Logical Analysis, Philosophy of

a trend in modern analytic philosophy which maintains that the problem of philosophy is the logical analysis of the language of science using instruments of modern formal (mathematical) logic.

The emergence and development of the philosophy of logical analysis was due to the increased interest in logical and methodological problems that has been characteristic of 20th-century science and was related to the intensified mathematization of science and to the development of methods of formalization. However, the detailed investigation of logical problems in science was related by the philosophy of logical analysis to a positivist negation of the significance of philosophy as a world view.

The fundamental ideas of the philosophy of logical analysis were first formulated by B. Russell. Russell advanced the thesis that any scientifically meaningful philosophical problem is essentially one of formal logic. The ideas of the philosophy of logical analysis were also developed in L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logi-co-philosophicus and received their full expression in the logical positivism of the Vienna circle. Beginning in the 1930’s, a number of other groups of philosophers and individual philosophers, such as the logical pragmatists W. Quine, N. Goodman, and A. Pap (USA), K. Popper (Great Britain), and K. Ajdukiewicz, J. Łukasiewicz, and T. Kotarbiński (Poland), became adherents of the philosophy of logical analysis.