Analytic philosophy and revisionism beyond the bounds

Abstract

This article is a critique of the so-called 'revisionism' with regard to the origins of analytic philosophy, which found an advocate in the person of Vladimir Shokhin who defends it on the pages of two academic journals, Problems of Philosophy and The Philosophy Journal. According to the revisionist position, the standard view of the emergence of analytic philosophy, as it was expounded by Bertrand Russell and George Moore, can be contested in favour of earlier evidence or other philosophers. Now the author of both papers in question, Vladimir Shokhin stretches this tendency to the extreme by placing the beginning of the analytic tradition as far back in time as in ancient Indian philosophy. By unreservedly relying in his argumentation on a single source, Aaron Preston's book Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Shokhin presents a distorted picture of an alleged decline in analytic movement, completely ignoring the astounding boom we are witnessing in analytical studies which make use of the advances in modern science and mathematical logic. The historiography of analytic philosophy as delineated by Shokhin is untenable, too, because it is based on an unwelcome oversimplification of its methods and achievements, and no less because of the unhappy attempt to artificially expand the historical framework of a very concrete philosophical school of the 20^th century, which deprives it of its historical context and of any recognizable specific traits. 'Boundless revisionism' in Shokhin's version has little in common with the actual practice of analytic philosophy where the elucidation of classical metaphysical doctrines of Western thinking, such as Alexius Meinong's 'stratification of reality', is successfully achieved without any recourse to the philosophical wisdom of Ancient East.