Introducing Analytic Philosophy: It Sense And Its Nonsense, 1879-2002

Herbert Hochberg

ISBN 10: 3937202218 / ISBN 13: 9783937202211

Published by Ontos Verlag, 2003

About this Item

mostly clean, unmarked pages, good clean covers.

Seller Inventory # A1030 05132025

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Introducing Analytic Philosophy: It Sense And Its Nonsense, 1879-2002
• Publisher: Ontos Verlag
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3937202218
• ISBN 13: 9783937202211
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

This work is both an excellent primer in the development of twentieth-century philosophy, and at the same time, a critique of its linguistic excesses and separation from the world as such. Herbert Hochberg takes as his cue the words of Bertrand Russell that "absorption in language sometimes leads to a neglect of the connection of language with non-linguistic facts, although it is this connection that gives meaning to words and significance to sentences." Introducing Analytic Philosophy is a balanced effort to stay within the linguistic turns that have characterized philosophy in the past century. The author does this by a review of those philosophies that treat things and facts seriously.

It is Hochberg's contention that the classical focus on ontology, combined with precise and careful formulations that marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated into the spinning of intricate webs of verbal analysis. The latter supposedly yield theories of meaning, but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of anti-realism and internal realism. The focus on the world, as what words are about, is often lost by analytic philosophers who concentrate on language itself at the cost of the world itself.

Such trends toward linguistic exclusivity have come to typify analytic tradition in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as continental European tendencies. Hochberg is unafraid of a polemical accounting of those trends that display arrogance toward and ignorance of the philosophical tradition that such tendencies illustrate, even in influential works. The book discusses in depth the early works of Frege, Meinong, and Bradley, and follows these with examinations of Russell, Wittgenstein, and other important, if lesser-known works. The author notes the processes by which the early analytic tradition, with its careful and precise formulations, was sometimes transformed into dismissal of real-world concerns as such. The work is clear and incisive. It can be read with great benefit by scientists and students of culture, no less than specialists in the history of philosophy.

Herbert Hochberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. Among his works are critical related essays in Philosophical Studies, Methodos, Nous, and a series of edited volumes.

Synopsis

Philosophy took a "linguistic turn" in the twentieth century that was marked by the focus on theories of meaning, reference, description, predication and truth. Starting with the roots of the analytic tradition in Frege, Meinong and Bradley, this book follows its development in Russell and Wittgenstein and the writings of major philosophers of the analytic tradition and of various lesser, but well known and widely discussed, contemporary figures. In dealing with basic issues that have preoccupied analytic philosophers in the past century, the author notes how analytic philosophy is sometimes transformed from its original concern with careful and precise formulations of classical issues into the dismissal of such issues and the resultant spinning of intricate verbal webs, often signalling the rebirth of idealism in the guises of "contextualism" and "anti-realism." The book thus examines the change that came to dominate the analytic tradition by a shift of focus from the world, as what words are about, to a preoccupation with language itself.