Analytic philosophy emerged from a stew of ideas in philosophy and mathematics, which, especially in Britain and German-speaking Europe, was brought slowly to a simmer in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Many of these ideas were, naturally enough, highly technical, and thus intelligible only within the philosophical and scientific discourses on which they drew. It is worth stressing, then, that these conceptual developments were infused with the ambient cultural and political values of their time, especially those of the diffuse cultural moment known as modernism. The radicalism of analytic philosophy was of a piece with the broader sense of rupture and renewal that defined fin-de-siècle Europe.

Three ingredients stand out as being of special importance to the formation of the tradition. The first is the legacy of German Idealism. It has often been said that analytic philosophy was born in revolt against Kant and Idealism – a claim based, in large part, on Bertrand Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s explicit repudiation of specific doctrines of Kant and Hegel, as well their broader scorn for the metaphysics of British Idealism.