Current W ork on the History and Nature of Analytic Philosophy精品管理文档.doc

THE IMPLICATIONS OF RECENT WORK IN THE HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY* This essay is based on a talk entitled “Current Work on the History and Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, given at a joint session of the Bertrand Russell Society and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy Society, APA-Central Division Conference, Chicago, April 28, 2005. * This essay is based on a talk entitled “Current Work on the History and Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, given at a joint session of the Bertrand Russell Society and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy Society, APA-Central Division Conference, Chicago, April 28, 2005. Aaron Preston 0. Introduction Though the genre has existed since the middle of the twentieth century, reflection on analytic philosophy’s history and nature has come into its own as a field of inquiry only in the last fifteen years. In this essay, I aim, first, to survey some of the main ways in which analytic philosophy has been represented in historical work concerning it, and, second, to discuss the implications of certain inconsistencies in these representations. Specifically, I will argue (1) that historical work on analytic philosophy has undergone an evolution that can be parsed (roughly) into three main phases, (2) that work in the first phase helped to solidify a received view of analytic philosophy which, though erroneous, was crucial to the movement’s success, (3) that work in the second and third phases have a shared tendency to define analytic philosophy in ways that fail to do justice to the facts surrounding the rise of analytic philosophy, especially as concerns the historical significance of the erroneous received view, and (4) that all of this points to the conclusion that analytic philosophy is something of an illusion. 1. The Three-Stage Evolution of Historical Work on Analytic Philosophy On my view, historical work on analytic philosophy falls roughly into three categories, which I prefer to characterize as three evolutionary