This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date. As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear. Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.

Acknowledgments ixIntroduction to the Two Volumes xi
PART ONE:
G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1
CHAPTER 1
Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3
CHAPTER 2
Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12
CHAPTER 3
Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34
CHAPTER 4
The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore's Ethics 71
Suggested Further Reading 89
PART TWO:
BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91
CHAPTER 5
Logical Form, Grammatical Form, and the Theory of Descriptions 93
CHAPTER 6
Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132
CHAPTER 7
Logical Constructions and the External World 165
CHAPTER 8
Russell's Logical Atomism 182
Suggested Further Reading 194
PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS 195
CHAPTER 9
The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197
CHAPTER 10
Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214
CHAPTER 11
The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234
Suggested Further Reading 254
PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255
CHAPTER 12
The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257
CHAPTER 13
The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271
CHAPTER 14
Emotivism and Its Critics 300
CHAPTER 15
Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320
Suggested Further Reading 346
PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349
CHAPTER 16
The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351
CHAPTER 17
Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378
Suggested Further Reading 406
Index 409