Adam Tuboly (Ed.): The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic Book Cover The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic
History of Analytic Philosophy
Adam Tamas Tuboly (Ed.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2021
Ebook 93,08 €
XV, 370

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

Alfred J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic was first published in 1936, a second, revised edition appeared in 1946. Chapter 1 (‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’) of this book opens with the following paragraph:

“The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.” (Ayer 2001: 13)

The author of these words was only twenty-five when he finished writing a book which became a milestone in contemporary philosophy. It was indeed “a young man’s book” (…) “written with more passion than most philosophers allow themselves to show”, as Ayer admitted in the second edition (Ayer 2001: 173). “With these and similar assertions the young Ayer embarked on a course of discussion that was designed to shake the philosophical establishment” (Hanfling 1997: 4). And even though time has clearly demonstrated the flaws and shortcoming of Ayer’s text and its main ideas, it needs to be acknowledged that Language, Truth and Logic (henceforth LTL) is a major achievement in the field, with long lasting influence, provoking over the years vivid discussions and reactions, especially in the areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.

The volume edited by Adam Tamas Tuboly reconsiders the philosophical and historical importance of LTL, and discusses its more contemporary legacy in several different disciplines. Tuboly specifies that the questions that need to be asked and discussed: “are the following: how did Ayer preserve or distort the views and conceptions of the logical empiricists, especially those of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap? How are Ayer’s arguments different from those he aimed to reconstruct? How influential was LTL really, and what are the factors that explain its success in Britain and especially at Oxford?” (3).

The book comprises an introduction and five parts (each consisting of two chapters). The introduction gives necessary background information, part one contextualizes Ayer’s book, part two concentrates on philosophy of language in LTL, part three discusses philosophy of mind and psychology, part four looks at epistemology and truth, and part five focuses on ethics and values. The individual chapters provide critical re-examinations of LTL, with the final chapter offering a highly critical analysis within a wide context of philosophy and culture. Each chapter is furnished with an extensive list of references.

In the first, introductory chapter, ‘From Spying to Canonizing – Ayer and His Language, Truth and Logic’, Tuboly traces Ayer’s road to LTL, his first encounters and contacts in Vienna, and provides a brief overview of the book’s content and its main theses. He observes that Ayer’s main task is “twofold: to show that all metaphysicians try to go beyond the empirical realm and to buttress his core thesis that only empirical propositions are meaningful in a literal sense” (12).

An important part of this chapter is devoted to discussing the controversy surrounding the significance and influence of LTL. Tuboly offers here a brief overview of the most important references on the subject and concludes this section observing that “the influence of LTL can be measured on two grounds. First, it was quite negatively received by the philosophical community, as it stepped on many toes and produced a mainly critical response among both philosophers and public intellectuals. (…) On the other hand, Ayer’s book was more than successful in other ways. LTL is one of the best-selling philosophy books of the twentieth century; every student of analytic philosophy has to read it at least once (…), and many educated laymen know it as a source of inspiration and a seminal text from the intellectual history of positivism – a distinction shared by only a few books in analytic philosophy. Whether institutional success is enough for philosophical success, however, is a different question” (27-28). Tuboly also stresses that LTL, though written when the Vienna Circle was past its peak, provides rather scarce information on logical positivism and its historical and theoretical developments. These remarks prepare the ground for more detailed analyses in the following parts of the volume.

Further contextualization of Ayer’s book is provided by the two chapters in Part One (‘The Book and Its Context’). Andreas Vrahimis discusses LTL and the Anglophone reception of the Venna Circle, he further investigates the issue of omissions made by Ayer in tackling the history of logical positivism, the debate around the Neurath-Haller thesis, and Ayer’s divergences with Carnap. Vrahimis observes that the linguistic Empiricism of LTL is presented as partly conceding the Rationalist critique of classical Empiricism, while rejecting the metaphysical conclusions the critique had driven them to; fortifying Empiricism by rejecting the mistaken assumptions of its classical proponents; and both aligning itself with the Empiricist side of the dispute, and also resolving the dispute in an Empiricist manner (47). In concluding remarks on the aftermath of the publication, Vrahimis observes that:

