What made people think that we could and should analyze concepts?

Intriguing.  From The Failure of Analysis and the Nature of Concepts by Michael Huemer.  He starts with a strong claim.

1. The Failure of Analysis

Philosophy began with attempts to define things. Socrates asked people “What is virtue?”, “What is justice?”, “What is knowledge?” Famously, he never found out.

Two millennia later, a movement arose in the English-speaking philosophical world known as “analytic philosophy”. At its inception, analytic philosophers thought that their main job was to analyze language or concepts. Many very smart, highly-educated people dedicated careers to the project of conceptual analysis in the 20th century. If ever we should have expected that project to bear fruit, it would have been in the 20th century.

What do we have to show for it? Only negative results—we refuted some analyses. We never found a single correct analysis. To speak more cautiously, as far as I can tell, no one—either in the 20th century or any other time—has ever advanced an analysis of any philosophically interesting concept that was widely accepted by philosophers as correct. Nearly all analyses are subject to counter-examples that most philosophers would agree refute the analysis. (Caveat: sometimes you will meet a philosopher who claims to have correctly analyzed some concept. But hardly ever do you meet one who thinks that anyone else has correctly analyzed a concept.)

( *The field of mathematics is an exception to the rule. It contains many precise definitions that are widely accepted by mathematicians. There may also be a few other concepts that can be defined. )

The attempts to define “knowledge” after 1963 are the most instructive case, because that term received particularly intense scrutiny. Philosophers went through dozens of increasingly complicated analyses and counter-examples over several decades, and no consensus emerged. To this day, we don’t know the definition of “knowledge”. Philosophers had similar experiences when they tried to define such things as “good”, “cause”, “if”, “freedom”, and so on.

This raises some questions:

What made people think that we could and should analyze concepts?

Why did it prove so difficult, and what does this tell us about the nature of concepts?