Absurdity is the state or condition of being unreasonable, meaningless, or so unsound as to be irrational. "Absurd" is the adjective used to describe absurdity, e.g., "Tyler and the boys laughed at the absurd situation." It derives from the Latin absurdum meaning "out of tune". The Latin surdus means "deaf", implying stupidity.
Absurdity is contrasted with being realistic or reasonable In general usage, absurdity may be synonymous with nonsense,
meaninglessness, fancifulness, foolishness, bizarreness, wildness. In
specialized usage, absurdity is related to extremes in bad reasoning or
pointlessness in reasoning; ridiculousness is related to extremes of
incongruous juxtaposition, laughter, and ridicule; and nonsense is
related to a lack of meaningfulness. Absurdism is a concept in philosophy related to the notion of absurdity.
The term absurdity has been used throughout history regarding foolishness and extremely poor reasoning to form beliefs. In Aristophanes' 5th century BC comedy The Wasps, his protagonist Philocleon learned the "absurdities" of Aesop's Fables, considered to be unreasonable fantasy and not real.
Philosophy
Ancient Greece
The Classical Greek philosopher Plato
often used "absurdity" to describe very poor reasoning, or the
conclusion from adopting a position that is false and thus reaching a
false conclusion, called an "absurdity" (argument by reductio ad
absurdum). Plato describes himself as not using absurd argumentation
against himself in Parmenides. In Gorgias, Plato refers to an "inevitable absurdity" as the outcome of reasoning from a false assumption.
Aristotle rectified an irrational absurdity in reasoning with empiricism using likelihood, "once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity.
He claimed that absurdity in reasoning being veiled by charming
language in poetry, "As it is, the absurdity is veiled by the poetic
charm with which the poet invests it... But in the Epic poem the
absurdity passes unnoticed." In Aristotle's book Rhetoric,
he discusses the situations in which absurdity is employed and how it
affects one's use of persuasion. According to Aristotle, the idea of a
man being unable to persuade someone by his words is absurd.
Any unnecessary information to the case is unreasonable and makes the
speech unclear. If the speech becomes too unclear; the justification for
their case becomes unpersuasive, making the argument absurd.
Renaissance and early modern periods
Michel de Montaigne, father of the essay and modern skepticism,
argued that the process of abridgement is foolish and produces
absurdity, "Every abridgement of a good book is a foolish abridgement...
absurdity [is] not to be cured... satisfied with itself than any
reason, can reasonably be."
Francis Bacon, an early promoter of empiricism
and the scientific method, argued that absurdity is a necessary
component of scientific progress, and should not always be laughed at.
He continued that bold new ways of thinking and bold hypotheses often
led to absurdity, "For if absurdity be the subject of laughter, doubt
you but great boldness is seldom without some absurdity."
Thomas Hobbes
distinguished absurdity from errors, including basic linguistic errors
as when a word is simply used to refer to something which does not have
that name. According to Aloysius Martinich:
"What Hobbes is worried about is absurdity. Only human beings can
embrace an absurdity, because only human beings have language, and
philosophers are more susceptible to it than others".
Hobbes wrote that "words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound, are
those we call absurd, insignificant, and nonsense. And therefore if a
man should talk to me of a round quadrangle; or, accidents of bread in
cheese; or, immaterial substances; or of a free subject; a free will; or
any free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say
he were in an error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to
say, absurd".
He distinguished seven types of absurdity. Below is the summary of
Martinich, based on what he describes as Hobbes' "mature account" found
in "De Corpore" 5., which all use examples that could be found in
Aristotelian or scholastic philosophy, and all reflect "Hobbes'
commitment to the new science of Galileo and Harvey". This is known as "Hobbes' Table of Absurdity".
"Combining the name of a body with the name of an accident." For
example, "existence is a being" or, "a being is existence". These
absurdities are typical of scholastic philosophy according to Hobbes.
"Combining the name of a body with the name of a phantasm." For example, "a ghost is a body".
"Combining the name of a body with the name of a name." For example, "a universal is a thing".
