Analytic philosophy has been the dominant academic philosophical movement in English-speaking countries and in the Nordic countries from about the beginning of the twentieth century up to about the 1970s or 1980s, and possibly since then. It is distinguished from Continental philosophy, which takes its name from the European continent and is the dominant philosophy in most non-English speaking countries.

The main founders of analytic philosophy were the Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Perhaps its strongest impetus came from their reaction against British Idealism, and their rejection of Hegel and Hegelianism. However, both Moore and Russell—especially Russell—were heavily influenced by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, and many of analytic philosophy's leading proponents, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, and Carl Hempel have come from Germany and Austria.

OVERVIEW
Analytic philosophy developed primarily in English-speaking countries.

In Britain, Russell and Moore were succeeded by C. D. Broad, L. Susan Stebbing, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, R. B. Braithwaite, Paul Grice, John Wisdom, R. M. Hare, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, William Kneale, G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, and others.

In America, the movement was led by many of the above-named European emigres as well as Max Black, Ernest Nagel, Charles L. Stevenson, Norman Malcolm, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, and others, while A. N. Prior, John Passmore, and J. J. C. Smart were prominent in Australasia.

Logic and philosophy of language were central strands of analytic philosophy from the beginning, although this dominance diminished greatly in the latter part of the twentieth century. Several lines of thought originate from the early, language-and-logic part of this analytic philosophy tradition. These include: logical positivism or logical empiricism, logical atomism, logicism and ordinary language philosophy.

Central to logical positivism and logical empiricism were the Vienna Circle, the work of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap and other members of the Circle, the principle of verificationism, the analytic-synthetic distinction, the rejection of metaphysics, and emotivism in ethics and aesthetics. A.J. Ayer's small but highly influential book, Language, Truth, and Logic can be thought of as a summary statement of and introduction to logical positivism for the English-speaking world. In the 1930s, with the coming of Nazism, there was a large immigration of logicians and scientists from continental Europe to Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the non-Nazi world.

In the 1950s the programs of the logical positivists and logical empiricists began to unravel for both internal and external reasons. Quine's 1951 essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," disposing of the supposed analytic-synthetic distinction, and of reductionism, "the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience" as Quine put it, was central to the demise of logical positivism. Hempel's essay, "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," published in 1950, also showed logical and other problems inherent in the notions of experiential testability, verifiability, falsifiability, confirmability, and translatability into an empiricist language as a criterion of cognitive meaning. Those works and others, written by former proponents of logical positivism or logical empiricism, proved devastating to the program.

It is possible to divide analytic philosophy into two strains or camps: ordinary language philosophy, led by John L. Austin and carried on by his followers—this has sometimes been known as "Oxford philosophy"—and the other camp containing everything else. This break comes over the question whether analysis should be carried on primarily through and on ordinary language, or whether it should have a component of formal logic and formal language.

Subsequent analytic and post-analytic philosophy includes extensive work in ethics, such as carried out by Philippa Foot, R. M. Hare, J. L. Mackie, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others; political philosophy as done most notably by John Rawls and Robert Nozick; aesthetics as investigated by Monroe Beardsley, Richard Wollheim, and Arthur Danto; philosophy of religion as studied by Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne; philosophy of language carried out by many philosophers including David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Nathan Salmon, and John Searle; and philosophy of mind as studied by Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, Hilary Putnam and others. Analytic metaphysics also came into its own with the work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Nathan Salmon, Peter van Inwagen, P.F. Strawson, and others.

Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy

The history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy is marked by the rapidity with major movements suddenly appear, flourish, lose their momentum, become senescent and eventually vanish. Examples include idealism, in its absolutist and subjective variants, sense-data theory, logical atomism, neutral monism, and logical positivism. There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern. In ontology, various forms of materialism continue to enjoy widespread support, and naturalized epistemology as developed by W.V.O. Quine and expanded by his followers shows no signs of abatement. Indeed, if anything, the tremendous prestige of science has intensified in the twentieth century. Scientism, which P.S. Churchland has defined as the notion that “in the idealized long run, the completed science is a true description of reality: there is no other Truth and no other Reality”, is today widely espoused in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

Contemporary philosophers have reacted to the impact of science principally in three ways, two of which are forms of scientism.
1. The more radical form of scientism asserts that if philosophy has a function, it must be something other than trying to give t true account of the world. A variant of this view holds that philosophy should deal with normative or value questions, while science engages in wholly descriptive activity.
2. A less radical form of scientism maintains that philosophy, when done correctly, is just an extension of science. According to Quine, for example, there is a division of labor among scientific investigators – including philosophers – and their tasks and problems, though compatible, are somewhat different. 3. There is a variety of approaches that reject scientism and in different ways defend the autonomy of philosophy; they hold that philosophy has a descriptive function and can arrive at nonscientific truths about reality. G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, P.F. Strawson, and John Searle, among others, espouse this last sort of belief.

It is difficult to give a precise definition of analytic philosophy, since it is not so much a specific doctrine as a loose concatenation of approaches to traditional problems. If there is a single feature that characterizes analytical philosophy, it is probably its emphasis on trying to articulate clearly the meaning of concepts such as “knowledge”, “truth”, and “justification”. This project is guided by the assumption that a proposed thesis cannot be assessed judiciously until it and its constituent concepts are understood plainly. The effort at such clarification constitutes roughly what is meant by “analysis”.
There are, however, many different ways of pursuing this end, from the strict formal approach of Gottlob Frege or Alfred Tarski to the aphoristic, example-oriented technique of the later Wittgenstein. Therefore, rather than trying to define the concept exhaustively, we shall concentrate on individuals who are unquestionably regarded as analytical philosophers. This group include Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), G.E. Moore (1873-1958), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), J.L. Austin (1911-1960), Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), Karl Popper (1902-1994), and W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000). Nearly all of the major achievements in this field are due to these people. Many of them have transformed older traditions in new ways (as we will see with Quine’s holistic empiricism), but some (especially Wittgenstein and Austin) have developed new and unique approaches to philosophical questions. Without a doubt, the most influential philosopher of the era has been Wittgenstein (1889-1951). His writing - nearly all of them published only after his death – dominate the contemporary scene and seem destined to remain of central importance in the foreseeable future. A fruitful way of surveying the period is thus to concentrate (chronologically) upon the contributions of this distinguished group of individuals.

The creation of symbolic (or mathematical) logic is perhaps the single most significant development in the century. Apart from its intrinsic interest and technical sophistication, it has exercised an enormous influence on philosophy per se. Though there are anticipations of this kind of logic among the Stoics, it modern forms are without exact parallel in Western thought. It quickly became apparent that an achievement of this order could not easily be ignored, and no matter how diverse their concerns nearly all analytical philosophers acknowledge the importance of mathematical logic. This was especially true when the new logic, with its close affinities to mathematics, was recognized as fundamental to scientific theorizing. The combination of logic and science was regarded by many philosophers as a model that philosophical inquiry should follow. Logical positivism – a doctrine that flourished in the 1930_s an 1940_s - was an egregious expression of this point of view.

But logic itself, apart from its scientific affiliations, served as a role model. Many philosophers felt that its criteria of clarity, precision, and rigor should be the desired ideals in grappling with philosophical issues. Yet other thinkers, especially the latter Wittgenstein, rejected this approach, arguing that treating logic as an ideal language, superior to natural languages such as English or German, led to paradox and incoherence. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy consisted in developing a unique method that emphasized the merit of ordinary language in describing the world. In particular, his method avoided the kind of theorizing and generalization essential to logic. Since the new logic initiated such powerful and diverse reactions, we shall begin with a brief account of its central tenets. On this basis, we can describe why these philosophers responded to it in their different ways.

An Overview of Analytic Philosophy

Analytic philosophy, also called linguistic philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts. Although most work in analytic philosophy has been done in Great Britain and the United States, significant contributions also have been made in other countries, notably Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of Scandinavia.

NATURE OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
“Analytic Philosophy” is used to describe philosophy that proceeds via analysis – broadly, by seeking to understand the composition of its subject matter (or concepts of that subject matter) out of simple (or simpler) components. Some important marks of analytic philosophy are a focus upon small parts of larger issues, attention to fine details of the small parts, rigor and explicitness, with the latter often facilitated by the use of formal methods.
The method of analysis is the method to understand a subject matter by coming to understand its components. The aim is to understand the behavior of the whole by tracing the behavior to the influences of its parts and their organization. The success of the method is dependent both upon the correctness of the analysis and upon its capacity to deepen understanding by explaining the less well understood – the whole – on the basis of what is better understood – the simpler components and the effects of their configuration in the whole.

Analytic philosophers conduct conceptual investigations that characteristically, though not invariably, involve studies of the language in which the concepts in question are, or can be, expressed. According to one tradition in analytic philosophy (sometimes referred to as formalism), for example, the definition of a concept can be determined by uncovering the underlying logical structures, or “logical forms,” of the sentences used to express it. A perspicuous representation of these structures in the language of modern symbolic logic, so the formalists thought, would make clear the logically permissible inferences to and from such sentences and thereby establish the logical boundaries of the concept under study. Another tradition, sometimes referred to as informalism, similarly turned to the sentences in which the concept was expressed but instead emphasized their diverse uses in ordinary language and everyday situations, the idea being to elucidate the concept by noting how its various features are reflected in how people actually talk and act. Even among analytic philosophers whose approaches were not essentially either formalist or informalist, philosophical problems were often conceived of as problems about the nature of language.

