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This chapter discusses the two types of philosophy, natural and analytical. Natural philosophy, now called natural science or simply science, deals with things found in nature and it does not require much exercise of the imagination. Analytical philosophy, on the other hand, deals with conceptual analysis. It often involves the intellectual taking to pieces of concepts or ideas, discovering the elements and components of an idea or concept and examination of how they are related. There are different perceptions of an analytical philosopher including one involved in conceptual geography or conceptual mapping or charting, and one involved in therapy to cure certain characteristic kinds of intellectual disorder.

This paper argues that historians of philosophy must coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. Two concepts are introduced: “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and “philosophic prophecy.” “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” explains that from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy. “Philosophic prophecy,” comprises the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. The second half of the paper offers a fresh narrative about the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. Ernest Nagel is treated as the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy his views are compared to those of Moritz Schlick.

This chapter discusses the different forms or objectives of a positive systematic analytical theory or conceptual analysis. Based on analogy with chemical and syntactical analyses, it appears that the task of analytical philosophy is to find ideas that are completely simple and free from internal conceptual complexity, and to demonstrate how the more or less complex ideas that are of interest to philosophers can be assembled by a kind of logical or conceptual construction out of the simple elements. From this, it can be said that the role of an analytical philosopher is to get a clear grasp of complex meanings through reduction, which seems a rather implausible task.

This chapter focuses on H. L. A. Hart's experiences as Chair of Jurisprudence at University College. Herbert's inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, ‘Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence’, delivered in 1953, which laid out the positive and substantive agenda which he saw as defining the autonomous terrain of a jurisprudence informed by analytical philosophy. The lecture set out Herbert's stall as a linguistic philosopher prepared both to bring the insights of philosophy to law, and to exploit his legal understanding to generate a fund of examples suitable for philosophical analysis.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the New Cultural History, a movement commonly described as history's response to the growing influence of radical, continental conceptions of language. It argues that cultural history's reception of French structural linguistics and post-structuralism was shaped by earlier linguistic turns in American anthropology and analytic philosophy. It notes that language, along with culture, perhaps the most important keyword of the human sciences in the twentieth century, had a lengthy history in North America, where academic and popular studies of linguistics were strongly formed by ethnographic encounters with racial difference. It discusses that some of the most radical renditions of language came not from the deconstructive inclinations of literary critics but from analytical philosophy's encounters with popular anthropology. As a result, when historians began to borrow idioms and phrases from anthropology, they entered a semantic field in which language, art, and racial difference had grown tightly together.

Chapter 7 considers the consequences of the Parmenidean Ascent with regard to meaning for the alleged distinction between philosophy and the study of its history. The argument that any such distinction is unintelligible focuses on the disregard of the history of philosophy in certain quarters of analytical philosophy. The argument identifies three pillars or struts of analytical philosophy: realism, the method of intuition or common sense, and discreteness in metaphysics. The chapter then shows how each of these three struts is implicated in the disdain for or ignoring of the history of philosophy. Rejecting an isolationist response to this analytical forgetfulness—a response that separates the study of the history of philosophy from philosophy itself—the chapter goes on to challenge the struts of analytical philosophy and to make a Parmenidean Ascent with regard to the distinction between philosophy and the study of its history.

This chapter presents a memoir of G. A. Cohen, who died on August 5, 2009. Cohen was born on April 14, 1941, into a Jewish Marxist family, and his life and character were woven into his philosophical work in an unusual way. His upbringing, his family, his Jewishness (as distinct from Judaism), and his need to position his own beliefs in relation to Karl Marx and to Soviet Communism all played central roles in his life and work. Armed with the techniques of analytical philosophy, Cohen began his earliest project, resulting in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, in which he sets out a clear account of the core of Marx's theory of history. This chapter considers Cohen's other writings which articulate his views on subjects ranging from capitalism and socialism to freedom and the nature and consequences of the thesis of self-ownership.

