Analytic and Synthetic Philosophy

Philosophy may be said to be a critical examination of fundamental concepts and principles, that is, concepts and principles which structure all or nearly all of our experience, all our language and its essential grammar and every thing or theme that we can know or think of.  It is also in some of its exercises attempts to revise and to simplify and tidy up such fundamental concepts and principles …[which] may lead further to the attempt to integrate them into a systematic unity in which differing sorts of things are brought under as few main heads as possible, and ideally under a single, ultimate head, and in which there is as much mutual dependence and close interconnection between things and sorts of things and facts as possible, and as little left unexplained and unexplainable, and having to be swallowed as a mere fact, as possible. This second aspect of philosophy is constructive or speculative or synthetic … (Philosophy as a Discipline, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Summer, 2005, p. 141).