The paper discusses Arvi Grotenfelt's, professor of philosophy in Helsinki 1905 – 29, reading of Heinrich Rickert's philosophy of history. Rickert was one of the key figures of the so-called south-west German neo-Kantianism. In the center of attention of the south- west neo-Kantians was the topic that Immanuel Kant himself had omitted: how to philosophically establish the humanities and the social sciences and separate them from the natural sciences? Rickert's philosophy of history was essentially an attempt to ground the historical (...) knowledge in a strictly transcendental philosophy in the Kantian sense. His argumentation relied on his concept of value. Grotenfelt did not share Rickert's definition of values. According to his view, the fundamental foundation of our judgements of value is beyond scientific reasoning. I will also argue that Grotenfelt's standpoint has a general affinity to Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of world view. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Schrift unternimmt eine Revision des vorherrschenden Bildes der Rolle und der Konzeptionen von Moral und Ethik im Wiener Kreis. Dieses Bild wird als zu einseitig und undifferenziert zurückgewiesen. Die Ansicht, die Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises hätten kein Interesse an Moral und Ethik gezeigt, wird widerlegt. Viele Mitglieder waren nicht nur moralisch und politisch interessiert, sondern auch engagiert. Des Weiteren vertraten nicht alle die Standardauffassung logisch-empiristischer Ethik, die neben der Anerkennung deskriptiv-empirischer Untersuchungen durch die Ablehnung jeglicher normativer und inhaltlicher (...) Ethik und der Verfechtung eines extremen Nonkognitivismus geprägt ist. Am meisten entspricht die Standardauffassung den Ansichten Rudolf Carnaps, weniger bereits jenen Karl Mengers, Otto Neuraths oder Philipp Franks. Am weitesten weichen Moritz Schlick, Victor Kraft sowie Herbert Feigl von der Standardauffassung ab. Entgegen dem herkömmlichen Bild weltabgewandter Logiker und Metaethiker wurde im Wiener Kreis sogar Angewandte Ethik betrieben, und dies bereits unter diesem Namen. Neben den ethischen Hauptthemen und Ansichten der jeweiligen Philosophen in ihrer Entwicklung im Rahmen ihres persönlichen und kulturellen Kontextes zeigt die Untersuchung, dass allen Ansätzen eine aufgeklärte und humanistische Version von Moral und Ethik gemeinsam ist. Dieser wissenschaftliche Humanismus, der sich schon in der Programmschrift Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis findet, liegt jedoch in verschiedenen Ausprägungen vor. Was die Abweichungen von der Standardauffassung wesentlich betrifft, ist ihre unterschiedliche Auffassung von Moral als gemeinsames oder individuelles Unternehmen. Carnap führt ein extremer Individualismus zu einem extremen Nonkognitivismus, in dem ihm Menger folgt. Bei Schlick ist die Lage zweideutig, was sich in unterschiedlichen Moralbegriffen widerspiegelt. Bei Kraft und Feigl tritt das Verständnis von Moral als gemeinschaftlich geteilte Praxisform klar hervor. Auf der Basis eines gemeinsamen Begriffs des moralisch Guten, der auch eine Sachkomponente enthält, ist eine Verständigung über moralische Fragen möglich. Von einem extremen Nonkognitivismus kann dort nicht mehr die Rede sein. Mit diesen Ergebnissen verbietet es sich, dem Wiener Kreis allgemein eine Ablehnung normativer Ethik und einen extremen Nonkognitivismus zuzuschreiben. Eine systematische Ethik, die Moral als Gemeinschaftspraxis begreift, steht einigen im Wiener Kreis näher, als das vorherrschende Bild suggerieren möge. Wer meint, mit engem Bezug zur Tradition des Wiener Kreises nur Carnap folgen zu können und Ethik als suspektes Unternehmen betrachten zu müssen, irrt. Ethik war in der Tradition Analytischer Philosophie nicht immer so marginalisiert, wie sie es in manchen ihrer Teilrichtungen heute noch ist und Gegner(innen) der Analytischen Philosophie vorwerfen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung liefert die nötige Revision einer verfänglichen Fehlentwicklung. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream (...) analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

