> Okay, we agree in practice. _In practice_, AP's method involves
discouragement of scholarship as Justin defines it here. [BTW, I like the
typo, the spelling of "culkture," though maybe "kultur" would be more
appropriate.]
Of course we could drop the "method involves" and have a sentence that means almost
the same thing, which undermines the point of talking about "method." However, there
is no point in raking this over again.
>The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what distinguished it
from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy (except maybe post
modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since Aristotle thought that
formal logic was extremely revealing if not absolutely necessary to clear
thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that previous philosophers didn't
know about?
Analytical philosophy is the heir of logical positivism, which gave modern logical, as
developed by Frege, Russell and Whitehead, et al. an absolutely central place in doin
philosophy.
Modern mathematical logic is a quantum jump over the Aristotlean logic that preceded
it in power and flexibility; there's no comparison. Frege antedates analytical
philosophy, but AP added much that was important--Russell is a founder of AP and a
foundational figure in modern logic as well; Wittgenstein made important contributions
in the Tractatus; Goedel was a member of the Vienna Circle; Church and Turching were
in the loop; Frank Ramsey, the inventor of decision theory, was a logician at
Cambridge, etc. So, yes, I think you can say that analytical philosophy has advanced
the study of logic a bit--more than anyone had since Aristotle, truth be told.
Russell's analutical philosophy, the early Wittgenstein, and logical positivism (the
Vienna Circle) made the use of this logic basic to the doing of philosophy; problems
were formulated in terms of it, and those that couldn't be were dismissed. The only
previous philosophical movement that made logic so central was scholasticism, where
philosophers were likewise expected to be fluent in formalism and able to think that
way as part of professional competence. Of course the logic was much more primitive.
Analytical philosophy has discarded most of the tents of logical positivism--the
verification principle, etc.--but it has retained the emphasis on logic.
At Michigan grad school in philosophy, you had to pass the math logic course with a
high grade, and it also fulfilled the language requirement, on the grounds taht it was
a "formal language." That shows the attitude AP takes towards scholarship better than
anything else I know. Louis Loeb, Michigan's leading expert in early modern philosophy
when I was there, did not know Latin, Greek, French, or Italian, i.e., he could not
read the works he was writing about in the original, But he still got tenure. After I
left, they hired E.M. Curley, who is a genuine scholar and knows the languages.
--jks
