The Morning Star and the Evening Star launched a whole philosophical movement
Both names point at Venus, yet saying one equals the other tells you something, while saying the Morning Star is the Morning Star tells you nothing. Gottlob Frege's 1892 puzzle about that difference helped turn philosophy toward language and logic, founding the style that has dominated English-speaking universities since mid-century.
Analytic philosophy prizes clear prose, tight argument, formal logic and closeness to mathematics and science. Its defining feature is the linguistic turn: treating questions about meaning as central. It is usually set against continental philosophy, a loose label for existentialism, phenomenology and Hegelian traditions, and the split is sometimes described as technical versus literary. Michael Dummett thought the movement owed so much to thinkers from Austria-Hungary, such as Franz Brentano, that it deserved the name Anglo-Austrian.
Frege, a geometry professor at Jena, is widely regarded as its father. His Begriffsschrift of 1879 created modern predicate logic with quantifiers, merging the Aristotelian and Stoic strands of ancient logic. He hoped to reduce arithmetic to pure logic, siding with Leibniz against Kant, and insisted that numbers and thoughts are public objects rather than private mental states. His distinction between a word's reference and its sense, or mode of presentation, solved the Venus puzzle: the two names share a referent but differ in cognitive value.
In Britain the movement began as a revolt. Late nineteenth-century philosophy was dominated by neo-Hegelian idealists such as F. H. Bradley, who held that ordinary beliefs describe mere appearance and that things can only be understood through the whole. At Cambridge, G. E. Moore rebelled first and Bertrand Russell followed, later recalling the relief of being allowed to believe that grass is green. Against holism they offered logical atomism, picturing the world as made of independent facts.
Russell also found the crack in Frege's system. In 1901 he discovered a paradox in the rule known as Basic Law V, undermining Frege's set theory. His 1905 essay On Denoting, later called a paradigm of philosophy, analysed phrases like 'the present King of France' and argued that most proper names are disguised descriptions. Later, Quine, Kripke, David Lewis and others eroded logical positivism and revived metaphysics.
Source: Analytic philosophy
