The History of Analytic Philosophy, 1884-1950

Catalog description

This course covers the development of analytic philosophy in its early stage: from Frege's logical revolution to logical positivism at its highest point, before critiques by Quine and Wittgenstein fundamentally transformed the analytic tradition in the early 1950s. We begin with Frege's attempt to address traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems about numbers through the logical analysis of language and then trace how this project - the analysis of language with formal logic to resolve philosophical questions - develops through Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, particularly Carnap. We then consider how Gödel and Tarski's logical work forces a reinterpretation of the project and conclude with Carnap and Quine's debate "on what there is".