Epistemology, Ethics, Language, Logic and Metaphysics

This is a bibliography containing entries on key works in primarily 20th century analytic philosophy. The arrangement of the entries is descriptive and chronological and is restricted to only books which means articles or essays are excluded unless they reappear in the author’s book. The reason for this is due to the need to keep the description length of the entry very short because the main readership is non-specialist although specialists will also find it beneficial as a quick reference. In most cases, the accompanying description for each entry focuses on only one aspect of the book – like an idea, concept or argument –  and how that is a contribution to and significant for the development of analytic philosophy. Again, this is for the need to maintain concision and to avoid making the bibliography into that of an encyclopedia entry.

Each entry will contain an accompanying section that highlights its significance in some respect for students of the Islamic kalam theological tradition

The bibliography will be periodically updated.

Considered by some to be the first work in analytic philosophy, the Wissenschaftslehre was a four-volume tour de force of epistemology, logic and what we would now call philosophy of science. It attempts to demonstrate the logical foundations for the sciences (by ‘logic’ Bolzano did not just mean formal logic but meta-principles or the foundational rules of knowledge and the various areas of knowledge) that includes analysis of metaphysical notions like mereology (the study of part-whole relations), abstract objects, substances and ideas as well as logical topics like propositions and mathematical notions such as sets, numbers and collections. The various topics that are tackled and explored in detail fall into a tripartite division of (i) language, (ii) thought and (iii) logic – one that would be familiar throughout early 20th century analytic philosophy. One significance of Wissenschaftslehre lay in its clearly theoretical approach to philosophy, where propositions about absolute and foundational truths are thoroughly investigated and a systematic presentation given of any axioms of knowledge and valid inferences that are required before we can even begin theorising about science. A ‘science’ (wissenschaft) for Bolzano is a parcel or division of an entire body or collection of propositional truths human beings have acquired about reality. The collection is not a closed corpus of propositional truths but can be added to as we discover more about ourselves and the world.

Frege, Gottlob. 1879. Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (‘Concept-Script: A Formal Language for Pure Thought Modeled on that of Arithmetic’). Halle: Verlag von Louis Nebert (available online)

Frege is attributed with the title of being the founder of modern mathematical logic – a subject that integrated philosophical questions and techniques to
mathematics; something not done by anyone prior to him. He is also considered the father of analytic philosophy and is said to have marked the ‘linguistic
turn’ that ushered in the analytic philosophical method. His Begriffsschrift sought to argue that mathematics grew out of logic – a view known as logicism – and in doing that influenced major figures like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this work, Frege sought to free human reasoning from the ‘deceptions’ of natural language and uncover its underlying logical structure and to represent it with a symbolic language. He also wanted to demonstrate how mathematics was not based on intuition like Immanuel Kant argued. Hence, one of Frege’s revolutionary innovations in the Begriffsschrift was not only the symbolic machinery but the introduction of modern quantificational theory and an axiomatic predicate calculus. In this way, he also broke with the prior Aristotelian-Stoic propositional logic which was very limited in certain areas and application and set out the contours pretty much of modern logic. 

 

Moore, George Edward. 1903 (repr. 1922). Principia Ethica. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. (available online).

 

The publication of Moore’s Principia Ethica ushered in a new and path-breaking method of metaethics that focused on linguistic analysis of ethical precepts. In the book, Moore explores the central ethical notion of “Good” arguing forcefully for three theses: (i) moral realism: ethics is an objective part of the world and (ii) moral intuition: morality is immediately known and (iii) that morality is autonomous, independent and apart from how it might relate to other things. This ultimately led him to conclude that what is Good is a real but simple or an unanalyzable term, i.e. it is ineffable and beyond any reduction to other categories or precepts. This conclusion meant that Moore, like others during his time, held a strong non-naturalist position on ethics. Moore’s own moral outlook, i.e. that which constituted what is Good, inclined to a version of ideal consequentialism where the requirement of morality is to promote a plurality of intrinsic goods for those able to possess them. Moreover, Principia Ethica is famous for explicating what is called the naturalistic fallacy which roughly is: any attempt to reduce or explain what is Good in terms of natural properties like ‘being pleasurable’ or ‘being desirable’ for example is erroneous. If we try to directly infer that ‘X is good’ from any natural property like being desirable or being pleasurable, then we are committing a fallacy because the inference is not warranted unless we supply an additional evaluative premise or claim. We cannot directly move from purely factual premises or claims to evaluative conclusions.

Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand. 1910-13 (1st edn.) and 1925-27 (2nd edn.). Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

The Principia Mathematica is hailed as one of the most revolutionising works in the field of mathematical logic ranked alongside Aristotle’s Organon and Gottlobe Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (‘Foundations of Mathematics’). It was written as a defense of logicism (the thesis that mathematics is reducible to the formal axioms of logic). Although hefty, extremely dense and highly technical, it influenced the way philosophers, mathematicians and logicians undertook the study and presentation of logic and logical analysis. The Principia demonstrated the power and possibilities of symbolic logic in explicating propositions and axioms. Subsequent to its publication, it deeply shaped the approach and tools of analytic philosophy.

Broad, Charles Dunbar. 1925. The Mind and its Place in Nature. London: Keagan Paul.

Broad as a philosopher, dealt with a wide range of philosophical topics like time and free will to induction and knowledge. One area he did address in relative detail is perception. In The Mind and its Place in Nature, he assesses issues related to perception, sensation, cognition and memory. An important notion in his book, discussed in Chapter Two, is emergentism, which is a model proposed for solving the relation between mind and matter (the mind-body problem). On Broad’s physicalist account (he uses the word ‘mechanistic’), emergentism is the idea that mental properties are distinct from physical properties; they are properties that emerge when neurophysiological processes attain a sufficiently high degree of complexity. In other words, the emergent property is a novel characteristic of a system or entity that arises only when that system of entity acquires a certain level of complexity. The emergent property is not reducible to (identical with) the properties of the parts of that system or entity. Thus, emergentism is a view about the whole being greater than its part.

Carnap, Rudolph. 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt (‘The  Logical Structure of the World’). Berlin: Weltkreis.

Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Aufbau for short) is a representation of the major ideas of the logical positivist movement that began in Vienna in the early 20th century. It is a clear example of the application of the powerful systems of logic set out by Frege, Russell and Whitehead in their works and the developments within the natural sciences as well as a focus on the intersection between language and logic. The central aim of the Aufbau is encapsulated in Carnap’s conception of the Konstitutionssysteme (‘constitution systems’). The basic idea is the possibility of delineating a method and a deductive procedure whereby the ordinary language sentences as well as scientific discourse in general can be reformulated or paraphrased into a rigorous and precise logical language and structure. Assuming an underlying unity between the different sciences and the possibility of a rational reconstruction of reality, Carnap believed that logic and language can demonstrate how all scientific concepts based on the sensed reality can be simplified to or reduced to a single coherent conceptual system that are based on a handful of fundamental and non-reducible concepts.

Popper, Karl. 1935. Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft (‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’). Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer.

In this famous work, Popper sets out to analyse the underlying principles of science and its application. One of the well-known doctrines about science associated with the book is the falsifiability principle. Popper argued that one of the central problems in the philosophy of science is the demarcation problem, which is how we can distinguish real and true science from non-science (sometimes referred to as ‘pseudo-science’). Popper’s proposed solution to this demarcation problem is his falsifiability principle: in order for something to count as scientific, it must be able to be proven false (it must in principle be falsifiable). The refutability or testability of science is what defines it from what is non-science. Hence, for Popper, how we demarcate science from non-science is through its falsifiability.

 

Ayer, Alfred Jules. 1936. Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. Gollancz.

 

A landmark book on meaning written by Ayer when he was only 24 years old but it was a broader philosophical manifesto of Logical Positivism which established him as the English representative of that philosophical movement. The focus of the book included different kinds of propositions and the empiricist criteria that make such propositions meaningful and true. The core argument of Language, Logic and Truth rests on Ayer’s explication of the verification criteria of meaning. In its basic version, the verification criteria asserts that for any statement P, Q and R to be meaningful, it must be verified and for it to be verified it must be demonstrated. The only way it can be demonstrated, Ayer argued, is if P, Q and R are either (i) analytic (true by definition because of what the words mean) or (ii) synthetic (true by empirical verification). Examples of the former type are “All bachelors are unmarried” and “All triangles have three sides” and examples of the latter are “anything temporally originated has a cause” and “all physical bodies have parts”. This strict verification criteria effectively meant huge swathes of human discourse like ethics, metaphysics, religion and aesthetics is literally meaningless; they are not only false, but they have nothing really to tell us. This strong logical empiricism methodology encapsulated in Language, Logic and Truth dislodged Philosophy from the excessive metaphysical speculation that Ayer thought haunted and confounded it and put it in its proper place which is to focus on and clarify the logical relationships between empirically verified propositions. Philosophy in this way could be pressed into the service of science. Ayer, nearly half a century later from the publication of Language, Logic and Truth, rejected almost everything in it as the verification criteria of meaning collapsed as a tenable position.

 

Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.

