Philosophers have long been tempted by the idea that some statements
are analytic, in the sense that we can discover that they are true
simply by reflecting on what they say, without making empirical
observations.  This idea was central to Anglo-American philosophy
for several decades in the 20th century, and many philosophers still
rely on it.  The goal of this course is to examine and evaluate some
of the best attempts to clarify the idea.  After a brief survey of
how John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein tried to clarify it, the course will examine Rudolf
Carnap’s definition of analyticity in terms of semantical rules, W.
V. Quine’s and Hilary Putnam’s criticisms of Carnap’s definition of
analyticity, Saul Kripke’s criticisms of description theories of
reference, and Frank Jackson’s and David Chalmers’s recent attempts
to construct a new definition of analyticity from the rubble left by
Quine's, Putnam's, and Kripke’s criticisms. Required written work
includes two papers, a midterm, and a final.  Prerequisites:
knowledge of elementary formal logic (including polyadic
quantification theory) and at least two 300-level philosophy
courses.