THE EMPIRICIST TRADITION
In spirit, style, and focus, analytic philosophy has strong ties to the tradition of empiricism, which has characterized philosophy in Britain for some centuries, distinguishing it from the rationalism of Continental European philosophy.
The most renowned of the British empiricists—John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill—have many interests and methods in common with contemporary analytic philosophers. And although analytic philosophers have attacked some of the empiricists’ particular doctrines, one feels that this is the result more of a common interest in certain problems than of any difference in general philosophical outlook.

Three philosophical influences were at work in Britain in nineteenth century: Scottish common sense, English philosophic radicalism, and German idealism.
English philosophy started off in the nineteenth century continuing the Scottish common-sense outlook, but also saw the development of an applied empiricism by radical thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham (1746-1832), James Mill (1773-1836), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). A couple of English literati, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), immersed themselves in the developing German thought and brought it to the attention of the English intellectual public. Kant and Hagel suddenly came fully into their own and, in turn, led to the development of a British form of idealist philosophy that dominated Oxford and Cambridge to the end of the century, until it was challenged by G.E. Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), (The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. (1999) Richard H. Popkin, Editor, pp 517 and 575)

Absolute idealism was avowedly metaphysical, in the sense that its adherents thought of themselves as describing, in a way not open to scientists, certain very fundamental truths about the world.
In their conclusions and, most important, in their methodology, the idealists were decidedly not on the side of commonsense intuition. The Cambridge philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, for example, argued that the concept of time is inconsistent and that time therefore is unreal. British empiricism, on the other hand, had generally started with commonsense beliefs and either accepted or at least sought to explain them, using science as the model of the right way in which to investigate the world. Even when their conclusions were out of step with common sense (as was the radical skepticism of David Hume), the empiricists were generally concerned to reconcile the two.

The first break from the idealist view occurred when Moore, in a paper entitled “The Nature of Judgment” (1899), argued for a theory of truth that implies that the physical world does have the independent existence.
In his seminal essay “A Defence of Common Sense” (1925), as in others, Moore argued not only against idealist doctrines such as the unreality of time but also against all the forms of skepticism—for example, about the existence of other minds or of a material world—that philosophers have espoused. The skeptic, he pointed out, usually has some argument for his conclusion. Instead of examining such arguments, however, Moore pitted against the skeptic’s premises various quite everyday beliefs—for example, that he had breakfast that morning (thus, time cannot be unreal) or that he does in fact have a pencil in his hand (thus, there must be a material world). He challenged the skeptic to show that the premises of the skeptic’s argument are any more certain than the everyday beliefs that form the premises of Moore’s argument.

Although some scholars have seen Moore as an early practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, his appeal was not to what it is proper to say but rather to the beliefs of common sense. His rejection of any philosophical doctrine that offends against common sense was influential not only in the release that it afforded from the metaphysical excesses of absolute idealism but also in its impact on the sensibilities and general orientation of most later analytic philosophers.

Moore was also important for his vision of the proper business of philosophy—analysis. He was puzzled, for example, about the proper analysis of “a sees b,” in which b designates a physical object (e.g., a pencil). He thought that there must be a special sense of see in which one does not see the pencil but sees only part of its surface. In addition, he thought that there must be another sense of see in which what is directly perceived is not even the surface of the pencil but rather what Moore called “sense data” and what earlier empiricists had called “visual sensations” or “sense impressions.” Moore’s problem was to discern the relationships between these various elements in perception and, in particular, to discover how a person can be justified, as Moore fully believed he is, in his claims to see physical objects when what he immediately perceives are really only sense data. The idea that sense impressions form the immediate objects of perception played a large role in early analytic philosophy, showing once again its empiricist roots. Later, however, it became an important source of division among the logical positivists. In addition, most ordinary-language philosophers, as well as those closely influenced by the later work of Russell’s most famous student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, found sense data to be as unpalatable and unwarranted as Moore had found McTaggart’s doctrine of the unreality of time.

One can hardly claim, however, that analytic philosophers have universally accepted commonsense beliefs, much less that metaphysical conclusions (regarding the ultimate nature of reality) are absent from their writings. But there is in the history of the analytic movement a strong antimetaphysical strain, and its exponents have generally assumed that the methods of science and of everyday life are the best ways of finding out the truth.

Most empiricists, though admitting that the senses fail to yield the certainty requisite for knowledge, hold nonetheless that it is only through observation and experimentation that justified beliefs about the world can be gained—in other words, a priori reasoning from self-evident premises cannot reveal how the world is. Accordingly, many empiricists insist on a sharp dichotomy between the physical sciences, which ultimately must verify their theories by observation, and the deductive or a priori sciences—e.g., mathematics and logic—the method of which is the deduction of theorems from axioms. The deductive sciences, in the empiricists’ view, cannot produce justified beliefs, much less knowledge, about the world. This conclusion was a cornerstone of two important early movements in analytic philosophy, logical atomism and logical positivism. In the positivist’s view, for example, the theorems of mathematics do not represent genuine knowledge of a world of mathematical objects but instead are merely the result of working out the consequences of the conventions that govern the use of mathematical symbols.

The question then arises whether philosophy itself is to be assimilated to the empirical or to the a priori sciences. Early empiricists assimilated it to the empirical sciences. Moreover, they were less self-reflective about the methods of philosophy than are contemporary analytic philosophers. Preoccupied with epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the philosophy of mind, and holding that fundamental facts can be learned about these subjects from individual introspection, early empiricists took their work to be a kind of introspective psychology. Analytic philosophers in the 20th century, on the other hand, were less inclined to appeal ultimately to direct introspection. More important, the development of modern symbolic logic seemed to promise help in solving philosophical problems—and logic is as a priori as science can be. It seemed, then, that philosophy must be classified with mathematics and logic. The exact nature and proper methodology of philosophy, however, remained in dispute.

THE ROLE OF SYMBOLIC LOGIC
For philosophers oriented toward formalism, the advent of modern symbolic logic in the late 19th century was a watershed in the history of philosophy, because it added greatly to the class of statements and inferences that could be represented in formal (i.e., axiomatic) languages. The formal representation of these statements provided insight into their underlying logical structures; at the same time, it helped to dispel certain philosophical puzzles that had been created, in the view of the formalists, through the tendency of earlier philosophers to mistake surface grammatical form for logical form. Because of the similarity of sentences such as “Tigers bite” and “Tigers exist,” for example, the verb to exist may seem to function, as other verbs do, to predicate something of the subject. It may seem, then, that existence is a property of tigers, just as their biting is. In symbolic logic, however, existence is not a property; it is a higher-order function that takes so-called “propositional functions” as values. Thus, when the propositional function “Tx”—in which T stands for the predicate “…is a tiger” and x is a variable replaceable with a name—is written beside a symbol known as the existential quantifier—∃x, meaning “There exists at least one x such that…”—the result is a sentence that means “There exists at least one x such that x is a tiger.” The fact that existence is not a property in symbolic logic has had important philosophical consequences, one of which has been to show that the ontological argument for the existence of God, which has puzzled philosophers since its invention in the 11th century by St. Anselm of Canterbury, is unsound.

Among 19th-century figures who contributed to the development of symbolic logic were the mathematicians George Boole (1815–64), the inventor of Boolean algebra, and Georg Cantor (1845–1918), the creator of set theory. The generally recognized founder of modern symbolic logic is Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), of the University of Jena in Germany. Frege, whose work was not fully appreciated until the mid-20th century, is historically important principally for his influence on Russell, whose program of logicism (the doctrine that the whole of mathematics can be derived from the principles of logic) had been attempted independently by Frege some 25 years before the publication of Russell’s principal logicist works, Principles of Mathematics (1903) and Principia Mathematica (1910–13; written in collaboration with Russell’s colleague at the University of Cambridge Alfred North Whitehead).

HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
The method of analysis played a role in early Greek philosophy (see e.g. Plato’s “Theaetetus”) and reappeared to take a major part in the early modern period, in the work of Descartes and his followers. However, the method began gradually to lose its centrality during the rise of German Idealism, as philosophers responded to the work of Kant by seeking to develop grand systematic theories. In part, the aim of work in that tradition was to respect what was thought to be the holistic interconnectedness of mind and world, an aim thought not to be well served by the method of analysis. Although the method was a central tool of some other important thinkers in the 19th century―most notably, Franz Brentano and C. S. Pierce―its rise to prominence in 20th Century Anglo-American philosophy was due mainly to the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

Moore and Russell
In the very late 19th century, Moore began a revolt against German Idealism. There were four main sources of dissent.
First, Moore felt that Idealism was an erroneous metaphysical view and that, where possible, there should be a return to Realism.
Second, he felt that the urge to grand system building should be suppressed in favor of careful attention to detail and rigorous argumentation.
Third, and related, he objected to what he saw as unnecessary obfuscation in the writings of German Idealists. He felt that philosophical theories and arguments for those theories should be open to objective assessment and so should be stated as clearly and sharply as possible.
The first three sources of dissent were based upon an un-favorable comparison of the major philosophical work of the period with work in the sciences. In Moore’s view, these more successful cognitive practices should serve as a model for a better philosophical methodology.
The same motivations were at work in the fourth source of Moore’s dissent, his negative reaction to the Idealist suppression of the method of analysis. Calling for a return to the method, Moore wrote that ‘… a thing becomes intelligible first when it is analysed into its constituent concepts’ (Moore's "The Nature of Judgement", 1899: 182)

Inspired by Moore, and enamored in particular by the science of mathematics, Russell began systematically to develop the programme of analysis. He was helped by his discovery (or rediscovery) of modern quantificational logic. A very similar logic was developed in the medieval period. However, the discovery of quantificational logic in its modern form is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (1879) and (independently) Peirce (1885). Although Russell was aware of the work of both thinkers, their influence on his own development of quantificational logic is not well understood. This logic enables the systematic treatment of the inferential behavior of a very large range of the statements that can be made in natural language (and so the thoughts expressible by the use of those statements) as well as the sharp statement of complex positions and arguments. Of special importance was Russell’s treatment of definite descriptions.

