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Question

what are the principle issues of analytical philosophy.

Answer 1

The site from which this sample was taken would be worth a visit (and so would the 2nd site.)

"some of the early analytic philosophers had two main aims:

To show that mathematics could be reduced to logic; and
To show that the resulting (mathematical) logic is an ideal language.
The first was called the logistic thesis and was the goal of Whitehead and Russell in their Principia Mathematica. Of more interest to us, perhaps, is the second: if true, it would mean that the imprecision and other difficulties associated with everyday language could be eliminated in favour of a formal mode of expression defined by logical rules. This was an attractive proposition to some philosophers; after all, it would mean that philosophical questions could be translated into the ideal language and addressed by applying the rules of logic. A question that was poorly thought out, or fallacious in some way, would then be exposed as such by logical analysis.

Although beyond the scope of this discussion, Gödel's first theorem—a famous result in mathematics—showed that this ideal language would be incomplete; that is, it would not be possible to find a language that could do everything the philosophers hoped. In spite of this, attempts at this new language was able to make important contributions, most notably the theory of descriptions. This will be considered later.

Logical atomism

A metaphysical theory that grew from this work was logical atomism, the idea that the structure of reality is essentially the same as that of mathematical logic. It followed, of course, that the study of the latter would thus tell us about the former. Some philosophers thought that the universe consisted of atomic facts that combined to form propositions according to the rules of logic. Analysis of a proposition, then, would consist in translating it into the ideal language, breaking the result up into its constituent atomic facts and checking if they have been combined in a meaningful way.

Technical criticisms of logical atomism meant that it was soon rejected, in part due to the advent of logical positivism. As we learned in our sixth discussion, too, there are and can be no such facts on which to base logical atomism. Even so, it was part of the development of analytic philosophy and can help us understand what was to follow.

Logical positivism

Positivism tends to be associated with the principle of verification, which we will come to shortly, but it traditionally had three strands. The first concerned analytic and synthetic propositions.

Recalling our fifteenth discussion, an analytic proposition (also called a priori or necessary) is one that is true by virtue of its definition, the typical example being "all bachelors are unmarried". There is no need to know anything about the world to conclude that this proposition is true because the term "bachelor" means someone who is unmarried. On the other hand, a synthetic proposition (also called a posteriori or contingent) is one that seems to be true but need not be, an example this time being "all men are mortal". All our experience points to men being mortal, but it could conceivably be the case that some future medical advance will mean otherwise. The point, of course, is that we have to refer to our experience of the world to decide whether the proposition is true or not.

To return to the point, the logical positivists first claimed that all propositions are either analytic or synthetic, but not both. This has interesting consequences: to begin with, the rationalist hope of learning truths about the universe via reason had to be rejected wholesale. After all, the results of reasoning had to be analytic propositions, but these do not tell us about the world. Next, whatever truths could be discovered had to be uncertain, since only synthetic propositions tell us things about the universe and they are always tentative. This is because circumstances may change, as in the example of men being mortal, or we may not be sure of what our senses tell us, or we may refer back to the problem of induction (as discussed in our fifth piece). Synthetic propositions are the business of science, of course, which acknowledges these skeptical restrictions on what we can know, so the logical positivists advocated science as the only tool to learn about our world.

Thinking back to our look at the philosophy of religion, we can see that an obvious criticism of this element of logical positivism would be to point to propositions that seem to be neither wholly analytic nor synthetic, such as "God is just" or "the universe is purposive". Responding to this objection, and thus giving their second tenet, the positivists appealed to the principle of verification, according to which only those propositions that can conceivably be verified are meaningful. Different forms of what "verified" should mean were tried, but the basic idea was that a person should be able to state an experiment that would make him or her accept or reject a proposition. Since this cannot be done (or so it was supposed) for most of the humanities—but especially metaphysics and theology—it followed that any claim made by these disciplines was cognitively meaningless. (That is, it might still have meaning insofar as it had emotive import or to act as inspiration, but not with regard to what is or is not real.) Note also that a proposition need not be verified, but it was necessary that it could in principle be verified at some time—like the theory that there was life on Mars or that there is life elsewhere in the universe.

The third aspect of logical positivism was called the reductive hypothesis, which spoke of the relationship between a synthetic statement and the observations that would verify it (or otherwise). The positivists held that this relationship could always be reduced to observation statements; that is, a statement about sense experience (also called a sense-datum).

As we said above, there were many attempts to state the principle of verification in a way that responded to the critique it was faced with but it is widely agreed that they all failed. One objection was to ask if the principle is analytic or synthetic: if analytic, it says nothing about the universe; but if synthetic it would have to verifiable. However, what could possibly count as an observation showing it to be either true or false? This means it is self-defeating. A second problem was identified by Hempel, who demonstrated in ingenious fashion that the principle could be used to make any proposition verifiable.

The distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions was challenged by Quine (of whom more below) via consideration of the example of a solidly analytic statement like "all bachelors are unmarried". This is true by virtue of the definition of "bachelor", of course, but how, asked Quine, do we know what "bachelor" means? Usually we know because we were taught it, or learned it from observing its use in conversation, or by looking it up in a dictionary, but all of these rely on experience. In that case, the separation of analytic and synthetic would have to be rejected.

Quine also addressed the reductive hypothesis, pointing out that terms or propositions do not retain their meaning when taken in isolation; that is, they often depend on the context of their use. Moreover, and as we saw in our sixth discussion, it was (at least in part) because observation is theory-laden that the sense-datum theory of knowledge was rejected, although in recent years it has begun a rehabilitation, especially in the philosophy of mind.

As a result of these and other criticisms, logical positivism was shown to be untenable."

Answer 2

Analytic philosophy is any philosophy concerned with the study of language -- an empirical investigation into how words are used, thus what meanings words have. In clarifying language, one does not find a source of truth about the universe in the same way science does. Wittgenstein (a representative of this field) believed that the appropriate use of philosophy is to demonstrate to one puzzled by a metaphysical question that it is meaningless ..."Whereof one cannot speak, therefore, one must be silent."

Answer 3

An addiction to thinking is essential to understanding and accepting the concepts of philosophy.

Answer 4

the individual actions compared to the actions of the group... that could be psychology also

Answer 5

That Don Lichty made the statement of to be or not to be .

Answer 6

i am sorry that's tuff tooooo tuff think about it longer and then maybe use a caulcul8er hope u find the answer babe!