Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Edmonds repeatedly discusses the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the Vienna Circle in philosophy and Austro-Marxism in politics. You might call it ... some sort of waltz.  But let us begin with Mach.   Ernst Mach was a scientist and philosopher who flourished circa 1900. As a philosopher, he believed that sense perception is the paradigm of all knowledge and that scientific laws, mathematics, and the postulation of unseen entities like magnetic fields, are all simply ways of describing and predicting sense perception. This notion, which came to be called "empirio-criticism," would in time have a great influence on the Vienna Circle.   Aside from geography and chronology, Austro-Marxism would seem unrelated to empirio-criticism. The former was an ideology closely associated with Bruno Bauer, the head of Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934. In '34, as fascists tightened their control in Austria (though at this time they were fasc...

This will be the last post in which I'll be working from Leon Chai's book on the connections between Europe's romantics and America's Renaissance figures, because I am near finished with said book.  For one of my earlier invocations of Chai , go here. That scholar's summary of Schiller's philosophy is as follows: "For Schiller, there is a pathetic, moving eloquence [in the relation of consciousness and object]: never can the object attain the nature of the idea, in which reposes the infinitude of the purely ideational. Consciousness here embodies, implicitly, a state of striving or aspiration: having informed or identified itself with an object, it then attempts in relating that object to an idea to pass from finite to infinite, the transcend the material element of its own content through realization of the purely ideational." What the heck does that mean? I don't know. To those of us who aren't ever going to be tested on our grasp of ...