Arnaud Dewalque, Charlotte Gauvry, Sébastien Richard (Eds.): Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School: Reassessing the Brentanian Legacy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School: Reassessing the Brentanian Legacy Book Cover Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School: Reassessing the Brentanian Legacy
History of Analytic Philosophy
Arnaud Dewalque, Charlotte Gauvry, Sébastien Richard (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2021
Hardback 114,39 €
XVII, 322

Michael Potter: The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, 1879–1930: From Frege to Ramsey

The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, 1879–1930: From Frege to Ramsey Book Cover The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, 1879–1930: From Frege to Ramsey
Michael Potter
Routledge
2019
Paperback £31.99
522

Reviewed by: Piotr Stalmaszczyk (University of Lodz, Poland)

Michael Potter is Professor of Logic at Cambridge University, his studies in the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophical foundations of mathematics include an overview of philosophies of arithmetic from Kant to Carnap – Reason’s Nearest Kin (2000), a critical introduction to set theory – Set Theory and Its Philosophy (2004), and a study of Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic (2008). His most recent book, The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, 1879-1930, is a comprehensive introduction to the work of four philosophers, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey, in the half century, from 1879 (the year in which Frege’s Begriffsschrift was published), till Ramsey’s death in 1930.

Analytic philosophy is one of the most important sources for modern philosophy of logic and mathematics, for philosophy of language, and for philosophy of mind. According to some philosophers and historians of philosophy, it is not only one of the most important developments in twentieth-century philosophy, but the most important one, at least in the English-speaking world (cf. Beaney 2007: 1). Michael Dummett has famously defined it in the following way:

“A succinct definition would be: analytical philosophy is post-Fregean philosophy. Frege’s fundamental achievement was to alter our perspective in philosophy, to replace epistemology, as the starting point of the subject, by what he called ‘logic’. What Frege called ‘logic’ (…) embraced precisely what is now called ‘philosophy of language’.” (Dummett 1978: 441).

Though the above definition is far from being uncontroversial, there is a general consensus that the achievements of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein were crucial for the early developments of analytic philosophy; with the work of Ramsey featuring less prominently in historical overviews. Several general and more detailed studies have already investigated the origins of this movement in considerable detail (it will suffice to mention the works by Michael Beaney, Michael Dummett, Hans-Johan Glock, Scott Soames, and Stephen Schwartz). However, there is still a need for studies analyzing, reanalyzing and contextualizing the achievements of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. This is precisely what Potter does; additionally, the author’s ambition is to trace the changes within the philosophers’ thought (the ‘genetic approach’).

The choice of the four philosophers in Potter’s monograph is connected with their unquestionable and durable relevance to current philosophy: Frege’s notions of sense and reference are central to modern semantics, Russell’s theory of descriptions may be regarded as a “paradigm of philosophy”, philosophy of language continues to be influenced by Wittgenstein’s picture theory, and Ramsey’s argument against the particular/universal distinction retains its validity (2). Assuming that analytic philosophy originated in 1879 with the publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift and the birth of quantifier-variable logic, it might be claimed that further work by Frege, and also by Russell, (early) Wittgenstein, and Ramsey, flowed directly from this new logic. Throughout his study, Potter hopes to convey “a sense of the exhilarating progress they made, and of the extent to which modern analytic philosophy is in their debt” (3).

The detailed organization of this book is similar to the approach  characteristic of the author’s former studies. The book is divided into four parts, further divided into numerous chapters (21 devoted to Frege, 24 to Russell, 18 to Wittgenstein, and 10 to Ramsey), and each chapter is followed by concise suggestions for further reading. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and a detailed index. Each part starts with a short biographical sketch (in the case of Russell and Wittgenstein, concentrating on the relevant time span), in which Potter contextualizes the life of the respective philosopher. Further contextualization, which takes into consideration appropriate ideas and developments, is provided in the more thematic chapters. Thus conceived, the parts offer a detailed chronological and thematic guide to the work and legacy of the individual philosophers.

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is generally associated with developments in modern predicate logic and analyses of sense and reference crucial for contemporary philosophy of language. He devised a symbolic language for logic, provided the seminal analysis of the meaning of an expression, offered a semantic analysis of identity statements, and formulated the context principle; he is also credited with putting forward the assumptions that lead to formulation of the compositionality principle and introducing the notion of presupposition (of the assertion). In the part on Frege (5-144), Potter provides an overview of logic before 1879, from the Stoics, through Aristotelian logic, transcendental logic, empiricism and idealism, to Boole’s early example of modern axiomatic logic. Potter observes that The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) is the only plausible competitor as the harbinger of modern logic; however, even though Boole “had devised an algebraic calculus of considerable sophistication for solving problems in categorical and hypothetical logic, it fell short of unifying the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions” (19).

Potter devotes five chapters exclusively to the Begriffsschrift (the German title is rendered by the author as ‘Concept-Script: A formula language, modelled on that of arithmetic, for pure thought’), one of “the most remarkable books in the history of human thought” (21). The five chapters are concerned with foundations of logic, propositional logic, quantification, identity, and the ancestral. In order to fully appreciate Frege’s achievements it is necessary to understand the aim of his concept-script, the significance of his notation, usage of particular symbols, and, especially, the revolutionary introduction of a notation of quantifier and variable to express generalizations, all explained by Potter. In the short presentation of Frege’s account of function and argument, Potter observes that three features are worth stressing: the fact that in the decomposition of sentences a function is obtained by removing part of an expression, not part of its content; the possibility of replacing grammatical predicates; and, most importantly, Frege aimed to “decompose, and hence discern function-argument structure in already existing sentences, not to explain how the sentences acquired their meanings in the first place” (29).

In the remaining chapters in this part, Potter discusses in detail other studies and ideas of Frege: the Grundlagen (in 4 chapters), sense and reference (3 chapters), the Grundgesetze (2 chapters). Potter also tackles the development of early philosophy of logic, the Frege-Hilbert correspondence, the importance of Frege’s late writings. The discussed issues include the crucial components of Fregean semantics and philosophy of mathematics: the context principle, the concept and object distinction, the status of numbers, names and descriptions, different conceptions of sense, the reference of a sentence, (un)saturated senses, and more. Paul Pietroski remarked once that Frege “bequeathed to us some tools – originally designed for the study of logic and arithmetic – that can be used in constructing theories of meaning for natural languages” (Pietroski, 2005: 29–30). The discussion provided by Potter demonstrates the relevance of these tools for a number of current disciplines – he mentions the Fregean legacy in logic, philosophy of language (especially formal semantics and pragmatics), and mathematics. A possible addition to this list would be philosophy of mind, where Frege’s legacy is seen in, for example, contemporary discussion on different approaches to reference.

In one of his earlier studies, Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic, Potter compared his analysis of Wittgenstein’s text to the work of a historical detective (Potter 2008: 3). Also, in The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, Potter offers analyses exemplary of a detective’s work; additionally, an important feature of his analyses is connected with discussing those ideas that were NOT followed by the individual philosophers; for example, he observes that although Frege introduced rules and basic laws of propositional logic, he did not discuss the question whether every logical truth expressible using only negation and the material conditional is provable in this system of truth-functional logic (35). Below, I mention the book Russell might have written (had he not met Wittgenstein); and, at yet another instance, Potter comments on the ‘one place we might expect to find Ramsey’s influence, given the closeness of their interactions in 1929, is in Wittgenstein’s later work, but in fact this influence is notably muted’ (468). Another example of Potter’s approach can be found in chapter 69, where he discusses Ramsey’s idea of universals, with the aim, among others, to unravel the (missing) influence on Wittgenstein’s departure from Frege’s views (the binary distinction between saturated and unsaturated entities).

Part II (145-312) is devoted to the achievements in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) during the appropriate period. In the sections tracing the early influences upon the philosopher, Potter focuses on Bradleyan idealism, and McTaggart’s reading of Hegel. He also discusses Russell’s early work on geometry (An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, 1897), moves next to Russell’s education in mathematics, and then the influence of, and further collaboration with, Alfred N. Whitehead. He also discusses G. E. Moore and his switch from absolute idealism to platonic realism, and the influence of the Italian mathematician, Giuseppe Peano. Important sections are devoted to Russell’s early, middle, and late logicism, his changing views on judgment, his studies of denoting, truth and theories of truth, types, the relationship between acquaintance and knowledge, the status and different understanding of facts, and approaches to monism. The list of topics important for Russell’s philosophy reads like an index of key topics in 20th century philosophy of language, with considerable implications outside this discipline.

The discussion demonstrates the importance of careful reading of texts, but even more so of direct contact – for Russell, meeting Peano, and the young Wittgenstein, was one of the turning points in his thinking about mathematics and philosophy of mathematics: ‘In May 1913 Russell began writing a book on the relationship between acquaintance and knowledge. He never completed it, partly as a consequence of Wittgenstein’s criticism” (365). One might only speculate about the developments in Russell’s philosophy had he not met Wittgenstein.

Russell’s (and Frege’s) influence and legacy in philosophy of language is indisputable. Potter offers an interesting comment on two crucial texts: ‘Much as Frege chose to write ‘On sense and reference’ as if it was about the philosophy of language, even though his real concern was primarily with logic, so also Russell presented ‘On denoting’ as if his concerns were with analyzing George IV’s curiosity about the authorship of Waverley rather than with solving the logical paradoxes’ (309). This resulted in both influence and controversies within analytic philosophy, and challenges offered by ordinary language philosophy, notably by Strawson. Potter notes that ‘ordinary language philosophy withered after Austin’s death (…) but its demise did not mark a return to Russellian analysis’ (312), which is a consequence of the linguistic turn in philosophy dominated by Rorty, Dummett, and Davidson. It might be added that the influence of ordinary language philosophy has been rediscovered in contemporary linguistics, especially pragmatics.

Though not directly connected with the topic of the book, it is interesting to observe that Russell ‘was the only one of the four philosophers discussed in this book to receive major public honours in his lifetime (the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit)’ (149).

It would probably be difficult to find two philosophers so different in personality and way of life as Russell and Wittgenstein. Their philosophical concepts also differ, though they strongly influenced one another. Part III (313-415) is devoted to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) early work. The first sections of this part provide insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas, especially those connected with ‘facts’, ‘pictures’, and ‘propositions’. Potter offers here some ‘archeological’ research into the history of ideas and discusses the Bodleianus, the version (kept now in the Bodleian Library, hence the name) preceding even the typescript known as the Prototractatus. This first version of the Tractatus was concerned with theses 1-6: ‘what stands out straightway is that the outline ends not with the injunction to silence of the final published version but with a technical claim (..) about the expressive power of a certain notation. (…) The central claim of the 1916 Tractatus is thus that the world may be pictured logically by means of propositions obtained from elementary propositions by recursive application of the N-operator’ (319).

In the following chapters, Potter elucidates the changes Wittgenstein made to the final version, with fascinating discussion of the purported ‘solipsism’ (chapter 54), i.e. thesis 5.6. (‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’); this discussion is continued in the chapter on ‘the metaphysical subject’. Other chapters focus on ordinary language, on ethics, and on the mystical element in the Tractatus (chapter 62). This chapter also includes a useful – though brief – note on the possible reading of the Tractatus, which would distinguish, pace James Conant and Cora Diamond, the outer part and the inner part: the outer part (the ‘frame’) would consist of senseful instructions for reading the inner nonsensical part. As succinctly observed by Potter: ‘it is not altogether clear, however, which sentences belong to which part’ (405).

The final chapter of this part discusses the legacy of the Tractatus, and concentrates on issues such as elementary propositions, the picture theory, and briefly comments on the relation to, and legacy in, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Potter stresses that ‘the popular conception of two Wittgensteins was always too simplistic’ (409). He concludes his discussion by observing that Wittgenstein was right ‘to dismiss as incoherent the persistent attempts of philosophers to conceive of our representation of the world as undertaken from one viewpoint among many’ (415).

The last part of the book (417-471) is devoted to Frank Ramsey (1903-1930), a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist; the least known of the four philosophers discussed by Potter, due chiefly to his premature death at the age of 27. It has to be noted, however, that recent years have seen growing interest in his work and legacy, cf. the chapters in Lillehammer and Mellor, eds. (2005), and the most recent comprehensive monograph by Misak (2020). Ramsey’s contribution to philosophy is centered predominantly around the topics of truth, knowledge, belief, and universals. Potter also discusses his work on the foundations of mathematics, and traces the possible influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus on Ramsey’s conception of truth. The chapters on truth and knowledge demonstrate the potential of Ramsey’s ideas for contemporary discussions not only in semantics, but also in pragmatism, and philosophy of mind. A similar observation is to be made in connection with the chapters on the foundations of mathematics; however, in the final chapter, Potter comments also on the unfortunate misunderstandings and problems with the appropriate reception of Ramsey’s work.

The four philosophers discussed in Potter’s book all contributed to the rise of analytic philosophy, their legacy is still important today in a wide variety of disciplines, including philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, logic, and linguistics (especially pragmatics and semantics). Michael Potter’s study constitutes a comprehensive guide to their achievements and legacy. The book should be of considerable interest to anyone studying the roots of contemporary philosophy, and especially philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. It would be most interesting to see a comparable study tracing the parallel developments of analytic philosophy and pragmatism and phenomenology (for some preliminary studies on analytic philosophy and phenomenology, see the contributions in Beaney 2007). Such a study might contribute to the development of ‘ideochronology’, dealing with the chronological relationship between philosophical ideas (modelled after glottochronology, which deals with the chronological relationship between languages).

Readers of Potter’s earlier books will recognize his ‘detective’s approach’ in this most recent volume. Potter meticulously traces the sources of ideas, discusses mutual influences, and carefully analyzes changes and shifts in theories, which makes his study almost a log-book for analytic philosophy.

