ABSTRACT
Analytic philosophy began with interest in new topics—logic, language, and mathematics—that had not been rigorously pursued before. Principia Mathematica reinforced the idea of logical analysis as a powerful tool for addressing philosophical problems. The relation between the resulting system and the pre-philosophical knowledge of the world was supposed to roughly parallel the relation between Bertrand Russell's logicized version of arithmetic and the ordinary knowledge of arithmetic. Language during the stage of the analytic tradition was both an object of study and, through its connection with the new logic, an all-purpose tool for doing traditional philosophy. Though the tool was often tied to questionable linguistic doctrines, it was also used in uncontentious ways to reveal defects in philosophical arguments and to frame objections to certain doctrines. The primary activity of the philosopher was to be the logical analysis of the concepts of science and the structure of scientific theories.
