Analytic & pragmatist · 1879 – c. 1930
Early analytic philosophy
Many philosophical problems come from the misleading surface of language, and can be solved by analysing statements into their true logical form.
What is the logical structure of thought, language and the world?
Frege’s new logic of 1879 set out to show that arithmetic rests on logic alone, giving philosophy a tool far sharper than Aristotle’s syllogisms. Around 1900 in Cambridge, Russell and Moore broke with the Hegel-inspired British idealism they had been taught, and turned to logic and common sense instead.
Grammar can hide logical form: “The present king of France is bald” looks as if it names someone, but analysis shows it asserts that exactly one such king exists, so it is simply false. If philosophy clarifies what our sentences really say, puzzles about existence, meaning and truth can be answered precisely or dissolved. Logic thus becomes the method of philosophy.
- Modern logic is the essential tool of philosophy.
- Grammatical form can mislead us about logical form.
- Analysis breaks complex propositions into simpler ones.
It founded the analytic tradition that dominates English-language philosophy, and its formal logic fed directly into the theory of computation.
Thinkers
1848–1925Gottlob FregeJena mathematician who invented modern logic1872–1970Bertrand RussellLogician, public intellectual and Nobel laureate; lectured in China 1920–211873–1958G. E. MooreCambridge defender of common sense against idealism1889–1951Ludwig WittgensteinViennese-born Cambridge philosopher who overturned his own first philosophyKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstGerman IdealismRussell and Moore launched analytic philosophy by rejecting the Hegel-inspired British idealism of Bradley and McTaggart.Reacted against
AristotelianismFrege’s logic of quantifiers replaced Aristotle’s subject–predicate syllogistic, which had ruled logic for two thousand years.Grew out of
RationalismFrege presented his Begriffsschrift as a step toward Leibniz’s dream of a universal logical language.Grew out of
British empiricismRussell’s theory of knowledge by acquaintance with sense-data carried British empiricism into the new logical framework.
What it led to
Carried on byLogical positivism (Vienna Circle)The Vienna Circle read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus line by line and took from Frege and Russell the idea that logic is empty of factual content.Opposed by
Ordinary language philosophyThe later Wittgenstein attacked the Tractatus’s own idea that language has a single hidden logical form.