Analytical Philosophy of History

Analytic philosophy emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts. It originated around the turn of the twentieth century with the rejection of idealism by G.E.Moore and Bertrand Russell. They used a linguistic expression based on the arguments on the “meanings” of terms and propositions.

The focused areas of study in Analytical Philosophy

• Analytic philosophy involves studies of the language in which the concepts are expressed.
• It studies the structures or forms of language or sentences and establishes logical concepts. 
• Analytic philosophy of history enquires the way in which the discipline of history discovers and understands that past.
• Its inquiry is ‘analytic’ because it critically analyses the thinking behind the ways in which historians undertake their discipline.

Language and its expressions are the primary fields in analytical philosophy. It focuses on the text and linguistic expressions of historical explanations. Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical and scientific status of historical knowledge. There are different traditions of analytical philosophy. Analytic philosophers introduced new modes of critical evaluation of ancient texts.

Though the analytic philosophy was born in linguistic turn, later it underwent several internal micro-revolutions and passed into several phases. During the 1960s, linguistic philosophy gave way to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of language gave way to metaphysics, and this gave way to a variety of philosophical sub-disciplines.

Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions about the structure of the world—including human history. Philosophical reasoning by itself cannot be a source of substantive knowledge about the human actions, that we call “history.” Rather, substantive knowledge about the world can only derive from empirical investigation and logical analysis. Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical and scientific status of historical knowledge and attempted to understand this claim along the lines of the scientific standing of the natural sciences.