Analitikus filozófia és modernitás

Many prominent figures in analytical philosophy saw themselves as protagonists of modernity and champions of a new Enlightenment. To interpret this self-image, I will examine what 20th-century analytical philosophers considered as the criteria of philosophical modernity and whether there is a common core to their ideas on this subject. I will argue that some overarching features characterize at least a significant part of 20th-century analytic philosophy. One common formal and methodological feature is that, according to several influential schools of analytic philosophy, modern philosophy is scientific philosophy. Another unifying feature is that 20th-century analytic philosophy was predominantly committed to empiricism and physicalism. This means that it was dominated by specific metaphysical views (e.g., concerning universals, modalities, natural laws, or causality) that fit well with a general empiricist and physicalist starting point, i.e., they assume that all knowledge must have some observational/experiential basis and that only physical entities exist. This is true of “analytical metaphysics” in its classical period, roughly between 1960 and 2000, but mutatis mutandis also of the earlier logical empiricist tradition, despite its declared anti-metaphysical stance. (However, it does not apply to the ordinary-language philosophy movement and the late Wittgenstein.) It should be noted, however, that we seem to have moved beyond the modern era of analytical philosophy, as the “post-modern” metaphysics that began in the 2000s abandoned the common empiricist and physicalist framework. Analytical metaphysics has become eclectic: Platonic, Aristotelian, and even Hegelian ideas have gained ground, which were explicitly rejected by analytic philosophers of the second half of the 20th century and, of course, even more so by the logical empiricists.

Keywords: modernity, scientific philosophy, analytic metaphysics, logical empiricism,
empiricism, physicalism