.
* Clarke, D.S. 1997: Philosophy's Second Revolution: Early and
Recent Analytic Philosophy, La Salle: Open Court.
* Coffa, J.A. 1991: The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Cohen, L. J. 1986: The Dialogue of Reason: An Analysis of
Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Collingwood, R.G. An Essay on Philosophical Method
* Corrado, Michael. 1975: The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy:
Background and Issues, Chicago: American Library Association.
* Dummett, Michael. 1993: Origins of Analytical Philosophy,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Garber, Daniel. 2004: "Philosophy and the Scientific
Revolution," in Teaching New Histories of Philosophy, Princeton:
Princeton University Center for Human Values. Available online at
http://www.pdcnet.org/tnhp.html
* Glock, Hans-Johann (ed.). 1997: The Rise of Analytic Philosophy,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* Grafton, Anthony. 2004: "A Note from Inside the Teapot," in
Teaching New Histories of Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University
Center for Human Values. Available online at
http://www.pdcnet.org/tnhp.html.
* Hanna, Robert. 2001: Kant and the Foundations of Analytic
Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Mehta, Ved. 1961: Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with
British Intellectuals, New York: Columbia University Press.
* Nagel, Ernest. 1936a-b: "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic
Philosophy in Europe," The Journal of Philosophy vol. 33, no. 1, 5-24
and no. 2, 29-53.
* Pap, Arthur. 1949: Elements of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Macmillan.
* Preston, Aaron. 2004: "Prolegomena to Any Future History of
Analytic Philosophy," Metaphilosophy, vol. 35, no. 4, 445-465.
* Preston, Aaron. 2005a: "Conformism in Analytic Philosophy: On
Shaping Philosophical Boundaries and Prejudices," The Monist, Volume
88, Number 2, April 2005.
* Preston, Aaron. 2005b: "Implications of Recent Work on Analytic
Philosophy," The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, no. 127 (August
2005), 11-30.
* Prosch, Harry. 1964: The Genesis of Twentieth Century
Philosophy: The Evolution of Thought from Copernicus to the Present,
Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc.
* Soames, Scott. 2003. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth
Century, 2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press.
* Stroll, Avrum. 2000: Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, New
York: Columbia University Press.
* Warnock, G.J. 1958: English Philosophy Since 1900, London:
Oxford University Press.

g. Anthologies and General Introductions

* Ammerman, Robert (ed.). 1990: Classics of Analytic Philosophy,
Indianapolis: Hackett.
* Baillie, James (ed.). 2002: Contemporary Analytic Philosophy:
Core Readings, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall.
* Martinich, A. P. and Sosa, David (eds.). 2001a: Analytic
Philosophy: An Anthology, Blackwell Publishers.
* Martinich, A. P. and Sosa, David (eds.). 2001b: A Companion to
Analytic Philosophy, Blackwell Publishers.
* Rorty, Richard (ed.). 1992: The Linguistic Turn: Essays in
Philosophical Method, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press.