Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy
It is difficult to give a precise definition of analytic philosophy
since it is not so much a specific doctrine as an overlapping set of
approaches to problems. Its 20th-century origin is often attributed to
the work of the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958). In Principia
Ethica (1903), Moore argued that the predicate good, which defines the
sphere of ethics, is “simple, unanalyzable, and indefinable.” His
contention was that many of the difficulties in ethics, and indeed in
philosophy generally, arise from an “attempt to answer questions,
without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire
to answer.” These questions thus require analysis for their
clarification. Philosophers in this tradition generally have agreed with
Moore that the purpose of analysis is the clarification of thought.
Their varied methods have included the creation of symbolic languages as
well as the close examination of ordinary speech, and the objects to be
clarified have ranged from concepts to natural laws and from notions
that belong to the physical sciences—such as mass, force, and
testability—to ordinary terms such as responsibility and see. From its
inception, analytic philosophy also has been highly problem-oriented.
There is probably no major philosophical problem that its practitioners
have failed to address.
The development of analytic philosophy was significantly influenced
by the creation of symbolic (or mathematical) logic at the beginning of
the century. Although there are anticipations of this
kind of logic in the Stoics, its modern forms are without exact parallel
in Western thought, a fact that is made apparent by its close affinities
with mathematics and science. Many philosophers thus regarded the
combination of logic and science as a model that philosophical inquiry
should follow, though others rejected the model or minimized its
usefulness for dealing with philosophical problems. The 20th century
thus witnessed the development of two diverse streams of analysis, one
of them emphasizing formal (logical) techniques and the other informal
(ordinary-language) ones. There were, of course, many philosophers whose
work was influenced by both approaches. Although analysis can in
principle be applied to any subject matter, its central focus for most
of the century was language, especially the notions of meaning and
reference. Ethics, aesthetics, religion, and law also were fields of
interest, though to a lesser degree. In the last quarter of the century
there was a profound shift in emphasis from the topics of meaning and
reference to issues about the human mind, including the nature of mental
processes such as thinking, judging, perceiving, believing, and
intending, as well as the products or objects of such processes,
including representations, meanings, and visual images. At the same
time, intensive work continued on the theory of reference, and the
results obtained in that domain were transferred to the analysis of
mind. Both formalist and informalist approaches exhibited this shift in
interest.

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G. E. Moore
British philosopher
born Nov. 4, 1873, London, Eng.
died Oct. 24, 1958, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Main
influential British Realist philosopher and professor whose
systematic approach to ethical problems and remarkably
meticulous approach to philosophy made him an outstanding
modern British thinker.
Elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1898, Moore remained there until 1904, during which time he
published several journal articles, including “The Nature of
Judgment” (1899) and “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), as
well as his major ethical work, Principia Ethica (1903).
These writings were important in helping to undermine the
influence of Hegel and Kant on British philosophy. After
residence in Edinburgh and London, he returned to Cambridge
in 1911 to become a lecturer in moral science. From 1925 to
1939 he was professor of philosophy there, and from 1921 to
1947 he was editor of the philosophical journal Mind.
Though Moore grew up in a climate of evangelical
religiosity, he eventually became an agnostic. A friend of
Bertrand Russell, who first directed him to the study of
philosophy, he was also a leading figure in the Bloomsbury
group, a coterie that included the economist John Keynes and
the writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Because of his
view that “the good” is knowable by direct apprehension, he
became known as an “ethical intuitionist.” He claimed that
other efforts to decide what is “good,” such as analyses of
the concepts of approval or desire, which are not themselves
of an ethical nature, partake of a fallacy that he termed
the “naturalistic fallacy.”
Moore was also preoccupied with such problems as the
nature of sense perception and the existence of other minds
and material things. He was not as skeptical as those
philosophers who held that we lack sufficient data to prove
that objects exist outside our own minds, but he did believe
that proper philosophical proofs had not yet been devised to
overcome such objections.
Although few of Moore’s theories achieved general
acceptance, his unique approaches to certain problems and
his intellectual rigour helped change the texture of
philosophical discussion in England. His other major
writings include Philosophical Studies (1922) and Some Main
Problems of Philosophy (1953); posthumous publications were
Philosophical Papers (1959) and the Commonplace Book,
1919–1953 (1962).
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Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The formalist tradition
» Logical atomism
The first major development in the formalist tradition was a
metaphysical theory known as logical atomism, which was derived from
work in mathematical logic by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970). Russell’s work, in turn, was based in part on early
notebooks written before World War I by his former pupil Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889–1953). In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, a
monograph published in 1918, Russell gave credit to Wittgenstein for
supplying “many of the theories” contained in it. Wittgenstein had
joined the Austrian army when the war broke out, and Russell had been
out of contact with him ever since. Wittgenstein thus did not become
aware of Russell’s version of logical atomism until after the war.
Wittgenstein’s polished and very sophisticated version appeared in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he wrote during the war but did
not publish until 1922.
Both Russell and Wittgenstein believed that mathematical logic could
reveal the basic structure of reality, a structure that is hidden
beneath the cloak of ordinary language. In their view, the new logic
showed that the world is made up of simple, or “atomic,” facts, which in
turn are made up of particular objects. Atomic facts are complex,
mind-independent features of reality, such as the fact that a particular
rock is white or the fact that the Moon is a satellite of the Earth. As
Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus, “The world is determined by the
facts, and by their being all the facts.” Both Russell and Wittgenstein
held that the basic propositions of logic, which Wittgenstein called
“elementary propositions,” refer to atomic facts. There is thus an
immediate connection between formal languages, such as the logical
system of Russell’s Principia Mathematica (written with Alfred North
Whitehead and published between 1910 and 1913), and the structure of the
real world: elementary propositions represent atomic facts, which are
constituted by particular objects, which are the meanings of logically
proper names. Russell differed from Wittgenstein in that he held that
the meanings of proper names are “sense data,” or immediate perceptual
experiences, rather than particular objects. Further, for Wittgenstein
but not for Russell, elementary propositions are connected to the world
by being structurally isomorphic to atomic facts—i.e., by being a
“picture” of them. Wittgenstein’s view thus came to be known as the
“picture theory” of meaning.
Logical atomism rested upon a number of theses. It was realistic, as
distinct from idealistic, in its contention that there are
mind-independent facts. But it presupposed that language is
mind-dependent—i.e., that language would not exist unless there were
sentient beings who used sounds and marks to refer and to communicate.
Logical atomism was thus a dualistic metaphysics that described both the
structure of the world and the conditions that any particular language
must satisfy in order to represent it. Although its career was brief,
its guiding principle—that philosophy should be scientific and grounded
in mathematical logic—was widely acknowledged throughout the century.

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Bertrand Russell
British logician and philosopher
in full Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell of
Kingston Russell, Viscount Amberley of Amberley and of
Ardsalla
born May 18, 1872, Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales
died Feb. 2, 1970, Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales
Main
British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding
figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American
philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and
the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the
foremost philosophers of the 20th century. To the general
public, however, he was best known as a campaigner for peace
and as a popular writer on social, political, and moral
subjects. During a long, productive, and often turbulent
life, he published more than 70 books and about 2,000
articles, married four times, became involved in innumerable
public controversies, and was honoured and reviled in almost
equal measure throughout the world.
Russell was born in Ravenscroft, the country home of his
parents, Lord and Lady Amberley. His grandfather, Lord John
Russell, was the youngest son of the 6th Duke of Bedford. In
1861, after a long and distinguished political career in
which he served twice as prime minister, Lord Russell was
ennobled by Queen Victoria, becoming the 1st Earl Russell.
Bertrand Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell in 1931, after
his elder brother, Frank, died childless.
