Analytic Philosophy And The Later Wittgensteinian Tradition

This book aims to explain the decline of the later Wittgensteinian tradition in analytic philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s, Oxford was the center of analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein – the later Wittgenstein – the most influential contemporary thinker within that philosophical tradition. Wittgenstein's methods and ideas were widely accepted, with everything seeming to point to the Wittgensteinian paradigm having a similar impact on the philosophical scenes of all English speaking countries. However, this was not to be the case. By the 1980s, albeit still important, Wittgenstein was considered as a somewhat marginal thinker. What occurred within the history of analytic philosophy to produce such a decline? This book expertly traces the early reception of Wittgenstein in the United States, the shift in the humanities to a tradition rooted in the natural sciences, and the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, to reveal the factors that contributed to the eventual hostility towards the later Wittgensteinian tradition.

An in-depth history of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, from a leading philosopher of language This is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philosopher of language and historian of analytic philosophy, provides the fullest and most detailed account of the analytic tradition yet published, one that is unmatched in its chronological range, topics covered, and depth of treatment. Focusing on the major milestones and distinguishing them from detours, Soames gives a seminal account of where the analytic tradition has been and where it appears to be heading. Volume 2 provides an intensive account of the new vision in analytical philosophy initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its assimilation by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, and the subsequent flowering of logical empiricism. With this “linguistic turn,” philosophical analysis became philosophy itself, and the discipline’s stated aim was transformed from advancing philosophical theories to formalizing, systematizing, and unifying science. In addition to exploring the successes and failures of philosophers who pursued this vision, the book describes how the philosophically minded logicians Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing discovered the scope and limits of logic and developed the mathematical theory of computation that ushered in the digital era. The book’s account of this pivotal period closes with a searching examination of the struggle to preserve ethical normativity in a scientific age.

This collection of previously unpublished essays presents a new approach to the history of analytic philosophy--one that does not assume at the outset a general characterization of the distinguishing elements of the analytic tradition. Drawing together a venerable group of contributors, including John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, this volume explores the historical contexts in which analytic philosophers have worked, revealing multiple discontinuities and misunderstandings as well as a complex interaction between science and philosophical reflection.

This unique collection looks at analytic philosophy in its historical context. Prominent philosophers discuss key figures, including Russell and Wittgenstein, methods and results in analytic philosophy to present its story. This volume assesses the challenge posed by changing cultural and philosophical trends and movements.

This volume discusses some crucial ideas of the founders of the analytic philosophy: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the ‘golden trio’. The book shows how these ‘old’ ideas are still present and influential in the current philosophical debates and to what extent these debates echo the original ideas. The collection aim is twofold: to better understand these fruitful ideas by placing them in the original setting, and to systematically examine these ideas in the context of the current debates animating philosophical discussions today. Divided into five sections, the book first sets the stage and offers a general introduction to the background influences, as well as delimitations of the initial foundational positions. This first section contains two papers dedicated to the discussion of realism and the status of science at that time, followed by two papers that tackle the epistemic status of logical laws. The next three sections constitute the core of the volume, each being dedicated to the most important figures in the early analytic tradition: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The last section gathers several essays that discuss either the relation between two or more analytic thinkers, or various important concepts such as ‘predicativism’ and ‘arbitrary function’, or the principles of abstraction and non-contradiction.​

This edited collection covers Friedrich Waismann's most influential contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of language: his concepts of open texture and language strata, his early criticism of verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction, as well as their significance for experimental and legal philosophy. In addition, Waismann's original papers in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics are here evaluated. They introduce Waismann's theory of action along with his groundbreaking work on fiction, proper names and Kafka's Trial. Waismann is known as the voice of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Vienna Circle. At the same time we find in his works a determined critic of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, who anticipated much later developments in the analytic tradition and devised his very own vision for its future.

This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, ‘logistical’ approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles.The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, ‘phenomenological’ approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.