Russell’s treatment of definite descriptions showed that philosophical progress could be made by discerning the (or a) logical form of a philosophically problematic range of statements and that some philosophical disputes are usefully viewed as (at least in part) concerning how best to represent the logical forms of statements involved in those disputes. Together with the new treatment of quantification more generally, became a model for a variety of approaches to philosophical problems that involved attention to the forms of language used in the statement of those problems. For it supported the view that philosophical problems can arise due to the misleading superficial forms of the language we use and provided a model for how problems that arise in that way might be solved through uncovering the true logical forms of the statements involved.

The influences on Russell and Moore—and thus their methods of dealing with problems—soon diverged, and their different approaches became the roots of two broadly different traditions in analytic philosophy, referred to above as formalism and informalism. Russell, whose general approach would be adopted by philosophers in the formalist tradition, was a major influence on those who believed that philosophical problems could be clarified, if not solved, by using the technical equipment of formal logic and who saw the physical sciences as the only means of gaining knowledge of the world. They regarded philosophy—if as a science at all—as a deductive and a priori enterprise on a par with mathematics. Russell’s contributions to this side of the analytic tradition have been important and, in great part, lasting.

In contrast to Russell, Moore, who would inspire philosophers in the informalist tradition, never found much need to employ technical tools or to turn philosophy into a science. His dominant themes were the defense of commonsensical views about the nature of the world against esoteric, skeptical, or grandly metaphysical views and the conviction that the right way to approach a philosophical puzzle is to examine closely the question through which it was generated. Philosophical problems, he thought, are often intractable simply because philosophers have not stopped to formulate precisely what is at issue.

Because of these two themes, Moore enlisted sympathy among analytic philosophers who, from the 1930s onward, saw little hope in advanced formal logic as a means of solving traditional philosophical problems. These philosophers also shared with Moore the belief that it is often more important to look at the questions that philosophers pose than at their proposed answers. Thus, unlike Russell, who was important for his solutions to problems in formal logic and the philosophy of mathematics, among other areas, it was more the spirit of Moore’s philosophy than its lasting contributions that made him such an important influence.

In his seminal essay “A Defence of Common Sense” (1925), as in others, Moore argued not only against idealist doctrines such as the unreality of time but also against all the forms of skepticism—for example, about the existence of other minds or of a material world—that philosophers have espoused. The skeptic, he pointed out, usually has some argument for his conclusion. Instead of examining such arguments, however, Moore pitted against the skeptic’s premises various quite everyday beliefs—for example, that he had breakfast that morning (thus, time cannot be unreal) or that he does in fact have a pencil in his hand (thus, there must be a material world). He challenged the skeptic to show that the premises of the skeptic’s argument are any more certain than the everyday beliefs that form the premises of Moore’s argument.

Although some scholars have seen Moore as an early practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, his appeal was not to what it is proper to say but rather to the beliefs of common sense. His rejection of any philosophical doctrine that offends against common sense was influential not only in the release that it afforded from the metaphysical excesses of absolute idealism but also in its impact on the sensibilities and general orientation of most later analytic philosophers.

Moore was also important for his vision of the proper business of philosophy—analysis. He was puzzled, for example, about the proper analysis of “a sees b,” in which b designates a physical object (e.g., a pencil). He thought that there must be a special sense of see in which one does not see the pencil but sees only part of its surface. In addition, he thought that there must be another sense of see in which what is directly perceived is not even the surface of the pencil but rather what Moore called “sense data” and what earlier empiricists had called “visual sensations” or “sense impressions.” Moore’s problem was to discern the relationships between these various elements in perception and, in particular, to discover how a person can be justified, as Moore fully believed he is, in his claims to see physical objects when what he immediately perceives are really only sense data. The idea that sense impressions form the immediate objects of perception played a large role in early analytic philosophy, showing once again its empiricist roots. Later, however, it became an important source of division among the logical positivists. In addition, most ordinary-language philosophers, as well as those closely influenced by the later work of Russell’s most famous student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, found sense data to be as unpalatable and unwarranted as Moore had found McTaggart’s doctrine of the unreality of time.

Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein was the most famous pupil of Russell and Moore. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) further developed the analysis of statements in the direction of logical atomism. … This paradigm of analysis -- which bears comparison with aspects of Plato’s Theaetetus -- was driven by the view that ‘A proposition [i.e. the content of a statement] has one and only one complete analysis’ (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus “, 1922: 3.25). The work’s major conclusion was that there are two types of statement: those that represent the world, and so can be either true or false depending upon how the world in fact is -- the synthetic truths and falsehoods -- and those that either cannot be true or cannot be false -- the logical or analytic truths and falsehoods -that fail to represent the world as being one way or another. Since genuinely philosophical statements, derived by analysis, were taken to fall on the non-representational (analytic) side of this divide, they were taken to be devoid of real content and to have a role other than that of conveying information. And since a core sense of meaningfulness was identified with representational significance, such statements were taken to be -- in that core sense -- meaningless.

Vienna Circle
Members of the Vienna Circle―including especially Rudolf Carnap―were inspired by Wittgenstein’s work and sought to embed its central themes in an approach to philosophy―logical positivism―shaped by epistemological concerns. They replaced Wittgenstein’s distinction between statements whose truth-value depends upon worldly contingency and statements whose truth-value is fixed independently of such contingency with a distinction between statements that admit of verification or falsification on the basis of experience and statements that cannot be so verified or falsified. The task of philosophy was taken to be the analysis of statements into experientially significant components, an analysis that would either indicate precisely the course of experience that would verify or falsify the statement or show it to be beyond verification of falsification. In that way, philosophy would either show how a statement can be assessed on the basis of scientific observation, or show the statement to be (in the Circle’s proprietary sense) meaningless. Since the only properly cognitive activity was taken to be the collection of observations, the programme of the Vienna Circle was shaped by the view that ‘what is left over for philosophy … is only a method: the method of logical analysis’. (Carnap's "Überwindung der Mataphysik durch logische Analyse derSprache", 1932) (reprinted as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language", 1959)

In the early post-1945 period, many philosophers retained the Vienna Circle’s animus towards traditional metaphysics but viewed its approach to analysis as overly restrictive. They sought to replace what they saw as an empirically unmotivated fixation upon a very narrow conception of empirical content with a more expansive view of philosophical analysis. According to the more expansive view, the analysis of statements was to include the tracing of their roles within larger systems of language driven by careful attention to the way those statements are actually used in ordinary contexts. The more expansive view therefore involved a partial return to the sort of holistic approach involved in German Idealism. Wittgenstein’s work within the more expansive paradigm developed his earlier view that the role of philosophical analysis should be largely therapeutic―that it should serve the removal of philosophical perplexity by uncovering and excising the sources of confusion in the misleading superficial forms of language. But many other philosophers working within the new paradigm of analysis, including J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and P. F. Strawson―the so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophers―returned to the view that some philosophical questions might be genuine and hoped that the analysis of language would deliver answers to those questions.

Quine
W. V. Quine took a different path away from the Vienna Circle. Quine was strongly influenced by the work of Carnap and retained the Circle’s view that scientific observation is the only source of cognitive significance. However, he thought that Carnap had failed fully to draw out the consequences of that view. Quine argued that the view served to undermine the distinction between statements that can be verified or falsified on the basis of experience and those that cannot be so verified or falsified―i.e. the Circle’s version of the distinction between statements that are analytic and those that are synthetic. Quine therefore took the range of statements that are up for scientific assessment to include statements in logic and mathematics. He took our total theory of the world to form an interconnected web of statements that can only be assessed as a whole on the basis of the range of predictions it makes about the course of experience. Again, Quine’s work involved a partial return to the holism of earlier periods and a rejection of the goal of atomist analysis that formed the impetus for the earliest work in modern analytic philosophy.

Quine’s rejection of the existence of a category of analytic truths went hand in hand with a general rejection of the philosophical utility of appeals to unreconstructed notions of linguistic meaning. In particular, Quine argued for the indeterminacy of translation, the claim that for any translation from one language into another(including translation from a language into itself), there will be other translations that have equally good empirical credentials. For one famous instance, he argued that evidence that an expression is to be translated by the English expression ‘rabbit’ can be equally good evidence that the expression is to be translated by the English expression ‘un-detached part of a rabbit’. (See Quine’s “Word and Object”, 1960: 1–79.) When conjoined with Quine’s rejection of a principled distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, acceptance of Quine’s views has seemed to many to undermine the possibility of a philosophy based upon methods of analysis. For the rejection of an analytic-synthetic distinction appears to undermine a distinction between the analysis of statements and the empirical assessment of those statements. And the rejection of determinate translation appears to undermine the assumption that there is such a thing as the analysis of a statement.

