The Ideal Language Tradition

From Jena to Harvard

This so-called ‘ideal language tradition’, stood in stark contrast to the British analytic philosophy of – for example – Gilbert Ryle. Reading some of the main texts of this time, we want to find out in this seminar what the main characteristics of this tradition are. What did neopositivism inherit from Frege and Wittgenstein? How did this mix with American pragmatism, when the logical positivists came to the US? Was Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction in ‘Two Dogmas of Empricism’ the end of that tradition? If not, which aspects do survive after the ‘cognitive turn’?