Commentaires sur le débat nativisme-empirisme au XIXe siècle et la théorie des signes locaux de Lotze.

The task of this paper is to show that Franz Brentano was not a solitary figure who advanced his philosophy in complete isolation from other contemporary philosophers in Germany, as some Neo-Brentanists have claimed over the last 30–40 years. He developed his philosophical psychology in the context of his time—in particular, under the influence of Hermann Lotze.

Lotze’s "Microcosm" was published in three volumes, in 1856, 1858 and 1864, respectively. It was soon one of the most widely read philosophy books of the time. It was translated into French and Russian immediately, into English in 1885/87, and into Italian in 1911/16. The book saw six editions in Germany alone by 1923.

The purpose of this study is to assess Husserl’s debt to Lotze’s philosophy during the Halle period (1886-1901). I shall first track the sources of Husserl’s knowledge of Lotze’s philosophy during his studies with Brentano in Vienna and then with Stumpf in Halle. I shall then briefly comment on Husserl’s references to Lotze in his early work and research manuscripts for the second volume of his Philosophy of Arithmetic. In the third section, I examine Lotze’s influence (...) on Husserl’s antipsychologistic turn in the mid-1890s. The fourth section is a commentary on Husserl’s manuscript entitled “Microcosmus,” to which he explicitly refers in his Prolegomena, and which he planned to publish as an annex of his Logical Investigations. This work contains a detailed analysis of the third book of Lotze’s 1874 Logic. The last section examines Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism in his Prolegomena, which I discuss through the lens of Stumpf’s critique of psychologism in his paper “Psychology and theory of knowledge”. I argue that Stumpf’s early works on this topic make it possible to establish a connection between Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of Ideas and Husserl’s antipsychologism. My hypothesis is that Stumpf’s analyses represent the background of Husserl's critique of logical psychologism in his Logical Investigations. I shall conclude this study by showing that Husserl’s position with respect to Lotze’s philosophy remains basically unchanged after the publication of his Logical Investigations, and that Husserl’s main criticism of Lotze pertains, in the final analysis, to the absence of a theory of intentionality in Lotze’s philosophy. (shrink)

Many historians of analytic philosophy consider the early philosophy of Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein as much more neo-Hegelian as once believed. At the same time, the authors who closely investigate Green, Bradley and Bosanquet find out that these have little in common with Hegel. The thesis advanced in this chapter is that what the British (ill-named) neo-Hegelians brought to the early analytic philosophers were, above all, some ideas of Lotze, not of Hegel. This is true regarding: (i) Lotze’s (...) logical approach to practically all philosophical problems; (ii) his treating of the concepts relation, structure (constructions) and order; (iii) the discussion of the concepts of states of affairs, multiple theory of judgment, general logical form; (iv) some common themes like panpsychism and contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. (shrink)

Resumo: Franz Brentano não foi uma figura solitária que propôs sua filosofia isolada de outros filósofos contemporâneos na Alemanha, tal como alguns neo-brentanianos reivindicaram nos últimos anos. O objetivo deste artigo é corrigir tais concepções equivocadas estabelecendo que Brentano desenvolveu sua psicologia filosófica engajado ativamente no rico contexto histórico-intelectual e acadêmico de seu tempo - em particular, sob a influência de Hermann Lotze. Especificamente, Brentano: (i) adota de Lotze a ideia de que juízo não é apenas uma associação (...) de ideias, mas uma asserção do conteúdo; (ii) também adota a ideia de Lotze de que o conteúdo da percepção é algo dado; (iii) a noção brentaniana de intencionalidade também foi herdada de Lotze, (iv) bem como o método da psicologia descritiva; (v) finalmente, Lozte e Brentano concordaram ao admitir que percepção e conhecimento estão intrinsicamente conectados às emoções. Ao mesmo tempo, há ao menos dois pontos nos quais Brentano discorda de Lotze: (i) ele critica a teoria da percepção do signo local, bem como o atomismo de Lotze. Estas eram claramente teorias construtivistas inspiradas por Kant. (ii) Brentano também critica o princípio do teleomecanismo de Lotze, influenciado pelos idealistas alemães. (shrink)

