Early 20th Century Analytic Philosophy

Abstracts for 20 papers to be discussed at a symposium on  Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, From the Notes of G. E Moore, edited by David Stern, Brian Rogers, and Gabriel Citron.  The symposium will be held at the University of Iowa, May 18-22, 2015.

C. I. Lewis’s distinction between the given and the concept is often exposed as the key element of his treatment of the problem of intentionality in that the given and the concept would be necessary and sufficient conditions for objective purport. Such an account nonetheless offers a truncated picture of Lewis’s treatment of the problem of intentionality. The best way to appreciate this verdict is to state the predicament this account is confronted with: If the distinction between the given and the concept apparently leads to a version of the same problem it was designed to address, how could it be the key element contributing to answering the problem of intentionality? Indeed, according to Lewis, the given and the concept are mutually independent so that prima facie nothing guarantees that concepts are applicable to the given. The difficulty is what Lewis calls “the problem of the a priori”: how to guarantee that our concepts can be imposed upon a content of experience which is independent and not yet given? This is a version of the problem that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction addresses: How can categories, as subjective conditions of experience, be objectively valid? A natural question is then: How does Lewis address the problem of the a priori? The main purpose of this essay is then to investigate how C. I. Lewis’s addresses the problem of the a priori and to contribute to restoring an appropriate understanding of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism.
http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/2573

Here we compare the logical behaviour of negation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921) with Demos’ account of denial (1917). Even if we hold negation as a pure syntactical device, at least in some context, it shall bring a handful of complex semantic information, potentially infinite (e.g. in the ascription of degrees to empirical qualities or of colours to visual points). We advocate then the existence of at least two negations due to the existence of two different and non-reducible kinds of exclusion. The first one is, in some sense, a tractarian and classical one, based on the notion of contradiction, and the second negation is a non-classical one, based on the notion of contrariety.

Every intellectual inquiry is geared towards the truth about reality of the world so as to make the truth of such reality accessible and objective. However, some falsehoods seem to realize this aim better than other falsehoods while some truths realize this aim better than some truths do. The dichotomy of the class of propositions into truths and falsehoods should thus be supplemented with a more fine-tuned ordering- one which classifies propositions according to their closeness to the truth, their degree of truth-likeness or verisimilitude. Viewing this, the method or nature of explanations especially in the Analytic Tradition stands out as an indispensable aspect of the truth of reality as it provides in an explicit way the approaches employed in addressing issues in philosophy which are objectively aimed at unraveling the mystery of the truth of reality in all its inquiries. In this connection, different schools and different philosophers have attempted to expound these methods in a bid to get to the realization of the truthfulness of reality.

[If you refer to the paper, please send me a message.] The textbook-like history of analytic philosophy is a history of myths, re-ceived views and dogmas. Though mainly the last few years have witnessed a huge amount of historical work that aimed to reconsider our narratives of the history of ana-lytic philosophy there is still a lot to do. The present study is meant to present such a micro story which is still quite untouched by historians. According to the received view Kripke has defeated all the arguments of Quine against quantified modal logic and thus it became a respectful tool for philosophers. If we accept the historical interpreta-tion of the network between Quine, Kripke and modal logic, which is to be presented here, we have to conclude that Quine’s real philosophical animadversions against the modalities are still on the table: though Kripke has provided some important (formal-logical) answers, Quine’s animadversions are still viable and worthy of further considera-tion.

Common sense has often been unflatteringly defined as a grab-bag of unjustified beliefs and incoherent intuitions. Likewise, G. E. Moore’s work as the 20th Century’s champion of common sense philosophy is often regarded as little more than a historical curiosity, rife with arguments that are both unconvincing and question begging. In opposition to these claims, I will show that common sense beliefs and Moore have been unfairly overlooked and that a closer examination of his work will provide important epistemological insights. In “A Defence of Common Sense” Moore makes a list of common sense assertions that the non-philosopher would regard as obvious truths. The list asserts commonly accepted beliefs such as that he has a body and that objects exist outside his mind. The purpose of Moore's project was to reject the speculative claims of idealism as well as provide a response to skeptical worries about the justification of one’s most basic knowledge claims. While Moore invokes the notion of common sense to defend his list of beliefs he never bothers to define or defend the notion of common sense itself. In this paper I propose a definition for common sense beliefs as learned but not taught knowledge. Drawing on both Moore and the later Wittgenstein, I will show that common sense beliefs are  acquired through an interaction between the agent and the world and that they are necessary for the construction of further beliefs. This perspective on common sense beliefs can both provide a better defence of Moore's project and provide the tools through which a diagnosis of skeptical dilemmas can be reached.