References

Beaney, Michael. 2007. “The analytic turn in early twentieth-century philosophy.” In: Beaney (Ed.), The Analytic Turn. Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. New York & London: Routledge, 1-30.

Beaney, Michael (Ed.) 2007. The Analytic Turn. Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. New York & London: Routledge.

Dummett, Michael. 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth.

Lillehammer, Hallvard and D. H. Mellor (Eds.). 2005. Ramsey’s Legacy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Misak, Cheryl. 2020. Frank Ramsey. A Sheer Excess of Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pietroski, Paul M. 2005. Events and Semantic Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Potter, Michael. 2000. Reason’s Nearest Kin. Philosophies of Arithmetic from Kant to Carnap. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Potter, Michael. 2008. Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nikolay Milkov: Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition

Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition Book Cover Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition
Nikolay Milkov
Bloomsbury Academic
2020
Hardback £76.50
x + 296

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ARC Centre for History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)

The four sections of this review essay will each pursue a major facet of Nikolay Milkov’s monograph, a monograph mainly directed at professional philosophers and their postgraduate students, but not without interest for historians of ideas. Within the space available, we shall give particular attention to the opening chapters. Indeed, it is in these chapters that the fundamental framing of Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition is erected. They are finally re-engaged in the concluding pair of chapters, chapters that portray two dominant conceptions of analytic philosophy influencing its subsequent factional development; the consequent proliferation of incomplete often methodological definitions of analytic philosophy; and, finally, what amounts to the author’s manifesto for the future renewal of analytic philosophy. The questions governing the four sections of this critique can be summarised as follows. Firstly, how does Milkov construe the context of historical enquiries into early analytic philosophy? Secondly, what does he believe ought to be the task and goal of such endeavours? Thirdly, how do the demands of a case-study of the impact of a controversial major intellectual upon early analytical philosophers demonstrate his actual historical practice? Finally, to what extent do other significant, contemporaneous historical approaches invite further questions? Or, to recast this issue, do the assumptions Milkov makes about the very nature and crafting of the history of philosophy raise closer scrutiny and debate?

I

Milkov’s re-framing of the history of the early phase of analytic philosophy comes a half-generation after Daniel Garber’s reflection upon attitudes to the intellectual past by so many of its practitioners.  Garber’s own generation was “reacting against … a bundle of practices” that could be characterized by several trends (2004: 2). These included the tendencies “to substitute rational reconstruction of a philosopher’s views for the views themselves,” “to focus upon an extremely narrow group of figures,” “to focus on just a few works … that best fit with … current conception[s] of the subject of philosophy,” “to work exclusively from translations and to ignore secondary work … not originally written in English,” and “to treat philosophical positions as if they were those presented by contemporaries” (2004: 2).

Before assessing how Milkov differs in his historical approach, let us focus upon the first two theoretical chapters of his sixteen-chapter volume in order to examine the underpinnings of that approach. Whereas the vast majority of chapters draw upon a dozen articles and chapters published between 1999 and 2012, both introductory chapters implicitly provide Milkov’s readers with his most recent thinking. It occurs within the statement of his over-arching aim of transforming the “largely disparate efforts” (4), notably but not exclusively since the ‘’seventies when Michael Dummett (1981: 628ff. & 665ff.) began probing the development of Gottlob Frege and the philosophy of language (also succinctly critiqued by George Duke (2009)). Milkov believes this can be achieved by “developing a comprehensive account of early analytic philosophy as a movement that both inherited and transformed an entire spectrum of themes … in mainstream German philosophy” (4). A significant factor amongst English-speaking commentators in avoiding, if not disparaging, the role of Germanic thinking from the twentieth century’s first world war to the aftermath of the second was “socio-cultural animosity and clashing ideologies” (4).

Milkov is well aware that his effort to construct “a theoretically balanced and comprehensive, ideologically unbiased account” involves him in pursuing “pioneering figures” of analytic philosophy such as B.A.W. Russell and G.E. Moore. More particularly, it demands that he demonstrates how they probed “inherited problems and doctrines” originating in Germanic philosophical thinking “in the language and theoretical idiom of a far different cultural and intellectual environment” (5). By so doing, we find that Milkov overtly opposes five historical conceptions of what many scholars construe as the Anglo-Germanic intellectual relationship (or lack thereof) during the initial period of the analytic movement (and subsequently elaborated when dealing with “incomplete definitions” of the extended analytic movement’s “methodological” and “defining themes” (208-212)). In brief, they comprise the following objections:

[i] that, as the twelfth and sixteenth chapter in the first volume of Scott Soames (2003) might be interpreted, Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy was central to early analytic projects (5, cf. 8, 11-12);

[ii] that, despite efforts to reconnect two historically divorced yet aligned traditions in Paul Redding (2007) and thereby contend that Hegel’s “grand … theories” were central, but not his methods which Milkov specifically upholds subsequently (e.g. 46ff.) (5);

[iii] that, as promoted by the likes of Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, Kant and his followers operated “in principle” with a “universe of ideas” totally independent of the analytic movement (5-6);

[iv] that neo-Kantians, notably Ernst Cassirer of the Marburg school, “were largely preoccupied with the philosophy of culture,” thereby ignoring their continuation of “the logicalization of philosophy initiated by Kant” (6, cf. 7, 221); and,

[v] as Dummett (e.g. 1981: xlii, 665-684) influentially maintained, that “Frege alone introduced analytic philosophy as a kind of philosophy of language” (6, cf. 12, 111, 209-210).

From the pivotal occurrence of Kant’s “recalibration” of occidental philosophy by “synthesizing logic with the rest of the field” (7), Milkov proposes the next major pivot to be neither Hegel nor Frege but Hermann Lotze. His investigations would later be identified, if not always acknowledged, as “signature concerns” of early Cambridge analyses, ranging “from the proposition, objective content—both conceptual and perceptual—of knowledge, and intentionality to the theory of logical forms, the objective nature of values and logical validity” (7). As Hans-Johann Glock (1999: 141ff.) emphasizes, the “logocentric” factor in what he regards as German analytic philosophy saw the pronounced rejection of the naturalist trend of reducing philosophy to an empirical science such as psychology to which the laws of logic were subservient and thereby functioning as little more than empirical, inductive generalisations.

The subsequent questioning of logocentric constraints rationalises Milkov upholding a distinctive, “discrete” second (or “middle”) phase of analytic philosophy initially associated with the Vienna Circle’s focus upon “problems of explanation in science” (9). Thereafter, he observes, a “clearly distinguishable” third (or “late”) phase emerged from the ’sixties with Van Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and John Rawls epitomizing “leading exemplars” of shifts into questions of translatability and interpretation, scientific revolutions and commensurability, and socio-political rules and cohesion. In sum, synoptic attempts to define analytic philosophy fail to “discriminate … different stages” (10) and thus distort historical actualities of its “multifacteted” development (11).

Chapter One ends by returning to its goal of “a fine-grained” investigation of topics “from alternative perspectives” that were “formative” of early analytic philosophy to be treated by way of its “methodology … which was more focused on descriptions than explanations” (11). Rather than impose a “monothematic,” if not hierarchical, interpretation upon actual analytic development, such as Soames’ singular notion of analysis or Dummett’s one of language (11-12), Milkov points elsewhere. We, in fact, face “concepts that survived the demise of the grand theories in which they originally figured” (13). At the same time, when “later recast by thinkers,” the “supersession of historically successive philosophical contexts, whereby seminal ideas make their way through history, explains why philosophically formative ideas are often difficult to recognize” (13). Furthermore, “the progress of these ideas was not always linear … nor was it always a function of a proximate influence” (13).

II

Chapter Two ends Milkov’s theoretical introduction by initially surveying attitudes of philosophers, be they analytic or other, towards their intellectual antecedents. Whilst so doing, he notes that even philosophers “cannot, in principle, write down their completely finished story” (18). This state of affairs holds irrespective of whether their successors, be they “friends or rivals,” develop “steps” suggested or even when others, attempting to demonstrate how their ideas are “constructed” or related, typically interpret such ideas as contributing to a “completely new problem” (18-19). Curiously, for a chapter devoted to the logical, systematic history of philosophy, Milkov does not pursue the conceptual consequences of history as retrospective narrative, a point to be expanded in our fourth section.

Milkov contends that the task of an historian of philosophy is fourfold, namely:

[i] explicating “elements” of the “different range and level of specific philosophical works”;

[ii] relating these elements within “a logical net” or, still metaphorically speaking, mapping them;

[iii] logically relating them to “the ideas of other philosophers: predecessors, contemporaries, successors” irrespective of whether they are “members of the philosopher’s school or group”; and, finally,

[iv] aiming to “develop them further in their authentic sense” (19).

That said, Milkov makes allowance for more implications arising from his four designated tasks. These include, for example, the need for historians—especially for those pursuing “logical connections” aiming to detail “a map without omissions” (26)—to adopt two directions. On the one hand, there is a diachronic quest for the “origins of particular concepts, problems, and theories” (20). On the other hand, there is a synchronic “reporting” about how other philosophers deploy these differently in order to “delineate … how the systematic philosophical problems and concepts, past and present, interrelate in formally determinate ways” (20). In his penultimate chapter, Milkov reframes this dual task along the lines of what Peter Strawson (1992: 17-28) once called “connective” as opposed to “reductive” analysis (203).

The foregoing may nonetheless leave readers wondering if Milkov’s fourfold set of tasks above is sufficiently explicated. Consider, for instance, why Milkov’s preferred “elements”—concepts, problems, theories—gradually focus upon the first two at the expense of the third. Consider again, how one is to construe Milkov’s metaphorical notions of “net” and “map.” The latter, as we shall consider in our final section, reveals some questionable presuppositions bedevilling theories of history applied to the realm of ideas. Finally. consider why his reference to “specific … works” omits the interpretive nature, let alone assumptions and consequences, of translations, transcriptions, and reconstructions of published and unpublished work or works; all the more so, when pitted against the goal of approaching its or their “authentic sense” (19). Is this appeal to “authentic sense” in danger of becoming embroiled in a potential dilemma? As argued in more literary circumstances by Saam Trivedi (2001), the underlying conception of communication ultimately “implies a commitment” to “the view that the correct meanings and interpretations … are fixed” or “at least … constrain[ed]” by their authors’ “actual intentions” in constructing their works (195). In other words, the problem is “an epistemic dilemma, a dilemma with redundancy as one of its horns, and indeterminancy as the other” (198). Imagine a situation in which Antonio and Alessia, archaeologists and keen students of accounts of the settlement of the Azores archipelago begin reading the fifteenth chapter of the 1894 Raymond Beazley history of “one continuous thread of Christian” European exploration and expansion across the Atlantic which “treat[s] the life of Prince Henry as the turning point” albeit one “clouded by the dearth of compete knowledge… but enough … to make something of … a hero, both of science and of action” (xvii). Both sense the above-mentioned danger of confronting them, namely, whether or not Beazley’s textual or oral sources are pervaded by ambiguity. If ambiguity is pervasive according to Antonio, the historian’s attempt to appeal to contexts if not conventions as a sufficient constituent of his sources’ meaning in cases of failed or indeterminate intentions begins to crumble. The dilemma remains if, as Alessia contends, ambiguity here is not pervasive because the sources threaten to become superfluous especially in the face of Beazley’s ideological pre-occupations.

III

Our previous section has in passing questioned Milkov’s conception of the goal and task of historians of (early) analytic philosophy in terms of retrospective narratives and metaphors of mapping. However, before turning to these issues in our final section, we shall pursue, albeit briefly, how the demands of a significant philosophical case-study demonstrate his actual practices. Here, we find a rich array from Chapter Three onwards. In practical terms, we would hardly expect a volume of under three hundred pages to present a fully “comprehensive,” let alone an “unbiased,” account (5); rather, it acts as a corrective by challenging engrained scholarly perspectives with alternative ones. An example of a complex major German thinker, initially rejected by Russell and Moore as intersecting with early analytic philosophy, should suffice, namely, Hegel, a pivotal figure for what is popularly called the European idealist movement.

Milkov acknowledges the recent role of Redding (2007) and Angelica Nuzzo (2010) in drawing parallels between analytic philosophy and Hegel’s approach to concepts (46). However, he elects to highlight an “unexplored” perspective of the “methods employed” not as the “genealogical connection between … two theoretical orientations, but rather … [as] their kinship” (47). His prime candidate is the “economic method of elimination” (as distinct from the “reductive” conception of analysis in which particular concepts were assigned to specific classes (cf. 49)). Early analytic philosophers, beginning with its “only one founding father,” Russell (221), deployed elimination to rid analysis of “a superfluous duplication of terms” (47). For instance, if Antonio knows the words comprising a proposition (“The Azores is Europe’s largest volcanic archipelago”), then by that very fact he knows its meaning. If his colleague Alessia can confirm that the hypogea of the Azores are products of human activity at least a millennium before European settlement from 1433, then, ipso facto, she can prove that there were ancient people and things before and beyond herself.

This method, asserts Milkov, is akin to Hegel’s mereological approach in logic to analysing the relationship between a whole or totality and its parts or elements. By so analysing the connections between parts of a whole by “the most economic type of connection between them,” Hegel can simultaneously characterize those between the parts and the whole which “are unities of individuals” (48), the latter, citing Hegel (1830: §158), functioning as “only moments of one whole.” Nonetheless, Milkov concedes that the above method specifically “related to Hegel’s dialectics” was “a major trend” amongst fin de siècle philosophers ranging from William James, a key contributor to the North America pragmatist movement, to Edmund Husserl, a major instigator of the European phenomenological movement, and not peculiar to the early analytic movement as such (49).

