The Twentieth Century to Today · School
Analytic Philosophy
Takes logical and linguistic analysis as its method and prizes clarity of argument; founded by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein.
Representative figures · 20
Charles Sanders Peirce皮尔士
Founder of pragmatism, pioneer of semiotics and the logic of relations, banished from academia in life and recognised after death as America's most original philosopher.
Gottlob Frege弗雷格
Inventor of modern logic: quantifiers, function and argument, sense and reference. He set out to reduce arithmetic to logic; a letter from Russell brought the edifice down, but analytic philosophy begins with him.
Alfred North Whitehead怀特海
From mathematical logic to process metaphysics: reality is not substance but event, the universe an organic creative advance, and even God is in becoming.
Bertrand Russell罗素
A founder of analytic philosophy: co-author of Principia Mathematica, inventor of the theory of descriptions, lifelong campaigner for peace, reason and liberty, Nobel laureate in literature, leader of the anti-nuclear movement in old age.
G. E. Moore摩尔
Common sense against metaphysics: he proved the external world by holding up his hands, showed that 'good' is indefinable, and was the spiritual guide of the Bloomsbury group.
Ludwig Wittgenstein维特根斯坦
He changed philosophy twice: the Tractatus says language pictures the world and whereof one cannot speak one must be silent; the Investigations say meaning is use and philosophy is therapy for the diseases language causes.
Rudolf Carnap卡尔纳普
Leading figure of the Vienna Circle: meaningful propositions must be verifiable, metaphysics consists of meaningless pseudo-propositions, and philosophy is the logical syntax of the language of science.
Karl Popper波普尔
Falsifiability demarcates science from non-science, knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation, and the open society advances by piecemeal social engineering rather than utopian blueprints.
W. V. O. Quine蒯因
The two dogmas of empiricism overturned: no analytic–synthetic distinction, no isolated statement facing experience; translation is indeterminate, 'to be is to be the value of a variable', and philosophy is continuous with science.
Donald Davidson戴维森
Reasons are causes, anomalous monism, truth-conditional meaning, radical interpretation and the principle of charity, the myth of conceptual schemes: in a series of papers he wove mind, language and action into one whole.
G. E. M. Anscombe安斯康姆
Intention founded the philosophy of action, 'Modern Moral Philosophy' revived virtue ethics and coined 'consequentialism', and she opposed an honorary degree for Truman because he ordered the atomic bombs dropped.
John Rawls罗尔斯
Justice as fairness: behind a veil of ignorance, rational persons would choose equal liberty and only those inequalities that benefit the least advantaged. A Theory of Justice revived normative political philosophy.
Hilary Putnam普特南
Functionalism, Twin Earth, brains in a vat, internal realism, the entanglement of fact and value: he devised many of the central arguments of contemporary philosophy of mind and language, then criticised them himself.
Alasdair MacIntyre麦金太尔
After Virtue: modern morality is a heap of fragments torn from their context, emotivism is its truth, and the way out is a return to practices, tradition and the virtues, waiting for a new St Benedict.
Richard Rorty罗蒂
Philosophy is not the mirror of nature: no representation, no foundations, only conversation and solidarity. Leaving analytic philosophy behind, he turned pragmatism into an ironic liberalism that annoyed every camp.
Thomas Nagel内格尔
'What is it like to be a bat?', the view from nowhere, the gulf between subjective and objective: in the clearest prose he guards the questions reductionism cannot cover, consciousness, value and the meaning of life.
Robert Nozick诺齐克
The minimal state, rights as side constraints, entitlement theory, the Wilt Chamberlain argument: one book made him the philosophical voice of libertarianism, and then he turned to everything else.
Saul Kripke克里普克
Possible-worlds semantics, rigid designators, necessary a posteriori truths, 'Kripkenstein' rule-scepticism: a prodigy who published a theorem as a teenager and changed metaphysics in a few lectures given without notes.
Derek Parfit帕菲特
Personal identity is not what matters, psychological continuity is; future people count as much as present ones; moral philosophy is a young science and secular ethics has only begun. He wrote two books in his life.
Peter Singer彼得·辛格
Animal liberation, the drowning child and global poverty, effective altruism: he carried utilitarianism from the lecture hall to the street and the wallet, the most influential and most controversial applied ethicist alive.