Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

CHAPTER 5: THE RECENT PERIOD: LATE 19TH TO 21ST CENTURY

I think of the recent period as the 20th and 21st centuries but not to the exclusion of the 19th century. The recent period can be seen - this will be given an intrinsic refinement below - as that period in which we are immersed to the point that it is difficult to have the objectivity that comes from distance and un-involvement. This is not to imply that objectivity is otherwise impossible or that there is an absolute value to distance and un-involvement.

Recent tendencies grow out of the developments to this point and the cultural influences - these include the cultural trends of the West including such main influences as Cartesianism, science and, within philosophy, the dualism of rationalism vs. empiricism and all its twists, turns and divisions. Philosophy starts from realism but by criticism (the conflict of) realism is found to be not absolute but depends upon the common culture - the common paradigms, pictures, symbols and stories or myths. Cultural influences also include those from other modern, ancient and native societies and civilizations.

These influences are detailed below:

INTRODUCTION

Influences on recent philosophy

First, I outline some influences on recent philosophy. The ‘internal’ influences are the trends arising in the history of philosophy until the recent period. ‘External’ influences are the ascent of science and analysis, cultural influences, and the culture of the individual. This system of complex influences are the sources of influence upon recent philosophy. The development of a discipline is not deterministic - recent philosophy may be better understood by an inclusion of the influences in the understanding; however the development of philosophy is not determined by the influences and contains its own elements of novelty. In order to continue as a vibrant discipline, philosophy must contain its own elements of novelty.

The history and nature of philosophy: Thales to the modern period.

What is accepted as philosophy in any age may be subject to the Kuhnian concept of the paradigm: the paradigm that defines acceptable practice includes implicit elements that are not fully spelled out - that is not to say that they could not (or could) be spelled out.

Paradigms

There is also an explicit reflection upon practice and ideals that interact with the implicit attitudes in constituting the paradigm. However, it is not in the nature of philosophy to approach some delimitation or definiteness of subject matter in the way that science does.

The concept of paradigm is also somewhat paradigmatic. Kuhn held that different paradigms are incommensurable meaning that, while the words might be the same, the actual differences among alternate paradigms are so great as to constitute an insurmountable barrier to communication and understanding. Kuhn also held that the truth of each paradigm was relative to the culture and that paradigms contained no absolute truth; this point was emphasized by Paul Feyerabend. Given that each culture negotiates a world that is not entirely of their own creation and that different cultures live in worlds that are not completely alien, it follows that the different paradigms have some measure of truth and that they may share enough truth for there to be common truth and sharing of understanding.

Further, paradigms are not flat but multi-layered with elements of but not full hierarchy. For example, paradigmatic attitudes to truth in philosophy which are not the same as but not completely different from truth in philosophy are affected by and affect attitudes to the possibility of truth in general.

The possibility and nature of disciplines is thus complex and attitudes to this possibility are affected by realism, the pendulum (pendulums) of opinion, happenstance and fashion.

What is philosophy?

There is a limitation on defining or specifying the nature of any discipline. First, that such fields of activity are paradigmatic in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, i.e., that the definition is through practice and unwritten or unspoken or, in part, through at most partially explicit and definite norms. A second difficulty is that a purpose of definition is not only the understanding of the past but to understand and navigate the future. What is science? A difficulty of definition is that science adapts, within a broad framework, to the needs of the discipline or problem… Subsequent paragraphs consider some further, generic problems associated with specifying what philosophy may be. The problems include the issue of distinguishing the activity, the methods and the accumulated narrative. What is philosophical activity and what are its methods - are there any? The answers to these questions lie in the historical process but any specific answer may depend on the orientation of the individual or groups of individuals - schools. Is philosophy purely rational - an exercise of the mind… is it descriptive… is it empirical? These thoughts are informed by a concept of knowledge that is foundational: an independent foundation of knowledge may be found. But when we consider our immersion in the flow of the world, it would seem that there are only specialized realms in which foundations are possible; outside those realms lie vast areas of being. What becomes philosophy in the adventure into the unknown? I consider this below; however, I may assert: the answer to this will be one that generalizes given concepts of philosophy, takes them out of the fields of activity and places philosophy in its ultimate realm.

The various influences on philosophy, outlined here and below, also affect what is and what is considered to be philosophy. Since philosophy is in part the creation of humanity - in part because the creation is in the interaction between humanity and the world - the distinction between what is and what is considered to be philosophy is not absolute. We may use ‘what is’ to stand for ‘what is and or what is considered to be.’ The various considerations may also influence reflections on what is philosophy. There is an additional significant consideration: the various fields of human activity stand in intra and interaction; it is then not only that the various fields taken together constitute the entire realm of activity but, also, the entire realm may be divided or classified into the fields. The classification would not be unique: the posited fields may be different in number, concept - and name; and the distribution of various activities may be different even when the fields are the same. What is at one time and place considered to be philosophy may at another time and place be science, or political theory or economics.

These comments notwithstanding, there is some degree of cohesion among the various activities that may be considered to be philosophy and there are threads of continuity in the history of philosophy.

The crisis of recent philosophy has much to do with postmodern issues. The origin and influence of postmodern issues significantly predate the Postmodern and related movements. The existence of a crisis is not the equivalent of the existence of substantial issues. This means, especially, that even while a crisis may exist its nature may not be what it is commonly held to be.

The period of recent philosophy is roughly identical with the crisis of philosophy; the era of philosophy in search of identity. This is true of recent philosophy today; it is not true that at any point in the history of philosophy there is a recent period that can be equated with a current crisis.

What is the crisis in philosophy and what are the factors that precipitated it? The period of enlightenment was a ‘grand’ time for philosophy. It was a time when all the human disciplines of knowledge could be seen as subsumed under one ‘grand narrative’ in which philosophy had a major role. What led up to this and what led away from it?

The positive factors leading up to enlightenment philosophy were the freeing of the European mind from the shackles of religion, the beginning of the maturation of science - the subsumption of (seemingly) vast territories under the umbrella of science and reason, the possibility of a world view founded in but not limited to these foundational elements. What is the concept of foundational - something simple, secure - rationality or thought, perception and the senses, practice and so on: something that is simple, seemingly firm and given… something that is less than, a part of, being itself. There was also an excess in the form of confidence and system building; this excess no doubt had sources in ‘youthful exuberance’ but also in hubris.

What are the forces that led to the collapse of the grand vision? They include the continuation of the factors leading to the grand vision itself, the attempt to find a (e.g. purely rational) foundation to philosophy - one that, in retrospect, applied to philosophy standards actually more stringent than those of science. For, the ‘methods’ of science are formulated in retrospect, in an attempt to found what is already known in methods more secure than the actual ways in which science was discovered. And, while the search for method is not without value there is no guarantee of its success or of its absolute value and application. Other forces are listed below.

Can philosophy free itself of the limitations imposed by the crisis - philosophy as an inferior or adjunct (why should there even be a comparison of different kinds) if wide ranging partner in the academic (or, more generally, the intellectual) enterprise, philosophy as possibly edifying instead of certainly instructing? I take this up in A concept of philosophy, below.

The separation of philosophy into the disciplines; the ascent of science and analysis

The influence of and reaction to science and ‘scientific methods…’ and to the scientific - and other - disciplines

The influence of and reaction to analysis, focus on language and symbolic systems and methods

Cultural influences - internal and the influence of other ‘non-western’ cultures

The West

The nature of modern society, political idealisms; the split between the English speaking world and Continental philosophy

Pluralism, the concept of democracy applied in the realm of truth; cultural relativism.

Critical commentary

Every individual has a picture of the world and its parts that informs his or her activities in the world. ‘Picture’ is not to be taken in any literal or iconic sense. The picture may be fragmentary; and it may be dynamic - changing in response to learning and experience. What forms a culture is a sort of template that informs the individual pictures. The disparity of cultural templates - traditional or otherwise - makes for difficulty in communication. The sources of the difficulties are not univalent; they include, of course, the ‘unique’ adaptations of the particular culture. But to say that the variety of templates and pictures are incommensurable assumes that the system of meanings - the templates and pictures - are strictly adaptations. The alternative is not necessarily a fictional theory of meaning and truth. Cultures are not static entities - they come into being, they adapt. The meanings are created; and as such there needs only to be a sufficient degree of adaptation and, subject to this constraint, there may be play in the meanings and beliefs. That play may be called fictional if the beliefs are truly held as such; alternatively, they may be serious but understood as being provisional or they may be true play. In either case there is room for intercultural adaptation and merging of meaning. The barriers to this are, then, the forces of tradition, the identification of the individual with the belief… We may say that the belief in absolute cultural relativism is the defense of a particular culture. The mesh an merging of cultures, this includes the import of belief systems to whatever degree, is part of the transformation and change of a culture. It is possible for cultural transformation and identity to co-exist just as this is possible for the individual, the ‘self.’

There is a survival aspect associated with the pluralism that is extant in the modern academic (or, more generally, the intellectual) community. If one does not accept one’s place as an equal among equals then one is shunned or may feel shunned as boorish and so on - although philosophy may abandon its role as gatekeeper on the grounds that such a thing is impossible there is in effect a gatekeeper that says that there is no gatekeeper. It should be necessary to distinguish between persons and professions - where profession is understood in an active sense and not as a predefined role that one fulfils. The communal activity of finding truth - universal, complete, critical - there is a role for that - regardless of whether we call it philosophy, science, religion… or whether we coin a new phrase, formulate a new concept. The reply immediately comes - or may come, ‘ But there is no truth or, at least, there is no universal, complete, critical truth!’ As far as there being no instances of truth - all meanings and assertions are thereby rendered meaningless and valueless. As far as there being no universal, complete, critical truth: what shall we call the endeavor that may labor under that ideal? In the political sphere, every liberator becomes a tyrant. In the intellectual sphere those who decry truth are setting up there own or else everything is so much babble. These hypo-critical would be iconoclasts are, in fact, a sometimes useful sometimes destructive part of the process that they profess to abhor. These comments are not intended to imply that those who endeavor or profess to labor under the ideal of truth are always constructive, always sufficiently critical, never destructive. It is to say that that endeavor, the labor - the adventure under truth, is possible, meaningful and realistic.

Professionalism and specialization

Professionalism and specialization, especially within the academic - or, more generally, the intellectual - enterprise

Thinking to accelerate evolution: the dialectic; without actually having something to say. This tendency arises from the pressures of the modern academic and intellectual environment as well as the culture of the individual, below. Of course, the pressures in question and the culture of the individual are not independent and they interact and have common roots.

Other cultures

Influence / mesh with the philosophies and systems of other advanced and indigenous cultures.

The culture of the individual: the 19th and 20th centuries.

I do believe that argument against those who come from merely fashion, vanity, ego (see Metaphysics and Power) is almost a waste of time. Ignore; but if the arguments are sufficiently destructive there is a problem. And despite the cult of the individual, the product may have value.

The effect on philosophy

The massive loss of nerve in the face of the above

Despair of construction - there are, however, some systematic thinkers and system builders (there is a serious and renewed interest in the nature, problems and scope of metaphysics)

The relative isolation of the schools and trends: continental philosophy and the inheritance of rationalism vs. Anglo-American philosophy and the inheritance of empiricism. Scientific materialism dominates idealist tendencies.

The surreality of post-modernism and related schools

Philosophy as an adjunct, merely edifying as providing a clarifying commentary - if that

Theoretical understanding primary, ‘philosophy of life’ as secondary

Relation to the disciplines philosophy as (wide-ranging) participant - not as cultural gatekeeper

Historical orientation to philosophy: philosophy of history of philosophy: hermeneutics.

There is, in addition to material factors, a psychology of the tidal flow in the conception of philosophy: both the idea of philosophy as instructor / cultural gatekeeper and merely edifying / merely participating are based in the same elements of the ego. First and primitively, in search for identity, separation and opposition: the disciplines. And only secondarily in the culture of the individual, in the various cultural influences, in the aggrandizement of the self or the special group over the whole. Here, too, is the origin of philosophy as merely something - merely analysis of concepts, language, ordinary language… and the idea of language games as mere games, of the incommensurability of paradigms, of speech communities isolated by their own conventions…

Maturation: Philosophy as a discipline with distinct content and methods.

There always has been, since the origins of Greek philosophy, a distinction between what might be called the philosophical or reflective and the scientific or instrumental temperaments. Both temperaments are found within philosophy and science and this makes the distinction somewhat subtle. Thus, within philosophy, there are rationalists and empiricists; and, within science, there are theoreticians and experimenters.

In the beginnings, the distinction between philosophy and the disciplines, though present was not formal or clear cut - the disciplines are modern but the distinctions are not.

It is in the early modern period that physics began to mature as an independent discipline. This was followed by biology, then psychology and, in the 19th and 20th centuries by the social sciences and aesthetics.

This process brought about a self-consciousness within philosophy - what is philosophy, what subjects may be properly said to be the province of philosophy, and does philosophy have its own distinct methods - and, if so, what are those methods?

The questions are not fully but are accentuated and given new meaning in the modern period; the emphasis on these questions has accelerated in recent philosophy.

There are two broad approaches to delineating the subject matter of philosophy. We may specify the content: e.g. philosophy is analysis. This, of course, specifies method and content. The content, under analysis, is language and concepts; and the method is the analysis of structure and meaning. This is simple in the interest of being brief. Alternatively, we may specify what philosophy is not. E.g., philosophy is not science. But, one would not want to ban ‘scientific method’ in the doing of philosophy. One would then say, perhaps, that philosophy is not the special disciplines. It is not that the special disciplines could not be done under the umbrella of philosophy - rather that would be inefficient; the disciplines are best studied by specialists with specialist tools; to study, say geomorphology, under philosophy would be an encumbrance to philosophy and unenlightening to geomorphology.

