In the final section of his paper...

In the final section of his paper, Hacker takes issue with Timothy Williamson’s recent suggestion that analytic philosophy has now taken a ‘representational turn’, repudiating the earlier ‘linguistic turn’. Hacker clarifies what was involved in the linguistic turn and defends its essential achievement, which was to make the meticulous examination of language a central method of philosophy.

He criticizes Williamson’s claim that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of representation, and indicates why he thinks that the revival of metaphysics that Williamson associates with the representational turn is a retrograde step. The aim of philosophy, Hacker concludes, “is the clarification of the forms of sense that, in one way or another, are conceptually puzzling - for they are legion” (p. [19] below).

Although Hacker may be cautious in characterizing the state of analytic philosophy today, it seems to me that, whether or not there is now a new strand that has taken a representational turn, analytic philosophy is alive and well in the work of Hacker and all those for whom connective analysis continues to play a central role.

In ‘Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Fate of Analysis’, Robert Hanna traces what he sees as the main development in conceptions of analysis from Kant to the later Wittgenstein via the Tractatus . He begins by outlining what he calls Kant’s ‘conceptual-decompositional’ theory of analysis, though stressing its subservience to Kant’s transcendental idealist project.

He then suggests that in rejecting both Kantian and Hegelian idealism, early analytic philosophy replaced this theory by the ‘logical-decompositional’ theory, which found its definitive statement in the logical atomism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus . As Hanna explains the Tractarian conception, logical analysis is concerned both to offer a critique of language and to reveal the deep structure of our language and thought; and it is in the latter respect that it differs from Kantian analysis.

In Kantian jargon, Hanna remarks, “Tractarian logical-decompositional analysis is noumenal analysis of things-in-themselves ”, aimed at establishing contact with the simple objects that make up the substance of the world (p. [12] below). Hanna goes on to discuss Wittgenstein’s later conception of analysis, which he sees as dropping the noumenalism.