The Analytic Tradition

 
 


This course introduces analytic philosophy, the primary style of doing philosophy since roughly 1900 in the English-speaking world. We will examine some of the key thinkers and texts in that tradition and evaluate their arguments and theories.


Analytic philosophy focuses on themes and methods with a long philosophical history: Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Bentham, and Mill are all in a sense analytic philosophers. But the contemporary analytic tradition began with a rebellion against the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and other thinkers, which had dominated the 19th century. Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, began the attack, using logical tools to undermine idealist accounts of mathematics, language, and logic while posing new philosophical puzzles. G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead soon joined the attack, as did Ludwig Wittgenstein and the philosophers of the Vienna and Berlin Circles. Moore and Russell defended realism, the view that some things are independent of mind, and developed comprehensive philosophical views. The Vienna Circle, in contrast, tended to think of philosophical problems as arising from misuses of language, and saw the analysis of language as the key to their solution. They took scientific language as their model. Hume was their hero. Metaphysics became a bad word, and epistemology became the philosophy of science. Ethics sank into disrepute.


Around mid-century, a group of philosophers centered at Oxford focused instead on natural language, and developed philosophical perspectives granting it center stage. Around the same time, Carl Hempel recounted the difficulties the philosophers of the Vienna Circle faced in making their ideas about meaningfulness precise. W. V. O. Quine began his attack on the central theses that Moore, Russell, and Vienna Circle thinkers shared. Wilfrid Sellars launched a more general assault against their atomism. Wittgenstein dramatically reshaped his earlier views on language.


Saul Kripke and David Lewis, finally, introduced ways of understanding necessity and normativity that brought basic questions of metaphysics back to the fore.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.


Required Texts


Many readings for this course will be available online. But these books are required:


Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic

W. V. O. Quine, Quintessence

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity

Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language


Additional readings will be from Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell. G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel, P. F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfrid Sellars, David Lewis, Gareth Evans, Scott Soames, Paul Boghossian, and Simon Blackburn.


PHL 327  CTI 335   MWF 1:00pm, CLA 0.106


The Professor


Daniel Bonevac is Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin. His book Reduction in the Abstract Sciences received the Johnsonian Prize from The Journal of Philosophy. The author of six books and editor or co-editor of four others, Professor Bonevac's articles include “Against Conditional Obligation” (Noûs), "Sellars v. the Given" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), "Reflection Without Equilibrium," (Journal of Philosophy), "Free Choice Permission Is Strong Permission" (Synthese, with Nicholas Asher), "The Conditional Fallacy," (Philosophical Review, with Josh Dever and David Sosa), “The Counterexample Fallacy” (Mind, also with Dever and Sosa), “A History of Quantification” (Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 11), “A History of the Connectives” (Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 11, with Josh Dever), “Fictionalism” (Handbook of the Philosophy of Mathematics, Volume 4), and “The Argument from Miracles” and “Two Theories of Analogical Predication” (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion), “Heidegger’s Map” (Academic Questions), “Arguments from Reference, Content, and Knowledge,” in T. Dougherty and J. Walls (ed.), Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press), “Quantifiers Defined by Parametric Extensions” (Journal of Philosophical Logic, with Hans Kamp), and “Defaulting on Reasons” (Noûs).


WAG 403, Monday 2-4; bonevac@austin.utexas.edu


Video Resources


Class sessions will be recorded and available on a playlist on my YouTube channel:


The Analytic Tradition playlist


Here are additional online lectures you might find useful:


Stephen Neale on Russell’s Theory of Descriptions

A. J. Ayer on Logical Positivism

Brian Magee interviews W. V. O. Quine

Panel discussion including W. V. O. Quine

Panel discussion including W. V. O. Quine

Panel discussion including W. V. O. Quine

Robert Brandom on Wilfrid Sellars

John McDowell on the Myth of the Given



 

Course Description