How did we get here from there? The transformation of analytic philosophy

Abstract

Opponents of analytic philosophy often associate it with logical positivism. From a historical point of view, it is clear that one main strand in the development of the broad tradition known as 'analytic philosophy' was indeed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, with its austerely verificationist principle of significance and its exclusion of metaphysics as cognitively meaningless. Another main strand in the development of the analytic tradition, ordinary language philosophy, tended to be almost equally suspicious of the ways in which metaphysicians made free with ordinary words, far from the everyday contexts of use on which their meaning was supposed to depend. Despite that history, however, recent decades have seen the growth and flourishing of boldly speculative metaphysics within the analytic tradition. Far from being inhibited by logical positivist or ordinary language scruples, such analytic metaphysics might be described by those unsympathetic to it as pre-critical, ranging far outside the domain of our experience, closer in spirit to Leibniz than to Kant. How did a species of philosophy with so much anti-metaphysics in its gene pool evolve so quickly to the opposite extreme? Enough time has passed for us now to start achieving the historical perspective necessary to answer the question in a systematic way. That project is too extensive to be properly carried out in less than a book. In this paper, I attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. Especially in section II, I write as someone who lived through the latter stages of the process, and concentrate on