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RECENT PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl - David Emile Durkheim - Georg Simmel Giuseppe Peano - Samuel Alexander - William Ralph Inge James Edwin Creighton - Rudolf Steiner - Maurice Maeterlinck Hugo Munsterberg - Heinrich Rickert - Max Weber Miguel de Unamuno - Hans Driesch |
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Diagrams The Development of Modern and Recent Philosophical Thought Major Influences on American Social Thought Unclassified Recent Philosophers When Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (picture) died, the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, deplored the loss of one of its most brilliant teachers; the French people mourned a staunch defender of human rights and a convinced and active republican and democrat; tens of thousands of political refugees, of human beings persecuted for religious or racial reasons, felt themselves deprived of the moral and material support of a true humanitarian; and experts in sociology, psychology, philosophy, epistemology and many branches of linguistics began to miss the inspiring influence of a scholar whose ideas had offered them new aspects. Lévy-Bruhl had published solid and significant works on the history of German and French philosophy before he began his important investigations into primitive society. He penetrated into the soul of prelogical man who thought mystically. The philosophical problem that was raised by the results of his inquiries can be formulated as follows: Although all physio-psychological processes of perception of the primitive man are the same as those of modern, logical man -- although both have the same structure of brain, the primitive man does not perceive as modern man does. The external world which the primitive man perceives is different from that of modern man, just as the social environments of both are different. Death forced Lévy-Bruhl to commit to his successors the responsibility of drawing further conclusions from his statements. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
David Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) A founder of the science of sociology, Emile Durkheim (picture) regarded sociology neither as a branch of philosophy, psychology, nor biology, though he always stressed the importance of psychological and biological knowledge. Similarly, he was well versed in ethnology and utilized many of its results; but he carefully defined the method and object of sociology as distinct from the former. Even as a sociologist, Durkheim retained his belief in moral values. He stated that these could not be explained without taking into account the existence of society; that society formed and enlightened the individual; that it was impossible to separate the individual from society, or to regard society as the mere totality of individuals. He conceived of the group mind as a reality distinct from the minds of the individuals who comprised the group. Durkheim's real starting point was his study of the division of labor. He regarded the division of labor not only as an important social and economic phenomenon but as a proof that the individual was incapable of controlling his life. From this he proceeded to demonstrate that the concepts of causality, space, and time had to be derived from collective sources. He was a man of wide perspectives. His inquiries embraced religion (particularly its elementary forms, law, criminology, ethics, moral data, economics, aesthetics, and the histories of language and the arts. He was particularly interested in education which he viewed as the birth of social man from the embryo of the individual. All who met Durkheim were deeply impressed by his ascetic appearance. He seemed to be the embodiment of the scientific spirit. His disciples, among whom Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was the outstanding, never forgot the inspiration engendered by Durkheim for methodical investigation. Even his opponents respected the austerity of his devotion to the cause of truth. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
From about 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War, Georg Simmel (picture) was considered one of the greatest contemporary philosophers. Not favored by the Prussian government, Simmel was a lecturer, then an associate professor at the University of Berlin, and only a few years before his death he was appointed a full professor at the University of Strasbourg. As long as he lectured in Berlin, his audience was composed mostly of students from Russia and Central and Southern Europe where his fame was even greater than in Germany. Nevertheless, he did not form a school. Many of his former pupils died on the battlefield, others, uprooted by the events of the war and revolution, were forced to renounced philosophy altogether, or turned to radical Marxism or nationalism, both of which were contrary to Simmel's mind which, despite all changes, maintained a relativist attitude. Simmel's talents for psychological analysis are unsurpassed, and he always succeeded in elucidating psychological insight by philosophical aspects, no matter whether he dealt with Platonic ideas or fashions, Schopenhauer's pessimism or the flirt, the effects of money lending or the question of theistic faith. He interpreted Kant's a priori, which he himself adopted, psychologically and as supporting relativism. Later he developed, independently of American thinkers, a