For Milkov, only the early Wittgenstein (1922) fully embodies Hegel’s dialectics where “every concept transforms into another concept” and thereby making it “more precise” (50). His other nominee is Rudolf Carnap who, during the middle or second period of the analytic movement’s trans-Atlantic debates over the logical quest for conceptual or definitional precision, “called the practice of analysis explication” (50). Thereafter, the relatively open-ended use of “explication”—nowadays known as “conceptual (re)engineering”—by advocates in philosophical and psychological fields has seized upon experimentally or experientially driven applications of theoretical enquiries. Whereas Milkov subsequently concentrates upon Susan Stebbing’s criticisms (e.g. 186-187), the contested arguments of Quine and Strawson amongst others continue to reverberate. These include, for example, the viability of securing necessary and sufficient conditions; the validity of distinctions between analytical and empirical truths; the separation of denotative and connotative meanings; the division between semantic and pragmatic kinds of context and reference; and the methodological question of whether “explication” ultimately alters the subject of enquiry or forcibly resolves it by way of implicit stipulation.

Hegel’s mereological approach above carries implications for its relationship to the “absolute” or “absolute idea” which Milkov construes more generally amongst German idealists as determining “the characteristics and behavior of all individuals that fall under it with necessity of a law” (62). Later, focusing upon the early Russell under the specific influence of Lotze, Milkov claims that Russell, when first emphasizing “the logical discussion of metaphysical problems,” conceptually distinguished between space and time “as consisting of relations” and “as adjectives to the absolute” (89). What is ignored here is an alternative account of the “absolute idea” which, according to Markus Gabriel (2016), is grounded in “methodological assumptions designed to guarantee the overall intelligibility of what there is, regardless of its actual natural, social or more broadly normative structure” (181). Gabriel’s challenging perspective centres upon “how reality as a whole is the main topic of Hegel’s philosophy” which includes the crucial task in the face of scepticism of “accounting for the presence of self-conscious thinking in nature” (2018: 383). Irrespective of the merits of this alternative, it compels intellectual historians to ask if early analytic philosophers realised that Hegel’s “absolute idea” was not a first-order metaphysical method for disclosing, in Gabriel’s words, “the composition of ultimate reality in the sense of the furniture of mind-independent fundamental reality” (2016: 185).

There is something else Milkov largely seems to overlook in his treatment of Hegel’s mereological mode of dialectical analysis which only tangentially comes to the fore when his sixth and seventh chapters delve into Lotze’s focus upon the logical relations within judgements and its influence upon Russell and Moore (e.g. 73-74 & 76-77). For many readers, especially those more familiar with the third (or “late”) phase of analytic philosophy and its persistent debates about semantic holism, curiosity centres upon the extent to which the early analytic phase and its German antecedents wrestled with holistic assumptions. Yet only passing mention of Moore’s widely disseminated and influential Principia Ethica is made. Milkov simply remarks that the volume was “developed around the concepts of ‘organic unity’” or organic whole in a “quasi-Hegelian manner” (49)—notably, it may be added, in terms of the intrinsic and non-intrinsic values of whole and parts (e.g. 1903: §18-23, 27-36)—without any explicit mention of Lotze.

From an historical perspective, amongst the basic conceptions upheld by the generation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the organic kind, as Dennis Phillips has long argued, took root in efforts to deny the adequacy of atomistic or mechanistic assumptions associated with the physical and chemical sciences of the day when applied, for example, to conscious beings, human societies, or even “reality as a whole” (1976: 6). Why? Because the “parts of an organic system are internally related to each other” (1976: 7). Internal relations are commonly explained by such propositions as the “whole determines the nature of its parts”; “parts cannot be understood … in isolation from the whole”; and, parts are “dynamically” inter-dependent or -related (1976: 6). To accept internal or intrinsic relations, continues Phillips, rapidly leads to the contestable belief that “entities are necessarily altered by the relations into which they enter” (1976: 8). Hegel’s mereological approach in, for example, The Science of Logic is replete with holistic assumptions. This becomes all the more so as Hegel probes the “essential relation” in that work’s 1813 The Doctrine of Essence as “the relation of the whole and the parts” wherein the whole “consists of the parts, and apart from them it is not anything” (1813: 449-450). Because the whole “is only relative, for what makes it a totality is rather its other, the parts” (1813: 451), Hegel unhesitatingly declares:

Nothing is in the whole which is not in the parts, and nothing is in the parts which is not in the whole. The whole is not an abstract unity but the unity of a diversified manifoldness; but this unity within which the manifold is held together is the determinateness by virtue of which the latter is the parts. (1813: 452)

In sum, we might ask, would focusing upon Hegel’s holistic commitments give us a more cohesive framework for explaining why the development of early analytic philosophy hinged upon overtly rejecting them for several decades at least? Or, if Milkov’s cryptic remarks about Hegel’s dialectical approach (e.g. 46-51, 75-76) tempt us to accept the reconstruction proposed by Gabriel (2011: 104-119), might this, in turn, explain why early analytic philosophers misinterpreted Hegel’s concept of the absolute in so far as it was premised on the “dialectical failure of transcendent metaphysics” from Kant onwards?

IV

The last two chapters deftly portray three key issues motivating Milkov’s monograph which some readers may find worthwhile reading first of all before retracing earlier chapters for the expository details. These key issues include the emergence of two dominant conceptions of analytic philosophy influencing its subsequent factional development which, as Gordana Jovanović (2010) unwittingly demonstrates, echoes tensions within the early history of psychological theory and practice. Thereafter, Milkov turns to the resultant proliferation of incomplete, and often implicitly reified methodological, definitions of analytic philosophy. Finally, he ends Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition with what amounts to a manifesto for the future renewal of analytic philosophy partly by contrasting its fundamentally asymmetric relationship with “continental” philosophy and partly by looking to how reconnecting to scientific developments promises its theoretical interdisciplinary enrichment (217ff.).

Milkov’s closing chapters seek “to articulate a clear definition” based upon “the findings” of his preceding chapters and to “foster a more historically informed and theoretically nuanced understanding of analytic philosophy in general” (208). This statement returns us to his initial one about the ideal goals and tasks facing the historian of philosophy: “a theoretically balanced and comprehensive, ideologically unbiased account” (5). As noted in our previous sections, this left at least two historical issues in abeyance which we rather tersely associated with the retrospective character of narratives and the misleading metaphors of mapping. We shall briefly conclude by questioning the presuppositions of these and related issues whilst drawing upon recent re-conceptualisations of the crucial explanatory dimension of history of philosophy.

To ask Milkov what the criteria are that mark an historical account of analytic philosophy as balanced, comprehensive, and unbiased may well be accompanied by such questions as “From whose perspective?” or “By what objective measure?” More unsettling here is the possibility that we are dealing with an idealised set of attributes. How, were this the case, would we ever recognise a comprehensive or an unbiased historical account? The contrast with actual historical accounts immediately shifts our focus. For example, the question might now become whether any historical narration of the occurrences and persons said to be instrumental in the formation of the analytic movement—the role, for instance, assigned to the neglected Dimitri Michaltschew and Johannes Rehmke (153ff.) or Jacob Fries and Leonard Nelson (167ff.)—changes with each re-description by the historians involved, irrespective of whether their chronological, let alone intellectual, scope is relatively narrow or expansive.

Or, to change tack, do individual re-descriptions multiply other kinds of consequences facing historians of analytic philosophy? For example, if Dummett identifies Frege, Redding identifies Hegel, and Milkov identifies Lotze as pivotal to the development of early analytic philosophy, have we become trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, between accepting, on the one hand, a multiplicity of different pasts, different formative occurrences and persons, different causal sequences and accepting, on the other hand, an incapacity for historical accounts to become synthesized and for historical understanding to accumulate? Again, do we confront another consequence? To what extent is any historical narration ultimately a product of imaginative re-enactment where the historian has, as R.G. Collingwood proposed, “no direct or empirical knowledge of … facts … no transmitted or testimonial knowledge of them” (1936: 282)? Hence, when probing the formation of analytic philosophy, the historian is not engaging in an act of recollection where “the past is a mere spectacle” as distinct from being “re-enacted in present thought” (1936: 293). If so, how are we to defend the historical reconstruction’s claim to have disclosed the truth of the matter? Would it be feasible here to appeal to all narrated propositions within the account as not only constituting the facts but also corresponding to a past and actual state of affairs? Or would it feasible to presume that the narrative account is simply justified by an appeal to generalisations about intellectual influences, the Zeitgeist, which map particular occurrences and persons as necessary to the historical terrain being explored, namely, how the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition or a pivotal figures within it influenced the early twentieth-century analytic movement? In turn, is that historical act of mapping or charting the means for automatically justifying what is therefore construed as significant and hence worthy of inclusion?

The foregoing questions, drawing upon the concerns of Louis Mink (1987) amongst others with the very idea and practice of history, emphasize that the past is not somehow immutable and unchanging, that the past is not somehow awaiting historical discovery to be told (by analogy with the excavations undertaken by our archaeologists, Antonio and Alessia, in the Azores archipelago). Rather, as Mink (1987: 140 & 79) contends, historical enquiries plumb developmental processes retrospectively. Being written from at least one particular perspective at the historian’s time and place, his or her account is thereby characterized by its “conceptual asymmetry” with the antecedent time and place under examination. In that respect, Milkov can be rightly seen as taking particular care over what might be implied and thus translated by Lotze’s concepts (e.g. 98ff.) that have misled Anglophone commentators and translators. Furthermore, Mink portrays a distinctive feature of historical accounts. Their significant conclusions are not so much a mathematical quod erat demonstrandum as what the preceding narrative “argument” aims to have “exhibited”: “they are seldom or never detachable” so that “not merely their validity but their meaning refers backward to the ordering of evidence” (1987: 79).

Finally, as Paul Roth (1989: 468ff.) suggests, there is a “logic internal” to the way in which a narrative account proves explanatory by using “cases … taken to be exemplary instances of problem solving.”  In the course of so saying, Roth seems to have provided us with a set of criteria by which any historian of philosophy, Milkov included, can be evaluated. Does the historical account under examination establish the significance of the occurrence or the event, the person or the puzzle; what is problematic about that occurrence or event, person or puzzle; why have other rational reconstructions failed; and how has the narrative presented solved the problem set (1989: 473).

References

Beazley, C.R. 1894. Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D.: With an Account of Geographical Progress Throughout the Middle Ages As the Preparation for His Work. New York & London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Collingwood, R.G. 1936. “History as Re-enactment of Past Experience.” In The Idea of History with Lectures 1926-1928. Edited by W.J. van der Dussen, rev. edn., 282-302. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Duke, George. 2009. “Dummett and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 63(2): 329-347.

Dummett, Michael. 1981. Frege: Philosophy of Language. 2nd edn. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Garber, Daniel. 2004. “Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.” In Teaching New Histories of Philosophy. Edited by J.B. Schneewind, 1-17. Princeton: Princeton University Center for Human Values.

Gabriel, Markus. 2011. “The Dialectic of the Absolute: Hegel’s Critique of Transcendent Metaphysics.” In Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, 104-119. London & New York: Continuum International Publishing.

——-. 2016. “What Kind of an Idealist (If Any) Is Hegel?” Hegel Bulletin 37(2): 181-208.

——-. 2018. “Transcendental Ontology and Apperceptive Idealism.” Australasian Philosophical Review 2(4): 383-392.

Glock, H.-J. 1999. “Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 44: 137-166.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1813. The Doctrine of Essence. In The Science of Logic. Edited and translated by George di Giovanni, 337-505. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

——-. 1830. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic. 3rd edn. Edited and translated by Klaus Brinkmann & D.O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Jovanović, Gordana. 2010. “Historizing Epistemology in Psychology.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 44(4): 310-328.

Mink, L.O. 1987. Historical Understanding. Edited by Brian Fay, E.O. Golob & R.T. Vann. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Moore, G.E. 1903. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nuzzo, Angelica (ed.). 2010. Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. London & New York: Continuum International Publishing.

Redding, Paul. 2007. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roth, P.A. 1989. “How Narratives Explain.” Social Research 65(2): 449-478.

Soames, Scott. 2003. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Strawson, P.F. 1992. Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trivedi, Saam. 2001. “An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism.” British Journal of Aesthetics 41(2): 192-206.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung [1921]/Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

Sebastian Luft: Philosophie lehren: Ein Buch zur philosophischen Hochschuldidaktik, Meiner, 2019

Philosophie lehren: Ein Buch zur philosophischen Hochschuldidaktik Book Cover Philosophie lehren: Ein Buch zur philosophischen Hochschuldidaktik
Sebastian Luft
Meiner
2019
Paperback 19,90 €
214

Michela Beatrice Ferri (Ed.): The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America

The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America Book Cover The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America
Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 100
Michela Beatrice Ferri (Ed.)
Springer
2019
Hardback $119.99
XXVII, 482

Reviewed by: Justin Humphreys (The University of Pennsylvania)

There is more than one way to conceptualize the development of North American phenomenology. An image of “transplantation” would take the classical phenomenological tradition extending from Brentano to Husserl to be essentially the product of a European cultural sphere exported to the New World. In this view, Husserl’s thought is a seed planted in foreign soil and cultivated by his students. An image of “absorption” would portray North American philosophy as an autonomous enterprise enriched in stages by the themes and problems of classical phenomenology. On this conception, its origin in the European university is a contingent historical fact about phenomenology rather than a feature of its essential nature.

The choice between these images has consequences for how one reads the archive of phenomenological texts produced in North America. For example, in the course of a series of letters in 1940 discussing William James’ psychology, Aron Gurwitsch remarks to Alfred Schutz that they share the “goal of using James to present motives leading to phenomenology to a public which is unfamiliar with phenomenology.” Though Gurwitsch takes James never to have escaped completely the atomistic and sensualistic understanding of consciousness he criticized, he insists that James’ thought leads to and motivates the phenomenological project. American philosophy may therefore be translated into the language of phenomenology and “both parties gain infinitely with this translation.”[i] While the transplantation image implies that the gain is the ability of the phenomenologist to communicate to an American audience, the absorption image suggests that there are indigenous forces in American philosophy that could add to the phenomenologist’s project of fundamentally clarifying the structures of intentionality.

