The Analytic Turn
Analytic philosophy was a philosophical movement that was especially strong in England and the United States in the twentieth century. Analytic philosophy concentrated on language and the attempt to analyze statements in order to get clear about philosophical problems.
It was once said that “Philosophers raise a dust and then they complain that they cannot see.” Analytic philosophers tried to solve the problem and clear the dust by getting clear about the language they use. They sought to break down statements and concepts into their clearest logical forms.
In the twenty-first century the analytic approach to philosophy continues to be the dominant trend in philosophy in the English-speaking world. In the early part of the twentieth century and continuing on through today, a number of philosophers have held the conviction that clarifying language — and making it unambiguous and concise — is the most pressing and important task of philosophy. This movement is known as
One, the philosophers thought science had taken over much of the territory formerly occupied by philosophy. If various special sciences had taken over the acquisition of knowledge about the world, then the only task that remained for philosophy was to clarify linguistic meaning. As Mortiz Schlick, an early member of the analytic movement, put it, “Science should be defined as the pursuit of truth” and philosophy as “the pursuit of meaning.”
Even if Schlick's conclusion contains a kernel of truth, there are still many questions that philosophy considers and these questions have not been subsumed by the special sciences. These include but are not limited to: questions in normative and applied ethics; arguments about the nature and existence of God; the issue of free will versus determinism; issues in the philosophy of mind, including mind-body interaction. These issues are still the special province of philosophy.
A second reason for the linguistic turn in philosophy is the new and more powerful methods of logic that had been developed in the twentieth century. These methods promised to shed new light on some of the old philosophical stalemates. With these logical techniques, expressions that appeared to be meaningful propositions, but that were actually vague, equivocal, misleading, or nonsensical, could be exposed and eliminated by careful analysis.
One striking example of this tendency is the philosophy of A. J. Ayer and the movement known as
