Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1

Winner of the 2003 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2004 "I know of no sustained philosophical work that is as clear, deep, and incisive as these two volumes. There are several other excellent books on twentieth-century analytic philosophy, but Soames's is likely to become the standard. His ability to reconstruct arguments, to fill in inchoate arguments, and to detect what may have motivated or underlain some philosopher's position is amazing... These are superb volumes by a superb philosopher."--A. P. Martinich, Journal of the History of Philosophy "The writing and the organization are admirably clear and straightforward, exhibiting many of the virtues Soames claims for the tradition as a whole... It is hard to imagine another work being produced which would deliver so much solid information on this dense and difficult subject matter in such easy form."--Charles T. Mathewes, Virginia Quarterly Review "Because of its combination of sympathetic, illuminating exposition of the central doctrines and arguments of the analytic tradition and the hard-nosed critical evaluation to which they are subjected, this will surely be the standard history of analytic philosophy for many years to come."--Choice Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century is a marvelous introduction to analytic philosophy. The two volumes unfold as a series of studies of some of the most important and influential philosophers in the analytic tradition... It is a philosopher's history of analytic philosophy, with a careful and critical assessment of ideas about truth, morality, logic, mind, and meaning."--Alex Byrne and Ned Hall, Boston Review

Scott Soames is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His other books include "Reference and Description" (Princeton), "Beyond Rigidity", and "Understanding Truth".

Acknowledgments ix Introduction to the Two Volumes xi PART ONE: G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1 CHAPTER 1 Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3 CHAPTER 2 Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12 CHAPTER 3 Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34 CHAPTER 4 The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore's Ethics 71 Suggested Further Reading 89 PART TWO: BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91 CHAPTER 5 Logical Form, Grammatical Form, and the Theory of Descriptions 93 CHAPTER 6 Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132 CHAPTER 7 Logical Constructions and the External World 165 CHAPTER 8 Russell's Logical Atomism 182 Suggested Further Reading 194 PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS 195 CHAPTER 9 The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197 CHAPTER 10 Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214 CHAPTER 11 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234 Suggested Further Reading 254 PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255 CHAPTER 12 The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257 CHAPTER 13 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271 CHAPTER 14 Emotivism and Its Critics 300 CHAPTER 15 Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320 Suggested Further Reading 346 PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349 CHAPTER 16 The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351 CHAPTER 17 Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378 Suggested Further Reading 406 Index 409