Russell’s early life was marred by tragedy and
bereavement. By the time he was age six, his sister, Rachel,
his parents, and his grandfather had all died, and he and
Frank were left in the care of their grandmother, Countess
Russell. Though Frank was sent to Winchester School,
Bertrand was educated privately at home, and his childhood,
to his later great regret, was spent largely in isolation
from other children. Intellectually precocious, he became
absorbed in mathematics from an early age and found the
experience of learning Euclidean geometry at the age of 11
“as dazzling as first love,” because it introduced him to
the intoxicating possibility of certain, demonstrable
knowledge. This led him to imagine that all knowledge might
be provided with such secure foundations, a hope that lay at
the very heart of his motivations as a philosopher. His
earliest philosophical work was written during his
adolescence and records the skeptical doubts that led him to
abandon the Christian faith in which he had been brought up
by his grandmother.
In 1890 Russell’s isolation came to an end when he
entered Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study
mathematics. There he made lifelong friends through his
membership in the famously secretive student society the
Apostles, whose members included some of the most
influential philosophers of the day. Inspired by his
discussions with this group, Russell abandoned mathematics
for philosophy and won a fellowship at Trinity on the
strength of a thesis entitled An Essay on the Foundations of
Geometry, a revised version of which was published as his
first philosophical book in 1897. Following Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), this work presented a
sophisticated idealist theory that viewed geometry as a
description of the structure of spatial intuition.
In 1896 Russell published his first political work,
German Social Democracy. Though sympathetic to the reformist
aims of the German socialist movement, it included some
trenchant and farsighted criticisms of Marxist dogmas. The
book was written partly as the outcome of a visit to Berlin
in 1895 with his first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith, whom he
had married the previous year. In Berlin, Russell formulated
an ambitious scheme of writing two series of books, one on
the philosophy of the sciences, the other on social and
political questions. “At last,” as he later put it, “I would
achieve a Hegelian synthesis in an encyclopaedic work
dealing equally with theory and practice.” He did, in fact,
come to write on all the subjects he intended, but not in
the form that he envisaged. Shortly after finishing his book
on geometry, he abandoned the metaphysical idealism that was
to have provided the framework for this grand synthesis.
Russell’s abandonment of idealism is customarily
attributed to the influence of his friend and fellow Apostle
G.E. Moore. A much greater influence on his thought at this
time, however, was a group of German mathematicians that
included Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor, and Richard
Dedekind, whose work was aimed at providing mathematics with
a set of logically rigorous foundations. For Russell, their
success in this endeavour was of enormous philosophical as
well as mathematical significance; indeed, he described it
as “the greatest triumph of which our age has to boast.”
After becoming acquainted with this body of work, Russell
abandoned all vestiges of his earlier idealism and adopted
the view, which he was to hold for the rest of his life,
that analysis rather than synthesis was the surest method of
philosophy and that therefore all the grand system building
of previous philosophers was misconceived. In arguing for
this view with passion and acuity, Russell exerted a
profound influence on the entire tradition of
English-speaking analytic philosophy, bequeathing to it its
characteristic style, method, and tone.
Inspired by the work of the mathematicians whom he so
greatly admired, Russell conceived the idea of demonstrating
that mathematics not only had logically rigorous foundations
but also that it was in its entirety nothing but logic. The
philosophical case for this point of view—subsequently known
as logicism—was stated at length in The Principles of
Mathematics (1903). There Russell argued that the whole of
mathematics could be derived from a few simple axioms that
made no use of specifically mathematical notions, such as
number and square root, but were rather confined to purely
logical notions, such as proposition and class. In this way
not only could the truths of mathematics be shown to be
immune from doubt, they could also be freed from any taint
of subjectivity, such as the subjectivity involved in
Russell’s earlier Kantian view that geometry describes the
structure of spatial intuition. Near the end of his work on
The Principles of Mathematics, Russell discovered that he
had been anticipated in his logicist philosophy of
mathematics by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, whose
book The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) contained, as
Russell put it, “many things…which I believed I had
invented.” Russell quickly added an appendix to his book
that discussed Frege’s work, acknowledged Frege’s earlier
discoveries, and explained the differences in their
respective understandings of the nature of logic.
The tragedy of Russell’s intellectual life is that the
deeper he thought about logic, the more his exalted
conception of its significance came under threat. He himself
described his philosophical development after The Principles
of Mathematics as a “retreat from Pythagoras.” The first
step in this retreat was his discovery of a
contradiction—now known as Russell’s Paradox—at the very
heart of the system of logic upon which he had hoped to
build the whole of mathematics. The contradiction arises
from the following considerations: Some classes are members
of themselves (e.g., the class of all classes), and some are
not (e.g., the class of all men), so we ought to be able to
construct the class of all classes that are not members of
themselves. But now, if we ask of this class “Is it a member
of itself?” we become enmeshed in a contradiction. If it is,
then it is not, and if it is not, then it is. This is rather
like defining the village barber as “the man who shaves all
those who do not shave themselves” and then asking whether
the barber shaves himself or not.
At first this paradox seemed trivial, but the more
Russell reflected upon it, the deeper the problem seemed,
and eventually he was persuaded that there was something
fundamentally wrong with the notion of class as he had
understood it in The Principles of Mathematics. Frege saw
the depth of the problem immediately. When Russell wrote to
him to tell him of the paradox, Frege replied, “arithmetic
totters.” The foundation upon which Frege and Russell had
hoped to build mathematics had, it seemed, collapsed.
Whereas Frege sank into a deep depression, Russell set about
repairing the damage by attempting to construct a theory of
logic immune to the paradox. Like a malignant cancerous
growth, however, the contradiction reappeared in different
guises whenever Russell thought that he had eliminated it.
Eventually, Russell’s attempts to overcome the paradox
resulted in a complete transformation of his scheme of
logic, as he added one refinement after another to the basic
theory. In the process, important elements of his
“Pythagorean” view of logic were abandoned. In particular,
Russell came to the conclusion that there were no such
things as classes and propositions and that therefore,
whatever logic was, it was not the study of them. In their
place he substituted a bewilderingly complex theory known as
the ramified theory of types, which, though it successfully
avoided contradictions such as Russell’s Paradox, was (and
remains) extraordinarily difficult to understand. By the
time he and his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, had
finished the three volumes of Principia Mathematica
(1910–13), the theory of types and other innovations to the
basic logical system had made it unmanageably complicated.
Very few people, whether philosophers or mathematicians,
have made the gargantuan effort required to master the
details of this monumental work. It is nevertheless rightly
regarded as one of the great intellectual achievements of
the 20th century.
Principia Mathematica is a herculean attempt to
demonstrate mathematically what The Principles of
Mathematics had argued for philosophically, namely that
mathematics is a branch of logic. The validity of the
individual formal proofs that make up the bulk of its three
volumes has gone largely unchallenged, but the philosophical
significance of the work as a whole is still a matter of
debate. Does it demonstrate that mathematics is logic? Only
if one regards the theory of types as a logical truth, and
about that there is much more room for doubt than there was
about the trivial truisms upon which Russell had originally
intended to build mathematics. Moreover, Kurt Gödel’s first
incompleteness theorem (1931) proves that there cannot be a
single logical theory from which the whole of mathematics is
derivable: all consistent theories of arithmetic are
necessarily incomplete. Principia Mathematica cannot,
however, be dismissed as nothing more than a heroic failure.
Its influence on the development of mathematical logic and
the philosophy of mathematics has been immense.
