Analytic philosophy before World War II began with a rejection of British idealism via G.E. Moore’s (1873–1958) well-received common sense philosophy and a new rigor in theories of meaning, introduced by the empiricist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The doctrine of logical atomism, as developed by Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), flourished for a while.

Logical atomism was dependent on truth-functional logic for its explication. In other words, analytic philosophers generally turned to logic as the science par excellence that set the standard for philosophy.