The point, again, is to make the case that the period 1880 to 1920 was a golden age for western thought -- in philosophy and in the leavening by philosophy of related intellectual work.
Again, a caution. The use of UPPER CASE LETTERS for all the published items below does not discriminate among genre or by length. Many of the pieces below are books. But some below are brief articles (such as Harris on education, right at the top). Some are plays, speeches, etc. Roll with it.
1880: Fyodor Dostoyevsky [pictured above], THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
William Torrey Harris, PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION
Commentary: The Harris item was a contribution to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the standard-bearer of the so-called St Louis Hegelians' school. Much of the philosophic activity of the 41-year period under discussion concerns Hegelianism pro and con, and much of it involves education, too, so we might as well give both themes a kick-off here. Harris saw an ideal education as a matter of helping a growing child through criticism to self-criticism and self-awareness.
1881: O.W. Holmes, THE COMMON LAW
Henry George, THE IRISH LAND QUESTION
1882: Henrik Ibsen, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
M. Bakunin, GOD AND THE STATE
1883: Friedrich Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
Auguste Weissman, THE GERM PLASM
Commentary: Weissman made a strong case for thesis that acquired characteristics can not be transmitted genetically: that is, though exercise can give me bigger biceps, those biceps will die with me, I do not pass them along to through my genes to later generations on my line. This point seemed to many at the time to have intense ramifications in social philosophy --it is a lot easier to pair evolutionary theory with leftist politics if one presumes evolution can happen, or can be made to happen, quickly.
1884: Herbert Spencer, MAN VERSUS THE STATE
Edwin Abbott, FLATLAND
Commentary: Flatland? Well ... yes. Abbott discussed a hypothetical 2-dimension world and its relationship with the three-dimension world -- and, by extension, the relationship of the familiar 3-dimensional space to continuums of 4 or more dimensions. Although Abbott's book was not an effort at cosmological theorizing (it was a comedy of manners!) his example shows that philosophers did not really have to wait for the physicists to bring them the news of such issues.
1885: William Graham Sumner: PROTECTIONISM
Lou Andreas-Salomé', IN THE STRUGGLE OVER GOD
1886: Ernst Mach, ANALYSIS OF SENSATIONS
Jean Moréas, SYMBOLIST MANIFESTO
1887: Mary Baker Eddy, NO AND YES
Michelson-Morley INFLUENCE OF MOTION OF THE MEDIUM ON THE
VELOCITY OF LIGHT
Commentary: It turns out, oddly enough, that the motion of the medium doesn't have an impact on the velocity of light. "The dog that doesn't bark is the curious incident." There is no good explanation of this within the Newtonian framework that reigned at the time. Oddly, Einstein seems not to have been familiar with the M-M results while he was working on what became the special theory of relativity. The safest thing to say about the relationship between the two lines of work is that M-M created a demand for an explanation, and Einstein, coming to the matter by another route, supplied that demand.
1888: Friedrich Nietzsche, TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
Francis Galton, CO-RELATIONS AND THEIR MEASUREMENT
Commentary: Francis Galton is often remembered today chiefly as an important figure in the development of a eugenics movement in the late 19th century. The whole line of thought proved full of misfortune for the species whose gene-line it was meant to strengthen. But Galton should also be remembered as a pioneering mathematician and statistician. He invented the ideas of correlation and regression to the mean in roughly the sense in which they are routinely employed to this day.
1889: Henry Bergson, TIME AND FREE WILL
Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, POSITIVE THEORY OF CAPITAL
1890: Alfred Marshall, PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS
William James, THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY
Commentary: James is the central figure in what is known as the "functionalist" school of psychology. It was an outgrowth of Darwinian biology. After all, the notion of "survival of the fittest" naturally leads to the question: what is it about mind that makes biological creatures endowed with mind specifically fit for the struggle to survive? what are the functions of mind, or perhaps of the various parts of the whole we call "mind," and how are those functions achieved? James' version of functionalism was especially focused on the cognitive aspect of mind. what are the functions of the fact of knowing and how are they achieved? Here of course psychology steps directly into epistemology.
1891: George Plekhanov, THE MEANING OF HEGEL
Errico Malatesta, ANARCHY
1892: Gottlob Frege, SENSE AND REFERENCE
Bernard Bosanquet, A HISTORY OF AESTHETIC
Commentary: Not a book of aesthetic philosophy but a book about aesthetic philosophy -- making the case that the way philosophers see the nature and function of art and beauty is intimately connected with everything else in their thought and their time. Bosanquet is another of our neo-Hegelian thinkers, and of course Hegel believed that art necessarily passes through dialectical stages, each of which is a different way of expressing the Absolute. Bosanquet agreed with that. But he added that art doesn't just reflect changes in the world, it is part of the project by which they come about.