Inductive thinking is a universal human habit; we generalise from our experiences the best we can. The induction problem is to identify which observed regularities provide reasonable justification for inductive conclusions. In the natural sciences, we can often use strict laws in making successful inferences about unobserved states of affairs. In the social sciences, by contrast, we have no strict laws, only regularities which most often are conditioned on ceteris paribus clauses. This makes it much more difficult to make reliable (...) inferences in the social sciences. In particular, we want knowledge about general causal relations in order to be able to determine what to do in order to achieve a certain state of affairs. Knowledge about causal relations that are also valid in the future requires experiments or so called ‘natural experiments’. Only knowledge derived from such experiences enable us to draw reasonably reliable inferences about how to act in order to achieve our goals. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of science and epistemology revert to the project of the unity of sciences introduced by Rudolf Carnap, Charles William Morris and Otto Neurath in 1930s. It leads to revision of philosophy and semiotics of Charles William Morris, including Ch. W. Morris’ humanistics. According to Ch. W. Morris humanistics is either socio-humanistic sciences or meta-language of socio-humanistic sciences. Depending on what humanistics is – theory of value or descriptive semiotics, it appears as an axiological humanistics or as a scientific (...) humanistics correspondingly. Axiological humanistics is a valuative use of signs which is the reason for preferential behavior. Axiological humanistics as a theory of value is not distinguished from socio-humanistic sciences. And what is more, socio-humanistic sciences make up axiological humanistics. Scientific humanistics as a descriptive semiotics explores actual use of signs in socio-humanistic sciences. Scientific humanistics is a metalanguage of socio-humanistic sciences which Ch. W. Morris qualified as semiotical sciences, i. e. sciences that study semiotic reality, realm of signs and meanings. Since axiological humanistics is socio-humanistic sciences, scientific humanistics is a meta-language of axiological humanistics. In any case scientific humanistics appears to be semiotics of semiotics, i. e. metasemiotics. Scientific humanistics is similar to scientific empiricism over both are semiotics. Thanks to this fact the unity of natural and socio-humanistic sciences can be achieved. But scientific humanistics is different from scientific empiricism because scientific humanistics is a semiotics of semiotical sciences, i. e. meta-semiotics, and scientific empiricism is a semiotics of non-semiotical sciences, i. e. just semiotics. (shrink)

Philosophy of science pays meagre attention to the social sciences and humanities. It deals with basic questions in the natural sciences like Hempel, or general epistemology like e.g. Putnam and Kripke. Popper is the main exception.

This article examines Cohen’s “transcendental method”, Windelband’s “critical method”, the neo-Kantian distinctions between natural science and the humanities (i. e., human or cultural sciences), and Weber’s account of ideal-typical explanations. The Marburg and the Southwest Schools of neo-Kantianism have in common that their respective philosophies of science focused on method, but they substantially differ in their approaches. Cohen advanced the “transcendental method”, which was taken up and transformed by Natorp and Cassirer; later, it became influential in neo-Kantian approaches to 20th (...) century physics. Windelband distinguished between facts and values, linking the former to the “genetic” method of history and the latter to the “critical” method of philosophy; and between the “nomothetic” and “idiographic” methods of the empirical sciences, a distinction further elaborated by Rickert. The distinction does not give rise to a sharp discrimination but is rather what Weber would later call an ideal type. All these approaches contribute in different ways to understanding the structure of scientific knowledge, focusing on different aspects of the general path of the empirical sciences between rationalism and empiricism. (shrink)

This article is concerned with interactions between the natural and the human sciences. It examines a specific late 19th-century episode in their relationship and argues that the schism between the two branches of knowledge was due to cognitive factors, but consolidated through the social dynamics of institutionalized disciplines. It contends that the assignment of a social function to the human sciences to compensate for the self-destructive tendencies inherent in the technological society was expressed even by those, at the end of (...) the 19th century, who were fervent advocates of a science- and technology-driven modernization. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article analyses the transformation of the notion of Bildung that is constructed in the German human sciences. From a perspective of field theory and discourse analysis, the article reveals how the notion evolves and stabilizes during a first stage (1810–60), how it comes under pressure because of the contextual changes in a second stage (1860–1960) and how the tension increases before it is resolved by a fundamental change of the traditional notion of Bildung in a third stage (1960–99).

