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Language is very important to understand human behavior. This realization was made (anew) around 1940. Bertrand Russell in this way became famous, but this stream of thought became dominated by his former
student Ludwig Wittgenstein. It relativizes philosophy as a science of 'rational knowlege' and originates from the view that words and skill are the basis of any language,
because communicating skill requires language.
In itself no new view, it is at least as old as Plato. Analytic philosophy florished in Europe and US between 1945-1960 (though in the US purely as analytical/mathematical approach of studying communication, producing no serious philosophers in an after war period in which especially France produced great thinkers) and was the successor of the Logical Positivism (Vienna Circle) of the 1930s (both inspired by the "Tractatus Logicus", see Minitractatus) of the young Wittgenstein to see reality as made by words, Analytic Theory by the Philosophical Investigations of the elder (see Wittgenstein about Language) that is saying that words only have meaning in relation to reality). As said the most famous representative from this period: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), though the deeper message in his Investigations that there is no truth in math was in Europe largely missed, and in the US totally. It's method focussed on language and the analysis of the relation to reality (concept) expressed in it. The employed methods were often mathematical Followers of this philosophy in this period all rejected the scientific attitude of their Positivist predecessors, who only believed in 'rational' experience and 'rational' theories about it, and instead attacked most problems as language puzzles Nonsense was accepted as world view too in Analytic Philosophy. These philosophers added abnormality to common sense, CERTAINLY not frivolous though but in a strict mathematical sense. |
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Wittgenstein