I approached Michela Beatrice Ferri’s new volume, The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America, with the hope of gaining tools for understanding this transition of a set of philosophical problems and methods from one surrounding world to another. Indeed, in his elegant if somewhat enigmatic Preface, Robert Sokolowski claims that the book is an “exercise in hermeneutics” concerning the displacement of phenomenology from one cultural-historical setting to another (vii). Continuing this theme, Ferri’s Introduction portrays this displacement as a “transplanting of Husserl’s thought” occasioned by the rise of Nazism (xvii) and as an “endeavor to graft phenomenology into American intellectual culture” (xxiv). Ferri suggests that by examining the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology in the United States and Canada (for reasons that are unclear to me, Mexico is excluded), the book will contribute to an understanding of “the division of philosophical discourse in North American [sic] that has been called the ‘Analytic-Continental Divide’” (xviii). The book proposes, then, to cut to the root of the divergence between the “analytic” and “continental” traditions in North American philosophy.

Unfortunately, the book is organized and edited in a way that does not contribute to a unified description of American phenomenology. Even worse, most of the discussions of the reception of Husserl’s philosophy remain on the level of merely factual history, without providing phenomenological analyses of particular receptive acts. Since I cannot discuss every one of the book’s twenty-six chapters here, this review will focus on those parts most salient to gaining an understanding of phenomenology in North America.

Jonathan Strassfeld’s meticulously researched opening chapter shows how the professionalization of philosophy at Harvard beginning in the 1890s required that the department offer a diverse curriculum rather than establish a single school. Indicative of this diversity effort, seven of the ten North American students who studied with Husserl before 1925 were associated with Harvard (7). Among them, the Canadian-born Winthrop Pickard Bell went to work under Husserl in Germany in 1911. With the internment of foreign nationals at the outbreak of the first World War, in 1914 “Bell became the first Anglo-American to receive a doctorate from Husserl; but only after defending his thesis inside a detention facility” (12). The chapter continues by offering a chronology of how other early notables – Marvin Farber, Dorion Cairns, Charles Hartshorne, and V. J. McGill – studied with Husserl during the interwar period. Drawing on Farber’s 1925 dissertation, Strassfeld argues persuasively that Husserl’s foundational program was not understood as part of a separate, “continental” tradition until at least the 1930s, when the work of Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein began to hold sway at Harvard (16-20).

Jason Bell’s chapter proposes the project of examining Winthrop Bell’s 1927 Harvard course, “Husserl and the Phenomenological Movement,” the first class on phenomenology offered in North America. Perhaps the most interesting question raised in this chapter is whether logic is “purely a priori” or “dependent on induction,” a discussion of which would allow for a comparison of the phenomenological and pragmatistic theories of truth and evidence (33). But the chapter neither offers a phenomenological analysis, nor makes of any use of primary texts by Husserl, Peirce, Royce, or James. Consequently, this question is never addressed. Moreover, although the chapter is clearly written, it really examines only the first week of the course, and thus fails to give a comprehensive view of the earliest phenomenological curriculum in North America.

After discussing the seeding of phenomenology at Harvard, the book turns to the growing of phenomenology at the New School for Social Research. Judith Friedlander’s chapter offers a careful institutional history of the philosophy department at the New School. Lester Embree and Michael Barber’s chapter on the “Golden Age” of phenomenology at the New School is more anecdotal, but likewise contains interesting information on the role of three major figures associated with the school – Schutz, Gurwitsch, and Cairns. But although these chapters offer insight into the history of the New School, they are not recognizably concerned with Husserl’s thought – hardly any mention is made of his specific works, much less how his ideas were received or modified by North American philosophers.

The chronological orientation of these early chapters is not incidental to the structure of the book. Ostensibly, the chapters are organized into seven sections, beginning with the introduction of phenomenology at Harvard, and its establishment at the New School, and then proceeding to discussions of individual figures, centers and societies, phenomenological journals, regional schools, and finally to a comparison of the phenomenological and analytic traditions. Inexplicably, however, treatments of individual figures spill over into the first section (a chapter on Gurwitsch), and into the penultimate section (a chapter on Dallas Willard). Moreover, it is difficult to characterize what is going on in many chapters of the book that focus on phenomenological publications, societies, and centers. For example, Nenon and Ferri’s chapter on “Important Twentieth Century American Husserl Scholars” (145-149) is a mere list of “leading researchers” working in North American universities. A chapter by McKenna and Hopkins on the journals Husserl Studies and The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (337-341) provides only very brief editorial histories of these journals, quoting extensively from the publishers’ websites.

What do these chapters contribute – if anything – to an understanding of the reception of Husserl’s phenomenology? They certainly do not employ a phenomenological method. But nor do they draw on themes that have been investigated by well-known phenomenologists.

Even a clearly written and informative chapter, such as Jeffrey McCurry and Chelsea R. Binnie’s history of The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University seems out of place in series of “contributions to phenomenology.” In this chapter one learns, for example, how Erwin Straus’ office furniture was saved due to an encounter in 1938 with an SS Officer who had been his patient. Out of gratitude, the officer made special arrangements to ship the physician-phenomenologist’s possessions to the United States, which after Straus’ death in 1975 were donated to the Silverman Center (300-301). But what was the significance of the furniture within the face-to-face encounter between a Jewish physician and a Nazi Officer? How does the intact collection today allow one to reenter the embodied space of a working phenomenologist? What is the meaning of removing a culturally meaningful object – Straus’ Victorian music stand, for example – from one surrounding cultural world to another? This story could provide the starting point for a phenomenological investigation that would be appropriate to Straus as an emigre and as a theorist of embodied thinking. But the discussion remains merely factual, without exploring the meaning of the preservation of the furniture that constituted Straus’ workspace.

Though as mere catalogues of facts, these central chapters fail to elucidate how Husserl’s thought made inroads in North America, the chapters focusing on phenomenological figures have a more recognizably philosophical content. I shall focus on these chapters in the remainder of the review.

Daniel Marcelle’s chapter argues that Aron Gurwitsch’s “field theory” of attention advances the project of Husserlian phenomenology by breaking with Husserl’s own “searchlight” theory of attention. On Marcelle’s reading, Husserl focused on the noetic or “act” aspect of attending, which he described metaphorically as a “ray of regard” directed towards the object of thought (65-66). This spatial metaphor led Husserl to assume that noematic parts of the object remain constant as the consciousness undergoes attentional modifications, for example, that individual notes remain the same, whether they are heard separately or as part of a melody (67). By focusing instead on the noematic or “object” aspect of attention, Gurwitsch offers a richer descriptive theory that dispenses with this presupposition. Gurwitsch distinguishes among theme, the focal point of consciousness, thematic field, the content of which is not thematic but is contextually relevant to the theme, and margin, the content of which is not relevant to the theme but which is nevertheless featured in the stream of consciousness (50). This theory rejects the constancy implicitly assumed by Husserl, while offering richer resources for the description of attentional change (68). Marcelle’s reconstruction of these positions, as well as his characterization of Gurwitsch as promoting the project of phenomenology even while criticizing some of Husserl’s views, is on the mark. Phenomenology as both philosophers conceived it was not a static set of doctrines but a research program intended to uncover the fundamental structures of consciousness. My only objection concerns the chapter’s use of the “Freiburg Encounter” between Husserl and Gurwitsch to frame the discussion. Surely it was his decades of work at the intersection of classical phenomenology and gestalt psychology, rather than his brief 1927 encounter with the person of Husserl, that provides the proper context for understanding Gurwitsch’s field theory of attention.

Eric Chelstrom’s chapter examines Marvin Farber’s “idiosyncratic” understanding of Husserl. On the one hand, Farber wrote a dissertation on Husserl, advanced Husserl’s work for an English-speaking audience, and edited Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, a journal that, in its early period, was dominated by research conducted in a Husserlian phenomenological vein. On the other hand, Farber disagreed fundamentally with Husserl’s idealism, going so far as to separate the “logical” works as the only acceptable texts in Husserl’s corpus (109). Chelstrom makes a convincing case that Farber harbored doubts about Husserl’s methodology from early in his career, though they later emerged as more definite criticisms of Husserl’s idealism. According to Chelstrom, Farber saw the epoché as a valuable method of logical criticism, but argued that the turn to idealism smuggled in metaphysical assumptions that revealed Husserl’s “absolutist and eternalist” political views (112-113). Chelstrom holds that although Farber understood his own materialist and pluralist commitments to be opposed to pure phenomenology, the separation of Husserl’s logical and metaphysical doctrines was arbitrary. I am not so convinced. Doesn’t Husserl’s conception of a transcendental ego speak against the primacy of the empirical self? Likewise, Farber’s pluralism requires that he accept more than one method in philosophy, not that he accepts Husserl’s method. Though Chelstrom’s chapter raises important questions about a difficult figure, it does not explain how Farber used phenomenology within his own naturalistic and pluralistic project.

Though it offers a nice overview of Dorion Cairns’ career, Richard Zaner’s chapter also seems philosophically thin. Its central conceit is that Cairns introduced a novel and helpful principle into phenomenological philosophy, according to which “no belief is philosophically acceptable unless it is established on the basis of adequate evidence. This is a condition of the legitimacy of any epistemic claim” (139). But who would disagree with that? The principle is so general that, on its own, it adds nothing interesting to epistemology. The real question is: what counts as adequate evidence for a belief? In order to answer that question, one would need a more substantive phenomenological analysis of evidence and its adequacy than is available here.

Carlo Ierna’s chapter on Herbert Spiegelberg takes a biographical approach, outlining the phenomenologist’s education, studies, emigration to the United States, and finally his polemical exchange with Farber in the wake of the publication of Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement (Farber complained that phenomenology did not have the internal consistency to count as a “movement” but would be better described as a “tendency.” Spiegelberg disagreed.) (163-164). The most interesting part of the chapter concerns Spiegelberg’s phenomenological  “workshops,” in which participants would attempt to enter sympathetically into one another’s perspectives. This is an alternative model to the current lecture- and text-based practices of most American phenomenologists. Indeed, it would have been interesting to read more about the methodology and content of these workshops.

Gabriel R. Ricci’s chapter focuses on Jitendra Nath Mohanty’s decades-long project of comparing Indian philosophy to Husserlian phenomenology. For example, whereas in the Vedantic tradition consciousness plays the logical role of mobilizing sources of knowledge but not of judging, in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology consciousness is taken to have “judicative authority” (176). However, without a strong background in the various traditions of Indian philosophy, it is difficult to understand what is at stake in such a comparison. Moreover, since it neither quotes not cites any primary text of Indian philosophy, nor includes a bibliography, this chapter serves more as an encomium of Mohanty than as a critical engagement with his work.

The chapter on Robert Sokolowski by Molly Brigid McGrath presents similar problems. To be sure, McGrath makes an excellent case for Sokolowski’s anti-solipsistic interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, according to which the epoché exposes “not a solitary ego” but an intersubjective intentionality (197). But in attempting to summarize nearly a half-century of philosophical scholarship, it is not clear how this essay contributes to the volume’s stated purpose. As attractive as Sokolowski’s interpretation may be, what is the broader lesson concerning the reception of phenomenology? Would this understanding of the epoché have been acceptable to Husserl himself? What does it add to the phenomenological project that is not already available in Husserl’s philosophical writings?

Daniela Verducci’s chapter, which purports to show how Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka wove together pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, likewise strays from the topic of Husserl reception. An extended section on Scheler’s critique of pragmatism (210-214) is illustrative of this lack of focus. Indeed, the main point Verducci attributes to Scheler, that “the basic error of pragmatism” is “identifying knowledge exclusively as the knowledge of control” (212) rests on a misunderstanding of pragmatism. More importantly, it is unclear what this has to do with Tymieniecka’s reception of Husserl. The last section argues that the synthesis of phenomenology and pragmatism requires, in Tymieniecka’s words, that “not constitutive intentionality, but only the constructive march of life that supports it can reveal to us the beginning of all things” (215). But Husserl’s use of epoché, insofar as it reduces the field of phenomenological inquiry to the constitution of meanings, should block any claims about the beginnings of things. It is hard to read Tymieniecka’s statement as respecting this “immanent” orientation of phenomenological inquiry. However, given Verducci’s references to a plethora of philosophical figures, free use of Greek, Latin, and German technical terminology and neologisms, and large number of creative capitalizations and typographical errors, it seems that the issue is less philosophical than editorial. The editors should have worked more on the chapter before it went to print, which might have led to a more lucid treatment of an interesting topic.

California Phenomenology, a chapter co-written by Jeffrey Yoshimi, Clinton Tolley, and David Woodruff Smith, offers an historical outline of the development of Husserlian phenomenology on the west coast beginning in the 1960s. Interestingly, the founding figure of this movement was not a Californian but the Norwegian-born, Harvard-educated philosopher Dagfinn Føllesdal, who trained a generation of phenomenologists at Harvard and Stanford. Among those who attended early meetings in the Bay Area, most of whom were once Føllesdal’s students, were Hubert Dreyfus, David Woodruff Smith, Ronald McIntyre, and Robert Tragesser; they were later joined by such notables as Izchak Miller, John Haugeland, and Richard Tieszen. The authors note that the California school of Husserl interpretation is marked by an emphasis on exploring the relationship between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, and a “reading of Husserl as developing a semantic theory that can be viewed as a generalization of Fregean semantics, from language to consciousness” (372). As opposed to the “orthodox Gurwitschian” understanding of the noema as the object of thought, this “Fregean semantic” interpretation takes the Husserlian noema to be an abstract object mediating between the act and object of reference (372-373). For the California phenomenologists, your act of thinking of a tabby cat is able to pick out the furry thing on your doormat in virtue of its instantiating a noema or “sense” in you that puts your thinking of the cat into potential inferential relations with the other noemata you constitute. The fact that the noema can be pre-predicative makes it more general than Frege’s notion of Sinn: a noema enters into any description of thinking, regardless of whether that thinking is propositional. Unfortunately, the authors do not develop the consequences of this view but continue the memoir, which relies heavily on direct quotations of emails from various members of the group. However, this memoir is somewhat marred by the fact although the reader can usually tell who is writing, it is unclear which author was the recipient of the email. Another idiosyncracy is that although the chapter is dedicated to Richard Tieszen, precious little discussion of his work is included in the piece.

