Dainton and Robinson’s Companion traces lines of descent of analytic philosophy from ancestors. They characterize analytic philosophy as a movement, a tradition, a style, and a commitment to the va...

Margaret MacDonald (1907–56) was a central figure in the history of early analytic philosophy in Britain due to both her editorial work as well as her own writings. While her later work on aesthetics and political philosophy has recently received attention, her early writings in the 1930s present a coherent and, for its time, strikingly original blend of common-sense and scientific philosophy. In these papers, MacDonald tackles the central problems of philosophy of her day: verification, the problem of induction, and (...) the relationship between philosophical and scientific method. MacDonald’s philosophy of science starts from the principle that we should carefully analyse the elements of scientific practice (particularly its temporal features) and the ways that scientists describe that practice. That is, she applies the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to actual scientific language. MacDonald shows how ‘scientific common-sense’ is inconsistent with both of the dominant schools of philosophy of her day. Bringing MacDonald back into the story of analytic philosophy corrects the impression that in early analytic philosophy, there are fundamental dichotomies between the style of Moore and Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and the Vienna Circle on the other. (shrink)

Drawing on a close reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s works, I offer five lessons for a science of crime and punishment: always historicize; dissect symbolic categories; produce embodied accounts; avoid state thought; and embrace commitment. I offer illustrative examples and demonstrate the practical implications of Bourdieu’s ideas, and I apply the lessons to a critique of orthodox criminology.

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard story (...) of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

We develop a reading of Moore’s “Proof of an External World” that emphasizes the connections between this paper and Moore’s earlier concerns and strategies. Our reading has the benefit of explaining why the claims that Moore advances in “Proof of an External World” would have been of interest to him, and avoids attributing to him arguments that are either trivial or wildly unsuccessful. Part of the evidence for our view comes from unpublished drafts which, we believe, contain important clues concerning (...) Moore’s aims and intent. While our approach to PEW may be classified alongside other broadly "metaphysical" readings, we believe that a proper recognition of the continuity in Moore’s philosophical concerns and strategies across his philosophical career shows that the customary distinction between "epistemological" and "metaphysical" interpretative approaches to PEW is at best superficial. (shrink)

This article was first published in 1982 in Educational Analysis (4, 75–91) and republished in 1998 (Hirst, P. H., & White, P. (Eds.), Philosophy of education: Major themes in the analytic tradition, Vol. 1, Philosophy and education, Part 1, pp. 61–78. London: Routledge). I was then a lecturer in philosophy of education at Sheffield University teaching the subject to Master’s students on both full- and part-time programmes. My first degree was in philosophy, read under D. W. Hamlyn and David Cooper (...) and, given their interests, inevitably emphasized the philosophy of language, in particular the work of Wittgenstein in this field. When I subsequently turned my attention to the philosophy of education it seemed obvious to me that there were serious problems with Professor Peters’ approach to language, and I had particular difficulties with his approach to criteria, meaning theory and what seemed an odd interpretation of a transcendental argument. This article thus set out to show that the then dominant form of philosophy of education seemed not to take account of developments in the philosophy of language that preceded Professor Peters’ early work by at least a decade and which cast serious doubt on the enterprise as it was then understood. As the articles in the 1998 collection indicate, I was not alone in thinking there was something amiss, although at the time I seemed to be ploughing a somewhat lonely furrow. In revisiting this early article some 30 years after it was first published I have found to my surprise that there is little I would now change, although I have been forcibly reminded of the very lively discussions Professor Peters and I had over these issues. The fact that there is little I would now add to, or subtract from, my critique is in itself a telling comment on the enduring and influential legacy of the approach to the philosophy of education that Professor Peters championed so powerfully. (shrink)