In my view...

In my view, the single most significant event in the development of analytic philosophy was not Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against idealism, but the appearance in 1905 of Russell’s theory of descriptions. Frank Ramsey rightly described this theory as a ‘paradigm of philosophy’ (1931, p. 263), a view that was endorsed by Moore (1959, p. 151).

What is crucial about the theory of descriptions is that it introduced a quite different conception of analysis, which might be characterized as a transformative or explicatory conception. Fundamental to the theory is the rephrasing of the sentence to be analyzed, a sentence of the form ‘The F is G ’, where ‘The F ’ represents the definite description, into a sentence of a quite different form.

To take Russell’s classic example, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is analyzed as ‘There is one and only one King of France, and whatever is King of France is bald’. There is nothing decompositional about this type of analysis. ‘The present King of France is bald’ is not being analyzed into ‘The present King of France’ and ‘is bald’, for example. The definite description is ‘analyzed away’: no such phrase appears in the analyzed sentence.

Again, though, the idea of transformative analysis itself was not new. It can be found in medieval logic, for example, and arguably goes back to Aristotle’s logic and ancient Greek geometry (which is the original source of talk of ‘analysis’). Indeed, in some sense, transformation is involved in all types of analysis.[^3] A good example of the idea in its pure form can be found in the conception of paraphrasis articulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

In his Essay on Logic (published posthumously, in 1843), Bentham wrote: “By the word paraphrasis may be designated that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity” (1843, p. 246). Bentham applied the method in ‘analyzing away’ talk of ‘obligations’ (cf. 1843, p.

247), and the similarities between Bentham’s method and Russell’s theory of descriptions have been discussed, most notably, by John Wisdom (1904-93) in a book devoted to just this relationship published in 1931.[^4] In its distinctive modern form, however, transformative analysis originated with Frege, which is why Frege has also come to be seen as one of the founders of analytic philosophy.