PHIL 332: Issues in Analytic Philosophy

PHIL 332-001: 20th Century Anly Phil
(Fall 2014)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R

Krug Hall 19

Section Information for Fall 2014

A complaint one often hears about philosophy is that philosophers never seem to be able to answer their questions (so I'd better major in computer science or business management instead).  The major impetus for the birth of the 20th century movement known as analytic philosophy was the desire to explain why this is so and what we should do about it.  The answer they gave was that traditional philosophical questions are not real questions at all; rather they are pseudo-questions that stem from a misuse of language.  By the same token, the purported "answers" to these questions don't really convey information--not even misinformation--but at best are subtle, convoluted expressions of emotion.  This is a bold and controversial thesis, of course, but the analytic philosophers attempted to back it up by developing theories of linguistic meaning and showing that the language used in traditional philosophy generally lacked such meaning.  If this succeeded, the result would be that philosophy, as traditionally done, would cease to exist.  In this course we will be looking at the various forms the analytic movement took, beginning with Bertrand Russell and the logical positivist movement and going up through Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.  This will take us through about the first 2/3 of the 20th century.  Ultimately, none of this worked (I hope I'm not being a spoiler in telling you that) and now even self-styled analytic philosophers are back to dealing with traditional philosophical questions.  But as this represented the most ambitious attempt ever to debunk traditional philosophy, it is worth seeing WHY it didn't work.

Course Information from the University Catalog