While continental Europe was producing dramatic, system-destroying thinkers, the English-speaking world took a different path. Instead of declaring war on the whole tradition, several philosophers decided that the tradition had largely been talking nonsense because it had never properly understood its own language.
Bertrand Russell and the Dream of Logical Clarity
Bertrand Russell began as a mathematician and idealist. He ended as one of the most influential critics of idealism and one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. Together with G.E. Moore and later with Alfred North Whitehead, Russell argued that philosophy should model itself on the rigor of mathematics and the new symbolic logic rather than on the literary and historical styles of the past.
The early analytic program was ambitious. If one could construct a perfect logical language — one in which every legitimate proposition had a clear structure and every illegitimate philosophical claim could be shown to be a misuse of language — then many centuries of metaphysical dispute would simply evaporate. Philosophy would become the activity of clarifying propositions, not the activity of building world-views.
Russell’s own work on the foundations of mathematics (the monumental Principia Mathematica, written with Whitehead) was an attempt to carry out this program at the deepest level. If mathematics itself could be shown to rest on pure logic, then the dream of a completely transparent, rational foundation for knowledge would be at least partially realized.
The Early Wittgenstein: The Picture Theory
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) was the most extreme and beautiful statement of the early analytic vision. The world, Wittgenstein argued, is the totality of facts. Language can picture facts because both language and the world share a logical form. What can be said clearly can be said in propositions that correspond to possible states of affairs. What cannot be said clearly — ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, the nature of the world as a whole — cannot be said at all.
The famous final line of the Tractatus — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — was not an expression of mysticism but a strict consequence of the picture theory. The problems of philosophy, properly understood, were not problems to be solved but confusions to be dissolved. Once the logic of our language was made visible, the traditional problems would no longer appear as problems.
The Later Wittgenstein: Language Games
Wittgenstein later came to believe that the Tractatus had been profoundly mistaken. Language does not have a single logical form. It has many different uses, each with its own rules and purposes. The meaning of a word is not an object it stands for but its use in a particular “language game.” Philosophical problems arise when we take words out of their ordinary contexts and try to use them in ways they were never meant to be used.
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein offered a completely different picture of philosophy. Its task is not to construct ideal languages or to find hidden logical structures. Its task is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use — to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Philosophy becomes a form of therapy rather than a form of construction.
The End of the Dream
The analytic turn began with enormous confidence that the right logical tools would finally make philosophy scientific and progressive. By the middle of the twentieth century, that confidence had been tempered. The later Wittgenstein suggested that philosophy might not be a cumulative discipline at all. It might be more like a perpetual struggle against our own tendency to be bewitched by language.
The analytic tradition did not disappear. It became more technical, more specialized, and in many ways more modest. It also produced extraordinary work in the philosophy of language, mind, science, and mathematics. But the original dream — that philosophy could achieve something like the clarity and progress of the exact sciences by purifying its language — proved more difficult than the early analysts had hoped.
What remained was a permanent change in the self-understanding of a large part of the philosophical world: a suspicion of grand system-building, a respect for precision and argument, and a willingness to treat many traditional philosophical questions as questions about how we use words rather than questions about ultimate reality.