Still the distinctions, though useful and valid - both practically and theoretically, are likely not absolute; and any assumption that they are absolute is a sign of times rather than a feature inherent in the pursuit of knowledge.

Maturation brings both confidence and doubt.

THE RECENT PERIOD: SCHOOLS AND TRENDS OF PHILOSOPHY

These speculations are exemplified, informed and confirmed by the recent schools of philosophy.

20th Century Schools and Trends of Philosophy

Introduction

What is a school of philosophy, and how are schools defined, described or identified? The boundaries are not absolute and there are lateral and vertical (historical) connections. For example, the empiricist tradition has origins in the atomism of Greek philosophy, was influenced by Aristotle, William of Occam and took hold in the modern period in Britain and this subsequently influenced the entire history of philosophy in the English speaking world. Thus, analytic philosophy has strong ties with British empiricism. Such developments are not monolithic; America, particularly, is pluralistic - especially in the 19th century when pragmatism with ties to holism, Darwinism and empiricism originated… and in the latter 20th century when many thinkers, often under the influence of the continent, undertook criticism of the concept of philosophy and the deconstruction of paradigms and texts. A second major strain of philosophical thought, rationalism, has origins in the Greek philosophies of substance and change, the idealism of Plato, and continued on in scholasticism, in the rationalism of the continental philosophers - Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel; in the idealistic philosophies of Marxism (which has a dual roots in rationalism and empiricism), in neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, and existentialism. As noted above, such developments are not monolithic: Marxism, and existentialism have dual roots; there were significant schools of idealism and realism in 19th and early 20th century Britain and America. The identification of schools is a general guide; and, once a school is recognized, philosophers may identify with this or that school - or be so identified by others. Such influences show that the real definitions of schools are only rough and indicate family resemblances with rather porous boundaries. This is, in part, in the nature of philosophy with its indefinite, self-defining and self-transforming nature.

When we review the literature on the descriptions of the schools we find that each identified school is specified, at most, by family resemblance. Beyond this, there is the curious phenomenon of different writers identifying the schools according to somewhat different characteristics, different time periods, different boundaries - yet each writer presents his description as though it presents simple factual information stated, often, in dogmatic form. The conclusion is that while schools of philosophy exist, they are, of course, interactive - despite the contrary idea contained in the ‘incommensurability of speech communities’ - with boundaries, epochs and adherents that are, however, not at all definite in their specification.

The definitions of the following schools are from One Hundred Twentieth-Century Philosophers, by Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson and Robert Wilkinson, 1998. The purpose to the inclusion here is to have available the philosophy of an era as an object that, despite internal complexity, may be seen as a simple item that is part of the stream of thought - that eras of philosophical thought as objects. This contributes to the intuitive understanding of history that may transcend formal theories; and lends itself to the formulation of explicit understanding.

Absolute Idealism

‘Whatever is real is an aspect of the eternal consciousness or absolute spirit.’

Origins: Hegel and Schelling.

England: Thomas Hill Green (1836 - 1882), FH Bradley Appearance and Reality 1893, HH Joachim, Bernard Bosanquet, John Ellis McTaggart.

France: A. Fouillée (1838 - 1912), Emile Betroux (1845 - 1922)

America: Josiah Royce, Brand Blanshard.

Italy: Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile.

Analytic Philosophy

‘Philosophy is the analysis of concepts. It should not attempt to make statements about the nature of reality or should do so only in a limited way.’

Notes

Analytic philosophy is sometimes considered to be the same as linguistic philosophy.

Analytic philosophy includes the movement known as ‘Oxford philosophy’

Analytic philosophy is perhaps too broad to be called a school - it is in some senses a trend, a movement, or a paradigm of how to do philosophy.

Analytic philosophy is the paradigm or trend that informs the dominant strains of philosophy in the English speaking countries and Scandinavia in the 20th century. It may be thought of as continuing the empiricist tradition that found its main home in Britain. This tradition may be seen as going back to Aristotle and standing in contrast to the other main paradigm of philosophy - that of rationalism that can be seen as beginning with Plato, continuing on the continent with Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and into recent times - the 20th and 21st centuries - with the various neo-rationalisms and modern Continental philosophy.

Places: Cambridge, Vienna Circle, Uppsala Sweden, Lyov-Warsaw Scholl.

Origins: Socrates.

Modern: Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Quine, Strawson, Hare, Davidson.

Sub-developments: Logical positivism, linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein rejected the practice of reductive analysis and focused on use or practice as the source of stable meanings.

Analytic Philosophy - Phase 1: Logical Positivism.

A. J. Ayer (the problem of knowledge)

Analytic Philosophy - Phase 2: Linguistic Analysis.

Gilbert Ryle, J. C. Austin, Peter Strawson, Iris Murdoch, John Searle in the U.S.

Analytic Philosophy - Phase 3: Philosophy of Mind.

In the later phase analytic philosophy has become broader than strictly linguistic philosophy; analysis of concepts, however, remains important.

Anti-Realist Trends and Tendencies in 20th Century Philosophy: Pragmatism, Positivism, Analytic Philosophy.

Anti-realism is a descendant of empiricism but does not represent a single school; a number of schools may be subsumed under anti-realism. The following paragraphs, therefore, contain repetition.

The focus on sense data and experience of empiricism becomes a focus on conventionalism and fictionalism in the hands of Mach, Avenarius, and Vaihinger; in pragmatism: a focus on experimentalism and instrumentalism - the consequences and uses of knowledge over representation as truth criteria; an attack on metaphysics and a scientific reductionism in positivism; and a focus on language in analytic philosophy: facts and descriptions of facts form the content of knowledge.

Scientific conventionalism and fictionalism

Ernst Mach (1838 - 1936), R. Avenarius (1843 - 1896), Hans Vaihinger (1852 - 1933), Henri Poincare (1854 - 1912): conventionalism.

Pragmatism

Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis (1883 - 1964), F. S. C. Northrop

Positivism and Logical Empiricism

John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, P. W. Bridgman, Rudolf Carnap, Ernest Nagel, Charles W. Morris.

A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivism 1959, P. Achinstein and S. F. Barker, eds. Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1969

Positivism and ethics

There are two approaches: (1) (Schlick) psychological value, good are mere abstractions, but valuation, approbation are actual psychic occurrences; (2) (Ayer) one class of ‘ethical statements are not propositions at all but ejaculations or commands which are designed to provoke the reader to action of a certain sort’…The statement ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses nothing but my disapproval of theft. (Clearly a pragmatist interpretation of ethics.)

Analytic and linguistic philosophy

England: Wittgensteinians: Intention G. E. M. Anscombe, Norman Campbell, and extension into the United States: investigated knowledge, certainty, memory; Oxford Philosophers: Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind 1949; John Austin How To Do Things with Words 1962: the total speech act and its environment.

United States: W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object 1960; Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures 1957

Empiricism

W. K. Clifford (1845 - 1879), Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936), Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)…Challenges to Empiricism H. Morick ed., 1980

Utilitarianism

See the section on Utilitarianism for details.

Rationalism

Reason as the chief source of knowledge: H. J. Patton, In Defense of Reason 1951; W. H. Walsh, Reason and Experience 1947; A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality 1929; J. M. W. McTaggart The Nature of Existence, 2 volumes, 1921 - 1927; Brian Ellis Rational Belief System 1979

Comtean Positivism

...or scientific positivism - the stage of the history of sciences after theology and metaphysics

‘A positive sociology will lead to a better society’

Continental Philosophy: Trends.

In the 20th century continental philosophy was influenced by phenomenology and existentialism. Neo-Kantianism and political philosophy were also among the important movements. Of course, ‘continental philosophy’ is not a single school but is largely influenced by idealism, Kantianism and systematic metaphysics.

Note that the following classification and assignments are from Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater, eds., The Continental Philosophy Reader, Routledge: London and New York, 1996

From phenomenology to Hermeneutics

Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Others: Simone de Beauvoir, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur.

From Marxism to Critical Theory

Rosa Luxemberg, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt.

Others: Gyorgy Lukàcs, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Louis Althusser.

From Structuralism to Deconstruction

Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.

Others: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard.

Deconstructionism includes a challenge to the notion that philosophy criticizes texts in fundamental and distinct ways.

Critical Realism

The critical realists were a group of American realists in the 1920s who distinguished themselves from the New Realists of the previous decade. They objected to the ‘naïve’ realism of the new realists who held that physical objects were perceived directly. According to the critical realists, the mind directly perceives only ideas and sense data: (1) Mind is directly confronted with some data, the vehicle of knowledge; (2) physical objects exist independently of mind and are known through sense data, (3) material objects are distinct from the data by which they are known.

D. Drake, A.O. Lovejoy, J. Pratt, A.K. Rogers, George Santayana, Wilfrid Sellars, C.A. Armstrong, in their cooperative volume Essays in Critical Realism, attacked the monistic tenets of the New Realism.

Empiricism

‘All knowledge of the world is based upon sense-experience.’ ‘Experience - sensation and perception rather than ideas, concepts and thought - is the source of knowledge.’

Radical empiricism is a theory of knowledge in which ideas are reducible to sensations.

Scientific empiricism is another name for logical positivism

Favored in the 20th century by pragmatists and logical positivists

William James - radical empiricism

A.J. Ayer, Herbert Feigl - logical empiricism.

Criticized: Quine, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend

Evolutionary Philosophers

Philosopher’s whose accounts of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics give central importance to evolution, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution.

C. Lloyd Morgan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Popper.

Roots: Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer.

Existentialism

The nature the experience of existence as a human being in the world. What are the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical entailments of that existence?

A school or movement dominated by thinkers in Germany and France.

Philosophy of irrationalism - actuality over reason: ‘existence precedes essence’ (a-rationalism)

Gives prominence to human passionate and esthetic nature and to human feelings of anguish, love, guilt, sense of inner freedom…has romanticist origins.

Literature as philosophy…life issues: death, sex, religion, politics and meaning; the idea of literature as philosophy is a theme within existentialism. This idea and the more general idea of art, even life, as philosophy is not limited to existentialism

Truth is free commitment by the individual which leads to ‘faith - philosophy’…choice of individual as total being (not free-willistic)

German existentialism owes many insights to traditional idealism.

Claimed roots: St. Augustine, Pascal

Roots: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche

Main: Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

Others: Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Buber, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merlau-Ponty

Mary Warnock Existentialism 1970, Robert D. Cumming, Starting Point 1979

Frankfurt School: Critical Theory

The Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), Frankfurt; founded: Felix J. Weil, 1923, for interdisciplinary Marxist research, provided a base for many brilliant Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Max Horkheimer established the concept of a Critical Theory when he took over directorship from the historian Carl Grünberg as director in 1930. Due to the rise of Nazism, the institute moved first to Geneva and Paris and then, in 1934, to New York. The Institute was re-established in Frankfurt after WW II.

The distinctive Frankfurt perspective is a flexible post WW II neo-Marxism due to Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse... a desperate opposition in the face of fascism, Stalinism and managerial capitalism.

Others of the school are: Walter Benjamin; historian Franz Borkenau; economists Friedrich Pollock, Henryk Grossman, Arkady Gurland; psychologists Bruno Bettelheim and Erik Fromm; political theorists Otto Kircheimer and Franz Neumann; and literary theorist Leo Lowenthal.

Later postwar critical theorists, more academic in orientation, include Jürgen Habermas, Karl Otto Apel, Albrecht Wellmer and Alfred Schmidt. Critical theory is continued into the 1990s by philosophers and sociologists such as Claus Offe, Axel Honneth and Klaus Eder.

Hegelianism

A form of Absolute Idealism (see Absolute Idealism, above, for names) associated with Hegel’s influence. Hegelianism is both a method - the dialectic - and a doctrine, the doctrine of what is real - the final category of dialectical analysis - the Absolute idea. The method and doctrine are inseparable, the method is precisely the formulation of the doctrine and the doctrine is precisely the detailed expression of the method.

Though Hegel was despised by analytical philosophers in the middle decades of the 20th century, the study of his work has flowered since the 1970s.

Hermeneutics

‘The art and methodology of interpretation’

Hermeneutics is usually applied across time to texts. This concept could fruitfully be applied, also, across geographical and cultural borders to cultural, political and other activities. It could be applied within a given culture as the hermeneutics of the media and politics: what is the real message behind the rhetoric?

Related to rhetoric and the philosophy of rhetoric. Philosophy as rhetoric.

Originated in ancient Greece, hermeneutics became an adjunct to theology under Christianity and achieved prominence in the 19th century as a methodology of the human studies which challenged positivism.

Recently fashionable among Western intellectuals particularly because it figured in the philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer.

Also Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey.

Common presuppositions: there are common, basic features of humanity; and (Giambattista) Vico’s principle that man can understand what man has made.

Idealism

Various meanings; a generic meaning one associated with Leibniz in the 17th century gives priority to the human mind. Leibniz called Plato the greatest of idealists. That form of monism which holds that the substance of all being is mental - idea, will… - could be labeled ‘metaphysical idealism.’

Immanuel Kant

Has been contrasted with realism and opposed by pragmatism and personalism from the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. 19th century in England and America philosophy was strongly idealistic. The influence of idealism waned in the 20th century but there has been some revival in the 1980s and 90s.

The idealists distinguish between (1) intellect (verstand: understanding): the function of thought which mechanizes experience, and (2) rational insight (vernunft: reason), and though the idealists - especially Hegel and his followers –tend to be intellectual, they emphasize reason. They tend to be opponents of extreme intellectualism and have this in common with (1) pragmatists, positivists, conventionalists and fictionalists, and especially analytical philosophers who hold that knowledge is limited to study and description of the facts of experience; and (2) intuitionists and romanticists.