"Combining the name of an accident with the name of a phantasm." For example, "colour appears to a perceiver".
"Combining the name of an accident with the name of a name." For example, "a definition is the essence of a thing".
"Combining the name of a phantasm with the name of a name." For example, "the idea of a man is a universal".
"Combining the name of a thing with the name of a speech act." For example, "some entities are beings per se".
According to Martinich, Gilbert Ryle discussed the types of problem Hobbes refers to as absurdities under the term "category error".
Although common usage now considers "absurdity" to be synonymous with "ridiculousness", Hobbes discussed the two concepts as different, in that absurdity is viewed as having to do with invalid reasoning, while ridiculousness has to do with laughter, superiority, and deformity.
G. E. Moore, an English analytic philosopher,
cited as a paradox of language such superficially absurd statements as,
"I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe it". They can
be true and logically consistent, and are not contradictory on further
consideration of the user's linguistic intent. Wittgenstein
observes that in some unusual circumstances absurdity itself disappears
in such statements, as there are cases where "It is raining but I don't
believe it" can make sense, i.e., what appears to be an absurdity is
not nonsense.
In existentialism, absurdism, and related philosophy since the 20th century, absurdity is used in a more specialized way, often termed the absurd: the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life,
and the human inability to find these with any certainty. The universe
and the human mind do not each separately cause the absurd, but rather
the absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing
simultaneously.Therefore, absurdism, a philosophy most famously associated (posthumously) with Albert Camus,
is the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless,
alongside theorizing about the human struggle to create meaning.
Due to the absurd, seeking purpose or meaning in an uncaring
world without purpose or meaning may be regarded as either pointless or
as still potentially valuable. Seeking to accumulate excessive wealth or
pursuing other existential goals in the face of certain death are other
concepts discussed by philosophers who contemplate the absurd.
In his paper The Absurd, Thomas Nagel
analyzed the perpetual absurdity of human life. Absurdity in life
becomes apparent when we realize the fact that we take our lives
seriously, while simultaneously perceiving that there is a certain
arbitrarity in everything we do. He suggests never to stop searching
for the absurd. Furthermore, he suggests searching for irony amongst
the absurdity.
Art and fiction
Absurdity has been explored, particularly the absurd (in the above philosophical sense), in certain artistic movements, from literary nonsense to Dada to surrealism to absurdist fiction. Following the Second World War, the Theatre of the Absurd was a notable absurdist fiction movement in the dramatic arts, depicting characters grappling with the meaninglessness of life.
"Theater should be a bloody and
inhuman spectacle designed to exercise (sic. exorcise) the spectator's
repressed criminal and erotic obsessions.
Medical commentators have criticized methods and reasoning in alternative and complementary medicine and integrative medicine as being either absurdities or being between evidence
and absurdity. They state it often misleads the public with euphemistic
terminology, such as the expressions "alternative medicine" and
"complementary medicine", and call for a clear demarcation between valid
scientific evidence and scientific methodology and absurdity.
Theology
"I believe because it is absurd"
— Tertullian
Absurdity is cited as a basis for some theological reasoning about the formation of belief and faith, such as in fideism, an epistemological theory that reason and faith may be hostile to each other. The statement "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd") is attributed to Tertullian from De Carne Christi, as translated by philosopher Voltaire. According to the New Advent Church, what Tertullian said in DCC 5 was "[...] the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd."
In the 15th century, the Spanish theologian Tostatus
used what he thought was a reduction to absurdity arguing against a
spherical Earth using dogma, claiming that a spherical Earth would imply
the existence of antipodes.
He argued that this would be impossible since it would require either
that Christ has appeared twice or that the inhabitants of the antipodes
would be forever damned, which he claimed was an absurdity.
Absurdity can refer to any strict religious dogma that pushes
something to the point of violating common sense. For example,
inflexible religious dictates are sometimes termed pharisaism, referring to unreasonable emphasis on observing exact words or rules, rather than the intent or spirit.
Andrew Willet grouped absurdities with "flat contradictions to scripture" and "heresies".
