"For scholars and layman alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that alone can answer the question: What is mathematics?"
What is Mathmatics, Courant and Robbins, 1941, no page number
Analytic philosophy is the philosophical activity that philosophers engage in. If one wants to give an exact definition of "science" before writing the history of science, then they will not have the energy to write the history of science. Therefore, for the sake of rigor (armor, mistake), this precise definition should not be involved. However, these are all nonsense, and an explanation of analytic philosophy is still needed.
Analytic philosophy began in the early 20th century and has now become mainstream philosophy. Analytic philosophy has also evolved and developed with various political events, technological advancements, self-exploration, and criticism. Analytic philosophy has multiple origins, including the British tradition of empiricism, with the main driving force being the development of logic, set theory, and the foundations of mathematics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
How analytic philosophy developed and matured: In the mid-20th century, many analytic philosophers were able to take a more objective and critical approach to empiricism, science, and mathematics than early practitioners. This allowed analytic ethics to expand, rekindled interest in metaphysics, and increased attention and appreciation for past philosophers, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers. Ethicists, metaphysicians, and historians of philosophy brought the methods of analytic philosophy into their research: clear expression, logical reasoning, direct and extensive dialectical communication among philosophers, and a gradual adoption of scientific methods to address questions, while abandoning the more dogmatic aspects of the early movement.
The term "analytic philosophy" refers more to the method of analytic philosophy rather than a specific doctrine shared by all analytic philosophers. Analytic philosophers analyze problems, concepts, questions, and arguments. They break them down into parts, dissect them, and find their essential features. Insight comes from seeing how things are combined and how they are separated; how they are constructed and how they can be reconstructed. Symbolic logic has always been the most distinctive tool of analytic philosophers.
Analytic philosophers have been struggling with themselves, each other, their traditions, origins, and ideas. No characteristic of analytic philosophy has escaped the challenges of other analytic philosophers. After World War II, many British analytic philosophers opposed what they saw as an excessive reliance on symbolic logic, natural science, and formal analysis. American philosophers of the same period criticized what they claimed to be the unreasonable dogmas of analytic philosophy. An eternal question that analytic philosophers often focus on is methodology, including questions such as:
- To what extent should we rely on formal logic?
- Is natural science the only reliable source of knowledge?
- Should philosophy attempt to become a science?
Analytic philosophy, its methods, and doctrines are among the topics that analytic philosophers like to think about.
Analytic philosophy is a manifestation of modernism. Like analytic philosophy, modernism cannot be precisely defined. The characteristics of modernism include rejecting past traditions, attempting shocking and disturbing new forms, focusing on language and methods, fascination and anxiety about technology and science, and using new technical methods.
As a cultural phenomenon, analytic philosophy has never been as obsessed with modernism as 20th-century painting and music (nor as obsessed with modernism as some continental philosophers like Heidegger), and has always retained a commitment to the essence of philosophy - reasoned argumentation, although this is difficult to see in Wittgenstein and some ordinary language philosophers. Analytic philosophers rejected the hypocrisy of Enlightenment philosophers but did not reject their commitment to reason. Analytic philosophers aimed to replace what they considered outdated traditional philosophical methods with new techniques based on symbolic logic, language analysis, and scientific methods.
This is the story that will unfold in the chapters that follow.