Huraian
This anthology collects some of the most important contributions to contemporary analytic philosophy. Both "contemporary" and "analytic" can be given contrastive definitions. That is, I mean "contemporary" as opposed to "modern," and thus my selections are taken from the past century or so. I mean "analytic" as distinct from "continental" philosophy, though with some caveats. First, I do not want this anthology to contribute to the split between philosophy in English-speaking countries and elsewhere. This antagonism has decreased in the past couple of decades to mutual benefit. Second, some of the greatest analytic philosophers were from Europe, particularly Austria and Germany, and need to be understood against a background of philosophical activity that includes continental post-Kantian philosophy. As Michael Dummett recently remarked, "The sources of analytical philosophy were the writings of philosophers who wrote, principally or exclusively, in the German language; and this would have remained obvious to everyone had it not been for the plague of Nazism which drove so many German-speaking philosophers across the Atlantic" (1993, p. ix). The idea of analytic philosophy clearly rests on some notion ofanalysis.Analysis consists of breaking down a complex system into its component parts, thereby making the underlying elements and the relations between them explicit. The method of analysis was modeled on chemical analysis, whereby a compound decomposes into its ultimate constituents. The properties of the compound are explained in terms of its elements and their interrelations. The aim of philosophical analysis was to become clear about what was being said or thought. The new logic provided a systematic means for doing this, providing a perspicuous representation of sentences and the patterns of inference to and from each one. This, it was hoped, would prevent wooly speculation, and reveal grand metaphysical theories to be built on sand. While the notion of analysis was prevalent from the beginnings of the movement, the specific expression "analytic (or analytical) philosophy" entered common usage only in the 1950s. In other words, the classification is virtually retroactive, since by that time any substantive or methodological unity had long dispersed into a wide variety of approaches. We can identify several roots of what we now regard as the analytic tradition. First, in Germany, there was the rejection of psychologism by Gottlob Frege, as summarized in his dictum, "Always separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective:" That is, by making a strict distinction between logic on the one hand, and epistemology and psychology on the other, he separated the act of thinking from the content of thoughts themselves. Philosophy is concerned only with the latter. Second, in England, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell urged a return to the method of analysis in place of the dialectical methods of the then dominant Absolute Idealists such as F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart (whose middle initial "M," incidentally, stood for "McTaggart"). Moore and Russell opposed "the dependence of the object of knowledge on the knower, the monism of the Absolute, the coherence theory of truth, the unreality of relations and the doctrine of internal relations" (Hacker 1998, p.15). Third, there was the development of formal logic and its application to natural languages, firstly by Frege and then by Russell. Frege's criticisms of psychologism were allied to his new conception of logic as the systematic study of patterns of valid inference. Russell held that ordinary language disguised the true logical form of the propositions expressed, and that this was a major cause of philosophical error. Russell and Moore represent two sides of an ongoing tension in analytic philosophy in the first part of this century in that they disagree over the status of ordinary natural languages. Russ