ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-century Philosophy 3- Bolzano and Husserl: Semantic, Conceptual and Phenomenological Analysis As the papers in Part One confirm, analytic philosophy as we understand it today has its origins in the work of Frege, Russell and Moore around the turn of the twentieth century, and as the papers in Part Two show, that work was developed in various ways as analytic philosophy blossomed in the period that followed.

As we have also seen, however, the founders of analytic philosophy were not operating in a vacuum. They were both reacting against earlier forms of philosophy and yet at the same time subtly transforming certain key conceptions that they inherited, such as the decompositional conception of analysis associated with Kant, in particular. A proper understanding of the nature and development of analytic philosophy thus requires situating it in the broader historical context.

One important philosopher active in the period between Kant and early analytic philosophy is Bolzano, who was born in the year that the Critique of Pure Reason was published and died in the year that Frege was born.

Although Bolzano had no direct influence on the founders of analytic philosophy, many of his ideas anticipated ideas that we now treat as characteristic of analytic philosophy, and he offered a powerful critique of Kant’s philosophy, as Sandra Lapointe shows in ‘Bolzano’s Semantics and his Critique of the Decompositional Conception of Analysis’.

Lapointe begins by elucidating the decompositional conception of analysis that can be found in Kant’s discussion of analyticity, and identifies what Bolzano took to be responsible for the inadequacies of this conception, namely, the deficient understanding of the distinction between the properties of objects and the constituents of concepts.

Bolzano’s critique of Kant is grounded in his own semantic theory, and Lapointe goes on to explain some of the main elements of this theory, focusing, in particular, on his conceptions of ‘Proposition’ (‘ Satz an sich ’) and ‘Idea’ (‘ Vorstellung an sich ’) and his account of analyticity.

In the case of the former, there are instructive comparisons to be made with Frege’s conception of sense ( Sinn ), and Lapointe clarifies the process of analysis that Bolzano saw as required to exhibit the Proposition expressed by an ordinary sentence as used on a given occasion.