Philosophy - Analytic

Analytic Philosophy

20th Century school of thought, rejected traditional points; contend that the entire business of philosophy is analysis, philosophy consists of linguistic activity designed to eliminate problems arising from intellectual confusion and this to clarify the knowledge which we already possess; a non-metaphysical school of thought; a reaction against Idealism.

G. E. Moore - method of posing questions or problems to be analyzed, instead of postulating answers and solutions.

Most difficulties in philosophy are caused by “the attempt to answer questions without first discovering what question it is which you desire to answer”

- the task is to analyze and clarify ordinary language.

- the search for truth and discovery was replaced by the search for meaning and clarification and the examination of language.

Bertrand Russell - founded logical atomism, theory that the world consists of a number of simple facts, each independent of all the others yet related externally to the others.

Not facts, but propositions are true or false; proportions are symbols, not facts.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - in his later life he broke away from previous thinking (picture theory: basic analytic philosophy) and expounded a language-games theory.

Tractatus - a proposition is a picture of reality...a picture is a model of reality...a picture is a fact...the world is the totality of facts...the totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world; thus language is a picture of reality.

Later life - emphasised that the way in which a word is used, not its meaning as a name for some object, gives language and statements their validity.

John Wisdom - philosophy is essentially therapeutic activity designed to clarify the uses of language.

- philosophers present us with old facts in anew light, but do not discover new facts.

Oxford Philosophy - incorrect use of ordinary English is responsible for philosophical problems, and these can be solved only by “pointing” out the normal usage of the words employed and the normal grammatical form of the sentence in which they appear.  Ordinary language is correct language.

- concerned with the “elucidation of concepts” and the “logic of expressions”; dualism is the “dogma of the Ghost in the machine.”

Philosophy - Neo Realism and Critical Realism

Neo-Realism and Critical Realism

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) - reality is thought (a progressive development which is both active and creative: Neo-Hegelian) and philosophy is history (reality is identified with historical processes as it undergoes its evolutionary course creatively and with freedom).

- identified reality with self-creating mind; a self-creative mind alone exists.

- four aspects of reality (art, logic, social activity, evaluation of the past) inasmuch as reality is self-consciousness, philosophical activity itself creates reality.

Neo-realism - objects exist and their existence is not dependent upon any mind which happens to be conscious of them; emphasised Epistemological monism (based on the theory that the knowing process and the thing known are one and the same).

Naive realism - the belief that real things are precisely as they appear to us in consciousness

egocentric predicament - the “difficulty of conceiving objects apart from any consciousness”

- they attempt to separate metaphysics from epistemology by proving that the nature of real things is not found simply in the nature of knowledge.  Thus the emancipation of metaphysics from epistemology is seen as the “most notable” feature of Neo-realism; they have adopted a metaphysical pluralism (the existence of a variety of real objects possessing external relations to one another).

Critical realism as opposed to neo-realism advocated an epistemological dualism (the representative theory that the knower and the thing known are two distinct, separate entities, namely material objects and ideas or mental states).

George Edward Moore (1873-1958) - made a sharp distinction between consciousness and the thing perceived as the object of consciousness; the object known cannot be separated from the knowing process.

Bertrand Russell (1873-1958) - aim of Principia Mathematica was to verify the statements that all pure mathematics utilises concepts definable in logical terms only and that pure mathematics follows from purely logical premises.

- the existence of a real world beyond sense data cannot be proved.

Correspondence theory of truth - a belief is true if it agrees with the fact with which it is supposed to correspond.

Scientism - doctrine that all valid knowledge is attained through use of the scientific method and that whatever cannot be known scientifically cannot be known at all.

- values lie outside the domain of knowledge, they represent merely the venting of emotions.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) - reality consists of a multiplicity of objects; the universe is always in process.

concresence - process whereby this world of many things acquires integration or unity