The Ontology of the Anayltic Tradition and Its Origins: Realism and Identity in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine

The analytic movement advertised its 'linguistic turn' as a radical break from the two-thousand-year-old substance tradition. But this is an illusion. On the fundamental level of ontology, there is enough reformulation and presupposition of traditional 'no entity without identity' themes to analogize Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine to Aristotle as paradigmatic of modified realism. Thus the pace of ontology is glacial. Frege and Russell, not Wittgenstein and Quine, emerge as the true analytic progenitors of 'no entity without identity,' offering between them at least twenty-nine private language arguments and sixty-four 'no entity without identity' theories.