Related to idealism are intuitionism and existentialism

Godfrey Vesey ed., Idealism Past and Present 1982, the central role of the ideal or spiritual

Intuitionism

The intuitionism of Henri Bergson is anti-rationalistic. The opposition between static and dynamic aspects is important.

Static Dynamic

Morality Obligation Morality Morality of Creativity

Religion Static Myth Religion True Mystical Thought

In mathematics, LEJ Brouwer ‘Truth is what is known to be true’... mathematics is not reducible to logic.

In ethics ( GE Moore) - moral truths are known by intuition.

Legal Positivism

There are no natural rights except the positive laws of countries. Derives from logical positivism in so far as natural rights are metaphysical

Jeremy Bentham; in the 20th century Hans Kelsen and, of the Uppsala school, Axel Hägerström

Linguistic Philosophy

Influenced by and ‘can be seen as a development within analytical philosophy.’ ‘The problems of philosophy can be solved or dissolved by careful attention to the details of language - especially ordinary language.’ Speech acts (J. L. Austin, John Searle) - uses of language other than to state facts.

In Oxford and Cambridge, under the influence of the later Wittgenstein - the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations... and picked up by Ryle, Austin, and Wisdom.

America: Bouwsma, Searle.

Scandinavia: von Wright, Justus Hartnack.

Logical Positivism

A form of positivism influenced by the ascent of science - the only meaningful propositions, i.e. those that are certainly true or false about the world, are the ones that are verifiable by the methods of science. Philosophy should not be concerned with the synthetic but its business is analysis - and analysis is the way that the truth of the propositions of logic and mathematics are discovered. The propositions of ethics and metaphysics are not verifiable and, so, not meaningful. Properly derives from the Vienna Circle (Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap - ‘the brightest’) and associated groups in Berlin (Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises), Lyov and Uppsala. Emphasis on logic and language, presaged in Wittgenstein’s Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus.

A problem of Logical Positivism was the status of observation statements. The program included the reduction of everything to observation statements... regarding which there was no unanimous agreement. Schlick equated observation statements to sensation statements; Neurath and Carnap wanted to stop at statements describing physical objects.

Lyov-Warsaw School - the ‘Warsaw Circle’

Similar to and had contact with Vienna... though less extreme in its positivistic outlook and less programmatically adventurous.

Preoccupied with logic and language. Distrusted ‘abstract speculation of an illusive and deceptive clarity’. Some, like Ajdukiewicz was closer to Logical Positivism, others like Kotabiski, Lukasiewicz and Tarski, though they favored logic without metaphysics, were less extreme.

Marxism.

Best known as a socio-political theory rooted in Hegelian idealism and its notion of dialectic... but firmly located at the material level resulting in dialectical materialism. When dialectical materialism is applied to history it implies a class struggle within each society (thesis) generating its own contradiction (antithesis) until there is a new synthesis.

According to Marx, society consists of a dominant economic base with a cultural superstructure that depends on the economic base and the means of production. In Das Kapital, the primary impact of capitalist economics is to alienate workers from their labor - or reification, the transformation of labor and worker into economic commodities. Marxism is a philosophy with a definite socio-political agenda - to change the world rather than just interpret it.

Lenin, Stalin

Gyorgy Lukàcs, Frankfurt school.

‘Late 20th century decline of communism eroded Marxism’s philosophical and aesthetic authority’...we don’t know that the story is over... and, besides, who is writing that story?

For post-modernists Marxism is a paradigm of an outmoded grand narrative or universal theory.

Materialism

The world is fundamentally material.

Mental phenomena are a function of / reducible to physical phenomena.

Putatively diametrically opposite to idealism... and there is a long history of this opposition in India, China, Greece, and Europe’s philosophies and, to a lesser degree, in those of Japan and Latin America.

As a reaction to analytical behaviorism (Gilbert Ryle) and partly because recent developments in biochemistry and physiological psychology have greatly increased the plausibility of materialism in the philosophy of mind, there has lately been a resurgence of interest in central state materialism. The following notes are not a complete account of materialist theories. Metaphysical concerns are omitted; ethical materialism is ignored.

Central State Materialism (CSM) - mental processes are brain processes.

Analytical Behaviorism - mind is not a thing (even a very complex thing, or a nonmaterial thing) but a shorthand reference to ways of behaving in circumstances.

Translation CSM - mentalist discourse is neutral between physicalism and dualism or can be translated into such form: U. T. Place of Britain, J. J. C. Smart and D. M. Armstrong of Australia, Herbert Feigel and David K. Lewis of the United States.

Disappearance CSM: the translation is not possible, mentalism is false. P. K. Feyerabend, W. V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars of the United States.

Munich Circle.

At the University of Munich, significant in phenomenology, largely due to Theodore Lipps (1851 - 1914) at that University, whose psychologism stood in opposition to Husserl’s phenomenology. Lipps held that psychology could serve as a foundation for logic, i.e. the a priori can be founded in the phenomena of thought.

Members traveled between Munich and Göttingen (Husserl and the Göttingen circle)... and membership in the two circles overlapped.

Adolf Reinach, Theodor Conrad, Moritz Geiger, Aloys Fischer, August Gallinger, Ernst von Aster, Hans Cornelius, Dietrich von Hilde-Brand, Max Scheler.

Naturalism

Most commonly, naturalism holds that there are no supernatural causes (needed to explain phenomena)… materialism is a form of naturalism but a naturalist need not be a materialist - naturalism has no ontological preference. But what is natural, or supernatural? This is not the most profitable to understanding naturalism. To be saying something positive, naturalism must be saying more than that ‘there are no supernatural causes,’ or that ‘all influences lie within the universe,’ for the terms involved are rather vague. The idea of ‘nature’ also has to do with simple, given. The idea of ‘nature’ is in opposition to the idea of the occult - hidden factors and influences. Thus naturalism is the idea that the world can be understood. Owing to the dominance of science, naturalism is often equated with the idea that all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. This, unfortunately, leads to a rather cold and clinical picture. But the original idea of science, in my view, is not one of a method, or a rationality, or a logic or empiric. Also, the idea that the universe is intelligible imparts a clinical view. To retain the idea of science but not the clinical ‘air,’ conceive of science as the understanding of the real pattern of the world. That leads to a naturalistic conception of naturalism.

Naturalism has many meanings, kinds (axiological, epistemological, ethical) and varieties.

Santayana - a major influence on early 20th century American naturalism... and on Morris Cohen, Woodbridge.

Dewey, RW Sellars, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook.

Neo-Kantians

Diverse but (1) reaction to the philosophical positions in Germany c. 1850, especially Hegelian Idealism, naturalism, monism, materialism and (2) ‘Back to Kant’ (Otto Lieb, 1865)

No clearly identified common philosophical tendency - despite the slogan, ‘Back to Kant.’ Early views were labeled ‘physiological,’ while later views were ‘realistic’ or ‘metaphysical.’ Two important philosophical traditions within Neo-Kantianism are the Marburg and Baden (or Heidelberg or South German) schools; the Göttingen school was also important.

Marburg school - close to the metaphysical school but emphasizing science and epistemological considerations: Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer emphasized culture and so came close to the Baden school.

Baden school - placed emphasis on values and their role in the humanities: Wilhelm Windelbland, Heinrich Rickert.

Göttingen school - reacting to the Baden school, Leonard Nelson placed greater emphasis on psychology: Leonard Nelson who was largely influenced by the thought of Jakob Friedrich Fries.

Neo-Scholasticism

‘All neo-scholastics have common commitments: to a realism, epistemological and the objective reality of values; to metaphysics as foundational of philosophy; and, thirdly, that, broadly, the scholastics approached philosophy in the right way.’

A continuation of scholasticism but tends to focus on Aquinas. Originated mid-19th century, committed to a belief in a philosophia perennis and that Aquinas, of all European philosophers came closest to it. That view was discredited.

Scholasticism itself began with the Aristotelian revival in the 12th century, flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries, languished, and was revived in the 16th and 17th centuries by Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, and Francisco Suarez.

Bernard Lonergan, Emerich Coreth, Joseph Maréchal, Johannes Lotz.

New Realism

‘The knower and known are independent for some classes of object - the physical, minds, mathematical entities. The mind directly perceives physical objects.’ Epistemological monism: the object of knowledge is directly given to consciousness.

c. 1910

Six men: EB Holt, WT Marvin, WP Montague, RB Perry, WT Pitkin, EG Spaulding.

Much in common with Russell, Moore and Samuel Alexander

Opposition to idealist doctrine of internal relations - the idea that relations between entities may transform those entities. Idealism is ‘skeptical.’ (However, idealism is not inherently skeptical.)

Independence of knower-known... in case of physical things, minds, mathematical entities

Adopted neutral monism in order to avoid idealism or materialism

Personalism

The term has origins in the 19th century - Schleirmacher, ‘God is a person’… a reaction to Absolute Idealism, pantheism. In the early 20th century the use of the term focused on individual humans as fundamental, irreducible entities.

Though excluding naturalism, materialism and reacting against Absolute Idealism, included some Absolute Idealists - Caird, Calkins and Green.

Included idealists: Brightman, Carr, Howison, Rashdall, Webb who rejected the tendency of Hegelian idealism to monism and pantheism

Included realists: Pringle-Pattison, Pratt

Catholic personalism: a reaction against naturalist and materialist philosophies.

Phenomenology

A group of philosophies bearing family resemblance rather than common doctrines …but what, if anything, is common to all phenomenology? Rejection of empiricism, positivism, naturalism and psychologism (except, see, Munich Circle)… and a focus on the contents of mind as inspiration for though not, in all versions of phenomenology, as foundation of the contents and conception of the real

Realist Phenomenology

Originally inspired by Husserl, Alexius Menong (1853 - 1921) on the theory of objects

Rejects the empiricist restriction to the physical and the mental

Everything has its essence: existents - the physical and the mental but also numbers, states of affairs, logical laws, institutions.

There are synthetic or synthetic-like a priori truths whose necessity is purely objective and has nothing do with how we do or must think.

Intentionality is central.

Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology.

‘A method for the description and analysis of consciousness through which philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict science … and, thereby, a secure foundation for human knowledge’

Influenced by Franz Brentano’s intentional psychology

Preliminary to the transcendental phenomenology is the phenomenological analysis of experienced reality. This is crucial to any ‘static or dynamic map of mind.’ It is natural though not logical that this should develop into a metaphysics.

An idealism

Intentionality important... not conceived as relation to the external world.

Transcendental Phenomenology is the description of the essential structures constituting the world in transcendental subjectivity.

Ludwig Landgrebe, Walter Biemel.

Europe: H.L. Van Breda, and Alphonse de Waelhens of Belgium, Stephan Strasser of The Netherlands, Enzo Paci of Italy, Jan Patocka of Czechoslovakia and, in Poland, Roman Ingarden.

United States Marvin Farber, a student of Husserl, The Foundation of Phenomenology (1943). At the New School for Social Research in New York, Alfred Schütz, Austrian-born (died 1959), and Aron Gurwitsch, Lithuanian-born, author of Théorie du champ de la conscience (1957; The Field of Consciousness, 1964), and Herbert Spiegelberg, an Alsatian-American Phenomenologist The Phenomenological Movement (2nd ed., 1965)

Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Heidegger... because the phenomenological task of Dasein is the interpretation, conceptual unfolding of its understanding of being.

Existential Phenomenology

e.g. Merleau-Ponty Structure of Behavior 1963, Phenomenology of Perception 1962, exposes the prejudice of an objective world; t task is to describe the ‘life-world’

The distinction from transcendental phenomenology is its focus on the concrete, situated, historical, engaged body-subject, not the transcendental ego.

Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merlau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Suzzane Bachelard.

Philosophical Anthropology.

Reaction against mechanistic studies of human nature characteristic of Darwinian, Freudian and other approaches and, therefore, has affinities with existentialism and phenomenology.

Traced back to Kant... precursors in the early 20th century - Dilthey, Husserl.

Flourished 1920s - 30s Germany; key figures - Max Scheler, Helmet Plessner.

Ludwig Binswanger, Martin Buber, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, RD Lang, Michael Polanyi, Werner Sombart.

Philosophical Logic.

Philosophical logic is not a ‘school’ but is included for completeness.

The treatment is incomplete. Frege, Russell (also, till the end, a British empiricist; Russell on knowledge), Wittgenstein (mainly the Tractacus but also Philosophical Investigations for its influence on linguistic philosophy, Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Kurt Gödel.

Positivism.

Any view in which science has a monopoly over knowledge of the universe. Usually anti-metaphysical and anti-religious.

The term was introduced by Claude-Henri Saint-Simon and popularized by his follower Auguste Comte; Comtean positivism was a philosophy and a substitute religion.

Less professionally academic than logical positivism and due to the associations some members of the Vienna Circle preferred the name of Logical Empiricism to Logical Positivism.

Also see: Vienna Circle, Logical Positivism, Legal Positivism, and Comtean Positivism.

Post Marxism.

Meaning 1

Finding place within Marxism for various new social movements: feminism, anti-institutional ecology, various minorities.

...as well the techniques of post-modernism and post-structuralism; and a challenge to classical Marxist assumptions e.g., the central position of the working class in moving social change, notions of hegemony and of historical necessity. Aims at a pluralistic approach to politics.

Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe.

Meaning 2

A break with and move beyond Marxism. More of an attitude (disillusionment) to Marxism than a system of thought, originating e.g., when French intellectuals had their faith in Marxism shaken by the actions of the French communist party in the 1968 Paris événements when the party was felt to have colluded with the state in diffusing a revolutionary situation.

Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and others rejected Marxism and turned to / created post-modernism in its various guises.

Postmodernism

Rejects modernism, the ‘Grand Narrative’ emancipation (that stems from the enlightenment) and Hegelianism ( and its ideal of the complete synthesis of knowledge ). Examines and criticizes social and cultural tendencies that dominated advance capitalist societies since the 1950’s. The ‘Grand Narrative’ replaced by language games which are arbitrary, replaceable, relative, restricted, incommensurable; and, since there is no self-legitimation of language games, they are replaceable. A criticism of synthesis and of the concept of progress; time itself is ‘dislocated,’ it is not constant, uniform, split into past and future, the present is not a link from past to future. Reality is a collage of ephemeral images, no more. E.g., Baudrillard’s statement that the Gulf War did not take place; instead, the West was confronted with fragmentary television images which presented, but did not represent ‘happenings.’

The statement above is a little longer than for other schools, not because of philosophical importance but to give a flavor to a segment of culture that I want to understand.

Began 1970s in philosophy, culture, arts

Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari... claims Nietzsche among its philosophical ancestors.

The computer has marginalized knowledge that cannot be stored in a data bank.

Post-Structuralism

A movement within philosophical and literary criticism; deconstruction is within its scope - the meaning of the literary text is indeterminate and there is no stability of meaning in language - thus anti-Wittgensteinian; the moderate and, according to some critics of post-structuralism, most useful aspect is the idea that a text can assume or be assigned many meanings. The extreme claim is that a text can take any interpretation whatsoever. Hostile to structuralism with its claims to scientific objectivity, detachment, comprehensiveness. The movement is anti-traditional, anti-metaphysical and anti-ideological - are these positions or reactions?

Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard and (in later writings) Roland Barthes.

Trends in common with postmodernism. With an easy if constipated flourish the idols are smashed.

France, late 1960s then quickly spread to parts of Europe and North America.

No stability of meaning in language.

Word-association (de Saussure) escapes the public and rule-governed nature of language and is a prime example of liberation and creativity. Derrida’s article Shibboleth includes word-associations ‘Shibboleth’, ‘Anniversaries’, ‘Rings’, ‘Circumcision’ and is interspersed with German words (the Saussurean assertion that the division between natural languages is arbitrary)

Pragmatism

Pierce –the originator of pragmatism– emphasizes truth as the outcome of scientific inquiry rather than defining inquiry as aiming at truth. Reality is what it is independent of what anyone thinks of it and so reality is the object of a true belief. Pierce used his pragmatism to clarify the ideas of meaning, truth and reality. Although there are clear affinities with Wittgenstein, people do not seem to make this point. There is also an affinity with the thought that knowledge, at base, does not stand independently of life or action - that occurs only in special circumstances, e.g. ‘science.’ However, in the field where knowledge can stand independently it is natural to use ‘intrinsic’ criteria: that is the meaning and function of independence; and in the general case there is no need to give criteria or narrative. Pragmatism is useful in pointing to the fact that knowledge, meaning, truth, reality have broader bases than sometimes previously and otherwise conceived; this, however, can be seen otherwise.

Origins - 1860s; the work of thinkers in science, mathematics, law, psychology and philosophy: in consequence of Darwin’s thought there could be a naturalization of knowledge itself.

Aim - a scientific philosophy in which questions can be settled as decisively as in the sciences.

‘Pragmatic’ adopted from Kant - ‘A judgment about which one cannot be objectively certain but is practically certain.’ British psychologist Alexander Bain characterizes ‘belief as that upon which one is prepared to act.’

William James made pragmatism famous, John Dewey applied it to all areas of life, especially education.

Pierce, James, Dewey are the most important pragmatists.

George Herbert Mead carried the evolutionist and pragmatist view of mind further, developed a theory of origin of language, intelligence and self out of interactions and gestures and, then, a difficulty metaphysics and a fruitful social psychology.

CI Lewis developed conceptualistic pragmatism - a pragmatic theory of the a priori: the a priori –not the empirical– element of knowledge is pragmatic. FCS Schiller –not an originator of pragmatism but a main advocate in Britain– developed pragmatic humanism. Pragmatic threads are taken up by Quine, Davidson and Rorty.

Process Philosophy

A metaphysics in which process, not substance, is fundamental.

a 20th-century school of Western philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality; it opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity.

Henri Bergson, 1859 - 1941, is often regarded as the originator of process philosophy; his main ideas are expounded in Creative Evolution, 1907. A. N. Whitehead’s 1929 work Process and Reality is a landmark in the development of process philosophy; and, also due to... influenced in the latter part of the 20th century, by Charles Hartshorne. Samuel Alexander 1859 - 1938, Space, Time and Deity, 1920, a process metaphysician, developed a metaphysics of emergent evolution involving time, space, matter, mind, and deity.

Realism

There are various ‘realisms’ according to what is taken as real (ideas, matter, universals, substances, process, relationship, ethics…) and what that conception is applied to - the whole world or a part or aspect of it, so much so that no general statement is possible as regards the content of realism. However the concept of realism has to do with the idea that the world is independent of the knowing mind. Of course, this too, is highly underspecified - e.g. it allows for the world to be constituted of mind or of matter or both or, yet, something else... and these conceptions are in turn also minimally specified - but it does lend itself to the idea that objects exist, in some form or guise, independently of their being perceived or defined in social convention.

In the most persistent realist concern is that of the reality of ‘universals,’ the principles of the classification of things. When a new object is called a horse one feels that one is doing something essentially right in calling it a horse - if that is what it is - rather than a giraffe. Realists hold that such classification corresponds to something in the world; according to nominalists the reality of the natures of things is mere naming. Conceptualists hold a middle ground and accord universals reality as categories of the mind.

Plato: abstract but not sense objects are real - leads to idealism. While some forms of idealism and realism stand in opposition, it is a mistake to suppose that idealism and realism are essentially opposed. Plato was also a moral realist in that he opposed the view that moral values are dependent on social convention... his theory of forms is one kind of moral realism.

Aristotle: realism of sense objects - the main alternative to Plato.

Frege, among others, subscribed to the controversial position of realism in mathematics.

20th century realism begins with Russell and Moore as a reaction to the 19th and early 20th century dominance of Absolute Idealism in philosophy in British and American universities. This led in Britain to Russell’s empiricism and to logical positivism and linguistic analysis and, in America, to, first, New Realism and then to Critical Realism.

Realism stands generally but not absolutely in opposition to idealism, subjectivism, relativism, constructivism, phenomenalism.

A problem of realism relative to an empiricist epistemology: unobservable theoretical entities in an empiricist epistemology are not real. Opposed to this ‘scientific realists’ such as RW Sellars assert the reality of all scientific entities including unobservable ones. (This problem is in part the result of philosophy developing as a separate discipline rather than in relation to other disciplines. The possible types of relation include inclusion, interactivity... but the key point is that such divisions should not themselves be the generators of problems and paradoxes and this becomes possible when it is not asserted in advance that so and so topic is the province of such and such discipline or endeavor but, rather the provinces of the known and of knowledge are seen as integral wholes and more even that distinction is not regarded as an a priori absolute but in so far as it is real –and even if that reality should turn out to be necessary reality– it should be treated as a contingent real.)

The 1980s and 1990s have seen the revivalism of an ethical realism as reaction to various forms of subjectivism and pervasive realism in ethics.

Semiology - ‘The Science Of Signs’

Semiological analysis: analyzing the grammatical relations between signs in given system.

Derived from the structuralism inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure

Claude Levi-Strauss applied this idea to a group of South American Indian myths to reveal the group as a genre with its own underlying grammar.

Roland Barthes applied it to advertising, fashion... to identify the semiological codes and audience response.

Sociology of Knowledge.

A view of epistemology in which social relations are important in establishing what is accepted as knowledge. Affinities with pragmatism and Wittgenstein.

Karl Mannheim 1893 - 1947, remembered for a study of science as a social organization having a sociological impact outside itself.

Structuralism.

Structuralism: the concepts de Saussure’s linguistic analysis applied to any system e.g. Levi-Strauss on myth or Edmund Leach on Genesis.

de Saussure’s synchronic (a-historical, looking at a slice through time) approach was: 1. Model language as a self-regulating whole with parts, 2. Recognize a deep level ‘Langue’ or rules and ‘Parole; the surface level product (strings of words) of the rules. Note the similarity with Chomsky, Fodor.

Influential throughout the 20th century but in the last three decades of the 20th century displaced by post-structuralism.

Twentieth Century Realism

Twentieth century realism is largely influenced by science - Scientific Realism: supported by nineteenth and twentieth century advances in mathematics, logic and science, ‘the object of knowledge in perception, memory, logical and mathematical thought, and science, is a reality which exists and possesses properties independent of the knowing mind.’ Scientific Realism draws, historically, from David Hume’s philosophical empiricism and skepticism. Its paradigmatic influences include psychological atomism, empiricism and the analytic method.

Also influential in Twentieth century realism are the British philosophers G. E. Moore - constructive realism applied to sense data; Bertrand Russell - physical realism as the simplest hypothesis: ‘Every principle of simplicity urges us to accent the natural view of objects behind sensations’… extended to universals: akin to Plato; Samuel Alexander - Space, Time and Deity, 1929; Alfred North Whitehead - philosophy of organicism, process as real.

Uppsala School

A positivistic movement in Uppsala, Sweden founded by Axel Hägerstrom, Adolf Phalén, flourished 1910 - 1940... prior philosophy there, as in Britain and America, was strongly idealistic.

One of three places (the other two homes of positivism being the Vienna Circle and Cambridge) where analytic philosophy originated, according to Justus Hartnack, largely independently... Uppsala shared with the Vienna School the view that moral utterances have no truth value and an anti-metaphysical bias... and with Cambridge (Moore and Russell) the emphasis on conceptual analysis and commitment to realism.

Continued post WW II by Konrad Marc-W0gau, Ingemar Hedenius... but more influenced by the Vienna Circle, Anglo-American analytic philosophy than by Hägerstrom or Phalén.

Utilitarianism

Traditionally, the view that the right act or action will produce the greatest amount of pleasure or happiness in the world as a whole. More recently, especially in England, the same view with happiness generalized to ‘good.’

Jeremy Bentham 1748 - 1832 regarded as the founder but has antecedents in Helvetius, Hutcheson and Hume... pleasure/pain are intrinsically good/bad and the morality of an action correlates with the amount of pleasure and pain.

JS Mill distinguished higher and lower pleasures in contrast to Bentham’s use of ‘quantity of pleasure’... but issue of (role of) justice remains.

Henry Sidgwick and GE Moore reject psychological hedonism and assert moral principles may be known intuitively.

In the 20th century - Rule, Act and Preference Utilitarianism; Criticisms of Utilitarianism.

Rule Utilitarianism: right action observes rules that maximize happiness. Stephen Toulmin, Patrick Nowell-Smith, (J. S. Mill), John Rawls.

Act Utilitarianism: the right act produces maximum happiness in a given situation. JJC Smart: there is no proof of Utilitarianism but it is of general appeal and provides guidance.

Preference Utilitarianism of RM Hare: the right act provides what people prefer.

Criticism of utilitarianism by Bernard Williams: mature persons shape their lives by meaningful projects whose importance is not determined by utilitarianism.

Jan Narveson Morality and Utility 1967; Michael D. Bayles, ed. Contemporary Utilitarianism 1968; J. J. C. Smart An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics 1961; Donald Regan Utilitarianism and Cooperation 1980

Vienna Circle.

The group of logical positivists, 1920s - 30s, Vienna, led by Moritz Schlick, published a manifesto 1929 stating its scientific outlook. Broken up by Nazism.

Members and Associates

Philosophers: Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, Friedrich Waisman, Edgar Zilsel, Victor Kraft.

Scientists and mathematicians: Phillip Frank, Karl Menger, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper associated with members but distanced themselves from the ideas.

AJ Ayer associated with the group as a young man, then advocated its views in the English speaking world.

Brief History

International Congress, Prague, followed by others 1930s, Königsberg, Copenhagen, Prague, Paris, Cambridge... led to alliances with similar groups in Berlin, Uppsala and Warsaw... and, also to an influence through AJ Ayer and others on philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge.

Like minds in Britain - Susan Stebbing, Richard Braithwaite; and in USA - Ernest Nagel, Charles Morris, WVO Quine.

After its breakup, remained influential in USA (Carnap emigrates, publishes International Encyclopedia of Unified Science which included Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions even though it was remote from the original spirit). Influence in the English speaking world diluted because of the way logical positivism influenced analytic philosophy. Influence in Scandinavia continued, particularly through the Uppsala School.

Vitalism in the 20th Century.

Vitalism

Life irreducible to physico-chemical processes. Driesch, von Uexküll.

Contrasted to ‘organicists’ e.g. JS Haldane who agree with the reduction of the organic to the inorganic but deny the equivalence of the inorganic to the mechanical.

Ratio-vitalism

Ortega Y Gasset. 1. Reason is the only means to knowledge; and 2. Reason is a property of a living subject.

Specialized Disciplines or Activities Within Philosophy.

The disciplines chosen for consideration are: political philosophy, economics and economic philosophy, education and the philosophy of education, natural philosophy, social philosophy and, for the 20th century, the philosophy of science. These various sub-disciplines are not merely applications of philosophy but are essentially intertwined with the mainstream of philosophical thought. Why do I include, both economics and economic philosophy, both education and the philosophy of education…? It is because in the early phase of the development the special discipline was not recognized as separate in its own right - it is likely that thought regarding the content of what is later labeled as a discipline occurs before the idea that the content does or may form an independent, coherent system of understanding; before the development of an independent discipline of economics the very idea that trade and commerce could be thought of in rational way was a novelty and thought in those areas, initially and until foundations could be secured and accepted as such, would have been experienced as philosophical. The same is true for natural philosophy except that the development of the independent natural sciences occurred earlier.

