Analytic PhilosophyAnalytic Philosophy

Logic and the dream of a precise and unambiguous language

• Leibniz and the Characteristica universalis and the Calculus ratiocinator

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)University of Jena

• Recognized as father of analytic philosophy

• Logicism (reduction of mathematics to pure logic; i.e. no psychologism or intuition)

• Quantification theory

Frege’s Begriffschrift

Jena

Jena

C. S. Peirce

• Truth table method• Quantification theory• Theory of relations• Modal logic• 3-valued logic

Peirce’s existential graphs

Harvard, Cambridge Mass.

Sever Hall

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)University of Cambridge

• Logicism• Principia Mathematica

1910-13 with Alfred North Whitehead

• 1916 dismissed from Cambridge and imprisoned during Great War for pacifism

University of Cambridge

Vienna (Wien) Austria

The Vienna Circle (Der Wiener Kreiss)

• Logical Empiricism/ Logical Positivism

• Mathematics, Modern Symbolic Logic & Natural Sciences (theory of relativity, quantum physics)

• Hume’s relations of ideas & matters of fact

• “When we run over our libraries persuaded of these [empiricist] principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number [math]. No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence [natural science]. No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Moritz Schlick (1882-1936)

• Founder of the Vienna Circle

• Murdered by a former student and Nazi for his Jewish sympathies

• Metaphysics results from a confusion over language; pseudoproblems

Einstein & Gödel

Kurt Gödel (1906-78)

• Member, Vienna Circle

• Mathematician, logician

• Completeness proof 1st-order predicate logic; incompleteness theorems -> trouble for the logicist program

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Wittgenstein

• Studied with Russell at Cambridge (1911-13) on Frege’s advice

• Fought for Austria in Great War (1914-18)

• POW in Italy; writes Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

• Some-time member Vienna Circle 20’s

• 1929 return to Cambridge, DPhil for Tractatus

• 1936-37 Norway, writes Philosophical Investigations

• ‘39-Cambridge professor• becomes British citizen (as a Jew

not comfortable in Nazi Austria)• Philosophical puzzles result from

misapplications of our ordinary uses of language

• ‘Language games’; ‘forms of life’; pragmatic approach

Rise of Hitler and the National Socialists1933-1945

Heidegger (1889-1976)

• Philosophy of Being; Dasein

• Member of Nazi party

• “Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language here is running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.” Russell, Wisdom of the West, 303

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989)Oxford

• Visit with the Vienna Circle 1932-33

• Language Truth and Logic 1936

• Verifiability theory of meaning (any statement that cannot be verified is meaningless)

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000)Harvard University

• PhD under Whitehead on PM

• Visit with Vienna Circle 1932-33

• “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

• “Epistemology naturalized”

Hilary Putnam (1926-)Harvard

• Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy

• Reason, Truth and History 1980

• Critique of ‘metaphysical realism’ (the ‘God’s eye view’)

• ‘Internal realism’ (realism from within a conceptual scheme/language)

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)Stanford

Major critic of analytic philosophy

Though analytically trained himself

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 1980

Language and the World

• How does language ‘hook onto’ the world?

• Can there be one uniquely true account of reality?

• Or are there multiple accounts/descriptions suitable for distinct purposes? E.g. scientific, spiritual/religious

• Is this relativism? What of objectivity?

Analytic Philosophy Today