The History of Analytic Philosophy and Its Influence

Catalog description

This course is about the influence of Analytic Philosophy on contemporary thought. Analytic philosophy is a tradition within Western Philosophy that aims for clear writing, rigor in arguments, and continuity with both the formal and the empirical sciences. The goal is to study early Analytic Philosophy and Logical Positivism to lay a foundation for understanding more recent work in their tradition. Early figures of Analytic Philosophy include Gottlob Frege (*1848), who provided a theory of meaning, developed modern logic and aimed to reduce arithmetic to logic; Bertrand Russell (*1872), who adopted Frege's logic as a method to expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems; and George Edward Moore (*1873), who argued that goodness cannot be analyzed by the methods of natural science and defended common sense beliefs against both skepticism and British idealism. The early figures and Russell's student Ludwig Wittgenstein (*1889) emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which should be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language. The quest for an ideal language inspired Logical Positivism and #8212;-the thesis that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful. This course invites you to delve into the development of Analytic Philosophy to date. We will read groundbreaking papers by the mentioned philosophers and more recent ones. This year, we will focus in particular on the subjective interpretation of probability as degrees of belief offered by Frank Plumpton Ramsey (*1903) and the development of theories of causality from Hans Reichenbach (*1891) over John Leslie Mackie (*1917) and David Kellogg Lewis (*1941) to the contemporary work conducted at Carnegie Mellon University.