Despite their differences, Russell and Frege were alike
in taking an essentially Platonic view of logic. Indeed, the
passion with which Russell pursued the project of deriving
mathematics from logic owed a great deal to what he would
later somewhat scornfully describe as a “kind of
mathematical mysticism.” As he put it in his more
disillusioned old age, “I disliked the real world and sought
refuge in a timeless world, without change or decay or the
will-o’-the-wisp of progress.” Russell, like Pythagoras and
Plato before him, believed that there existed a realm of
truth that, unlike the messy contingencies of the everyday
world of sense-experience, was immutable and eternal. This
realm was accessible only to reason, and knowledge of it,
once attained, was not tentative or corrigible but certain
and irrefutable. Logic, for Russell, was the means by which
one gained access to this realm, and thus the pursuit of
logic was, for him, the highest and noblest enterprise life
had to offer.
In philosophy the greatest impact of Principia
Mathematica has been through its so-called theory of
descriptions. This method of analysis, first introduced by
Russell in his article “On Denoting” (1905), translates
propositions containing definite descriptions (e.g., “the
present king of France”) into expressions that do not—the
purpose being to remove the logical awkwardness of appearing
to refer to things (such as the present king of France) that
do not exist. Originally developed by Russell as part of his
efforts to overcome the contradictions in his theory of
logic, this method of analysis has since become widely
influential even among philosophers with no specific
interest in mathematics. The general idea at the root of
Russell’s theory of descriptions—that the grammatical
structures of ordinary language are distinct from, and often
conceal, the true “logical forms” of expressions—has become
his most enduring contribution to philosophy.
Russell later said that his mind never fully recovered
from the strain of writing Principia Mathematica, and he
never again worked on logic with quite the same intensity.
In 1918 he wrote An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,
which was intended as a popularization of Principia, but,
apart from this, his philosophical work tended to be on
epistemology rather than logic. In 1914, in Our Knowledge of
the External World, Russell argued that the world is
“constructed” out of sense-data, an idea that he refined in
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918–19). In The Analysis
of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927), he
abandoned this notion in favour of what he called neutral
monism, the view that the “ultimate stuff” of the world is
neither mental nor physical but something “neutral” between
the two. Although treated with respect, these works had
markedly less impact upon subsequent philosophers than his
early works in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and
they are generally regarded as inferior by comparison.
Connected with the change in his intellectual direction
after the completion of Principia was a profound change in
his personal life. Throughout the years that he worked
single-mindedly on logic, Russell’s private life was bleak
and joyless. He had fallen out of love with his first wife,
Alys, though he continued to live with her. In 1911,
however, he fell passionately in love with Lady Ottoline
Morrell. Doomed from the start (because Morrell had no
intention of leaving her husband), this love nevertheless
transformed Russell’s entire life. He left Alys and began to
hope that he might, after all, find fulfillment in romance.
Partly under Morrell’s influence, he also largely lost
interest in technical philosophy and began to write in a
different, more accessible style. Through writing a
best-selling introductory survey called The Problems of
Philosophy (1911), Russell discovered that he had a gift for
writing on difficult subjects for lay readers, and he began
increasingly to address his work to them rather than to the
tiny handful of people capable of understanding Principia
Mathematica.
In the same year that he began his affair with Morrell,
Russell met Ludwig Wittgenstein, a brilliant young Austrian
who arrived at Cambridge to study logic with Russell. Fired
with intense enthusiasm for the subject, Wittgenstein made
great progress, and within a year Russell began to look to
him to provide the next big step in philosophy and to defer
to him on questions of logic. However, Wittgenstein’s own
work, eventually published in 1921 as Logisch-philosophische
Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922),
undermined the entire approach to logic that had inspired
Russell’s great contributions to the philosophy of
mathematics. It persuaded Russell that there were no
“truths” of logic at all, that logic consisted entirely of
tautologies, the truth of which was not guaranteed by
eternal facts in the Platonic realm of ideas but lay,
rather, simply in the nature of language. This was to be the
final step in the retreat from Pythagoras and a further
incentive for Russell to abandon technical philosophy in
favour of other pursuits.
During World War I Russell was for a while a full-time
political agitator, campaigning for peace and against
conscription. His activities attracted the attention of the
British authorities, who regarded him as subversive. He was
twice taken to court, the second time to receive a sentence
of six months in prison, which he served at the end of the
war. In 1916, as a result of his antiwar campaigning,
Russell was dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity
College. Although Trinity offered to rehire him after the
war, he ultimately turned down the offer, preferring instead
to pursue a career as a journalist and freelance writer. The
war had had a profound effect on Russell’s political views,
causing him to abandon his inherited liberalism and to adopt
a thorough-going socialism, which he espoused in a series of
books including Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916),
Roads to Freedom (1918), and The Prospects of Industrial
Civilization (1923). He was initially sympathetic to the
Russian Revolution of 1917, but a visit to the Soviet Union
in 1920 left him with a deep and abiding loathing for Soviet
communism, which he expressed in The Practice and Theory of
Bolshevism (1920).
In 1921 Russell married his second wife, Dora Black, a
young graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, with whom he
had two children, John and Kate. In the interwar years
Russell and Dora acquired a reputation as leaders of a
progressive socialist movement that was stridently
anticlerical, openly defiant of conventional sexual
morality, and dedicated to educational reform. Russell’s
published work during this period consists mainly of
journalism and popular books written in support of these
causes. Many of these books—such as On Education (1926),
Marriage and Morals (1929), and The Conquest of Happiness
(1930)—enjoyed large sales and helped establish Russell in
the eyes of the general public as a philosopher with
important things to say about the moral, political, and
social issues of the day. His public lecture “Why I Am Not a
Christian,” delivered in 1927 and printed many times, became
a popular locus classicus of atheistic rationalism. In 1927
Russell and Dora set up their own school, Beacon Hill, as a
pioneering experiment in primary education. To pay for it,
Russell undertook a few lucrative but exhausting lecture
tours of the United States.
During these years Russell’s second marriage came under
increasing strain, partly because of overwork but chiefly
because Dora chose to have two children with another man and
insisted on raising them alongside John and Kate. In 1932
Russell left Dora for Patricia (“Peter”) Spence, a young
University of Oxford undergraduate, and for the next three
years his life was dominated by an extraordinarily
acrimonious and complicated divorce from Dora, which was
finally granted in 1935. In the following year he married
Spence, and in 1937 they had a son, Conrad. Worn out by
years of frenetic public activity and desiring, at this
comparatively late stage in his life (he was then age 66),
to return to academic philosophy, Russell gained a teaching
post at the University of Chicago. From 1938 to 1944 Russell
lived in the United States, where he taught at Chicago and
the University of California at Los Angeles, but he was
prevented from taking a post at the City College of New York
because of objections to his views on sex and marriage. On
the brink of financial ruin, he secured a job teaching the
history of philosophy at the Barnes Foundation in
Philadelphia. Although he soon fell out with its founder,
Albert C. Barnes, and lost his job, Russell was able to turn
the lectures he delivered at the foundation into a book, A
History of Western Philosophy (1945), which proved to be a
best-seller and was for many years his main source of
income.
In 1944 Russell returned to Trinity College, where he
lectured on the ideas that formed his last major
contribution to philosophy, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and
Limits (1948). During this period Russell, for once in his
life, found favour with the authorities, and he received
many official tributes, including the Order of Merit in 1949
and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. His private
life, however, remained as turbulent as ever, and he left
his third wife in 1949. For a while he shared a house in
Richmond upon Thames, London, with the family of his son
John and, forsaking both philosophy and politics, dedicated
himself to writing short stories. Despite his famously
immaculate prose style, Russell did not have a talent for
writing great fiction, and his short stories were generally
greeted with an embarrassed and puzzled silence, even by his
admirers.
In 1952 Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, and
finally, at the age of 80, found lasting marital harmony.