kind of pragmatism. Likewise, he was independent of Bergson when he tried to overcome his relativism by a belief in the self-transcendence of life. From a purely descriptive ethics he proceeded to one of valid values. He always remained an unorthodox Kantian, stressing the antagonism between immediate experience and the elaboration of this experience by the creative human spirit, insisting that the natural sciences as well as history offer only an image of reality that is transformed by the theoretical or historical a priori. According to Simmel, sociology does not belong to philosophy. Sociology and philosophy offer two different aspects of the situation of man in the world. They are two autonomous interpretations of mental life. Simmel started with studies On Social Differentiation (1890), then published his Philosophy of Money (1900) and Sociology (1908). A thorough student of Marx, he admitted the influence of economic facts on intellectual attitudes but insisted that the effects of intellectual patterns on economics act likewise. He maintained that the decisive factor of human attitudes is antecedent to changes of social or economic institutions. Sociology is conceived by Simmel as the doctrine of the forms of the relations between individuals, independent of spiritual contents which are subject to historical change. It is the "geometry of social life." Religion and the arts represent to Simmel autonomous worlds which are independent of science but accessible to the philosopher, provided he does not disregard their autonomous foundations. In his monographies on Goethe (1913) and Rembrandt (1916), Simmel tried to show that the poet and artist while forming his own image of life, although determined by the historical situation of his lifetime, transcends historical conditions and testifies that life always hints beyond itself. The principal problem of culture is formulated by Simmel as the difficulty to seize life without violating it. In The Radical Academy
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Modest, simple, kindhearted, benevolent, affable in his personal behavior, Giuseppe Peano (picture) impressed his audiences and readers with the strict precision of his thinking. He was principally a mathematical logician, but was also devoted to the idea of the perfection of human relations, international communications, spiritual and technical advance and rapprochement. It was scientific and humanitarian interest that drove him to the problem of universal language or, as he called it "inter-language" and to the purpose of achieving what Leibniz had planned in his program of a universal characteristic. After publishing, in 1884, Differential Calculus and Principles of the Integral Calculus, and, in 1888, The Geometrical Calculus, Peano introduced new concepts and methods into mathematics, whose vocabulary he reduced to three words. He became convinced that, in order to maintain the strict character of mathematics, it was necessary to renounce common language and to shape an instrument of language that renders to thought the same services as the microscope does in biology. The ideography created by Peano uses for logical operations symbols that are shaped differently from algebraic symbols. His system permits writing every proposition of logic in symbols exclusively, in order to emancipate the strictly logical part of reasoning from verbal language and its vagueness and ambiguity. In his Formulary of Mathematics (1894-1908), he reduced mathematics to symbolic notation. Besides his efforts to systematize logic as a mathematical science, Peano tried to make the idea of an international language popular and to develop its practical use. As the president of the Academia pro Interlingua, he was a devoted apostle of this idea. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Alexander (picture) was a philosopher born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He studied at Oxford, and in 1893 was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Manchester Univesity. His growing concern for the situation of European Jewry led him to introduce Chaim Weismann, his colleage at Manchester Univeristy, to Arthur James Balfour -- a meeting which led to the Balfour Declaration, establishing the principle of a Jewish national home. A teacher at Oxford, Glasgow and Victoria Universities, Alexander's fame rests principally on his book Space, Time and Deity, which evolved out of his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow given in 1915. This book has been referred to as the most significant British metaphysical contribution since that of Hobbes. Classed as both idealist and realist, he tended more toward realism as he grew older. In 1889, his prize essay Moral Order and Progress (which he disowned some twenty years later) fanned the Anglo-Aristotelian-Hegelian movement in British ethics toward the direction of a sophisticated evolutionary theory. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