Philosophy and Structure. On why it is necessary for hermeneutic philosophy to make use of structural theory. In this essay I give reasons for the thesis that hermeneutic philosophy has to adopt considerations on structural theory in order to avoid the paradox of historism. Concepts of structure like 'criticism', 'centralism', 'creativity' etc. possess both a metaphilosophical and an empirical status which enables us to compare and to combine differend and opposed philosophies by means of common structures. Such an hermeneutic reflection (...) on philosophical structures requires the methodical work of fiction and selection. Otherwise relativism concerning the evaluation of philosophical traditions would be the result. (shrink)

Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap's mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values and value judgments were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally (...) positive attitude concerning values. It is argued that his non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never properly dissolved tension between conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap's non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between logical empiricists and American pragmatists. Carnap's persisting adherence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris's and Kaplan's pragmatist theses that cognitivism might well be compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey's late nineteenth-century doctrine of `re-experiencing' the thoughts and feelings of the actors whose lives the social scientist seeks to understand has been criticized by several commentators as entailing a `naïve empathy view of understanding' in which social scientists are said to transport themselves into other cultural contexts in a wholly uncritical, unreflective manner. This article challenges such criticisms by arguing that Dilthey's writings on hermeneutics amount to a highly sophisticated defence of the role of psychological feeling in understanding (...) that should still be of interest to contemporary social theorists. Beginning with a review of the reception of Dilthey's work by Max Weber and the Neo-Kantians, the article goes on to enumerate a number of significant parallels between Dilthey's insights and more recent approaches in social and cultural theory. (shrink)

Este artigo enfoca a originalidade da tentativa de Wilhelm Windelband, o fundador da escola de neokantismo de Baden, de fornecer uma base teórica para a história como disciplina científica. Enquanto Kant, na Crítica da Razão Pura, tomou como modelo para toda a ciência a certeza das leis gerais da ciência da natureza, Windelband pretendia romper com os estreitos limites deste modelo kantiano para fornecer uma teoria de inteligibilidade científica que nenhuma busca por leis gerais poderia enfocar. No lugar dos conceitos (...) gerais, a teoria de Windelband empregou valores historicamente mutáveis que permitem ao historiador colocar em relevo a qualidade singular dos contextos passados e dos indivíduos que neles interagem. Neste estudo, defendo que a vontade de Windelband de reconhecer a historicidade radical dos valores que estão por trás de todas as preocupações culturais, incluindo a continuidade e coerência da própria teoria, trouxe o ideal neokantiano da ciência histórica perante um dilema que ela não poderia resolver. Esta dificuldade, entretanto, não desqualifica de forma alguma a busca original de Windelband, mas exige uma reformulação de seu escopo e propósito fundamental. (shrink)

Gustav Radbruch is one of the most important German‐speaking philosophers of law of the twentieth century. This paper raises the question of how to classify Radbruch's theories in the international context of legal philosophy and philosophy in general. Radbruch's work was mainly influenced by the southwest German school of Neo‐Kantianism, represented by Windelband, Rickert, and Lask. Their theories of culture and value show an affirmative‐holistic understanding of philosophy as a source of wisdom and meaningfulness. Kant, on the other hand, belongs (...) more to a fundamentally different, critical camp of philosophy. Although Radbruch has incorporated Kantian Elements into his theory, he is rather a member of the affirmative‐holistic camp. In the end the question will be raised as to what ought to be preserved of his philosophy. (shrink)

