Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Western philosophy > Analytic philosophy

Analytic Philosophy

Russell held in 1900 that “all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions” (as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes him), and in 1914 gave his second Lowell lecture the title “Logic as the Essence of Philosophy”: “every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical” (Our Knowledge of the External World). Two years earlier he had put the aim more widely: “Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences” (The Problems of Philosophy, 1912). Its value, he added, “is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty”; it is to be studied “for the sake of the questions themselves”, and through it the mind “becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good”. His account of what the sciences leave to philosophy is on Philosophy and the special sciences.

The early Wittgenstein defined philosophy against both science and doctrine. “Alle Philosophie ist ‚Sprachkritik’”, all philosophy is critique of language (Tractatus 4.0031). It “is not one of the natural sciences”, and the word “must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences” (4.111, tr. Ogden). “Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken. Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit”: “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity” (4.112, tr. Ogden). It “limits the disputable sphere of natural science” (4.113). And it names its own method: “The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science … and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (6.53, tr. Ogden).

The Vienna Circle made clarification a programme. Its manifesto of 1929, as the IEP quotes it: “The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it. The task of philosophical work lies in … clarification of problems and assertions, not in the propounding of special ‘philosophical’ pronouncements. The method of this clarification is that of logical analysis.” Carnap drew the conclusion: “Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science—that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science” (The Logical Syntax of Language, English 1937, Foreword). Its §72 is titled “Philosophy Replaced by the Logic of Science”, though it says the thesis “cannot be established here and will not be assumed”, and records that “Neurath is definitely opposed to the continued use of the expressions ‘philosophy’, ‘scientific philosophy’”.

The later Wittgenstein kept philosophy as a critique of language and changed its method to description. “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place … The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Philosophical Investigations §109, tr. Anscombe). “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (§127). What it aims at is an ending: “the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace”; and “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (§133). J. L. Austin said of ordinary language that it “is the first word”, though not “the last word” (as the IEP quotes him).

In the second half of the century Rawls’s reflective equilibrium moves “back and forth between the initial judgments and the principles”, and his justice is “political not metaphysical” (as the IEP quotes him).