“Ayer’s book focused on discussions of particular problems and only very briefly touched upon the context in which they had initially been addressed by the Vienna Circle and its predecessors. The reception of his work also followed course, and the bold claims made by LTL resulted in bringing a critical debate over the viability of verificationism to the center of Anglophone philosophy during the 30s and 40s. Within this debate, there had been little concern about the acceptability of Ayer’s brief history of Logical Empiricism”. (63)

Chapter 3, by Siobhan Chapman, concentrates on ‘Viennese Bombshells’, i.e. reactions to LTL from Ayer’s philosophical contemporaries, especially John L. Austin, Arne Naess, and L. Susan Stebbing. All three philosophers found interesting elements in LTL but also had objections to the implications of Ayer’s study for the study of language. Chapman focuses on the reaction of these three philosophers to LTL, and on their further influence upon the study of language. Austin’s name is closely associated with ordinary language philosophy, one prominent version of the ‘linguistic philosophy’ (acknowledged by Ayer in his retrospective). Naess is less well known in Anglophone philosophy, “but was extremely influential in the development during the middle part of the twentieth century of philosophy in Norway, where he was celebrated as the founder of the school of empirical semantics” and finally Stebbing’s work “has been relatively neglected in recent decades, but in the 1930s and 1940s she was recognized as a leading figure in British analytic philosophy, particularly in relation to what became known as the Cambridge School of directional analysis” (71). In the remaining parts of the chapter Chapman discusses some subsequent developments connected with LTL and ordinary language philosophy in the fields of philosophy and linguistics, and she claims that after initial criticism connected with the fact that Ayer failed to recognize the disjuncture between philosophical inquiry and the assessment of ordinary linguistic usage, in the last few years “some analytic philosophers have returned to the idea that ordinary language might be of relevance, and even of vital methodological significance, to philosophical inquiry” (85). She also points at some interesting developments in Critical Discourse Analysis which might have been inspired by the close attention to different uses of language explicit in ordinary language philosophy (92).

The two chapters in Part Two are explicitly devoted to philosophy of language in LTL. Nicole Rathgeb discusses Ayer’s stance on analyticity, and Sally Parker-Ryan studies Ayer and early ordinary language philosophy. Ayer’s definition of analyticity is of great significance for his whole philosophy, not least because he regards philosophical truths as analytic propositions, hence his conception is often cited as ‘truth in virtue of meaning’ (101). Rathgeb carefully traces the inspirations and sources for Ayer’s ideas, the developments of this conception, changes between the first and second edition of LTL, and objections voiced against this approach. In the conclusion, the author suggests that Ayer’s account of analyticity is fundamentally correct, and that “the two definitions of analyticity given in LTL and in the introduction to the second edition can be brought into accord, that the truth of analytic propositions so understood is not contingent upon the existence of language, and that the different factors Ayer appeals to in his explanation of the necessity of analytic propositions are all important, although one of them is more fundamental than the others” (120).

In chapter 5, Parker-Ryan examines the development of two approaches to language: the concept of ideal language, and the concept of ordinary language. The former is connected with Ayer’s views expounded in LTL, whereas the latter is discussed by Parker-Ryan with reference to the work of John Wisdom. The author briefly presents the origins of the method of linguistic analysis, the influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and of his later views, succinctly introduces ordinary language philosophy and contrasts it with theories advocating ideal language. In conclusion, Parker-Ryan claims that Ayer and the positivists “understood linguistic analysis as the weeding out of nonsense, such that the ‘logic of science’ could emerge. Such a language would be ideal, in the sense of being perfectly transparent logical form, and comprised exhaustively of empirically verifiable propositions, logical propositions and nothing else” (146). On the other hand, for ordinary language philosophy, the aim was also to resolve philosophical confusion; proponents of this movement “believed that a closer and more thoughtful examination of how language really is used, in various circumstances, can be philosophically revealing” (147).

