6.2 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analytic philosophy | 5/18 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:19:43.103246+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== China === Chinese philosopher Zhang Shenfu first introduced Russell's ideas to China, and later translated the Tractatus. In 1920, Russell visited China at the invitation of Liang Qichao. This begins the first phase of analytic philosophy in China. Tscha Hung then introduced logical positivism to China with The Philosophy of the Vienna Circle (1945). During the second phase, scholars such as Jin Yuelin and Hong Qian spread analytic philosophy, until Communist political pressure sidelined research. After the reform and opening up of the 1970s, analytic philosophy in China is now in its third phase, and is an active and growing area of study.
== Metaphysics == During the second half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy saw the demise of logical positivism and a revival of metaphysical theorizing.
=== Sellars === Kant scholar Wilfrid Sellars, the son of Roy Wood Sellars, "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Sellars's criticism of the "Myth of the Given", in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), challenged logical positivism by arguing against sense-data theories and knowledge by acquaintance. In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars's critical realism distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world. Sellars's goal of a synoptic philosophy uniting the everyday and scientific views of reality is the basis of what is sometimes called the Pittsburgh School, whose members include Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland.
=== Quine ===
Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine shaped much of subsequent philosophy and is recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He is regularly cited as the greatest philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, or the next great philosopher after Wittgenstein. Quine was a student of Carnap. He was an empiricist who sought to naturalize philosophy and saw philosophy as continuous with science, distinguished only by philosophy being the most general science. However, Quine doubted usual theories of meaning, and, instead of logical positivism, advocated a kind of semantic holism and ontological relativity, which explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world.
==== Word and Object ==== In his magnum opus Word and Object (1960), Quine introduces the idea of radical translation, an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the inscrutability of reference. The gavagai thought experiment tells about a linguist, who tries to find out what the expression gavagai means when uttered by a speaker of a yet-unknown native language upon seeing a rabbit. At first glance, it seems that gavagai simply translates with rabbit. Quine points out there is no way to tell that the speaker did not mean, for instance, "undetached rabbit-part" (such as its ear) as well as several other scenarios.
==== On What There Is ==== Quine's essay on ontology, "On What There Is" (1948) elucidates Russell's theory of descriptions. Quine uses Pegasus instead of "the present King of France" and dubs the problem of nonexistence Plato's beard. The essay contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable". One is committed to the entities his theory posits by use of the existential quantifier, like "There are some so-and-sos". Other parts of speech do not commit one to entities and so for Quine are syncategorematic.
==== Two Dogmas of Empiricism ==== Also among the developments that resulted in the decline of logical positivism and the revival of metaphysics was Quine's attack on the analytic–synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), published in The Philosophical Review, a paper "sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper made Quine the most dominant philosopher in America before Kripke.
=== Kripke ===
Saul Kripke is widely regarded as having revived theories of essence and identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion. He was influential in arguing that flaws in common theories of descriptions and proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of modality, or of necessity and possibility. Modal logic was developed by pragmatist C. I. Lewis to deal with the paradoxes of material implication. Carnap also contributed to modal logic with works like Meaning and Necessity (1947). Ruth Barcan Marcus introduced the now standard "box" operator for necessity and "diamond" operator for possibility in her treatment of the Barcan formula. Kripke provided a semantics for modal logic; he and Barcan both argued identity is a necessary relation.
==== Naming and Necessity ==== Especially important was Kripke's book Naming and Necessity (1980). According to one author, Naming and Necessity "played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language." Kripke argued proper names are rigid designators, or designate the same thing in all possible worlds, unlike descriptions. For example, an election may have turned out differently, so the description "winner of the 1968 US presidential election" might have designated Hubert Humphrey instead of Richard Nixon. However, the name "Richard Nixon" designates the man Richard Nixon, regardless of the election results. Kant stated in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that necessity is the criterion for a priori knowledge. Kripke argued that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H2O, or gold is atomic number 79. Kripke and Quine's colleague Hilary Putnam argued for realism about natural kinds. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment is used to argue water is a natural kind.
=== David Lewis ===