In Praise of Analytic Philosophy

The art of thinking clearly

Recently, philosopher James K.A. Smith posted his review of a book about the social history of analytic philosophy. It is not my purpose here to engage directly with all Smith says in this review, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not, but instead to use only one thing he says as a jumping off point to clear up some misconceptions about analytic philosophy and to extol its virtues. As someone trained in the analytic tradition, both as an undergraduate and during my PhD program, I am admittedly biased. However, in this case, my bias happens to coincide perfectly with the truth (of course).

Offering his own definition of analytic philosophy in order to contrast it with the continental tradition, Smith says the following:

“Analytic” philosophy, or “Anglo-American” philosophy, is a form of philosophy that aspires to be math. It is primarily animated by the endeavor to reduce (i.e., break down, analyze) philosophical questions to a clarification of terms. With terms clarified, the terms can then be run through the machine processing of logic to secure conclusions. It tends to be ideologically a-historical and interested in the “history” of philosophy only as a mine for propositions and “intuitions.” This is the legacy of philosophers like G.E. Moore, W.V.O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Lewis, and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.

If I interpret this charitably, there is indeed some truth to this characterization, but it nevertheless also seems to, if not outright state, at least to suggest or imply, a number of common misconceptions about analytic philosophy.

Roughly, those common mischaracterizations tend to involve claims like the following: Analytic philosophy is largely unconcerned with the history of philosophy and the context it provides to contemporary philosophizing; it is unhelpfully obsessed with language and logic-chopping, to the exclusion of substantive issues; it is unduly abstract in a way that stands aloof of real-world issues of politics, justice, and the good life; it mistakenly tries to model itself off of mathematical or scientific methodologies that are inappropriate to the more ‘humanistic’ practice philosophy is and ought to be; among others.

To the extent that there is some truth to these critiques, they primarily apply only to certain earlier periods in the history of analytic philosophy, but in general do not adequately characterize it especially from the period of about the 1970s onward. And insofar as some of these critiques are false, it is because they wrongly discount or dismiss certain intellectual virtues essential to the good practice of philosophy, and which can be seen embodied in the best of philosophy from antiquity, through the middle ages, and up to the early modern period and beyond.

First, the truth in the critiques.

Most associate the birth of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century with four main intellectual trends, two of which involve substantive philosophical views and two of which involve questions of method. The substantive philosophical views are the verificationist theory of meaning, and a rigidly empiricist and scientistic epistemology. The methodological approaches are the application of new developments in formal logic (especially by figures like Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell) to questions of philosophy, and the view that many traditional philosophical questions can be resolved or made more progress on by attending more closely to the structure and use of language.

According to verificationism, a sentence is meaningful only if either (1) it is in principle empirically verifiable, or (2) it’s truth is a matter of definition (i.e., a trivial statement of semantic equivalence or implication, such as “A is A” or “All bachelors are unmarried men”). A scientistic, empiricist epistemology (again, speaking very broadly here) would claim that the only true knowledge we can have is derived from sense experience, and especially from the experimental methods of science as applied to that sense experience. The combination of verificationism and a rigidily empiricist epistemology is bleak indeed—and obviously false (for reasons we need not get into here). Moreover, the implications of such a worldview for the practice and aspirations of philosophy are equally bleak, for it renders most traditional philosophical questions of metaphysics, religion, and ethics not only epistemically out of our reach, but worse, meaningless.

The problem, however, is that not everyone associated with the birth of analytic philosophy even held to such views. Both Frege and Russell, for example, were mathematical Platonists. Moreover, insofar as early analytic philosophy could be characterized to an extent by certain rigidly empiricist, scientistic trends of thought, this slowly ceased to be the case over time (especially after, for example, everyone realized just how self-referentially incoherent verificationism was). And, especially beginning in the 1970s, the full range of traditional philosophical disciplines (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, ethics, political theory, and so on) fully blossomed within academic analytic philosophy.

Apart from certain earlier periods in its history, then, analytic philosophy has not been and is not today associated with any set of substantive philosophical commitments. In epistemology, there are foundationalists, coherentists, virtue epistemologists, etc.; in metaphysics, Platonists, Aristotelians, nominalists, realists, reductionists, holists, etc.; in political philosophy, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.; in philosophy of religion, theistic personalists, classical theists, atheists, agnostics, panentheists, etc.); in philosophy of mind, dualists, reductive materialists, functionalists, panpsychists, hylomorphists, and so on, and so forth. Analytic philosophers have no shared, substantive philosophical commitments.

Nevertheless, it is true that analytic philosophers do retain, to this day, the two above-mentioned shared methodological emphases: rigorous application of the tools of logic (especially formal logic) to philosophical questions, and the notion that a close attention to the structure and use of language can be philosophically illuminating.

These methodological emphases, however, are as old as philosophy itself—one can see them clearly on display, for example, in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Suarez, Ockham, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and so on, and so forth. They are on full display in the “pre-analytic” history of philosophy because they are simply intellectual virtues: the virtue of logical thinking (understanding and properly utilizing the concepts of validity, invalidity, soundness, deduction, induction, abduction, formal and informal fallacies, etc.), and the virtue of clarity of thought/argumentation, which, in part, inevitably involves the clarification of terms and a close attention to how the meaning of terms may subtly impact a line of reasoning. A casual perusal of, say, Aristotle’s Categories or his syllogistic works (the Organon), or Proclus’ metaphysical masterwork The Elements of Theology (explicitly modeled after Euclid’s mathematical treatise The Elements of Geometry), among many other similar instances in the history of philosophy, should disabuse anyone of the notion that it is uniquely analytic philosophy that is obsessed with careful attention to language, rigorous application of logical methods, and orderly systematization.