William Ralph Inge (1860-1954) Dean Inge (picture) is one of the most popular figures in Britain's public life, and his interpretation of English peculiarities has been heeded outside the kingdom. He has spoken about questions of the day quite as often as George Bernard Shaw, and some people have grumbled that in England a playwright and a dean always fancy they know everything better than anybody else. In matters of public opinion, if not in those of religion, Inge is, in his own way, as heretic as was Shaw. Inge has searched for a philosophy by which he could live. He found it in those Christian mystics who were steeped in the Platonic tradition, and it was Plotinus whose work he regarded as the summit of Platonism. Inge's Philosophy of Plotinus (1918) has been recognized as a work of penetrating scholarship, even by those who do not share Inge's appraisal of that thinker. To Inge, Christianity is a religion of spiritual redemption, not one of social reform, and he has protested, "I am unable to distinguish between philosophy and religion." He holds that mythology, which rightly claims a large place in all religions, cannot be kept out of philosophy, provided that the thinker tries to "live by the rule of his thought." The real world is regarded by Inge neither as the material universe, assumed as existent independently of mind, nor as the thought of the universe in the mind of man, but rather as the unity of the thought and its object. Values are defined as the attributes of the ultimate real. According to Inge, the founder of Christianity made the greatest contribution to the science or art of living by teaching that wisdom, knowledge and judgment of value are the result of love and sympathy. These ideas are explained in Inge's Faith and Knowledge (1904) and Speculum Animae (Mirror of the Soul, 1911). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
James Edwin Creighton (1861-1924) To have his own philosophical system would have been contrary to Creighton's fundamental conviction that human thoughts are never completely the work of an isolated mind. He was an ardent advocate of social cooperation in philosophy, repeatedly pointing to the successes that resulted from cooperation in science. He regarded intellectual life as a form of experience which can be realized only in common with other through participation in a social community. With this point of view, Creighton concluded first, that the philosopher must participate intimately in the mental activities and interests of other people; and second, that he must define the task of philosophy as that of determining the real, stressing the importance of a precise concept of experience. He regarded "concept of experience" as an ambiguous term which was generally appealed to in a very uncritical and too confident fashion. Though he endeavored to define experience as strictly as possible, he was influenced in his earlier years by Kant, Bradley, and Bosanquet. Later, he accepted some view of Windelband and Rickert, without sharing all of their opinions. Creighton differentiated between that which is intelligible in philosophy and that which is intelligible in the natural sciences. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet By 1900, Rudolf Steiner (picture), then at the age of forty, surprised his friends by a complete change of personality. He had been a faithful disciple of Ernst Haeckel and a devoted adherent of evolutionist materialism, when he suddenly became a mystic. He had been a Bohemian, and suddenly became a saint. He had been nonchalant, and suddenly proved to be a fanatic. Only his admiration of Goethe did not change; but now Steiner interpreted his works in a new way, claiming that his understanding of Goethe was the only correct and congenial one, and that it was, at the same time, a justification of his new creed. Dissatisfied with natural sciences, Steiner became devoted to theosophy which he regarded as the legitimate and consequent continuance of biology and psychology. For a time he adopted the doctrine of Annie Besant, and was its enthusiastic propagator in Germany, winning influential adherents among the industrialists, army officers, even clergymen and poets. But when he tried to graft European ideas upon the "ancient wisdom," he and his followers were excluded from the Theosophical Society. Thereupon Steiner founded the "Anthroposophical Society" whose center was in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner, who regarded himself an occult scientist rather than a mystic, taught that moral purification, emancipation from egoistic drives, and training in meditation developed spiritual qualities which enabled him and his followers to know realms of human and cosmic existence which otherwise remain hidden to the profane mind. Steiner was also interested in rhythmics, dancing, social questions and medicine. In 1917 he advanced a program for general peace. He exposed his doctrine in Vom Menschenraetsel (On the Riddle of Man, 1916) and Von Seelenraetseln (On the Riddles of the Soul, 1717). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) Motoring, canoeing, skating, bicycling, and, in his earlier years, even boxing, were Count Maeterlinck's (picture) recreations, even in his advanced age. Perhaps he was the greatest sportsman among poets and thinkers, since the end of the ancient Greek civilization. But, as a poet and thinker, Maeterlinck has conceived of life mostly as a fragile, human existence troubled by indefinite fright or as the presentiment of an inevitable catastrophe. His principle experience is the awareness that the sentiments, instincts and ideas of humanity are incapable of remaining consistent as soon as what he called the Unknown appears in life. He was convinced that no human concept of reality corresponds to the metaphysically Real, and that, when the Unknown and the metaphysically Real interfere with human life, man's habitual connection between his ideas and senses is disrupted. All this drove Maeterlinck to a mysticism, though it