Introduction to Analytical Philosophy and European Culture

Genoa 2004

The chemistry of concepts:

Analytic philosophy, whose founders include such famous thinkers as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, grew out of the "chemistry of concepts." This term refers to the mathematical logic developed by Russell and other European logicians at the beginning of the 20th century. This new logic, in fact, compares with previous logic as does chemistry with alchemy. Relying on the rigor of the development of modern logic and on the ideal of speech analysis, analytic philosophers developed a new method of philosophical practice that referred back to tradition, rejecting the shortcuts of the irrationalists. Analytic philosophy spread throughout Europe, from Cambridge and Oxford to Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw (although Italy was untouched by this expansion, Frege and Russell considered the mathematician Peano a central figure for discussion of the foundations of mathematics). In this period, a single style and common pursuit came to extend across Europe. Philosophers participated in salons in which they held dialogues with intellectuals and scientists from the most varied disciplines. The two most renowned poles were found at small Cambridge, a center of intellectual life where artists, writers, and scientists (from Russell to Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes) would meet and at grand Vienna (with Freud, Klimt, Kokoschka, Boltzmann, Hertz, Wittgenstein). This wealth of exchange and the spread of analytic philosophy itself were drastically cut off by Nazism. In fact, during the years of Nazism’s rise, not only great scientists like Einstein, but also a large number of logicians and philosophers were forced to emigrate to the U.S. or otherwise remain outside the European continent. We need only recall the figures of Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Nazism and its consequences:

While the destruction of the philosophical environment in Central Europe that Nazism provoked had disastrous effects on the development of European philosophy, it actually benefited philosophy in the United States. Forsaken by the greater part of its analytic philosophers, continental philosophy abandoned its privileged tie to the sciences and sought refuge and consolation in topics more closely linked with issues either historical and political or intimate and private (though the idea of philosophy as consolation is one of the more traditional topics that derives from antiquity). At the same time, European analytic philosophers who had emigrated to the United States had a profound influence often directly and sometimes indirectly on the American environment and maintained contacts, above all, with philosophy in Britain.

American philosophical culture thus assimilated diverse aspects of the philosophical preoccupations of European culture, creating a paradoxical situation: the fundamental ideas of the great European tradition of analytic philosophy became "typical" characteristics of American (and Anglo-American) culture, while European philosophy, in which the culture of historicism, phenomenology, and existentialism were the primary developments, long found itself unprepared to confront either the growth of Anglo-American philosophical culture or scientific and technological progress. At the same time, American philosophy, profoundly interwoven with European culture through the contribution of analytic philosophers, brought back to Europe its own roots, thus stimulating European philosophy’s rediscovery of its own origins. In this way, societies of analytic philosophy were born in France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Germany, and other European countries; these united at an international level in the European Society for Analytic Philosophy.

In addition to the "two cultures":

Some aspects of European philosophical culture have provoked misgivings. The reaction to scientific developments has frequently oscillated between reductionist scientism and emotional irrationalism. Early analytic philosophy was also a reaction to the romantic and historicist exasperation of the 19th century that was sometimes filled with anti-scientific attitudes. In the United States, however, there was no such problem: reason underwent no crisis when faced with scientific developments. Analytic philosophy’s fusion with sides of the American spirit thus had positive consequences: on one hand, it reinforced a rapprochement with the scientific spirit and, on the other, it tempered the excesses of scientific rigor with its pragmatist approach, curing the European philosophical tradition of its dangerous detours. It must be remembered, however, that such core authors as Bertrand Russell united within themselves a libertarian spirit, a strong concern for social issues, and a great respect for science. In this perspective, we may consider the essential element of analytic tradition to be the rejection of a division between these two cultures, the humanistic and the scientific. Analytic philosophers proposed a model of unitary culture in which the philosopher was simultaneously both humanist and scientist, thus recovering the deepest roots of European culture, where philosophy, science, and art have historically always been entwined.

^ Top

« Analytic Philosophy and European Culture | The Place of Philosophy in European Culture (1,2) by Michael Dummett »

European Capitals of CultureΠοιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Navigation

Introduction to Analytical Philosophy and European Culture