Quine’s conclusions remain the subject of controversy. The main effects of his work―either directly or indirectly―have involved the further broadening of the analytic horizon. Many contemporary analytic philosophers who are influenced by Quine’s rejection of an analytic-synthetic distinction allow their work to be shaped by the findings of empirical science. Under the same influence, many contemporary analytic philosophers allow that philosophy―even when approached from the armchair―can be a source of discovery about the world. Thus, the culmination, via Quine, of the Vienna Circle’s anti-metaphysical empiricism has led ultimately to the reinstatement of metaphysics as a legitimate area of cognitive inquiry. Finally, many contemporary philosophers have followed Quine in relegating the study of meaning from its central place in the analytic philosophers’ armoury and have sought a more direct approach to answering philosophical questions.

Post-war period
The post-war period of intense focus upon language and linguistic meaning coincided with Frege’s work becoming widely available in translation and led to a re-evaluation of his place in the development of analytic philosophy. In particular, Michael Dummett has claimed that it is criterial of modern analytic philosophy that it approaches the study of thought via a study of the way language is used to express thought and that, from that perspective, Frege should be assigned priority over Russell as its progenitor. (See Dummett’s “Origins of Analytical Philosophy” , 1993.) Dummett’s claim is controversial for at least three reasons. First, it is controversial that it is criterial of analytic philosophy that it assigns methodological priority to the study of language. The criteria would appear not only to place many contemporary philosophers who work within the analytic tradition outside the bounds of analytic philosophy proper, but would also appear to exclude the early work of Russell and Moore. Second, it is controversial that Frege would himself count as an analytic philosophy by Dummett’s standard, since he distrusted natural language and sought to construct artificial systems better able to capture the nature of thought. Third, although Frege’s work now occupies a central place in the curriculum of analytic philosophy, there is little consensus concerning its precise role in shaping the initial development of the modern analytic tradition. His work had some influence on Russell, as noted above, and exerted a powerful influence on both Wittgenstein and Carnap. But other philosophers also played important roles in the development of all three thinkers. What is uncontroversial, however, is that Frege’s work possesses many of the qualities associated with analytic philosophy, including narrow focus, clarity, rigor, and depth, and exhibits all those qualities to a very high degree. To that extent, no education in analytic philosophy would be complete that did not involve a careful study of his work.

1. Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy, understood as a phase in the history of ideas, originated in Cambridge in the late 1890s with the revolt, by the young Moore and Russell, against the neo-Hegelian Absolute Idealism that had dominated British philosophy in the last third of the nineteenth century. What Moore and Russell shared was a commitment to realism, as opposed to Hegelian idealism, and to analysis, as opposed to Hegelian synthesis. Neither Moore nor Russell conceived of themselves as concerned with language or thought – they were concerned with discovering special, very general, truths about the world. Russell’s early pluralist Platonism evolved, via the theory of denoting concepts, the theory of descriptions and the theory of types, on the one hand, and the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, on the other, into the more austere doctrines of logical atomism. Logical atomism attained its most sophisticated form in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The most important achievements of that book were twofold. Negatively, it gave profound criticisms of the Fregean and Russellian conceptions of logic, language, and intentionality. Positively it made great strides in clarifying the nature and status of the necessary truths of logic. The Tractatus was the culmination of the first phase of analytic philosophy and the primary source of the next two phases.

The second phase was Cambridge analysis of the 1920s and early ’30s (e.g. Ramsey, Braithwaite, Wisdom, Stebbing) a movement greatly influenced by Moore and Russell and inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It was short lived, for Wittgenstein himself terminated it through his own teachings in Cambridge from 1930 onwards, when he repudiated the Tractatus and self-consciously engineered a revolution in philosophy – dismissing its aspirations to disclose truths about reality, and insisting upon its restriction to the disentangling of conceptual confusions.

The third and more influential phase, which also stemmed from the Tractatus, was the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and its affiliates. Under the influence of the Tractatus programme for future philosophy, and greatly impressed by its explanation of the vacuous character of the propositions of logic, the logical empiricists repudiated the ambitions of philosophy to investigate the nature of the world, vehemently rejected the aspirations of metaphysics, and restricted philosophy, by and large, to what they called ‘the logic of scientific language’. They proposed the principle of verification as the key to the notion of linguistic meaning and invoked verifiability as a criterion of meaningfulness. The latter was wielded, rather heavy-handedly, in the anti-metaphysical polemics of the Circle, which lacked the subtlety of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of metaphysics of the mid-1930s.The Circle was destroyed by the Nazis, and the leading logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap, Feigl, Reichenbach, Hempel, Frank, Tarski, Bergmann, Gödel) fled to the USA, where they played a major role in the post-war years in transforming American pragmatism into logical pragmatism.

The fourth phase of the movement was the emergence of postwar Oxford analytic philosophy, led by Ryle (influenced by Wittgenstein) and Austin (influenced by Moore), with such colleagues as Berlin, Hampshire, Hart, Grice, and after 1959, Ayer (influenced by the Vienna Circle), and among the postwar generation Strawson and Hare. From Oxford, its influence spread throughout the English speaking world and beyond. Unlike the Vienna Circle, this was no ‘school’ of philosophy, it published no manifestos, and contrary to current myth, cleaved to no dogmas. But there was broad consensus on three points. First, no advance in philosophical understanding can be expected without the propaedeutic of investigating the use of the words relevant to the problem at hand. Second, metaphysics, understood as the philosophical investigation into the objective, language-independent, nature of the world, is an illusion. Third, philosophy, contrary to what Russell had thought, is not continuous with, but altogether distinct from science. Its task, contrary to what the Vienna Circle averred, is not the clarification or ‘improvement’ of the language of science.

A strand, which is interwoven with, but distinguishable from, postwar Oxford, even though it ran concurrently with it, is, of course, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the work of his many distinguished pupils: for example, his successors in the Cambridge chair, von Wright, Wisdom and Anscombe, those of his students who taught at Oxford, such as Waismann, Paul and (again) Anscombe, and those who transmitted his ideas to philosophers in the USA, such as Ambrose, Black and Malcolm.

This fourth phase of analytic philosophy declined from the 1970s, partly under the impact of American logical pragmatism, the leading figures of which were Quine (much influenced by Carnap) and Quine’s pupil Davidson (influenced by Tarski), and, in Britain, under the impact of Dummett and later of his pupils. For the first twenty years, a new philosophical endeavour dominated the subject – the project of constructing a theory of meaning for a natural language, an endeavour which promised the key to the great problems of philosophy. Subsequently, as performance failed to match promise, forms of speculative philosophy of mind, focused largely on mind/body questions and converging on emergent self-styled cognitive science, came to occupy centre stage. Whether what resulted from these varied reactions to Oxford analytic philosophy was a fifth phase of a still flourishing tradition or the slow death of analytic philosophy itself is, I believe, still too soon to say. In fifty years time our successors will perhaps be able to see more clearly. But there is no doubt that many philosophers today who deem themselves analytic philosophers repudiate most of what was achieved, or was understood as having been achieved, in the fifty years between the 1920s and the 1970s. To be sure, what counts as achievement in philosophy is itself a moot philosophical issue of no small moment. I shall turn to this matter below.

2. Analysis, logic and language
It might be said that one unifying feature of the analytic tradition is the commitment to analysis.

Early Moore held himself to be analysing concepts, which he took to be not uses of words, but rather constituents of propositions of which reality consists (Moorean propositions being more akin to Tractatus facts that to senses of sentences). Analysing a concept, Moore confusedly thought, was a matter of inspecting something that lies before the mind’s eye, seeing the parts of which it is composed and how they are related to each other, and discerning how it is related to and distinguished from other concepts. Analysis was, therefore, associated with decomposing complexes into components.

Young Russell was influenced in his reaction against Absolute Idealism by Moore, but his early conception of analysis had other roots too, namely Leibniz and Bradley, on the one hand, and Weierstrass, Dedekind and Cantor, on the other. But, like Moore, Russell thought that analysis is essentially the decomposition (in thought) of conceptually complex things (of which the world supposedly consists) into their simple unanalysable constituents. Russell’s exuberant Platonist realism was curbed by his conception of denoting concepts and his subsequent invention of the theory of descriptions. The latter focused his attention on the symbolism with which we describe the world, and led him to distinguish complete from incomplete symbols. This suggested a deficiency in the overt grammatical forms of sentences containing denoting expressions, and bred the myth of ‘the logical form of the proposition’.³ Subsequently Russell came to think of analysis as having facts as its object. He came to think of the form of a fact as one of its constituents, and held that the task of philosophy is to analyse the most general facts of which the world consists, and to catalogue their forms. Given his epistemological convictions, this committed him to reductive analysis, e.g. of material objects to sense-data.

(Note³: Russell was to drop this muddled conception of propositions in favour of a slightly less muddled conception of facts as composing the world. Then the sentences of natural language were argued to misrepresent not the real forms of the propositions they signify, but the real forms of the facts they describe.)

