Abstract

This is an excellent collection of fifteen essays on the state of analytic philosophy, past, present, and future, with contributions from such philosophers as Peter Hacker, Hilary Putnam, and Jaakko Hintikka. The editors have divided the collection into four parts. Part 1, “Introduction,” consists of an outstanding overview of analytic philosophy by Hacker, “Analytic philosophy: what, whence, and whither?” For the “what,” Hacker describes seven characteristic marks of analytic philosophy. As for “whence,” Hacker gives us a typical synoptic historical view, from Moore and Russell to post-war Oxford and the later Wittgenstein. As for the “whither,” Hacker argues that as analytic philosophy has won most of its battles, it is now, due to Quine, characterized by scientism, but this need not mean the demise of philosophy. Two complementary tasks remain to analytic philosophy: the critical task of rectifying conceptual confusion; and the descriptive task of providing a “perspicuous representation of our conceptual schema”.