Analytic philosophy: has it finally been defined?

While analytical philosophy remains the main format of academic philosophizing in Great Britain and the USA, wining ground on the European continent and in the Third World countries, its comprehension as a cultural phenomenon falls far behind the scale of its spread even at the level of identification. The article examines solution to this problem suggested by Hans-Johann Glock — one of the most eminent historians of analytic philosophy, who sets the parameters for discussing the subject within the framework of contemporary metaphilosophy. The author highlights Glock’s step-type repudiation of accepted identifications of analytic philosophy (from the geographical to ideological ones) and his offer of his own, i.e. via “family resemblances” and “family ties” within it, and criticizes it as both consensual and contradictory from the methodological point of view.

In return, the author of the article offers an alternative interpretation of the same phenomenon as a very traditional investigative-cum-controversial practice, very distant from being “revolutionary,” i.e. contrary to the non-rational belief of its numerous apologists stubbornly marketing it as a modern philosophical school dating from Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (sometimes also from Gottlob Frege). The practice under discussion cannot be typologically separated from the centuries-old intercultural scholasticism (the term being used by the author without any pejorative accent) in whose history the activity of the aforementioned persons can be seen as truly seminal but by no means ground-breaking. Attention is paid also to such effects which are conditioned by appropriation analytic philosophy by one of the Russian publishers working unalterably with the same translators.