Part Three is devoted to philosophy of mind and psychology. Gergely Ambrus traces the evolution of Ayer’s views on the mind-body relation, whereas Thomas Uebel investigates the puzzle about other minds in early Ayer. Ambrus observes that the analysis of Ayer’s views, “beyond being interesting in itself, is also important in that it provides further details about the large-scale development of analytic philosophy, stretching from the logical positivists’ radical anti-metaphysicalism in the 1930s to the 1960s when (some) classical metaphysical problems like realism or idealism, and the mind-body problem, were treated as being meaningful and legitimate once more” (153). The chapter discusses the phenomenalist background, focuses on the relations between the mental and physical events (a core issue in contemporary philosophy of mind) and on reinterpretations of the psychophysical relation within Ayer’s ‘sophisticated realist’ framework. Ambrus sums up the developments in Ayer’s thought in the following way: “the changes in Ayer’s views about the nature of the psychophysical relation were embedded in the evolution of his overall approach to philosophy. He departed from the radically anti-metaphysical attitude of logical positivism and arrived at a sort of pragmatist realism” (187). The shift from radical anti-metaphysical to ‘soft’ metaphysical views (with simultaneous faithfulness to earlier empiricist foundations) is characteristic of developments in Ayer’s thought (188).

Chapter 7 provides additional evidence for Ayer’s changing views in what today might be referred to as proto-philosophy of mind. Uebel concentrates on the account of knowledge of other minds as formulated in LTL, provides different interpretations and reinterpretations, and discusses Ayer’s approach to logical behaviorism: “once it is noted how his verificationism limited his options, it is of course difficult to dispute Ayer’s conclusion that no knowledge of other minds is provided at all, but this limitation does not apply unless the doctrine of logical behaviorism is also reinterpreted” (211).  Uebel also points to the discrepancies between the argument as presented in LTL, and as later interpreted by Ayer himself (240), a very interesting observation connected with authorial methodological consciousness (or lack of it).

Part Four deals with epistemology and truth. First Hans-Joachim Glock takes a close look at Ayer’s verificationism, next László Kocsis focuses on the problem of truth and validation. Truth, the second element in the title of Ayer’s book, was crucial both for the author’s line of investigation, and for the interpretation of his theory. Glock opens his chapter observing that the most fundamental aspiration of LTL is meta-philosophical: “Its stated aim is to argue for a positivist, anti-metaphysical conception of philosophy, its tasks and proper methods” (251). Further in this chapter, Glock discusses the importance of verificationism in LTL, different criteria of verifiability, the principle of verification, and the differences between the two (also in the context of Wittgenstein’s use-theory of meaning); it follows from this discussion that “there remains more to be said both against and for Ayer’s verificationism” (275).

In chapter 9, Kocsis starts with examining the difference between the definition and the criterion of truth and how they can be connected; next, he devotes some space to Ayer’s deflationism about the nature of truth and his place in the famous protocol-sentence debate, including his defense of a correspondence conception of the criterion of truth. In the final section he shows that Ayer’s deflationism about the nature of truth is not in conflict with his correspondence conception of the criterion of truth. This is because, contrary to his logical positivist contemporaries, Ayer did not admit any intimate connection between the two above-mentioned truth-theoretical tasks. According to Kocsis, “Ayer was convinced that the correspondence criterion could be applied to synthetic propositions, but as a fallibilist he did not distinguish between epistemically basic and incorrigible propositions (…) and all other non-basic propositions (hypotheses)” (301).

Part Five brings two chapters dealing with ethics and values. In chapter 10, Krisztián Pete compares Ayer and Berkeley, and their concepts of the meaning of ethical and religious language. Ayer starts the preface of the first edition of LTL with the following claim: “The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the Empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume” (Ayer 2001: 9). Berkeley’s and Hume’s influence on Ayer, and Ayer’s interpretation of Empiricism have already been discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Pete discusses in some detail Ayer’s and Berkeley’s views on emotional and theological use of language, he also explores the claim that Ayer is indebted to Berkeley “not only for the core ideas of his phenomenalism but also for his emotivism” (307), and provides a Berkeleyan reinterpretation of Ayer. Pete concludes that “by examining the semantic theory of one of Ayer’s distant empiricist predecessors, we can get some guidance on how to modify the ethical theory that Ayer outlined in LTL” (330).

