Reason and Analysis

Brand Blanshard

Brand Blanshard's counter-revolutionary polemic transcended the circumstances of its time, to become a classic historical and critical essay on the scope and task of philosophy. It is both a readable introduction to the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and, like Russell's Problems of Philosophy, a concise and penetrating account of perennial questions.
With impeccable clarity and elegance, Blanshard presents a fair-minded yet withering characterization of the schools of philosophy dominant in the Anglophone world from the 1920s to the 1960s: logical atomism, logical positivism, and 'ordinary language' philosophy. Most of the objectionable features which Blanshard attacked have now disappeared from analytic philosophy, in part due to the influence of this book. Yet Blanshard's acute observations retain their freshness and relevance.