1893, F.H. Bradley, APPEARANCE AND REALITY
Thomas H. Huxley, EVOLUTION AND ETHICS
Commentary: Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog," a reputation cemented by a notorious debate between Huxley and an opponent of evolutionary theory, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, in 1860. That of course is outside the range of our golden age. But Huxley's lecture on Evolution and Ethics more that 30 years later moves boldly into territory that Darwin generally avoided. Huxley maintained in essence that biological evolution poses us as humans with a problem. Evolution does NOT offer us a good functional basis for ethics. We have to build for ourselves an ethics that works contrary to the "cosmic process," prize our ability to co-operate rather than struggle with one another.
1894: Leo Tolstoy, WHAT I BELIEVE
Rudolf Steiner, THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM
Commentary: Steiner set out a concept of human freedom according to which freedom involves knowing (and endorsing) the real grounds for one's actions. He considered Kantian epistemology a threat to freedom so understood -- because Kant would say that the real basis for actions is noumenal and so it must be unknowable. Steiner gave his reasons for believing Kant wrong, for believing that there is in principle no outward bound of human knowledge, thus defending the possibility of freedom as he defined it.
1895: Emile Durkheim, THE RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, STUDIES ON HYSTERIA
1896: Theodor Herzl, THE JEWISH STATE
William Jennings Bryan, CROSS OF GOLD ADDRESS
Commentary: With Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech we introduce the question "what is money?" as a key to political philosophy. In our own day we have people who seriously believe that cryptocurrencies are money. They seem to be something else to most observers, including a new-fangled invisible tulip bulb. But the idea of cryptos as a money replacement may help us remember that gold was once not so long ago considered the Ur-money. Nothing else is money, ran this line of thought, unless it is redeemable into gold.
1897: Herbert Spencer, PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY
Wilhelm Wundt, OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY
1898, George Santayana, THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
Alfred Russel Wallace, PAPER MONEY AS A STANDARD OF VALUE
Commentary: With Wallace's article on paper money, we continue the line of thought that Bryan helped us to initiate. As it happens, Wallace could 'hit to all fields' intellectually. He is known for his observations, as a naturalist, on the Malay archipelago; for his social activism; opposition to eugenics; contribution to evolutionary theory. But it is his work as a monetary economist that I find especially striking. Bryan's dissent from the goldbugs went only as far as the minting of silver. Wallace, though, was plugging for paper money before the 19th century was out. It is almost as if he had invented television, too!
1899: Sigmund Freud, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
Thorstein Veblen, THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
1900: Edmund Husserl, LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Henry Bergson, LAUGHTER
1901: Josiah Royce, THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Henry James, SACRED FOUNT
Commentary: The one novel of Henry James' that I have chosen for inclusion in this list has an ambiguous place in the Jamesian 'canon'. James himself, in his later years, would decree the "New York edition": of his collected works to be complete and definitive. He also excluded Sacred Fount from the NY edition, thinking of it apparently as a book-length joke that he had not managed to pull off. But it has impassioned fans among discerning readers. The plot (in which almost nothing really happens outside one character's head) illustrates beautifully how easy it is for people, especially perhaps intelligent ones, to confuse their own mapping with the territory.
1902: Henri Poincare, SCIENCE AND HYPOTHESIS
William James, VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Commentary: James has a populist-Carlylean idea of history. It was individualistic, but with a lot more 'greats' than a Carlylean sans phrase can allow -- he once wrote that "Smith and Jones" have a place in individualistic reading of history just as do Bismarck and Grant. He carries this view over into the religious sphere. To him the interesting aspect of religious history is the lives of stand-out individuals, those spirits -- like George Fox, Emanuel Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, or Mary Baker Eddy -- who manage to be both extraordinary and typical. By studying them we study ourselves.
1903: Charles Peirce, PRAGMATISM AS A PRINCIPLE
G.E. Moore, PRINCIPIA ETHICA
1904: Alexander Bogdanov, EMPIRIOMONISM ,Vol. I
Thorstein Veblen, THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
1905: G.B. Shaw, MAN AND SUPERMAN
Muhammad Abduh, THE THEOLOGY OF UNITY
Commentary: Abduh was the Grand Mufti of Egypt from 1899 until his death in 1905. His book may be said to represent the Sufi/mystical strain within Islamic thought and practice, an important strain throughout the period of European colonization of much of the Middle East and North Africa. This book is regarded as a founding text of modernist Islam.
1906: Harold Joachim, THE NATURE OF TRUTH
Albert Schweitzer, THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS
1907: Walter Rauschenbusch, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS
Arthur Lovejoy, ENTANGLING ALLIANCE OF RELIGION & HISTORY
Commentary: The Lovejoy book laments precisely the entanglement in which the Schweitzer book, above, delights. Lovejoy meant by his striking title that to the extent theologians find themselves arguing about history (what did Moses/Jesus/Mohammad actually do or say?) they have been sidetracked. He thinks that theists have at the least a worthwhile case to make in metaphysics but that in all matters of human history such as those an honest agnosticism is best, the more so the further into the past the pertinent events are said to have happened.
