The issue of the introduction of viennese "scientific philosophy" in France appears to be resolved. However, the rediscovery of the positivist physicist Marcel Boil (1886-1971), who was the first - well before Louis Rougier - to draw the French public 's attention to the works of Schlick, Frank. and Carnap, obliges us to rethink the passage from traditional positivism to neo-positivism during the l920s and l930s. The French reception of the Vienna circ le can be dated earlier than accepted and (...) is more profound than usualy assumed. (shrink)

Cassirer’s philosophy of culture has been examined through various disciplines. Until now, however, no such assessment has taken place within the field of economics. In this paper, I attempt to develop this unexplored task through the economic concepts of commodity, money, capital, and culture. I argue that these concepts can help to draw an updated concept of capitalism and power relations created through capitalist planning. I also claim that these concepts can contribute to understanding the historical specificity of capitalist culture, (...) by understanding it as an historical process of social production. I conclude that these concepts are able to defy Cassirer’s view of capitalism as a system in which economic prosperity and political liberty could be achieved in a universal manner. Finally, I demonstrate that these concepts can shed light on Cassirer’s failed quest to find a coherent universal culture within capitalism. (shrink)

At the end of May 1917, Max Weber attended a “cultural congress” at the picturesque castle of Lauenstein in Thuringia. The congress had been organized by the publicist Eugen Diederichs of Jena and by the Patriotic Society for Thuringia 1914. The moment was a particularly tense one in the life of the embattled German Reich. Against the advice of many cooler heads within the country, Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare in January, which together with other antagonistic moves on its (...) part, had led to the entry of the United States into the war in April. By this point it was clear to all but the most indefatigable optimists that Germany would lose the war. In this atmosphere of dread and of new hope that a phoenix-like new Germany or a new humanity would arise out of the ashes of the war, the participants outlined their visions of the future. The eccentric former Social Democrat-turned-nationalist Max Maurenbrecher denounced capitalist mechanization but called for a revival of the traditional Prussian concept of the state, for an “idealistic state” and for workers to be educated towards national consciousness by means of the German literary and philosophical classics. (shrink)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sociology was becoming established as a discipline in the United States and Great Britain. This article looks closely at the lives and work of two prominent sociologists at this time, Patrick Geddes and Lester F. Ward. As sociology was becoming established in academic departments, neither Ward’s nor Geddes’ thought managed to survive intact. A number of factors played into this process, especially the overall broadness of their perspectives, as well as the incompatibility (...) of several of their key concerns, including gender, religion, race and education, with the eventual trajectory of the sociology and the scholars who were involved in consolidating the discipline as such. (shrink)

An inescapable feature of human growth is the toll in lives, including non-human ones, that occurs through the imperfect management of the institutions and technologies we develop. The histories of colonial and economic expansion, along with those of transportation, communications and political institutions, to name a few areas in man's recent growth, are replete with examples of violence, destruction and chapters of human suffering: part of the price for growing complexity. Since the increasing ability to engage in violence can be (...) considered a manifestation of this human growth, then it becomes equally important to examine the phenomena of violence alongside other phenomena of human growth. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rising rates of suicide were widely held to be indicative of a pervasive crisis of meaning. This article examines the response to the problem of...

During the influx of neurological research into France from across Europe that took place rapidly in the late 19th century, the philosophy course in lycées was mobilized by education reformers as a means of promulgating the emergent brain sciences and simultaneously steering their cultural resonance. I contend that these linked prongs of philosophy’s public mission under the Third Republic reconciled contradictory pressures to advance the nation’s scientific prowess following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 without dropping France’s distinct (...) tradition of 19th-century spiritualism, which extended from Maine de Biran’s philosophical psychology to Victor Cousin’s official eclectic spiritualism. Between 1874 and 1902, the French Ministry of Public Instruction transformed philosophy into a national project designed to guide the reception of experimental psychology generally and neurology in particular. This article features original archival research on philosophy textbooks and students’ course notes that illuminate the cultural and intellectual impact of these sciences in the fin de siècle from inside the classroom. I argue that the scientific turn in the psychology section of the lycée philosophy course reflected and brought about a distinct philosophical movement that I call ‘scientific spiritualism’. While historians have analysed philosophy instruction as a mechanism used by the Third Republic to secularize students, this article sheds new light on lycée philosophy professors’ campaign to promote scientific spiritualism as a means to advance incipient brain research and pare its reductionist implications. (shrink)

A full representation of all events in society is not possible. The Weber–Rickert solution to the establishing of transparent concept formation requires both theoretical and practical value relevance, that is, our fashions of today shape our selections from the past which, though, also have to be valid for the period studied. Max Weber’s tools for the selection of relevant information without risking uncontrolled value intrusion are influenced by Rickert’s historical relativism, which, however, is not free from lingering ‘objectivism’, transcendental metaphysics (...) in the form of normatively generally valid values, while Weber only claims general empirical validity for values serving as tools for abstraction in a process of double historicity. Today’s historical conceptualizations are not immune to conjectures and fashions; there is no permanence or resistance to the ‘teeth of time’. Weber manifests the post-Enlightenment predicament of anxiety and necessity of choice, which Rickert tries to escape by an ‘Indian rope-trick’ or Icarian flight. Weber’s solution anticipates Gunnar Myrdal’s explicit value premises anchored in significant social movements; a more radical anti-metaphysics. Weber’s ‘sociology’ grew out of history and its contemporary problems. His way of dealing with the value-incommensurability problem makes him part also of a long trend of secularization. (shrink)

Daniel Bell’s writings are often cast as offering a contemporary jeremiad regarding the corrosive effects of culture upon the modern economic and social order. In this paper, I take the opposite approach and argue that Bell is a sensitive cultural analyst who is claiming that human experience ought not to be deprived of culture – understood as symbol and myth that tap into the felt need for human transcendence. Bell could therefore be seen as a strong advocate for the concept (...) of culture, and for a cultural sociology. It is only that the modern versions of culture do not realize the full potential of culture to move and inspire human actors. The conclusion is reached that what ails modern culture is neither rationalization nor secularization, but rather what Bell termed the ‘Great Profanization’. Rendering culture profane is much more serious, and deleterious, than any of the other specific dynamics sociologists have diagnosed regarding modern culture. (shrink)