PHIL 540 History of Analytic Philosophy

Analytic philosophy is the tradition that tried to make philosophical problems tractable by treating language and logic as the proper tools for them, and this seminar traces that project through the writers who shaped it, Frege on number and sense, Russell on logical atomism, Wittgenstein's later turn against his own earlier picture, and Anscombe on action. You'll spend the term doing close readings, writing a short essay nearly every week, and producing one longer term paper, so the work is almost entirely about learning to reconstruct and assess arguments on the page. It's a graduate-level seminar that assumes you already know basic logic and some philosophy of language, and it's the backbone for later work in metaphysics, mind, and ethics, since most contemporary anglophone debates still inherit their vocabulary from these four.