This substantial anthology comprises the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of readings in analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. It provides a survey and analysis of the key issues, figures and concepts.The volume is divided into seven philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, free will and personal identity, ethics, and methodology. It includes the most familiar texts of the analytic tradition, as well as several others that are less often anthologized. Several articles are logically related to each other. For example, Moore's Four Forms of Skepticism, appears together with selections from Wittgenstein's On Certainty; Langford's discussion of the paradox of analysis and Moore's reply are both included; and Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism is paired with Grice and Strawson's In Defense of a Dogma.The distinctive selections and internal coherence make this anthology an invaluable guide for anyone interested in twentieth-century and analytic philosophy.
A. P. Martinich is an analytic philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language and religion and the history of political thought. He is considered a foremost authority on Thomas Hobbes.
I have been reading this book piecemeal for months and I have finally finished. Although I think it is essential to read complete primary texts to really understand any philosopher's world view as I'm sure Ricoeur would agree, this anthology lends itself very well to the 'atomic' nature of analytic philosophy: Many of the contributions originally appeared as journal articles so you do in a sense get a complete text with a lot of the readings in this book. Martinich and Sosa have quite skilfully created a kind of dialectic between the philosophers by pitching arguments against each other quite often directly referring to each other, this has given a load of great pointers on where to read from here and given a very detailed backdrop in which to read a great deal of contemporary philosophers.
In terms of the merits of analytic philosophy within itself, it is clear that a more cohesive world view than analytic philosophy accounts for should be included within the discipline of philosophy - a point that Wilfred Sellars makes very well, and a point that has been a grounds on which people have disregarded whole reams of philosophy - but to trivialise the work of authors such as Kripke is to miss the already ground breaking influential effect of his work. It is also clear to see that a great deal of continental philosophy has greatly suffered by ignoring a whole plethora of authors just because Carnap and Frege said a few insensitive dismissive things.
I enjoyed the selection of papers in this anthology. There were many in the philosophy of language. I would personally have enjoyed more in metaphysics and epistemology but their selection probably reflects historically what the distribution of papers were.