Someone may object at this point, “Well, that’s all well and good, but the problem with analytic philosophers is they think deep questions of philosophy can be settled just by clarifying terms and logic-chopping!” This, again, is a silly caricature, and no one could believe it unless they had little to no familiarity with analytic philosophy as it’s actually practiced in the academy.

It could be, however, that such a person has in mind a relatively short-lived period in the history of analytic philosophy where in some (not all) circles, something called “ordinary language philosophy” flourished. It is true that, according to these ordinary language philosophers, many or most questions of philosophy really could be settled by just clarifying how terms were being used in various contexts or “language games.” The problem is once again, however, that almost no one in analytic philosophy believes this anymore, hasn’t in a long time, and even during the period during which ordinary language philosophy flourished in certain circles (around the 1940s to 1970), not every analytic philosopher subscribed to it.

If all of the foregoing is true, you might be wondering, then is there anything that distinguishes analytic philosophy from early modern or pre-modern philosophy? The answer is yes, but what distinguishes it is primarily a difference in degree, rather than kind. While historically nearly all philosophers prized logic, clarity, and rigorous argumentation (though some of this came to be underemphasized in certain (though not all) strands of the so-called “continental” tradition, unfortunately), it’s nevertheless the case that the extent to which these things are prized and utilized in analytic philosophy is in certain ways more intense or extensive. And this is primarily because formal logic as a discipline underwent important and helpful developments in the early 20th century (the development of the predicate calculus, quantificational logic, modal logics, and so forth), and there were subsequent developments in better understanding the canons of reasoning deployed in the sciences (namely, probabilistic reasoning and inference to the best explanation). These developments in logic, moreover, aided not only philosophical reasoning, but also the clarification of language, for it was realized that when the underlying logical structure of language is modeled or unpacked in formal terms, it is often the case that certain traditional philosophical puzzles are illuminated. But again, this does not mean that perennial philosophical problems are somehow “settled” in this way. To use the language of logic, a close attention to and analysis of language is often a necessary condition for making progress on a philosophical question, but is is almost never a sufficient condition.

Does all this mean that analytic philosophy is not in practice subject to certain vices? Of course not. During my time in graduate school, I encountered a number of peer-reviewed philosophy papers that made me want to scream and pull my hair out. When analytic philosophy goes bad, it can indeed descend into a pedantic exercise in overly formalizing a trivial question for no good reason. But although this is a danger in the practice of analytic philosophy, it does not represent (in my experience) most work in analytic philosophy. Moreover, I suspect that when it does occur it has more to do with the “publish or perish” pressure all academics live under, incentivizing them to publish meaningless results dressed up with hyper-formalization in order to make them seem more novel or important than they actually are. Similarly, while it’s true that historically many analytic philosophers had a woefully deficient historical consciousness, this has also changed significantly over time, and (again, just in my own experience) there is for the most part much more awareness of and fruitful engagement with historical sources in analytic philosophy now than there may have been in earlier periods.

At it’s best, however, analytic philosophy is best summarized by a more general definition of philosophy that the philosopher John Campbell once gave:

Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed – to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.

“Thinking in slow motion.” Indeed, this is the art of good philosophy, and good reasoning in general. An intellectually virtuous search for truth demands that we slow our thinking down, carefully observe and assess what our thoughts and concepts (and corresponding sentences and terms) mean, what the actual logical structure of the argument that’s being made is, whether it is valid or sound (if deductive), whether it is strong or cogent (if probabilistic), what evidence there is for the premises, whether there are alternative plausible hypotheses for the data under consideration, whether there may be counterexamples, how we’re assessing the relative theoretical virtues of these competing hypotheses, and so on. Analytic philosophy, at its best, is simply trying do this well—to think well, in slow motion.

Unfortunately, however, this is often not how philosophical or intellectual discussions more broadly are carried out. Observing many discussions, one would get the impression that thinking in fast motion was a virtue, or that reasoning using quick and broad associations or drawing implications from vague, impressionistic principles were signs of profundity or intellectual virtuosity. But the intellectual life demands better of us. It demands a basic grounding in the tools and methods of logic, a slow, contemplative approach to complex questions, and an intellectual humility that enables us to carefully consider alternative hypotheses and potential counterexamples to our own views.

And that, in short, is why analytic philosophy, when done well, is good and beneficial. And the central virtues cherished by analytic philosophers are simply universal intellectual virtues exhibited in the best of philosophy from Aristotle and Plato to the present day, virtues we would all do well to continue to cultivate and attend to. Moreover, an analytic approach to philosophy need not mean stylistic dryness. Indeed, analytic philosophy at its best has consistently been colorful and creative, using, for example, humor and memorable and imaginative thought experiments to convey and think creatively about deep philosophical questions.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what analytic philosophy was all about, or had some misconceptions or over-generalizations about it, I hope this post has gone some way to convince you that it might not be as bad as you think.

The late great analytic philosopher Saul Kripke. You can be an analytic philosopher and as jolly and bright as this!