The analysis of concepts has always been an important part of the work of philosophers. The label ‘analytical philosophy’ usually refers to a certain range of philosophical inquiries and doctrines which have developed from the last decade of the 19th century to present times. Many of them conceive of philosophy as an analytical activity and/or envisage the study of language as necessary for tackling or perhaps solving philosophical problems. The last two features are perhaps most important for an understanding of the origins of the label ‘analytical philosophy’. An overview of the main authors and problems of analytical philosophy in the Twentieth century, in the light of present-day philosophical debates, is provided by Soames (2003). The beginnings of analytical philosophy have often been identified with a change in the way of doing philosophy that occurred in the 20th century called the ‘linguistic turn’. This move involves a reconsideration of most traditional philosophical problems as problems of language. Gottlob Frege is generally held to have laid the foundations for analytical philosophy. At the basis of the analytical Linguistic Turn lies a fundamental conception that Frege shared with other philosophical writers who used the German language (Bolzano, Meinong, Husserl), which Dummett (1975, 1976) has called ‘the extrusion of thoughts from the mind’. At the beginning of the 20th century, the most widespread kind of philosophy in Britain was a kind of idealist metaphysics. G. E. Moore and B. Russell refused to follow it and took a different path, which was going to become the analytical one (cf. Urmson 1956). Most analytical philosophers in the decades preceding World War II focused attention on matters such as the relations between philosophical and scientific languages and the logic underlying the languages of the sciences. Philosophical analysis took as its main goal the discovery of misleading features in our everyday uses of language as well as in its philosophical use, and the substitution of supposedly unreliable languages with logically sound ones. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Rudolph Carnap's International encyclopedia of unified science are discussed in this section. During the 1930s, in the context of British universities such as Cambridge and Oxford, a different conception of analysis began to emerge. The philosophers’ concern began to shift from reduction, reformulation, and translation to description and elucidation. Correspondingly, the object of analysis shifted from the language of science to ordinary language, the polemics against metaphysics softened, and more attention began to be paid to non-assertive uses of language. Wittgenstein proposed to view language as consisting of ‘language games’, i.e. rule-governed linguistic activities, rooted in culturally bound social activities and attitudes or ‘forms of life'. The influence of John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle, together with Wittgenstein’s, largely contributed to the rise of the philosophical movement known as ordinary language philosophy, which flourished in the years after the Second World War. John L. Austin can be considered as the most influential representative of postwar Oxford ordinary language philosophy. His philosophical method was labeled ‘linguistic phenomenology’. Peter F. Strawson tackled major problems in logical theory from an ordinary language perspective. In 1967, H.P. Grice delivered his lectures on Logic and conversation, in which he propounded something that was going to count as a new conception of the relations between semantics and pragmatics. Throughout the evolution of his thought, Grice never lost sight of the spirit of ordinary language philosophy. Not all analytical philosophers accepted the ordinary language approach and, anyway, after 1960 ordinary language philosophy rapidly declined. Moreover, since the 1960s, the sharp opposition between constructed formal languages and natural languages softened, and the tendency arose to consider the former as capable to deal with the latter. The American philosopher Willard V. O. Quine outlined a view of language, both behavioristic and holistic. Since Carnap’s transition from logical syntax to formal semantics (1947), and independently from Quine’s rejection of intensional notions, research on formal languages paid more and more attention to semantics and took into consideration not only the extensions of linguistic expressions, but also their intensions. In this framework, modal logic developed into possible worlds semantics. Another important step in formal logic was taken by Richard Montague, who attempted to deal with at least some parts of a natural language such as English in a formalized way. From the 1960s on, many philosophers have worked in a Quinean framework. Among the most influential ones is Donald Davidson, who has combined Quine’s holism with a reconsideration of Tarski’s semantics. Some criticisms of the Quine-Davidson philosophical perspective on language have been formulated by Michael Dummett, who has stressed the relationship between meaning, understanding, and the manifestation of the latter. Since Chomsky showed, against behaviorism, that the mind can be an object of study, not only as a site where external events are recorded, but as having contents and structures of its own, also philosophers belonging to the analytical tradition shifted the focus of their interest from language, its logical form and its public use to the mind. In the area of the philosophy of mind, philosophers in the analytical tradition have been concerned with the mind-body problem and have discussed the nature of mental states or attitudes and of their salient feature, intentionality. The subdivision of semiotics into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, was theorized by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Morris. A few philosophers and logicians contributed to the study of deixis, which clearly belongs to pragmatics (see Levinson 1983): among them, there are Hans Reichenbach, who proposed an analysis of tense (1947) and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who investigated indexical expression (1954). Oxford ordinary language philosophy especially contributed to the development of pragmatics. In the present ‘state of the art’ of analytical philosophy, its identity as a trend of thought has become somewhat fuzzy. The primacy of philosophy of language over other areas of philosophy has been shaken. At present, few authors (see e.g. Jackson 1998) maintain that language-based conceptual analysis is a privileged tool for doing philosophy. So it is difficult to tell what the relations of present-day analytical philosophy to the universe of pragmatics are going to be. One salient fact is that philosophy has been influenced by cognitive pragmatics, particularly Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986, Carston 2002). Another salient fact is that several philosophers have recently focused attention on the role of context with respect to meaning, communication, and even the truth of assertions. However, it should be remembered that independently of their contextualist or anti-contextualist choices, philosophers in the analytical tradition still discuss such problems as reference, force, attitude attribution, interpersonal or cross-cultural understanding, all of which are at the same time objects of pragmatic research. This has led to fruitful encounters in the past and will most likely do so in the future as well.