A History of Western Philosophy Book 5

Book 5: Two Opposed Philosophies: Analytic Philosophy and Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Part 7: Analytic Philosophy: Logical Positivism, Linguistic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: Analytic philosophy was based on the methods of symbolic logic developed by mathematicians such as Bertrand Russell who assumed that philosophical problems could best be solved by a logical analysis of the major concepts or propositions of statements. Russell began by trying to reduce language to its most simple basic components in order to remove its ambiguities and give it the objectivity of mathematics. The greatest analytic philosopher of the twentieth century. Ludwig Wittgenstein, showed the impossibility of arriving at a perfectly logical language by explaining that it is not only the words that communicate meaning but the contexts in which they are used.

Part 8: Philosophy since the 1960s: Contemporary Continental Philosophy: Against the analytic philosophers, the predominantly European Continental philosophers developed intellectual theories which rejected the propositions and values of the Enlightenment and argued that language is unavoidably unstable so that our linguistic and cultural meanings can never be unambiguous or certain.

ISBN 9781925169195

Author: Jack Thomson,
Publisher: Phoenix