A catch-all phrase designating a variety of different types of work that have in common their opposition to continental philosophy, metaphysics, and all post-Kantian thought (including critical theory). Often known as Anglo-American philosophy because it originated in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and G. E. Moore (all of whom were influenced in this direction by the work of the German logician Frege, Gottlob), and because its practice tends to be confined to Anglophone countries, analytic philosophy is primarily interested in logic. It is suspicious of languageâs ability to mislead and misdirect via rhetoric, so it aims to find a logical core to its operations and thereby eliminate its power to obfuscate. It does this by converting all statements into their propositional form; where this proves impossible, it detects fuzzy thinking and falsehood. See also empiricism; logical positivism.