Early Analytic Philosophy: Origins and Transformations

The past few decades have seen considerable interest in the history of analytic philosophy. As this field has developed, complex and provocative questions have emerged about the very nature of analytic philosophy, challenging longstanding assumptions and spawning new research paradigms.

In this outstanding collection, an international team of contributors examine these questions and contribute to these debates, exploring the idea of analysis, the essence and status of logic, the nature of the proposition and its linguistic expression, the logical act of judgment, the distinction between external and internal relations, the possibility of category mistakes, and the demarcation of sense from nonsense. Several of the chapters shed light on the interconnections between Wittgenstein and other figures within that tradition, including Frege, Russell, Ramsey, and Ryle. Other chapters examine the interaction between analytic philosophers and members of other philosophical traditions, including Frege and Weierstrass, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Bradley, Russell and the North American Pragmatists, Russell and the Neo-Kantians, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Heidegger and Ryle. Among the specific topics explored are Russell’s conception of the judging subject, Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following, Frege’s conception of the logical categories, and Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense.

The volume also includes a book review by Gilbert Ryle – collected and published non-anonymously here for the first time – which sheds important light on the reception of Frege’s philosophy in the analytic tradition.

Early Analytic Philosophy: Origins and Transformations will be of great interest to those studying and researching the history of twentieth-century philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of language and logic.

James F. Conant is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, USA.

Gilad Nir is a Lecturer at the University of Potsdam, Germany.