Russell devoted his last years to campaigning against
nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, assuming once again the
role of gadfly of the establishment. The sight of Russell in
extreme old age taking his place in mass demonstrations and
inciting young people to civil disobedience through his
passionate rhetoric inspired a new generation of admirers.
Their admiration only increased when in 1961 the British
judiciary system took the extraordinary step of sentencing
the 89-year-old Russell to a second period of imprisonment.
When he died in 1970 Russell was far better known as an
antiwar campaigner than as a philosopher of mathematics. In
retrospect, however, it is possible to see that it is for
his great contributions to philosophy that he will be
remembered and honoured by future generations.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
British philosopher
in full Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
born April 26, 1889, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in
Austria]
died April 29, 1951, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.
Main
Austrian-born English philosopher, regarded by many as the
greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein’s two
major works, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921;
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) and Philosophische
Untersuchungen (published posthumously in 1953;
Philosophical Investigations), have inspired a vast
secondary literature and have done much to shape subsequent
developments in philosophy, especially within the analytic
tradition. His charismatic personality has, in addition,
exerted a powerful fascination upon artists, playwrights,
poets, novelists, musicians, and even filmmakers, so that
his fame has spread far beyond the confines of academic
life.
Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest and most
remarkable families of Habsburg Vienna. His father, Karl
Wittgenstein, was an industrialist of extraordinary talent
and energy who rose to become one of the leading figures in
the Austrian iron and steel industry. Although his family
was originally Jewish, Karl Wittgenstein had been brought up
as a Protestant, and his wife, Leopoldine, also from a
partly Jewish family, had been raised as a Catholic. Karl
and Leopoldine had eight children, of whom Ludwig was the
youngest. The family possessed both money and talent in
abundance, and their home became a centre of Viennese
cultural life during one of its most dynamic phases. Many of
the great writers, artists, and intellectuals of fin de
siècle Vienna—including Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, Oskar
Kokoschka, and Sigmund Freud—were regular visitors to the
Wittgensteins’ home, and the family’s musical evenings were
attended by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, and Bruno
Walter, among others. Leopoldine Wittgenstein played the
piano to a remarkably high standard, as did many of her
children. One of them, Paul, became a famous concert
pianist, and another, Hans, was regarded as a musical
prodigy comparable to Mozart. But the family also was beset
with tragedy. Three of Ludwig’s brothers—Hans, Rudolf, and
Kurt—committed suicide, the first two after rebelling
against their father’s wish that they pursue careers in
industry.
As might be expected, Wittgenstein’s outlook on life was
profoundly influenced by the Viennese culture in which he
was raised, an aspect of his personality and thought that
was long strangely neglected by commentators. One of the
earliest and deepest influences upon his thinking, for
example, was the book Sex and Character (1903), a bizarre
mixture of psychological insight and pathological prejudice
written by the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, whose
suicide at the age of 23 in 1903 made him a cult figure
throughout the German-speaking world. There is much
disagreement about how, exactly, Weininger influenced
Wittgenstein. Some allege that Wittgenstein shared
Weininger’s self-directed disgust at Jews and homosexuals;
others believe that what impressed Wittgenstein most about
Weininger’s book is its austere but passionate insistence
that the only thing worth living for was the aspiration to
accomplish work of genius. In any case, it remains true that
Wittgenstein’s life was characterized by a single-minded
determination to live up to this latter ideal, in pursuit of
which he was prepared to sacrifice almost everything else.
Although he shared his family’s veneration for music,
Wittgenstein’s deepest interest as a boy was in engineering.
In 1908 he went to Manchester, England, to study the
then-nascent subject of aeronautics. While engaged on a
project to design a jet propeller, Wittgenstein became
increasingly absorbed in purely mathematical problems. After
reading The Principles of Mathematics (1903) by Bertrand
Russell and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) by Gottlob
Frege, he developed an obsessive interest in the philosophy
of logic and mathematics. In 1911 Wittgenstein went to
Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in order to make
Russell’s acquaintance. From the moment he met Russell,
Wittgenstein’s aeronautical studies were forgotten in favour
of a ferociously intense preoccupation with questions of
logic. He had, it seemed, found the subject best suited to
his particular form of genius.
Wittgenstein worked with such intensity on logic that
within a year Russell declared that he had nothing left to
teach him. Wittgenstein evidently thought so too and left
Cambridge to work on his own in remote isolation in a wooden
hut that he built by the side of a fjord in Norway. There he
developed, in embryo, what became known as the picture
theory of meaning, a central tenet of which is that a
proposition can express a fact by virtue of sharing with it
a common structure or “logical form.” This logical form,
however, precisely because it is what makes “picturing”
possible, cannot itself be pictured. It follows both that
logic is inexpressible and that there are—pace Frege and
Russell—no logical facts or logical truths. Logical form has
to be shown rather than stated, and, though some languages
and methods of symbolism might reveal their structure more
perspicuously than others, there is no symbolism capable of
representing its own structure. Wittgenstein’s perfectionism
prevented him from putting any of these ideas in a
definitive written form, though he did dictate two series of
notes, one to Russell and another to G.E. Moore, from which
one can gather the broad lines of his thinking.
In the summer of 1914, at the outbreak of World War I,
Wittgenstein was staying with his family in Vienna. Unable
to return to Norway to continue his work on logic, he
enlisted in the Austrian army. He hoped that the experience
of facing death would enable him to concentrate his mind
exclusively on those things that mattered most—intellectual
clarity and moral decency—and that he would thereby achieve
the degree of ethical seriousness to which he aspired. As he
had told Russell many times during their discussions at
Cambridge, he regarded his thinking about logic and his
striving to be a better person as two aspects of a single
duty—the duty, so to speak, of genius. (“Logic and ethics
are fundamentally the same,” Weininger had written, “they
are no more than duty to oneself.”)
While serving on the Eastern front, Wittgenstein did, in
fact, experience a religious conversion, inspired in part by
Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (1883), which he bought at
the beginning of the war and subsequently carried with him
at all times, reading and rereading it until he knew it
practically by heart. Wittgenstein spent the first two years
of the war behind the lines, relatively safe from harm and
able to continue his work on logic. In 1916, however, at his
own request, he was sent to a fighting unit at the Russian
front. His surviving manuscripts show that during this time
his philosophical work underwent a profound change. Whereas
previously he had separated his thoughts on logic from his
thoughts on ethics, aesthetics, and religion by writing the
latter remarks in code, at this point he began to integrate
the two sets of remarks, applying to all of them the
distinction he had earlier made between that which can be
said and that which must be shown. Ethics, aesthetics, and
religion, in other words, were like logic: their “truths”
were inexpressible; insight in these areas could be shown
but not stated. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be
put into words,” Wittgenstein wrote. “They make themselves
manifest. They are what is mystical.” Of course, this meant
that Wittgenstein’s central philosophical message, the
insight that he was most concerned to convey in his work,
was itself inexpressible. His hope was that precisely in not
saying it, nor even in trying to say it, he could somehow
make it manifest. “If only you do not try to utter what is
unutterable,” he wrote to his friend Paul Engelmann, “then
nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will
be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered.”
Near the end of the war, while he was on leave in
Salzburg, Austria, Wittgenstein finally finished the book
that was later published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
In the preface he announced that he considered himself to
have found “on all essential points” the solution to the
problems of philosophy. “The truth of the thoughts that are
here communicated,” he wrote, “seems to me unassailable and
definitive,” and, “if I am not mistaken in this belief, then
the second thing in which the value of this work consists is
that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are
solved.” For the most part, the book consists of an
austerely compressed exposition of the picture theory of
meaning. It ends, however, with some remarks about ethics,
aesthetics, and the meaning of life, stressing that, if its
view about how propositions can be meaningful is correct,
then, just as there are no meaningful propositions about
logical form, so there can be no meaningful propositions
concerning these subjects either. This point, of course,
applies to Wittgenstein’s own remarks in the book itself, so
Wittgenstein is forced to conclude that whoever understands
his remarks “finally recognizes them as senseless”; they
offer, so to speak, a ladder that one must throw away after
using it to climb.
