Kant and the Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The author studies Kant’s impact on contemporary analytic philosophy and on its historiography from Frege, Russell, and Viennese logical positivism to some more recent reformulations of the Kantian problem concerning the analytic-‑synthetic distinction, and the possibility of the synthetic a priori, as is the case, among others, of Quine’s and Kripke’s. The reasons behind the return to Kant in analytic philosophy from the 1950s to the present (particularly what he calls “rejection versus acceptance of Kant”) are analysed, showing how this return has focused (and it partly continues to focus) on the topicality of the above-‑mentioned problem and its implications.