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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-century Philosophy [Introduction] One of the most important developments in twentieth-century philosophy - arguably, the most important development, at least in the English-speaking world - was the rise of analytic philosophy.

There has been increasing debate in recent years over what exactly ‘analytic philosophy’ means, as the term has been used in a wider and wider sense and it has become harder and harder to identify any common assumptions, methods or themes. But there is general agreement on its main sources: the work of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), G. E. Moore (1873-1958) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in the period from roughly 1880 to 1920.

(Frege’s first book, Begriffsschrift , setting out his new logic, was published in 1879; and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was published in 1921.) More specifically, the origins of analytic philosophy are often dated to the rebellion by Russell and Moore against British idealism at the turn of the twentieth century.

But there is little doubt that as Russell’s and Moore’s ideas were developed - in particular, as Russell became convinced that mathematics was really logic, and through Wittgenstein’s early work - Frege’s writings became increasingly influential.

In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein critically engages with Frege’s and Russell’s ideas above all else, with the result that both Frege and Wittgenstein have taken their place alongside Russell and Moore as the acknowledged founders of the analytic tradition. Central to Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against idealism was the emphasis placed on analysis, as the remark cited above from Russell’s My Philosophical Development indicates.

But both Russell and Moore were notoriously unclear as to what exactly ‘analysis’ meant, and they use the term in a number of ways throughout their writings. At the time of their rebellion, however, the decompositional conception was undoubtedly dominant: analysis was understood as the process of decomposing something into its constituent parts. This conception is explicit in Moore’s 1899 paper, ‘The Nature of Judgment’.

On the naïve realist view advocated in this paper, the world is composed of ‘concepts’, which are synthesized into propositions, both concepts and propositions being independent of us.