At the beginning of the analytic tradition...

At the beginning of the analytic tradition, Kant’s critique of reason provided both a model and an inspiration for practitioners of the newly developed methods of logical and grammatical analysis.

This influence was felt not only by philosophers like Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle (whose training and background in the Neo-Kantianism of Cohen, Natorp and Rickert played a decisive role in determining the Circle’s project) but just as much by the young Wittgenstein, who saw in the new methods of analysis pioneered by Frege and Russell the possibility of conceiving of all philosophy as linguistic critique: All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense).

It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.[^275] Like Kant’s own project, the methods of this new form of linguistic critique would seek to elucidate and demonstrate the necessary forms of the representation of facts, and thereby to gain an understanding of their a priori conditions and the limits of their possibilities.

But the definitive inspiration of the new practice of critique was that this form could be grasped as logical or linguistic one, and so could be clarified through the newly developed methods of analysis. The Russellian theory of descriptions itself was a limited case, bearing only on the question of the actual significance of a certain class of apparently referring propositions, and eventually to be undermined by its own set of seeming counterexamples.

But for Wittgenstein as well as other early analytic philosophers, it provided an essential early demonstration of the bearing of the methods of analysis on the clarification of language, the illumination of its “real” possibilities of meaning over against the tendency of ordinary language to obscure or falsely assimilate these forms.

Such was the singularity of Wittgenstein’s insight, or the specificity of his historical position, that he could see philosophy’s problems as entirely and universally grounded in such linguistic obscurities and illusions.