 

In this modern classic, Ryle sets out to correct what he argues is the long-standing mistake on the mind-body problem held by philosophers since Rene Descartes. The mind-body problem is essentially how an immaterial or mental substance can causally interact with and influence a material and physical one. He critiques Descartes position that the mind and body are separate substances (i.e. the mind is a separate entity from the body) and dubbed this Cartesian view as “the ghost in the machine”. Ryle’s core contention is that the Cartesian mind-body dualism makes a category mistake because it attempts to analyse the relation between “mind” and “body” as if they were terms belonging to the same logical category and are thereby compatible. An example would be the college buildings on a university campus. If a visitor is shown various campus buildings of a university like the administration office, libraries and lecture halls, and thereafter askes that she would like to see the university, it would indicate that perhaps they have not understood how the word university is used. The university just is the way all that the visitor has seen is organised. Ryle wanted to argue that to think there is some non-physical entity above and beyond the campus buildings that is called a ‘university’ and it exists and interacts with the various physical buildings  is to commit a category mistake. His university analogy was supposed to highlight how entirely physical objects follow physical laws and hence have explanations grounded in science without any need to seek explanations above and beyond science. To confuse words in this way is to unnecessarily create philosophical problems from language.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philosophical Investigations’). Oxford: Blackwell. Tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe.

 

Published posthumously in 1953, Philosophical Investigations represents a defining work in the tradition of analytic philosophy subsequently influencing diverse topics of investigation and study such as logic, language, ethics and religion. The book represents what is often labelled as the ‘later’ Wittgenstein phase which is a transition from his ‘earlier’ philosophical phase captured by his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein takes a logo-centric assessment of philosophy where he insists that the root of much confusion within philosophy is attributable to the failure and misuse of language. He argued forcefully that our assumptions about language, its nature and relation with meaning and reality have problematised our undertakings in Philosophy. A key theme that emerges out of Philosophical Investigations is how language is a simple phenomenon complicated by philosophers in their preoccupation with meaningless questions. The defining feature of language is not its referential character (picking out objects in the world) nor its use for definitions but rather how it is employed by language users. Meaning, therefore, is constructed through how the ‘life’ of a language is ‘lived’ through a community. Wittgenstein insisted that language was like a game (Sprachspiel) being played out according to agreed rules and a known context. This means that concepts – embedded in language – are not about capturing reality or necessarily representing it and neither are linguistic terms about clarity and precision; it is rather about pragmatic uses, i.e. towards what practical or useful end. Words can be used in multifarious ways. Wittgenstein gives the well-known example of “Water!”, which can be used as an exclamation, an order, a request, or an answer to a question. Which one of those meanings it is depends on the language-game within which it is being used. Another way Wittgenstein makes the point is that the word “water” has no meaning apart from its use within a language-game. The word may be used as an order to have someone else bring a glass of water or it may be used to warn someone that the water is contaminated.

Strawson, Peter Frederick. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen.

 

With the publication of Individuals in the heyday of British philosophy, Strawson is considered as one of a group of significant philosophers who revived or rehabilitated the study of metaphysics within analytic philosophy. In this book, Strawson engages in what he calls ‘descriptive metaphysics’ contrasted with what he calls ‘revisionary metaphysics’. The former notion consists of eschewing grand metaphysical ambitions such as aiming to discover the ultimate and authentic nature of reality and the reasons why reality must have those features; rather, the aim should be a more modest one where the goals is merely to describe some of the most general features of how us as cognising agents think, reason and communicate about various aspects of reality that are identifiable by observation. The latter notion of metaphysics is undertaking inquiry into the actual structure of reality or how it would be if it were accurately reflected in a conceptual scheme we ought to have.

One interesting argument Strawson advances in Individuals is an anti-Cartesian one, where he attacks the notion of being a person as analysed fundamentally in terms of the concept ‘ego’, i.e. a mind. Descartes had argued that human beings are essentially a mind that is embodied, where the former can be conceived without the latter, and is a subject of experiences. Strawson argued that if we define a person in this way as fundamentally a mind with mere subjective experiences, then we lose the concept of our own selves, entailing that the concept of self, the first person, is essentially empty and entailing further that any first-person references like ‘I do …’ or ‘I am…’ would be unintelligible. But this kind of entailment is absurd because our first-person utterances are not unintelligible or incoherent and we definitely possess a sense of the self. Strawson further argues that taking this Cartesian notion of the self as mind would mean we cannot know others as persons but only as subjects that bear experiences this is because we would not be able to identify them as persons. Moreover, if having a concept of ourselves is based on having oa concept of others as persons, then it would follow that our own concept of self would be impossible. Thus, the Cartesian notion of persons as minds is an empty notion.

