Introduction

Analytic Philosophy has recently started to discover its roots. You will naturally ask ‘Well, what is Analytic Philosophy? When does someone count as belonging to it? Do you have a good definition up your sleeve?’ No, but I don’t need one. Analytic Philosophy is a tradition held together by the use of a distinctive family of concepts, acceptance of specific assumptions, problems and methods for their solution. There is little doubt about the main founders of Analytic Philosophy in this sense: Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein1 provided the framework and the topics for the central debates. But none of the founders of Analytic Philosophy worked in an intellectual vacuum. It is now well known that Austrian Philosophers made contact at various points with the founders of Analytic Philosophy:2 Russell discussed Meinong’s assumption that there are things that do not exist. Moore states in his review of Brentano’s Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis that ‘[i]t would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this work’.3 Husserl’s early work on the concept of number has been discussed and criticised by Frege. Frege’s criticism led to a fruitful exchange between both philosophers. Dummett takes Frege and Husserl to be so close in philosophical orientation that he devotes a book to explain how Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy could develop in such different directions in the end.4