Origins of analytic philosophy and the trivialization of philosophy

Abstract

Frege’s logicism or, more generally, his efforts to construct a foundation for mathematics based on deductive reasoning was motivated by his wish to fight the radical empiricism that began to dominate scientific argument in German speaking countries after Hegel’s death. Russell’s (and Moore’s) similar purpose a few decades later, on the other hand, was originally due mainly to their wish to overcome Bradley’s neo-Hegelianism. Young Wittgenstein forged the system of the Tractatus drawing from his knowledge of both, refuting some key aspects of one or other. There are therefore important incompatibilities between the three proposed solutions for the problems related to the concept of truth and to the relation we must suppose exists between world, language and thought. When we compare their thoughts to today’s ways of handling questions which are approximately equivalent, particularly in the wake of the semantic concept of truth we owe to Tarksi, we may become aware that we have certainly gained enormous flexibility in the handling of symbolic languages; the Internet and intelligent telephones, among other signs of progress would have been impossible without this technical mastery of tools we obtained thanks to the formalization of symbolic logic. But, on the other hand, we also lost view of the philosophical depth that stood at its cradle and, it might be said, a bit of what makes philosophy philosophical. The intense sparkle of the new technologies together with the impression that we have an infinite hierarchy of languages or metalanguages at our disposal which allow us to handle any problem inherited from the previous level, may give us the impression that questions related to more deeply philosophical problems, such as the first proponents of analytical philosophy tried to deal with, are idle. Other phenomena which bear witness to the trivialization of philosophy are in part due to this loss of philosophical meaning of the business of philosophy: subduing this activity within the academic framework to methods of quantification which result in a deluge of perfectly useless publications, or the confusion of philosophy with the elaboration of operating rules for hospitals.