Consistent with his view that he had solved all the
essential problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein abandoned the
subject after World War I and instead trained to be an
elementary school teacher. Meanwhile, the Tractatus was
published and attracted the attention of two influential
groups of philosophers, one based in Cambridge and including
R.B. Braithwaite and Frank Ramsey and the other based in
Vienna and including Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, and
other logical positivists later collectively known as the
Vienna Circle. Both groups tried to make contact with
Wittgenstein. Frank Ramsey made two trips to Puchberg—the
small Austrian village in which Wittgenstein was teaching—to
discuss the Tractatus with him, and Schlick invited him to
join the discussions of the Vienna Circle. Stimulated by
these contacts, Wittgenstein’s interest in philosophy
revived, and, after his brief and unsuccessful career as a
schoolteacher came to an end, he returned to the discipline,
persuaded, largely by Ramsey, that the views he had
expressed in his book were not, after all, definitively
correct.
In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Trinity College,
initially to work with Ramsey. The following year Ramsey
died at the tragically young age of 26, after a spell of
severe jaundice. Wittgenstein stayed on at Cambridge as a
lecturer, spending his vacations in Vienna, where he resumed
his discussions with Schlick and Waismann. During this time
his ideas changed rapidly as he abandoned altogether the
notion of logical form as it appeared in the Tractatus,
along with the theory of meaning that it had seemed to
require. Indeed, he adopted a view of philosophy that
rejected entirely the construction of theories of any sort
and that viewed philosophy rather as an activity, a method
of clearing up the confusions that arise through
misunderstandings of language.
Philosophers, Wittgenstein believed, had been misled into
thinking that their subject was a kind of science, a search
for theoretical explanations of the things that puzzled
them: the nature of meaning, truth, mind, time, justice, and
so on. But philosophical problems are not amenable to this
kind of treatment, he claimed. What is required is not a
correct doctrine but a clear view, one that dispels the
confusion that gives rise to the problem. Many of these
problems arise through an inflexible view of language that
insists that if a word has a meaning there must be some kind
of object corresponding to it. Thus, for example, we use the
word mind without any difficulty until we ask ourselves
“What is the mind?” We then imagine that this question has
to be answered by identifying some “thing” that is the mind.
If we remind ourselves that language has many uses and that
words can be used quite meaningfully without corresponding
to things, the problem disappears. Another closely related
source of philosophical confusion, according to
Wittgenstein, is the tendency to mistake grammatical rules,
or rules about what it does and does not make sense to say,
for material propositions, or propositions about matters of
fact or existence. For example, the expression “2 + 2 = 4”
is not a proposition describing mathematical reality but a
rule of grammar, something that determines what makes sense
when using arithmetical terms. Thus “2 + 2 = 5” is not
false, it is nonsense, and the philosopher’s task is to
uncover the multitude of more subtle pieces of nonsense that
typically constitute a philosophical “theory.”
Wittgenstein thought that he himself had succumbed to an
overly narrow view of language in the Tractatus,
concentrating on the question of how propositions acquired
their meaning and ignoring all other aspects of meaningful
language use. A proposition is something that is either true
or false, but we do not use language only to say things that
are true or false, and thus a theory of propositions is
not—pace the Tractatus—a general theory of meaning nor even
the basis of one. But this does not imply that the theory of
meaning in the Tractatus ought to be replaced by another
theory. The idea that language has many different uses is
not a theory but a triviality: “What we find in philosophy
is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science
does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is
enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy
is in fact the synopsis of trivialities.”
Wittgenstein regarded his later book Philosophical
Investigations as just such a synopsis, and indeed he found
its proper arrangement enormously difficult. For the last 20
years of his life, he tried again and again to produce a
version of the book that satisfied him, but he never felt he
had succeeded, and he would not allow the book to be
published in his lifetime. What became known as the works of
the later Wittgenstein—Philosophische Bemerkungen (1964;
Philosophical Remarks), Philosophische Grammatik (1969;
Philosophical Grammar), Bermerkungen über die Grundlagen der
Mathematik (1956; Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics), Über Gewissheit (1969; On Certainty), and even
Philosophical Investigations itself—are the discarded
attempts at a definitive expression of his new approach to
philosophy.
The themes addressed by Wittgenstein in these
posthumously published manuscripts and typescripts are so
various as to defy summary. The two focal points are the
traditional problems in the philosophy of mathematics (e.g.,
“What is mathematical truth?” and “What are numbers?”) and
the problems that arise from thinking about the mind (e.g.,
“What is consciousness?” and “What is a soul?”).
Wittgenstein’s method is not to engage directly in polemics
against specific philosophical theories but rather to trace
their source in confusions about language. Accordingly,
Philosophical Investigations begins not with an extract from
a work of theoretical philosophy but with a passage from St.
Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400), in which Augustine
explains how he learned to speak. Augustine describes how
his elders pointed to objects in order to teach him their
names. This description perfectly illustrates the kind of
inflexible view of language that Wittgenstein found to
underlie most philosophical confusions. In this description,
he says, there lies “a particular picture of the essence of
human language,” and “in this picture of language we find
the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning.
This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object
for which the word stands.”
To combat this picture, Wittgenstein developed a method
of describing and imagining what he called “language games.”
Language games, for Wittgenstein, are concrete social
activities that crucially involve the use of specific forms
of language. By describing the countless variety of language
games—the countless ways in which language is actually used
in human interaction—Wittgenstein meant to show that “the
speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form
of life.” The meaning of a word, then, is not the object to
which it corresponds but rather the use that is made of it
in “the stream of life.”
Related to this point is Wittgenstein’s insistence that,
with regard to language, the public is logically prior to
the private. The Western philosophical tradition, going back
at least to Descartes’s famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I
think, therefore I am”), has tended to regard the contents
of one’s own mind as being foundational, the rock upon which
all other knowledge is built. In a section of Philosophical
Investigations that has become known as the private language
argument, Wittgenstein sought to reverse this priority by
reminding us that we can talk about the contents of our own
minds only once we have learned a language and that we can
learn a language only by taking part in the practices of a
community. The starting point for philosophical reflection,
therefore, is not our own consciousness but our
participation in communal activities: “An ‘inner process’
stands in need of outward criteria.”
This last remark, along with Wittgenstein’s robust
rejection of Cartesianism generally, has sometimes led to
his being interpreted as a behaviourist, but this is a
mistake. He does not deny that there are inner processes,
nor does he equate those processes with the behaviour that
expresses them. Cartesianism and behaviourism are, for
Wittgenstein, parallel confusions—the one insisting that
there is such a thing as the mind, the other insisting that
there is not, but both resting on the Augustinian picture of
language by demanding that the word mind has to be
understood as referring to some “thing.” Both theories
succumb to the temptation to misunderstand the grammar of
psychological descriptions.
Related to Wittgenstein’s rejection of theorizing in
philosophy are two more general attitudes that have to be
taken into account if one is to understand the spirit in
which he wrote. The first of these attitudes is a
detestation of scientism, the view that we must look to
science for a “theory of everything.” Wittgenstein regarded
this view as characteristic of 20th-century civilization and
saw himself and his work as swimming against this tide. The
kind of understanding the philosopher seeks, Wittgenstein
believed, has more in common with the kind of understanding
one gets from poetry, music, or art—i.e., the kind that is
chronically undervalued in our scientific age. The second of
these general attitudes—which again Wittgenstein thought
isolated him from the mainstream of the 20th century—was a
fierce dislike of professional philosophy. No honest
philosopher, he considered, could treat philosophy as a
profession, and thus academic life, far from promoting
serious philosophy, actually made it almost impossible. He
advised all his best students against becoming academics.