Political Philosophy

Details to be developed later

Name Major Works.

Plato Republic.

Aristotle Politics.

Cicero The Republic.

St Augustine The City of God.

Aquinas Summa Theologica.

Dante On World Government.

Machiavelli The Prince.

Hobbes Leviathan.

Locke Two Treatises on Civil Government.

Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws.

Rousseau Social Contract 1762

Burke Reflections on the French Revolution.

Paine The Rights of Man.

Hegel The Philosophy of Rights.

Saint-Simon The Industrial System.

Proudhon What is Property?

Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto.

JS Mill On Liberty.

Bakunin God and the State.

Economics and Economic Philosophy.

Details to be developed later.

Name Major Works.

Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations 1776

Thomas Malthus Essay on the Principles of Population l798

David Ricardo Principles of Political Economy 1817

Karl Marx Das Kapital 1867 - 95

Leon Walras Elements d’économie politique pure 1874 - 77

Alfred Marshall Principles of Economics 1890

John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1936

Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 1942

John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society 1958

Milton Friedman Inflation: Causes and Consequences 1953

Education and the Philosophy of Education

Details to be developed later

Name Major Works

Comenius Didactica Magna 1628 - 32, The Visible World in Pictures 1658

Rousseau Emile 1762

Pestalozzi How Gertrude Teaches her Children 1801

Froebel Education of Man 1826

Steiner The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity 1894

Thorndike Educational Psychology 1903

Montessori The Montessori Method 1912

Piaget The Language and Thought of Children 1923

Skinner The Technology of Teaching 1969

Illich Deschooling Society 1971

Natural Philosophy

Details to be developed later

Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Gauss, Maxwell, Poincaré, Einstein, Dirac, Darwin, Freud.

Social Philosophy, Schools of.

Details to be developed later.

With sub-disciplines of economic, political and educational philosophy.

Philosophy of Science

Details to be developed later

The treatment is incomplete. Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society And Its Enemies, Conjecture And Refutations, The Unended Quest.

Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn.

Philosophies of the disciplines

Details to be developed later

The treatment is incomplete.

Philosophies of the disciplines: especially the rise of a new philosophy of biology, which, in turn, has implications for epistemology.

Philosophies of the individual sciences - including the sciences of mind and of society; of art, of technology and society; of religion; of history; and of philosophy itself. Philosophy of philosophy brings the specialization through a whole circle back to unity. ‘Philosophy of philosophy,’ the very idea, is a partial characterization of the nature of philosophy: the idea of a ‘physics of physics’ does not make sense - although the same is not true of a ‘science of science’ or of a ‘science of philosophy.’ Philosophy of philosophy also has sub-disciplines such as the important philosophy of the history of philosophy.

20TH Century Philosophers

The following list of philosophers is complementary to the schools. Many philosophers could be listed under two or more schools. The lists of philosophers associated with each school above tend to be indicative rather than comprehensive; the listing below provides a degree of completeness and further information about the philosophers.

American Philosophers

Hannah Arendt 1906 - 1975; German-American political science, philosophy, ethics.

Roderick Milton Chisholm b. 1916; American; analytic philosophy.

Noam Avram Chomsky b. 1928; American; structuralist, linguist, political philosophy and activist.

Donald Herbert Davidson b. 1917; American; analytic philosopher of mind and language.

John Dewey 1859 - 1952; American; pragmatist, philosopher of education.

Kurt Gödel 1906 - 1978; Austrian-American; philosophy of mathematics and mathematical logic, a Platonist in mathematics.

Nelson Goodman b. 1906; American; analytic philosopher of science, education, language; aesthetics.

Charles Hartshorne b. 1897; American; process and evolutionary philosophy, philosophy of religion.

Carl Gustav Hempel b. 1905; German-American; philosophy of science.

William James 1842 - 1910; American; pragmatism, psychology.

Saul Aaron Kripke b. 1940; American; logic, philosophy of language and mind.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn 1922 - 1996; American; philosophy and history of science.

Susanne Katerina Langer 1895 - 1985; American; neo-Kantian symbolist.

David Kellog Lewis b. 1941; American; logician, analytic philosopher of language.

Bernard Lonergan 1904 - 1984; Canadian; Thomist interested in epistemology and metaphysics.

Norman Malcolm 1911 - 1990; American; analytic philosopher interested in epistemology, philosophy of language, mind and religion.

Robert Nozick b. 1938; American; political philosophy - libertarianism, epistemology, metaphysics.

Charles Sanders Peirce 1839 - 1914; American; pragmatism, philosophy of science, logic, physics.

Hilary Putnam b. 1926; American; philosophy of mind, mathematics, mind, language and science.

Willard Van Orman Quine b. 1908; American; logic and mathematical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science.

John Rawls b. 1921; American; moral and political philosophy - social contract theory, philosophical analysis.

Richard McKay Rorty b. 1931; American; pragmatism - post-analytical and hermeneutic, nature and history of philosophy, metaphysics.

Josiah Royce 1855 - 1916; American; absolute idealism, metaphysics.

John Rogers Searle b. 1932; American; analytic philosopher with interests in philosophies of language and of mind.

Alfred Tarski 1902 - 1983; Polish-American; mathematician, logician, philosopher with interests in the theory of truth, philosophy of language, semantics, foundations of mathematics.

Alfred North Whitehead 1861 - 1947; British-American; process metaphysician, mathematician, philosopher of science.

British Philosophers.

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe b. 1919; British; analytic philosopher, ethics and religion, defense of Catholic doctrines.

John Langshaw Austin 1911 - 1960; British; analytic philosopher of epistemology, language, mind.

Alfred Jules Ayer 1910 - 1989; British; logical positivist philosopher of epistemology, philosophical logic, ethics.

Francis Herbert Bradley 1846 - 1924; British; absolute idealist philosopher of ethics, logic, metaphysics.

Robert George Collingwood 1889 - 1943; British; philosophy of history and art.

Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett b. 1925; British; analytic philosopher, questioned the Principle of Bivalence.

Peter Thomas Geach b. 1916; British; analytic philosopher.

Richard Mervyn Hare b. 1919; British; analytic philosopher.

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre b. 1929; British; analytic philosophy, ethics.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart 1866 - 1925; British; ontological idealist.

George Edward Moore 1873 - 1958; British; analytic philosopher interested in epistemology and moral philosophy.

Jean Iris Murdoch b. 1919; British; ‘I might describe myself as a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist’

Karl Raimund Popper 1902 - 1994; Austrian-British; philosopher of science and evolution, political philosophy.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey 1903 - 1930; British; philosophy of mathematics, logic, metaphysics.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell 1872 - 1970; British; logical empiricism, mathematical logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, politics, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, criticism of religion.

Gilbert Ryle 1900 - 1976; British; analytical philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of mind, theory of mind, Plato.

Peter Frederick Strawson b. 1919; British; analytical philosopher working in philosophy of logic and language with interests in epistemology and metaphysics.

Alfred North Whitehead 1861 - 1947; British-American; process metaphysician, mathematician, philosopher of science.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein 1889 - 1951; Austrian-Naturalized British in 1939; early a logical atomist, later a philosopher of language and meaning emphasizing the context and use of language as providing meaning and stability of meaning; interests included language, philosophy of mind, logic, philosophy of mathematics, nature of philosophy.

European Philosophers

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno 1903 - 1969; German; Frankfurt School.

Louis Althusser b. 1918; Algerian-French; structural Marxism.

Hannah Arendt 1906 - 1975; German-American; political science, philosophy, ethics.

Gaston Bachelard 1884 - 1962; French; philosopher of science and art,

Walter Benjamin 1892 - 1940; German; Marxist aesthetics.

Henri-Louis Bergson 1859 - 1941; French; metaphysics, process philosophy.

Franz Brentano 1838 - 1917; German-Austrian; philosophical psychology, phenomenology interested in intentionality, act psychology.

Albert Camus, 1913 - 1960; French; existentialist philosopher of the absurd, ethicist.

Rudolf Carnap 1891 - 1970; German; logical positivism, analytic philosophy.

Ernst Cassirer 1874 - 1945; German; neo-Kantian.

Benedetto Croce 1866 - 1952; Italian; philosopher of the spirit, student of world literature, philosophy, political-economic theory, influenced by Hegel and Marx.

Jacques Derrida b. 1930; Algerian-French; post-structuralist, phenomologist, founder of Deconstructionism.

Wilhelm Dilthey 1833 - 1911; German; philosopher of culture with a neo-Kantian strain and history, philosopher of worldviews.

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem 1861 - 1916; French; philosophy and history of science and intellect; intellect, religion.

Paul Karl Feyerabend 1924 - 1994; Austrian; anti-empiricist, anti-rationalist philosopher of science.

Michel Foucault 1926 - 1984; French; post-structuralist, history of ideas.

Gottlob Ludwig Friedrich Frege 1848 - 1925; German; analytic philosophy, philosophy of logic and mathematics - a Platonist in mathematics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer b. 1900; German; hermeneutic philosopher.

Giovanni Gentile 1875 - 1844; Italian; idealist metaphysician, the unity of thought and action.

Henri Étienne Gilson 1884 - 1978; French; neoscholastic, interested in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, history of philosophy.

Kurt Gödel 1906 - 1978; Austrian-American; philosophy of mathematics and mathematical logic, a Platonist in mathematics.

Antonio Gramsci 1891 - 1937; Italian; Marxist, political philosopher, culture theorist.

Jürgen Habermas b. 1929; German; post-Marxist critical theorist with an interest in hermeneutics.

Nicolai Hartmann 1882 - 1950; German; metaphysics and ethics.

Martin Heidegger 1889 - 1976; German; phenomenology, ontology.

Carl Gustav Hempel b. 1905; German-American; philosophy of science.

Edmund Husserl 1859 - 1938; German; phenomenology.

Roman Ingarden 1893 - 1970; Polish; phenomenology, a realist, epistemology, aesthetics.

Luce Irigaray b. 1930 or 1932; Belgian with French nationality; feminist philosopher.

Karl Jaspers 1883 - 1969; German; existentialism, psychology, history of philosophy.

Julia Kristeva b. 1941; Bulgarian; psychoanalyst, linguist, aesthetician.

Jacques Lacan 1901 - 1981; French; psychoanalyst interested in the philosophy of mind and language.

Vladimir Il’ich Lenin 1870 - 1924; Russian; Marxist.

Emannuel Levinas b. 1905; French; phenomenologist, theologian.

Gyorgy Lukács 1885 - 1971; Hungarian; Marxist, aesthetician, metaphysician, literary theorist.

Jean-François Lyotard b. 1924; French; post-modernist, aesthetician, philosopher of language, political philosopher.

Gabriel Marcel 1889 - 1973; French; neo-Socratic and theistic existentialist.

Herbert Marcuse 1898 - 1979; German; critical theorist, history of philosophy, social philosophy, psychoanalytic theory.

Jacques Maritain 1882 - 1973; French; Thomist interested in all areas of philosophy.

Alexius von Meinong 1853 - 1920; German; metaphysician interest in perception and the philosophy of mind.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908 - 1961; French; phenomenology, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1884 - 1900; German; post-Kantian philosopher interested in ontology, epistemology, Greek and Christian thought, values, nihilism, aesthetics, cultural theory.

José Ortega y Gasset 1883 - 1955; Spanish; ratio-vitalist.

Jean Piaget 1896 - 1980; Swiss; developmental psychology focusing, especially, on cognition, epistemology.

Karl Raimund Popper 1902 - 1994; Austrian-British; philosopher of science and evolution, political philosophy.

Paul Ricoeur b. 1913; French; hermeneutics and Biblical studies, phenomenology, existentialism, literary theory.

George Santayana 1863 - 1952; Spanish-American; systematic philosopher with interests in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, politics.

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 - 1980; French; existentialist working in phenomenology, ontology, psychology.

Ferdinand de Saussure 1857 - 1913 ; Swiss; language theory, semiotics.

Max Scheler 1874 - 1928; German; phenomenologist interested in value theory, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, sociology of knowledge, philosophical anthropology.

Friedrich Albert Maurice Schlick 1882 - 1922; German; physicist, philosopher of physics, logical positivist with an interest in epistemology.

Alfred Tarski 1902 - 1983; Polish-American; mathematician, logician, philosopher with interests in the theory of truth, philosophy of language, semantics, foundations of mathematics.

Paul Tillich 1886 - 1965; German; existentialist and theologian interested in the philosophy of religion.

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo 1864 - 1935; Spanish; analyst of the human condition with interests in epistemology and ethics.

Simone Weil 1909 - 1943; French; moral and social philosopher, philosopher of religion.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein; Austrian-Naturalized British in 1939

Supplement - Cognitive Science.

Bernard Baars / Daniel Dennett / David Marr / Fred Dretske / George Lakoff / Gerald Edelman / Jerry Fodor / Ned Block / Noam Chomsky / Patricia M. Churchland / Ray Jackendoff / Roger Penrose / William Lycan / Zenon W. Pylyshyn.

Supplement - Philosophy of Mind.

Colin McGinn / J.J.C. Smart / Jaegwon Kim / Owen Flanagan.

Supplement - Resources.

Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell, Oxford 1994

Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to Metaphysics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995

Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to Epistemology, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992

Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam, eds., Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, Routledge, London 1997

Ian P. McGreal, ed., Great Thinkers of the Eastern World,, HarperCollins, New York 1995

Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1998

THE RECENT PERIOD: INFLUENTIAL PHILOSOPHERS

The purpose of this section is to provide a detailed treatment of the influence of recent pivotal philosophers - their role in transformation and creation in the stream of thought.

