Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition

Summary

Introduction: analytic Germans and surprisingly analytic Germans

Although at present analytic philosophy is practiced mainly in the English-speaking world, it is to a considerable part the invention of German speakers. Its emergence owes much to Russell, Moore, and American Pragmatism, but even more to Frege, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. No one would think of analytic philosophy as a specifically Anglophone phenomenon, if the Nazis had not driven many of its pioneers out of central Europe.

So there are analytic Germans. It is nevertheless controversial to speak of a German analytic tradition. For it may seem that Frege, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle stand radically apart from the mainstream of Germanophone philosophy. (Wedberg 1984, chapter I; Coffa 1991, 1–4). In so far as they belong to a tradition at all, the story goes, it is that of anglophone analytic philosophy, which received either these thinkers or at least their ideas with open arms. The German and Austrian origins of Frege, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle are, it appears, merely an unfortunate coincidence, just like the origins of Händel, Freud, Einstein, the House of Windsor, or the christmas tree.

In this paper I want to undermine this image and to make out a tentative case for the existence of a German analytic tradition.