The young Wittgenstein did not think that forms are constituents of objects, propositions or facts. He held that logical analysis of language would disclose the logico-metaphysical forms of facts and of their constituent objects – the substance of the world. For, he held, there is a pre-established metaphysical harmony between language and reality. The logico-syntactical forms of expressions are the forms of what, on analysis, they represent. So logical analysis is the key to the (strictly speaking, ineffable) nature of all things.

The Vienna Circle, however, viewed logical analysis as a method merely for the clarification of sentences of ‘science’ and the elimination of the pseudo-propositions of metaphysics. This conception evolved, in Carnap’s hands, first into reductive analysis, and later into the method of explication and of the invention of artificial languages for elucidatory purposes.

The later Wittgenstein was adamantly opposed to reductive analysis. He renounced any claims to penetrate appearances in order to disclose the logico-metaphysical forms of things, not because this is beyond the powers of philosophy, but because there is no such thing to disclose. A proposition is fully analysed, he claimed (The Big Typescript, p. 417), when we have completely laid bare its ‘grammar’ (the sense-determining rules for its use) and present that grammar in the form of a perspicuous representation that will dissolve philosophical confusion. This conception of analysis had non-coincidental affinities with Ryle’s ‘logical geography’ of concepts. It was perspicuously articulated in Strawson’s methodological discussion of ‘connective analysis’ and exemplified in his numerous papers.5 Connective analysis, or elucidation, is a non-reductive description of conceptual connections, compatibilities and incompatibilities, arrayed for the purposes of philosophical clarification.

Yet other forms and conceptions of analysis are to be found in latter day analytic philosophers (such as Davidson, Dummett, Putnam and Quine) but it should be evident that the concept of analysis, logical and linguistic, is Protean. Its history is part of the history of the analytic movement, and just because of that, the bare concept of analysis is not a useful tool to illuminate its general character. But there are two features that can be invoked, not to define, but to characterize this phase in Western philosophy.

The first is the revival, for the first time since the Middle Ages, of interest in, and a philosophical preoccupation with the nature of, formal logic. ...

The second feature of the analytic movement in the twentieth century is the intense interest in, and meticulous attention to, language and its uses. ...

3. Analytic philosophy: the linguistic turn and beyond
Analytic philosophy has sometimes been characterized by reference to the linguistic turn. But there is considerable unclarity over what this is. It is not a phrase used by any of the major philosophers of the period to refer to their work. Richard Rorty borrowed it from Gustav Bergmann as the title of his 1967 anthology of essays.8 He deemed members of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein and his followers, Oxford philosophers, and sundry Americans associated with these groups (including Quine), to be linguistic philosophers – participants in ‘the most recent philosophical revolution’.9 They shared, Rorty suggested, the common belief that the problems of philosophy may be solved or dissolved either by reforming language (the advocates of this were dubbed ‘ideal language philosophers’) or by understanding more about the language we actually use (‘ordinary language philosophers’). Thus conceived, the linguistic turn characterizes the third and fourth phases of the analytic movement. Rorty sensed, rightly I think, that a deep and important change had occurred in analytic philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s – a shift in the conception of the problems and methods of philosophy that to some extent bridged the gulf that separated the Vienna Circle and affiliates (with all the differences there were between the Schlick/Waismann wing, on the one hand, and the Neurath/Carnap wing, on the other) from Oxford philosophers and affiliates and followers of Wittgenstein (with all the differences between them). Despite these great differences both within and between these two streams, a sea-change had occurred.

With the benefit of another thirty eight years’ hindsight, I myself should wish to elaborate Rorty’s account. The linguistic turn, I suggest, was taken when it was proposed

1. That the goal of philosophy is (a) the understanding of the structure and articulations of our conceptual scheme, and (b) the resolution of the problems of philosophy (to be specified by paradigmatic examples), which stem, inter alia, from unclarities about the uses of words, from covert misuses, and from misleading surface grammatical analogies in natural languages.

2. That a primary method of philosophy is the examination of the uses of words in order to disentangle conceptual confusions.

3. That philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge about reality, either superior to or on the same level as scientific knowledge, but a contribution to a distinctive form of understanding.

This turn had been initiated by Wittgenstein’s Tractatu s. It could be completed only when the metaphysical doctrines of the Tractatus were jettisoned and the logical doctrines accordinglymodified. This was effected by Wittgenstein himself in the 1930s, and, partly under his influence, by the Vienna Circle. The three claims are common ground to most of the logical positivists, most Oxford analytic philosophers and their followers, and most of Wittgenstein’s pupils. One cannot therefore characterize analytic philosophy as such, but only its third and fourth phases, by reference to the linguistic turn.

“Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy (Brian Leiter)

"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of "analytic" philosophy.) The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson.

"Continental" philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of (primarily) French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The geographical label is misleading: Carnap, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all products of the European Continent, but are not "Continental" philosophers. The foundational figure of this tradition is usually thought to be Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte, Schelling), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is sometimes distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, less reliant on formal logic [though most so-called “analytic” philosophy makes no use of formal logic]), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation). So-called “Continental philosophy” is not, however, a monolith; indeed, “analytic philosophy,” before its demise at the hands of Quine and Sellars, was a far more coherent philosophical movement than the two hundred years of philosophy on the European Continent since Hegel. “Continental philosophy” is more aptly characterized as a series of partly overlapping traditions in philosophy, some of whose figures have almost nothing in common with other.

There is an important sense in which "analytic" philosophy—as a substantive research program— is dead. The idea that intellectual labor is neatly divisible between philosophers and empirical scientists; that philosophers have a special method ("conceptual analysis") with which to solve problems; that philosophical problems are essentially soluble a priori, from the armchair—all these substantive commitments have largely died thanks to Quine and others. "Analytic" philosophy, today, is the most richly interdisciplinary of all the humanities, engaging with psychology, linguistics, biology, physics, law, computer science, and economics in way that no other traditional ‘humanities’ field does. Indeed, what distinguishes analytic philosophy even more than "style" is its adoption of the research paradigm common in the natural sciences, a paradigm in which numerous individual researchers make small contributions to the solution of a set of generally recognized problems. This is true, interestingly, of even the best work by Anglophone philosophers about so-called “Continental” philosophy: researchers debate and work out the details of the readings of Hegel by Brandom, Forster, Pippin, and Wood, or the readings of Foucault by Dreyfus & Rabinow, Gutting, and Pile. Some of this is simply an artifact of the structure of post-graduate education in the Western world, where each new generation of doctoral students must find their niche and establish the significance of their research against the background of established scholarship.

Criticisms of "analytic" philosophy are familiar: arid, insular, boring, obsessed with logic-chopping, irrelevant. The criticisms are not without some truth. Clearly the "best" analytic philosophers do not resonate with the concerns of the broader culture in the way that figures like Nietzsche and Sartre do. Analytic philosophers do often miss the forest for the trees, and they often let dialectical ingenuity trump good sense (and sometimes science!) in terms of the views they will defend. Read the entire article   Copy

Read also William Blattner's comment on this article: Some Thoughts About "Continental" and "Analytic" Philosophy   Copy  

Relation of Analytic Philosophy to continental philosophy

The term "analytic philosophy" in part denotes the fact that most of this philosophy traces its roots to the early 20th century movement of "logical analysis"; in part the term serves to distinguish "analytic" from other kinds of philosophy, especially "continental philosophy." Continental philosophy mainly denotes philosophy that developed in continental Europe after Hegel, largely in response to Modernity or Modern philosophy that developed from Descartes through Hegel. The major philosophical movement of "continental philosphy" was phenomenology initiated by Edmund Husserl, followed by Martin Heidegger. Analytic philosophy developed as a reaction against the strong influence of Hegel, and especially against Heidegger. Most analytic philosophers considered themselves to be empiricists, and they took Hume to be their greatest and most important philosophical ancestor. Analytic philosophers viewed Hegel's philosophy to be "obscure and neologistic" and Heidegger's to be "aggressive and oppressive obscurantism, obfuscation, and opacity."

The split between the two began early in the twentieth century. The logical positivists of the 1920s promoted a systematic rejection of metaphysics, and a generalized hostility to metaphysical concepts that they considered meaningless or ill-conceived: for example, God, the immaterial soul, or universals such as "redness." This was at the same time that Heidegger was dominating philosophy in Germany and becoming influential in France, and his work became the object of frequent derision in English-speaking philosophy departments.

While continental philosophers pursued traditional metaphysical issues and socio-political-historical dimensions of knowledge, analytic philosophers focused on logical analyses of languages. These two movements took different paths without much communication. Analytic philosophers ignored continental philosophy as “obscure and meaningless,” and continental philosophers looked down on analytic philosophy as “superficial and shallow.” The split affected various philosophy departments of higher education. Most philosophy departments in England and USA were dominated by analytic philosophy and those of Germany, France, and other countries in the continental Europe were dominated by continental philosophy.

Each tradition, however, outgrew and evolved into diverse styles and forms. The division of these two movements today is no longer as sharp as that was at early half of the twentieth century.

The coinage of “analytic” and “continental” is also problematic. The term "analytic" conventionally indicates a method of philosophy, while the term "continental" indicates, rather, a geographical origin. The distinction is, for this reason, somewhat misleading. Analytic philosophy's founding fathers, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, the logical positivists (the Vienna Circle), the Logical Empiricists (in Berlin), and the Polish logicians were all products of the continent of Europe. Much philosophy in Germany and Italy today, most of that in the Nordic countries, and a great deal scattered over the rest of the continent and in Latin America, is likewise analytic. The European Society for Analytic Philosophy holds continental-wide conventions every third year. Conversely, continental philosophy is pursued today perhaps by more people in English-speaking countries than anywhere else, if primarily in comparative literature or cultural studies departments.

