This course is a general survey of the following three lines of contemporary Anglo-American philosophical development. It is said that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy first took the "linguistic turn" (including the development of contemporary logics) and then the "cognitive turn" in the twentieth century. The linguistic turn began with the three major figures, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and with the rise of logical positivism (and later, logical empiricism). Frege and Russell set up the beginning stage of analytic philosophy by initiating studies in the foundations of mathematical logic and philosophy of language. In its heyday there came Quine, Kripke, and Putnam who make great contributions in logics, semantics, and ontology. The cognitive turn began with the computational/representational theory of mind and cognition in the 60's, and initiated the rise of the new interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences". The third development began with the rise of logical positivism (logical empiricism) deeply influenced by Wittgenstein. Logical positivism (logical empiricism) then dominated studies in the philosophy of science concerning issues such as the demarcation of science, the nature of scientific explanation and theory, and theoretical reduction and unity. Theories of scientific explanation have occupied contemporary philosophical studies of sciences ever since Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim's seminal paper in 1948. We will introduce the development from his Covering Law models to Salmon's SR approach.
當代英美哲學界在二十世紀對於哲學的研究，先是「語言」的轉向（包括各種邏輯的發展），後來進入「認知」的轉向。語言的轉向起自Frege、Russell、Wittgenstein三位對當代英美哲學的發展影響重大的哲學家，以及邏輯實證論（後來發展為邏輯經驗論），包括Hempel、Carnap等人。在它的黃金時代，影響重大的哲學家有Quine、 Kripke以及Putnam等人。在認知的轉向方面，英美哲學界對於人的心智發展出計算／表徵理論，帶動「認知科學」這門新興科技整合研究的發展。此外，自Hempel起，對於「科學解釋」的探討成為當代科學哲學的重大課題。本門課將引導同學從這三大發展瞭解當代英美哲學。