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Instructor: Joshua Mozersky

In the West, the dominant philosophical outlook of the 19th Century was idealism, the view that everything is, ultimately, mental; alternatively, that only the contents of our minds are knowable. The early part of the 20th Century witnessed the birth of a new approach, eventually known as analytic philosophy, that was, in large part, the rejection of the idealism of the previous era. The turn away from idealism was encouraged by two revolutions. The first was the rise of modern physics, with the introduction of Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. The second was the birth of mathematical logic. It is the latter that was especially influential because the pioneers of the analytic movement, such as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, took great inspiration from the work of the mathematician Gottlob Frege, whose ideas lie at the foundation of modern logic, computer science, and much of contemporary philosophy. This course is a study of analytic philosophy’s birth, development, and influence on 20th Century thought. We begin with a brief overview of 19th Century views on the nature of mathematics and mathematical knowledge, against which Frege reacted. We then turn to his pivotal ideas on the foundations of arithmetic, and their extensions to his theories of meaning and thought. Next, we look at the ideas of Russell and Wittgenstein that built on Frege’s works. We end with an examination of some of the most influential analytic works from the middle and later 20th Century, with an eye toward understanding the strengths, limits, and prospects of the movement