Although analytic philosophy is a major movement shaping contemporary philosophy, there are not too many historical accounts of that movement which would be comprehensive, unified and sufficiently detailed. An impressive attempt to fill in this lacuna is the two-volume book 'Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century', modestly described by its author Scott Soames (renowned mainly for his work in the philosophy of language) as 'an introductory overview of the analytic tradition in philosophy covering roughly the period between 1900 and 1975'. The first volume discusses the philosophy of G.E. Moore, the most influential views of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus', logical positivism (including emotivism in ethics and reaction against it), as well as the early philosophy of W.V. Quine. The second volume continues the story of analytic philosophy by providing an account of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, the ordinary language philosophy and its demise, the philosophical naturalism of W.V. Quine, the theory of meaning of Donald Davidson, and finally Saul Kripke's seminal philosophy of language and its wide-ranging implications. The book contains also a short epilogue outlining the direction taken by analytic philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The two volumes of Soames' account of contemporary analytic tradition are packed with lucid, sophisticated and detailed discussions of various views of major thinkers of that tradition. However, besides these merits the book by Soames has several weaker points. It defines analytic philosophy in a rather loose and unspecific manner, as well as gives an arbitrarily selective and unbalanced account of its recent developments.
In various accounts of contemporary and recent philosophy W.V.O. Quine is presented as a towering figure which to a large extent shaped the philosophical landscape of the second half of the twentieth century, at least as far as the Anglo-American philosophy goes. There are, however, two different, and to some extent incompatible, ways of construing his thought in the historical perspective. The prevailing view is that although he was highly critical of logical positivism, and even brought this powerful philosophical movement to an end, he should be seen as a pupil and follower of Rudolf Carnap. Nevertheless taking into account his Harvard milieu, and the concluding paragraph of his famous 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', where Quine declared that by washing out the boundary between the analytic and the synthetic he put forward a more thorough pragmatism, he is quite often portrayed as a characteristically pragmatist thinker. In his later writings Quine distanced himself from the latter construal, insisting that it is not clear to him what it takes to be a pragmatist. He also admitted that his knowledge of classical pragmatism was limited: 'I must say that I have not read widely in it. Some of it came through in a modified form from C. I. Lewis, who taught me during one of my two years of graduate study'. The auyhor thinks that this passing remark is a useful historical hint that can shed a new light on Quine's pragmatism by construing it almost exclusively in the context of Lewis' philosophy, and its distinctively pragmatic features.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.