Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Let's return to the issue of logic, or the issues of mathematics-and-logic, which was (were?) always of great importance to the Vienna Circle. As we have mentioned, the VC came together at a time of a lot of argument about the foundations of mathematics. The "logicists" said that mathematics is a stern necessary outcome of logic. The "intuitionists" said it is, at least at the margins, a matter of social convention. Both sides in that dispute presumed that their positions were incompatible: social convention is one thing, logic is something utterly different.  Rudolf Carnap, though, offered an distinctive approach to logic.  He said logic itself is a social convention, not a successful flight from conventions. [The illustration for this blog entry is my silly pun, the name "Carnap" never fails to lead me to think of catnip.] Anyway, Carnap, the son of a successful capitalist (the elder Carnap owned a ribbon-making factory), studied at both the Univers...

In our four further discussions of the Edmonds book this week, we will break little if any truly new ground.  We will try to go more deeply into some questions that we raised last week.                                     First, I mentioned last week that Wittgenstein's discussion of the foundations of mathematics after an exposure to Brouwer's views was what brought him fully back into philosophy. I omitted a related point.  Wittgenstein did eventually write up his thoughts on that subject. REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS was published after his death, in 1956.  There he makes the remarkable observation that what is called "losing" in chess may constitute winning in another game.  That is his analogy. His example involves "Russell's system," the logicism/logical apparatus of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. A proposition could be proven the case in Russell's system yet sti...

We have come to a point where we should really discuss the issue of the "unity of the sciences," a central issue of debate, it seems, within the Vienna Circle -- and in the philosophy of science (or the sciences?) to this day.  This was an issue central to their philosophizing. When they became a big enough of a deal to organize international conferences, those conferences were to be known as the International Congress for the Unity of Science. At one of the conferences that they gave that title, at Prague in 1934, Alfred Tarski made his appearance on the stage of the history of philosophy. Tarski (portrayed above) gave a lecture on the ideas of truth and falsity in which he tried to resolve the ancient Liars' paradox. His efforts, Edmonds tells us, "caused so much buzz that an additional session was hastily arranged to discuss it further."  Tarski's reaction to the Liar Paradox was to suggest a formal language with a hierarchy of truths. At the bottom level...

  There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938.  In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was.  But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific?   The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...

  a n  + b n  = c n , where integer  n  ≥ 3, has no non-trivial solutions. This and, if all goes well, the next seven posts in this blog constitute an unprecedentedly ambitious project for me.  I'll be attempting a very granular reading of the book I discussed in a more abstract fashion earlier, THE MURDER OF PROFESSOR SCHLICK: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE VIENNA CIRCLE.  Let us start with the "rise" of that subtitle. In 1922 Schlick was offered and accepted the chair for natural philosophy at the University of Vienna. Edmonds calls this simple hiring "a turning point in the history of twentieth-century philosophy."  The core of the study-and-discussion group that he seems to have formed almost immediately after that appointment consisted of Schlick himself, Neurath, and Hahn. Otto Neurath and Schlick had background and personality differences as far apart as the poles, as Edmonds tells it. Schlick was a gentile, Neurath a Jew. Schlick was soft-spoken...

  I think of certain thinkers as "Top Shelf." These are the ones who are named and discussed BY name even in undergraduate survey courses in their field. If you are not majoring in a STEM field, but you don't want to live and die completely ignorant of physics, you might well take a survey course on the field's modern history. That will presumably discuss Newton, Maxwell, Mach, Einstein and Schrodinger: the top shelf.  If you take a survey modern-era philosophy course, an analogous list might include Kant, Hegel, James, Russell, Arendt.  But even drawing up such a list surely leads some to note that the last of those names, Hannah Arendt, died almost a half century ago. Who are the top shelf philosophers of today ? Who will future undergraduates study and know by name as the outstanding thinkers of the early 21st century? We cannot know -- time is the great editor and has not passed on this copy yet.  So forget about contemporaneity for a bit. When we speak of the ...