Micah D. Tillman’s chapter stands out as one of the strongest in the collection, managing to introduce Dallas Willard’s work, while offering fruitful suggestions for attaining a unitarian reading of Husserl’s corpus. On Tillman’s reconstruction, Willard pursued a realist interpretation according to which Husserl’s fundamental aims are at once to provide an ontology of objects, and to account for the possibility of objective knowledge. This attempt to account for objective knowledge is faced with two fundamental paradoxes. The first is that although knowledge must be objective, it is only realized in a subject’s mental acts. The second is that while any such realization must be immediate (in Tillman’s terms, “intuitive”), most of our scientific knowledge is not immediate but is grasped through symbols (393). On Willard’s reconstruction, Husserl resolves the first paradox by developing an account of universals as modes of intentionality that can be fulfilled. Thus, Willard maintains that universal meanings have objective validity but in their fulfillment are apprehended by a subject. The second paradox is also resolved via the notion of fulfillment, which ensures the validity of mechanical or symbolic reasoning not through direct inspection, but through the possibility that any symbolic mathematical proof could be “reactivated” or intuitively “fulfilled” (396). Even for those who, like this reader, are not versed in Willard’s thought, Tillman’s presentation is lucid and philosophically compelling. Though the rest of Tillman’s paper is too rich to be summarized here, one can only hope that Tillman continues this line of inquiry, perhaps by exploring the theological consequences of Willard’s view that are merely signaled at the beginning of the essay (390).

Several chapters are less relevant to the reception of classical phenomenology. Ihde’s chapter is a reprint of a somewhat polemical article on the analytic-continental divide from the 1980s, which now seems dated. Rescher’s chapter on Pittsburgh philosophy has little to do with phenomenology. Calcagno’s chapter on Edith Stein is interesting, but has no direct bearing on Husserl reception in North America.

The final essay in the collection, by Paul M. Livingston, argues that there is a fundamental methodological difference between Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy, in virtue of which the two cannot be directly reconciled (435). According to Livingston, analytic philosophy since Frege has looked to linguistic patterns of public usage to understand the structure of thought (442). Exploiting the work of several figures central to this tradition, Livingston argues that a “characteristic methodological and ontological” assumption of analytic philosophy is that “the objective explanation of mental phenomena requires locating them in an intersubjectively and publicly available network of causally related phenomena” (453-454). Though there is much to be said for Livingston’s use of this literature, it seems to me that the entire weight of this latter claim rests on how one construes the word “objective.” If “objective” here means “true,” then all first-personal statements must indeed be excluded as subjective and false. This leaves no place for Husserl but amounts to the extravagant claim that in order to do philosophy at all, one must forfeit one’s first-personal grasp of the world. In distinction, if “objective” here means “empirical,” it is hard to imagine that Husserl or anyone else would object: surely the mark of an empirical explanation is its causal relation of a phenomenon to other publicly observable phenomena. Of course, there is a residual question of whether there are non-empirical explanations, that is, whether priori knowledge is possible. And some philosophers have answered this question negatively. But this denial could never be a general methodological commitment of analytic philosophers, some of whom have made non-empirical claims, including claims about logic.

I have suggested that in privileging facts over analyses of the reception of Husserl’s thought in North America, the volume includes too much information. But one may also remark on what it excludes. The lack of a chapter relating Husserl to James is strange, especially given Geniusas’ work in the same book series exploring the connection between James’ “fringes” and Husserl’s “horizon.”[ii] There is very little discussion of the work of Alfred Schutz, despite the fact that his work in phenomenology exerted tremendous influence in the social sciences, particularly through The Social Construction of Reality, the bestselling sociology text by Luckmann and Berger, who studied under him at the New School.[iii] Likewise, though his furniture is described in some detail, a chapter dedicated to Straus’s work would have been a welcome addition, and might have provided an opportunity to examine the theme of embodiment that haunts the history of phenomenology and is a concern of current work in philosophy. Another figure who is ignored is Hermann Weyl, who drew from Husserl and had an influential career at Princeton. Finally, it is surprising that there is no chapter on Kurt Gödel, who both attended meetings of the Vienna Circle and, while in the United States, dedicated himself to the study of Husserl. An examination of his views on phenomenology could be used stage an encounter between the mid-century analytic philosophy that stemmed from logical positivism and the continental tradition, which is one of the acknowledged aims of the volume.

This theme of the relationship between, and potential rapprochement of phenomenology and analytic philosophy is an important one, and merits further discussion. Analytic philosophy began as an approach that, like phenomenology, aimed to provide an ultimate clarification of the problems of philosophy. But traditional analytical topics like the problem of mental causation, the justified true belief theory of knowledge, or the metaphysical “debate” between three- and four-dimensionalists today look like artefacts of a stagnant and outmoded philosophical methodology. One’s sense of disappointment is not alleviated by observing the plethora of new philosophical research programs – formal philosophy, experimental philosophy, and critical theories of race and gender – that ape the methods of mathematics, experimental psychology, and sociology. The shattered hegemony of linguistic analysis leaves American philosophers in need of new, distinctively philosophical methods. While the wholesale revival of classical phenomenology might be a tall order, the critical and judicious use of first-personal description and a commitment to elucidating the meanings of lived experience may have much to offer practicing philosophers today.

This book has the virtue of discussing a number of figures in phenomenology who have received less attention than they deserve. In doing so, it shows that despite a common prejudice that takes phenomenology to be primarily a Western European phenomenon, phenomenologists have also been doing interesting work on this side of the Atlantic. However, the book ignores some key figures and leaves important questions unanswered. Indeed, it never makes thematic the fundamental questions about phenomenology in North America. In being received on this continent, how have the interests and methods of phenomenology been transformed? Is this transmission better conceived as the transplantation of a European cultural product to the New World, or as the absorption of a way of theorizing by North American philosophers? What sort of enrichment of philosophy was envisaged by figures like Gurwitsch and Schutz that could justify the countless hours they spent working out the details of a phenomenological philosophy, even while their families and friends were in danger of extermination at the hands of the Nazis? In failing to address these questions, the The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America misses an opportunity to raise the radical problems that would allow one to grasp the telos of the phenomenological project.


[i] Grathoff, R. [Ed] Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959. Indiana University Press, 1989, 30-31.

[ii] Geniusas, S. The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht/New York: Springer (Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 67), 2012.

[iii] Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966

Giuliano Bacigalupo, Hélène Leblanc (Eds.): Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy

Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy Book Cover Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy
History of Analytic Philosophy
Giuliano Bacigalupo, Hélène Leblanc (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2019
Hardback $99.99
XVII, 237

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ARC Centre for History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)

This nine-chapter anthology edited and introduced by Giuliano Bacigalupo and Hélène Leblanc is one of the recent volumes within the History of Analytic Philosophy series. The series aims not only to open debate and research into its nominated field of philosophy, but also to engage those thinkers nowadays regarded as “founders” of the analytic movement. These include Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein—as well as those influencing and succeeding them—who shaped contemporary concerns as much rooted, for example, in the logico-linguistic as in the psycho-phenomenological terrain. To that extent, the three main parts of Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy respectively step readers into language broadly and narrowly conceived; competing conceptions of space and time; and theoretical approaches to existence and philosophy. Whilst so doing, contributors (re)position Marty against both his contemporaries such as Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl as well as current philosophers such as Graham Nerlich and Alberto Voltolini (who contributes the penultimate chapter of the anthology).

Readers will therefore find that this volume is not merely an exegesis of one of the less familiar figures associated with Brentano’s intellectual circles, it is also an act of retrieval in an historical or diachronic sense. It consequently shares a duality of aims traceable in recent anthologies centred upon Marty, including, for instance, those edited since the ’nineties by Kevin Mulligan, Robin Rollinger, Laurent Cesalli with Hamid Taieb, and Guillaume Fréchette also with Hamid Taieb. Therefore, this review essay faces two tasks. Firstly, it will critically probe the actual way in which Marty is presented in light of contemporary debates with particular reference to the logico-linguistic realm which at least half the chapters engage. Secondly, it will examine more closely how this philosophical anthology more generally operates historically despite the editors’ overt declaration that “this volume is not a reconstruction of Marty’s theories for historical purposes” as distinct from an effort to resurrect his thinking “via the lenses of a contemporary perspective” (3).

I

Because Marty has tended to be recruited as a precursor of Paul Grice by Frank Liedtke (1990), Laurent Cesalli (2013) and Guy Longworth (2017) amongst others, let us begin by concentrating upon two opening chapters. In Chapter Two, François Recanati counters this tendency by proposing a marked contrast in their respective conceptions of communicative acts. Grice (1957: 213-223; cf. 1980: 290-297) claims that two distinctive kinds of meaning operate within our acts of communication. For example, if Laura says, “Those dark clouds mean that it will rain,” then the meaning of “dark clouds” functions as a “natural” sign of an impending change of weather. In other words, in cases like “dark clouds” where “rain” can be inferred or predicted from the fact that they are present, Laura is giving expression to “natural” meaning. By contrast, if her older sibling Lucantonio keeps pointing to the wispy grey sky overhead, repeatedly exclaiming “You’ll see, it will rain,” his pointing can be taken to mean “it will rain.” However, it does not as a matter of fact actually follow that it will rain since Lucantonio may well, for example, be teasing or mocking others accompanying him. Here, the meaning communicated is not “natural”: it is not a case of what follows from what. Rather, what Lucantonio means by pointing and playfully declaring “it will rain” reveals a communicative intention of leading his listeners to recognize his intention of teasing or mocking them. Meaning here, now tied to the speaker’s intention of inducing a particular psychological effect amongst his listeners by their recognition of his intention, is regarded by Grice as “non-natural” meaning.

Recanati reminds readers that Grice (1969: 93ff.), even when subsequently elaborating his analysis of a speaker’s intention and a listener’s response, did not waver from upholding “non-natural” meaning as independent of “natural” meaning nor did he explicitly resort to rationalising the difference purely in terms of, say, conventions or rules governing acts of spoken communication. Instead, to cite Recanati, “Communicative intentions have a nested structure and […] potentially involve an infinite sequence of sub-intentions pertaining to the recognition by the hearer of a previous sub-intention” (14).  So, for Recanati, “to make the speaker’s communicative intention fully ‘overt’,” Grice needs to allow the communicative intention to be “reflexive” (14). This perhaps explains why Grice concedes that the listener’s recognition is grounded “at least partly on the basis of” the speaker’s utterance (1969: 94, 96).

Turning to Marty (1908: 283ff.), there appears to be no evidence for treating “natural” and “non-natural” meaning in strictly binary terms. Recanati contends that Marty construes the two kinds of meaning as “continuous” (15).  Indeed, he continues, human behaviour itself can be “a natural sign of ‘internal psychological processes’” (15 (citing Marty)), especially in instances such as involuntary tears of sorrow, grief or anguish and screams of pain, horror or fear. Yet, if Laura’s tears merely expressed her sorrow, that alone is insufficient a criterion for being a communicative act. From Marty’s perspective, for Laura to engage an act of communication, her principal intention should be directed at her listeners, inducing in them “a matching attitude towards the object of the expressed thought” (15) where expressing her own psychological response is but a means to that end. That said, when Laura’s tears on the death of her beloved nonna enable her listeners to align themselves with her anguish, grief, or sorrow, then for Marty unlike Grice an instance of “natural” meaning need not exclude an instance of “non-natural” meaning.

Pursuing the difference between Marty and Grice further, Recanati finds the former assigns “only one semiotic relation” which characterises “natural” meaning whereas “non-natural” meaning comprises “three distinct semiotic relations at work” (17). The three relationships are said to be the expressive meaning of the utterance; the wider or communicative meaning of the utterance; and the narrower or denotational meaning of the utterance. Collectively, as some readers might surmise, Marty’s threefold depiction seems to form an antecedent of that of Karl Bühler (1918: 1; cf. 12-13) initially in his review of theories of sentences and subsequently in his seminal Sprachtheorie (1934: 34ff.) on three basic semantic functions of language. For Recanati, the threefold relational features underpin how Marty “views linguistic communication as continuous with natural meaning” without incorporating the “nested/reflexive structure” Grice assigns to communicative intentions (19 & 18). The line of demarcation between Marty and Grice is that the latter ultimately adheres to the view that “a natural sign ceases to be a natural sign as soon as the hearer recognizes that it is produced deliberately” (20).  Recanati re-enforces what is at stake by briefly alluding to the highly frequent use we make of experientially- or situationally-bound utterances when interacting with others, best known as the deictic field or indexical dimension of language. Consider, for example, when Laura and Lucantonio are momentarily separated in a crowd and lose sight of each other. Lucantonio shouts, “I am here” to the relief of Laura (whether or not she deictically replies, “Now I see you”). Here, as Bühler (1934: 93ff.) in Part Two of Sprachtheorie also maintains, both “natural” and “non-natural” meaning are at play within the deictic field. Lucantonio’s communicative intention to advise or re-assure Laura that he is in her vicinity exemplifies the “non-natural” and, for Laura, his very act of shouting embodies a “natural” sign indicating his location to her.

