School · 76 thinkers

Analytic Philosophy

76 thinkers of Analytic Philosophy on the Agora star map, from Bernard Bolzano to Robin Dembroff, in chronological order.

• 1781–1848Bernard Bolzano

  Truths exist in themselves whether or not anyone thinks them, and logic studies how they follow from one another.

• 1845–1918Georg Cantor

  Cantor held that the infinite can be treated mathematically as a completed whole: infinite sets differ in size, and beyond the finite numbers lie transfinite numbers that can be ordered and compared.

• 1848–1925Gottlob Frege

  For Frege, logic can be written as precisely as mathematics, and a word has both a sense – how it presents something – and a reference – what it picks out.

• 1858–1932Giuseppe Peano

  Peano held that arithmetic can be built on a few axioms for the natural numbers and that mathematics and logic can be written in an exact symbolic notation, which Russell and Whitehead later adopted.

• 1862–1943David Hilbert

  Hilbert held that a mathematical theory should be set out as a system of axioms whose consistency is all that existence requires; infinitary mathematics could be secured by formalising it and proving its consistency with finitary reasoning about signs – in mathematics, he insisted, there is no “ignorabimus”.

• 1866–1938Kazimierz Twardowski

  Every presentation has a content and an object, and the two must be kept apart; truth is absolute, not relative, and philosophy owes its readers clear language and precise distinctions.

• 1868–1939Axel Hägerström

  There are no objective values: calling an action good or a duty binding expresses a feeling or a command and states no fact; rights and the “binding force” of law are ideas with roots in magic, which must be explained historically, not taken as knowledge.

• 1872–1970Bertrand Russell

  Mathematics can be derived from logic, and philosophical confusions dissolve once we analyse the logical form hidden beneath ordinary sentences.

• 1873–1958G. E. Moore

  Good cannot be defined by anything else, and common-sense beliefs like having two hands are more certain than any philosophy denying them.

• 1878–1956Jan Łukasiewicz

  If statements about the future were already true or false, everything would be determined; a logic with a third value, “possible”, leaves the future open and shows that classical logic is one system among several.

• 1882–1945Otto Neurath

  There is no secure foundation for knowledge: we can only test statements against other statements and rebuild our knowledge piece by piece while relying on the rest.

• 1882–1936Moritz Schlick

  A statement is meaningful only if we can say how to check it – so claims that cannot be tested in any way say nothing.

• 1885–1943Susan Stebbing

  Stebbing held that philosophical analysis starts from what we already know to be true and seeks its ultimate constituents, rather than constructing formal systems; she applied the same discipline of clear thinking to physicists’ popular metaphysics and to the arguments of politicians and newspapers.

• 1886–1981Tadeusz Kotarbiński

  Only things exist; words for properties and relations abbreviate talk about things, and a decent life needs no religious sanction, only the example of the reliable guardian who can be counted on in need.

• 1886–1939Stanisław Leśniewski

  A class can be understood as a whole made of its parts rather than as an abstract set; once these two senses of “class” are kept apart, Russell’s paradox no longer arises, and logic needs no abstract objects.

• 1889–1951Ludwig Wittgenstein

  For the early Wittgenstein, language pictures the world, and whatever cannot be pictured must be passed over in silence; for the later, in many cases what a word means is how it is used.

• 1890–1963Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz

  The meaning of an expression is fixed by the rules of the language it belongs to, so the picture of the world we can form depends on the conceptual apparatus we choose; logic and semantics give philosophy a precise method for such questions.

• 1890–1958Eino Kaila

  Knowledge, from perception to physics, searches for invariances – relations that stay constant through change; a scientific philosophy must keep to what can be tested, yet the concepts of science cannot be built from elementary experiences alone, and reality has distinct levels.

• 1891–1970Rudolf Carnap

  Metaphysical claims are not false but meaningless, and philosophy should become the logical analysis of the language of science.

• 1891–1953Hans Reichenbach

  Relativity shows that even the basic principles of physics can be revised; what science can justify is a probability, and how a theory was found is a different question from whether it holds.

• 1896–1974Maria Ossowska

  Morality can be studied like other social facts: by analysing moral concepts and describing which norms and ideals groups have actually held and how they changed, without first deciding which of them are right.

