What is analytical philosophy?; outline of a theory; meaning; being, existence and truth; time; change and causation; teleology and mental states; moral concepts; conceiving and understanding; consciousness; thought and philosophy. This book explains in down-to-earth language what analytical philosophy is, and presupposes no previous knowledge of the subject. In discussing several central philosophical problems, William Charlton aims to show why they are problems for philosophy rather than for any other discipline and thereby illustrate and confirm a general theory of the nature and scope of philosophical enquiry. "The Analytic Ambition" also answers recent relativist attacks on analytic philosophy and argues that its methods can still provide fresh insight into the traditional problems of philosophy. It contains a new theory of the nature of philosophical enquiry and challenges current orthodoxy on such central topics as meaning, time, causation and thought.