Quine, Willard van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

Quine’s publication of Word and Object sets out a full range and mature level of his philosophical thinking. In it he expands on a number of his earlier seminal essays. He states his doctrine of naturalism where philosophy is to be pursued within the natural sciences. This leads him to posit his naturalised epistemology, which asserts that knowledge acquisition, production and evaluation must be based on scientific methods or empirical processes, whatever their limitations. This naturalism meant he held to a doctrine of physicalism over phenomenalism and all models of mind-body dualism. It also led him to favour extensionality over intensionality when it comes to meaning. The significance of the book is how Quine’s own philosophical thinking and solutions to various questions about epistemology, logic, semantics and metaphysics influenced how his contemporaries conceptualised and answered them – even if their own answers differed somewhat from his.

Plantinga, Alvin. 1974. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Plantinga’s publication of The Nature of Necessity is a seminal work that focuses on defending de re modality, which concerns the modal properties of things (accidental and necessary) by virtue of their nature. Not only was it a contribution to the debate on modality involving Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Robert Stalkner, Ruth Marcus and others, but it was an original discussion on how emerging analytic metaphysics of the 1970s can be imaginatively applied to issues in the Philosophy of Religion. Plantinga, for example, offers a free will defense (FWD) for the problem of evil and defends a modal ontological argument (MOA) for the existence of God. In the former case, he utilises modal notions and intuitions about personal identity, essences, counterfactuals and logical principles within a framework of possible worlds and applies that to God’s power to actualise possible worlds and the scope of His foreknowledge as it relates to human actions. This strong integration of religion (primarily theistic) and tools and ideas of analytic philosophy in The Nature of Necessity would mark a broader shift towards a respectability for philosophy of religion paving the way for a flowering of Christian philosophy for the remainder of the 20th century.

Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

 

A transcript of three lectures by Saul Kripke delivered at Princeton considered one of the most important contributions to 20th century analytic philosophy. It addresses the problem of reference, proper names as well as the nature of identity employing the machinery of possible world semantics; thus intersecting Metaphysics with the Philosophy of Language. An important contribution of the book is Kripke’s attack on descriptivist theories of proper names which is the view that the semantic content (the meaning of the word) of a proper name are identical to the collection of descriptions associated with it, e.g. if we take the name Abu Hanifa then descriptions associated with him like ‘the student of Hammad or ‘the jurist from Iraq’ are the referents constituting the meaning of his name. Thus, on descriptivist theories, names are connected to their referents via a process of association by the speaker. Kripke proposed an alternative theory of reference which is a causal theory one arguing that names fix themselves to their referents the moment the name is initially given (or “baptized”) and as a result they become what he calls “rigid designators”. Names are linked to their referents by a causal connection or causal chain going back to the original act of naming. Thus, “Abu Hanifa” is a name that refers rigidly to the bearer to which it is causally connected, regardless of any descriptions or facts about the bearer (like being Hammad’s student or a jurist from Iraq). Other notions in the book revolutionized the way philosophers conceive and discuss modality (possibility and necessity) as metaphysical notions and notions of truth and meaning. One particular idea revived in the book was essentialism, the belief that objects possess certain properties necessarily, i.e. without such properties, the objects themselves would cease to exist. In this way, there are propositions about objects – like “water is H₂O” – that are necessarily true but we can only know that a posteriori (from investigating the world) and other propositions that are contingent that we know about objects but do so a priori (prior to any investigation of the world). This radically overturned Immanauel Kant’s long held distinction that all necessary propositions are a priori and all contingent ones a posteriori.

Lewis, David Kellog. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

 

David Lewis is one of the most significant philosophers of the later 20th century and the importance and appeal of his works has found renewed interest in the past several years. Among his many contributions to the field of Philosophy, one doctrine that is most famously associated with him is concretism or modal realism. Building on a reinvigoration in the study of both metaphysics as well as advances within modal logics and semantics, Lewis proposed in On the Plurality of Worlds (and other prior essays) the idea that possible worlds (an entire way reality, situations or states of affairs might be otherwise from how they actually are) are just as real as the actual world, i.e. they are of the same kind of worlds as the actual world only differing in content. These possible worlds, although just as real, are distinct and isolated both casually and spatio-temporally from our actual world as well as every other possible world. Lewis’ justification for holding this doctrine of modal realism, in addition to its logical soundness, include pragmatic grounds: because possible worlds concretism enables us to better understand key philosophical notions in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, it is extremely useful and its usefulness ought to lead us to believe in it being true. Moreover, if mathematicalia (mathematical objects) like numbers and sets are held to be real because they are indispensable and useful, possible worlds likewise ought to be believed in on similar grounds. Thus, its theoretical utility provides a reason to accept it as true. On Plurality of Worlds opened up an important adventure into possibilia (what things are possible) for metaphysicians and enabled a way of imagining it with the technical machinery of modal logic that has far-reaching influences today.