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What an article on analytical philosophy might look like.

History

Preamble: The dream of philosophy as a rigorous science

The title of this section is derived from that of a work by Edmund Husserl which is somewhat ironic since, as we will see, it was Husserl who laid the foundations for what would become the major alternative and competing "school" to the project of philosophical analysis. Nonetheless, it is a fitting title for the original impetus of a revolutionary intellectual movement that we would now call analytic (or analytical) philosophy. It is easy to defend the claim that the intellectual movement was not only new but revolutionary: many of its primary architects were some of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of their day or would regularly converse with such figures. Note that the term itself is somewhat of an ambiguous designator: it can be used to refer (without anachronism) to any philosophical work written from around 1900 onwards employing a particular method (analysis), or rather, as I have been using it, to an event or ideology of sorts that emerged upon the scene of Western intellectual history in the early 20th century. Analytic philosophy in this latter sense was simply the widespread desire to make philosophy as rigorous and scientific as possible, for it to be subject to the norms and constraints of scientific research especially insofar as collaboration was concerned, and to hold it accountable to something objective. Why, at the turn of the century, this idea suddenly held so much weight for intellectuals both on the Continent and across the Channel is a larger question which is not of our concern. We only need to know in which thinkers this movement originated and their contributions to making philosophy more closely allied with the empirical sciences and hostile to irrationality and superstition.