It's big, it's very big – over a thousand pages on the history of analytic philosophy, consisting of 34 chapters, arranged into 3 parts, covering themes and episodes from the 19^th century precursors of analytic philosophy to the present day. Bolzano to Brandom almost covers it. Part I is entitled ‘Origins of Analytic Philosophy’, Part II ‘The Development of Analytic Philosophy’ and Part III ‘Themes in the History of Analytic Philosophy’. There are also 4 introductory chapters by the editor, which will be especially useful to the novice, on the nature of our discipline and its historiography, including a 73-page chronology of analytic philosophy, which starts in 1781 with the publication of the 1^st edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and terminates in 2013 with the publication of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. (Health warning: I must confess at this point I have found reading and reflecting upon Beaney's chronology to be curiously compelling, to the point of distraction, because it just calls out to you to spot for absences, which no doubt is part of the point. I'll come back to the matter.)

The 34 authors of the other entries include many authoritative figures whose work on the history of analytic philosophy is well known but there are welcome new faces offering new perspectives too. The entries differ somewhat in the level at which they are written. Some will serve well as entry points into the issues they discuss for a relative novice, whilst others are more demanding and presuppose considerably more background on the part of their reader. Nonetheless, because of the extraordinary range of the entries, there is pretty much sure to be something here for everyone.

Well, almost. I have what, for want of a label, might be described as left and right wing reservations that I'd like to share with you. Histories of analytic philosophy have often (understandably) focused upon developments in the philosophy of logic and language. It's an especially welcome feature of this volume that it also includes bespoke chapters on how analytic philosophers have applied their trade to meta-ethics, normative ethics, aesthetics and politics. Here's the left wing reservation. It's a little disappointing that there aren't also chapters on what analytic philosophers have had to say about religion or about feminism, areas where there has been a great deal of analytic activity.

Here's the right wing reservation. Mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science were for a long time conceived as lying at the heart of analytic philosophy. But this volume has no bespoke chapters on these topics. To be fair there is a chapter devoted to early logical empiricism and another to the contributions Carnap, Gödel and Tarski to logic but one is left with the impression that logic, mathematics and science didn't subsequently matter that much to the development of analytic philosophy. And this itself reflects something of our current intellectual climate. For mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science are no longer conceived of being central to the endeavour of analytic philosophy; they're just specialisations thereof. But it was the inability of our idealist predecessors to make any credible sense of mathematical and scientific practice that was partly responsible for Russell and Moore succeeding in supplanting idealism with analytic philosophy. How could it have come about that – indeed how could it be right that – science and mathematics have become just a discretional interest for most of us? What happened?

But, hey, even with 34 entries you can't cover everything. The fact of the matter is that our discipline has developed a yearning for self-consciousness, many analytic philosophers have now become interested in the history of their subject; this is an undoubtedly timely volume.

I can't forget the chronology. As you might already suspect it's relatively light on contributions to mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics. For my own part, I think that since (e.g) Hale and Wright are included, George Boolos, to pick one significant name from the analytic hat, definitely deserves a mention too; his work on provability, plural logic and Frege's philosophy of mathematics stand out, at least for me, as a paradigm of late 20^th century analytic philosophy. The chronology is relatively light on recording the contribution of women too, especially outside the fields of moral and political philosophy. Some women whose contributions to the philosophies of science, logic and mathematics deserve to have been mentioned include May Brodbeck, Mary Hesse, Susan Haack, Nancy Cartwright and Penelope Maddy.

Here's a whistle stop tour of the volume – but still it's best to take a deep breath. Part I, ‘The Origins of Analytic Philosophy’, consists of 11 papers. Mark Textor introduces us to Bolzano's theory of objective propositions, in virtue of which Bolzano counts as a precursor to the analytic tradition. David Hyde provides us with a description of 19^th century philosophy of physics and geometry, the fertile soil, so to speak, from which analytic philosophy sprang. Gottfried Gabriel looks to the particular debts Frege owed to other German philosophers, especially Trendelenburg, Herbart, Lotze and Windelband. John Skorupski assesses the relationship between analytic philosophy, conceived specifically as the school according to which the analysis of language can dissolve philosophical questions and 19^th century empiricism represented by Mill. Jamie Tappenden sketches the logical and mathematical background to the development of analytic philosophy. Tyler Burge discusses some of the most important aspects of Frege's influence upon the development of analytic philosophy, including his formulation of logic, his use of the context principle, the sense-reference distinction and his rationalism. Nicholas Griffin describes how Moore and Russell emerged from the bath of British idealism to acknowledge the reality of propositions and relations. Bernard Linsky provides an overview of Russell's theory of descriptions and how reflection on this theory gave rise to Russell's logical construction programme. Tom Baldwin outlines G.E. Moore's distinctive conception of analysis and describes its influence upon the succeeding generation of Cambridge philosophers. Michael Kremer explains to us how Wittgenstein's Tractatus has an ethical point, to enable us to foreswear the need for justification for our lives by enabling us to appreciate that philosophical questions are nonsense.