Psychology
Psychologists study how humans adapt to constant absurdities in life. In advertising,
the presence or absence of an absurd image was found to moderate
negative attitudes toward products and increase product recognition.
The absurdity doctrine is a legal theory in American courts. One type of absurdity, known as the "scrivener's error", occurs when simple textual correction is needed to amend an obvious clerical error, such as a misspelled word.
Another type of absurdity, called "evaluative absurdity", arises when a
legal provision, despite appropriate spelling and grammar, "makes no
substantive sense". An example would be a statute that mistakenly
provided for a winning rather than losing party to pay the other side's reasonable attorney's fees. In order to stay within the remit of textualism and not reach further into purposivism,
the doctrine is restricted by two limiting principles: "...the
absurdity and the injustice of applying the provision to the case would
be so monstrous, that all mankind would, without hesitation, unite in
rejecting the application" and the absurdity must be correctable "...by modifying the text in relatively simple ways". This doctrine is seen as being consistent with examples of historical common sense.
"The common sense of man approves the judgment mentioned by Pufendorf
[sic. Puffendorf], that the Bolognian law which enacted 'that whoever
drew blood in the streets should be punished with the utmost severity',
did not extend to the surgeon who opened the vein of a person that fell
down in the street in a fit. The same common sense accepts the ruling,
cited by Plowden, that the statute of 1st Edward II, which enacts that a
prisoner who breaks prison shall be guilty of a felony, does not extend
to a prisoner who breaks out when the prison is on fire – 'for he is
not to be hanged because he would not stay to be burnt'."
Logic and computer science
Reductio ad absurdum
Reductio ad absurdum, reducing to an absurdity, is a method of proof in polemics, logic and mathematics,
whereby assuming that a proposition is true leads to absurdity; a
proposition is assumed to be true and this is used to deduce a
proposition known to be false, so the original proposition must have
been false. It is also an argumentation style in polemics,
whereby a position is demonstrated to be false, or "absurd", by
assuming it and reasoning to reach something known to be believed as
false or to violate common sense; it is used by Plato to argue against
other philosophical positions.
An absurdity constraint is used in the logic of model transformations.
Constant in logic
The "absurdity constant", often denoted by the symbol ⊥, is used in formal logic. It represents the concept of falsum, an elementary logical proposition, denoted by a constant "false" in several programming languages.
Rule in logic
The absurdity rule is a rule in logic, as used by Patrick Suppes in Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.
Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, which was coined as a catch-all term for other methods that were prominent in continental Europe, most notably existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism.
There is widespread influence and debate between the analytic and
continental traditions; some philosophers see the differences between
the two traditions as being based on institutions, relationships, and
ideology, rather than anything of significant philosophical substance. The distinction has also been drawn between "analytic" being academic or technical philosophy and "continental" being literary philosophy.
History of analytic philosophy
Austrian realism
Franz Brentano gave to philosophy the problem of intentionality.
Analytic philosophy was deeply influenced by what is called Austrian realism in the former state of Austria-Hungary,
so much so that Michael Dummett has remarked that analytic philosophy
is better characterized as Anglo-Austrian rather than the usual
Anglo-American.
As a result of his logicist project, Frege developed predicate logic in his book Begriffsschrift (English: Concept-script, 1879), which allowed for a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic. An example of this is the problem of multiple generality.
Number
Neo-Kantianism dominated the late 19th century in German philosophy. Edmund Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them.
In contrast to this "psychologism", Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (German: Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893–1903), argued similarly to Plato or Bolzano
that mathematics and logic have their own public objects, independent
of the private judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians
and logicians. Following Frege, the logicists tended to advocate a kind
of mathematical Platonism.
Analytic philosophy in the narrower sense of 20th and 21st century anglophone philosophy is usually thought to begin with Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore's rejection of Hegelianism for being obscure; or the "revolt against idealism"—see for example Moore's "A Defence of Common Sense". Russell summed up Moore's influence:
"G. E. Moore...took the lead in
rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. Bradley had
argued that everything common sense believes in is mere appearance; we
reverted to the opposite extreme, and that everything is real that
common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy of theology, supposes real.