The last chapter, by Aaron Preston, is significantly entitled ‘Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary Western Culture’. Preston offers a highly critical reading of LTL, with an equally critical assessment of its influence:

“Given that its flaws were both grievous and fairly obvious to many, LTL and the simplistic positivism it exemplified would be mere curiosities in the annals of a very curious century if it weren’t for the fact that they had massively harmful effects on culture, effects which persist to this day. (…)

LTL’s real significance lies here, in its role as a sophisticated and successful bit of propaganda for an ideology that played a critical role in loosing Western culture from its moral and epistemic moorings”. (334; 335)

Preston considers the rise of positivism in the light of the crises of contemporary western culture, including contemporary politics, fake news and post truth politics. Parts of this chapter sound rather like a political manifesto; however, it is interesting to see the line of argumentation leading the author from flaws in LTL to analyses (neither very deep nor original though) of Trump’s presidency. The tenor of the conclusion is predictable: “What, then, is the real significance of LTL? Sadly, its significance is overwhelmingly negative. It resides in the fact that it gave a distinctive and rhetorically powerful voice to a form of scientistic naturalism which has played a powerful role in fouling our relations to moral truth” (361). A brief critical remark with respect to these claims is included earlier in the volume, in chapter 8, where Glock observes that Preston’s dismissive attitude is precipitate, for:

A. Ayer’s later assessment leaves open that LTL also includes important truths.  B. Mistakes can be philosophically significant. C. By its own lights, LTL aims at introducing and implementing a method of clarification and critical thinking rather than at propounding a true doctrine.” (273-4)

The above points provide a good coda to this final chapter; however, it would be interesting to see a chapter polemic with regard to Preston’s stance.

In the conclusion of his brief introduction to Ayer’s work, Oswald Hanfling observed that “just as one must admire the bravado of his early book, so one must be impressed, when reading his later work, by his cautious and painstaking treatment of the questions at issue, and his constant striving to do justice to alternative views before arriving at his own conclusion” (Hanfling 1997: 51); and Ben Rogers added that the greatness of LTL resides in the fact that “it exudes a rare and inspiring passion for truth” (Rogers 2001: xvi). The papers collected in the reviewed volume attest to the depth and breadth of Ayer’s thought, they demonstrate that the shortcomings of his early work cannot overshadow its lasting influence in several philosophical disciplines.

Ayer’s book provoked reaction also within literary studies, and its title inspired at least two publications – Hamm (1960) and Martin (1975) – with both authors consciously alluding to the original title, and both investigating the benefits and shortcomings of logical positivism as applied to literary analyses. This aspect of Ayer’s influence is not discussed in the reviewed book, however, it additionally confirms the importance of LTL for various developments in several disciplines.

The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic provides an excellent overview of the topics discussed by Ayer, the controversies surrounding the publication and its influence. Additionally, it provides important (not only historical) considerations connected with the developments in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.

References

Ayer, Alfred J. [1936/1946] 2001. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Penguin Books.

Hamm, Victor M. 1960. Language, Truth and Poetry. The Aquinas Lecture 1960. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Hanfling, Oswald. 1997. Ayer. Analysing What We Mean. London: Phoenix.

Martin, Graham Dunstan. 1975. Language, Truth, and Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Rogers, Ben. 2001. “Introduction.” In: Ayer (2001), ix-xviii.

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.

Rudolf Carnap: The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings

The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings Book Cover The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings
Rudolf Carnap. Edited by A.W. Carus, Michael Friedman, Wolfgang Kienzler, Alan Richardson, and Sven Schlotter
Oxford University Press
2019
Hardback £70.00
528

Reviewed by: Flavio Baracco (Institut Wiener Kreis)