According to Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein composed TS 209 (Philo-sophical Remarks) and handed it in to Russell in order to renew a grant from the Cambridge Council Cambridge in April-May 1930. Pichler (1994, 2009) and Rothhaupt (2010) challenged Rhees' hypothesis and claimed that Witt-genstein handed in TS 208 to Russell, and not TS 209. Against their view, I argue that Rhees' hypothesis best explains the major motive for the composition of Philosophical Remarks, and that it best explains what Wittgenstein handed in to Russell. While I give six reasons in favor of Rhees, I also try to explain how Russell, Moore, Littlewood, Schlick, and Waismann are linked with the composition of TS 208 and TS 209.

This paper aims to offer a concise overview of certain key features of the accounts of emotion defended by the early phenomenologists. After briefly presenting the movement of early phenomenology and describing its historical context, I shall elaborate the main claims about the emotions defended by this group, articulating them through the following five topics: 1) the stratification of emotional life; 2) the qualitative and phenomenal aspect of emotional experience; 3) the foundation of the emotions in cognitive acts; 4) the intentionality of the emotions; and 5) their moral dimension. The paper finishes with some concluding remarks about the significance of the early phenomenological discussion of the emotions for the debate on this topic in contemporary analytical philosophy.

This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the intent of arguing that the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is a spurious one of no real benefit to the enterprise of philosophy as long as it remains so pronounced and important philosophers of either side are neglected in their opposite tradition. It shows that these two philosophers, undeniably held up as important and influential in their respective traditions, can not only be meaningfully compared but actually display similar motives, projects, arguments and methods, and when read together productively illuminate each other’s work. This I think can be done not just with these two philosopher’s bodies of work, but with many others either side of the divide. The divide then, does not mean very much, merely denoting a difference in focus and method. My main comparative point I will make in arguing this is that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein use a negative concept (nothing and nonsense, respectively) as part of a project of initiating an overcoming of metaphysics. Heidegger questions nothingness in order to get to the heart of what metaphysics is and having done so informs us that even questioning the nature of metaphysics questions beyond metaphysics. Metaphysics is engaged with and put on display as something to be overcome. Something similar, I argue, happens in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein engages with previous ways of doing philosophy (and thus metaphysics), putting them on display before informing us that they are in fact nonsense. What he actually sees as nonsense is engaged with, reproduced and declared as something to be overcome. Other points are made along the way, such as that Wittgenstein’s thought is more continuous than was originally supposed and that the early Wittgenstein can be just as meaningfully compared with Heidegger as the later Wittgenstein has been, but our main point of comparison will be on negative concepts used as parts of projects that engage with metaphysics in order that it can be overcome. This is more than a superficial similarity in method and project, so if the divide really does denote something significant, it does not seem to in this area.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the content and context of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. It argues that Ayer's book did more than just misrepresent some of the theses of the Vienna Circle, but on the contrary, provided fresh insights into some of the debates among its members. While the influence of Ayer's book is undeniable, this chapter invites readers to reevaluate their knowledge about Ayer's work by reexamining his place and role in the history of analytic philosophy.

"Rational sufficiency has been a root-concept in philosophy ever since the Greeks. Kant’s Copernican Turn is largely motivated by the wish to save this concept after Berkeley’s reduction of its classic formulation (representationalism). This, as post-Kantians were quick to point out, is a highly problematic move. It’s only with Kierkegaard though that an attempt is made to subject the Kantian formulation to an *internal* critique. His own thinking about human communication is meant to be a successor-notion to Kant’s transcendental reason. This is the real background of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the linguistic turn.  By recasting the concept in a rigorously semantic form, he shows its incoherence and so its inapplicability to philosophy as a whole. This reduction cuts much deeper than most Wittgensteinians think.
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The ‘between Wars’ period in England in the early 20th century was extraordinary, philosophically. It was marked by a profusion of new, controversial, and revolutionary ideas. Developments in formal logic, the rise of the method of ‘analysis’, and logical atomism were already changing the face of philosophy in England. From this mix emerged two distinctive views about language and its connection to philosophical methodology: one championing the concept of an ideal language; and one rejecting this and favoring appeal to ordinary language. The origin of both views is to be found in the (earlier and later) work of Wittgenstein. In this paper, I will examine the emergence of these views in relation to one another: an ideal language conception represented by Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (LTL), and the reaction against this conception in the early phases of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) , in particular in the work of John Wisdom.

Keywords: Ayer; Positivism; Ordinary Language Philosophy; Wittgenstein; Linguistic Analysis

The goal of this course is to survey some central debates in the philosophy of language. It is organized around three main themes: (1) the relationship between language and reality, (2) the relationship between language and thought, and (3) the relationship between language and people.

During the first part, we shall discuss some classical theories of meaning that have had a profound influence on the development of philosophy over the past 100 years. In particular, we will look at some proponents of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, understood broadly as the programmatic idea that the goal of philosophy is to understand the structure of our conceptual schemes, and that philosophical questions could be resolved, or laid to rest, by a careful examination of language in order to disentangle conceptual confusions.

