Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today. Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods, prominent in Europe.
Central figures in this historical development of analytic philosophy are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history include the logical positivists (particularly Rudolf Carnap), W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics. Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, and others developed an analytic approach to Thomism.
Analytic philosophy is characterized by clarity of prose and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It also takes things piecemeal, in "an attempt to focus philosophical reflection on smaller problems that lead to answers to bigger questions".
Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most notably continental philosophies such as existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism. The analytic tradition has been the dominant tradition in Western philosophy since the latter half of the 20th century. The tradition is often critiqued for ahistoricism and aloofness towards alternative disciplines and outsiders.
History
The history of analytic philosophy (taken in the narrower sense of "20th-/21st-century analytic philosophy") is usually thought to begin with the rejection of British idealism, a neo-Hegelian movement.
British idealism as taught by philosophers such as F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) and T. H. Green (1836–1882), dominated English philosophy in the late 19th century. Since its beginning, a basic goal of analytic philosophy has been conceptual clarity, in the name of which Moore and Russell rejected Hegelianism for being obscure—see for example Moore's "A Defence of Common Sense" and Russell's critique of the doctrine of internal relations. 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. An important aspect of British idealism was logical holism—the opinion that there are aspects of the world that can be known only by knowing the whole world. This is closely related to the opinion that relations between items are internal relations, that is, properties of the nature of those items. Russell, along with Wittgenstein, in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the belief that the world consists of independent facts.
Russell, during his early career, along with his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was much influenced by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), who developed predicate logic, which allowed a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic. Frege was also influential as a philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to Edmund Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik, which argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them, Frege argued that mathematics and logic have their own validity, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians (which were the basis of arithmetic according to the "psychologism" of Husserl's Philosophie). Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (, 1893–1903), where he provided an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.