With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that
grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware
of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic
ideas."
Paradox
Bertrand Russell, during his early career, was much influenced by Frege. Russell famously discovered the paradox in Basic Law V
which undermined Frege's logicist project. However, like Frege, Russell
argued that mathematics is reducible to logical fundamentals, in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He also argued for Meinongianism.
On Denoting
Russell sought to resolve various philosophical problems by applying Frege's new logical apparatus, most famously in his theory of definite descriptions in "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905. Russell here argues against Meinongianism. He argues all names
(aside from demonstratives like "this" or "that") are disguised
definite descriptions, using this to solve ascriptions of nonexistence.
This position came to be called descriptivism.
Additionally, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary
philosophical method, a method Russell thought could expose the
underlying structure of philosophical problems. Logical form would be made clear by syntax. For example, the English word "is" has three distinct meanings, which predicate logic can express as follows:
For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x)).
For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x).
For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Frege, Russell, Moore, and Russell's student Ludwig Wittgenstein
emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which
would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their
opinion, often made philosophy invalid. During this phase, they sought
to understand language (and hence philosophical problems) by using logic to formalize how philosophical statements are made.
Logical atomism
Ludwig Wittgenstein
An important aspect of Hegelianism and British idealism was logical holism—the
opinion that there are aspects of the world that can be known only by
knowing the whole world. This is closely related to the doctrine of internal relations, the opinion that relations between items are internal relations, that is, essential properties of the nature of those items.
Russell and Moore in response promulgated logical atomism and the doctrine of external relations—the belief that the world consists of independent facts. Inspired by developments in modern formal logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions.
Early Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism with a picture theory of meaning in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921) sometimes known as simply the Tractatus.
He claimed the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and
that these states of affairs can be expressed and mirrored by the
language of first-order predicate logic. Thus a picture of the universe can be constructed by expressing facts in the form of atomic propositions and linking them using logical operators.
Wittgenstein thought he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus. The work further ultimately concludes that all of its propositions are meaningless, illustrated with a ladder one must toss away after climbing up it.
Logical positivism
(1)
(2)
(3)
Members of the Vienna Circle (clockwise): (1) Moritz Schlick (2) Otto Neurath; (3) Hans Hahn
Logical positivists used formal logical methods to develop an empiricist account of knowledge. They adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or synthetic. The truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies,
and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two
constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else
was nonsense.
This led the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics,
as meaningless. It had the additional effect of making (ethical and
aesthetic) value judgments (as well as religious statements and beliefs)
meaningless.
Logical positivists therefore typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own.
Several logical positivists were Jewish, such as Neurath, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Friedrich Waissmann, and Reichenbach. Others, like Carnap, were gentiles but socialists or pacifists. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism
in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain
and the United States, which helped to reinforce the dominance of
logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.
In 1936, Schlick was murdered in Vienna by his former student Hans Nelböck. The same year, A. J. Ayer's work Language Truth and Logic introduced the English speaking world to logical positivism.
The logical positivists saw their rejection of metaphysics in some ways as a recapitulation of a quote by David Hume:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract
reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any
experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No.
Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry
and illusion.
After World War II,
from the late 1940s to the 1950s, analytic philosophy became involved
with ordinary-language analysis. This resulted in two main trends.
Later Wittgenstein
One strain of language analysis continued Wittgenstein's later philosophy, from the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which differed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. The criticisms of Frank P. Ramsey on color and logical form in the Tractatus
led to some of Wittgenstein's first doubts with regard to his early
philosophy. Philosophers refer to them like two different philosophers:
"early Wittgenstein" and "later Wittgenstein". In his later philosophy,
Wittgenstein develops the concept of a "language-game" and, rather than his prior picture theory of meaning, advocates a theory of meaning as use. It also contains the private language argument and the notion of family resemblance.