In Chapter Three, Mark Textor continues investigating Marty and Grice on communicative intentionality and meaning, but adds the contrasting position of Marty’s teacher Brentano. According to Textor, what Brentano, unlike Marty and Grice, brings to the debate over the nature of meaning is that it primarily centres upon the speaker’s utterance “independently of whether utterances are made in order to influence the thought [or response] of others” (35).  This, we are told, can be best demonstrated by counter-examples of “non-natural” meaning without communicative intentions found in assertoric judgements. Let us revisit the situation where Lucantonio, when first looking at the cirrostratus clouds overhead, states “I claim that it is going to rain.” If Laura afterwards reports, “He claimed that it was going to rain,” all she has conveyed is what was communicated by his initially uttered claim, not any effect it had upon her. Again, if Lucantonio afterwards conceded that, despite his subsequent teasing and mocking manner, the very presence of cirrostratus clouds first became associated with the assertion “It is going to rain,” then this can be done without implying his utterance was necessarily true. Nor was the assertion self-referential in the way that Marty (1908: 495) and Grice (1969: 112-113) exemplify, including addressing one’s imagined future self or pretending to address someone else.

By Textor’s account, in so far as statements of claims or contentions instantiate judgements and evaluations more broadly, they reveal the speaker’s attitudes. Such attitudes contain the speaker’s (rational) commitment that his or her assertions or assumptions are correct. That is to say, the “non-natural” communicative meaning of utterances here is definable without reference to any listeners. Textor formulates his point as follows: “If I assume that p, I am committed to the correctness of my assuming and the state of affairs that p is worthy of this attitude” (54). Textor’s solution, for some readers, might still leave gaps in their understanding of Marty’s more controversial commitments “about how things are” (42). What are the consequences of Marty’s somewhat paradoxical handling of claims or judgements about entities or events that do not exist? Perhaps, it is here that they should consider the interpretive strategies of other contributors. For example, Ingvar Johansson in Chapter Five argues that the later Marty does not identify “non-real” with “non-existing” or “subsisting” with another mode of existing unlike “real” ordinary objects (100). Furthermore, Alberto Voltolini in Chapter Eight takes Marty to be analysing the “non-real” as “grounded” upon the “real” (184).

If nothing else, the respective attempts by Recanati and Textor to draw Marty into latter-day arguments surrounding Grice warn readers against searching for simple one-to-one correlations between an intellectual precursor and his putative successor. That each often appears to express comparable solutions is not tantamount to concluding that each is responding to an identical set of problems.

II

The second section of this review essay will focus upon Kevin Mulligan’s lengthy Chapter Nine in Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy. By so doing, it will give us the opportunity to examine, albeit briefly, how Marty (when leaving aside his approach to communicative acts discussed above) construes language as threatening to undermine philosophical enquiry. At the same time, Mulligan himself traces the way in which Marty’s strategies when dealing with modality, logic, and intentionality anticipate those influentially deployed by Wittgenstein.

Modality pervades much of our attitude towards and thinking about our actions, ideas and world, ranging from certainties, doubts and necessities to obligations, possibilities, and willingness. Marty (1908: 354) seizes upon the erroneous way we construe not some, but “all possibilities” which “are, of course, merely something non-real,” something “treated as things, which have effects and are effected.” How does it come about that we treat possibilities, and for that matter impossibilities, as if they were “real” in the sense of being “causally efficacious” as Mulligan succinctly notes (199 (cf. e.g., Johansson 100; Mac Cumhaill 123, 129; Sattig 170, n. 6; and Voltolini 183-184))? Marty’s reply unequivocally identifies the problem in largely linguistic terms:

All our names have as their inner linguistic form either the presentation of a substance or of an accident, thus of something real. But we always designate the non-real, too, indeed even what is completely fictitious, with the help of a substantive (such as […] possibility, impossibility, etc.) […] or with the help of an adjective which is attributed to a real or apparent subject as a predicate or attribute… (1908: 354-355)

We are, in brief, misled by our use of nouns and adjectives into thinking of possibilities either as substances or as if they were properties inhering in substances. Because “language uses expressions for what is real also for what is non-real,” we face “more disastrous” epistemological consequences such as when “a physicist takes for the truth what is, in his [or her] field, merely a picture and an attempted illustration” (1908: 356). Whilst we find many analogous examples in Wittgenstein (1945) of how possibilities become conflated with actual states of affairs when our “forms of expression […] send us in pursuit of chimeras” (§94; cf. §194), Marty appeals to “inner linguistic forms” which Mulligan immediately understands to be “a conceptual presentation which has a certain function, that of directing an interlocutor’s attention to what the speaker has in mind” (199).

What has been ignored at this juncture in Chapter Nine, especially from a more linguistic point of view, is how and why Marty should have appealed to the contestable notion of “inner linguistic form”; a notion explicated through debates against which Marty reacted by Werner Leopold (1929) & (1951) and through earlier iterations of Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative theory of language as first broached by Sige-Yuki Kuroda (1972: 8ff.). On the information given, it is not entirely obvious how such inner forms, which Marty finds in metaphors particularly and language development generally, can be connected with linguistic signs of, say, the “non-real” and the “fictitious” yet have no role in their meaning.

Next, Mulligan deftly portrays the manner in which the kinds of difficulties besetting modality in effect ricochet throughout the way consciousness is all too often erroneously depicted irrespective of whether emphasis is laid upon cognitive, conative, or emotional factors. We need only witness here how Marty summarises his analysis of earlier thinkers from Aristoteles onwards:

One wanted to get to the bottom of the secret of consciousness and in so doing took more or less seriously a linguistic picture used in the description of the peculiar process. The more abstract locution […] of what is thought in the thinker (and likewise what is felt in one who feels) […] is, in my opinion, only justified as a fiction of pictorial, inner, linguistic form, […] but leads to a falsification as soon as it is taken more seriously. (1908: 397)

Similarly, Wittgenstein (1945), when considering how easily one enters “that dead end in philosophizing where one believes that the difficulty of the problem consists in our having to describe phenomena that evade our grasp” (§436), continues:

expectation is unsatisfied, because it is an expectation of something; a belief, an opinion, is unsatisfied, because it is an opinion that something is the case, something real, something outside the process of believing. (§438)

In what sense can one call wishes, expectations, beliefs, etc. “unsatisfied”? What is our prototype of non-satisfaction? Is it a hollow space? And would one call that “unsatisfied”? Wouldn’t this be a metaphor too? (§439)

Mulligan then turns to how Marty and Wittgenstein oppose the view of logic as a framework or scaffold and its implications for how propositions are construed. Marty, citing Husserl in passing, questions “the picture” of an “ideal framework which every language fills up and clothes differently” (1908: 59). Instead, he suggests, “The tissue of the elementary meaning-categories” of propositional forms within logic “stands to real language and their makers more like a pattern which they try to trace” and “not as a frame which would stand before the consciousness of all in the same way and which they would merely fill out in different ways” (1908: 59). Wittgenstein examines “the question of the essence of language, of propositions, of thought” and finds that his attempts to comprehend the nature of language, especially “its function, its structure” that “already lies open to view, that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering,” is not the target of such a question (1945: §92). Instead, he remarks:

 

The essence is hidden from us’: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: “What is language?”, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all, and independently of any future experience. (1945: §92)

Such a misunderstanding immediately leads to “the sublimation of our whole account of logic” with the “tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional sign and the facts. Or even to purify, to sublimate the sign itself” (1945: §94). Logic, the “essence” of thinking, “presents an order: the a priori order of the world; that is, the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common,” the quest for which is aligned with a superordinate “order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, inference, truth, experience, and so forth” (1945: §97).

As Mulligan realises, the rejection by Marty and Wittgenstein of logic as a framework or scaffold applies to “conceptions of propositions as ideal entities, as intermediaries […] as immanent or private objects” (208). Equally, propositions do not “represent states of affairs or the world in a sui generis and irreducible way” by virtue of a “special sort of unity” (208). He does acknowledge that Marty only implicitly construed natural language to be pervaded by a “family of structures more or less akin to one another,” with terms forming “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing” popularly characterised nowadays as “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1945: §108, §66 & §67). However, Mulligan believes Marty’s theory of language was more explicitly developed by Karl Bühler (1934: 247ff.) especially when Bühler analysed the processes of merging or fusion where “partial, overlapping similarities hold” within the symbolic field of language under the concept of the “synchytic” (210).

For Mulligan, the above-mentioned distortions afflicting philosophical enquiry lead both Marty and Wittgenstein to make “the critique of language necessary” (212). Marty overtly identifies the habitual role language can and does play:

the presentation of thing and property always and everywhere forces itself on us, if not as a consequence of an innate necessity, then thanks to the power of a strong and general linguistic habit. (1908: 355)

Wittgenstein, too, is convinced that linguistic habits are deeply engrained when commenting how “problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language […] are as deeply rooted in us as the forms of our language” (1945: §111). In addition, Mulligan draws our attention to the “affective and conative” dimension of misleading images and metaphors in philosophy (214). Marty, for instance, writes of the potency of urges:

An instinctive urge leads us, at first, to take whatever appears in a sensory fashion to be real, i.e. to ascribe “external” reality to it; to the colours, sounds, places and changes of place which are present for us in sensation or hallucination

to the point where

We therefore transfer what in them is intuitive and forces itself upon us as real, in an instinctive belief, into the mind. (1908: 396)

Wittgenstein, too, is mindful of how wrestling with “the workings of our language” occurs “despite an urge to misunderstand them” (1945: §109).

Both thinkers noticeably vacillate over what precisely they define as misleading within language per se (its symbols or similes? its analogies or metaphors?). However, what is not in doubt, as Mulligan observes, is that both agree that philosophy’s “first task is to identify the misleading pictures” which impair if not corrupt philosophical enquiries which take their “first orientation from them” (217). Hence, it is hardly surprisingly when, in the course of asking how philosophical problems about mental processes and states arise, Wittgenstein (1945: §308) should insist that the “first step is the one that altogether escapes notice.”

III

Having pinpointed crucial views given significant weighting within Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy to Marty’s approach to communication and language, in the limited space remaining let us briefly question how, in practice, this anthology construes its task of illuminating the history of analytic philosophy.

First of all, when is analytic philosophy clearly identifiable? Indeed, are we safe in saying that its origins can be unequivocally traced to a set of Anglo-Germanic thinkers? Jan Claes and Benjamin Schneider in their logico-linguistic analysis (59ff.) have little hesitation drawing upon the multi-volume 1837 Wissenschaftslehre by Bernard Bolzano whereas Voltolini when delving into kinds of being and first- and second-order properties of existence (175ff.) alludes to the 1884 monograph Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik by Gottlob Frege. Again, Johansson, when tracing the antecedents of Marty’s conception of space as a container (99ff.) contrasts the superficially similar metaphors of spatiality in Immanuel Kant as well as Isaac Newton without specifying their respective texts. If nothing else, such examples suggest the shifting, albeit implicit, commencement dates and associated canonical texts in what have been and can continue to be taken as analytic antecedents.

Secondly, was analytic philosophy ever a unified, self-aware intellectual movement? After all, the first attested use of the attributions “logico-analytic philosopher” and “analytic philosopher” was first coined a century later by John Wisdom (1931) when exploring Jeremy Bentham’s posthumously published Notes on Logic (circa 1831) and its technique of paraphrasis and analysis of propositional meaning. Even a cursory glance at Clare Mac Cumhaill (121ff.) or Thomas Sattig (153ff.), both juxtaposing Marty and contemporary debates in the field of spatio-temporal apprehension, reveals the tendency to refer to clusters of modern thinkers and their arguments considered relevant to the contentions being raised rather than owing to their analytic credentials.

Thirdly, are we, in view of the foregoing, witnessing convergences upon a specific problem rather than a convergence of specific problems in the unfolding of analytic philosophical debates? Does this, on the one hand, suggest that philosophical movements are open-ended by nature to the point where critical exchanges amongst self-nominated “schools” or “movements,” such as the analytic, the phenomenological, and the pragmatic, gradually became commonplace? On the other hand, need being open-ended preclude the occurrence of distinctive phases (as distinct from problems) of the kind the Bacigalupo and Leblanc volume seems to make manifest when threading logico-linguistic discussions through so many of its chapters?

To that extent, have the detailed explorations here of Anton Marty’s assumptions about language helped to demonstrate two crucial features? The first, more specifically, in many of the debates and problems engaging Marty in the decade preceding the twentieth-century’s first world war the anthology has, perhaps unwittingly, exposed the centrality of the confrontation between “ideal” formal language associated with logic and “ordinary” natural language associated with everyday discourse as what marks analytic philosophy of the period. To return to Werner Leopold, he intuitively senses the foregoing tension between theories of “ideal” and “ordinary” language—a topic most recently addressed by Hans-Johann Glock (2017: 214-220; cf. 2008: 39ff., 52ff., 115-116 & 153ff.), Kelly Jolley (2017: 229-238), and Scott Soames (2017: 34-40)—when he finds Marty’s “theoretical mind” employing “an a-priori approach going from meaning to form” whilst admonishing “philosophers’ overemphasis on logic” (1951: 368). In fact, Leopold proclaims to his audience of linguists: “Marty is a philosopher who does not use language for the purposes of philosophy, but applies philosophical thinking in the service of linguistics” (1951: 370).

The second feature, more generally, was initially voiced by Moritz Schlick, founder of what became the Wiener Kreis:

Every philosophical movement is defined by the principles that it regards as fundamental and to which it constantly recurs in its arguments. But in the course of historical development, the principles are apt not to remain unaltered, whether it be that they acquire new formulations, or come to be extended or restricted, or that even their meaning gradually undergoes noticeable modifications. (1932: 259)

If “some terminological dispute of the old from the new” occurs amongst “the various adherents of a ‘movement’” and results “in hopeless misunderstandings and obscurities,” then these only dissipate, Schlick (1932: 259) claims, when “the various principles” at “cross-purposes” are “separated from each other and tested individually for meaning and truth on their own account […].” Not unlike Bacigalupo and Leblanc rejecting the task of reconstructing Marty’s theories “for historical purposes” (3), Schlick believes “cross-purposes” are “best” handled by disregarding “entirely the contexts in which [disputed principles] have historically arisen” (1932: 259). Or, for those of us who prefer to talk in terms of analytic philosophy as a “tradition,” perhaps we ought to heed the widely disseminated view of Alasdair MacIntyre that any tradition, presumably including intellectual traditions, can be characterised as an

argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition […] and those internal, interpretive debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted. (1988: 12; cf. 354ff.)