In this endeavor one cannot expect the objectivity that comes from distance.

In this section I am not currently aiming for completeness which may come later. Instead, the entries here are eclectic and in the nature of a commentary on my reactions to the philosophers.

Gottlob Frege

Alfred North Whitehead

Karl Raimund Popper

My comments here are from a short essay that I wrote in 2001 entitled Hume’s Brilliant Error. I wrote during a backpacking trip in the Trinity Alps in Northwestern California. I had no references with me and I relied on my acquaintance of the authors.

This is a good place to take up Hume’s arguments. Almost every major philosopher since Hume has had something to say about Hume. Popper is, perhaps, the main modern example and he is thought to have liberated science from ‘Hume’s curse’ - as well as Bacon’s curse of linear induction - just as Kant so delivered philosophy. Yet I think I have something new to say.

A fundamental criticism of reason typical of and due to Hume, one that is foundational, is the criticism of induction - the generalization from a set of data to a law. This includes but is more general than Baconian induction. Hume’s criticism amounts to the following. For, given a set of data and a law that fits or explains the data, there is always another law that also fits the data. So suppose we perform more experiments, gather more data. Either the old law fits the data or we need a new law. In either case, there is another law that will fit the data equally well. Any new law that agrees with the old law on the data points but is different elsewhere will do and is trivial to construct. This criticism applies to all physical laws, concepts, theories… and it applies specifically to the concepts of cause or causality and space-time. I’m not sure why Hume did not apply his idea to determinism - perhaps because it would have made his point moot.

A simple answer to Hume is that his argument forgets that we are of this world. This is not a trivial answer because it includes the way when a theory is right it suddenly ‘clicks.’ So, some irregular alternative, is not only artificial but, likely, excessively cumbersome. When a new law or theory becomes necessary by virtue of new data and inspiration - the law itself - the situation is different; thus Einstein’s theory of gravitation is not an artificial successor to Newton’s - and there is an history of inelegant and ad hoc alternatives to Newton’s theory that have been considered and abandoned. Hume’s argument ignores the place of intuition and aesthetics.

But this argument does not remove the logical force of Hume’s point. One argument that does remove the logical force of Hume’s point is Popper’s. Popper’s argument is that theories, laws and so on are always tentative and always carry a hypothetical nature: they can be disproved but not proved. The actual situation is complex for one new data point that is unexplained by a hitherto successful law casts doubt not only on the law but on the data itself; and, perhaps, the resolution lies in some kind of adjustment rather than abandoning either the data or the law. It is only when the weight of exceptional ‘data’ is excessive and an alternative theory is available that transitions to new theories occur. The word ‘data’ is in quotes because it is intended in a generalized sense. For example, the conflicts regarding Newtonian Mechanics were not merely data points; the foundations of Newtonian Mechanics were inconsistent with Maxwell’s Equations of Electromagnetism and, as it turned out, it was Newtonian Mechanics that had to ‘give.’ What is Popper doing? He is taking science of its high perch as certain and absolute knowledge and saying that, within its own domain, it is the best explanation of what is thus far known and the best predictor within a similar domain of what is unknown. Here, though being plain and direct, Popper is being Wittgensteinian… and, just as Kuhn is ‘obvious’ - see my essay Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions: A Critique - so is Popper.

There is a way in which both Hume and Popper are right. Hume is right in insisting that science and its underlying metaphysics such as space, time and causation are not absolute. In fact this is one approach to a solution of some fundamental metaphysical problems - e.g. The Fundamental Problem Of Metaphysics; see also Metaphysics. At the same time Popper is right in accepting Hume’s point that science is not absolute and recognizing that this is the nature of science and, then, developing a philosophy about this point instead of wringing his hands like Hume (Popper had, of course, knowledge of two hundred additional years of history of science than did Hume) or trying to reclaim the absolute nature of science as did the Logical Positivists in the first half of the 20th century.

But there is a way in which Hume and, to some extent Popper, are wrong. The following is not fully contra-Popper but, also, complementary to Popper.

Hume’s mistake was that he did not fully understand the nature of scientific theories. But he was quite right in making that mistake for it was the conventional understanding of scientists and philosophers to that point and even today - despite Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyeraband - the four irrationalist 20th century philosophers of science. It is one thing to practice science and another to say what it is, what is its nature and what are its justifications - other than success of the enterprise. One of the, perhaps implicit, claims was that it was about certainty with regard to fact and concept - Kant invented a form of the transcendental analytic to allow this to remain true despite Hume - and that there was a logic of this truth: the logic of induction.

Hence Hume’s valid criticism of Baconian induction. Note: despite the evident validity of Hume and the emptiness of induction (this is quite different than mathematical induction which is a separate and distinct concept) I believe that the jury has not yet returned the final verdict, see Kinds of Knowledge and Journey in Being.

But Hume, Bacon, and the rest including the British Empiricists from Locke to Russell and, to some extent Popper, miss the following point to science and knowledge. Science is not merely about explanation, validity, certainty, absoluteness. Science is also about finding and seeing patterns; the universe is patterned and the concept of a pattern is, in some ways, more fundamental than explanation, certainty, prediction. It is true, though, that a valid pattern is aesthetic precisely because it is a pattern of the world - even if an approximation it is not a mere numerical approximation but it is an approximation to the mechanism of the world - and, additionally a valid pattern is often economic with regard to explanation, understanding and prediction. Surely Darwinian theory of evolution, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, Einstein’s theories of space-time-gravitation, Newton’s earlier theories, modern cosmology and the standard model of elementary particles reveal deep patterns of behavior and structure even if they are not universal. And once these structures are revealed, power - both intellectual and practical - is released. The practical or instrumental covers politics, economics, technology and art; the intellectual includes the raw intellectual aspect - the ideas in themselves - and, also, art and spirit and religion… Now, it is not neurotic t be concerned about the reliability of science but it is rather neurotic, rather like the story of the goose that laid golden eggs, to set up certainty and absoluteness as absolute values.

To do that is to set the pyramid upon its apex Ñ - which makes it rather easy to topple over. But, since the scientific-philosophical-academic community identified with that Ñ, its toppling sent waves emanating from Hume, through history and to the 21st century.

Hume’s mistake is that it detracts from the real nature of knowledge and is a misunderstanding of our place in the world. Imagine being in the 31st century and assume that time to have continuity with Western Civilization and the Modern World. From that perspective, the mistake is understandable. It a criticism of the exuberance of first discovery - the origin not of a scientific theory but of science itself; it is the confidence of first discovery. But the focus on pattern restores some confidence: even if we stumble, we are still of the universe and its patterns. We are of the universe even in that stumbling; for the path of history and evolution are not linear, progressive, inexorable or predetermined: those paths are halting and experimental - we could call them nature’s experiments in being. We learn from Hume’s ‘brilliant’ error what is knowledge and what is our place in the tidal flow of being.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

This section starts with an outline of Wittgenstein’s range of thought and then goes on to extended reflection the basis of which was a reading of Wittgenstein (Tractacus Logico-Philosphicus and Philosophical Investigations) and of David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, in two volumes, volume I: 1987 and volume II: 1988

Wittgenstein’s sources of inspiration

…include Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Arthur Schopenhauer.

A characterization of the range of Wittgenstein’s thought.

On thought, perception, emotion.

Especially thought in language.

How are they possible.

Their nature, structure - and processes and relations.

What this tells us about the world and about thought, language, perception…

A division of problems:

Perception of mind in others.

Perception of the world.

Wittgenstein’s ‘methods’

The depth analysis of the Tractacus.

Logical atomism; realism; picture theory of sentences; solipsism.

The lateral practice based methods of the Philosophical Investigations.

The problem of the self; the analysis of sensations - the problems of phenomenalism and of other minds; the problem of a private language; meaning and action; the problem of Platonism.

Wittgenstein: Reflections

( The quotes below are from David Pears’ False Prison or are very close paraphrases )

‘Wittgenstein… is Kantian - critical - as Kant offered a critique of thought, Wittgenstein offered a critique of thought in language.

‘As with Kant, Wittgenstein offers no dogmatic metaphysic but a metaphysic of experience. ( The nature of the world is simple objects in immediate combination with one another. ) The immediate paradox is that W. says this cannot be expressed in factual language - because it is deduced from the possibility of language. The argument proceeds from the requirement that sentences about complex objects have sense and the resolution is that the actual simple objects exist but are not revealed. This is the early Wittgenstein.

‘The traditional view of mental phenomena made the contents of each persons mind inaccessible to others and, in the case of the ego, inaccessible even to the person himself. Wittgenstein’s new view avoided these unavoidable consequences without toppling over into behaviorism, in something like the way his new view of language (in P.I.) avoided pure realism without toppling over into arbitrary conventionalism.

Why is Wittgenstein’s philosophy important or useful to me? How important is it to me?

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In the first place his philosophy is fundamental as are all critiques of ( human ) knowledge; all critiques of the possibilities of being; and all imaginative constructs of the same. These are, of course, useful individually and in interaction. All these supplement my own thought ( which includes the interaction of imagination and criticism ) on the search for possibilities and construction of being. Suppose I feel through experience, study, imagination that ‘x’ is possible. Then I may try some imaginative approach to ‘becoming’ x. But, x may be dangerous or ‘costly’; therefore some assessment is useful - though not always necessary for, in the end, experiment with ( my own ) being may be the only way given that I am searching in a space where ‘reproducibility’ of results ( the laboratory fallacy ) may impossible or undesirable… So here, assessment of the claim is good. Generally, search is guided and made more efficient by thought. Thus, the philosophy of Wittgenstein is important because he makes some creative claims about knowledge and meaning. First, he is saying that certain assumptions about the possibilities for knowledge and meaning do not exist - not just contingently but necessarily. But he is also saying that there are false assumptions about what is not possible in the realm of knowledge, communication and meaning. Similarly, Kant’s thought is critical and suggestive. Also, the great critic Hume. For, if I look at Hume’s criticism of, say, induction, cause, or his arguments for the entrapment of the mind in its solipsistic isolation, I can then see where the negative judgments of Hume come from; and the assessment of Hume will be freeing: if Hume is correct then I will not waste my time in beguiling but impossible search… but if he is mistaken and I see where his error lies then I understand better where and why to search - see Philosophy, Science and Life. Wittgenstein and Hume for some fresh views on Hume’s problems. The creative imagination of someone like Jorge Luis Borges would also be useful: Borges finds the route into the mystical from the ordinary.

A specific point of interest is in Wittgenstein’s arguments against the existence of (consciousness as) a realm of private inner states - his reflections on ‘the inner and the outer’. This has implications for the nature of mind(s) and the nature and degree of separation / connection. It has implications for the nature of knowledge - is it detached, dimensionless, inert - are we in a ‘False Prison’ of solipsistic disengagement… or is knowledge dynamically interweaving our being / with the being of the universe. This has implications for the nature of knowledge - and language: the (lack of) depth dimension, for what can be known; and for being.

On Critical-Imaginative Sources

Good criticism is a source of good imagination; the objective of thought is to construct not to tear down. The objective of criticism is not one of tearing down; it is, first, the application of thought to thought itself so as to enhance the quality of the thought whether that quality is in the positive power of its imagination and construction or the elimination of incorrect thought. Therefore, good criticism is a source of good thought.

Anti-critical moods: entrapment and intimidation- how thought is blocked in tyrannies; morality and moral anger- how virtuous I am; morality as control; seduction- how imagination is trapped in ‘open’ societies; accept the canons of this system and you too will receive grace; the power of conventional thought- including science; packaging- making thought merely attractive; all contributions are equally valuable- misunderstanding democracy… two misunderstandings: first a confusion with equality of opportunity; second, the balance of perception and judgment, and of labor and leisure; the delusion of rebellion; becoming an attic- collecting ideas, storing ideas in the attic of a mind; depending on the temporal artifacts of a system of thought for foundation; martyrdom: the universe is lonely and alien but I can manage the desolation… science is cold and rational but I am equal to the bleakness of reality… I will sacrifice my being through social norms for the good of others; I am mature and have arrived- the journey is at an end… I will sound wise and quote authority as though it were original. Also see Metaphysics and Power.

The specific importance of Wittgenstein

The criticism of dogmatic metaphysics and metaphysical concepts. Is this absolute? Can I answer the criticism? Do my ventures beyond… stand up?

Wittgenstein’s new concept of philosophy. Is this new and real… or a phase of thought? What are the necessities, we cannot argue that they are more than historical in nature for any necessities will necessarily be relative to a broad context of historical and cultural contingencies in which we are immersed - Wittgenstein’s critique, over the next phase of cultural history starting with the publication of Philosophical Investigations will necessarily be subject to its own criteria. What are the contents and ways ( methods ) of Wittgenstein’s concept of philosophy - note that the alleged ‘strangeness’ of Wittgenstein’s new concept of philosophy are due to its being very different from the old philosophy allegedly modeled on science in method –? How is this useful to me?

Most importantly. The concept of knowledge and language as used in Wittgenstein. (1) As criticism of ideas, (2) Used or adapted in its critical and imaginative aspects as part of my thought.

Wittgenstein as a Critical Philosopher.

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Normally perceived as limiting - arguing against empty claims to knowledge and meaning, e.g., philosophical problems that appear - all of dogmatic metaphysics - that appear when terms are taken out of the context of their use and which are ( or may then be ) assumed to have sense but are in fact void of sense.

