Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Beaney, Michael. Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
◆ Philosophical questions
▪ philosophers have approached these questions with attention to the workings of language and awareness of the multifarious ways in which language can mislead us. It is this approach that is characteristic of what has come to be called 'analytic philosophy'.
◆ Things and kinds of things
▪ If it is not immediately obvious how to answer a given question, then we need to identify its possible meanings.
◆ Introducing Gottlob Frege
▪ number statements are assertions about concepts.
▪ the property of having an instance is a logical property
◆ Interpretive analysis
▪ analysis, all three dimensions—interpretive, decompositional and regressive
◆ Can ‘good’ be defined?
▪ The central question of Principia Ethica is ‘What is good?’, and Moore’s main claim is that ‘good’ is indefinable, or, as it might also be put, that goodness is unanalysable and hence has to be regarded as a simple quality.
▪ Are ethical questions ones that can be answered by using the methods and results of natural science? Those who say ‘yes’ are called naturalists
◆ Sense and reference
▪ What Frege said is that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ have the same reference (they both refer to Venus) but different senses.
◆ So do you know what I mean?
▪ Moore's open question argument, we noted, makes a key assumption: that if you understand the meanings of two phrases, then you can immediately tell whether those meanings are the same or not.
◆ Some difficulties in saying things
▪ Things fall into different categories and what can be legitimately said of things in one category cannot necessarily be said of things in a different category.
◆ Saying and showing
▪ Wittgenstein's response is to suggest that such things can only be shown, not said. (In German, the distinction is between zeigen and sagen.) That there is a distinction between object and class, or between object and concept, for example, cannot be said, but it can nevertheless be shown in an appropriate symbolism
◆ What is it to say something?
▪ On Wittgenstein’s view, a sentence, when used to express a sense, is a kind of picture: it presents a possible state of affairs—a way that the world could be. If that state of affairs does indeed obtain—if the world is indeed that way—then the sentence is true; if the state of affairs does not obtain, then the sentence is false.
◆ Is metaphysics nonsense?
▪ logical empiricists appealed to what they termed the doctrine of verificationism: a proposition has meaning if and only if it can be verified, that is, its truth or falsity can in principle be determined by experience.
▪ The logical empiricists endorsed this view: metaphysical propositions are neither synthetic, since they cannot be verified, nor analytic, since they are not true or false solely in virtue of meaning, and are therefore meaningless.
◆ So are there limits to what we can say or think?
▪ the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein felt, arise through misunderstanding of these rules—from the failure to understand the logic of our language, as he put it.
◆ Taking stock
▪ clarity of thinking is manifested in precision of expression.
◆ So how can we think more clearly?
▪ How can we think more clearly?
▪ read—and learn the lessons from—a book on logic.
◆ So what is analytic philosophy?
▪ analytic philosophy is above all a way of doing philosophy, exemplifying certain virtues and using the new methods that came from the development of modern logic.
◆ Ordinary language philosophy
▪ Besides Wittgenstein, three philosophers stand out as representatives of ‘ordinary language philosophy’: Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), J. L. Austin (1911–60), and P. F. Strawson (1919–2006), all of whom were based in Oxford.
◆ Ideal language philosophy and scientific philosophy
▪ Let me single out three philosophers to give a sense of developments in analytic philosophy in post-war America: W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), Donald Davidson (1917–2003), and Hilary Putnam