Analytical Philosophy

A good place to mark the start of analytical philosophy is therefore with the young G. E. Moore's (1873–1958) emphatic denunciation of this idealist philosophy. Moore rejected internal relations and organic wholes, and in their place he gives priority to individual judgments, or propositions, and their constituent concepts. Since he holds that true propositions are real structures that do not represent facts, but constitute them, it follows that an analysis of a proposition into its constituent concepts is equally an analysis of a fact into its elements: as he puts it "A thing becomes intelligible first when it is analysed into its constituent concepts" (1899; 1993, p. 8). Thus in Moore's early work a method of conceptual analysis is employed to identify the basic properties of things. This is manifest in Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), where Moore famously argues that goodness is the basic ethical property and thus that ethical theory is the theory of the good. It should be observed, however, that Moore's method of analysis does not specify the content of his theory of the good, even though this is also supposed to be a priori. Moore's method of metaethical analysis is therefore combined with an appeal to intuitive reflection concerning synthetic a priori ethical truths; and one of the issues that has remained a matter of debate is just what contribution conceptual analysis has to offer to ethical theory.