The paper presents an analysis and interpretation of axiology and ethics as seen by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. The author follows the assumption that, in a situation where indifference is observed with regard to values (cf. Simmel, Sloterdijk), a return of philosophical reasoning to the idea of objectivity of values could be worthwhile. Therefore, he examines a specific type of axiological objectivism that can be found in Rand’s work. In the present paper, the suggested comparison with Baden neo-Kantism (...) as well as phenomenological axiology serves to capture the specifics of Rand’s axiological approach. These lie in placing emphasis on such a relationship between facts and values in which values result from the facts of reality, as well as in the very understanding of the objectivity of values that Rand identifies with long-term life goals and identifies them as an objective necessity for an individual’s life. Following the analysis of Rand’s axiology, the author focuses on her understanding of ethics, which he places in contrast to Kant’s deontology, as well as morality, which he views through the prism of a business relationship based on the exchange of values. The aim of the paper is to, by means of an analysis and interpretation of Rand’s ideas, show that objective values can be understood as a necessary prerequisite for consequential ethics and an individual living a happy life without being anchored in transcendence or social consensus. (shrink)

In the paper we build up the ontology of Leśniewski’s type for formalizing synthetic propositions. We claim that for these propositions an unconventional square of opposition holds, where a, i are contrary, a, o (resp. e, i) are contradictory, e, o are subcontrary, a, e (resp. i, o) are said to stand in the subalternation. Further, we construct a non-Archimedean extension of Boolean algebra and show that in this algebra just two squares of opposition are formalized: conventional and the square (...) that we invented. As a result, we can claim that there are only two basic squares of opposition. All basic constructions of the paper (the new square of opposition, the formalization of synthetic propositions within ontology of Leśniewski’s type, the non-Archimedean explanation of square of opposition) are introduced for the first time. (shrink)

The principal thesis of this article is to see Levinas’ philosophy as an attempt to protest against the goodness of health and the undiscussable value of selfcontrol and the notions associated with it – freedom, heroism, and resoluteness. It’s based on the analysis of principle ethical and philosophical conceptions such as Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger.

The early decades of the last century saw European philosophical thought becoming increasingly interested in the sociological extension of the idea of law. From the viewpoint of the sociology of law, law is formed in the process of social interactions and is not sanctioned by the state. Sergey Hessen and Georges Gurvitch base their conceptions of social law on the sociology of law in the 1920s and 1930s. They start a polemic in the pages of the journal Sovremenniye zapiski. Although (...) they differ radically in their definitions of the status of the state they concur in defining society as a set of social institutions and communities existing as instruments for expressing personal freedom. The social regulations they propose are already legal situations. Hessen and Gurvitch believe that the individual can fully exercise his/her freedom only in conditions of such legal pluralism. However, the concept of legal pluralism involves an inherent problem of preserving social unity: why is it that society does not fall into a range of autonomous social entities, each offering the individual its own legal order for actualising freedom? To solve this problem the philosophers use the concept of “the general will”. General will is an instrument of correlation between individual freedom and the development of society and culture as a whole. The object of philosophical dispute is how the general will is formed: 1) in the process of social self-organisation according to Gurvitch; 2) in the operation of the suprafunctional organisation according to Hessen. The difference in the grounding of the general will leads to a difference in the concepts of social unity: 1) sobornost according to Gurvitch and 2) solidarity according to Hessen. Analysis of the dispute between Gurvitch and Hessen brings out not only the differences in the interpretation of social unity but also the fundamental problems with the conceptions of social law. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the recent interest shown by critical realists in the study of generative mechanisms in sociology and proposes stronger integration of hermeneutics into this theoretical approach. There are important differences between realism and hermeneutics. While realism strives to overcome the extremes of empiricism and interpretivism with a new version of naturalism, hermeneutics bases its explanations of society on research into meanings. The question is whether underlining these differences is useful for social theory. On the one hand, underestimating (...) hermeneutics makes it difficult for realists to recognize fully the role that processes of understanding play in generating social change. On the other hand, hermeneutical arguments in sociology idealistically identify being with interpreted being. The concept of generative hermeneutics is designed to help to build an alliance between realism and hermeneutics, since one-sided overemphasis on mechanistic logic devaluates the study of social interaction pursued by interpretative sociology. (shrink)