did not prevent him from remaining fond of science. He proved to be an excellent empirical scientist, observing the life of bees, ants and spiders with unsurpassed accuracy. Maeterlinck's mysticism was founded upon pantheism and a sympathy with whatever exists. He felt himself in intimate touch with whatever suffers and desires, and his moral teachings pronounced universal love. Maeterlinck studied the mystical authors of the Christian Middle Ages, but it was two American authors who influenced him decisively in his formative years. Edgar Allan Poe impressed him by his poetry of horror, and Ralph Waldo Emerson revealed to him the sense of spiritual life, and gave his thinking the direction toward the contemplation of eternity. Maeterlinck also strongly sympathized with Walt Whitman with whom he shared the conviction that nothing can perish definitely. Maeterlinck was no traditionalist. He did not regret any abandonment of a creed, or even the collapse of a civilization that has lost its vitality. In his later years, Maeterlinck turned more and more from mysticism to modern science. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
The current of Munsterberg's life (picture), which had seemed to take a slow course along German university lines, was suddenly turned to new tasks, experiences and ideas by a letter written to him by William James on February 21, 1892. James, who had met Munsterberg at an international congress three years before, had been impressed by his psychological methods and philosophical views, and now invited him to direct the Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University, claiming that in the whole world no better man could be found for that post than Munsterberg. The latter accepted and, apart from the years 1895 to 1897 and 1910 to 1911, taught at Harvard until his death. Throughout his life in America, Munsterberg's scientific intertwined with cultural and political interests. Fascinated by American life, he tried to interpret it to Germany, his native country, and to acquaint Americans with German cultural performances and scientific methods. His position became precarious after the outbreak of the First World War, when Munsterberg did not conceal his sympathy with Germany, without, however, approving all the measures taken by the German government. Munsterberg's scientific creed was that psychology must fit into a system of causally connected elements. The function of psychology is to analyze life into elements parallel to the elements of matter that physics reconstructs; but he emphatically warned against confusing that existence, postulated by psychological analysis, with the immediate reality of life, such as becomes manifest in moral and practical activities, in the arts and religion. Causal psychology must be completed by purposive psychology, and the latter must be founded upon a theory of values. Munsterberg also took great care in applying psychology to education, psychotherapy, the courtroom, vocational training and increase of industrial efficiency. He was the first psychologist to recognize the artistic importance and possibilities of the motion picture. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Closely associated with Wilhelm Windelband and his successor as professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, Heinrich Rickert (picture) was also a leader of the "South-West-German school of philosophy" and fought, as Windelband did, against a concept of science that comprises natural sciences only. His early works were concerned with the demonstration of the limits of the formation of concepts which natural sciences cannot extend, or with the thesis that natural sciences envisage only part of nature, leaving it to other sciences, namely historical sciences, to deal with the neglected aspects of reality. In his later years, Rickert, without abandoning the views he shared with Windelband, concentrated more and more upon the problem of values. While declaring that the values of civilization are the real object of philosophy, Rickert refuted the doctrines according to which life in itself is the supreme value. Contrary to philosophers like Nietzsche and Bergson, Rickert emphasized that values demand a distance from life, and that what Bergson, Dilthey or Simmel called "vital values" were not true values. For Rickert, the connection between' value and life was secured by the realm of meaning. While reality is to be explained and values are to be understood, meanings are to be interpreted. According to Rickert, the meaning of life can be interpreted only by understanding the value of civilization, even if civilization might be recognized as of no value. In The Radical Academy
