  If anything characterizes ‘analytic’ philosophy, then it  is presumably the emphasis placed on analysis. But as the foregoing  sections have shown, there is a wide range of conceptions of  analysis, so such a characterization says nothing that would  distinguish analytic philosophy from much of what has either preceded or developed alongside it. Given that the decompositional conception  is usually offered as the main conception today, it might be thought  that it is this that characterizes analytic philosophy. But this  conception was prevalent in the early modern period, shared by both  the British Empiricists and Leibniz, for example. Given that Kant  denied the importance of decompositional analysis, however, it might  be suggested that what characterizes analytic philosophy is the  value it places on such analysis. This might be true of  Moore's early work, and of one strand within analytic  philosophy; but it is not generally true. What characterizes analytic philosophy as it was founded by Frege and Russell is the role played  by logical analysis, which depended on the development of  modern logic. Although other and subsequent forms of analysis, such  as linguistic analysis, were less wedded to systems of formal logic,  the central insight motivating logical analysis remained.