Becoming a doctor, a gardener, a shop assistant—almost
anything—was preferable, he thought, to staying in academic
life.
Wittgenstein himself several times considered leaving his
academic job in favour of training to become a psychiatrist.
In 1935 he even thought seriously of moving to the Soviet
Union to work on a farm. When he was offered the prestigious
chair of philosophy at Cambridge in 1939, he accepted, but
with severe misgivings. During World War II he worked as a
porter in Guy’s Hospital in London and then as an assistant
in a medical research team. In 1947 he finally resigned his
academic position and moved to Ireland to work on his own,
as he had done in Norway before World War I. In 1949 he
discovered that he had cancer of the prostate, and in 1951
he moved into his doctor’s house in Cambridge, knowing that
he had only a few months to live. He died on April 29, 1951.
His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
Ray Monk
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Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The formalist
tradition » Logical positivism
Logical positivism was developed in the early 1920s by a group of
Austrian intellectuals, mostly scientists and mathematicians, who named
their association the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle). The logical
positivists accepted the logical atomist conception of philosophy as
properly scientific and grounded in mathematical logic. By “scientific,”
however, they had in mind the classical empiricism handed down from
Locke and Hume, in particular the view that all factual knowledge is
based on experience. Unlike logical atomists, the logical positivists
held that only logic, mathematics, and the special sciences can make
statements that are meaningful, or cognitively significant. They thus
regarded metaphysical, religious, ethical, literary, and aesthetic
pronouncements as literally nonsense. Significantly, because logical
atomism was a metaphysics purporting to convey true information about
the structure of reality, it too was disavowed. The positivists also
held that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between
“analytic” statements (such as “All husbands are married”), which can be
known to be true independently of any experience, and “synthetic”
statements (such as “It is raining now”), which are knowable only
through observation.
The main proponents of logical positivism—Rudolf Carnap, Herbert
Feigl, Philipp Frank, and Gustav Bergmann—all immigrated to the United
States from Germany and Austria to escape Nazism. Their influence on
American philosophy was profound, and, with various modifications,
logical positivism was still a vital force on the American scene at the
beginning of the 21st century.

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Rudolf Carnap
German-American philosopher
born May 18, 1891, Ronsdorf, Ger.
died Sept. 14, 1970, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.
Main
German-born U.S. philosopher of Logical Positivism. He made
important contributions to logic, the analysis of language,
the theory of probability, and the philosophy of science.
Education.
From 1910 to 1914 Carnap studied mathematics, physics, and
philosophy at the universities of Jena and Freiburg im
Breisgau. At Jena he attended the lectures of Gottlob Frege,
now widely acknowledged as the greatest logician of the 19th
century, whose ideas exerted a deep influence on Carnap.
After serving in World War I, Carnap earned his doctorate
in 1921 at Jena with a dissertation on the concept of space.
He argued that the conflicts among the various theories of
space then held by scholars resulted from the fact that
those theories actually dealt with quite different subjects;
he called them, respectively, formal space, physical space,
and intuitive space and exhibited their principal
characteristics and fundamental differences.
For several years afterward Carnap was engaged in private
research in logic and the foundations of physics and wrote a
number of essays on problems of space, time, and causality,
as well as a textbook in symbolic, or mathematical, logic
(Abriss der Logistik, 1929; a considerably different later
German version appeared in English translation: Introduction
to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications, 1958).
Career in Vienna and Prague.
In 1926 Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle—a
small group of philosophers, mathematicians, and other
scholars who met regularly to discuss philosophical
issues—invited Carnap to join the faculty of the University
of Vienna, where he soon became an influential member of the
Circle. Out of their discussions developed the initial ideas
of Logical Positivism, or Logical Empiricism. This school of
thought shared its basic Empiricist orientation with David
Hume, a Scottish Empiricist, and Ernst Mach, an Austrian
physicist and philosopher. Its leading members, informed and
inspired by the methods and theories of contemporary
mathematics and science, sought to develop a “scientific
world view” by bringing to philosophical inquiry the
precision and rigour of the exact sciences. As one means to
this end, Carnap made extensive use of the concepts and
techniques of symbolic logic in preference to the often
inadequate analytic devices of traditional logic.
Carnap and his associates established close connections
with like-minded scholars in other countries, among them a
group of Empiricists that had formed in Berlin under the
leadership of Hans Reichenbach, an eminent philosopher of
science. With Reichenbach, Carnap founded a periodical,
Erkenntnis (1930–40), as a forum for the new “scientific
philosophy.”
The basic thesis of Empiricism, in a familiar but quite
vague formulation, is that all of man’s concepts and beliefs
concerning the world ultimately derive from his immediate
experience. In some of his most important writings, Carnap
sought, in effect, to give this idea a clear and precise
interpretation. Setting aside, as a psychological rather
than a philosophical problem, the question of how human
beings arrive at their ideas about the world, he proceeded
to construe Empiricism as a systematic-logical thesis about
the evidential grounding of empirical knowledge. To this
end, he gave the issue a characteristically linguistic turn
by asking how the terms and sentences that, in scientific or
in everyday language, serve to express assertions about the
world are related to those terms and sentences by which the
data of immediate experience can be described. The
Empiricist thesis, as construed and defended by Carnap, then
asserts that the terms and sentences of the first kind are
“reducible” to those of the second kind in a clearly
specifiable sense. Carnap’s conception of the relevant sense
of reducibility, which he always stated in precise logical
terms, was initially rather narrow but gradually became more
liberal.
In his first great work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt
(1928; Eng. trans.—with a smaller work—The Logical Structure
of the World: Pseudoproblems in Philosophy), Carnap
developed, with unprecedented rigour, a version of the
Empiricist reducibility thesis according to which all terms
suited to describe actual or possible empirical facts are
fully definable by terms referring exclusively to aspects of
immediate experience, so that all empirical statements are
fully translatable into statements about immediate
experiences.
Prompted by discussions with his associates in Vienna,
Carnap soon began to develop a more liberal version of
Empiricism, which he elaborated while he was professor of
natural philosophy at the German University in Prague
(1931–35); he eventually presented it in full detail in his
essay “Testability and Meaning” (Philosophy of Science, vol.
3 [1936] and 4 [1937]). Carnap argued that the terms of
empirical science are not fully definable in purely
experiential terms but can at least be partly defined by
means of “reduction sentences,” which are logically
much-refined versions of operational definitions, and
“observation sentences,” whose truth can be checked by
direct observation. Carnap stressed that usually such tests
cannot provide strict proof or disproof but only more or
less strong “confirmation” for an empirical statement.
Sentences that do not thus yield observational
implications and therefore cannot possibly be tested and
confirmed by observational findings were said to be
empirically meaningless. By reference to this testability
criterion of empirical significance, Carnap and other
Logical Empiricists rejected various doctrines of
speculative metaphysics and of theology, not as being false
but as making no significant assertions at all.
Carnap argued that the observational statements by
reference to which empirical statements can be tested may be
construed as sentences describing directly and publicly
observable aspects of physical objects, such as the needle
of a measuring instrument turning to a particular point on
the scale or a subject in a psychological test showing a
change in pulse rate. All such sentences, he noted, can be
formulated in terms that are part of the vocabulary of
physics. This was the basic idea of his “physicalism,”
according to which all terms and statements of empirical
science—from the physical to the social and historical
disciplines—can be reduced to terms and statements in the
language of physics.
In later writings, Carnap liberalized his conception of
reducibility and of empirical significance even further so
as to give a more adequate account of the relation between
scientific theories and scientific evidence.
