Topics Philosophy

Question My question is about analytic philosophy. Is it true that analytic philosophy aims to approach philosophy ahistorically, and that when asking questions like "what's the meaning of life" it considers itself to be dealing merely with language puzzles and not with a legitimate question that actually matters in real life? If so, it would seem a strange place for philosophy to have evolved to. Then again, I'm sure strange mutations have happened in philosophy in the past, and have gained a large following. Is it possible that the people who practice analytic philosophy today, especially those who don't question it rigorously as a method and simply see it as the only lucid approach - is it possible that these people will ever come to see it differently, as containing some sort of fundamental mistake within itself?

Accepted:
December 22, 2007

Comments

There are really several questions here, and there isn't really any simple answer, since "analytic philosophy" isn't sufficiently unified for there to be any single approach. If there is such a thing as "analytic philosophy", then it is more a tradition than a school.

Some analytic philosophers do approach philosophical questions with little regard for history. Not all do, and I guess I'd be something of an example.

Some analytic philosophers have also regarded most, or even all, philosophical questions as the result of some kind of linguistic or conceptual confusion. And there was a time---half a century ago now---when that was the dominant approach. But times have changed, and there are now few analytic philosophers who would endorse it. What is widely believed is that making progess on philosophical problems often depends upon getting clear about the concepts involved, and experience has taught that close attention to the language used to express those concepts can be invaluable. But that's quite different from thinking that philosophical problems are just conceptual confusions.

And so yes: Many of the people who practiced the form of analytic philosophy that identified philosophical questions as merely linguistic puzzles, etc, did come to regard themselves as having been mistaken.