Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

This concerns especially those philosophers who later came to be called analytic (see Rorty, 1967); but not only them - Heidegger, e.g., has accomplished a turn of a very similar kind.

The central theme of semanticsL is meaning, and consequently also analytic truth (for analytic truth is "truth in virtue of meaning").

Philosophy, at least in its analytic variety, has in a certain sense come to rest on the analysis of language; any notion of metaphysics over and above 'natural language metaphysics' has proven itself to be rather precarious.

One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.

Kant's cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz's distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.

In the same vein we hear analytic statements defined as statements whose denials are self-contradictory.

Kant conceived of an analytic statement as one that attributes to its subject no more than is already conceptually contained in the subject.

But Kant's intent, evident more from the use he makes of the notion of analyticity than from his definition of it, can be restated thus: a statement is analytic when it is true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact.

If 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' were alike in meaning, the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' would be analytic.

Statements which are analytic by general philosophical acclaim are not, indeed, far to seek.