/lit/ - Literature

>>23137222
Analytic philosophy is not a small tradition by numbers OR geography. Nor is it true that very few philosophers of mathematics are analytics, but the other anon already pointed this out. Sometimes /lit/ overemphasizes some super narrow conception of analytic philosophy that seems to come out of the 1940s, and not the 2020s. It's really weird. When you guys read modern ethics or modern (post-classical) liberal political philosophy, to give an example, like someone talking about Kantian or Humean or virtue ethics (for example, Alasdair MacIntyre), or liberalism and social contract theory (like Rawls or Nozick), that's analytic philosophy, but /lit/ and others who hate analytic act as if it wasn't for some reason. Another example: The vast majority of historians of philosophy, both the ones writing the histories (like Grayling or Kenny) and the ones focusing on specific historical philosophers (like Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, etc, basically anyone writing guides and companions to primary sources) are also analytic philosophers. Hell even the ones working on Hegel/German Idealism, such as Stern, Houlgate, Pippin, Brandom, identify closer with analytics than with modern continental philosophy. This is just something /lit/ fails to grasp completely, how much of philosophy today is classified as analytic, and how insular continental philosophy is defined as. To be continental, you HAVE to be the work focused on figures mentioned by >>23137904 and it's so insular that even the German continentals are starting to identify LESS with the French continentals and MORE with the analytics as of recent times. There's a weird trend to bring Husserlian phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, and German Idealism in dialogue with analytic philosophy these days, by Germans themselves, and those same Germans really want to avoid French post-structuralism like the plague. Those Germans are particularly proud nowadays about Frege and Carnap being Germans, which explains why they feel as if analytic philosophy is more natively in line with their German way of doing philosophy (together with Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Adorno, etc). The only weird exception, when it comes to German pride, is that they really like to forget about Heidegger probably for Nazi reasons, but of all people it's Americans who are really in love with him, so the potential to analytic-ify Heidegger is there too. Analytic philosophy is very capable of appropriating once-continental philosophy and there are strands of continentals who are effectively defecting from the postmodern association these days. Even post-postmodernism (Badiou, the speculative realists, Negarestani) LOOK to analytic philosophy for new inspiration in their revolt against postmodernism. Combine this with the German trend and you get people like Markus Gabriel, see?

>>22307633
>Math Is the Purest Form of Philosophy
No. Logic is. When will the math nerds learn the formal languages that philosophers use, and use them to understand metaphysics better?

>>22294701
Look. Analytics are just doing hermeneutics. Carnap was a Dilthey student. If you have a problem with it take it up with Heidegger too. But Carnap's mindset about it was that it was provisional. It can be corrected. Ordinary language philosophy was a stupid stillborn movement because it set for itself weird conditions against formalism and concept-introduction, only to go and practice the exact same hermeneutic that it opposed. However its actual death was brought on by one of their own (Grice) pointing out the semantics/pragmatics distinction. You might appreciate the analytic project better if you study Deleuzian schizoanalysis. It's not surprising that the later Deleuze-inspired continentals end up turning to analytic philosophy for a new well of inspiration. That's only going to continue til someone heals this stupid artificial divide.

>>21500967
Tractatus-era Wittgenstein is overrated. The sad reason for this is that Russell and the Vienna circle overrated him. In reality, his most valuable insight (the saying/showing distinction) precedes him. Frege is suggestive of it, and has better thoughts about it. So does Russell, in his own lectures on logical atomism. The positivists are the saddest case here, Schlick was coming up with pre-positivist stuff that he humbly attributed to Wittgenstein even though he came up with them independent of him and even possibly before him. Schlick was generally a very modest man, and so was Carnap, who was even more radical and expansive in the breadth of topics and ideas he dealt with. Were it not for the fact Schlick and Carnap were extremely modest brilliant men, and that Russell was always a champion of any brilliant mind he met, Wittgenstein wouldn't matter so much. He wouldn't survive today. PI-era Wittgenstein was a little more original with arguments he made and claims, but what sucks is that those arguments and claims also suck. Better arguments exist for similar claims, made by Americans like Quine and Sellars, or by continentals like Heidegger, or even the old pragmatists like Peirce and James. Wittgenstein inspired the lowest point in analytic history (ordinary language philosophy or OLP). It was objectively the worst time in philosophy. Imagine the positivists which people already (unjustly) hate for "dismissing" metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The positivist view is more nuanced (Schlick and Carnap actually loved aesthetics, Carnap was also politically and social-justice involved, and there are positivist reductions of ethics and religion on a par with ordinary language use-theoretic reductions). But the OLP people are worst than positivists because they did everything the positivists are hated for, AND WORSE. They got rid of sense data epistemology AND objected to the use of clarifying and more-expressive formal languages, which even the positivists respected. So when they died due to Grice's pragmatics, and got replaced by revived metaphysics and dualism with Kripke, Lewis, etc, and dualism with Nagel, Jackson, etc, that was well deserved. Good riddance. Like I said if you actually LIKE the deflationary claims the later Wittgenstein and OPL people made, just study the pragmatists, the neopragmatist analytics like Quine and Sellars, or continentals proper. They'll all tell you better stuff. Even post-OPL people like Geach or Dummett are far better (at least they respect formal languages and the intelligibility of metaphysical realism, while still defending anti-realist positions). And if you like the Tractatus-era Wittgenstein, read Frege, Carnap, Quine again, and the revived metaphysics people, who are going farther than the useless Tractarian Wittgenstein (and it's always thanks to Frege, Carnap, and Quine).

