The Vienna Circle’s reception of Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle’s leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker

Juhos' Antiphysicalism and his Views on the Psychophysical Problem

My primary aim in this paper is to discuss Bela Juhos' views on the mind-body problem and his objections to the physicalist accounts of Carnap, Neurath and Hempel in the early 1930s. In order to achieve this, I also provide some background against which his ideas can be located: I shall outline Juhos' metaphilosophical views on the nature and goal of philosophical inquiry, and the diverse accounts of the psychophysical problem in and around the Vienna Circle

Brentano's conception of philosophy as rigorous science

Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an impact on these two traditions. The discussion will show that both took their liberties in the interpretation of the thesis, a move that allowed them to liberate themselves from Brentano’s inheritance and to fully develop their own philosophical positions

(WP 2011-02) The Change in Sraffa\u27s Philosophical Thinking

The availability of Piero Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts and correspondence at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, has made it possible to begin to set out a more complete account of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking than previously could be done with only his published materials and the few comments and suggestions made by others about his ideas, especially in connection with their possible impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later thinking. This makes a direct rather than indirect examination of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking possible, and also shifts the focus from his relationship to Wittgenstein to his own thinking per se. I suggest that the previous focus, necessary as it may have been prior to the availability of the unpublished materials, involved some distortion of Sraffa’s thinking by virtue of its framing in terms of Wittgenstein’s concerns as reflected in the concerns of scholars primarily interested in the change in the his thinking. This paper seeks to locate these early convictions in this historical context, and then go on to treat the development of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking as a process beginning from this point, arguing that his thinking underwent one significant shift around 1931, but still retained its early key assumptions. Thus the approach I will take to Sraffa’s philosophical thinking is to explain it as a process of development largely within a single framework defined by his view of how modern science determines the scope and limits upon economic theorizing

The Change in Sraffa\u27s Philosophical Thinking

The availability of Piero Sraffa\u27s unpublished manuscripts and correspondence at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, has made it possible to begin to set out a more complete account of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking than previously could be done with only his published materials and the few comments and suggestions made by others about his ideas, especially in connection with their possible impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein\u27s later thinking. This makes a direct rather than indirect examination of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking possible, and also shifts the focus from his relationship to Wittgenstein to his own thinking per se. I suggest that the previous focus, necessary as it may have been prior to the availability of the unpublished materials, involved some distortion of Sraffa\u27s thinking by virtue of its framing in terms of Wittgenstein\u27s concerns as reflected in the concerns of scholars primarily interested in the change in his thinking. This paper seeks to locate these early convictions in this historical context, and then go on to treat the development of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking as a process beginning from this point, arguing that his thinking underwent one significant shift around 1931, but still retained its early key assumptions. Thus the approach I will take to Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking is to explain it as a process of development largely within a single framework defined by his view of how modern science determines the scope and limits upon economic theorising

Revisiting the logical empiricist criticisms of vitalism

Vitalism claims that biological organisms are governed by nonmaterial agents like entelechies. The received view today rejects vitalism by presupposing metaphysical materialism (or physicalism). Metaphysical materialism maintains that the world is ultimately material (or physical), and it, therefore, repudiates the existence of nonmaterial entelechies. However, this marks a shift compared with the arguments against vitalism developed by logical empiricists, who were indifferent to metaphysical issues and were only concerned with logical and empirical matters in the sciences. Logical empiricists rejected the concept of the entelechy (vitalism), because vital laws confirmed by biological phenomena were unavailable; in contrast, they accepted the concept of the atom (materialism), since it constituted physical laws and was therefore associated with verifiable results in modern physics

An Introduction to Logical Positivism: the Viennese Formulation of the Verifiability Principle

The verifiability principle was the characteristic claim of a group of thinkers who called themselves the Vienna Circle and who formed the philosophical movement now known as logical positivism. The verifiability principle is an empiricist criterion of meaning which declares that only statements that are verifiable by —i.e., logically deducible from— observational statements are cognitively meaningful. This essay is a short introduction to the philosophical movement of logical positivism and its formulation of the verifiability principle. Its primary aim is to provide students of philosophy with an accessible first overview of this philosophical movement. After pointing out some aspects of the philosophical background of logical positivism (section 1), I will comment on the reasoning that lead these authors to formulate the verifiability principle (section 2), and I will analyse the debate about how to understand observational language and how observational statements (the so-called ‘protocol statements’) are verified (section 3). I will also comment on the two main consequences of accepting the verifiability principle: the conception of philosophy as the task of logical analysis and the project of unified science (section 4), and I will explain the different views on ethical language defended by logical positivists (section 5). I will end this essay by identifying the main problems of the verifiability principle and I will explain the core ideas of Carnap’s confirmability criterion, which attempts to resolve these problems (section 6 and 7)