Oxford philosophy
The other trend was known as "Oxford
philosophy", in contrast to earlier analytic Cambridge philosophers
(including the early Wittgenstein) who thought philosophers should avoid
the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal
languages. Influenced by Moore's Common Sense and what they perceived as the later Wittgenstein's quietism,
the Oxford philosophers claimed that ordinary language already
represents many subtle distinctions not recognized in the formulation of
traditional philosophical theories or problems.
Portrait of Gilbert Ryle
While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms,
which are supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors
(such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary-language
philosophy emphasizes the use of language by ordinary people. The most
prominent ordinary-language philosophers during the 1950s were P. F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, and Gilbert Ryle.
Ordinary-language philosophers often sought to resolve
philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of
misunderstanding ordinary language. Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), criticized Cartesian dualism, arguing in favor of disposing of "Descartes' myth" via recognizing "category errors".
Strawson first became well known with his article "On Referring"
(1950), a criticism of Russell's theory of descriptions explained in the
latter's famous "On Denoting" article. In his book Individuals (1959), Strawson examines our conceptions of basic particulars. Austin, in the posthumously published How to Do Things with Words (1962), emphasized the theory of speech acts and the ability of words to do things (e. g. "I promise") and not just say things. This influenced several fields to undertake what is called a performative turn. In Sense and Sensibilia (1962), Austin criticized sense-data theories.
One striking difference with respect to early analytic philosophy was
the revival of metaphysical theorizing during the second half of the
20th century, and metaphysics remains a fertile topic of research.
Although many discussions are continuations of old ones from previous
decades and centuries, the debates remains active.
Decline of logical positivism
The rise of metaphysics mirrored the decline of logical positivism, first challenged by the later Wittgenstein.
Sellars
Wilfred Sellars's criticism of the "Myth of the Given", in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
(1956), challenged logical positivism by arguing against sense-data
theories. In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962),
Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific
image" of the world. Sellars's goal of a synoptic philosophy
that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the
foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called the Pittsburgh
School, whose members include Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and John Haugeland.
Quine
W. V. O. Quine helped to undermine logical positivism.
From a Logical Point of View also contains Quine's essay "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidates Russell's theory of descriptions and contains Quine's famous dictum of ontological commitment, "To be is to be the value of a variable". He also dubbed the problem of nonexistence Plato's beard.
Quine sought to naturalize philosophy and saw philosophy as
continuous with science, but instead of logical positivism advocated a
kind of semantic holism and ontological relativity,
which explained that every term in any statement has its meaning
contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's
conception of the entire world. In his magnum opus Word and Object (1960), Quine introduces the idea of radical translation, an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to prove the inscrutability of reference.
Kripke
Saul Kripke helped to revive interest in metaphysics among analytic philosophers.
According to one author, Naming and Necessity "played a
large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so
popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing
more than the analysis of language."
Kripke was influential in arguing that flaws in common theories
of descriptions and proper names are indicative of larger
misunderstandings of the metaphysics of necessity and possibility. Kripke also argued that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H2O.
American philosopher David Lewis defended a number of elaborate metaphysical theories. In works such as On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) and Counterfactuals (1973) he argued for modal realism and counterpart theory – the belief in real, concrete possible worlds.
According to Lewis, "actual" is merely an indexical label we give a
world when we are in it. Lewis also defended what he called Humean supervenience, a counterfactual theory of causation, and contributed to abstract object theory. He became closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
Peter van Inwagen's 1983 monographAn Essay on Free Will played an important role in rehabilitating libertarianism with respect to free will, in mainstream analytical philosophy. In the book, he introduces the consequence argument and the term incompatibilism about free will and determinism, to stand in contrast to compatibilism—the view that free will is compatible with determinism. Charlie Broad had previously made similar arguments.
The theory of special relativity seems to advocate a B-theory of time. David Lewis's perdurantism, or four-dimensionalism, requires a B-theory of time. A. N. Prior, who invented tense logic, advocated the A-theory of time.
Edmund Gettier helped to revitalize analytic epistemology.