Furthermore, as Glock (2008; 212ff.) elaborates, the tradition ascribed to analytic philosophy is one “held together both by ties of mutual influence and by family resemblances.” Clearly, Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy ultimately sides with “internal, interpretive debates.”

References

Bühler, K.L. 1918. “Kritische Musterung der neuen Theorien des Satzes.” Indogermanisches Jahrbuch 6: 1-20.

Bühler, K.L. 1934. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Edited by Achim Eschbach; translated by D.F. Goodwin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1990 [abbreviated as Sprachtheorie in the review essay above].

Cesalli, Laurent. 2013. “Anton Marty’s Intentionalist Theory of Meaning.” In Themes from Brentano. Edited by Denis Fisette & Guillaume Fréchette, 139-164. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.

Glock, H.-J. 2008. What is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Glock, H.-J. 2017. “P.F. Strawson: Ordinary Language Philosophy and Descriptive Metaphysics.” In Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History. Edited by Aaron Preston, 214-228. New York: Routledge.

Grice, H.P. 1957. “Meaning.” In Studies in the Way of Words, 213-223. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Grice, H.P. 1969. “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions.” In Studies in the Way of Words, 88-116. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Grice, H.P. 1980. “Meaning Revisited.” In Studies in the Way of Words, 283-303. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Jolley, K.D. 2017. “Austin Athwart the Tradition.” In Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History. Edited by Aaron Preston, 229-238. New York: Routledge.

Kuroda, S.-Y. 1972. “Anton Marty and the Transformational Theory of Grammar.” Foundations of Language 9 (1): 1-37.

Liedtke, Frank. 1990. “Meaning and Expression: Marty and Grice on Intentional Semantics.” In Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics: The Philosophy and Theory of Language of Anton Marty. Edited by Kevin Mulligan, 29-49. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Leopold, W.F. 1929. “Inner Form.” Language 5 (4): 254-260.

Leopold, W.F. 1951. “Reviews.” Language 27 (3): 367-370.

Longworth, Guy. 2017. “Grice and Marty on Expression.” In Mind and Language – On the Philosophy of Anton Marty. Edited by Guillaume Fréchette & Hamid Taieb, 263-284. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

MacIntyre, A.C. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Marty, Anton. 1908. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Erster Band. Halle an der Saale: Verlag von Max Niemeyer [accessible at: https://archive.org/details/untersuchungenzu01martuoft/page/n4 ; translations adapted from the anthology under review].

Schlick, Moritz. 1932. “Positivism and Realism.” In Philosophical Papers: Volume II (1925-1936). Edited by H.L. Mulder & B.F.B. van de Velde-Schlick; translated by P.L. Heath, 259-284. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979.

Soames, Scott. 2017. “The Changing Role of Language in Analytic Philosophy.” In Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History. Edited by Aaron Preston, 34-51. New York: Routledge.

Wisdom, John. 1931. Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to Bentham’s Theory of Definition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1945. Philosophical Investigations, 4th rev. edn. Edited by P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte; translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Giuliano Bacigalupo, Hélène Leblanc (Eds.): Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy

Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy Book Cover Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy
History of Analytic Philosophy
Giuliano Bacigalupo, Hélène Leblanc (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2019
XVII, 237

Reviewed by: Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray (King’s University College, UWO)

This volume is the latest edition in Palgrave Macmillan’s History of Analytic Philosophy series, and it deals exclusively with the philosophical thought of Anton Marty, a student of Franz Brentano at Würzburg and Hermann Lotze at Göttingen.  The reason for such a volume is that Marty is often overlooked and underestimated.  In both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, Brentano, Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl receive most of the attention and Marty is often seen as merely a defender of Brentano – not a philosopher in his own right. This book seeks to disrupt these preconceived notions about Marty, in a way that clearly demonstrates the promise of his ideas for contemporary research (for both the analytic and phenomenological traditions and beyond) while breathing “new life into his thought”. (vii) For example, pieces by François Recanati and Mark Textor highlight Marty’s original contributions while engaging in fresh critical discussion of his work alongside that of Paul Grice and Brentano. Kevin Mulligan does something similar with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other authors, like Ingvar Johansson, showcase Marty’s contributions (for example, with space) that have been excluded from the history of philosophy. This volume feels less like a simple overview of a forgotten thinker and more like a critical introduction that simultaneously launches the reader into fruitful dialogue with both contemporary and longstanding issues in analytic philosophy. This book is organized into three parts: Issues pertaining to philosophy of language; philosophy of space and time; and the metaphilosophical aspects of existence and being in his thought.

In the first part, focusing on philosophy of language, Textor’s chapter stands out as particularly well executed, and which would appeal to a broader audience than just the analytic tradition.  What is said here will be of great value to scholars in the phenomenological tradition who study the early work of Edmund Husserl or the Munich Circle students who studied with him before the outbreak of WWI.  Issues surrounding the nature of language and signification, statements expressing wishing, commanding and questioning, and especially judgment are central to the works of Johannes Daubert and Adolf Reinach, who both read Marty, and then later students such as Roman Ingarden.  Textor identifies Marty’s theory of language as ‘intentionalist semantics’ – Marty defined the word language as synonymous with intentional indication of the inner life of the person – and this metaphysical view of meaning comes with two commitments: first, mental facts concerning desire and belief are the most fundamental to what signs mean; and second, the speaker means something if and only if she does it with the purpose of producing an attitude for or in an audience. (34) This is where we see Marty and Grice roughly align. Textor focuses his essay on this second commitment – communicative intention –, but while he does so, he explores an alternative view of meaning put forth by Brentano.  That is the idea that some utterances have meaning independently of whether they were made with the purpose of influencing others; therefore, with regard to the primary source of meaning, the utterance meaning takes priority over the speaker’s intended meaning for it. (35) Textor engages with Brentano’s position to remedy problems that both Marty and Grice fall prey to, specifically occurring with non-communicative utterances. Textor, however, isn’t painting Brentano as the answer to all of our problems, but rather delves into the shortcomings his view faces and then demonstrates how it can be rescued and developed to achieve greater insight about speaker meaning.  He takes Brentano’s work on the meaning of utterances expressed in judgments and extends it, to create a model that will connect judgment and non-natural meaning, looking to the mechanism of belief acquisition. For example, if we believe a speaker to be trustworthy, we are more likely to make a rational judgment based on the information they share. Textor ends with: “There are further details to be filled in to complete Brentano’s picture, but I hope that I gave the reader some reasons to take Brentano’s proposal to be the basis for an alternative to Grice’s and Marty’s that is worth completing further.”(64)  Textor primarily uses, as source material, Brentano’s logic lectures (EL 80), taken from the Würzburg course of the winter semester 1869/70 entitled Deduktive und Induktive Logik.[1] Brentano lectured for many years on logic, while at Würzburg and later Vienna, and it is great to see these lectures being highlighted and utilized.  Here, we see their value communicated, and Textor provides his own (excellent) translations – this is more than simply a passing mention of Brentano’s academic teaching history.

This piece by Textor is a real gem, because the reader gets a thorough journey into theories of language that were happening just prior to the activities of Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. For the latter, in particular, it was setting the stage for what he would write in the Logical Investigations (1900-1901).  For an early phenomenology scholar like myself, this chapter is great for the discussion of Brentano logic lectures and the Marty writings that rarely receive any attention and yet have such a central role to play in the ideas of the early movement.  Also, it is wonderful to read Brentano’s logical insights about language, and see them given serious consideration alongside someone like Grice, and in fact used to help Grice, as this work often takes a backseat to his intentionality thesis contained in the Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint and his later reism.

In the second part, the chapters on the consciousness of space and time are some of my favorite. This section was my reason for wanting a copy of this book, if I am honest. Once again, these chapters will appeal and prove very helpful to those in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions who wish to understand the discussions of the consciousness of time and space that informed major figures in the 20th century, and for me this means Husserl. This topic is yet another that Husserl lectured on early in the 20th century, and this theme continued to be a popular one with both the Munich and Göttingen Circles, for example in the works of Max Scheler, Moritz Geiger, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Roman Ingarden.  It was also one that Henri Bergson wrote about, and it informed the position expressed during the famous debate with Einstein in Paris. In this second part of the volume the first essay by Johansson, “A Presentation and Defense of Anton Marty’s Conception of Space” goes beyond a defense of Marty. Johansson clearly demonstrates how Marty’s ideas on the topic are relevant and important not just to history of philosophy but also to the field of physics. As he points out at the beginning, there are two kinds of space:  the perceptual and the physical.  He focuses on the physical expression of space, bringing together ideas from Marty with elements of Immanuel Kant, Graham Nerlich, and himself to defend a container conception of space and space-time and to show why contemporary physics should give it serious consideration.  Marty’s theory holds that space has a mind-independent existence, where all bodies, properties, events, spatial points and relations are all contained within this ontologically preexisting space. (100 – 102)  He also leaves open the possibility that space could be empty, which goes against not only Kant but also Brentano. This position is opposed to the relational theory of space, which was held by Leibniz.  While Marty’s theory most likely falls under the modern label “substantivalism” (i.e., the theory that space exists in itself in addition to the material objects within it), it doesn’t fit squarely: while it can conform to the general definition of substantivalism, Marty’s conception of space is ontologically more basic or, rather, primary to what is contained within it, and this makes him distinct from other “substantivalists”, like Barry Dainton. By the way, there is a great discussion of Dainton here, too. This chapter offers a wonderful historical run down, along with comparison of Marty’s conception, and in such an accessible way.  If you are rusty on the topic or new to it, this chapter is a great primer and will also leave you with some points to think about.

The next essay by Clare Mac Cumhaill “Raum and ‘Room’: Comments on Anton Marty on Space Perception” is the perfect follow up to Johansson. Cumhaill’s piece elaborates and extends what Johansson discussed, in particular on perception, and then in the comparisons of Marty to others who write on space and time, and again in a very approachable and engaging way. The essay contains an informative outline of Marty’s conception of the ontology of space, a section on Marty’s critiques of Kant and Brentano on the topic of space and time, and an inquiry into whether any contemporary theory of perception can handle Marty’s notion of space and time.  The most promising for Cumhaill is Naïve Realism, but this comes with its own difficulties. A highlight for me was the section comparing Husserl and Marty; it was full of insights.  I actually wanted more Husserl and comparison talk of him, because of what I stated earlier, but what is there is great (in particular on 137, the sections of the letters Marty wrote to Husserl are a fun read).

Thomas Sattig closes out this part of the volume with a bang, with his chapter: “Experiencing Change: Extensionalism, Retentionalism, and Marty’s Hybrid Account.”  Sattig builds on the previous two chapters to discussing contemporary ideas concerning our experience of change:  after some helpful encapsulations of extentionalism and retentionalism, there is a wonderful summary of Marty’s account, and at the close there are some challenges raised against Marty’s view.  Marty’s position is called a “hybrid account” because, as pointed out in section three, the notion of how we experience change combines elements from both the extensionalist and retentionalist views, and in a presentist framework (i.e., only the present is actual, the past and future are not). (163) This chapter, like the others, is well organized, accessible and has an engaging style; it even has some lovely diagrams with leaves to help illustrate (great diagrams are necessary for discussions of time). The challenges to Marty’s view are excellent, and the suggested fixes for the holes or omissions in Marty’s theory offered are thorough, but Sattig also leaves room for the reader to think and form their own insights about these shortcomings.

While I only discussed chapters from the first two sections of this book, this should not in anyway convey to anyone reading this review that the third section is subpar or weak – it isn’t.  The reader will get more fantastic pieces that really turn the spotlight on Marty’s work, which is much needed and deserved.

I really enjoyed what this volume had to offer and it reminded me of why I found Marty invaluable and fascinating during my graduate and postgraduate work.  He’s an amazing talent and brilliant scholar in his own right, not simply a defender of Brentano and fellow priest who left the cloth with convictions about the infallibility of the pope. I really appreciated how this book was organized, and enjoyed how the chapters in each section relate but thoughtfully expand in various directions. The discussion of Marty is always balanced; the presentation of Marty feels very well rounded, and the contributors are always willing to talk about the errors as much as the successes. Furthermore, the fact that much of this book contains his lesser-known works is fantastic and asset to any collection or library. This volume also offers some great excursions into the history of philosophy, and this not only provides the context for Marty’s ideas but also what made him such a great philosopher.

If I have anything critical to say, besides wanting more Husserl, it is that some might come to the idea that Marty is an analytic philosopher or more of a forefather to the analytic tradition than to phenomenology or any other discipline.  This can be gathered by the title of the book series and then the index of authors cited in the chapters. The introduction to this volume tries to convey that this is not what is being argued; it attempts to show that Marty’s work had significant influence on the analytic tradition, more influence than we currently feel he had, given that so much of his work is overlooked. But once you get into chapters, it is easy to forget what was said in the introduction and jump to conclusions, because sometimes the feel or approach is itself very analytic.  However, I will say, it would be shortsighted to jump to such conclusions and/or to not to read this book. This volume offers a wonderful picture of Marty that is insightful, thought provoking, and inspirational. As I said many times (proportionally to how many times I noticed this in my reading), it is also an approachable and engaging to read.  As a scholar of Husserl and Reinach, I see a lot of potential ties to my own work. Marty is one of many forefathers that both the analytic and phenomenological traditions share, and we should celebrate this man and his mind rather than divide ourselves into camps. Hey, we both share great taste in Austrians of the 19th century! Brentano and his students were immensely productive, interdisciplinary and incredibly brilliant; they changed the 20th century dialogue for philosophy – period. That being said, I highly recommend this book for both scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology, as well as those interested in the topics discussed between its covers.


