“Are there people who are unambiguously part of the analytic movement, but [about whom] it is an interesting question whether they are an analytic philosopher?”

That subject is discussed by Brian Weatherson (Michigan) in a recent post at his blog.

He says:

I’ve been reading a few things recently in history of analytic philosophy, and one recurring question is who counts as an analytic philosopher.

Usually the way this question is asked, the implicit focus is on ‘analytic’. The question becomes “Who is an analytic philosopher?”, with a background presupposition that they are indeed a philosopher. There is, at least in the bits of the literature I’ve been reading, less attention to the other form of the question: Who is an analytic philosopher? 

To the question of whether there are thinkers who are part of the analytic tradition, but about whom it’s ambiguous whether they’re analytic philosophers, he thinks the answer “seems to be obviously yes”:

Einstein, Gödel, von Neumann, Blackwell, and Arrow are all analytic philosophers if they are any kind of philosopher at all, and it’s a trickier question what place they should each have in our history of analytic philosophy.

Weatherson identifies John Maynard Keynes as possibly falling into this ambiguous category, too, calling The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) “the single best work of the Cambridge analytic school” (possibly, because he wonders whether Keynes is too much a philosopher to be an ambiguous case).

There are different ways Weatherson’s inquiry might be interpreted. I suspect some hasty readers might be asking themselves, “What does it matter if the thinkers are philosophers or not? Why the boundary policing?” But that is to get things backwards. Weatherson seems to be taking as a quite reasonable starting point the observation that disciplinary boundaries are fuzzy and porous, and asking how that applies to the history of analytic philosophy. It’s a question answers to which might yield a better understanding of the influences on (and influence of) analytic philosophy, and raise further philosophical, sociological, and historical questions about the relationships between philosophy and other disciplines, like economics.

Your thoughts about who occupied the blurry boundary of analytic philosophy in the 20th century are welcome.