Analytic Philosophy Books
Apolito Ghosh
There has been a recent spate of books attempting to explain the origins and intrinsic nature of analytic philosophy. Among these, What is Analytic Philosophy? by Hans-Johann Glock is a standout. As a German trained in Britain who is a professor in Zurich, Glock is particularly suited to offer a cosmopolitan assessment of the philosophical scene and especially the purported difference between the analytic and continental flavors. What's more, his book is jam-packed with argument and nuance, perspicuously organized, historically sensitive, and wrapped in a clear, muscular prose.
While some writers are content to offer an historical treatment of the origins of analytic philosophy, or attempt a necessary-and-sufficient-conditions analysis of "analytic philosophy," Glock commendably approaches the subject from several different angles. Chiefly interested in what analytic philosophy presently amounts to, Glock examines not only its genesis, but the geo-linguistic conception of the analytic/continental split, the relevance of the history of philosophy for analytics, whether analytic philosophy is distinguished by particular doctrines, topics of inquiry, or methodology, etc. He eventually works his way to offering a family resemblance account of "analytic philosophy."
The book initially reads like 1st Chronicles in the Old Testament -- it is the tale of who sired whom. Unlike the chronicler, though, Glock draws out the intellectual and argumentative links in his genealogy. Glock begins his historical account with Plato and Aristotle. The former is the source of conceptual analysis and the use of the intuitions of common sense (Socrates remarks to Theatetus that "being only ordinary people, we shall prefer first to study the notions we have in our own minds and find out what they are and whether, when we compare them, they agree or are altogether inconsistent"). The latter is the founder of the analytic/logical method of starting with a proposition Φ to be proven and then reasoning backwards to first principles, from which Φ can be derived.
From Plato and Aristotle, Glock skips late antiquity and the medievals altogether to arrive at the early modern period. While Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes get a nod, Glock identifies Kant as the one who genuinely sets the table for the analytic conception of philosophy. In Kant we find a priori metaphysics, the centrality of epistemology, and the vision of philosophy as autonomous from the special sciences while remaining a cognitive discipline. Kant also employs the term "analytic" in a way related to decompositional analysis. Kant the father begat the German idealists, who begat the twins of naturalism (which rejected idealism, metaphysics, and all a priori reasoning) and neo-Kantianism (which offered instead to clarify the logical, conceptual, and methodological preconditions of empirical knowledge).
If Kant is Kronos, then Frege is Zeus, arising out of the milieu of the 19th century German logic and mathematics of Bolzano, Dedekind, Cantor, Gauss, and Riemann. Frege's Begriffsschrift of 1879 was, of course, the invention of modern logic. Frege's work led directly to Russell, not only the discovery of the famous Russell Paradox, but the logicist program of reducing mathematical concepts to pure logic and set theory that Russell and Whitehead developed in Principia Mathematica. Also at the beginning of the 20th century was Russell and Moore's famous revolt against idealism when they abandoned Bradley, McTaggart, and other Britons still in thrall to the old German idealists.
According to Russell, logical analysis uncovers the true logical form of propositions, and not merely their misleading surface grammar. This approach was seen in Principia and in his theory of descriptions. Furthermore -- and this was an aspect of Russell's logical atomism -- true sentences are supposed to be isomorphic to the facts they express and in this way analysis gives the components of reality. Thus logic breeds ontology.
Following Russell, at least initially, was Wittgenstein, who in the Tractatus shared Russell's atomism while rejecting the latter's view that the logical calculus is an ideal language, viewing it instead as an ideal notation of the common structure of natural languages. The Tractarian position that philosophy illuminates the meaningful propositions of science while also revealing the nonsensicality of metaphysics, was influential on the members of the Vienna Circle and the subsequent development of logical empiricism. It is at this point (p. 37) that Glock identifies the positivists' interest in meaning and criteria of meaningfulness as the linguistic turn in philosophy, inherited from Wittgenstein. This is more controversial than Glock initially acknowledges. Dummett, for example, explicitly identifies the linguistic turn (and to Dummett's mind the founding of analytic philosophy) as having taken place not in the Tractatus, but in Frege's Grundlagen of 1884 -- section 62 to be precise. While Glock does dissect Dummett's view that the philosophy of language is definitive of the analytic approach later in the book (5.2), it is never clear why it is Wittgenstein rather than Frege who should get the credit for the linguistic turn.