In the section “Validity and Existence in Logik, Book III,” I explain Lotze’s famous distinction between existence and validity in Book III of Logik. In the following section, “Lotze’s Platonism,” I put this famous distinction in the context of Lotze’s attempt to distinguish his own position from hypostatic Platonism and consider one way of drawing the distinction: the hypostatic Platonist accepts that there are propositions, whereas Lotze rejects this. In the section “Two Perspectives on Frege’s Platonism,” (...) I argue that this is an unsatisfactory way of reading Lotze’s Platonism and that the Ricketts-Reck reading of Frege is in fact the correct way of thinking about Lotze’s Platonism. (shrink)

El propósito del presente estudio es afirmar la deuda de Husserl con la filosofía de Lotze durante el período de Halle. Mi interés se centra especialmente en el pensamiento del joven Husserl desde su llegada a Halle en 1886 hasta la publicación de su Hauptwerk en 1900-1901. Primero me remontaré a las fuentes del conocimiento de la filosofía de Lotze por parte de Husserl durante sus estudios con Brentano en Viena y después con Stumpf en Halle. Luego comentaré (...) brevemente las referencias de Husserl a Lotze en sus primeros trabajos y en sus manuscritos de investigación para el segundo volumen de su Filosofía de la aritmética. En la tercera sección, examino la influencia de Lotze en el giro antipsicologista de Husserl a mediados de la década de 1890. La cuarta sección es un comentario al manuscrito de Husserl titulado "Microcosmos", al cual se refiere explícitamente en sus Prolegómenos, y que planeaba publicar como anexo a sus Investigaciones lógicas. Esta obra contiene un análisis detallado del tercer volumen de la Lógica de Lotze de 1874. La última sección examina los argumentos de Husserl contra el psicologismo lógico en sus Prolegómenos, que yo expongo a través del prisma de la crítica de Stumpf al psicologismo en su artículo "Psicología y teoría del conocimiento". Sostengo que las primeras obras de Stumpf sobre este asunto hacen posible establecer una conexión entre la interpretación de Lotze de la teoría de las Ideas de Platón y el antipsicologismo de Husserl. Mi hipótesis es que los análisis de Stumpf representan el fondo de la crítica de Husserl al psicologismo lógico en sus Investigaciones lógicas. Concluiré este estudio mostrando que la posición de Husserl respecto de la filosofía de Lotze permanece básicamente la misma después de la publicación de sus Investigaciones lógicas, y que la principal crítica de Husserl a Lotze se refiere, en un último análisis, a la ausencia de una teoría de la intencionalidad en la filosofía de Lotze. (shrink)

Carl Stumpf (1848–1937) is a key figure in the fin de siècle germanophone philosophy. Unfortunately, after the World War One, the interest towards Stumpf as a philosopher waned. One of the reasons was that already in the 1920s the attention of the mainstream philosophers shifted in direction of the rising rivalry between analytic and continental philosophy. The interest towards Carl Stumpf’s philosophy was revived only in the last twenty years or so. Great service in this provided the Neo-Brentanists. But while (...) the association of Carl Stumpf with Franz Brentano fostered Stumpf studies, it also gave rise of one-sided interpretations of Stumpf as a philosopher. In this way his importance and idiosyncrasy as philosopher remained in shadow. (shrink)

State of affairs (Sachverhalt) is one of the few terms in philosophy, which only came into use for the first time in the twentieth century, mainly via the works of Husserl and Wittgenstein. This makes the task of finding out who introduced this concept into philosophy, and in exactly what sense, of considerable interest. Our thesis is that Lotze introduced the term in 1874 in the sense of the objective content of judgments, which is ipso facto the minimal structured (...) ontological unit. We would argue against authors such as Michael Dummett and Barry Smith, who have tried to prove that Lotze's theory of judgment, and so of states of affairs, was ad-vanced in the wake of psychologism. (shrink)

Je soutiens que la prise en compte de Lotze dans la genèse de la phénoménologie du jeune Husserl fournit de nouveaux éléments qui supportent la lecture frégéenne de la phénoménologie. Pour ce faire, je vais d’abord retracer l’origine lozéenne des questions épistémologiques issues du développement de la nouvelle psychologie et de la logique au milieu du XIXe siècle en Allemagne et j’insisterai sur l’apport de trois de ses étudiants prestigieux; je montrerai ensuite que Husserl a acquis sa connaissance de (...) cette problématique via sa fréquentation de Brentano et de Stumpf; je me pencherai ensuite sur la tournant antipsychologiste de Husserl au milieu des années 1890 et examinerai brièvement un manuscrit de Husserl intitulé « Microcosmos » qui date de cette même période et qui montre clairement l’apport de la logique de Lotze dans ce tournant antipsychologiste; j’examinerai enfin brièvement l’apport de Lotze dans la critique que Husserl adresse au psychologisme logique dans ses Prolégomènes. Je conclurai avec quelques remarques sur l’importance de Lotze dans la phénoménologie de Husserl après la publication des Recherches logiques. (shrink)

