The early history of analytic philosophy.

The founding myth of analytic philosophy.

When I first began learning about analytic philosophy, I was taught its founding myth. That founding myth goes something like this (exaggerated in style for effect, but I believe accurate in its content).

By the turn of the 20th century, idealism had conquered Europe. Kant’s legacy loomed large over philosophy. The German academies were ruled by the neo-Kantians and the British academies were ruled by the British idealists. These idealists brought philosophy to speculative extremes. For example, some idealists denied the reality of seemingly apparent objects (e.g. this table or this chair), instead supposing that they were just appearances of the underlying reality, the Absolute.

Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, then the promising next generation of British philosophers, rebelled against these metaphysical speculations. They freed themselves to rediscover the reality and vividity of the world — the greenness of grass, the light of the stars. Moore began the charge, delivering broadside after broadside against the idealist establishment. Then, Russell took up the work of the logician Gottlob Frege and realized that it represented the potential to found a new philosophy, one based on formal rigor and clarity of thought. The young philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein came to study with Russell and Moore, quickly becoming one of the leading luminaries of the new analytic philosophy. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represented the crowning glory of those first brilliant years.

Across the ocean, in Vienna, a group of scientifically inclined philosophers were watching these developments with great interest. They began organizing seminars on Wittgenstein’s work. Soon, they would organize into the Vienna Circle, full of philosophers aiming to achieve this same formal rigor and clarity of thought through their logical positivism. The Circle sought to create a logical foundation for philosophy and eliminate metaphysical speculation on principled grounds.

Back in Britain, a new generation of philosophers had grown up in Russell and Moore’s new tradition. Among them was the English philosopher Ayer, who discovered the work of the Vienna Circle and brought it to the Anglophone world in his Language, Truth, and Logic. The work was received stunningly well, allowing new ideas from the Vienna Circle to enter discourse in the British tradition.

Those heady days in which all seemed possible were brought to a sordid end with the rise of Nazism. The greatest luminaries of the Vienna Circle (many of whom were Jewish) one by one died or fled — fled west, across the wide ocean to America. There, they spread the teachings of logical positivism across prominent American universities. They met with eager converts and trained a new generation of philosophers who would go on to define American philosophy in the postwar age.

Thus, though extinguished in the German-speaking world, analytic philosophy took root across the Anglosphere, where it remains the dominant tradition today.

This narrative is a triumphalist one (probably more triumphalist than the presentation given in most introductory classes, even if it is built from the same components). It traces the founding of analytic philosophy first to Frege, then to the “revolt against idealism” undertaken by Russell and Moore in Britain. The logical positivists are presented as a consequence of two factors — first, the emerging analytic movement in Britain; second, the revolutions in physics happening concurrently.

The largest omission from my version of the narrative is the almost immediate downfall of logical positivism in the postwar world. This fact is hardly omitted from most introductory classes on analytic philosophy, as it usually comprises the majority of the content of said classes — the turn from logical positivism to the more modest pragmatically-inflected philosophies of the postwar world.

Even the early analytic philosophers themselves tell a version of this narrative. Many years after the fact, Russell wrote, reflecting on his development,

Moore took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. {…} With a sense of escaping from prison we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, [and] that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them. {…} The world, which had been thin and logical, suddenly became rich and varied.

Thus, analytic philosophy is taken a) to have made a decisive break with its philosophical inheritance and b) to have emerged as a self-conscious tradition with relatively unified aims.

Lingering questions.

But neither of these claims is entirely true. Moreover, the narrative presented above leaves open a number of questions about the content and force of the new analytic philosophy. I take the main ones to be —

1. What factors led to the revolt against idealism? In particular, why did analytic philosophy take the shape it did — what influenced early analytic philosophy? Moreover, why did the rejection of British idealism happen when it did?
2. Similarly, why did logical positivism emerge when and where it did? What was its engagement with existing German academic philosophy?
3. How did the early British analytics entrench themselves in British academia if the idealists were really such a powerful force? How did Russell and Moore find readers, let alone adherents?
4. Similarly, how did analytic philosophy entrench itself in American academia during and after the Second World War? What forces were present in American philosophy prior to its capture by the analytic movement, and how did they make way for analytic philosophy?

These questions show us that the birth of analytic philosophy was in actuality a much more complicated affair.

As I’ve done more reading into this question, I’ve come across four distinct philosophical strands which combined to create analytic philosophy.

1. The Brentano school. Brentano was both a philosopher and psychologist, influential in the formation of psychology as a discipline. His act psychology provided the basic materials for much of Moore’s realism, founded in a surprisingly strict and surprisingly metaphysical mereology. Brentano is also upstream of Russell through Meinong.
2. Frege’s logicism. Frege was a philosopher, mathematician, and logician who is often credited with the invention of first order logic (alongside Peirce, who developed it independently). Frege and other logicists like Peano and Dedekind were a major influence on both Russell and the Vienna Circle, and are upstream of the often-touted (though less often substantiated) relationship between analytic philosophy and logic.
3. Mach’s empirio-criticism. Mach was a physicist and philosopher of science. His empirio-criticism represented a significant reaction by the scientific community towards the idealist philosophy which had captured it. It was this reaction that formed the basis for the Vienna Circle (an initial organization of which was titled the “Verein Ernst Mach” in his honor).
4. American pragmatism. Pragmatism was the dominant philosophy in America prior to the development of analytic philosophy. Pragmatism has two better-accepted entrypoints into analytic philosophy — the first through Rorty and the explicitly self-avowed neopragmatists; the second (perhaps more contentious) through philosophers like Quine and Sellars. Besides these, there are also two other ways in which I take pragmatism to have influenced earlier developments in analytic philosophy — first, the debt owed by Oxford ordinary-language philosophers (e.g. Ryle and Austin) to American pragmatism; second, the influence of American pragmatism on Ramsey and Wittgenstein.

Of these strands, the only one emphasized in the story told above is (2), Frege’s logicism. Frege’s logicism forms the backbone of a self-narrative in which analytic philosophy is seen as a tradition made distinct by its strong connection with symbolic logic. But the absence of symbolic logic in much of analytic philosophy should call into question the centrality of the Fregean strand. Finally, to these strands, we should add some non-philosophical developments which have varying degrees of emphasis — the birth of modern physics, the crisis in the foundations of mathematics, and the birth of psychology.

Ultimately, we should view analytic philosophy as a part of the broader European philosophical conversation. Analytic philosophy is not, as we often let ourselves believe (even if our best scholars say otherwise), an ex nihilo development. Instead, analytic philosophy is one of many responses to the world Kant left behind in his Copernican Revolution — if nevertheless a response which took the form of a revolution of similar scale and impact on the philosophy to come.

I hope to cover each of these strands more in notes to come.