I will take liberties with “contemporary” and interpret it as “post Hegelian”, starting in the early 20^th century.   We will read and discuss the most important philosophers and subgroups of the early analytic movement:  Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ayer and the logical positivists, Austin and Strawson.   We will not discuss Quine, Goodman, Davidson, Lewis, Putnam, Kripke; those figures call for a second course!

Our main themes will be:  the place of commonsense realism in philosophy, the crucial distinction between apparent grammatical form and logical form, the reference theory of meaning, the correspondence theory of truth, the picture theory of language, the theory of truth conditions for statements, verificationism, the analytic/synthetic distinction, and ordinary language and its relation to the idealized languages of logical analysis.  These themes revolve around what Rorty (after Gustav Bergmann) called the linguistic turn in philosophy.

Our main text will be Classics Of Analytic Philosophy, edited, with Introduction, by Robert Ammerman, Hackett Publications 1990, 423 pp., cost new about $18 (paperback).  As background we will use J. O. Urmson’s Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two World Wars.  Originally published by Oxford University Press, this book may be hard to get (it is out of print); there are several used copies on Amazon ranging from $3-$30.   There will be Blackboard articles to read as well.

Requirements:  a midterm exam, a final exam, and a final term paper.  I have not yet decided if there will be other paper requirements during the semester.