Logical Studies in Early Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The essays collected here deal with the development of analytic philosophy in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In addition to providing a historical account of early analytic philosophy, these essays also contain logical reconstructions of Frege's, Russell's, Meinong's, and Wittgenstein's views during the period in question. Several of these reconstructions can and have been used in the new logicolinguistic developments in pragmatics and intensional logic that make up the vanguard of contemporary analytic philosophy. Others, such as the interpretation of the logical modalities in logical atomism, or the determination of the objects of fiction and dreams in Meinong's theory of objects or Russell's early logic, provide a useful introduction, if not also a solution, to a number of problems confronting analytic philosophy today. Indeed, for that matter, all of the essays collected here provide a useful propaedeutic to much of the research now going on in the study of logic and language.