1908: Jane Addams, THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS
J.M.E. McTaggart, THE UNREALITY OF TIME
1909: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
William James, A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE
Commentary: This is the final work from a James-family pen with which we shall deal. It begins with blasts against philosophers of the Absolute, beginning with Hegel. James was part of a broader "revolt against Hegel" in the Anglophonic world during this period. In England, Russell, Whitehead, Ramsey and Moore were also participants in that broad rebellion, and analytic philosophy was its result. In the US, the revolt took a somewhat different course, and produced what we may fairly consider far more intriguing and idiosyncratic thinking.
1910: John Dewey, HOW WE THINK
Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA (Vol. 1)
1911: Wilhelm Dilthey, TYPES OF WORLDVIEW
Evelyn Underhill, MYSTICISM
Commentary: Underhill's influence extends to her popularizing of the expression "the dark night of the soul." Such a night comes about, she says, when and because mysticism is a spiritual activity that must take place within a physical body. "Each great step forward will entail lassitude and exhaustion for that mental machinery which [the mystic] has pressed into service and probably overworked."
1912: Bertrand Russell, THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Max Wertheimer, EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON MOTION VISION
Commentary: Wertheimer is one of the founders of the gestalt school of psychology. This school contributes, specifically, to our understanding of perception. I would classify Gestalt as both cognitive in concern and as functional in approach. In other words, I believe it is a continuation of the Jamesian tradition, in contrast to the very different traditions of Freud/Jung on the one side and of Pavlov/Watson on the other. Gestalt, like functionalism, operates between what James (in other contexts) called "the upper and the lower dogmatisms."
1913: John Watson, PSYCHOLOGY AS THE BEHAVIORIST SEES IT
Josiah Royce, THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY
1914: James Joyce, DUBLINERS
Albert Einstein, THE FORMAL FOUNDATION OF THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
Commentary: The problem that Einstein's work has created for subsequent philosophy has been that when we adopt "space-time" into our mental machinery, we abandon the value that the older stand-alone notion of time expressed. Of course if we understand the possibility of n-dimensional space (see FLATLAND above), then we can mathematically make time one of those n dimensions. But in the process we reduce time to a sort of space, and THIS has had what I believe are lamentable consequences for philosophy. It played a part in bringing an end to this golden age we're reviewing. I believe we can get beyond the lamentable consequences of the public understanding of relativity if we give ourselves ... well ... time. Get the benefits of contemporary physics and the philosophic benefits of a novelty-embracing sense of temporality as well. But that will be a story for another day.
1915: T.S. Eliot, THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Carl Jung, THE THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
1916: W.B. Yeats, EASTER, 1916
Vilfredo Pareto, TREATISE ON GENERAL SOCIOLOGY
Commentary: Two of the books on this list have the word "sociology" in the title. I would consider the works by Veblen and Addams to be sociological in spirit as well, but one might reflect especially on the differences between Durkheim and Pareto. They are vast. Durkheim (1895) sought to explain shared norms and values, taking an approach to society that anticipates more recent "communitarian" political philosophy. Pareto discussed the circulation of elites, emphasizing questions of the distribution of power and resources. James Burnham would cite him (favorably) as an example of a Machiavellian.
1917: Woodrow Wilson, A WORLD LEAGUE FOR PEACE
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ON GROWTH AND FORM
1918: Oswald Spengler, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
Rosa Luxemburg, THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Commentary: Rosa Luxembourg was among the many leftist figures at this time who were quite skeptical of Lenin and Leninism at the moment of its great triumph in Russia. She was unhappy with the hierarchical organization Lenin had brought to the Communist Party there. She believed in intra-party democracy and that the revolutionary class would and should express its own needs spontaneously, rather than be told what it needs.
1919: Herman Hesse, DEMIAN
Hermann Cohen, RELIGION OF REASON OUT OF THE SOURCES OF MODERN JUDAISM
1920: William Inge, THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
Ludwig von Mises, ECONOMIC CALCULATION IN THE SOCIALIST COMMONWEALTH
Commentary: With the general slaughter of the Great War in the rear view mirror, and with the Bolsheviks consolidating power in Russia, it seemed broadly clear circa 1920 that human history was entering a new phase. Philosophy, too, and its attendant fields such as economics, entered new phases, bringing an end to the one we've been chronicling. So I leave you with this note from Von Mises: there is no good way for a socialist commonwealth to calculate prices, wages, etc. Choking out the profit motive literally makes things immeasurable.
Especially nerdy details. Categorizing the list into college-curriculum friendly bits, I find eleven. There is philosophy as a purist might see it (PP). There are also philosophically inclined literary works (LW), discussions of law & sovereignty (L+S), of economics (EC) of Marxism (MX), of biology (B), Physics and Math (P+M), aesthetics (AE), religion and theology (R+T), psychology (PS) and sociology (So).
Breaking that down a bit, the dominant voice in this Great Conversation belongs to PP, though it is slightly less than one-quarter of the whole (20 of the 82 works). The next three loudest voices belong to R+T, LW, and PS, with 10, 9, and 8 of these works respectively. Those four groups together make up 47 works.
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