Analytical and Analytical

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes nicely between analytical philosophy as a “particular” form of philosophy and as a “universal” philosophical mode, and gives a tidily potted history: “As a particular, it is a confluence of streams of thought whose springs were in Britain, Austria, Poland and the United States. It has an early classical, or ‘Cambridge,’ period (the period of Russell, Moore Wittgenstein); a middle classical, or ‘Viennese,’ period (Carnap and the logical positivists); a late classical, or ‘Oxford,’ period (Austen and the ‘philosophers of ordinary language’); and a post-classical or ‘American’ period (Quine, Kripke and David Lewis). Thought of as a universal, analytical philosophy is something that recurs periodically in the history of philosophy. Aristotle was an analytical philosopher by any reasonable definition of ‘analytical,’ as were most medieval philosophers (both Christian and Muslim), and the so-called British Empiricists and Continental Rationalists . . . . When I, a fairly typical post-classical analytical philosopher, read texts from any of these sources, I know that their authors and I are ‘up to the same sort of thing’ – something I cannot say of the work of Hegel, or Heidegger, or even Kant. They are philosophers of other times and other cultures, but I nevertheless recognize them as colleagues, ‘fellows of another college,’ as Littlewood said of the Greek mathematicians.”