11 Facts About Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today.

Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods prominent in Europe.

Central figures in this historical development of analytic philosophy are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G E Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Analytic philosophy is characterized by an emphasis on language, known as the linguistic turn, and for its clarity and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences.

Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most notably continental philosophies such as existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism.

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Since its beginning, a basic goal of analytic philosophy has been conceptual clarity, in the name of which Moore and Russell rejected Hegelianism for being obscure—see for example Moore's "A Defence of Common Sense" and Russell's critique of the doctrine of internal relations.

Analytic philosophy thereby argued that the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic.

One continued Wittgenstein's later Analytic philosophy, which differed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus.

Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers.

Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who in a series of papers from the 1950s onward and his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, produced a sophisticated defense of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice.

One striking difference with respect to early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing during the second half of the 20th century.