Solomon, Robert C. - The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life

The history of philosophy has many ironies. One of them, surely, is Bertrand Russell's self-congratulatory observation about the origins of "analytic" philosophy. Against Hegel, who incorporated virtually every facet of concrete human experience into his philosophy, Russell, following Frege and Moore, "rebelled." Misinterpreting German idealism, which he took (wrongly) to be the conviction that the world is made up of ideas and not of good, solid matter, Russell made his comment "the world which had been thin and logical . . . became rich and varied" in his own philosophy.¹ So began a hundred-year "analytic" movement that would render philosophy thin and logical indeed.²