Career in the United States.
By the time “Testability and Meaning” appeared in print,
Carnap had moved to the United States, mainly because of the
growing threat of German National Socialism. From 1936 to
1952 he served on the faculty of the University of Chicago.
During the 1940–41 school year, Carnap was a visiting
professor at Harvard University and was an active
participant in a discussion group that included Bertrand
Russell, Alfred Tarski, and W.V.O. Quine.
Soon after going to Chicago, Carnap joined with the
sociologist Otto Neurath, a former fellow member of the
Vienna Circle, and with an academic colleague, the
Pragmatist philosopher Charles W. Morris, in founding the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which was
published, beginning in 1938, as a series of monographs on
general problems in the philosophy of science and on
philosophical issues concerning mathematics or particular
branches of empirical science.
Since his Vienna years, Carnap had been much concerned
also with problems in logic and in the philosophy of
language. He held that philosophical perplexities often
arise from a misunderstanding or misuse of language and that
the way to resolve them is by “logical analysis of
language.” On this point, he agreed with the “ordinary
language” school of Analytic Philosophy, which had its
origins in England. He differed from it, however, in
insisting that more technical issues—e.g., those in the
philosophy of science or of mathematics—cannot be adequately
dealt with by considerations of ordinary linguistic usage
but require clarification by reference to artificially
constructed languages that are formulated in logical
symbolism and that have their structure and interpretation
precisely specified by so-called syntactic and semantic
rules. Carnap developed these ideas and the theoretical
apparatus for their implementation in a series of works,
including Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934; The Logical
Syntax of Language) and Meaning and Necessity (1947; 2nd
enlarged ed., 1956).
Carnap’s interest in artificial languages included
advocacy of international auxiliary languages such as
Esperanto and Interlingua to facilitate scholarly
communication and to further international understanding.
One idea in logic and the theory of knowledge that
occupied much of Carnap’s attention was that of analyticity.
In contrast to the 19th-century radical Empiricism of John
Stuart Mill, Carnap and other Logical Empiricists held that
the statements of logic and mathematics, unlike those of
empirical science, are analytic—i.e., true solely by virtue
of the meanings of their constituent terms—and that they can
therefore be established a priori (without any empirical
test). Carnap repeatedly returned to the task of formulating
a precise characterization and theory of analyticity. His
ideas were met with skepticism by some, however—among them
Quine, who argued that the notion of analytic truth is
inherently obscure and the attempt to delimit a class of
statements that are true a priori should be abandoned as
misguided.
From about 1945 onward, Carnap turned his efforts
increasingly to problems of inductive reasoning and of
rational belief and decision. His principal aim was to
construct a formal system of inductive logic; its central
concept, corresponding to that of deductive implication,
would be that of probabilistic implication—or, more
precisely, a concept representing the degree of rational
credibility or of probability that a given body of evidence
may be said to confer upon a proposed hypothesis. Carnap
presented a rigorous theory of this kind in his Logical
Foundations of Probability (1950).
Carnap spent the years from 1952 to 1954 at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he continued his work
in probability theory. Subsequently, he accepted a
professorship at the University of California at Los
Angeles. During those years and indeed until his death,
Carnap was occupied principally with modifications and
considerable extensions of his inductive logic.
Carl G. Hempel
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Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The formalist
tradition » Naturalized epistemology
The philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind developed since the
1950s by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000),
known generally as naturalized epistemology, was influenced both by
Russell’s work in logic and by logical positivism. Quine’s philosophy
forms a comprehensive system that is scientistic, empiricist, and
behaviourist (see behaviourism). Indeed, for Quine, the basic task of an
empiricist philosophy is simply to describe how our scientific theories
about the world—as well as our prescientific, or intuitive, picture of
it—are derived from experience. As he wrote:
The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody
has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world.
Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle
for psychology?
Although Quine shared the logical postivists’ scientism and
empiricism, he crucially differed from them in rejecting the traditional
analytic-synthetic distinction. For Quine, this distinction is
ill-founded because it is not required by any adequate psychological
account of how scientific (or prescientific) theories are formulated.
Quine’s views had an enormous impact on analytic philosophy, and until
his death at the end of the century he was generally regarded as the
dominant figure in the movement.

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Willard Van Orman Quine
American philosopher
born June 25, 1908, Akron, Ohio, U.S.
died December 25, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts
Main
American logician and philosopher, widely considered one of
the dominant figures in Anglo-American philosophy in the
last half of the 20th century.
After studying mathematics and logic at Oberlin College
(1926–30), Quine won a scholarship to Harvard University,
where he completed his Ph.D. in 1932. On a traveling
fellowship to Europe in 1932–33, he met some of the leading
philosophers and logicians of the day, including Rudolf
Carnap and Alfred Tarski. After three years as a junior
fellow at Harvard, Quine joined the faculty in 1936. From
1942 to 1945 he served as a naval intelligence officer in
Washington, D.C. Promoted to full professor at Harvard in
1948, he remained there until 1978, when he retired.
Quine produced highly original and important work in
several areas of philosophy, including logic, ontology,
epistemology, and the philosophy of language. By the 1950s
he had developed a comprehensive and systematic
philosophical outlook that was naturalistic, empiricist, and
behaviourist. Conceiving of philosophy as an extension of
science, he rejected epistemological foundationalism, the
attempt to ground knowledge of the external world in
allegedly transcendent and self-validating mental
experience. The proper task of a “naturalized epistemology,”
as he saw it, was simply to give a psychological account of
how scientific knowledge is actually obtained.
Although much influenced by the Logical Positivism of
Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle, Quine
famously rejected one of that group’s cardinal doctrines,
the analytic-synthetic distinction. According to this
doctrine, there is a fundamental difference between
statements such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” which are
true or false solely by virtue of the meanings of the terms
they contain, and statements such as “All swans are white,”
which are true or false by virtue of nonlinguistic facts
about the world. Quine argued that no coherent definition of
analyticity had ever been proposed. One consequence of his
view was that the truths of mathematics and logic, which the
positivists had regarded as analytic, and the empirical
truths of science differed only in “degree” and not kind. In
keeping with his empiricism, Quine held that both the former
and the latter were known through experience and were thus
in principle revisable in the face of countervailing
evidence.
In ontology, Quine recognized only those entities that it
was necessary to postulate in order to assume that our best
scientific theories are true—specifically, concrete physical
objects and abstract sets, which were required by the
mathematics used in many scientific disciplines. He rejected
notions such as properties, propositions, and meanings as
ill-defined or scientifically useless.
In the philosophy of language, Quine was known for his
behaviourist account of language learning and for his thesis
of the “indeterminacy of translation.” This is the view that
there are always indefinitely many possible translations of
one language into another, each of which is equally
compatible with the totality of empirical evidence available
to linguistic investigators. There is thus no “fact of the
matter” about which translation of a language is correct.
The indeterminacy of translation is an instance of a more
general view, which Quine called “ontological relativity,”
that claims that for any given scientific theory there are
always indefinitely many alternatives entailing different
ontological assumptions but accounting for all available
evidence equally well. Thus, it does not make sense to say
that one theory rather than another gives a true description
of the world.
Among Quine’s many books are Word and Object (1960), The
Roots of Reference (1974), and his autobiography, The Time
of My Life (1985).
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Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The formalist
tradition » Identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism
Logical positivism and naturalized epistemology were forms of
materialism. Beginning about 1970, these approaches were applied to the
human mind, giving rise to three general viewpoints: identity theory,
functionalism, and eliminative materialism. Identity theory is the view
that mental states are identical to physical states of the brain.