>>21279299
>is it plausible to consider Frege's philosophy as, in some way, neo-rationalist?
Maybe. I think rationalism (well, when defined vs. empiricism) has two aspects:
1. The belief that you can use reason to get surprising new and certain truths, usually about existence (for example, claiming that God exists beyond a doubt via the ontological argument). In this sense, Frege is not very rationalist. However, there's a principle Frege accepts (called "Hume's principle" by Frege) that he uses to derive the existence of abstract objects from the logic of language use. This may count as type 1 rationalism.
2. The belief that we have a priori grasp on some matters beyond what is given in sensation. This you could call rationalism too. In this sense Frege is very much a rationalist. For example, he believes in the existence abstract propositions, and he thinks we intuit them ("think" them).
>Regarding his foundation of mathematics in logic and his belief in the mathetical realm in wich its objects exist, is it plausible to consider Frege's philosophy as, in some way, neo-rationalist?
So I do think he's something of a rationalist in those two ways. However, he's more conservative than most old pre-Kant rationalists in the type 1 sense, while even many analytics since the 70s are actually open in some respects to type 2 (and there's neo-Fregeans who want to defend Frege's type 1 defense of platonism about numbers as well, like Crispin Wright).
>>21279314
Sucks to hear. Hopefully if this thread stays at a decent level of quality it won't get deleted. Likely to go to the archives if no one participates though.

>>20939611
Begin with Frege.

>>18590868
>>18591096
>His views on 'rigid designators', which underlie his defense of the analytic a posteriori, are widely discredited.
Not at all, his views on rigid designators are if anything widely accepted as canonical in current analytic philosophy. I take it some philosophy of language focused people might be more intent on saying he's "discredited" but I assure you if you're doing analytic philosophy elsewhere you will still take Kripke seriously enough. There is no post-Kripkean consensus that gets passed as the new canon. Anyway nobody needed Kripke to demonstrate an "analytic a posteriori" since it was in a sense already baked into logical positivism and introduced to analytic philosophy at the very beginning, by Frege. What the positivists and Frege realized which even Kripke didn't is that analytic equivalence does not mean synonymy or referential opacity. Which is to say, Kant's idea of analyticity is way too psychological. There's a place in Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic where he specifically criticizes that aspect of Kant, and Frege also explains the difference when he criticizes Kant in The Foundations of Arithmetic. Frege credits Leibniz's idea of (essentially) analytic truth as being the influence here. If you remember, the analytic/synthetic distinction was sort of drawn up ahead of Kant, under different names, by Hume and Leibniz (independent of each other) before Kant. Kant's psychological understanding of analytic equivalence is part of the reason he thought arithmetic had to be synthetic a priori instead, which is just absurd. For whatever reason despite what Frege and the positivists believed, people like Quine seemed to still think they defined analytic equivalence as synonymy seeing as he attacked that notion as proxy for attacking the entirety of the positivist project. And with that came an era of total misunderstanding about analyticity by analytics...so now Kripke takes credit for what is effectively a worse version of the view, since his "analytic a posteriori" is limited to the identity of de re expressions (his rigid designators), cases where Kripke thinks the sense of a naming expression is just its reference. On the other hand Frege and the positivists were dealing with broader cases where the sense of a naming expression was just a traditional sense. Kripke also got Frege wrong by calling him a descriptivist. I still like Kripke but people have to understand that the credit here in proving Kant wrong about this specific thing goes to Frege first.

>>17949066
Hm, if you want to get up to speed with stuff then you could do the following very minimal history for starters:
>Frege, "Sense and Reference"
>Russell, "On Denoting"
>Kripke, Naming and Necessity
The third of those is also a first introduction to a lot of debates and arguments for and against certain positions. Then for a basic introduction to a lot of metaphysics debates and arguments after Kripke, I recommend
>Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds
Now what you're looking for is holism on the one hand, and logic on the other hand. So for the holism, I think it would help to check out what people say about philosophy of mind at the very least. There's some readers for this that I could recommend:
>Chalmers, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings
As for logic, I don't know what to recommend. But I think it would help to understand the underlying semantics for sentential connectives, quantifiers, and modal operators. In this thread I've talked about possible world semantics. For the sentential connectives, the semantic account is one that sees them as truth functions. They are functions, monadic or dyadic, which take in arguments and spit out a value given the input combination. The possible input arguments are the True and the False, and the output values are also the True and the False. Hence: truth functions. For the quantifiers, Barcan's semantics for the quantifiers helps as a heuristic. The idea is that the universal quantifier can be approximated with an infinite conjunction analysis, and the existential quantifier with an infinite disjunction analysis, and evaluated for truth as they are. It's not a true analysis (for reasons), but it's a very useful approximation, and more or less true when dealing with a finite or countably infinite domain. If anyone knows a book that would cover these semantics accounts in an easy way, let us know, would help our anon friend here. I sort of learned them from various sources in specific university courses so it wasn't one source.

What's the best translation, the J. L. Austin or the Daniel Kolak or something else I don't know? I'm reading the Kolak and it is just so awkward. Sometimes, there's some omitted words so sentences end up ungrammatical. At least one time, in section 3, he says the opposite of what Frege meant, judging both from the context and from the Austin translation (I had to check it out to confirm my hunch).

>>14142592
How did that slide get simple things like that so wrong? That's not to mention they focus on Ryle and Rorty out of all the possible people they could have picked. Quine and Kripke, for example.