[1] See also: http://gams.uni-graz.at/archive/objects/context:bag/methods/sdef:Context/get?mode=logik-en

Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock: Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy

Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy Book Cover Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy
Texts in Philosophy, Volume 27
Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock
College Publications
2018
Paperback £16.00
520

Reviewed by: Jethro Bravo (UNAM/Husserl-Archiv der Universität zu Köln)

Guillermo E. Rosado de Haddock’s Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy (2018) is a collection of essays and book reviews representative of a Platonist understanding of analytic philosophy. In this sense, it is the counterpart of orthodox empiricist analytic philosophy, whose anti-universalism swings between negation and pragmatic forms of acceptance. In any case, this empiricism cannot be traced back to Gottlob Frege, as Rosado himself insists in this collection.[1]

In fact, the collection is strongly marked by the contentious approach to themes preferred by traditional analytic philosophy, like logic, mathematics and physics. I, as a philosopher formed in the phenomenological tradition founded by Edmund Husserl, was originally attracted to this book out of a hope for a possible critical exchange between both traditions. Alas, no such exchange is found here.

Nevertheless, the book speaks often of Husserl, but from the point of view of his objectivist efforts concerning logic and mathematics. Interesting topics include the simultaneous discovery of the (in Fregean terms) “sense-referent” distinction by both Frege and Husserl, Husserl’s distinction between “state of affairs” and “situations of affairs” (which I guess went unnoticed by many readers of Husserl), Husserl’s understanding of the relation between logic (syntactical) and mathematics (ontological-formal), which foreshadows that of the Boubarki School, or his acceptance of Bernhard Riemann’s views on geometry, who puts him at odds with the more antiquated Frege. He also touches upon Husserl’s notion of analyticity as a development of Bernard Bolzano, as well as Husserl’s very important understanding of mathematical knowledge as coming from a conjoined function between categorial intuition and formalization [as a side note, the treatment of categorial intuition is not so inexistent as Rosado thinks (152), one only has to look into Dieter Lohmar’s texts, who himself is a mathematician grown philosopher, just as Rosado likes to say about Husserl]. All these subjects, not excluding the case of Rudolf Carnap’s “intellectual dishonesty” in relation to Husserl’s ideas, which amounts to a sort of scandal in the philosophical realm, give a very interesting material for any philosopher -not just analytic philosophers.

Of course, the book contains other topics of interest, some of them original contributions from Rosado, like his definition of analyticity, which is strictly tied to his semantic treatment of the analytical-synthetical difference of judgements, or his many refutations of empiricism spread all over different essays. As I find the first one more attractive, I will sketch it out in what follows.

Rosado confronts the “traditional” identification of the following concepts: on the one hand, necessity, a priori and analytic; on the other hand, contingent, a posteriori and synthetic. To do this, he exposes three pairs of contrapositions, namely, necessity and contingency, which he characterizes as a metaphysic distinction, apriori and aposteriori, as an epistemological and analytic and synthetic, as a semantic (57-58). Rosado’s aim is to show in a comparison the inequivalence of the semantic notions with the other two (58), wherein the concept of “analyticity” comes to the fore. Rosado contrasts the definitions of analyticity given by Kant and Husserl. Although Husserl’s definition is regarded as more “solid” (59), it is not assumed. According to Husserl, a statement is analytic if its truth persists even when it is formalized. However, following this definition, some mathematical truths cannot be defined as analytic, e.g. “2 is both even and prime” (59-60). Therefore, Husserl’s notion, which seems to be more syntactical than semantical (60), cannot be followed. On the contrary, Rosado’s definition of analyticity is the following: “A statement is analytic if it is true in a model M and when true in a model M, it is true in any model M* isomorphic to M”, to which he adds the clause that the statement “does not imply or presuppose the existence either of a physical world or of a world of consciousness”. (61). In this sense, the Husserlian definition of “analytical necessity,” which is that of an instantiation of an analytical law, cannot be categorized as analytical. With this definition of analyticity, Rosado “attempts to delimit exactly what distinguishes mathematical statements from other statements” (72).

I think that in this context it is worth looking at the definition of necessity which is almost hidden in Husserl’s work. This definition is not metaphysical, but logical. In his Ideas I, necessity appears as a particularization of a general eidetic state of affairs and it is the correlate of what Husserl calls apodictic consciousness (Hua III/1: 19). On its turn, apodictic consciousness is the certitude that a given state of affairs cannot not-be or, to put it in Husserl’s words, “the intellection, that it is not, is by principle impossible” (96).

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl already exhibits this treatment with an interesting variation. In the third investigation, Husserl says that an objective necessity entails the subjective impossibility of thinking the contrary or, as he also puts it, the pure objective not-being-able-of-being-another-way, that is, necessity, appears according to its essence in the consciousness of apodictic evidence. Then he states that to the objective necessity corresponds a pure law, whereby necessity means to be on the ground of a law (Hua XIX/1: 242-243). We can then state that the comprehension of contingency is the exact opposite to that of necessity. That is, an objective contingency or a contingent object has the characteristic of being-able-to-be-in-another-way and the corresponding non-apodictic consciousness, both in the form of uncertainty and the possibility of thinking the contrary. However, this does not mean that objective contingency is unrelated to law or even that there are no necessary facts. As Husserl states in Ideas I, a contingent-object is limited by various degrees of essential laws and the necessity of existence of consciousness is grounded on an essential generality, through which we can recognize the mentioned subjective-objective characters (Hua III/1: 2; 98). Going beyond Husserl, not the object itself, but its being-contingent is an objective necessity based on the general eidetic law of contingency.

The treatment of the concept of analyticity by Rosado gains meaning in connection with the name he chose for “his philosophical endeavors since the 1970’s,” as an alternative to the term already taken by Karl R. Popper– “critical rationalism” (1). Rosado’s philosophy is analytic (I would not repeat why it is also unorthodox) because it has a strong tendency towards formalism in the sense of logical and mathematical analysis with the only exception being his lesser tendency to discuss physics. He believes that “you cannot do serious philosophy without taking into account the development at least of the three more exact sciences, namely, logic, mathematics and physics, but without committing to or presupposing in any sense the giant meta-dogma of empiricist ideology” (1), that is, that of the inexistence of “universals.”

Now, I think that philosophy does not need to unconditionally consider the latest developments of logic, physics and mathematics. This is clear, insofar as philosophy should not be identified with these specialized and highly technical enterprises. Philosophy’s endeavors can and must have another sense, namely, that of the examination of the fundamental concepts of scientific (in a broad sense that not only includes formal and natural sciences, but also the material eidetic sciences and the rigorous humanities) and everyday knowledge.[2] But this approach must also embrace our practical and emotional understanding in general too.

In fact, this concept of philosophy was present in Husserl since his Habilitationsschrift, which Rosado, in accordance with his Platonic point of view, sees as a “dead born child” (87). However, the most significant aspect of this very early text of Husserl does not lie in his unclear position regarding psychologism [through which, however, we can learn a lot in regard to philosophical thinking and which I would not call “mild psychologism” as Rosado does (87, 147, 162)], but in his use of the psychological analysis to clarify the phenomenal character and the origin of a fundamental concept in mathematics, namely, that of the number. For Husserl, philosophy was from the very beginning of his career a psychological analysis, which searches for the “concrete phenomena” related to a concept and the psychical process through which this concept is obtained, namely, abstraction (Hua XII: 292; 298-299). As Husserl’s analysis shows, this search is also carried out in intuition and by testing conflicting theses. In fact, Husserl’s famous argumentative style of the Prolegomena makes its first appearance in his Habilitationsschrift.

Moreover, the concept of a psychological analysis in Husserl’s Habilitationschrift is clearly distinguished from that of a mathematical, logical or even metaphysical analysis (291-292). In this line of thought, I agree with Rosado’s constant affirmation that Husserl’s logic and mathematical ideas do not lose their validity after the so-called “transcendental turn”.  However, if we have to talk about a “turn” instead of a penetration of former intentions, or, on the other side, of an unchanged validity of logic and mathematics instead of a modification of this same validity by clarification of its phenomenal character and origin such that it cannot stem from logic or mathematics themselves, then this is not so easily dismissed.[3]

Also, the more developed concepts of categorial intuition and formalization as epistemological groundings of mathematics can only be examined through a phenomenological analysis, for they are processes of consciousness. We have here a more advanced case of the clarifying function of Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, this contribution of phenomenology to the understanding of mathematics is not highlighted by Rosado as something that comes from outside mathematics itself, and in fact, outside any “objectifying science”.

In this same sphere of themes, it appears to me that the famous discussion of the Prolegomena presupposes a peculiar attitude of analysis that cannot be understood as pre-phenomenological, as Rosado understands it (150). If we agree with Husserl when he states that the dogmatic scientist does not question the givenness of his objects but just deals with them without further trouble (cf. Hua III/I: 54-55), then the problem of the recognition of universals and the confrontation with logical-psychologism is a problem that originates in the critical or epistemological attitude and its solution demands the clear exercise of reflection and the distinction of the different “data” given to consciousness. I believe that this is not only the true understanding of the discussion in the Prolegomena, but also that this is clearly seen in the study of the origins of this discussion in Husserl’s prior philosophical endeavors. Husserl’s philosophy started as a psychological analysis in the sense of his master, Franz Brentano, and only through the imperfection of this psychology in which there was no clear demarcation between psychological objects and logical objects the critique of psychologism became possible. To put it another way: without the prior reflective attitude towards consciousness and the confusion caused by conflating logical objects with psychological objects, i.e., without psychologism, there is no possibility of distinguishing both spheres of objects or to exercise any critique in relation to the psyche and the logical, which will be in fact missing. And the only way to solve this theoretical conflict is by means of a clear reflective analysis, in which the objects of each side are distinguished as they are given in their different sorts of acts of consciousness. The common idea that Husserl’s phenomenology is a consequence of the critique of psychologism seems to me to be false. In truth, it is the other way around.[4]

I am also not convinced that there is a Platonism of ideas in Husserl, as Rosado thinks (4). It is true that Husserl acknowledged the distinct givenness of ideal objects and that he defended his independence from empirical objects. However, this acknowledgement and defense do not make Husserl a Platonist (not even a structural one). So long as logic and mathematics, to mention two “ideal” sciences, deal with their respective subject matter, the sense and limits of their ideal objects are not in question. But when the epistemological problems start to confuse the mind of the scientist, that is, when he reflects on the relation of his objects with knowledge, then his acquiescence fades away. Now, even when the critical reflection on the mode of givenness of mathematical and logical objects shows that these objects are not to be confused with empirical data, this recognition does not amount to Platonism. On the contrary, their mere givenness, that is, the possibility of having something as “ideal objects” persists as a theoretical problem to be decided within the epistemological-phenomenological attitude. The sheer acceptance of the independent existence of these objects, that is, Platonism, cannot be conceded. On the contrary, just as realism of nature succumbs to the phenomenological analysis, so do Platonic ideas. It should be noted that Husserl was neither a psychologist in his early development, nor a Platonist at any moment of his career.

To conclude, I still would like to point out that although Rosado is well aware that for Husserl, first philosophy meant epistemology in the sense of transcendental phenomenology (145), he tries to downplay this determination by contraposing Husserl’s own definition of logic as first philosophy in his 1908 lectures on old and new logic (143-144). There, Husserl states, in effect, that the new logic is “first philosophy” (Hua M6: 7). Nonetheless, this same logic is understood as a dogmatic-positivist discipline in Formal and Transcendental Logic: logic can only be a truly philosophical logic says Husserl, as if remembering his lectures of 1908, or first philosophy, when it stays true to its original sense, already present in Plato, i.e., to the broader idea that ends in transcendental phenomenology as transcendental logic (Hua XVII: 17 ff.) Here again, the use of such beloved philosophical tags proves itself deceitful, for this enterprise resembles the empiricist’s traditional aim of exposing the origin of concepts in intuition.

Bibliography

Rosado  Haddock, Guillermo E. 2018. Unorthodox Analytic Philosophy. Texts in Philosophy 27. College Publications. Lightning Source: United Kingdom.

Husserliana

II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. 1950. Hrsg. Walter Biemel. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.

III/1: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. Erstes Buch: allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. 1976. Hrsg. Karl Schuhmann. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.

XII: Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890-1901). 1982. Hrsg. Lothar Eley. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.

XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. 1974. Hrsg. Paul Janssen. Martinuns Nijhoff: Den Haag.

XIX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. 1984. Hrsg. Ursula Panzer. Martinus Nijhoff: Den Haag.

Materialen

6: Alte und neue Logik. Vorlesung 1908/1909. 2003. Hrsg. Elisabeth Schuhmann. Springer: Dordrecht.


[1] I want to thank R. Andrew Krema for the review of the English of a penultimate version of this text.

[2] I took the idea of everyday knowledge hearing Dieter Lohmar’s lectures about modern epistemology.

[3] In fact, the problem digs deeper, because with the phenomenological clarification we attain the true understanding of the basic objects of science (cf. Hua XVII: 18 or Hua II: 22) or even of non-scientific attitudes, for example, of the world as being a horizon.

[4] I own this line of thought to an idea shared to me by my teacher and friend Antonio Zirión Quijano, who once conjectured that phenomenology does not comes from the critique of psychologism, but that this very critique indeed presupposes phenomenological analysis. If I have been true to Zirión’s intentions in my present development of his seminal idea, any possible error is of course my responsibility, not his.

Claude Romano: Les repères éblouissants: Renouveler la phénoménologie, PUF, 2019

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2019
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Giuliano Bacigalupo, Hélène Leblanc (Eds.): Anton Marty and Contemporary Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

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Palgrave Macmillan
2019
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XVII, 237