Twentieth-century methods of philosophizing, generally characterized by the careful effort to uncover logical and philosophical suppositions concealed beneath the superficial structure of statements in ordinary uses of language, pursuit of clarity in the treatment of genuine philosophical issues, and a deep respect for the achievements of natural science. In a variety of distinct forms, philosophical analysis was practiced by Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, Ryle, Austin, Bergmann, and Quine. Greatly influential in England and America, analytic philosophy is sometimes criticized for its excessive professionalization of the discipline.

Recommended Reading: James Baillie, Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Prentice-Hall, 1996); Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Harvard, 1996); Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. by Oswald Hanfling (Routledge, 2000); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (Routledge, 2002); Avrum Stroll, Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Columbia, 2000); Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. by Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (Oxford, 2001); Herbert Hochberg, Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-2002 (Hänsel-Hohenhausen, 2003); From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. by Erich H. Reck (Oxford, 2002); and Bruce Wilshire, Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy (SUNY, 2002).

Also see SEP, Floy E. Andrews, EB, and Jean-Michel Roy.