Précis of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1, The Dawn of Analysis

Wittgenstein, continuing through selected logical positivists, emotivists, and the antiemotivist David Ross, and concluding with pre-Word-and-Object works of Quine. The volumes are outgrowths of upper-division undergraduate courses at Princeton University that were often attended by first and second-year graduate students as well. The intended audience consists of comparable students at universities in the English-speaking world, autodidacts, and professional philosophers, who may use the volumes to fill gaps in their knowledge, and to interact with the larger evaluative and interpretative perspectives on offer. Although the volumes were intended as an intensive introduction, they were also written with a more ambitious agenda. The aim was to identify the main lines of progress in the analytic tradition—which involved selecting the most important works, explaining their most significant successes, and drawing lessons from their most disappointing failures. The result is a philosophically and pedagogically motivated history the aim of which is to separate the essential from the inessential by focusing intensively on the achievements that every member of the tradition should understand. Minor figures and minor works of major figures are, for the most part, omitted. The emphasis throughout is on explaining what was philosophically important and why, as opposed to tracing lines of historical influence, or chronicling changes in individual philosophers’ thoughts over time. The major achievements themselves are subjected to intense critical scrutiny. The aim, in each case, is to express the essential insights in the clearest, most powerful way—even if this means dispensing with inessential complexities and minor infelicities in the author’s own presentation. The model here is the history of logic. Just as we standardly introduce students to the theorems of great logicians like Gödel, Tarski, and Church by giving streamlined proofs of strengthened versions of the material in their original papers, so we do the same for philosophers like Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Of course, philosophy is not