Many people now claim that the distinction fails: that the subject matter of continental philosophy is capable of being studied using the now-traditional tools of analytic philosophy. If this is true, the phrase "analytic philosophy" might be redundant, or maybe normative, as in "rigorous philosophy." The phrase "continental philosophy," like "Greek philosophy," would denote a certain historical period or series of schools in philosophy: German idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis qua philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism.

Analytic philosophy, under one interpretation, failed by its own "systematic" lights to demonstrate the meaninglessness or fictitiousness of the concepts it attacked. As early as 1959 John Passmore declared that "Logical positivism … is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes." ("Logical Positivism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, Ed., Vol. 5, 56) Few analytic philosophers today would agree that they have anything like an exact and proven theory of which terms are meaningful and which meaningless. Contemporary analytic philosophy journals are—for good or ill—as rich in metaphysics as any continental philosopher.

1. LOGIC AND LOGICISM: BASIC CONCEPTS

2, THE EMERGENCE OF LOGICISM

3. LOGICISM AND ANALYSIS
As well as founding the logic of relations, developing the theory of logicism, and discovering fundamental contradictions in logic and set theory, Russell more than anyone else founded the twentieth-century movement of analytic philosophy that still dominates philosophy today.
Analytic philosophy as practiced by Russell logically analyzes concepts, knowledge, and language to say what there is and how we know it. Analysis is a significant part of analytic philosophy and its role in the movement is largely due to Russell. His logical analysis of mathematics is one of the movement’s primary examples of analysis.

Notions of analysis vary from one analytic philosopher to another and from one analysis to another by a single philosopher. This last case is true of Russell himself. Most generally, “analysis” for him means beginning with something that is common knowledge and seeking the fundamental concepts and principles it is based on. This is followed by a synthesis that begins with the basic concepts and principles discovered by analysis and uses them to derive the common knowledge one first analyzed to begin with.

In Russell’s own words (in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy): “By analyzing we ask what more general ideas and principles can be found, in terms of which what was our starting-point can be defined or deduced?” (p. 1). Similarly, in Principia Mathematica, he says “There are two opposite tasks which have to be concurrently performed. On the one hand, we have to analyze existing mathematics, with a view to discovering what premises are employed?. On the other hand, when we have decided upon our premisses, we have to build up again [i.e., synthesize] as much as may seem necessary of the data previously analyzed” (vol. 1, p. v).
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4. Logical analysis: The theory of descriptions
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For Russell, the theory of descriptions shows that the grammar of ordinary language is often misleading. Using it, sentences containing singular definite descriptions – descriptions of the form “the so-and-so” such as “the author of Waverley” in the sentence “Scott was the author of Waverley” – are analyzed so that the description does not occur in the logical analysis of the sentence, but is replaced by a predicate.

For example, “the author of Waverley” in “Scott was the author of Waverley” is replaced with the predicate “x wrote Waverley” and the sentence becomes “There is exactly one thing x such that x is Scott, and x wrote Waverley,” or more briefly, “Scott wrote Waverley.” The description “the author of Waverley” no longer occurs in the logical analysis of the sentence. In particular, the word “the” is gone. That is the whole function of the theory of descriptions.

Why analyze a sentence so that the definite description it contains, and especially the word “the,” disappears? Notice that “the author of Waverley” seems to function like a name and to denote a particular object. However, the expression that replaces it, “x wrote Waverley,” is a predicate, not a name, and by itself it does not denote any such object. Let us pause here to consider this idea that names denote, but predicates do not. It is an important idea to Russell.

The idea that names refer to, or denote, objects should not be controversial. “Napoleon” refers to the commanding French general at the battle of Waterloo, “Einstein” to the man who created the special and general theories of relativity, and so forth. And as Russell points out, names have these references independently of occurring in propositions. Finally, definite descriptions like “the author of Waverley” seem to function like names and refer to particular individuals too, just as “Sir Walter Scott” does.

Predicates, on the other hand, do not name, or refer to, objects. For example, the predicate “x is red” does not name or denote any particular individual by itself independently of occurring in a proposition. It does not specify which object or objects it might be used to apply to. So a predicate is definitely not a name. Because definite descriptions are not names but are predicates, Russell calls them incomplete symbols. They appear to name objects, but they really don’t.

By showing that definite descriptions, which appear to be names of objects, really aren’t, we can see how sentences containing descriptions can be meaningful without the sentence asserting the existence of what is described. For example, we can see how sentences like “The present king of France rolled the round square down the golden mountain” can be meaningful without asserting that any of these things (“the present king of France,” “the round square,” and “the golden mountain”) exist.

This solves a general problem of logic for Russell – how to logically analyze sentences containing definite descriptions true of no objects. More significantly, Russell uses a variation of this theory, called his “no-class” theory of classes, to remove all references to classes in his logic by treating names of classes and descriptions of classes as predicates. Then, since logic, so interpreted, does not assume that sets exist, the Russell paradox of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves cannot occur – as we will see next.

5. LOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE “NO-CLASS” THEORY OF CLASSES
In addition to analyzing singular definite descriptions so that what appear to be names are seen to actually be predicates that do not name anything, Russell sometimes treats proper names the same way, for example, in Principia Mathematica (in *14.21). He argues there that words like “Homer” that appear to be proper names are actually concealed definite descriptions such as “the author of the Homeric poems.” They are then treated like definite descriptions and replaced with predicates too. By 1918, in “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” Russell is using this idea aggressively, insisting that all proper names like “Socrates,” “Napoleon,” and “Einstein” are disguised definite descriptions, but in Principia, he only suggests it once.

After singular definite descriptions such as “the author of Waverley” come plural definite descriptions such as “the inhabitants of London.” These too are analyzed so that they are replaced by predicates. The phrase “the inhabitants of London” in the sentence “The inhabitants of London are cosmopolitan,” seems to name a class of objects, namely, the inhabitants of London. But it is replaced by “x lives in London,” which, being a predicate, names no object or objects. The sentence then reads “If anyone lives in London, that person is cosmopolitan.”

In the slightly different sentence “The class of people who inhabit London is large,” the subject is a description that appears to name a single object, the class of people living in London. It is a different example because it includes the word “class.” But as before, we replace the description with the predicate “x lives in London” to get “Many people live in London.” Similarly, when a symbol stands for a set as the name of the set, we treat it like a disguised definite description, just as “Socrates” is treated as the disguised description “the teacher of Plato.” For example, when α = the class of even numbers, we translate “6 ∈ α” (“the number 6 is a member of the class α of even numbers”) by replacing α with the predicate “x is divisible by two” to get “6 is divisible by 2.” Again, we simply replace the class with the predicate that defines it.

Russell uses these techniques to define classes as predicates in Principia Mathematica. This replaces apparent references to classes with predicates that do not refer to classes. Thus, Principia Mathematica makes no reference to classes. There are then no classes in his logicist thesis, which ensures that paradoxes of set theory cannot arise in it. So Russell eliminates classes from his logic to prevent paradoxes of sets from arising in it or in the logistic theory based on it. This is Russell’s no-class theory of classes. (Though in truth it is a little more complex than this, as we will see in Chapter 3.)
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6 LOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE THEORY OF LOGICAL TYPES
Though the no-class theory does avoid Russell’s paradox of classes, there is a paradox similar to it for predicates that the no-class theory does not eliminate. This of course is because the no-class theory eliminates classes, not predicates. Here is the new paradox: Some predicates are true of themselves – for example, “x is a predicate” is itself a predicate. Others are not – for example, “x is red” is not red. Thus, “x is a predicate that is not true of itself” is a meaningful predicate. It is true of some predicates and not of others. But is it true of itself or not? If it is, it isn’t, and if it isn’t, it is. We thus have a contradiction.

So simply eliminating classes from one’s logic and logicism using the no-class theory does not eliminate all paradoxes from logicism, because similar paradoxes arise in it for predicates. We can try to use something analogous to the no-class theory to eliminate predicates. For example, we might replace predicates with propositions. Unfortunately there are also similar paradoxes for propositions. And so on.

Fortunately, Russell has another method for avoiding paradoxes called the theory of logical types. Notice that both versions of the Russell paradox arise from self-reference – from allowing a set to be a member of itself or a predicate to apply to itself. Many other similar paradoxes also arise from self-reference, by allowing sets to be members of themselves, predicates to apply to themselves, propositions to be about themselves, and so forth. The theory of types prevents such paradoxes from arising by banning self-reference.
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7 ANALYSIS AND METAPHYSICS
Russell’s ideas about the nature of reality are often responses to problems in logic, mathematics, and analysis. His views on reality in early work (1900-17) are expressed in “Principles of Mathematics” (1903), “On the Relations of Universals and Particulars” (1912), and “Analytic Realism” (1911). In them, a defense of analysis is part of his view of reality.

Philosophical monists, who were common in England in Russell’s time, argue that analyzing the whole of reality into parts is impossible. They feel that the nature of objects is determined by the role they play in larger wholes, and that analyzing wholes into parts leaves out these larger connections. And if the nature of an object lies in the role it plays in a whole, and the nature of that whole lies in the role it plays in some larger whole, reality is ultimately one undivided whole – the plurality we experience is an illusion.