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In (...) spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception. (shrink)

Hermanns Lotze (1817–1881) hat nachweislich einige der bedeutendsten Philosophen des fin de siècle beeinflusst: (i) die britischen „Neo-Hegelianer“; (ii) Husserls Phänomenologie; (iii) Diltheys Philosophie des Lebens; (iv) die Neukantianer; (v) die frühere analytische Philosophie. Das angegebene Ziel seines dreibändigen Mikrokosmos (1856–1864) war „die Reflexion über den Sinn unseres menschlichen Daseins“. Die Aktualität dieser Aufgabe war eine Folge der wissenschaftlichen und industriellen Revolution Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Sie veränderte die Art, wie sich die Menschen das Universum vorstellten. Lotze sah (...) Gefahr in den zahlreichen Versuchen seitens einiger philosophisch interessierter Wissenschaftler in Deutschland, zu beweisen, dass das menschliche Sein nur mechanisch und materialistisch zu verstehen ist. Er machte es sich zur Aufgabe, den Menschen das Gefühl von Heimat in dieser stark veränderten Welt zurückzugeben. Dies erklärt auch, wieso Lotze seine Untersuchung in „völlig populärer Form“ darstellte. Lotzes Mikrokosmos war jedoch nicht nur ein Werk der populären Philosophie. Sie fußt auf fundierten theoretischen Überlegungen. Man kann Lotzes Werk als einen gewagten Versuch betrachten, die sich abzeichnende Spaltung zwischen akademischer und populärer Philosophie zu überwinden. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom has it that between 1905 and 1919 Russell was critical to pragmatism. In particular, in two essays written in 1908–9, he sharply attacked the pragmatist theory of truth, emphasizing that truth is not relative to human practice. In fact, however, Russell was much more indebted to the pragmatists, in particular to William James, as usually believed. For example, he borrowed from James two key concepts of his new epistemology: sense-data, and the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and (...) knowledge by description. Reasonable explanation of this is that, historically, Russell’s logical realism and James’s pragmatism have the same roots—the German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). In this paper we are going to explore the fact that in 1905, under Lotze’s influence, Russell married propositions with beliefs. A few years later this step also made Russell prone to embrace the theory of truth-making that has its roots in James. In contrast to the concept of sense-data and to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, however, the understanding that we believe propositions—and not, for example, simply grasp them—was in tension with Russell’s Principle of Extensionality, according to which propositions can be logically connected with other propositions only as truth-functions. The point is that when we judge a mind-relation (for example, a relation of belief) to a proposition, the latter cannot be determined as true or false. The two most talented pupils of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ramsey, severely criticized the central place propositional attitudes play in Russell’s logic. Wittgenstein analyzed “A believes that p” to “ ‘p’ says p” (5.542). Ramsey criticized Russell’s beliefs in propositions the other way round: He stressed that belief is an ambiguous term that can be interpreted for the better in the sense of pragmatism. Prima facie surprisingly, he maintained that his “pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell.” (1927: 51). (shrink)

The influence of Brentano on the emergence of Husserl's notion of intentionality has been usually perceived as the key of understanding the history of intentionality, since Brentano was credited with the discovery of intentionality, and Husserl was his discipline. This much debated question is to be revisited in the present essay by incorporating recent advances in Brentano scholarship and by focusing on Husserl's very first work, his habilitation essay (Über den Begriff der Zahl), which followed immediately after his study years (...) at Brentano, and also on manuscript notes from the same period. It is to be shown that (i) although Brentano failed to enact a direct influence on Husserl's notion of intentionality (much in line with K. Schuhmann's claim), (ii) yet the core of Brentano's notion remained operative in Husserl's theory of relations, which is seemingly influenced by John Stuart Mill and Hermann Lotze. This investigation is intended as a contribution towards the proper understanding of the complexities of Husserl's early philosophy. (shrink)

