This article examines the special features of the atmosphere in Habsburg’s Vienna, which led to the formation of such a direction in philosophical thought as a critique of language (Sprachkritik) and the influence its representatives such as Karl Kraus and Fritz Mauthner on the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on language. I argue that Sprachkritik was inextricably connected with Sprachkrise (crisis of language), Sprachkrise was a strongly Austrian phenomenon due to special socio-cultural-political reasons and which led to the consideration of the (...) very phenomenon of language from a new point of view. Here I claim that Ludwig Wittgenstein, a ‘product’ of Habsburg’s Vienna, was strongly influenced by the intellectual atmosphere of the critique of language reigning in it. In Roberto Poli’s (1997: 16), scholar in sociology and philosophy, words, the “language-world relationship was a central element of the intellectual debate of those years: suffice it to mention Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal among writers, and Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein among philosophers.” . (shrink)

This paper is the general introduction to a collection of essays entitled Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy (forthcoming). In this substantial introduction, I comment several aspects of the recent reception of Brentano’s philosophical programme in contemporary philosophy, and the actual debates on topics such as emotions, values, and intentionality, for example. It is divided in four parts corresponding to the four sections of the book. The first three sections contain 11 original contributions on Brentano’s philosophy and its place in the (...) history of philosophy in Austria, and the last section contains three unpublished manuscripts from Alfred Kastil et Moritz Schlick. I. Descriptive psychology and phenomenology: Brentano and Husserl II. Brentano and the Vienna Circle III. Brentano and the history of philosophy IV. Documentation: Alfred Kastil and the Vienna Circle . (shrink)

(1997). Wittgenstein and post‐analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard? Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 1-32. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.1997.tb00018.x.

I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy…’Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy ; and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses. The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it. The time has come to philosophize.…there is no danger of philosophy's ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato (...) to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth‐century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling, there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition. (shrink)

This study examines the place of the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna (1888-1938) in the evolution of the history of philosophy in Austria up to the establishment of the Vienna Circle in 1929. I will examine three aspects of the relationship between the Austrian members of the Vienna Circle and the Philosophical Society which has been emphasized by several historians of the Vienna Circle: the first aspect concerns the theory of a first Vienna Circle formed mainly by H. (...) Hahn, P. Frank and O. Neurath; the second aspect is the contention that the missing link between the Vienna Circle and the Bolzano tradition in Austria is Alois Höfler, a student of Brentano and Meinong; I will finally examine the link they established between the annexation of the Philosophical Society to the Kant-Gesellschaft in 1927 and the founding of the Vienna Circle in 1929. I will argue that this institution played a key role in the history of philosophy in Austria and is partly responsible for the formation of the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

Why have Polish philosophers fared so badly as concerns their admission into the pantheon of Continental Philosophers? Why, for example, should Heidegger and Derrida be included in this pantheon, but not Ingarden or Tarski? Why, to put the question from another side, should there be so close an association in Poland between philosophy and logic, and between philosophy and science? We distinguish a series of answers to this question, which are dealt with under the following headings: (a) the role of (...) socialism; (b) the disciplinary association between philosophy and mathematics; (c) the influence of Austrian philosophy in general and of Brentanian philosophy in particular; (d) the serendipitous role of Twardowski; (e) the role of Catholicism. The conclusion of the paper is that there is no such thing as 'Polish philosophy' because philosophy in Poland is philosophy per se; it is part and parcel of the mainstream of world philosophy simply because, in contrast to French or German philosophy, it meets international standards of training, rigour, professionalism and specialization. (shrink)

Austrian economics starts out from the thesis that the objects of economic science differ from those of the natural sciences because of the centrality of the economic agent. This allows a certain a priori or essentialistic aspect to economic science of a sort which parallels the a priori dimension of psychology defended by Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl. We outline these parallels, and show how the theory of a priori dependence relations outlined in Husserl’s Logical Investigations can throw light (...) on the Austrian account of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In this introductory paper I sketch the tradition, several early aspects of which are discussed in the following essays and reviews. I introduce the main figures whose work initiated and maintained the sociological orientation in Hungarian philosophy thereby tracing its evolution. I suggest that its sociological outlook, if taken to be a characteristic tendency that gives Hungarian philosophy its distinctive flavour, provides us with the framework of a possible narrative about the history of Hungarian philosophy in the broader context of (...) Central European philosophy. This narrative, in turn, suggests a way of integrating the latter into the history of Western philosophy rather than restricting its scope to a handful of canonical works only. (shrink)

The term ‘Continental philosophy’ designates not philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, but rather a selective slice of Franco-German philosophy. Through a critical analysis of the arguments advanced by Otto Neurath, the paper addresses the issue of why Austrian philosophers in particular are not counted in the pantheon of Continental philosophers. Austrian philosophy is marked by the predominance of philosophical analysis and of the philosophy of science. The paper concludes that it is not Austria which is the (...) special case when seen against the background of contemporary mainstream philosophy, but rather Germany and France. (shrink)