To defend analysis, Russell rejects the monists’ arguments and concludes that reality is plural and “atomistic,” that is, composed of parts that can be understood independently of their role in the whole. Details about reality in Russell’s atomism are reached by analysis of logical principles – it is a logical atomism. He believes that logic and grammar reveal the nature of reality. This avoids beliefs about reality not warranted by logic. For example, if reality consists of things that can be analyzed into parts, the parts themselves are either complex and further analyzable or not complex and simple. If they are complex, they presuppose the existence of still simpler entities.
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In his late period, he analyzes language to show that though we can explain most general words without assuming universals, we cannot eliminate all universals. For example, we can define “red” in “this is red” without assuming the universal redness by replacing “red” with “similar to this.” Yet we need at least one universal to define “similar.” Thus, particular experienced events alone are not enough to account for the meaning of sentences. Universals are not experienced, but to explain meaning we must assume the existence of at least one.

8 ANALYSIS AND KNOWLEDGE
Russell’s theory of knowledge concerns both empirical and a priori knowledge. His early views here occur in “The Philosophical Importance of Mathematical Logic” (1911), “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” (1911), “Problems of Philosophy” (1912), and “Our Knowledge of the External World” (1914). Logical and mathematical propositions are thought to be general truths that relate universals existing apart from space and time. These propositions are a priori - known independently of experience.

Knowledge in general is consciousness of particular or universal entities known by awareness (direct acquaintance). These are not physical objects, which Russell says we construct, but data of sense, memory, introspection, or logical intuition – patches of color, sounds, feelings, or mind-independent universals like similar. We also know about things by description, but then our grasp on them comes from our grasp on names of the things of which we are directly aware.

Throughout his career, Russell’s epistemology focuses on verifying the propositions of physics to show how physics as a branch of pure mathematics applies to the world. His view is that physical propositions are not completely verified until terms like “matter” and “instant” are defined by sentences about sense data. The definitions are produced in accord with the theory of descriptions, where phrases apparently naming entities are defined with names for sense data.

By defining physical concepts in terms of sense data, Russell seeks to avoid assuming any more than is necessary about the physical world. That is, he seeks to justify the laws of physics by sense data alone, without having to also assume physical objects that cause our experiences but are not directly experienced and so themselves transcend experience.
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9 ANALYSIS AND LANGUAGE
In his early period, Russell’s theories of meaning are confined to what words and sentences denote. These occur in his early metaphysical works such as the Principles (1903). Russell thinks the meaning of a name, verb, or predicate, is the entity it denotes, which may be concrete or abstract, in time and space or outside them. Words that occur as subjects of sentences denote either particulars or universals (things or concepts), while predicates and verbs denote only universals.

Though the things corresponding to words and phrases are their meanings, this is not to say that we are aware of them as meanings. Russell explains this with his doctrine of acquaintance with universals. We can be acquainted with a patch of color and not know that it is an instance of the word “yellow.” For this, the particular patch is not enough: we need to grasp the universal yellow. The understanding of meaning is by way of universals.

The above remarks concern words. Until 1910, the meaning of a sentence is also viewed as a single complex entity – the proposition aRb of two objects a and b with relation R to one another. On this view, a sentence has a meaning (the complex entity) even if it is not believed or judged. Eventually, Russell finds this doctrine unacceptable and replaces it with the theory that a sentence has no complete meaning until it is judged or supposed or denied by someone. On this view, judging is not a relation between a person and a single entity aRb, but a relation between a person and a, R, and b. The proposition is broken into parts and enters into a person’s belief, which arranges them in a meaningful way.

There is now no single entity aRb that is the meaning of a sentence. There are only sentences, which are incomplete symbols, and the context of belief that gives the sentence a complete meaning. This is another analysis using the theory of descriptions: a sentence aRb is an incomplete symbol that acquires meaning when judged or believed but is otherwise meaningless. That a person has a belief is a fact, and the entities that constitute the meaning of the sentence are gathered together with the believer in that fact. Just as the theory of descriptions replaces descriptions with predicates, so here it replaces propositions with facts of belief.

This theory requires that a person is acquainted with the things that enter into the belief, for example, with a, R, and b. But acquaintance with this data is not enough to make a judgment. To believe or judge, a person must also be acquainted with the form in which things are put together. In this case, he or she must grasp what it means to assert a relation.
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Russell's Metaphysics

Like many philosophical terms, “metaphysics” can be understood in a variety of ways, so any discussion of Bertrand Russell’s metaphysics must select from among the various possible ways of understanding the notion, for example, as the study of being qua being, the study of the first principles or grounds of being, the study of God, and so forth. The primary sense of “metaphysics” examined here in connection to Russell is the study of the ultimate nature and constituents of reality.
Read the article at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) The 1890s: Idealism
a.Neo-Hegelianism
b.F. H. Bradley and Internal Relations
c.Neo-Kantianism and A Priori Knowledge
d.Russell’s Turn from Idealism to Realism
      i.His Rejection of Psychologism
      ii.His Rejection of Internal Relations

2) 1901-1904: Platonist Realism
a.What has Being
b.Propositions as Objects
c.Analysis and Classes
d.Concepts’ Dual Role in Propositions
e.Meaning versus Denoting
f.The Relation of Logic to Epistemology and Psychology

3) 1905-1912: Logical Realism
a.Acquaintance and Descriptive Psychology
b.Eliminating Classes as Objects
      i.“On Denoting” (1905)
      ii.Impact on Analysis
c.Eliminating Propositions as Objects
d.Facts versus Complexes
e.Universals and Particulars
f.Logic as the Study of Forms of Complexes and Facts
g.Sense Data and the Problem of Matter

4) 1913-1918: Occam’s Razor and Logical Atomism
a.The Nature of Logic
b.The Nature of Matter
c.Logical Atomism
      i.The Atoms of Experience and the Misleading Nature of Language
      ii.The Forms of Facts and Theory of Truth
      iii.Belief as a New Form of Fact
      iv.Neutral Monism

5) 1919-1927: Neutral Monism, Science, and Language
a.Mind, Matter, and Meaning
b.Private versus Public Data
c.Language, Facts, and Psychology
d.Universals
e.The Syntactical View

6) 1930-1970: Anti-positivist Naturalism
a.Logical Truths
b.Empirical Truths
c.A Priori Principles
d.Universals
e.The Study of Language

7) References and Further Reading
a.Primary Sources
      i.Monographs
      ii.Collections of Essays
      iii.Articles
      iv.The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
      v.Autobiographies and Letters
b.Secondary Sources
      i.General Surveys
      ii.History of Analytic Philosophy
      iii.Logic and Metaphysics
      iv.Meaning and Metaphysics
      v.Beliefs and Facts
      vi.Constructions
      vii.Logical Atomism
      viii.Naturalism and Psychology
      ix.Biographies

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On The relations of universals and particulars

Excerpt and condensation

Particulars are percepts - the objects of acts of perception.
Universals are concepts - the objects of acts of conception.

Opponents of universals, such as Berkeley and Hume, will maintain that concepts are derived from percepts, as faint copies or in some other way.
Opponents of Particulars will maintain that the apparent particularity of percepts is illusory. The objects of acts of perception and the objects of acts of conception differ only by their greater complexity and are really composed of constituents which are concepts.

But the distinction of percepts and concepts is too psychological for an ultimate metaphysical distinction. Percepts and concepts are respectively the relata of two different relations, perception and conception, and there is nothing in their definitions to show whether, or how, they differ. Moreover, the distinction of percepts and concepts, in itself, is incapable of being extended to entities which are not objects of cognitive acts. Hence we require some other distinction expressing the intrinsic difference which we seem to feel between percepts and concepts.

A cognate distinction, which effects part at least of what we waut, is the distinction between thiugs which exist in time and things which do not.

A percept exists in time, while a concept does not.
The object of perception is simultaneous with the act of perception, while the object of conception seems indifferent to the time of conceiving and to all time.
However, the man who reduces concepts to percepts will say that nothing is really out of time, and that the appearance of this in the case of concepts is illusory. The man who reduces percepts to concepts may either, like most idealists, deny that anything is in time, or, like some realists, maintain that concepts can and do exist in time.

In addition to the above distinction as regards time, there is a distinction as regards space which, as we shall find, is very important in connection with our present question. Put as vaguely as possible, this is a distinction which divides entities into three classes: (a) those which are not in any place, (b) those which are in one place at one time, but never in more than one, (c) those which are in many places at once.

Our bodies exist in one place at a time, but not in more than one. General qualities, such as whiteness, on the contrary, may be said to be in many places at once: We may say, in a sense, that whiteness is in every place where there is a white thing.

In addition to the above psychological and metaphysical distinctions, there are two logical relations which are relevant in the present inquiry.

In the first place, there is the distinction between relations and entities which are not relations. It has been customary for philosophers to ignore or reject relations, and speak as if all entities were either subjects or predicates. But this custom is on the decline, and I shall assume without further argument that there are such entities as relations.
Among non-relation entities are included not only all the things that would naturally be called particulars, but also all the universals that philosophers are in the habit of considering when they discuss the relation of particulars to universals, for universals are generally conceived as common properties of particulars, in fact, as predicates.

