Origins of Analytic Philosophy

"Analytic philosophy has been the dominant philosophical perspective in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century. Grounded in the logical advances of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, analytic philosophy is characterized by logical precision, technical sophistication and expositional clarity. Recent work in the history of early analytic philosophy has shown that in a large part it developed in reaction against the critical thought of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. While the relationship between Kant and other major figures in early analytic philosophy - such as Russell, G.E. Moore and Rudolf Carnap - has been the subject of full length studies, no such work yet exists on the relationship between Kant and Frege." "The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege addresses this gap in our understanding of the origins of early analytic philosophy. Its concern is to chart the nature and significance of Frege's break with Kant over the question of whether arithmetic is a synthetic a priori or an analytic a priori science. In rejecting Kant's claim that arithmetic is an a priori synthetic science, Frege returns to a conception of the scope and power of pure reason that shows important similarities to the philosophical outlook of Kant's great predecessor and philosophical opponent Gottfried Leibniz. Here Delbert Reed shows how, in his attempts to establish the foundations of arithmetic on analytic principles, Frege developed many of the tools, concerns and problems that would dominate the development of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. As such, this book makes a crucial contribution to the study of the history of early analytic philosophy."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.