24 March 2005  Death Is Not the End  Long Live Theory!   The two
grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy
departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from
the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside
universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at
first called “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism,” then
simply “analytic philosophy,” was the best thing going. The
original idea was that logical analysis of language would show
which philosophical problems might be solved, and which
eradicated because they were not phraseable in clear, logical
language. That meant wiping out most of what Hegel had left us,
and Europe still understood, as philosophy—including history,
being, death, recognition, love. Still brand new in the 1930s
(Carnap, Russell, Ayer) when trying to develop its ideal logical
language, it had only just become institutional in the analytic
pragmatism of the 1950s and 1960s (Quine), in time to be cranked
up again in the 1970 (Kripke),