The analytic tradition arose partly as a rejection of Hegelian idealism in favor of what George Edward Moore (1873–1958) called a “common sense” view of the world, alongside developments in mathematical logic due to Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). This initially led to an increasingly sharp focus on the logical structure of language as a guide to resolving philosophical problems and, later, to a renewed interest in the structure of our scientific theories. Eventually, the everyday usage of natural language became the focus of attention, a change of direction most notably associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).
From the 1960s onward, the analytic tradition began to fragment into various subfields, and while certain broad similarities remain—the logical analysis of concepts and a methodological reliance upon the natural sciences—it is no longer helpful to speak of specific schools of thought within this tradition.
