Consider two classes of questions.
- Is there a God? What is the meaning of life? Is there an objective standard of right and wrong? Does a tree falling in a forest devoid of people make a noise? Am I currently awake or in a dream?
- How many passengers will there be on my bus up to New York on Friday? Why does water boil at 100 degrees? Is Phologiston Theory true? Is Quantum Theory true?
Questions from (1) are lofty and perennial, the stuff of true philosophy, but those from (2) seem more down to earth and answerable. The question is, have we ever, indeed, could we ever make inroads into the philosophical questions, those from (1)? Or is it their nature to stagnate? An extreme optimist would say they are answerable, but in order to back this claim up he must either answer them or show how one might go about doing that. An extreme pessimist would say philosophical questions are inherently unanswerable—but then he must give a method to distinguish such questions from non-philosophical, answerable ones. And then there is the philosopher of the middle position who might see some philosophical questions as answerable and others as unanswerable. He too must give a method for distinguishing them, and beyond this answer or point the way to answering those philosophical questions he holds out hope for.
Running down the list of well known philosophers, we might put Descartes and Plato (as he represents Socrates in the Republic) as extreme optimists. Hume and Kant (as of the first Critique) would count as extreme pessimists.
As for the analytic philosophers, they were extreme pessimists in one sense, namely that they felt only questions like those of (2) are answerable. But rather than saying the philosophical questions of (1) are unanswerable, they employed linguistic analysis to show that those questions are not even real.
That is, analytic philosophy altered the view of what philosophers ought to be doing: unmasking type (1) questions as pseudo-questions. Where the British Empiricists sought an empiricist theory of knowledge, the analytic philosophers sought an empiricist theory of meaning.
One can argue that Logical Positivism was the most ambitions attempt ever to make an empiricist theory of anything. This fact, along with the fact of its manifest failure, makes its story one of the great dramas of human culture.