It is not quite as often noted that Wittgenstein was also critical and destructive of empty claims to ignorance, e.g., The False Prison ( title of David Pears’ work )

Wittgenstein and privacy

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Wittgenstein was not arguing against the existence of individual experience but against its incommunicability… and when communicating required merely naming or pointing… and when and how description was possible and proper. Reference to mere naming is not meant to imply that that is all there is to meaning; it is agreed, with Wittgenstein, that it is use in context that maintains the stability of naming rather than any Platonic system of realism.

For practical purposes, at least - in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein explicitly allows our high level percepts to be elementary - unanalyzable - objects, for practical purposes… there are primary experiences ‘red’ ‘if’, say, which are named. The naming is not fixed by reality but not by arbitrary convention either - i.e. naming is not merely about what sign to use; naming is determined (occurs) and is sustained (adaptively… there is adaptive innovation and there is drift) in a context of mutual use in a line of history… and the naming is also of a constitutional– psychological and biological - though not completely given, unique or indecomposable nature.

For practical, scientific, purposes - like causes, like effects - the communication of ‘red’ to within shades and excepting pathology - neurosis, psychosis, organic - is automatic and given in the context.

Wittgenstein, of course, does not leave it at ‘automatic and given’ but deflates incommunicability: deflates the possibility of private experience.

When ‘another’s experience in relation to mine’ is identified as metaphysical it should be recognized that the implicit use of ‘knowledge’ in the identification is also metaphysical. It is a metaphysical use of ‘knowledge’ that identifies knowledge of others’ experience as metaphysical. When eliminating metaphysical ‘baggage’ all such baggage should be eliminated.

Thus, in the example of the inverted spectrum, I do not know that my experience of red is like another’s only in some metaphysical –overblown– meaning of ‘know’ or if I demand identity of experience. Thus, because of possibly faulty memory, I do not ‘know’ that my experience of red is continuous in time. Regarding identity of experience, even an individual’s experience of an object is variable. Thus an individual’s experience of red may be different for left and right eyes. Therefore, shifts in spectrum will not count as inversion. In a not overly metaphysical use we can assert that excepting pathological and extremely altered states the experiences of different individuals for the same stimulus are reasonably similar. There remains a doubt whether ‘the same’ experience has meaning; it seems that this doubt is based in dependence on an anchoring of experience when there should be no anchor. Suppose an omniscient being says to me ‘You and your brother have essentially the same experience of red, check it out logically.’ There is no way to check it out. There would have to be a way to transmit the picture of red I have in my head and transmit it to my brother’s head. There is no way to do that. Well, actually there it is. I say ‘the rose is red’ and my brother has the right experience. The idea that I have to transmit something from within my own head… that is the false prison to which David Pears refers.

… and then there are - again, for practical purposes - non-primary experiences which may be described as combinations of primary experiences.

‘A description is a representation of a distribution in a space (in that of time, for instance).’ P.I.II.ix.

Wittgenstein on philosophy

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A quote from the False Prison, David Pears, Volume II, part I, Chapter 1

‘The philosophy of the past modeled itself on science and its theories became more and more remote from life as it is lived, an exile not to be repeated. The new philosophy comes back from the desert with a different message: describe the familiar the right way and you will understand it’

( Notice the strength of the Biblical allusions. The exile, the desert, ‘…and the truth will set you free’)

This force of this quote shows that to go against Wittgenstein, i.e. not only a contrary model of thought but also a more inclusive one, will require argument and reason. Notice, I am being generous in not specifying that it be merely an alternative conception of philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy - some more and less connected accounts.

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‘We live in a unique common world from which it is quite impossible for each of us to cut out a miniature world of ones own.

This is the basis of his later philosophy of mind.

This argues against solipsism and the interest in brains-in-vats.

‘The solipsist says something only if he could identify himself independently of the objects of his awareness. But if his ( the solipsist’s ) theory is true he cannot do that for the ( whole ) point of his theory is that he the subject of his awareness is not located in the common ( or any ) world, not connected with anything located in it. If his theory is true, the only criterion to identify himself is as ‘the subject who is aware of these objects.’ It is not that ‘‘ is the only criterion, it is the only criterion permitted by his theory - the condition of solipsism. At this point, he is likely to respond that he has no difficulty identifying himself but that is in real life, not in his theory. The solipsist’s mistake is a confusion between what he can easily do in his real life and what he can do in his theory.

‘This is a characteristic way of thinking in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind. As Wittgenstein later said of this solipsist, ‘He is like someone who has constructed a clock that will not tell the time because he has inadvertently connected the dial to the hour hand so that they both go round together.’ This, as noted, is characteristic: two things that should be independent are artificially forced together. Another primary example is about word and meaning; in Platonism or Platonist realism words and meanings, knowledge and the world are bound rigidly together: we can know the world and the word independently of our contributions to our world. There may be a world independent of us; but the world we know is one that has one foot in reality and one foot in our way of knowing. Separating the two might be unmooring, placing us in the shadow - neither dark not light, may be dizzying at least at first… but is ultimately freeing. It is also one of my ideas: no final anchor, no exit from reality. And the converse, the bondage of our words and knowledge to a fixed world is slavery; there is no future; not no exit but no entry. This idea does not give us exit, it asserts that exit is logically impossible; and undesirable - for the negative reason that the impossible is undesirable and for the positive reason that the idea gives us entry and connection; but a ‘flowing elastic’ connection not a fixed one; a connection that is in the shadow region where mind and world meet. I suppose that this could be construed as ‘no black or white’ but only ‘shades of grey - that is the negative judgment; in the positive judgment ‘black and white are the borders of a region where the entire spectrum is present.’

But this leads to an interesting metaphysical consequence: a world independent of our knowing could (logically, if it is truly independent?) have no contact with us. It is only the mystification of knowledge that makes us think that there is a ‘universe’ that we cannot know that can have an effect on us or contact with us. A world forever and necessarily independent of all sentience could not exist.

Above, Wittgenstein was critiquing ego based solipsism but his argument applies equally to any solipsism. An aside on the interest of solipsism. Some minds are intrinsically curious about such matters. Perhaps that is slanting the truth; the reason for the interest is some point of connection with reality - and some minds see the connection through insight / experience / inclination; the solipsist has a point; and it is not an imaginary point; much common sense of the everyday is a kind of solipsist common sense: the ultimate privacy of the individual mind; the inverted spectrum; arbitrary conventionalism in definition - the model that anything can be defined as anything is anti-Platonist, since we are in our own solipsist bubble, Hey, define whatever as whatever; actual alienation and not mere existentialist alienation. The solipsist’s prison is the False Prison of modern conventionalist, realist, and critical thought; especially critical thought based in scientific realism. This is the underground interest. The explicit interest is that we learn from reflection on the issue of solipsism - there are other problems in philosophy where the interest is similar; Wittgenstein learned a lot. The two interests are of course joined in the sub-conscious; and while similar interest exists at numerous points in philosophy, Wittgenstein seems to be saying that that is the whole of metaphysics. Somewhere in the shadow region, Wittgenstein is affirming the mystical: Tractacus, 6.44 ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.’

‘Wittgenstein’s argument applies equally to any solipsism, not just the ego-based solipsism that the objects of the solipsist’s awareness are the only objects that exist’ ( this is close to phenomenalism and idealism of the kind that only ideas exist; does this extend to the extended conception of ‘idea’… note again so much of day to day thinking though allegedly hard headed is actually idealistic - not a closet idealism but an invisible one, a kind of refuge from the onslaught of critical realism )… ‘Wittgenstein’s argument applies to any solipsism in ( the theory of ) which there is the existence of a subject without a criterion of identity that is independent of its objects.’

An example is Hume’s solipsism or solipsistic idealism in which the subject is the sequence of its impression and ideas.

‘In the Tractacus the concern with solipsism is its truth but the real problem lies behind this, it is the ownership of the solipsist’s experiences. Is it possible to explain this ownership in a way which will do justice to the extraordinary closeness of subject and object without making them lose their independence from one another?

This is quite path breaking. So many paths converge here. This is the answer to the question of idealism of the type ‘my ideas are the only real.’ What of the idealism of Being, Mind and the Absolute?

Though it is path-breaking, unifying, it is about Wittgenstein’s world-as-I-found-it. It is not as I argue elsewhere and as Wittgenstein wanted it to be, a ban on metaphysics. Actually Wittgenstein was ambivalent here as was Kant; it is partly a question of how to do metaphysics and how to do philosophy; partly to do with the universal human characteristic, exaggerated in the brilliant, of different criteria for self and other - Ambrose Bierce’s definition of an egotism ‘A person of low taste more interested in himself than me’; and partly is of ‘What can be shown but not said’; the combination of mysticism and realism in Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein: The Tractacus.

Sunday 9.30.01

The main ideas (Pears):

Logical atomism

Basic realism and Picture Theory of Sentences

The treatment of solipsism

Logical Atomism

‘Reality is thus: there is a limit to the analysis of factual languages at which all sentences will consist of words designating simple objects.

‘In Wittgenstein’s logical atomism, reality is a grid of simple objects in immediate combination. The meaning of ‘simple’ is that the simple objects have no internal structure.

‘Any factual sentence can be completely analyzed into elementary sentences which are logically independent of one another because they name simple objects.

‘Elementary propositions cannot contradict one another.’ Given up in Philosophical Investigations.

‘The question whether a proposition has sense can never depend on the truth of another proposition about a constituent of the first’ ( separatism )

This implies Wittgenstein’s logical atomism but where does it come from? If it were ‘the case we could not form any picture of the world (true or false)’ i.e. if it were the case that the sense of one proposition could depend on the truth of one of its constituents - from another context in Wittgenstein.

The Basic Realism and the Picture Theory of the Tractacus

The basic realism of the Tractacus is clear. The picture theory makes it a very stark realism:

‘The principle of representation is the core of the picture theory. When sentences are analyzed into their atomic constituents each name designates something real - a simple object.

‘The picture theory has two striking features which are connected with one another, separatism and analytic depth.

‘(As a pointillist painting of which each point on the canvas is correlated with a minute fragment of the actual scene.)

Transition to Wittgenstein’s later account of language

‘Ask how sentences keep their senses and the weight will immediately fall on use. Treat sentences as ordinary instruments with a place and function in our lives and immediately the lateral investigation of systems will take over from deep analysis.

‘Wittgenstein’s first move away from the system of the Tractacus was to abandon the requirement that objects should be devoid of internal structure. ‘This is red’ and ‘this is green’ are elementary propositions despite their logical incompatibility.’

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations

Sunday 9.30.01

‘One of the recurrent themes of P.I. is that a word or grammatical symbol is not given a meaning merely by giving it a one-off attachment to a thing or even a use. What is required is sustained mutual correction-in-use ( which includes, of course, use itself ). Why? A rule cannot cover all cases encountered or unencountered; likewise, a picture, intuition, a finite sequence of exemplary applications - all such sequences must be finite but the potential is not given… This criterion applies to any theory that attempts to put meaning on static basis.

This means that concepts are not definite.

Argument against the possibility of a private language, independent of use: there would be no way to identify a sensation-type: you could imagine that but you would be bringing into memory a past use.

The ego is not a separate theater where ‘‘ is a rehearsal in private.

You think your sensation of red is ( can be ) like my sensation of blue - because you think sensations are like objects; that blue could = red is not only false, it is logically impossible. The point: it is not wrong, it is meaningless to say your sensation of blue = mine because that takes sensing out of the world and sets it above the world. If God said, ‘your blue is like A’s, prove it’ there would be only the following way, I would have to transmit the picture of blue in my head to A’s head - that would be impossible and unnecessary because A already has a picture of red, dare I say the picture?

False Prisons

Sunday 9.30.01

Notice the real freedom and real reality when the following are given up; this list is not restricted to the thoughts of Wittgenstein or his followers and interpreters:

The ego is a private theatre.

Sensations are detachable from subjects or objects.

Words have absolute moorings in reality: the ‘perfect dictionary’ hypothesis. ( Wittgenstein had a complex relationship with the idea of metaphysics - the idea of metaphysics and how to ‘talk’ about it. A freedom that comes from the unmooring is as follows. The idea of knowing reality has its origin in the fact that we can see behind appearance in various ways: we can look again, we can reflect on the nature of reality and combine reflection with looking. We get a new view, the view behind the appearance. Views behind appearances may seem more stable, may be sanctioned. Yet, they are ‘more sophisticated’ appearances. The world is always the-world-as-I-know-it; or as we know it. Now we can build theories about this but it is the same. There are ‘mediate’ realities but it is not clear, except in hypothesis, that there is a reality behind the world-as-it-is-presented. Thus, we are free to negotiate in this world; to know and to create. We are of reality; not merely resident in it; we participate in it. Wittgenstein believed that many metaphysical puzzles could be cleared up by an attention to language. It seems, however, that an attention to our mooring whether by words or ideas leads to the same result. Not all metaphysical issues are empty. However, a number of issues such as the mind-body problem have origin in taking as fixed our immediate constructs of our search ‘behind’ the phenomena. )

Regarding appearances, my philosophy of presence is showing that the phenomena are real - there is no need for a reality behind appearances. This is an approximate expression that is given precision in The Fundamental Problem of Metaphysics… Now, anyone may argue against this saying that it is pan-psychism, idealism but it is not so. First, it is not saying that the phenomena are the only real elements. Second, consider the following argument. Suppose I say that a table is real. That is not ‘table-ism,’ it is not saying that the ultimate constituents of the universe are tables but vice-versa. Similarly, here, we say the ultimate constituents are ‘presence’ and tables and appearances are ‘made up’ of them.

Beyond a point, dictionaries are aids - not definitive in their specifications despite attempts at definitiveness and the belief in that definitiveness. A dictionary reflects but does not establish practice. It may attempt to, and practically establish practice, but it cannot establish real meaning aside from practice. Similar comments can be made about all texts and their relation to knowledge. Modern education sets up the dictionary like an inverted pyramid _Ñ_ and, so, does - behind the obvious service - a great disservice. The establishment of contextual meaning as meaning is an impoverishment of possibility, an establishment of a sense of certainty, and a disconnection from reality.