The second logical distinction which we require is one which may or may not be identical in extension with that between relations and non-relations, but is certainly not identical in intension.
It may be expressed as the distinction between verbs and substantives, or, more correctly, between the objects denoted by verbs and the objects denoted by substantive.
The nature of this distinction emerges from the analysis of complexes. In most complexes, if not in all, a certain number of different entities are combined into a single entity by means of a relation.
"A's hatred for B," for example, is a complex in which hatred, combines A and B into one whole; "C's belief that A hates B" is a complex in which belief combines A and R and C and hatred into one whole, and so on.
The capacity for combining terms into a single complex is the defining characteristic of what I call verbs.
It is the possibility that there may be complexes of this kind which makes it impossible to decide off-hand that verbs are the same as relations. There may be verbs which are philosophically as well as grammatically intransitive. Such verbs, if they exist, may be called predicates, and the propositions in which they are attributed may be called subject-predicate propositions.

The above logical distinctions are relevant to our enquiry because it is natural to regard particulars as entities which can only be subjects or terms of relations, and cannot be predicates or relations. A particular is naturally conceived as a this or something intrinsically analogous to a this; and such an entity seems incapable of being a predicate or a relation. A universal, on this view, will be anything that is a predicate or a relation.

We may now return to the question of particulars and universals with a better hope of being able to state precisely the nature of the opposition between them. It will be remembered that we began with three different oppositions:
(1) that of percept and concept, (2) that of entities existing in time and entities not existing in time, (3) that of substantives and verbs. But in the course of our discussion a different opposition developed itself, namely, (4) that between entities which can be in one place, but not in more than one, at a given time, and entities which either cannot be anywhere or can be in several places at one time.

We may then define a particular in our fourth sense as an entity which cannot be “in” or “belong to” more than one place at one time, and a universal as an entity which either cannot be “in” or “belong to” any place, or can be “in” or “belong to” many places at once.

We have thus a division of all entities into two classes:
(1) particulars, which enter into complexes only as the subjects of predicates or the terms of relations, and, if they belong to the world of which we have experience, exist in time, and cannot occupy more than one place at one time in the space to which they belong;
(2) universals, which can occur as predicates or relations in complexes, do not exist in time, and have no relation to one place which they may not simultaneously have to another.
The ground for regarding such a division as unavoidable is the self-evident fact that certain spatial relations imply diversity of their terms, together with the self-evident fact that it is logically possible for entities having such spatial relations to be wholly indistinguishable as to predicates.

Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy

Analytic philosophy
Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, even of its several branches. At the beginning of the twentieth century, alongside G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the British "revolt against Idealism," a philosophy greatly influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his British apostle, F. H. Bradley. This revolt was echoed 30 years later in Vienna by the logical positivists' "revolt against metaphysics." Russell was particularly appalled by the idealist doctrine of internal relations, which held that in order to know any particular thing, one must know all of its relations. Russell showed that this would make space, time, science and the concept of number unintelligible. Russell's logical work with Whitehead continued this project.

Russell and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest components. Russell, in particular, saw logic and science as the principal tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most philosophers who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the world and to eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities; this principle, known as Ockham's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

Epistemology
Russell's epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed neo-Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge. While some of his views have lost favor, his influence remains strong in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with objects: "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description." For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own sense data—momentary perceptions of colors, sounds, and the like—and that everything else, including the physical objects that these were sense data of, could only be inferred, or reasoned to—i.e. known by description—and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.

In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of neutral monism, maintaining that the distinctions between the material and mental worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be reduced to a neutral property—a view similar to one held by the American philosopher, William James, and one that was first formulated by Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired. Instead of James' "pure experience," however, Russell characterized the stuff of our initial states of perception as "events," a stance which is curiously akin to his old teacher Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy.

Ethics
While Russell wrote a great deal on topics in ethics, he did not believe that the subject belonged to philosophy, or that when he wrote on ethics he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier years, Russell was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were objective but only known through intuition, that they were simple properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g., pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often ascribed (see Naturalistic fallacy), and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analyzed using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time, however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero, David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with subjective (personal and cultural) values that cannot be verified in the same way that matters of fact are. Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the logical positivists, who formulated the theory of emotivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of psychological attitudes and preferences. Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a vital subject matter for civil discourse. Indeed, although Russell was often characterized as the patron saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations: "Reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part I).

Russell wrote some books about practical ethical issues such as marriage. His book Marriage and Morals, even though it can be accused of being shallow and having more weaknesses than strengths, must be acknowledged as one of the very few works on this topic ever written by an Anglo-American philosopher. His opinions on this field were liberal. He argued that sexual relationships outside of marriages are acceptable. In his book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), he advocated the view that we should see moral issues from the point of view of the desires of individuals. Individuals are allowed to do what they desire, as long as there are no conflicting desires among different individuals. Desires are not bad, in and of themselves, but on occasion, their potential or actual consequences are. Russell also wrote that punishment is important only in an instrumental sense; thus, we should not punish someone solely for the sake of punishment.

Logical atomism
Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called "Logical atomism," which is explicated in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," which he gave in 1918. In these lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal, isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their truth-functional compounds.

Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are acquainted. Russell excluded certain formal, logical terms such as all, the, and is from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never entirely satisfied about our understanding of such terms. One of the central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them. In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism, especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.

Philosophy of language
Russell was not the first philosopher to suggest that language had an important bearing on how we understand the world; however, more than anyone before him, Russell made language, or more specifically, how we use language, a central part of philosophy. Had there been no Russell, it seems unlikely that philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, among others, would have embarked upon the same course, for so much of what they did was to amplify or respond, sometimes critically, to what Russell had said before them, using many of the techniques that he originally developed. Russell, along with Moore, shared the idea that clarity of expression is a virtue, a notion that has been a touchstone for philosophers ever since, particularly among those who deal with the philosophy of language.

Perhaps Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language is his "theory of descriptions," as presented in his seminal essay, "On Denoting," first published in 1905, which the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey described as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory is normally illustrated using the phrase "the present king of France," as in "The present king of France is bald." What object is this proposition about, given that there is not, at present, a king of France? (Roughly the same problem would arise if there were two kings of France at present: which of them does "the king of France" denote?). Alexius Meinong had suggested that we must posit a realm of "nonexistent entities" that we can suppose we are referring to when we use expressions such as this; but this would be a strange theory, to say the least. Frege, employing his distinction between sense and reference, suggested that such sentences, although meaningful, were neither true nor false. But some such propositions, such as "If the present king of France is bald, then the present king of France has no hair on his head," seem not only truth-valuable, but indeed obviously true.

The problem is general to what are called "definite descriptions." Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the," and sometimes includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious: Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What is the "logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them in order to show how the truth of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more or less. What, then, are we to say about the proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't functioning correctly?

Russell's solution was, first of all, to analyze not the term alone but the entire proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each definite description in fact contains a claim of existence and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says three things about some object: the definite description contains two of them, and the rest of the sentence contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.

One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does. Strawson also claims that a denoting phrase that does not, in fact, denote anything could be supposed to follow the role of a "Widgy's inverted truth-value" and expresses the opposite meaning of the intended phrase. This can be shown using the example of "The present king of France is bald." Taken with the inverted truth-value methodology the meaning of this sentence becomes, "It is true that there is no present king of France who is bald" which changes the denotation of 'the present king of France' from a primary denotation to a secondary one.

Wittgenstein, Russell's student, later achieved considerable prominence in the philosophy of language. Russell thought Wittgenstein's elevation of language as the only reality with which philosophy need be concerned was absurd, and he decried his influence and the influence of his followers, especially members of the so-called "Oxford school" of ordinary language philosophy, who he believed were promoting a kind of mysticism. Russell's belief that there is more to philosophy and knowing the world than simply understanding how we use language has regained prominence in philosophy and eclipsed Wittgenstein's language-centric views.

Philosophy of science
Russell frequently claimed that he was more convinced of his method of doing philosophy, the method of analysis, than of his philosophical conclusions. Science, of course, was one of the principal components of analysis, along with logic and mathematics. While Russell was a believer in the scientific method, knowledge derived from empirical research that is verified through repeated testing, he believed that science reaches only tentative answers, and that scientific progress is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. Indeed, he believed the same was true of philosophy. Another founder of modern philosophy of science, Ernst Mach, placed less reliance on method, per se, for he believed that any method that produced predictable results was satisfactory and that the principal role of the scientist was to make successful predictions. While Russell would doubtless agree with this as a practical matter, he believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand reality, not simply to make predictions.

The fact that Russell made science a central part of his method and of philosophy was instrumental in making the philosophy of science a full-blooded, separate branch of philosophy and an area in which subsequent philosophers specialized. Much of Russell's thinking about science is exposed in his 1914 book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. Among the several schools that were influenced by Russell were the logical positivists, particularly Rudolph Carnap, who maintained that the distinguishing feature of scientific propositions was their verifiability. This contrasted with the theory of Karl Popper, also greatly influenced by Russell, who believed that their importance rested in the fact that they were potentially falsifiable.

It is worth noting that outside of his strictly philosophical pursuits, Russell was always fascinated by science, particularly physics, and he even authored several popular science books, The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).

          It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russell's thought dominated twentieth century analytic philosophy: virtually every strand in its development either originated with him or was transformed by being transmitted through him. Analytic philosophy itself owes its existence more to Russell than to any other philosopher. — Nicholas Griffin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).