Very few scholars have been so severely tormented by the conflict between their scientific convictions and their vital instincts as was Max Weber (picture), and hardly any other one has, in his writings and teachings, so sternly disciplined himself as did he. His penetrating analysis of social formations, of the economic factor in history, of the relations between religion and economics and the general trends of human civilization, proceeds from and results in the statement that the victory of rational impersonality over irrational impulses is inevitable and historically justified. But Weber himself, a man of impulsive vehemence, afflicted by psychic tensions and disturbances, bitterly resented any loss of irrational privacy which was imposed on him by the development of depersonalizing tendencies, although his insight forced him to accept. His constant endeavor was not to betray personal feelings in his teachings and to keep his statements and characteristics of the objects of his science free from intrinsic value judgments. According to him, science has to give only technical knowledge which may be useful for the domination of things and human beings. Social science is defined by him as a method of interpreting social action and of explaining its course and its effects by the quest for its intention and the means of its accomplishment, without any regard to its desirability. Only on the occasion of literary feuds and political debates did Weber allow eruptions of his feelings. He was a formidable controversialist, capable of knocking down his adversaries with ice-cold irony or with truculent impetuosity. He was an ardent German nationalist but, for the greater part of his life, believed that democracy was more efficient than any authoritarian regime, and therefore he advocated Germany's democratization. Still opposed to the Treaty of Versailles, Weber, at the end of his life, came closer to nationalist extremists whom he had energetically combated during the war. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) Any appraisal of Miguel de Unamuno's (picture) philosophy is incomplete without taking into account his poetry. Unamuno the thinker and Unamuno the poet are one and inseparable. He accepted the word of a French critic, according to which Unamuno, the poet, had written only commentaries, perpetual analyses of his ego, the Spanish people, their dreams and ideals, but he maintained that Homer and Dante equally had written only commentaries. His greatest commentary was devoted to the figure of Don Quixote whom he presents as a fighter for glory, life and survival. The mortal Quixote is a comic character. The immortal, realizing his own comicalness, superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it. The longing for immortality is the ever-recurring theme of Unamuno's philosophy and poetry. It finds no consolation in reason, which is regarded as a dissolving force, or in the intellect, which means identity and which, on its part, means death. Rather, it relies on faith. But faith is a matter of will, and will needs reason and intellect. Thus faith and reason, or philosophy and religion, are enemies which nevertheless need one another. Neither a purely religious nor a purely rationalistic tradition is possible. This insight leads not to compromise but creates instead the tragic sentiment. The tragic history of human thought is the history of the struggle between veracity and sincerity, between the truth that is thought and the truth that is felt, and no harmony between the two adversaries is possible, although they never cease to need each other. Unamuno called himself "an incorrigible Spaniard." But his erudition was universal. In a conversation he was able to explain the particular Scotticism in a verse of Robert Burns, or the difference between two German mystics of whom only German specialists had ever heard. He combined a utilitarian mind with the search for God. But he confessed that his idea of God was different each time that he conceived it. Proud of his Basque origin, Unamuno, like Loyola, another Basque, was imbued with stern earnestness and a tragic sense of life. He felt himself as the descendant of saints and mystics. But he loved fools and regarded even Jesus as a divine fool. To him, dreaming meant the essence of life, and systematic thinking the destruction of that essence. He declined any philosophic system, but contemplation of the way of philosophizing was to him a source of profound wisdom. He was indeed the knight errant of the searching spirit. In The Radical Academy
A discovery made in 1895 by Hans Driesch (picture) attracted international attention and firmly placed him among the important figures in the history of biology. Driesch, by experiment, demonstrated that it was possible to remove large pieces from eggs; shuffle the blastomeres at will; take several blastomeres away; interfere in many ways, and yet not affect the resulting embryo. The fact that despite such operations, a normal, though small-sized embryo emerged was taken as proof that any single monad in the original egg cell was capable of forming any part of the completed embryo. This discovery made Driesch internationally famous as a zoologist. Until then he had been a disciple and adherent of Ernest Haeckel, but the success of the experiments led him to abandon the mechanistic point of view and to profess a renovated vitalism. At this time, he turned from biology to philosophy. His system was comprised of three parts: the first dealt with causality and consciousness; the second with logic, which he called "a doctrine of order"; the third was a doctrine of reality. Driesch was converted to vitalism because he believed that physical laws were insufficient to explain his discovery, which he declared to be beyond the powers of any machine ever constructed by man. Thus far, he encountered no objections. When he tried to prove the autonomy of life by introducing a nonphysical cause: entelechy (using Aristotle), he met with violent opposition. This opposition held for all other arguments that he advanced. Until his death, Driesch energetically continued to defend his views. Though he was an unscholarly thinker, his style was animated and colorful. In The Radical Academy
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