Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense, 1879-2002 (LOGOS: Studien zur Logik, Sprachphilosophie & Metaphysik) (German Edition)

This work is both an excellent primer in the development of twentieth-century philosophy, and at the same time, a critique of its linguistic excesses and separation from the world as such. Herbert Hochberg takes as his cue the words of Bertrand Russell that "absorption in language sometimes leads to a neglect of the connection of language with non-linguistic facts, although it is this connection that gives meaning to words and significance to sentences." Introducing Analytic Philosophy is a balanced effort to stay within the linguistic turns that have characterized philosophy in the past century. The author does this by a review of those philosophies that treat things and facts seriously.

It is Hochberg's contention that the classical focus on ontology, combined with precise and careful formulations that marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated into the spinning of intricate webs of verbal analysis. The latter supposedly yield theories of meaning, but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of anti-realism and internal realism. The focus on the world, as what words are about, is often lost by analytic philosophers who concentrate on language itself at the cost of the world itself.

Such trends toward linguistic exclusivity have come to typify analytic tradition in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as continental European tendencies. Hochberg is unafraid of a polemical accounting of those trends that display arrogance toward and ignorance of the philosophical tradition that such tendencies illustrate, even in influential works. The book discusses in depth the early works of Frege, Meinong, and Bradley, and follows these with examinations of Russell, Wittgenstein, and other important, if lesser-known works. The author notes the processes by which the early analytic tradition, with its careful and precise formulations, was sometimes transformed into dismissal of real-world concerns as such. The work is clear and incisive. It can be read with great benefit by scientists and students of culture, no less than specialists in the history of philosophy.

Herbert Hochberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. Among his works are critical related essays in Philosophical Studies, Methodos, Nous, and a series of edited volumes.