It is well known that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Brentano school interacted fruitfully with early analytic philosophy: the Russell-Meinong debate is a paradigm example...

This article offers a reconstruction of Brentano’s notion of act content that identifies the content of a mental act with a combination of marks (Merkmale) or a single such mark. The author will first clarify the role act content plays in Brentano’s philosophy of psychology and then go on to locate the proposed notion of content in the historical context of Brentano’s work as well as in his writings at the time of Psychologie. The author will defend this notion against (...) potential objections and explore its explanatory potential. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

What Russell regarded to be the ‘chief outcome’ of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ‘classificatory problem’ that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a spatial (...) one, with such motifs as ‘standpoints’, ‘place’ and ‘perspectives’ in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell’s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem. (shrink)

Shortly before G. E. Moore wrote down the formative for the early analytic philosophy lectures on Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1910–1911), he had become acquainted with two books which influenced his thought: (1) a book by Husserl's pupil August Messer and (2) a book by the Greifswald objectivist Dimitri Michaltschew. Central to Michaltschew's book was the concept of the given. In Part I, I argue that Moore elaborated his concept of sense-data in the wake of the Greifswald concept. Carnap (...) did the same when he wrote his Aufbau, the only difference being that he spoke not of sense-data but of Erlebnisse. This means, I argue, that both Moore's sense-data and Carnap'sErlebnisse have little to do with either British empiricists or the neo-Kantians. In Part II, I try to ascertain what made early analytic philosophy different from all those philosophical groups and movements that either exercised influence on it, or were closely related to it: phenomenologists, Greifswald objectivists, Brentanists. For this purpose, I identify the sine qua non practices of the early analytic philosophers: exactness; acceptance of the propositional turn; descriptivism; objectivism. If one of these practices was not explored by a given philosophical school or group, in all probability, it was not truly analytic. (shrink)

In 1956, a series of BBC radio talks was published in London under the title The Revolution in Philosophy . This short book included papers by prominent British philosophers of the day, such as Sir Alfred Ayer and Sir Peter Strawson, with an introduction by Gilbert Ryle. Although there is precious little in it concerning the precise nature of the ‘revolution’ alluded to in the title, it is quite clear that these lectures were meant to celebrate in an insular manner (...) the birth of ‘analytic philosophy’ at the hands of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The use of the word ‘revolution’ to describe the birth of ‘analytical philosophy’ and its rise to near complete dominance in the British universities thus carries with it connotations of a forcible substitution of one philosophical order by a new one that itself owed nothing to the past. To me, however, this talk of ‘revolution’ carries with it a false view of the history of British philosophy: it isn’t ‘historical’ at all, just ideological; it was introduced for a strategic purpose, namely that of encouraging new generations of students to avoid reading the work of earlier philosophers or becoming interested in the problems that concerned them. I shall sketch the broad outlines of a landscape that involves, when limited to the specific topic of the theory of knowledge, no radical break, where no entirely new order replaces an older one: the options, so to speak, and even some of the arguments are the same before and after the soi-disant ‘revolution’. (shrink)

This article examines the post-Ryle developments in philosophy of mind and psychology, in particular tracing the emergence of the concept of a mental state. The climate immediately following the large-scale rejection of Descartes seems rather hostile to the idea of mental properties as internal states that cause behaviour. In this context, the emergence of the reificatory view of mental states is quite surprising, and it appears to stem from Putnam's adoption of the Turing machine as a model for human psychology. (...) I conclude that the success of the “mental state” is down to the fact that it neatly conforms to the picture painted by the metaphorical expressions we use when talking about minds and mental things, and that its success is more accidental than inevitable. (shrink)