Analytic philosophy
Other important figures in its history include Franz Brentano, the logical positivists (particularly Rudolf Carnap), the ordinary language philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper.
[28] University of Vienna philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano—in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) and through the subsequent influence of the School of Brentano and its members, such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong—gave to analytic philosophy the problem of intentionality or of aboutness.
Edmund Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them.
With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas.
Russell and Moore in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the belief that the world consists of independent facts.
[38][r] Inspired by developments in modern formal logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions.
With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the United States, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.
The criticisms of Frank P. Ramsey on color and logical form in the Tractatus led to some of Wittgenstein's first doubts with regard to his early philosophy.
Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), criticized Cartesian dualism, arguing in favor of disposing of "Descartes' myth" via recognizing "category errors".
Wilfred Sellars's criticism of the "Myth of the Given", in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), challenged logical positivism by arguing against sense-data theories.
Important also for the revival of metaphysics was the further development of modal logic, first introduced by pragmatist C. I. Lewis, especially the work of Saul Kripke and his Naming and Necessity (1980).
"[53] Kripke was influential in arguing that flaws in common theories of descriptions and proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of necessity and possibility.
[57] Polish philosopher Stanisław Leśniewski coined the term mereology, which is the formal study of parts and wholes, a subject that arguably goes back to the time of the pre-Socratics.
A large portion of current epistemological research is intended to resolve the problems that Gettier's examples presented to the traditional "justified true belief" model of knowledge, found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus.
It evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist theories, such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which was based on J. L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts.
[80] A favorite student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" declared the "is-ought" impasse to be unproductive.
Since around 1970, a significant feature of analytic philosophy has been the emergence of applied ethics—an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues.
Members of this school seek to apply techniques of analytic philosophy and modern social science to clarify the theories of Karl Marx and his successors.
Other prominent analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright.
While in the analytic tradition, its major exponents often also engage at length with figures generally considered continental, notably G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
[90] Rigorous efforts to pursue analyses of traditional aesthetic concepts were performed by Guy Sircello in the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in new analytic theories of love,[91] sublimity,[92] and beauty.
[93] In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz, there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression, and innovation.
While the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly influenced by those authors from the first half of the century, e.g. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Tarski, and Quine.
[95] Hilary Putnam used the Twin Earth thought experiment to argue for semantic externalism, or the view that the meanings of words are not psychological.
The view of eliminative materialism is most closely associated with Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes, and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness.
Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers.
Kurt Gödel, a student of Hans Hahn of the Vienna Circle, produced his incompleteness theorems showing that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica also failed to reduce arithmetic to logic.
Analytic philosophy formed the basis for some sophisticated Christian arguments, such as those of the reformed epistemologists such as Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
[115] This interpretation was first labeled "Wittgensteinian Fideism" by Kai Nielsen, but those who consider themselves members of the Swansea school have relentlessly and repeatedly rejected this construal as a caricature of Wittgenstein's position; this is especially true of Phillips.
[119] The Duhem–Quine thesis, or problem of underdetermination, posits that no scientific hypothesis can be understood in isolation, a viewpoint called confirmation holism.