Part II, ‘The Development of Analytic Philosophy’, has 13 papers. It kicks off with Charles Travis and Mark Kalderon telling their story of how Oxford philosophy progressed through the work of Cook Wilson, Prichard, Austin and others towards a distinctive realist theory of perception and knowledge. Thomas Uebel seeks to shed light upon the intricacies and diversity of the logical empiricism movement even during its early manifestations in Vienna and Berlin. Erich Reck seeks to establish the major roles that the contributions of Carnap, Gödel and Tarski made to the development of modern logic, without which not. Hans-Johann Glock charts Wittgenstein's progress from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations and discusses the influence of his later work upon subsequent analytic philosophy. Maria Baghramian and Andrew Jorgensen describe the roles of Quine, Putnam and Kripke in bringing about what they describe as the ‘externalist takeover in the philosophy of language’. Sean Crawford seeks to undermine the ‘shadow history’ according to which the identity theory of mind gained ground as a replacement for a crude form of logical behaviourism; he describes an alternative history that takes seriously the more nuanced views of the mind that Schlick, Feigl et al actually held. Alex Miller describes the development of theories of meaning, discussing Frege, Davidson, Dummett, Wright and McDowell before concluding upon the question whether Charles Travis's contextualism poses an insuperable challenge to systematic semantics. Stewart Candlish and Nic Damnjanovic seek to provide reasons for doubting ‘causalism', the doctrine that psychological explanations are a species of cause-event explanation, by re-evaluating Davidson's arguments in favour of causalism in the context of contrary views propounded by Wittgenstein, Ryle and Anscombe. Peter Simons tells the tale of the rise, fall and resurrection of metaphysics during the analytic era, highlighting David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds as the single work that can be identified, if any can, as the one that got philosophers excited about metaphysics again. Jonathan Dancy documents the development of twentieth century metaphysics, through the heyday of ethical intuitionism, emotivism, prescriptivism before intuitionism regained ground but only as one position amongst many, including naturalism, expressivism and constructivism. Julia Driver reconstructs the development of normative ethics during the twentieth century as arising out of successive attempts to refine 19^th century utilitarianism; normative intuitionism and virtue ethics arose as progressive alternatives, reflecting the analytic techniques developed elsewhere, especially amongst ordinary language philosophers. Peter Lamarque describes the initially luke-warm, but ever closer relationship between analytic philosophy and aesthetics, involving reflection upon the ontology, epistemology and normative status of art. Jonathan Wolff explores the troubled relationship between analytic philosophy and political philosophy: the familiar figures of Rawls, Nozick and Dworkin are set against a backdrop of now less familiar characters, by Weldon, Laslett, Margaret Macdonald and others; the story is brought up to date with a discussion of Analytic Marxism.

Part III, ‘Themes in the History of Analytic Philosophy’ has 11 papers. Richard Heck and Robert May seek to elucidate and defend Frege's doctrine that functions are unsaturated. Richard Gaskin explores the relationship between Ryle on the one hand and Russell and Wittgenstein on the other, advancing, inter alia, his own view that saying is a variety of naming. Cora Diamond revisits Anscombe's An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and rereads her as an inaugurator of the anti-metaphysical reading of the Tractatus that Diamond herself recommends. Peter Hylton reflects upon the progress of the idea of a logically perfect language in analytic philosophy, through the different roles it has played in the philosophies of Russell, Carnap, Quine and Lewis. Peter Hacker seeks to understand the sense in which analytic philosophy undertook a linguistic turn, beginning with the Tractatus and having a subsequent influence upon logical empiricism, the later Wittgenstein and Oxford Philosophy. Gary Hatfield focuses upon Moore and Russell's work on perception and sense-data as a prequel to Sellars' and Austin's criticisms of sense-data. Annalisa Coliva charts the reception of Moore's ‘Proof of an External World’, before offering her own Wittgensteinian assessment of the argument. Juliet Floyd seeks to re-orientate our conception of early analytic philosophy by reflecting on the various senses of what it means to be rigorous to be found in Kant, Frege, Dedekind, Moore and Turing (amongst others). Sanford Shieh charts the fortunes of modal concepts from the reductionism of Frege, Moore and Russell, C.I. Lewis' institution of modern modal logic, Wittgenstein's conception of logical necessity in the Tractatus and its influence on Carnap, Quine's diverse animadversions against modality, through to Marcus and Kripke's rendering modal concepts respectable again. Jaroslav Peregrin adumbrates and elucidates Sellars' and Brandom's inferentialism, Cherly Misak offers a revisionist view of the relationship between pragmatism and analytic philosophy, arguing that not only many of the themes of the latter were already features of the former (Chauncey Wright, Peirce, James and Dewey serve as case studies) but also that many pragmatist ideas crept back into analytic philosophy later (here Quine and Rorty are held up for inspection). Finally, David Woodruff Smith argues that phenomenology performed an important role in the evolving tradition of analytic philosophy, describing the complex relationship of Frege and Husserl, before tracing the significance of phenomenology for the semantic tradition and contemporary philosophy of mind.

You can breathe now. Like I said, something for almost everyone.