On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a powerful sway (...) over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap’s lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on “Science and Life.” “I work in science,” he began, “and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life.”1 In this paper I will explore this “single life” of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years. 1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, “Wissenschaft und Leben,” prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh , document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End and Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, edited with Bruce Hevly . His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. (shrink)

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an earlier philosophical study (...) of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition. (shrink)

This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Even the Papuan is a Man and not a Beast”: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of CulturesDermot Moran (bio)“[A]nd in this broad sense even the Papuan is a man and not a beast.” ([U]nd in diesem weiten Sinne ist auch der Papua Mensch und nicht Tier, Husserl, Crisis, 290/Hua. VI.337–38)1“Reason is the specific characteristic of man, as a being living in personal activities and habitualities.” (Vernunft ist das (...) Spezifische des Menschen, als in personalen Aktivitäten und Habitualitäten lebenden Wesens, Husserl, Crisis, 338/Hua. VI.272)1. Particular Historicities and Universal ReasonIn this paper2 i shall explore—and suggest a way of resolving—the evident tensions to be found in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (and associated texts) [End Page 463] between his commitment to the universality of reason as the goal or telos of European humanity (founded on the ancient Greek “breakthrough” to philosophy and science) and his recognition of the empirical plurality and “relativity” (Relativität) of individual peoples and nations (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Papuan, Bantu) locked into their own particular “socialities” (Sozialitäten), communal worlds, and historical trajectories (what Husserl broadly calls “historicities,” Geschichtlichkeiten, Historizitäten). 3 I shall examine the complex relations and tensions between Husserl’s conception of universality, whereby the same reason functions in every human as animal rationale, “no matter how primitive he is” (“Origin of Geometry,” Crisis, 378/ Hua. VI.385), and his concept of the self-enclosed particularity of individual peoples with their own cultural forms. Indeed, Husserl often emphasizes that the most prominent feature of cultural plurality is precisely its relativity: “relativity belongs to the normal course of life.”4 I shall evaluate Husserl’s response, which defends the project of realizing the ideal of a critical universal rationality, by situating his discussion in terms of the cultural conflict of the time with the rising National Socialist commitment to racial particularism, and by showing Husserl’s commitment to the inherent universality of the one shared life-world.In his research manuscripts of the 1920s and 1930s Husserl frequently discusses the complex relationships that exist between different cultures and traditions; different cultures have their specific historicities (Crisis, 274/Hua. VI.320), dialects, norms, ways of life, and so on. This is simply a matter of fact. There are, furthermore, some well-known and controversial passages in Husserl’s “Vienna Lecture” of May 1935 and also in his Crisis texts (both in the main 1936 published text, Part One [§6] and in the then unpublished Crisis Part Three A §365) where Husserl speaks of the universality inherent in European philosophical culture of the logos and contrasts it with various other communal forms, which are, in his view, merely “empirical-anthropological” types, enclosed in their particular historicities and relativities. Indeed, in this context, Husserl regularly invokes the idea of the “relativity of everything historical” (die Relativität alles Historischen, Crisis, 373/Hua. VI.382). In addition, there are a number of related texts, collected in the Crisis supplementary volume (Hua. XXIX),6 in the Intersubjectivity volumes (especially Hua. XV),7 as well as in the recent volume on the life-world [End Page 464] (Hua. XXXIX),8 which discuss the empirical differences between peoples and also the layers and strata of social groups, nations, and even the idea of larger international collectivities or “supernations” (Übernationen), such as Europe, or the League of Nations. Furthermore, there are—as Husserl indicates in his 1935 letter to the prominent French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl—even cultures that are completely “self-enclosed” (abgeschlossene) unities, cut off, some of which know no history. According to Husserl, into this classical world of closed cultures, the ancient Greeks bring a new form of universality, one that leads them, through the grasp of idealization to infinite tasks, to break through the finite horizons of their environing world (Umwelt), which presents itself to them as a “near-world” (Nahwelt, Crisis, 324/Hua. VI.303; Hua. XXVII.228), and to arrive at the highly refined concept of the “true world” or the “scientific world [which] is a purposeful structure (Zweckgebilde) extending to infinity” (Crisis, 382... (shrink)

Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientific materialism is then contrasted with a different diagnosis of the abstractive maladies of modern society, the one (...) put forward under the Marxist rubric of `real abstraction'. While both stances allow us to explore the social repercussions of abstractive practices, it is argued that an understanding of the practically abstract character of capitalism permits us to identify the limits of Whitehead's pedagogical wish to reform our culture of abstraction. (shrink)

This paper places Husserl’s mature work, The Crisis of the European Sciences, in the context of his engagement with – and critique of – experimental psychology at the time. I begin by showing (a) that Husserl accorded psychology a crucial role in his philosophy, i.e., that of providing a scientific analysis of subjectivity, and (b) that he viewed contemporary psychology – due to its naturalism – as having failed to pursue this goal in the appropriate manner. I then provide an (...) analysis of Husserl’s views about naturalism and scientific philosophy. Some central themes of the Crisis are traced back to Husserl’s earlier work and to his relationship with his teacher, Franz Brentano, with whom he disagreed about the status of “inner perception” as the proper scientific method for a phenomenological analysis. The paper then shows that Husserl was well aware of at least one publication about the crisis of psychology (Bühler’s 1927 book), and it teases out some aspects of the complicated relationship between Husserl and members of the Würzburg School of thought psychology: The latter had drawn on Husserl’s writings, but Husserl felt that they had misunderstood his central thesis. I conclude by placing Husserl’s work in the wider context of scientific, cultural, and political crisis-discourses at the time. (shrink)

This paper, on the psychopathology and phenomenology of schizophrenia, presents a selective summary of the work of the French psychiatrist, Eugene Minkowski (1985-1972), one of the first psychiatrists of an explicitly phenomenological persuasion. Minkowki believed that the phenomenological essence of schizophrenia (what he called the "trouble générateur") consists in a loss of "vital contact with reality" (VCR) and manifests itself as autism. Loss of vital contact with reality signifies a morbid change in the temporo-spatial structure of experiencing, particularly in the (...) diminishment and modification of temporal-dynamic aspects and a corresponding predominance of spatial-static factors. The patient tries to compensate for this primary morbid process through a variety of affective-cognitive preoccupations (rich autism) or sterile intellectuoid attitudes (autisme pauvre). Autism signifies a morbidly modified existential pattern that affects the domains of experience and expression as well as action. Minkowski's psychopathological analyses are illustrated by brief clinical vignettes of his patients. (shrink)

The 1929 between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos (...) debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline. (shrink)

It is a well-known fact that Ernst Cassirer was inspired by his colleague, the biologist Jakob von Uexkiill at the university of Hamburg. This paper claims this inspiration was double—affecting both Cassirer's philosophical anthropology and Cassirer's epistemology of biology, but in two rather different ways. Thus, the paper intends to shed light on a corner of the history of the development of German thought of the interwar period. It may also have an actual interest because both Cassirer and Uexkiill enjoy, (...) for the time being and each in their way, a renaissance, e.g. in the recent field of biosemiotics. (shrink)

The sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer developed strikingly similar theories of modernity. Both viewed the transition from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world as the modern age's distinguishing characteristic. But they interpreted this transition from very different philosophical perspectives. Simmel subscribed to a phenomenalism derived from Mach, whereas Cassirer advocated an objectivism inspired by a particular interpretation of Kant. This epistemological disagreement helps account for the two thinkers’ divergent cultural attitudes. Whereas Simmel viewed the (...) complex structures of modernity as an alienation from the flow of subjective life, Cassirer viewed them as a proper expression of humanity's symbolising capacity. Simmel's cultural pessimism developed into an enthusiasm for radical collective action, especially during the First World War. Cassirer's optimism, conversely, guarded him against this temptation. (shrink)