After the complete collection of the published works of Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was accepted to be published by Oxford University Press in 2016, the long-awaited first volume of the 14-volume edition of the Collected Writings of Rudolf Carnap has been finally published. This volume represents the first ever English translation of Carnap’s early writings published from 1918 through 1926, before Carnap moved to Vienna becoming one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle. Carnap is rightly considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made contributions in many areas, from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of logic, always stressing the need for a critical assessment of the role logic, mathematics and philosophy should play in scientific knowledge. His works played a key role in the development of Logical Empiricism; one of the main sources of what would become analytic philosophy. Although in the present day a fruitful dialogue between analytic philosophy and other philosophical traditions is not always easily achievable, at that time rather different philosophical perspectives were coexisting. The perspectives shared a common cultural framework and, most importantly, they were used to profitably interact with each other in a way that has since become increasingly difficult and Carnap’s early writings are a perfect example of this. Carnap was an eclectic intellectual whose interests embraced different philosophical ways of thinking to such an extent that his multifaceted interests appeared to some as objectionable or even inconsistent, as he recalls in his autobiography. However, he was proud to claim that he acquired valuable insights from philosophers and scientists of ‘a great variety of philosophical creeds’. Carnap’s early writings indeed shows a clear influence of the main philosophers usually regarded as belonging to the analytic tradition, such as Frege and Russell, but Husserl’s phenomenology and many neo-Kantian thinkers such as Natorp and Cassirer play an important role as well. These essays  represent a fundamental resource for both Carnap scholars and historians of analytic philosophy. Firstly, these writings make possible a better understanding of Carnap’s thought and its development since the early years and, secondly, they shed some light on the origins of analytic philosophy and the multi-faceted nature of the cultural framework around  that time.

I wish now to make a few general considerations on the editorial work. First of all, let’s say the present volume represents an outstanding work in Carnap scholarship both for its great attention to detail and for its richness in several in-depth analyses that furnish all the historical and mathematical background needed to understand Carnap’s writings. The volume is the final outcome of the work of many people and the editors present an  overall picture of all those who have  contributed to the  project. The volume begins  with a brief chronology of Carnap’s life followed by an Introduction edited by Carus and Friedman which presents  an exhaustive overview of the essays that  follow. The editors show the original German alongside the English translation and at the end of volume they accurately report any minimal changes they have made with respect to the original text. Each essay is followed by a section giving further information that carefully helps the reader to contextualize and understand the text, and in places,  the editorial notes are impressively accurate. The editors indeed make  extensive use of Carnap’s Nachlass to furnish us with a clear representation of Carnap’s view. Although, reference to an English translation of much of the literature quoted in the final bibliography would have been useful to the reader. The editors accurately report the corrected bibliographic information for all items cited in Carnap’s texts, but they do not indicate whether  an English translation of each item is available . As  the present volume is mainly addressed to an English audience, this would have been useful even though  it would have resulted in a longer bibliographical list. Finally, I would report a misprint at page 189: towards the end of the page the editors refers to note mm (twice), but it should be note ll. In the following I will briefly show the content of the different essays and give a few remarks on the editorial work on these texts whenever appropriate.

The first essay is entitled Völkerbund – Staatenbund and depicts a young Carnap in his twenties engaged in the social-political life of his country towards the end of World War I. At that time Carnap was actively engaged with the German Youth Movement, particularly the parts of the movement politically engaged against the war, and this text represents his contribution to the first issue of the left-wing political newsletter Politische Rundbriefe, published by Karl Bittel in October 1918. This brief text should have been followed by another text where a few critical considerations on the German’s defeat in the war were addressed; however, this second text was never published. However, in the  Introduction the editors sketch the content of both texts and we can then see how they present  an overview of Carnap’s political world view at that time. According to Carnap, politics is not to be understood in a narrow sense, rather  it refers to everything that has ‘some connection with the public social life of people’. As the editors suggest, this view of politics underlies Carnap’s philosophical work for most of his life, especially with respect to the role that reason, and more specifically ‘scientific’ reasoning should play in a society or a community where all the activities should be regulated and so removed ‘from the realm of chaotic whim’ and subordinated ‘to goal-oriented reason’. On the contrary, an excessive contemplative, quietist, or even mystical approach of mental life, not properly balanced by a politically active life is instead suggested to be one of the main reasons for Germany’s guilt for causing the war. This text represents an important resource in order to understand the interconnection between the political and philosophical reflections that were co-existing in Carnap’s philosophy and more generally, in the ambitious and multi-faced cultural phenomenon represented by the Vienna Circle.