Both ‘Sachverhalt’ and ‘state of affairs’ seem to have been derived from the juridical ‘status’ in the sense of 'status rerum' meaning: state or constitution of things. ‘Status’ signifies also in an extended sense ‘the way things stand, the condition or peculiarity of a thing in regard to its circumstances, position, order’. We describe the history of usage of ‘Sachverhalt’ from these beginnings, addressing the role of Goclenius, Lotze, Stumpf, Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whose theory of the relations between (...) judgment and Sachverhalt served as one starting point for the development of Reinach’s theory of speech acts in 1913. (shrink)

English title: The Problem of the Synthetic a priori Judgements According to Hermann Lotze. The present article compares Kant’s and Lotze’s concepts of synthetic judgements. Lotze’s aim is a renewing of the Kant’s solutions, what he achieves thanks to introduction of the distinction between analytic (identical) content and synthetic form of these judgements which Kant recognised as synthetic. This distinction makes possible to lay down the concept of intentional sense which has influence over Frege and Husserl.

The article deals with the anthropological views of M. Olesnytskyі, a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy (КТА), whose creative work has not yet been properly studied. It reveals the connection of his anthropological ideas with moral theology and ethical doctrine, which he had taught for a long time in the KTA. Anthropological implications of the moral formation of a human person are also paid attention to, in particular, the dependence of the moral character on anthropological factors. In this context, (...) the writing considers Olesnytskyі’s views on the peculiarities of a person’s body-build. The Kyiv scholar focused on the principles of human corporeality based on natural conditions. In particular, Olesnytskyі stressed that it was the earth’s conditions that formed the bodily nature of man. The article also explores those religious ideas that influenced the anthropological views of the Kyiv scholar, which is quite understandable in view of his Christian outlook. Olenytskyі demonstrates the possibility of effective application of contemporary philosophical studies to the theological and anthropological analysis of man as an individual. In this sense, the conceptual connections of the anthropological views of the Kyiv scholar with the ones of the influential contemporary European philosophers and anthropologists, such as А. Schopenhauer, R. H. Lotze, F. Schleiermacher, E. von Hartmann, and others, become clearly evident. The article emphasizes the significance of the concept of the unconscious for the moral anthropological doctrine of Olesnytskyі; it also argues for the connection of this concept to the leading European doctrines of the unconscious, which were elaborated in philosophy and psychology in the second half of the 19 th century. (shrink)

This paper is about the topic of psychologism in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski and my aim is to revisit this important issue in light of recent publications from, and on Twardowski’s works. I will first examine the genesis of psychologism in the young Twardowski’s work; secondly, I will examine Twardowski’s picture theory of meaning and Husserl’s criticism in Logical Investigations; the third part is about Twardowski’s recognition and criticism of his psychologism in his lectures on the psychology of thinking; (...) the fourth and fifth parts provide an overview of Twardowski’s paper “Actions and Products” while the sixth part addresses the psychologism issue in the last part of this paper through the delineation of psychology and the humanities. I shall conclude this study with a brief assessment of Twardowski’s solution to psychologism. (shrink)

States of affairs are entities like snow’s being white. This dissertation encompasses two projects. First, I provide a historical survey of the concept of state of affairs as it has been used in the history of ontology. Second, I provide a novel conceptual account of states of affairs.

The received view has it that analytic philosophy emerged as a rebellion against the German Idealists (above all Hegel) and their British epigones (the British neo-Hegelians). This at least was Russell’s story: the German Idealism failed to achieve solid results in philosophy. Of course, Frege too sought after solid results. He, however, had a different story to tell. Frege never spoke against Hegel, or Fichte. Similarly to the German Idealists, his sworn enemy was the empiricism (in his case, John Stuart (...) Mill). Genealogically, this stance is not difficult to explain. Frege grew up as a philosopher in the context of the German Idealists. He was a member of Karl Snell’s “Sunday Circle” of university teachers in Jena. The group was influenced with Schelling and the German romanticists. The first Anglophone scholar to point out what Frege's thought owes to nineteenth-century Germany philosophy, Hans Sluga, argued that Frege followed the philosophical-logical tradition originating with Leibniz and Kant which Trendelenburg and Lotze developed significantly. About the same time, a philosophical historian writing in German, Gottfried Gabriel, did much to bring this tradition to light, casting Frege as neo-Kantian. Advancing beyond Sluga and Gabriel, the present paper reveals that through the mediation of Trendelenburg and especially of Lotze many elements of German idealism found their way into Frege's logic and philosophy. (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the pervading (...) Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)