In the second part, we turn to the psychological basis of linguistic understanding, in particular to theories of concepts, the building blocks of thoughts. We shall survey some of the leading theories of concepts, and compare their respective strengths and weaknesses in explaining what underlies our capacities for abstraction, intentionality, categorization, analogical inference, and conceptual combination. This will allow us to explore different conceptions of the relationship between language and thought.

Finally, we shall reflect on the role which language plays for our communicative practices. Starting with the theory of speech acts, and “how to do things with words” (Austin), we shall then move on to consider the place of language in the construction of social and institutional realities.

In this paper I want to argue that a unified set of concerns constituting a new dimension— a realignment of our sense of language, self, and world— emerges in the progress of the Tractatus as we turn to inquire into the inner connection between language and such notions as world, limits, life, and ipseity. The most elusive step in that progress, and the one most necessary to recognize as part of the argument of the Tractatus, is the transition from an understanding of language in terms of logic, sense, and meaning to a perspective in which language becomes the primary locus of significance or meaningfulness (that is, meaning that has value or importance). It is also the pivot from the logical to the ethical concerns of the book. An ethics that appeals to the notion of meaning-fulness is elaborated in terms of the dimension of existence, namely in terms of the very possibility of agreement of disagreement with what has ultimate reality.

Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics offered a sustained criticism of Hermann Cohen’s foundations of neo-Kantianism, evoking a radical rethinking of the basis of Marburg thought by Cohen’s student, Ernst Cassirer.
Russell’s criticisms were directed at the understanding of the concepts of the differential calculus, which grounded the objectivity of scientific thought in Cohen’s effort to resurrect the Kantian transcendental project. On the basis of Russell’s criticisms, Cassirer abandoned Cohen’s foundations and instead drew on the general relational form, borrowed from Russell’s work in mathematical logic, to serve as the a priori source of objectivity. However, Cassirer’s reliance on Russell’s thought was limited, for he rejected Russell’s Logicism, the principal philosophical thesis of his _Principles_. Instead, Cassirer specified that the serial relation, as defined by the Formalist mathematicians, was the source of objectivity of the advanced mathematical sciences. The result was a
structuralist epistemology, which was not only founded on distinctively Marburg premises, but deepened and enriched its traditional doctrines, like the genetic conception of knowledge.

The Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays theorem states that, for an arithmetical first-order language L, if S is a satisfiable schema, then substitution of open sentences of L for the predicate letters of S results in true sentences of L. For two reasons, this theorem is relevant to issues relative to Quine's substitutional definition of logical truth. First, it makes it possible for Quine to reply to widespread objections raised against his account (the lexicon-dependence problem and the cardinality-dependence problem). These objections purport to show that Quine's account overgenerates: it would count as logically true sentences which intuitively or model-theoretically are not so. Second, since this theorem is a crucial premise in Quine's proof of the equivalence between his substitutional account and the model-theoretic one, it enables him to show that, from a metamathematical point of view, there is no need to favour the model-theoretic account over one in terms of substitutions. The purpose of that essay is thus to explore the philosophical bearings of the Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays theorem on Quine's definition of logical truth. This neglected aspect of Quine's argumentation in favour of a substitutional definition is shown to be part of a struggle against the model-theoretic prejudice in logic. Such an exploration leads to reassess Quine's peculiar position in the history of logic.

According to Steward Candlish, Russell and Moore had misunderstood F. H. Bradley's monism. According to Jonathan Schaffer, they had misunderstood monism more generally. A key thread of the creation narrative of analytic philosophy, according to which Russell and Moore successfully undermined monism to give rise to a new movement is, therefore, in doubt. In this paper, I defend the standard narrative against those who seek to revise it.

I will begin by looking at the position Carnap held at the time of The Logical Syntax of Language (Syntax hereafter) and consider how his thoughts on the axiom changed over time. The surprising thing is that his position on this axiom changed very little over time. I say that this is surprising because his views on meaning and ontology changed quite radically just after Syntax. The philosophical program of Syntax was predicated on the rejection of meaning (at least as concerns a proper philosophical understanding of what is being claimed). Questions about ontology, especially abstract ontology, are then dismissed as inappropriately asking about the meaning of a term. In contrast to this drastic change in his views on ontology and meaning, Carnap’s discussion of the axiom of infinity after Syntax does not undergo a parallel metamorphosis. As we see in Frost-Arnold’s book, Carnap is still partial to interpreting the axiom of infinity as asserting the existence of infinitely many positions in 1940-41. Of course, the notes Frost-Arnold is dealing with contain many other suggested interpretations of the axiom of infinity, but a variation of the one from Syntax is contained there, and it is also one that Carnap keeps coming back to throughout the 40s and up to the mid 50s.