In Wer erzwingt die Geltung des Naturgesetzes? Carnap reviews Hugo Dingler’s Physik und Hypothese where the author defends a conventionalist account of the primary laws of nature. Carnap acknowledges Dingler’s philosophical view as one of the most important influences on his own  thought. In 1920 Carnap even considered writing a doctoral dissertation under Dingler’s direction at the physics department in Munich, and a joint publication was also planned till September 1921. Despite several disagreements, Dingler remained an important influence Carnap’s writings in the early 1920s. At the very beginning Carnap asked himself a question: what if someone comes along and claims that laws of nature are matter of free decision? That’s exactly the kind of question  that Dingler’s book seeks to address. Dingler holds that nature can neither impose a particular choice, nor ever contradict our stipulations, but we are free to choose the primary laws of nature; the spatial and causal laws. Carnap admits that a view of this sort appears  odd, and he is reluctant to  agree with Dingler, (especially with respect to Dingler’s rejection of Einstein’s general theory of relativity), but he proudly claims that this book ‘clears the ground on which an examination of the foundations of physics, and in particular the theory of relativity, could rest’. The present essay is an important resource in order to better understand the genesis of  very distinctive Carnapian notion, i.e. Carnap’s conventionalism. This notion is clearly influenced by Dingler’s view on the conventional nature of the laws of nature that Carnap identifies as critical conventionalism, thereby distinguishing it from Poincaré’s notion of conventionalism. According to Carnap, Poincaré’s conventionalism relies on a free choice that is completely arbitrary, whereas Dingler’s view holds that our choices can be uniquely determined by a certain principle of maximal simplicity. Carnap favours Dingler’s conventionalism over Poincaré’s account and  will reformulate Dingler’s criteria of simplicity in later years. Carnap’s early conventionalism then seems to find its roots in a critical reformulation of Dingler’s conventionalism. Moreover, this essay shows us the  extent to which Carnap’s philosophical considerations rely on an in-depth knowledge of physics and scientific practice. This is  evident from his remarks on stipulations that rely on a critical analysis of physical knowledge, conceived not simply as a study of empirical data, but as a stratified and articulated measurement practice of empirical phenomena.

Der Raum is definitely a fundamental text for Carnap scholars. It is a lengthy and substantial book, it was largely written in late 1920, then submitted in 1921 to the philosophy department as a doctoral dissertation, and eventually published in Kant-Studien in 1922. The book aims to make things clear on the  debate taking place at the time regarding  the source of our knowledge of space and, especially, to what extent an objective knowledge of space could depend on experience. Carnap argues that the many different perspectives advocated by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists are contradictory as their differences rely on confusion over the different meanings of space. Der Raum then aims to show that a proper conceptual clarification of the different meanings of space and their interconnections can shed light on this debate and finally dissolve the controversy.