This book offers a new interpretation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Science of Logic in order to elucidate the problem that underlies Hegel’s critique of traditional rationalism. It examines issues such as Hegelian dialectical ontology and its relation to the broader theoretical doctrines of post-Tractarian analytical philosophy, or whether modern science is itself dialectical. It analyzes Hegel’s dialectico-speculative logic and his rejection of formalism, along with his attitude towards metaphilosophy in the context of philosophy. It discusses three main problems, central to the history of Western philosophy, which Hegel claims to solve without resorting to traditional or nondialectical thinking: the problem of analysis, the problem of reference, and whether there is a logic that is appropriate to the conceptualization of the unity of the process of life. These three problems can be reformulated into one general problem: how to overcome the nihilism resulting from Eleatic monism on one hand, and of Platonic-Aristotelian dualism on the other.

Does Holmes’s social inductivism have an account of validation, or the justification of legal knowledge? Holmes viewed struggle as inevitable. Conflicts of principle imply social problems, which must somehow be resolved. War was the result of failure of resolution by consensual means. This implies a radical dialectic in the growth of human knowledge. Unlike Hegel, and analytical pragmatist writers like Robert Brandom, Holmes fully naturalizes the dialectic. Validation is radically inductive; it lies in the growth of knowledge by empirical and cooperative solution of human problems. Holmes is among the few writers who have elaborated the relevance of conflict to human knowledge, and is the first to introduce a conflict model of empiricism and logical induction. His famous skepticism adds a cautionary realism to Mill’s meliorism, emphasizing the precarious nature of the human endeavor. Its meliorist dimension lies in the insight that human conflict is not inherently violent and grounded in vengeance, but has itself been subject to transformation, as reflected in the evolution of liability in English common law. Restraint and humility in the face of yet-incomplete experience provides the only reliable path for judges in intractable controversies, and ultimately for the survival and flourishing of the human race.

This chapter attempts to establish the thesis that analytical legal philosophy is not an exercise in conceptual analysis. While conceptual analysis may have played some role in H. L. A. Hart's jurisprudence, it was rather tangential to the main project of his theory. Hart's main objective in The Concept of Law was not essentially different from that of Austin, namely, to provide a reductionist theory of law. The main purpose of Hart's theory was to offer an explanation of law in terms of something more foundational in nature, that is, in terms of social facts, which, in turn, can be explained by reference to people's actual conduct, beliefs, and attitudes. Hart's objection to Austin's reductionism was not to the idea of reduction but to the particular building blocks that Austin used in articulating his theory. The chapter argues that the main methodological thrust of legal positivism is reductionism, not conceptual analysis. And the main objections to legal positivism are best seen as a denial of the possibility of such a reduction.

While Cold War philosophy itself was relatively short lived, its repercussions continued in American intellectual life, Later representatives of analytical philosophy such as Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and W. V. O. Quine appropriated insights from it piecemeal into their own programs; others, such as John Rawls, gave it a more central place. But it was never faced and critically discussed as a whole, which meant that some of its basic premises stayed in place. As the academy at large emerged from the Sixties, Cold War philosophy’s dispassionate and ahistorical view of reason came under attack in from feminists and members of minority groups, who asserted that their particular identities went all the way to their cores; reason was not merely mathematical but to some degree partisan. A quote from UCLA chancellor Franklin Murphy shows how the departments of American universities, shaped by Cold War philosophy, were unable to accommodate this, resulting in a proliferation of programs such as those in African-American, Chicano, LGBT, and Women’s Studies, as women and minorities sought places to articulate their standpoints.

This paper explains and defends F.H. Bradley’s central argument in Appearance and Reality, i.e. his infinite regress argument concerning relations. Relata depend on other relata which depend on other relata and so on. Since Bradley’s argument claims that relations have to be grounded, and he can find no rational grounding given such regress and circularity of relations, he concludes relations are not real. Bradley thus emerges as an idealist and a monist; like the ancient philosopher Parmenides and many succeeding philosophers, he rejects diversity and multiplicity in favor of an underlying unity. Bradley’s central argument is strong and therefore the founding story of analytical philosophy, according to which Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore vanquished the hapless Bradley, is nothing more than a founding myth.