According to functionalism, a particular mental state is any type of
(physical) state that plays a certain causal role with respect to other
mental and physical states. For example, pain can be functionally
defined as any state that is an effect of events such as cuts and burns
and that is a cause of mental states such as fear and behaviour such as
saying “Ouch!” Eliminative materialism is the view that the familiar
categories of “folk psychology”—such as belief, intention, and desire—do
not refer to anything real. In other words, there are no such things as
beliefs, intentions, or desires; instead, there is simply neural
activity in the brain. According to the eliminative materialist, a
modern scientific account of the mind no more requires the categories of
folk psychology than modern chemistry requires the discarded notion of
phlogiston. A complete account of human mental experience can be
achieved simply by describing how the brain operates.
Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The informalist
tradition
Generally speaking, philosophers in the informalist tradition viewed
philosophy as an autonomous activity that should acknowledge the
importance of logic and science but not treat either or both as models
for dealing with conceptual problems. The 20th century witnessed the
development of three such approaches, each of which had sustained
influence: common sense philosophy, ordinary language philosophy, and
speech act theory.
Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The informalist
tradition » Common sense philosophy
Originating as a reaction against the forms of idealism and skepticism
that were prevalent in England at about the turn of the 20th century,
the first major work of common sense philosophy was Moore’s paper A
Defense of Common Sense (1925). Against skepticism, Moore argued that he
and other human beings have known many propositions about the world to
be true with certainty. Among these propositions are: “The Earth has
existed for many years” and “Many human beings have existed in the past
and some still exist.” Because skepticism maintains that nobody knows
any proposition to be true, it can be dismissed. Furthermore, because
these propositions entail the existence of material objects, idealism,
according to which the world is wholly mental, can also be rejected.
Moore called this outlook “the common sense view of the world,” and he
insisted that any philosophical system whose propositions contravene it
can be rejected out of hand without further analysis.
Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The informalist
tradition » Ordinary language philosophy
The two major proponents of ordinary language philosophy were the
English philosophers Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) and J.L. Austin (1911–60).
Both held, though for different reasons, that philosophical problems
frequently arise through a misuse or misunderstanding of ordinary
speech. In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle argued that the traditional
conception of the human mind—that it is an invisible, ghostlike entity
occupying a physical body—is based on what he called a “category
mistake.” The mistake is to interpret the term mind as though it were
analogous to the term body and thus to assume that both terms denote
entities, one visible (body) and the other invisible (mind). His
diagnosis of this error involved an elaborate description of how mental
epithets actually work in ordinary speech. To speak of intelligence, for
example, is to describe how human beings respond to certain kinds of
problematic situations. Despite the behaviourist flavour of his
analyses, Ryle insisted that he was not a behaviourist and that he was
instead “charting the logical geography” of the mental concepts used in
everyday life.
Austin’s emphasis was somewhat different. In a celebrated paper, A
Plea for Excuses (1956), he explained that the appeal to ordinary
language in philosophy should be regarded as the first word but not the
last word. That is, one should be sensitive to the nuances of everyday
speech in approaching conceptual problems, but in certain circumstances
everyday speech can, and should, be augmented by technical concepts.
According to the “first-word” principle, because certain distinctions
have been drawn in ordinary language for eons—e.g., males from females,
friends from enemies, and so forth—one can conclude not only that the
drawing of such distinctions is essential to everyday life but also that
such distinctions are more than merely verbal. They pick out, or
discriminate, actual features of the world. Starting from this
principle, Austin dealt with major philosophical difficulties, such as
the problem of other minds, the nature of truth, and the nature of
responsibility.
Contemporary philosophy » Analytic philosophy » The informalist
tradition » Speech act theory
Austin was also the creator of one of the most original philosophical
theories of the 20th century: speech act theory. A speech act is an
utterance that is grammatically similar to a statement but is neither
true nor false, though it is perfectly meaningful. For example, the
utterance “I do,” performed in the normal circumstances of marrying, is
neither true nor false. It is not a statement but an action—a speech
act—the primary effect of which is to complete the marriage ceremony.
Similar considerations apply to utterances such as “I christen thee the
Joseph Stalin,” performed in the normal circumstances of christening a
ship. Austin called such utterances “performatives” in order to indicate
that, in making them, one is not only saying something but also doing
something.
The theory of speech acts was, in effect, a profound criticism of the
positivist thesis that every meaningful sentence is either true or
false. The positivist view, according to Austin, embodies a “descriptive
fallacy,” in the sense that it treats the descriptive function of
language as primary and more or less ignores other functions. Austin’s
account of speech acts was thus a corrective to that tendency.
After Austin’s death in 1960, speech act theory was deepened and
refined by his American student John R. Searle. In The Construction of
Social Reality (1995), Searle argued that many social and political
institutions are created through speech acts. Money, for example, is
created through a declaration by a government to the effect that pieces
of paper or metal of a certain manufacture and design are to count as
money. Many institutions, such as banks, universities, and police
departments, are social entities created through similar speech acts.
Searle’s development of speech act theory was thus an unexpected
extension of the philosophy of language into social and political
theory.

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Gilbert Ryle
British philosopher
born Aug. 19, 1900, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.
died Oct. 6, 1976, Whitby, North Yorkshire
Main
British philosopher, leading figure in the “Oxford
philosophy,” or “ordinary language,” movement.
Ryle gained first-class honours at Queen’s College,
Oxford, and became a lecturer at Christ Church College in
1924. Throughout his career, which remained centred at
Oxford, he attempted—as Waynflete professor of metaphysical
philosophy (1945–68), in his writings, and as editor
(1948–71) of the journal Mind—to dissipate confusion arising
from the misapplication of language.
Ryle’s first book, The Concept of Mind (1949), is
considered a modern classic. In it he challenges the
traditional distinction between body and mind as delineated
by René Descartes. Traditional Cartesian dualism, Ryle says,
perpetrates a serious confusion when, looking beyond the
human body (which exists in space and is subject to
mechanical laws), it views the mind as an additional
mysterious thing not subject to observation or to mechanical
laws, rather than as the form or organizing principle of the
body. What Ryle deems to be logically incoherent dogma of
Cartesianism he labels as the doctrine of the
ghost-in-the-machine.
In Dilemmas (1954) Ryle analyzes propositions that appear
irreconcilable, as when free will is set in opposition to
the fatalistic view that future specific events are
inevitable. He believed that the dilemmas posed by these
seemingly contradictory propositions could be resolved only
by viewing them as the result of conceptual confusion
between the language of logic and the language of events.
Among his other well-known books are Philosophical
Arguments (1945), A Rational Animal (1962), Plato’s Progress
(1966), and The Thinking of Thoughts (1968).
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John Langshaw Austin
British philosopher
born March 28, 1911, Lancaster, Lancashire, Eng.
died Feb. 8, 1960, Oxford
Main
British philosopher best known for his individualistic
analysis of human thought derived from detailed study of
everyday language.
After receiving early education at Shrewsbury School and
Balliol College, Oxford, he became a fellow at All Souls
College (1933) and Magdalen College (1935), where he studied
traditional Greco-Roman classics, which later influenced his
thinking. After service in the British intelligence corps
during World War II, he returned to Oxford and eventually
became White’s professor of moral philosophy (1952–60) and
an influential instructor of the ordinary-language movement.
Austin believed that linguistic analysis could provide
many solutions to philosophical riddles, but he disapproved
of the language of formal logic, believing it contrived and
inadequate and often not as complex and subtle as ordinary
language.
Although linguistic examination was generally considered
only part of contemporary philosophy, the analytical
movement that Austin espoused did emphasize the importance
of language in philosophy. Austin’s theoretical essays and
lectures were published posthumously in Philosophical Papers
(1961), Sense and Sensibilia (1962), and How to Do Things
with Words (1962).
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