Words and meanings are detachable from users and uses.

Everything needs proof; anything is capable of proof.

We are ontologically alien to reality - an illusion produced by the idea of linguistic freedom ( arbitrary conventionalism )… note that it is not that meanings are either fixed or free but meanings are adaptively determined in use; and evolve; there is an act of creation that is free but not free-wheeling and is subject, in use, to all kinds of test including, at bottom, selection of the entire system; and it is the system of meaning and grammar / logic that is determined - grammar is metaphysical.

The immediate needs proof.

The immediate defines the universal. ( The universal includes the immediate… causality, e.g., is not projected to the universal but is locally and practically given. )

There is no causal order; there is universal causation. ( Causation is not the order not because of the Humean argument but because the world is not continuous. The Humean argument applies even if the world is continuous but is then a theoretical objection and not the denial of a practical metaphysic; causation is the local order as a practical metaphysic - the problem is to find the nature of that causation. ) ( The labor of humankind is a sort of unnecessary labor - the realization of being is accomplished but… humans must labor on. )

The brain models the environment. ( In a sense, it is modeling the environment but it is not modeling in a representational sense even though I ‘see’ a picture. And it is not modeling in a digital, computational sense… or even an analog sense. This is a common and to some extent useful model, but as a complete model of human knowledge it is an error. As far as modeling as in, say, mathematical-physical modeling it is not that the brain is a poor modeler - the idea of modeling is logically false in the context of the brain in the world. The brain is in the world and is not modeling the world. This is a source of error in the computational concept of the mind)

Wittgenstein and his followers

What is the significance of the corps of interpreters and followers? What kind of philosopher (man) would say… ‘you must follow my way’, ‘it is the only way’, ‘this way describes the essence of philosophy’, ‘philosophy and science are (completely) distinct’ - what after all is science, ‘ to follow another way leads into complete darkness’?

Perhaps the introduction of a new point of view requires a messianic figure… a presentation of a viewpoint as a universe. But a viewpoint as a universe is (always) self-contradictory. The self-contradiction is removed when the viewpoint is recognized to be a sub-universe. Use is (close to) the nature of original animal communication. And meaning as reference is an evolution of the original function. Is it possible for the new meaning of meaning to diffuse and spread back into the genesis of meaning? That would require a revision of the meaning of ‘reference’, of ‘pointing’, of ‘object’… and that would still be in the original Wittgensteinian spirit.

What is the psychology - the psychiatry - of a messianic figure such as Ludwig Wittgenstein?

On Meaning

There is discussion of concept and theory of meaning in Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness and in Journey in Being. Reference: Ogden and Richards, Meaning of Meaning.

Uses of language

Non-atomic uses of language; non-reference based uses: command, poetry, deception… and non-literal uses.

In some ways, ‘non-original’’ or ‘derived’ is better than the usual connotation of ‘non-literal’

Sense and reference

Roughly, sense is meaning and reference is the object to which a word refers. Not all words have an object of reference, e.g. ‘ouch’; Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 1953, has many examples.

Roughly, sense is connotation; reference is denotation.

Roughly, sense is intension; reference is extension.

All words have meaning or sense; the sense may be precise or vague.

Not all words have reference - certainly not to objects; and not necessarily in any generalized sense; thus not every word is a symbol - in the usual sense.

The following possibilities exist:

One word, two meanings; the meanings could be distinct, or similar - have a ‘family resemblance’

Two words, one meaning or shades of meaning

Modes of family resemblance include: of kind, of accident, of metaphor.

Analysis of meaning

Here, I am referring to linguistic meaning.

Wittgenstein’s lateral analysis; meaning is determined in use in a common context and that provides for stability and interpersonal coherence of meanings… is a useful concept. Use is a lateral ‘instrument’ or concept: there is no foundation of use except in use - that is except for diachronic analysis which Wittgenstein eschewed. There is no need for perfect coherence in meaning; a perfect system of meaning would signal the end of evolution - incompletions in meaning, the vagaries of languages are not essential defects: they represent possibility and potential. No final foundation - no final anchor; a crisis that is freeing. There is a limit to talk; explanation must stop somewhere; the final foundation is not in more talk but in use or action - it is a flexible foundation, one that can accommodate intended and imposed change. The unmooring of Wittgenstein’s realization - after the vertigo, the freedom; there is no solipsist bubble in which we are trapped and out of which we cannot communicate our real experience.

Yet, can we find generalized symbols based, in part, in generalized concepts of symbol? Regardless, Wittgenstein’s approach is not critically affected - but its utility may be reduced or eliminated.

The idea of use is related to that of function or functioning. There is a relation to the pragmatism and instrumentalism of Pierce, James and Dewey and to the inseparability of knowing and acting of Journey in Being. Use of signs - gestures, sounds, facial expressions, external signs - has origin early in evolution. Before the sign, and that is very early in evolution, there is only action; then the senses evolve to become cued to surface actions signs for complex internal states. After the simple sign, with development of imagery and the symbolic ability, the sign becomes freed for general use and can have ‘meaning.’ In a positivistic view, all meaning would be reference. But, even in such a view, without the specification of a metaphysics, and that is anathema to the old positivists, there is no universalization of meaning. Meaning, always lies between these extremes and may fall multivalently on the continuum between them.

Generally, origins, evolution, diffusion and clarification of meaning are ongoing, interactive processes.

Analysis of meanings alone does not constitute philosophy; clarification of meaning… is nonetheless useful to reduce unnecessary confusion and futile debate; and to establish and clarify concepts - in themselves and as preliminary to knowledge and transformation.

The meaning of ‘meaning’ is doubly recursive in that the process of meaning applies also to ‘meaning’

There is a distinction: sentence vs. speaker / interpreter meaning. Speaker and interpreter meaning are wrought with all kinds of psychological issues including defenses and intentional mischief, manipulation and malice; these must be factored out before we can even begin to talk of contextual meaning.

Meanings of words are dependent on the sentences and contexts in which they occur. There is an actual context - the general and specific physical, ethnic, social and cultural and, perhaps other aspects. And there is a semantic context - the environment of meaning that is continuous with the cultural environment; this environment of meaning is tantamount to an entire metaphysics. Elucidation of the metaphysics would, in general, be prerequisite to elucidation of meaning. Quine had something to say in this regard.

Meaning and knowing: theories of declarative meaning.

Declarative or assertive sentences are those that assert something; they take on truth values; they are propositional in nature; they depend for their meaning (heavily) on meaning as reference. Note that there is another usage of ‘declarative sentence’ as in ‘I now declare you husband and wife.’ For the variety of sentence kinds, i.e. kinds of speech act, see Kinds of Knowledge where I discuss the relations among meaning, logic and knowledge.

Frege and Wittgenstein

Frege in Volume 1, Section 32 of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, says that there is both sense and reference for every sentence of his ‘concept-writing’ - the Begriffsshrift. The reference of a sentence of Begriffsshrift is its truth value, and the sense of the sentence is the thought that the sentence expresses. For Frege, the notion of meaning of a declarative sentence is or correlates to the notion of understanding - and to understand a sentence is to have grasped its truth condition.

Wittgenstein in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus:

4.022 A sentence in use (Satz) shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.

4.024 To understand a sentence in use means to know what is the case if it is true.

4.061 A sentence in use is true if we use it to say that things stand in a certain way, and they do.

An alternative

The alternative is not radical and it is included in the above but changes the emphasis. The meaning of a declarative sentence is the state of affairs that it represents.

Notes

A phase of discovery and creation is and will be the clarification and specification of meaning; however, meaning and context / theory are not finally and absolutely distinct and the clarification of meaning in, say, science must always await the formulation of coherent theories.

Thus the following historical confusions: heat and temperature; momentum and energy. The historical confusion was not a confusion of otherwise clear meanings in the minds of scientists; clear meanings had not been arrived at owing to the lack of relevant coherent and sufficiently complete theories. Once the relevant theories were written, meanings became clear although, perhaps, limited.

There is currently a similar confusion about the meaning of ‘consciousness.’ I am referring, here, to the primitive sense of awareness and not to such meanings as ‘higher consciousness.’ Because consciousness does not appear as part of a coherent theory - there is no absolute reason to suppose that it will or should - there is doubt as to a proper definition of consciousness. Perhaps, as for force, the anthropic sense of consciousness will later be replaced by something more operational in nature - for the purposes of theory. There, currently, a number of alternatives; but, in the absence of a coherent framework, none of the alternatives stands out clearly. So, I currently find the anthropic sense to be most pertinent: consciousness is awareness, not mere operational or functional awareness, but subjective awareness. But, in the absence of a commonly accepted theory, all operational concept-definitions must be regarded as tentative, as not providing a well-founded meaning or concept. I have gone beyond this in the Metaphysics of Presence.

Martin Heidegger

In the following, I have used the standard translations into English of Heidegger’s 1926 Sein und Zeit: the 1962 translation of John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson and the 1996 translation of Joan Stambaugh. Additionally, I have referred to Charles Guignon, ed., Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, 1993

From the Cambridge Companion - there are knots in the thinking that characterizes western philosophy due to substance ontology that arose at the dawn of western philosophy and dominates thought today. Due to the emphasis on enduring presence, this traditional ontology is also called the metaphysics of presence.

Either / ors (dualisms) due to the substance ontology since Descartes:

There is mind or all is matter.

Ideas represent objects or nothing exists outside mind.

Something in an individual remains constant in change or there is no personality.

Values have objective existence or everything is permitted.

Heidegger’s program

Undercut substance ontology; mind and matter exist but are derivative, high level concepts and such concepts are fundamental only in certain regional inquiries or sciences, some of whose appeal includes that their projection to the whole would provide a unified account of being.

The problem is due to the theoretical attitude prevalent since the dawn of western philosophy; Heidegger sets this aside and recovers an original sense of things by focusing on how they show up in the flux of pre-reflective activity.

Begin with the question of traditional ontology, ‘What is the being of entities?’ but quickly asks ‘What is the meaning of being?’ or else ontology will remain naïve and opaque.

Since the being of things is accessible only if intelligible to us, fundamental ontology will clarify the meaning i.e. conditions of intelligibility of things in general.

Since our existence, Dasein i.e. being-there, is the original place of intelligibility, fundamental ontology must clarify the conditions of having any understanding which itself belongs to the entity called Dasein; and so the question of being becomes a question of the intelligibility of things - this is Kantian but Heidegger breaks from the Kantian assumption that consciousness is a self-evident point to start an account of reality. Heidegger begins from Dasein, us, in pre-reflective, pre-Cartesian every day activity i.e. from the existentiell. This inquiry, the analytic of Dasein, is the published portion of Being and Time.

Everydayness is pre-reflective …human existence is a happening, a life unfolding in time between birth and death. Existence as a temporal life course arises naturally from consideration of human agency: action is nested meaningful world contexts of the past, directed to some future end.

What is to be explained is not how Dasein and Dasein’s activities constitute a whole but why the tradition overlooked the unified phenomenon that is being-in-the-world and how the separation of being and world arose at all. It results from a breakdown in everyday connectedness in which objects are enduring but without value or meaning and the resulting substance ontology has both economic and a certain psychological appeal. Being is inseparable from understanding; there is no final ground to all knowledge. But we do have access to things in themselves since what things are is the way they show up: access to appearances is access to things. This undercuts representationalism and consequent traditional skepticism about the external world. All appearances are presentations and not merely re-presentations.

From Heidegger

What is the being of entities?

We live in understanding of being, yet its meaning is cloaked in darkness… this requires us to face the question of (the meaning of being)

It is Dasein that can ask: ‘What is (the meaning of) being?’

This entity which each of us is and includes inquiring as a possibility of its being, denote by ‘Dasein’

The question’s occurrence implies at least vague understanding.

This may be labeled ‘the second transcendental method;’ the first is Kant’s. Kant’s transcendental analytic is an inversion that proceeds from some immediate facts of existence, via the question of what the world must be like in order for those facts to be possible, to the nature of the world. Heidegger’s transcendental method is to recognize the fact of questioning into the essence of being.

The following essentially repeats the discussion of a variety of transcendental methods from Immanuel Kant: The first transcendental method.

I call Heidegger’s the second transcendental method because I earlier identify another - kant’s - and will later identify a third. The third transcendental method is transcendental logic i.e. the possibility of derivation of synthetic / empirical proposotions by pure logic. The third method, outlined in Journey in Being may seem to not truly make derivations possible by logic alone because it appears to assume the single fact there ‘is existence.’ However, it is shown in that essay that existence is and must be regarded as given. The possibilities for the third method, contrary to what might be expected, are substantial. As an alternative to derivation from a single fact, the third method may be regarded as an a way to generate an axiomatic system from a single axiom and the laws of logic. Various systems may result from additional axioms that purport to model the nature of our world; these would include the first and second methods. Also included would be the variety of logics. A question that arises is ‘Do the laws of logic have synthetic foundation?’ or ‘What is the nature of the world such that logic is possible?’ This may be a starting point for the development of theories of logic. By varying both the axioms of the third method and the systems of logic, various axiomatic systems may result.

Note that I have not here referred to Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology as a transcendental method.

Ontology must clarify the meaning of Being

Every ontology is blind to its own aim if it has not first clarified the meaning of being and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.

Dasein takes priorities over all other entities in several ways:

It’s being has the determinate character of existence - is ontical.

Existence is determinative for it - the ontological character.

As constitutive of understanding of existence, it has ability to understand the being of all entities - the ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of ontology.