Herbert Feigl once referred to a “schism” within analytic philosophy. This recalls for me another basic schism in European philosophy, that between the two camps known broadly as “Analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. One critical episode in this divide, the Davos disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, has been richly detailed in Michael Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways. In that retelling, it is Rudolf Carnap who plays a pivotal role in the split, in particular in the way his work from the early 1930s cemented the divide between the thought of the ascendant Heidegger and what would become the dominant trend in analytic philosophy of language. Because Carnap and the Vienna Circle had discovered and discussed the Tractatus well before the Davos disputation, I initially wanted the sole title for this talk to be “A Parting of the Ways: The Prequel”. But eventually it seemed to me to be the case that the sharp differences between Carnap and Wittgenstein on the one hand, and Carnap and Heidegger on the other, were in fact indicative of a deeper division that was already in the air of the German-speaking intellectual world of the early 1920s and that therefore there was something misleading about making my story too dependent on any easy chronology. Perhaps “Wittgenstein at Davos” would have been better.

In his 1927 Analysis of Matter and elsewhere, Russell argued that we can successfully infer the structure of the external world from that of our explanatory schemes. While nothing guarantees that the intrinsic qualities of experiences are shared by their objects, he held that the relations tying together those relata perforce mirror relations that actually obtain (these being expressible in the formal idiom of the Principia Mathematica). This claim was subsequently criticized by the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman as true but trivial, insofar as from a closed body of observations (or “Ramsey sentence”) one can always generate other equally-satisfactory networks of relations, provided they respect the original set’s cardinality. Since any model thus generated will be empirically adequate, “[t]he defence is therefore driven back from the fairly safe fictitious-real classification to the much less tenable ‘trivial’ and ‘important’” (Newman 1928). Given the definitional rigour afforded by the initial appeal to isomorphism (via one-to-one correspondences in extension), the received assessment, shared by Russell himself, is that retreating to a pragmatic adjudication would betoken a fatal blow. However, I suggest that reliance on “importance” can be avoided if we incorporate an impersonal criterion of diachronic precedence. When collecting observations, an ordinality emerges alongside the cardinality which gives that underived structure an irrevocable epistemological privilege. Hence, I argue that, all other things being equal, any construct parasitic on an antecedent theory ought to be regarded as inferior/dispensable, since it was generated by an algorithm lacking the world-involving pedigree of its host structure.

In 1948, A.J. Ayer was attacked on the pages of The New Statesman and Nation magazine where it was claimed that his views were partly responsible for increasingly Fascist attitudes at Oxford. Ayer was charged with promoting a philosophy of values (or one lacking therein) that allowed Fascism to fill the moral vacuum. Ayer noted that he knew who had written the article (and the ones that followed) and that this person had done so for entirely contingent and non-philosophical reasons. This paper aims to examine the historical context by discussing the article and the events that followed it; to show that the specific charges against Ayer were rooted in deeper philosophical/ practical issues, namely the nature and status of philosophy; and to demonstrate that logical empiricism, or rather logical positivism as a movement, was indeed especially sensitive to political issues.

These are my lectures on History of Philosophy: 20th Century that I gave last spring (2016) in the University of Helsinki. I hope to develop them into a book. They address only a selection of developments: Frege's philosophy of arithmetic, Russell and Moore and their revolt from idealism and their similarities with Brentano; Moore's Principia Ethica, Russell and logical analysis, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where I use Homer Simpson's head to illustrate the core of logical atomism, logical positivism and logical empiricism and, finally, philosophy and ordinary language, where I concentrate on Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind. There's a great deal of exciting stuff here; unfortunately, it's in Finnish.

Alexius Meinong a proposé, au début du xxe siècle, une théorie de l’objet qui articule un hyper-réalisme des objets de pensée à une fine théorie des états mentaux. Cette conception dépend largement de la réflexion précoce de Meinong sur les relations, dont cet ouvrage présente le développement.

Is There Such A Thing As Philosophical Nonsense?

For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense.  This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning.  But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, I believe, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been seriously addressed.

This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken.  It argues that nonsensicalism (the theory and practice of accusing your opponents of talking nonsense) is radically misguided and should be abandoned.

The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined.

This paper considers George A. Reisch’s account of the role of Cold War political forces in shaping the apolitical stance that came to dominate philosophy of science in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that at least as early as the 1930s, Logical Empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap already held that philosophy of science could not properly have political aims, and further suggests that political forces alone cannot explain this view’s rise to dominance during the Cold War, since political forces can- not explain why a philosophy of science with liberal democratic, anti-communist aims did not flourish. The paper then argues that if professionalization is understood in the right way, it might point toward an explanation of the apolitical stance of Cold War philosophy of science.

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.