How did modern symbolic logic change analytic philosophy?

Modern symbolic logic fundamentally transformed analytic philosophy by providing a rigorous tool for clarifying thought and exposing the "logical form" of language, which often differs from its surface grammatical structure.123

Key impacts include:

• Dispelling Philosophical Puzzles: By using formal languages, philosophers could demonstrate that certain traditional problems were based on linguistic confusion. For example, treating "existence" as a property—similar to how one predicates a quality like "biting" to a tiger—led to flawed arguments like the ontological argument. Symbolic logic reclassifies existence as a higher-order function, rendering such puzzles nonsensical or unsound.13
• The Linguistic Turn: The success of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in applying logic to mathematical foundations shifted the focus of philosophy toward language. Philosophers began to treat metaphysical issues by analyzing the language used to express them, establishing the philosophy of language as a foundational discipline.3
• Theory of Descriptions: Russell’s method of translating definite descriptions into quantificational expressions allowed philosophers to handle terms that appear to refer to non-existent entities (like "the present king of France") without assuming those entities exist as "logical fictions".43