# Widening the Picture **Opening (not a real abstract):** 9.1 How Did We Get Here from There? The Transformation of Analytic Philosophy Opponents of analytic philosophy often associate it with logical positivism. From a historical point of view, it is clear that one main strand in the development of the broad tradition known as “analytic philosophy” was indeed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, with its austerely verificationist principle of significance and its exclusion of metaphysics as cognitively meaningless. Another main strand in the development of the analytic tradition, ordinary language philosophy, tended to be almost equally suspicious of the ways in which metaphysicians made free with ordinary words, far from the everyday contexts of use on which their meaning was supposed to depend. Despite that history, however, recent decades have seen the growth and flourishing of boldly speculative metaphysics within the analytic tradition. **Authors:** [[Williamson]]