Analytic philosophy is now generally seen as the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world, and has been so from at least the middle of the twentieth century. Over the last two decades, its influence has also been steadily growing in the non-English-speaking world. One sign of this is the proliferation of societies for analytic philosophy around the world. Analytic philosophy now encompasses a far wider range of approaches, ideas and positions than it ever did in its early days. From its original concern with epistemological and metaphysical questions in the philosophy of logic and mathematics (in the case of Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell) and in ethics and the theory of judgement (in the case of G. E. Moore), it has ramified-via the linguistic turn (taken first by Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein)-into all spheres of philosophy. This book provides a picture of analytic philosophy and its historiography. It contains chapter that address a wide range of topics in analytic philosophy, from logical positivism to Russell’s theory of descriptions and the idea of logical construction, to Bernard Bolzano’s anti-Kantianism, rigorous experience, meta-ethics, normative ethics, metaphysics, analytic aesthetics, pragmatism, linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, skepticism and knowledge, Oxford realism, phenomenology, inferentialism and normativity, and developments in logic. The book examines the views of some of the leading philosophers of their time, including Russell, Frege, Moore, Wittgenstein, Bolzano, Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Elizabeth Anscombe.
