| |
This module focuses on themes relating to language, thought, and world, and how these developed throughout twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and will also discuss some connections with computer science. We will begin by discussing the work of the founders of the analytic tradition: Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, including their motivations and their projects such as Realism, Logicism, and Logical Atomism. An emphasis will be placed on the early Wittgenstein’s work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Next, we see how this was taken to extremes in the work of the Logical Positivists, before being overtaken by even more radical kinds of empiricism such as that of Quine. We focus in particular on debates regarding the notion of a priori knowledge and the Carnap-Quine debate regarding analyticity. We then discuss the later Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, and how his work over the intervening period had influenced yet another movement, that of Ordinary Language Philosophy. In the final part of the module, we will discuss Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, and developments in analytic metaphysics and recent analytic philosophy, before turning to consider the question “What is Analytic Philosophy?”.
|
TOPICS IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