If Wittgenstein's Tractatus spawned the "ideal language philosophy" of Frege, Russell, Tarski, the positivists, and Quine, then his Philosophical Investigations led to the ordinary language philosophy in the 1950's, pioneered by Ryle, Austin, and Strawson. The collapse of logical positivism in the wake of the suicide of the verification principle of meaning and Quine's critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" paved the way to a rebirth of metaphysics. According to Glock, there are three distinct branches to post-positivist metaphysics: (1) Quinean ontological naturalism, (2) Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics, and (3) possible world semantics for modal logic and theories of direct reference.
Out of the ashes of ordinary language philosophy arose the philosophy of language, now viewed as its own discipline on a par with the philosophy of law or the philosophy of science. Unlike the logical investigations of formal languages prominent earlier in the century, now the focus is on theories of meaning for natural languages. Glock argues that philosophy of mind developed out of a reversal of the linguistic turn, with the language of thought hypothesis and arguments that intentionality is prior to linguistic meaning. In a breathless race through the last thirty years, he covers the rise and fall of functionalism, identity theories, the development of metaethics, and finally the recent interest in political philosophy and applied ethics.
Even though Glock's thumbnail sketch of the origins and development of analytic philosophy is largely familiar territory for contemporary analytic philosophers, it is still worthwhile connecting the dots. Sometimes, like the Magic Eye, an unexpected pattern might emerge. And, like ceremonial speech, the recitation of our origins story serves a socially unifying function. There are some idiosyncrasies though. For example, Glock tends to overrate the lasting influence of Wittgenstein who, while continuing to loom large in the British perspective, never became much more than a cottage industry in the United States.
Glock spends a considerable amount of ink showing that "continental philosophy" is a misnomer, that analytic philosophy had tight ties to continental Europe at its founding (Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Frege), secondary development (Schlick, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach), and the present day. The geo-linguistic view of the analytic/continental divide is wrong in nearly every possible way. After a certain point, however, it feels like firing round after round from the Glock into a scarecrow, as if he spent fifty pages showing that "Kimberly" doesn't actually mean "beautiful meadow," no matter what the baby naming book said. Remember good old direct reference? "Continental Philosophy" is just a proper name -- figuring out quite what it is the name of (a philosophical school, method, set of problems, group of thinkers, etc.) is much more interesting than harping on why it is a bad moniker.
Of course, Glock does more than criticize the name of continental philosophy. He gives a detailed and systematic account of the development of the fracturing within 20th century philosophy, and his knowledge of 19th and early 20th century German political history well informs his discussion of which philosophers might be in contact with whom. He offers a persuasive case that both the story of the British origins of analytic philosophy and the Anglo-Austrian origins tale told by Neurath and Haller are incomplete and lopsided. Glock maintains that analytic philosophy does not contrast so much with French or German philosophy, as with romanticism, irrationalism, and existentialism. Perhaps this is the nature of historical inquiry, but the entire issue of traditions and influences ultimately seems so varied and convoluted that philosophy resembles a braided rope with the strands frayed at the end. Glock attempts to trace back the frayed to the fray, but a linear journey is impossible. He does provide a worthwhile corrective to those who might be tempted to see analytic/continental as exhaustive. American pragmatism does not fit neatly into either of those categories, nor does traditional historical philosophy, which remains a prominent approach in continental Europe. As ways of doing philosophy, both of these might even be at the same metaphilosophical level as analytic and continental, and properly viewed as orthogonal traditions.
One of the familiar complaints against analytic philosophy from other philosophical traditions is that it is ahistorical, and that analytics have a positive disdain for the great figures of yore. It is a curious charge on the face of it, as numerous quintessential analytic philosophers have serious interests in historical figures. Bertrand Russell, Nicholas Rescher, and John Hawthorne have all written books on Leibniz, Michael Dummett has written books on Frege, Arthur Danto and Bernard Williams did serious work on Nietzsche, and Roderick Chisholm was perhaps the world's leading Brentano scholar. No one could plausibly deny that they were or are analytic philosophers. Glock acknowledges that analytic philosophy intentionally constituted a break with traditionalist historical philosophy in that it focused on advancing, solving, or dissolving philosophical problems instead of, in the words of Umberto Eco, "divine recapitulation." To be sure, in the extreme there have been analytic philosophers disdainful of historical figures, but this has been the exception more than the rule.
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