• 1899–1979Alf Ross

  To call a rule valid law is to predict that courts will apply it, because judges feel bound by it; words such as “ownership” refer to nothing in themselves but link conditions to consequences, and “justice” without further content only expresses emotion.

• 1899–1942Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum

  Induction can be understood as a logic of probability: a hypothesis is confirmed to the degree that evidence raises its probability, which explains why a black raven supports “all ravens are black” much more strongly than a white shoe, which supports it only minimally.

• 1900–1976Gilbert Ryle

  The mind is not a ghost hidden inside the body; to have a mind is to have abilities and tendencies to act intelligently, not a hidden inner stage.

• 1901–1983Alfred Tarski

  A sentence is true if things are as it says – “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white – and this can be defined exactly for formal languages.

• 1902–1994Karl Popper

  A theory is scientific only if it could be refuted by observation, and a free society lives by criticism, not by grand plans for history.

• 1905–1997Carl Gustav Hempel

  To explain something scientifically is to show that it follows from general laws together with the particular circumstances.

• 1906–1978Kurt Gödel

  In any consistent rule system strong enough for arithmetic there are true statements it can never prove – mathematical truth outruns what any one such system can prove.

• 1908–2000W. V. O. Quine

  There is no sharp line between truths of meaning and truths of fact; our beliefs face experience together, as one web.

• 1910–1989A. J. Ayer

  Only statements that can be checked by experience or are true by definition make sense – moral judgments merely express our feelings.

• 1911–1960J. L. Austin

  Speaking is a kind of doing: when we promise, apologise or name a ship, our words perform the act rather than describing it.

• 1912–2009Arne Næss

  Shallow ecology fights pollution for the benefit of people in rich countries; deep ecology holds that all life has value in itself: by identifying with other beings, the self widens until their flourishing becomes part of its own.

• 1912–1989Wilfrid Sellars

  Nothing is simply given to us in experience without concepts – knowing means being able to give reasons, within a space of reasons.

• 1913–1988H. P. Grice

  We often mean more than we say, and listeners work it out because they assume we are trying to be cooperative, truthful, relevant and clear.

• 1916–2003Georg Henrik von Wright

  Norms of obligation and permission have a logic of their own, parallel to the logic of necessity and possibility; and human actions are understood rather than causally explained – through the practical syllogism, which links what agents intend and believe to what they do.

• 1917–2003Donald Davidson

  Reasons are the causes of our actions, and to understand what others say we must assume that most of what they believe is true.

• 1919–2001G. E. M. Anscombe

  Modern ethics talks of duty without a lawgiver; we should return to character and virtue, and ask what people intend when they act.

• 1919–2002R. M. Hare

  Moral judgments are prescriptions, like commands, that must apply equally to anyone in the same situation – including yourself.

• 1919–2018Mary Midgley

  Humans are animals with a nature of their own, and philosophy must resist simplistic myths like the selfish gene or the mind as a machine.

• 1919–1999Iris Murdoch

  Morality is mostly a matter of attention – of seeing other people justly and lovingly, which slowly frees us from our selfish fantasies.

• 1919–2006P. F. Strawson

  If there is no King of France, saying “the King of France is bald” is not false but misfires – and our practice of blaming and resenting needs no metaphysical backing.

• 1920–2010Philippa Foot

  Goodness in humans is like health in plants and animals, rooted in what our kind of creature needs to live well.

• 1920–2012J. J. C. Smart

  A sensation such as pain is simply a process in the brain, and the right action is the one with the best consequences.

• 1921–2012Ruth Barcan Marcus

  Logic can reason about what is possible and necessary, and a proper name is just a tag for a thing, not a hidden description of it.

• 1922–1996Thomas S. Kuhn

  Science does not grow steadily; it works within a shared framework until crisis forces a revolution that replaces it with a new one.

• 1922–1974Imre Lakatos

  Scientists rightly keep a theory despite counterexamples as long as its research programme keeps predicting new facts; it is abandoned when it only makes excuses.

• 1924–1994Paul Feyerabend

  There is no single scientific method: major advances broke the accepted rules, so the only rule that always holds is the ironic “anything goes”.

• 1924–2000U. T. Place

  Consciousness may turn out to be a brain process, just as lightning turned out to be electricity – science, not word meanings, decides.

