Jing Li

In recent decades, more and more philosophers have been committed to promoting a mutual enlightenment between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Some philosophers including Dermot Moran, A. W. Moore, and Dan Zahavi, among others, have provided thought-provoking reflections on these ongoing exchanges between the two traditions. Since these three philosophers all hold that phenomenology is incompatible with “classical reductionist naturalism”, their terminologies can neither smoothly accommodate the various versions of naturalised phenomenology, nor reserve sufficient logical space for the rich future possibilities of phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and naturalism. In contrast, in this article, I first minimally redefine the terms “phenomenology” and “analytic philosophy” as “a philosophy that goes back to the things themselves” and “a philosophy that does analysis”, respectively; second, I argue that there is by no means an intrinsic contradiction between the three terms “phenomenology”, “analytic philosophy” and “naturalism”; third, I argue that, on balance, the minimalistic redefinitions advocated in this article, do more good than harm—say, they are heuristic to reunderstanding phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and philosophy per se; finally, I conclude that such minimalistic redefinitions, will offer a novel, modest, moderate, balanced, or supplementary reunderstanding of the current popular definitions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy.

We are familiar with various set-theoretical paradoxes such as Cantor's paradox, Burali-Forti's paradox, Russell's paradox, Russell-Myhill paradox and Kaplan's paradox. In fact, there is another new possible set-theoretical paradox hiding itself in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. From the Tractatus’s Picture theory of language we can strictly infer the two contradictory propositions simultaneously: the world and the language are equinumerous; the world and the language are not equinumerous. I call this antinomy the world-language paradox. Based on a rigorous analysis of the Tractatus, with the help of the technical resources of Cantor’s naive set theory and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, I outline the world-language paradox and assess the unique possible solution plan, i.e., the mathematical plan utilizing ‘infinity’. I conclude that Wittgenstein cannot solve the hidden set-theoretical paradox of the Tractatus successfully unless he gives up his finitism.