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Full Idea
Formalism is a bulwark of logical positivist philosophy.
Gist of Idea
Formalism is a bulwark of logical positivism
Source
Alan Musgrave (Logicism Revisited [1977], §5)
Book Ref
-: 'British Soc for the Philosophy of Science' [-], p.120
A Reaction
Presumably if you drain all the empirical content out of arithmetic and geometry, you are only left with the bare formal syntax, of symbols and rules. That seems to be as analytic as you can get.