• 1925–2011Michael Dummett

  To understand a statement is to know what would count as showing it true, so we should not assume that every statement is true or false regardless of whether we could ever find out.

• 1926–2016Hilary Putnam

  What our words mean depends partly on the world and our community, not only on what is inside our heads.

• 1929–2023Harry Frankfurt

  Being free means acting on the desires we want to have, what we love gives our lives meaning, and “bullshit” is worse than lying because it does not care about the truth at all.

• 1929–2015Jaakko Hintikka

  Knowing means being able to rule out possibilities: knowledge and belief can be analysed through the possible worlds compatible with what someone knows or believes; and a sentence is true if its defender can always win a game against a critic who tries to refute it.

• 1929–2020Judith Jarvis Thomson

  Even if the fetus has a right to life, that right does not include using another person’s body – so abortion can be permissible even if the fetus is a person.

• 1929–2003Bernard Williams

  Morality cannot be squeezed into a tidy theory – luck shapes what we are blamed for, and our own deepest commitments count.

• 1932–2025John Searle

  A computer manipulating symbols no more understands them than a person following rules in a Chinese room – minds are more than programs.

• 1935–2017Jerry Fodor

  Thinking is computation in an inner language of symbols, and perception and language run on specialised, largely innate modules.

• b. 1937Thomas Nagel

  We can never know what it is like to be a bat; subjective experience cannot be captured by any objective description.

• 1938–2017Tom Regan

  Animals that experience their own lives have rights, so we may not use them as mere tools – not for food, science or sport – even when it would bring good results.

• 1940–2022Saul Kripke

  A name refers to the same thing in every possible situation, so some truths are necessary even though we discovered them by experience.

• 1941–2001David Lewis

  Every possible world is just as real as ours – and talking about possibilities is talking about what happens in those other worlds.

• 1942–2024Daniel Dennett

  Consciousness is no mystery but the work of many parallel processes in the brain, without an inner observer – there is no inner theatre where it all comes together.

• 1942–2017Derek Parfit

  Personal identity over time is not what matters – and seeing this makes us care more about others and fear death less.

• b. 1943Frank Jackson

  A scientist who knows every physical fact about colour still learns something when she first sees red – or so he argued before changing his mind.

• b. 1946Peter Singer

  Equal suffering counts equally, whether a human or an animal feels it – and if we can prevent great harm at little cost, we must.

• b. 1955Sally Haslanger

  Gender and race are real, but they are social positions of advantage and disadvantage – and philosophy should ask which concepts we need in order to fight injustice.

• b. 1957Andy Clark

  The mind does not stop at the skull – notebooks, phones and tools can be part of our thinking – and the brain is above all a prediction machine.

• b. 1958Thomas Metzinger

  Nobody has ever been or had a self: what we experience as our self is a model the brain builds and cannot recognise as a model.

• b. 1964Luciano Floridi

  Information is a basic feature of reality, and since we now live in an “infosphere”, we need a new ethics for the digital world.

• b. c. 1966Talia Mae Bettcher

  Trans people have first-person authority over their gender: the “wrong body” story does not capture trans experience, and transphobia often works by casting trans people as deceivers or pretenders.

• b. 1966David Chalmers

  Even a full account of what the brain does would not explain why any of it is experienced – that is the hard problem of consciousness.

• b. 1966Miranda Fricker

  People can be wronged as knowers: when they are not believed because of prejudice, or when society lacks the concepts to make sense of what they experience.

• b. 1969Jason Stanley

  Propaganda and fascist politics work by turning shared ideals against themselves and dividing people into “us” and “them” – and knowledge depends partly on what is at stake.

• b. 1973Nick Bostrom

  For Bostrom, some risks could end humanity’s whole future, so reducing them – including the risk from AI smarter than us – may be among the most important things we can do.

• contemporaryKristie Dotson

  Silencing is not only failing to listen: when listeners are unwilling or unable to hear, speakers learn to cut short what they say – and whole ways of knowing are shut out.

• b. 1987William MacAskill

  We should use evidence and reason to do as much good as we can – and because far more people may live in the future than today, protecting the long-term future matters greatly.

• contemporaryRobin Dembroff

  Gender categories are social, not natural – and people who live outside the binary of man and woman, like genderqueer people, challenge the system that sorts everyone into two.

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