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Analytic

George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy. He emphasized the importance of common sense and used it to argue against radical forms of philosophical skepticism. Moore was particularly influential in the field of ethics, where he claimed that our actions should promote the good. He argued that the concept of "good" cannot be defined in terms of other concepts and that whether something is good can be known through intuition.

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was another pioneer of the analytic tradition. His development of modern symbolic logic had a significant impact on subsequent philosophers, even outside the field of logic. Frege employed these advances in his attempt to prove that arithmetic can be reduced to logic, a thesis known as logicism. The logicist project of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was even more ambitious since it included not only arithmetic but also geometry and analysis. Although their attempts were very fruitful, they did not fully succeed, as additional axioms beyond those of logic are required. In the philosophy of language, Russell's theory of definite descriptions was influential. It explains how to make sense of paradoxical expressions like "the present King of France," which do not refer to any existing entity. Russell also developed the theory of logical atomism, which was further refined by his student Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). According to Wittgenstein's early philosophy, as presented in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the world is made up of a multitude of atomic facts. The world and language have the same logical structure, making it possible to represent these facts using propositions. Despite the influence of this theory, Wittgenstein came to reject it in his later philosophy. He argued instead that language consists of a variety of games, each with its own rules and conventions. According to this view, meaning is determined by usage and not by referring to facts.

Logical positivism developed in parallel to these ideas and was strongly influenced by empiricism. It is primarily associated with the Vienna Circle and focused on logical analysis and empirical verification. One of its prominent members was Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), who defended the verification principle. This principle claims that a statement is meaningless if it cannot be verified through sensory experience or the laws of logic. Carnap used this principle to reject the discipline of metaphysics in general. However, this principle was later criticized by Carnap's student Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) as one of the dogmas of empiricism. A core idea of Quine's philosophy was naturalism, which he understood as the claim that the natural sciences provide the most reliable framework for understanding the world. He used this outlook to argue that mathematical entities have real existence because they are indispensable to science.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy formed part of ordinary language philosophy, which analyzed everyday language to understand philosophical concepts and problems. The theory of speech acts by John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was an influential early contribution to this field. Other prominent figures in this tradition include Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) and Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (1919–2006). The shift in emphasis on the role of language is known as the linguistic turn.

Richard Mervyn Hare (1919–2002) and John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) were influential ethical philosophers in the analytic tradition, while John Rawls (1921–2002) and Robert Nozick (1938–2002) made significant contributions to political philosophy.