Owing largely to Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", and the so-called Gettier problem,
epistemology has enjoyed a resurgence as a topic of analytic philosophy
during the last 50 years. A large portion of current epistemological
research is intended to resolve the problems that Gettier's examples
presented to the traditional "justified true belief" model of knowledge,
found as early as Plato's dialogue Theaetetus. These include developing theories of justification to deal with Gettier's examples, or giving alternatives to the justified-true-belief model.
The debate between internalism and externalism still exists in analytic philosophy. Alvin Goldman is an externalist known for developing a popular form of externalism called reliabilism. Most externalists reject the KK thesis, which has been disputed since the introduction of the epistemic logic by Jaakko Hintikka in 1962.
Problem of the Criterion
While a problem since antiquity, American philosopher Roderick Chisholm, in his Theory of Knowledge, details the problem of the criterion with two sets of questions:
What do we know? or What is the extent of our knowledge?
How do we know? or What is the criterion for deciding whether we have knowledge in any particular case?
An answer to either set of questions will allow us to devise a means
of answering the other. Answering the former question-set first is
called particularism, whereas answering the latter set first is called methodism. A third solution is skepticism, or doubting there is such a thing as knowledge.
Epistemic closure is the claim that knowledge is closed under entailment; in other words epistemic closure is a property or the principle that if a subject knows , and knows that entails, then can thereby come to know . Most epistemological theories involve a closure principle, and many skeptical arguments assume a closure principle. In Proof of An External World, G. E. Moore uses closure in his famous anti-skeptical "here is one hand" argument. Shortly before his death, Wittgenstein wrote On Certainty in response to Moore.
In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Nelson Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction. Goodman's famous example was to introduce the predicates grue and bleen. "Grue" applies to all things before a certain time t, just in case they are green, but also just in case they are blue after time t; and "bleen" applies to all things before a certain time t, just in the case they are blue, but also just in case they are green after time t.
Other topics
Other, related topics of contemporary research include debates over basic knowledge, the nature of evidence, the value of knowledge, epistemic luck, virtue epistemology, the role of intuitions in justification, and treating knowledge as a primitive concept.
Ethics
Due to the commitments to empiricism and symbolic logic
in the early analytic period, early analytic philosophers often thought
that inquiry in the ethical domain could not be made rigorous enough to
merit any attention.
It was only with the emergence of ordinary-language philosophers that
ethics started to become an acceptable area of inquiry for analytic
philosophers. Philosophers working within the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major types of moral philosophy.
Meta-ethics, which investigates moral terms and concepts;
Normative ethics, which examines and produces normative ethical judgments;
Applied ethics,
which investigates how existing normative principles should be applied
to difficult or borderline cases, often cases created by new technology
or new scientific knowledge.
Meta-ethics
As well as Hume's famous is/ought distinction, twentieth-century meta-ethics has two original strains.
The
second is founded on logical positivism and its attitude that
unverifiable statements are meaningless. As a result, they avoided
normative ethics and instead began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments.
The logical positivists opined that statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-cognitive; that is, they cannot be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted an emotivist
theory, which was that value judgments expressed the attitude of the
speaker. It is also known as the boo/hurrah theory. For example, in this
view, saying, "Murder is wrong", is equivalent to saying, "Boo to
murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of
disapproval.
While analytic philosophers generally accepted non-cognitivism,
emotivism had many deficiencies. It evolved into more sophisticated
non-cognitivist theories, such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which was based on J. L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts.
Critics
As
non-cognitivism, the is/ought distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy
were questioned, analytic philosophers showed a renewed interest in the
traditional questions of moral philosophy.
Philippa Foot defended naturalist moral realism and contributed several essays attacking other theories. Foot introduced the famous "trolley problem" into the ethical discourse.
Perhaps the most influential critic was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose monograph Intention was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle". A favorite student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" declared the "is-ought" impasse to be unproductive. J.O. Urmson's article "On Grading" also called the is/ought distinction into question.
