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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analytic philosophy | 8/18 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:19:43.103246+00:00 | kb-cron |
As the influence of logical positivism declined, analytic philosophers had a renewed interest in normative ethics. Contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. At first, consequentialism or utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical theory to remain popular among analytic philosophers. Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874) exemplified the common theory. Robert Nozick criticizes utilitarianism with the utility monster. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) restored interest in Kantian, deontological ethical philosophy. Thomas Nagel also defended deontology. Anscombe, Foot, and Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue (1981) sparked a revival of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach. This increased interest in virtue ethics has been dubbed by some the "aretaic turn". Similar to Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia, Władysław Tatarkiewicz proposed a conception of happiness as a full and lasting satisfaction with one's whole life.
=== Applied ethics === Since around 1970, a significant feature of analytic philosophy has been the emergence of applied ethics. Difficult cases are often created by new technology or new scientific knowledge. Topics of special interest include education, such as equal opportunity and punishment in schools, environmental ethics, animal rights, and the many challenges created by advancing medical science, such as abortion or euthanasia. Peter Singer argues for vegetarianism in the book Animal Liberation (1975).
== Political philosophy == One of the most influential figures in the philosophy of law was ordinary language philosopher H. L. A. Hart, who was instrumental in the development of legal positivism, popularized by his book The Concept of Law (1961). Influenced by Hart and Ronald Dworkin, Matthew Kramer also proposed ethical (or normative) legal positivism.
=== Liberalism ===
During World War II, Karl Popper defended the open society in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). Isaiah Berlin had a lasting influence with his lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958). Berlin defined 'negative liberty' as absence of coercion or interference in private actions. 'Positive liberty' could be thought of as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free from, but what we are free to do. Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who in a series of papers (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" (1955) and "Justice as Fairness" (1958)) and his book A Theory of Justice (1971) produced a sophisticated defense of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice. Rawls introduced the thought experiment of the veil of ignorance. Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) defends free-market libertarianism. It is notable for the Wilt Chamberlain argument. Nozick also famously considers an objection to the labor theory of property found in Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1689):
[W]hy isn't mixing what I own with what I don't own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don't? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?
=== Analytical Marxism === Another development was the school of analytical Marxism, which applies analytic techniques to the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member is G. A. Cohen, whose book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978) defends Marx's historical materialism, and is generally considered the genesis of the school. Cohen jettisons the labor theory of value, and describes the structure of proletarian unfreedom, emphasizing power and freedom rather than labor-power and value. Other prominent analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. These later philosophers furthered Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory. Although a continental philosopher, Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas is another influential—if controversial—author in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and pragmatism.
=== Communitarianism === Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel use analytic techniques to challenge liberal assumptions. In particular, communitarians challenge whether the individual can be considered apart from the community in which he is brought up and lives. While in the analytic tradition, its major exponents often also engage at length with figures generally considered continental, notably Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
=== Other critics of liberalism === Other critics of liberalism include the feminist critiques by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and the multiculturalist critiques by Amy Gutmann, Charles Taylor, and left-libertarians such as Hillel Steiner.
== Aesthetics == While pragmatist George Santayana wrote The Sense of Beauty (1896), and British idealist R. G. Collingwood developed a theory of aesthetic expressivism in The Principles of Art (1938), aesthetics was not addressed in the analytic style until the 1950s and 1960s, by the likes of Susanne Langer, Frank Sibley, Morris Weitz, and Nelson Goodman. Since Goodman and Languages of Art (1968), aesthetics as a discipline for analytic philosophers has flourished.