Outline:
This course will examine methods of philosophical analysis, the history of such forms of inquiry and their role in contemporary philosophy. Conceptual analysis is often thought central to the whole of philosophy and it has a distinguished history: Plato, for example, sought an analysis of knowledge and Locke aimed to analyse complex ideas in terms of simple ones. We will focus largely on attitudes to analysis in the 20th century. The central historical stages include:
• Logical atomism, defended at one time by Russell and Wittgenstein, which postulates simples in the world and requires analysis to reveal how sentences are made true or false by those simples.
• The movement of Conceptual Analysis (associated particularly with Oxford in the 1950s), according to which the fundamental objects of philosophical inquiry are concepts (which are the meanings of linguistic predicates): philosophy should uncover conceptual truths that are knowable a priori.
• Celebrated objections to conceptual analysis put by Quine and others which some philosophers have taken to signal the death of analytical philosophy in general. These include the challenge to the assumption that there is a class of analytic truths (sentences true in virtue of their meaning alone).
• Replies to Quine (and his successors) and attempts to establish a new role for conceptual analysis.
Studying these episodes should help us to understand exactly what analysis is, how it should be done, and why, if at all, it is important. Three conceptions of analysis will occupy us particularly. 1) Reductive analysis: the task of breaking concepts down and revealing their composition in terms of something more fundamental. Do the notorious problems in finding necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of e.g. “knowledge” suggest such a task is not viable for our most interesting and important concepts? 2) Might the activity be better seen as mapping conceptual geography – displaying relations between concepts? 3) Alternatively, should we approach the project by asking what practical role a given concept might or should play in a language-community?
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