The
first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward, and
neglect of, normative ethics. However, contemporary normative ethics is
dominated by three schools: consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology.
Consequentialism, or Utilitarianism
During the early 20th century, utilitarianism
was the only non-skeptical type of ethics to remain popular among
analytic philosophers. However, as the influence of logical positivism
declined mid-century, analytic philosophers had a renewed interest in
ethics. Utilitarianism: For and Against was written with J. J. C. Smart arguing for and Bernard Williams arguing against.
Virtue ethics
Anscombe, Foot, and Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue sparked a revival of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach. This increased interest in virtue ethics has been dubbed the "aretaic turn" mimicking the linguistic turn.
Since around 1970, a significant feature of analytic philosophy has been the emergence of applied ethics—an
interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical
issues. The philosophers following this orientation view ethics as
involving humanistic values, which involve practical implications and
applications in the way people interact and lead their lives socially.
Isaiah Berlin had a lasting influence on both analytic political philosophy and liberalism with his lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty".
Berlin defined 'negative liberty' as absence of coercion or
interference in private actions. 'Positive liberty' Berlin maintained,
could be thought of as self-mastery, which asks not what we are free
from, but what we are free to do.
Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls,
who in a series of papers from the 1950s onward (most notably "Two
Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") and his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, produced a sophisticated defense of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice. Rawls introduced the term the veil of ignorance.
Another development of political philosophy was the emergence of the school of analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply techniques of analytic philosophy and modern social science to clarify the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is G. A. Cohen, whose 1978 book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence,
is generally considered to represent the genesis of this school. In
that book, Cohen used logical and linguistic analysis to clarify and
defend Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent
analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The work of these later philosophers has furthered Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory, to supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques in the interpretation of Marxian theory.
Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy to advance a socialist
theory of justice that contrasts with both traditional Marxism and the
theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he indicates
Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas
is another influential—if controversial—author in contemporary analytic
political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science,
Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.
Communitarianism
Alasdair MacIntyre
Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel
advance a critique of liberalism that uses analytic techniques to
isolate the main assumptions of liberal individualists, such as Rawls,
and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, communitarians
challenge the liberal assumption that the individual can be considered
as fully autonomous from the community in which he is brought up and
lives. Instead, they argue for a conception of the individual that
emphasizes the role that the community plays in forming his or her
values, thought processes, and opinions. While in the analytic
tradition, its major exponents often also engage at length with figures
generally considered continental, notably G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
As a result of logical positivism, as well as what seemed like
rejections of the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity
from post-modern thinkers, analytic philosophers were slow to consider art and aesthetic judgment. Susanne Langer and Nelson Goodman
addressed these problems in an analytic style during the 1950s and
1960s. Since Goodman, aesthetics as a discipline for analytic
philosophers has flourished.
Arthur Danto
argued for a "institutional definition of art" in the 1964 essay "The
Artworld" in which Danto coined the term "artworld" (as opposed to the
existing "art world", though they mean the same), by which he meant cultural context or "an atmosphere of art theory".
Rigorous efforts to pursue analyses of traditional aesthetic concepts were performed by Guy Sircello in the 1970s and 1980s, resulting in new analytic theories of love, sublimity, and beauty. In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz,
there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form,
representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression, and
innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a
work of art.
George Dickie was an influential philosopher of art. Dickie's student Noël Carroll is a leading philosopher of art.
Given the linguistic turn, it can be hard to separate logic,
metaphysics, and the philosophy of language in analytic philosophy.
Philosophy of language is a topic that has decreased in activity during
the last four decades, as evidenced by the fact that few major
philosophers today treat it as a primary research topic. While the
debate remains fierce, it is still strongly influenced by those authors
from the first half of the century, e.g. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein,
Austin, Tarski, and Quine.
Hilary Putnam used the Twin Earth thought experiment to argue for semantic externalism, or the view that the meanings of words are not psychological. Donald Davidson uses the thought experiment of Swampman to advocate for semantic externalism.
Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language
provides a rule-following paradox that undermines the possibility of
our ever following rules in our use of language and, so, calls into
question the idea of meaning. Kripke writes that this paradox is "the
most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to
date". The portmanteau
"Kripkenstein" has been coined as a term for a fictional person who
holds the views expressed by Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein.
Another influential philosopher, Pavel Tichý initiated Transparent Intensional Logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages—the
theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we
learn, know, and can communicate when we come to understand what a
sentence means.
Pragmatics
Paul Grice and his maxims and theory of implicature established the discipline of pragmatics.
Philosophy of mind and cognitive science
John Searle
John Searle suggests that the obsession with the philosophy of language during the 20th century has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind.
Physicalism
Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, logical behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind of analytic philosophy for the first half of the 20th century. Behaviorism later became much less popular, in favor of either type physicalism or functionalism. During this period, topics of the philosophy of mind were often related strongly to topics of cognitive science, such as modularity or innateness.
Behaviorism
Behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner tended to opine either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about
behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways or that mental
states were directly equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave.
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Putnam criticized behaviorism by arguing that it confuses the
symptoms of mental states with the mental states themselves, positing
"super Spartans" who never display signs of pain.
Type physicalism or type identity theory identified mental states with brain states. Former students of Ryle at the University of AdelaideJ. J. C. Smart and Ullin Place argued for type physicalism.
Functionalism
Functionalism remains the dominant theory. Type identity was criticized using multiple realizability.
Searle's Chinese room argument criticized functionalism and holds that while a computer can understand syntax, it could never understand semantics.
Eliminativism
The view of eliminative materialism is most closely associated with Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes, and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness.
Dualism
David Chalmers
Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers. Kripke also makes a notable argument for dualism.
Akin to the medieval debate on universals, between realists,
idealists, and nominalists; the philosophy of mathematics has the debate
between logicists or platonists, conceptualists or intuitionists, and formalists.
Platonism
Gödel
was a platonist who postulated a special kind of mathematical intuition
that lets us perceive mathematical objects directly. Quine and Putnam
argued for platonism with the indispensability argument. Crispin Wright, along with Bob Hale, led a Neo-Fregean revival with his work Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects.
...analytic philosophy has been a very heterogeneous 'movement'....
some forms of analytic philosophy have proven very sympathetic to the
philosophy of religion and have provided a philosophical mechanism for
responding to other more radical and hostile forms of analytic
philosophy.
As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of religion, largely dismissing (as per the logical positivists) the subject as a part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless.
The demise of logical positivism led to a renewed interest in the
philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers not only to introduce new
problems, but to re-study classical topics such as the existence of God, the nature of miracles, the problem of evil, the rationality of belief in God, concepts of the nature of God, and several others. The Society of Christian Philosophers was established in 1978.
Plantinga was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017 and was once described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God". His seminal work God and Other Minds (1967) argues that belief in God is a properly basic belief akin to the belief in other minds. Plantinga also developed a modal ontological argument in The Nature of Necessity (1974).
The analytic philosophy of religion has been preoccupied with Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein fought for the Austrian army in the First World War and came upon a copy of Leo Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. At that time, he underwent some kind of religious conversion.
Using first-hand remarks (which were later published in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as "contemplative philosophy", a Wittgensteinian school of thought rooted in the "Swansea school", and which includes Wittgensteinians such as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, and D.Z. Phillips, among others.
The name "contemplative philosophy" was coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's Culture and Value. This interpretation was first labeled "Wittgensteinian Fideism" by Kai Nielsen,
but those who consider themselves members of the Swansea school have
relentlessly and repeatedly rejected this construal as a caricature of
Wittgenstein's position; this is especially true of Phillips.
Responding to this interpretation, Nielsen and Phillips became two of
the most prominent interpreters of Wittgenstein's philosophy of
religion.
Science and the philosophy of science
have also had increasingly significant roles in analytic metaphysics.
The theory of special relativity has had a profound effect on the
philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the
free will debate. The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to commitments of philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism. Others will see a commitment to using science in philosophy as scientism.
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