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science was a reaction to the logical positivists. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany and Austria, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled Germany, most of them to Britain and America, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone countries.
Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function. For them, philosophy is concerned with the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. The positivists adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless. 4.5 Ordinary Language Philosophy
After World War II, during the late 1940s and 1950s, analytic philosophy took a turn toward ordinary-language analysis. This movement had two main strands. One followed in the wake of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which departed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. The other, known as "Oxford philosophy", involved J. L. Austin. While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary language philosophy emphasizes the use of language by ordinary people. Some have argued that ordinary language philosophy is of a more sociological grounding, as it essentially emphasizes on the use of language within social contexts. The best-known ordinary language philosophers during the 1950s were Austin and Gilbert Ryle. Philosophy of language is another area that has slowed down over the course of the last
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