Analytical philosophy refers as much to a method as to a body of philosophical doctrine. It is extremely difficult to give a unifying characterization of analytical philosophy that picks out what is common to all its instances. It was regarded as revolutionary; but it is questionable whether the new philosophy really marks such a discontinuity from what came before.

Analysis is a process which aims to elucidate complexes by reducing them to their simpler elements and the relations between those elements. This can apply to complex concepts, entities, or philosophical problems. In analytical philosophy, the analysis is characteristically linguistic. It is done through analyzing the language in which a complex philosophical problem, say, is expressed; perplexing complex philosophical concepts are dealt with by resolving the complexes into what are logically equivalent related simple constituents, which can be better understood.

The origins of analytical philosophy lie in work done in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century on logic and the foundations of mathematics. This work involved the construction of a new and powerfully expressive formal logical symbolism. Much of this work was carried out independently by the German logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). The culmination of the work in England was Principia Mathematica (1910–13), written jointly by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). The motivation for this work was the rejection of psychologism, and indeed all forms of naturalism, as providing a foundation of mathematical truth; the new view embraced objective logicism concerning mathematical truths.