Brian Leiter posts an interesting email exchange between himself and philosopher Jerry Fodor.

Leiter asks “So what in the world is ‘analytic’ philosophy these days?” Fodor replies that analytic philosophers share a thesis, “semantic pragmatism,” and a methodological presumption, “semantic ascent.” Fodor claims to reject both the thesis and the methodological presumtion, and so by his own lights, is not an analytic philosopher!

Fodor may be right about analytic philosophers sharing this thesis and methodological presumption, but he is wrong to look at analytic philosophy as being defined by this thesis or presumption.

Analytic philosophy is best understood historically. Analytic philosophers are the intellectual descendants of Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein (FRMW). They are those who work on the same set of problems as FRMW, or work on problems that arose while working on the first set of problems, or problems that arose while working on the second set of problems, and so on. They are those (such as Quine and Carnap) who read and drew inspiration from FRMW, or those (such as Davidson and Lewis) who read and drew inspiration from Quine and Carnap, or those who read and drew inspiration from Davidson and Lewis, and so on.

By this understanding, Fodor is certainly an analytic philosopher.

(þ Crooked Timber.)