|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
RECENT PHILOSOPHY |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Select: Moritz Schlick - Hans Reichenbach - Rudolf Carnap Bertrand Russell - Alfred J. Ayer |
|
|
SOME MAJOR PHILOSOPHERS Born in Berlin, Schlick (picture) studied physics at Heidelberg, Lausanne, and Berlin, taught at Rostock and Kiel, and from 1922 was professor of inductive sciences at Vienna. As a philosopher, he was one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. When, in 1936 a lunatic murdered Professor Schlick, many of the numerous admirers of the assassinated scholar considered it a particularly tragic irony that this nonsensical misdeed put an end to a life that was devoted to the inquiry into the meaning of life. Schlick's aim was not the construction of a system of ideas or thoughts but the investigation of the way of philosophizing that satisfies the demands of the most scrupulous scientific conscience. This task involved skill in seeing through wrongly set problems and in surveying the consequences of wrong approaches to them, and Schlick himself was never afraid of abandoning previously elaborated views when, in the course of his development, he recognized their falsehood. The principal results of Schlick's thinking are: a distinct demarcation between experience which is immediate and knowledge which is no vision but rather calculation and organization by means of concepts and symbols, and, furthermore, a new foundation of empiricism, which leans upon Berkeley and Hume but profits from modern logic. Reality is defined as happening in time. Every Real has a definite place in time. The task of science is to obtain knowledge of reality, and the true achievements of science can neither be destroyed nor altered by philosophy. But the aim of philosophy is to interpret these achievements correctly and to expound their deepest meaning. Schlick was fundamentally a man who preferred aesthetic contemplation to exact science. But as a thinker he was convinced of the unique philosophical significance of natural science, and he branded it as a grave mistake to believe that the arts and cultural sciences are in any way equivalent to natural science. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Reichenbach (picture) was born in Hamburg, Germany, and became a professor of philosophy at Berlin (1926-1933), Istanbul (1933-1938), and Los Angeles (from 1938). He was an early associate of the Vienna School of logical positivists, and with Rudolph Carnap founded the journal Erkenntnis in 1930 (which reappeared in 1975 in the United States). Reichenbach belongs to a generation of scientists who began to study after most of their teachers had already abandoned the concepts of classical physics; thus they were able to start with ideas and modes of thought found by their predecessors after much hardship, trial and error. Reichenbach, however, has actively participated in the further advance of science and philosophy. His contributions have been discussed by the greatest contemporary scientists and philosophers with respect if not with general consent, and are recognized either as real contributions or at least as working hypotheses or useful suggestions. At first, Reichenbach was preoccupied with the clarification of the concepts of space and time, their relations, and the way of assimilating one to another. As a theorist of knowledge, Reichenbach comes in his own way closer to the methods of the Vienna Circle, but he even more vigorously insists that all our knowledge is only probable. The doctrine of probability, advanced by R. von Mises and Reichenbach, is based on the concept of "frequency," a statistical concept. Every definition of induction is involved in this doctrine. Induction is described as a process of predicting future events with the aid of propositions of probability which serve as instruments of indication. Reichenbach objects to classical logic that it classifies propositions according to their truth or falsity instead of lower or higher degrees of probability. He holds that true logic is probability logic, and has presented his views in Doctrine of Probability (1935) and Experience and Prediction (1938). In his Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947), Reichenbach acknowledges classical logic as the "mother of all logics" and admits that it can be carried through in the sense of approximation, even if refined analysis demands probability logic. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Rudolf Carnap was a German-American philosopher who was one of the members of the Vienna Circle, a group associated with logical positivism. After teaching at the universities of Vienna and Prague, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago in 1935. From 1952 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and in the philosophy department of the University of California at Los Angeles. Regarding his thought...
Elsewhere On the Internet
Bertrand Russell (picture) was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers of the 20th century. Orphaned at three, he was reared by his puritanically religious but politically liberal paternal grandmother. He rebelled early against her rigid moral views, but her otherwise progressive beliefs influenced his later social thinking. Some Highlights of His Very Interesting Life
Throughout his life Russell was a prolific and highly regarded writer in many fields, ranging from logic and mathematics to politics to short works of fiction. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His private life was characterized by many disappointments and unsuccessful personal relationships, however. He scorned easy popularity with either right or left and exhibited an unbreakable faith in the power of human reason. Russell remained active and wrote extensively until his death at the age of 97. The most interesting account of his life is contained in his autobiography (3 vols., 1967- 69). He outlined his intellectual history in My Philosophical Development (1959). Although he had many preoccupations, Russell's primary contribution lay in philosophy, most particularly in logic and the theory of knowledge:
Russell used the rigorous methods of formal logic for a wide variety of problems.
Russell was seriously concerned with the application of logical analysis to epistemological questions and attacked this problem by trying to break down human knowledge into minimum statements that were verifiable by empirical observation, reason, and logic:
Difficulties of analysis led Russell to give up many of the characteristic theses of logical atomism, and with his Analysis of Mind (1921) and Analysis of Matter (1926) he shifted to what has been called neutral monism:
Throughout his life Russell acknowledged difficulties in his positions and was ready to admit criticisms and modify his views. While ranging over an immense field, Russell demonstrated an openness to ideas, an aversion to dogma, and a rigor in analysis that more than justify his position, with Moore and Wittgenstein, as a fountainhead of 20th-century English and American philosophy. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
Sir Alfred Ayer was an English philosopher instrumental in introducing the ideas of logical positivism into English philosophy with his book Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). Influenced by the thought of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the earlier empiricism of George Berkeley, Ayer held that philosophy's essential concern is the analysis of language rather than the construction of systems of metaphysics. He denied that metaphysical statements can be meaningful and regarded theology and the value statements of ethics and aesthetics as merely expressions of emotion. Ayer's later work, primarily concerned with epistemology and philosophical methodology, reflected more of the traditional emphases of British empiricism, but with a linguistic approach to problems:
Other works include:
Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book...
|
|
|
Introduction & Directory |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2004-05, & 2006 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.
This Page Was Updated On