The first three chapters deal respectively with three different meanings of space; formal, intuitive and physical space, whereas the last two chapters focus on their interconnections and how each space is related to experience. The notion of formal space (formale Raum) is defined in terms of ‘relational or structural system’, i.e. a system fully determined by a set of formal axioms whose objects and relations (holding among them) are indeterminate and not related to any specific intuitive meaning. From this formal system we can obtain the spatial system once we substitute spatial elements (point, line, …) for their indeterminate correlation. Carnap refers to this formal system also in terms of “pure theory of relations” (reine Beziehungslehre). He further claims that the construction of formal space can be undertaken in a different way, which is the only path that ‘makes the complete construction of formal space possible, comprising all the special cases’. Starting from formal logic, i.e. the general theory of classes and relations, Carnap then briefly sketches this construction. He introduces the basic notions of ‘judgment’, ‘proposition’, ‘concept’, ‘relation’, and so on, until he defines the notion of ‘(ordered) series’ (natural numbers, real numbers, etc) and finally he arrives at the most general notion of formal space, called n-dimensional topological space and designated by Rnt. By imposing specific conditions on this structure, Carnap obtains the n-dimensional projective space Rnp and the n-dimensional metrical space Rnm. Starting from these formal structures we can obtain the three different intuitive spaces (topological, projective, metrical) by substituting their indeterminate elements with spatial elements. Carnap explicitly claims that ‘a relation of substitution (Einsetzung) holds between the theory of formal and that of intuitive space’, even though the connection between formal space and intuitive space is not so straightforward since postulates and generalizations also play a role in the construction of the order-structure of intuitive space (for any dimension). However, this kind of connection resembles Husserl’s distinction between formal ontology and regional ontology and Carnap is well aware of this and he explicitly refers to it in order to clarify his perspective. Moreover, Husserl’s Wesenserschauung is mentioned to specify the kind of intuitive knowledge involved, making clear that it is not to be confused with ‘intuition (Anschauung) in the narrower sense, focused on the fact itself’ as it pertains to the essential features that can be grasped within phenomena. In agreement with Husserl’s remarks on Kant’s conception of a priori, Carnap claims that the essential features of intuitive space turn out be ‘the synthetic a priori propositions claimed by Kant’. Therefore, the principles governing the formal space are analytic a priori, whereas the ones governing the topological space are synthetic a priori. These two kinds of space, however, are not enough to give a comprehensive picture of scientific knowledge of space. We need to introduce the physical space that represents the domain of synthetic a posteriori knowledge. The knowledge of physical space, however, other than being based on the empirical results of experiments, necessarily relies on conventions that are based on the choice of metric stipulation we decide to adopt. Carnap further claims that, if we wish, we could impose a different metric geometry and still obtain a physical space that is compatible with all our everyday and scientific observations, even though the final outcome might be far from straightforward. Physical space, therefore, relies on conventions but the choice of metric stipulation should be evaluated in terms of some criteria of simplicity that consider the overall description of nature.

Carnap’s Der Raum shows an impressive richness both from a philosophical and mathematical point of view. Carnap’s appendix ‘Pointers to the Literature’ contains substantial resources to historically contextualize many of the issues raised in the book. Starting from his adherence to the logistic approach of Frege and Russell, then going through the neo-Kantian perspectives of Natorp and Cassirer, on to Husserl’s phenomenology and Dingler’s conventionalism, Carnap’s Der Raum turns out to be a very interesting re-elaboration and combination of different philosophical perspectives. Moreover, the most important mathematical and physical literature of the time is seriously taken into account and the major works of Hilbert, Poincaré, Weyl, Riemann, and many others, are discussed and their results are assimilated into Carnap’s view. Several issues in Der Raum, therefore, should be enlightened by reference to the rich cultural framework that underlies this book. For instance, further investigation into the interconnections between Der Raum and Weyl’s Raum-Zeit-Materie would prove  very interesting and fruitful. Carnap explicitly makes reference to Weyl’s writings several times, and a comparison between Carnap’s and Weyl’s studies on space – the latter being clearly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology – might shed light on the nature of Husserl’s influence on Der Raum. Similarly, further investigation into Carnap’s re-elaboration of Russell’s and Husserl’s perspectives on logic to construct formal space could be useful in order to clarify several aspects of Carnap’s later notion of rational reconstruction. Carnap’s notion of metrical stipulation is another example. A detailed analysis of Carnap’s account on stipulations could shed light on the development of his  later conventionalism. The editorial work on Der Raum (edited by Michael Friedman) successfully achieves a great deal of this task. It is extremely accurate and several in-depth analyses furnish the historical and mathematical background that a reader needs to properly understand the many issues contained in this book. The editor further includes Carnap’s marginalia (contained in Carnap’s own copy of Der Raum) in the editorial notes at the corresponding points which gives the reader a clearer picture of Carnap’s view on this specific issue.

However, a few critical remarks can be put forward. Friedman does not seem to capture the exact nature of the Husserlian framework underlying Carnap’s view nor how it relates to the neo-Kantian framework that – as Friedman rightly suggests – underlies Der Raum. In the Introduction (edited also by Carus), for instance, the editors charge Carnap with  confusion in respect to his conception of intuitive topological space, which ‘somewhat confusingly’ shares the status of conditions for the possibility of experience with formal topological space. This remark seems to underlie a misconception of Husserl’s philosophy. The introduction of phenomenology is definitely one major difference between the previous Masters dissertation of 1920 and the published version of Der Raum. The published edition of 1922, indeed, is a revisited version of the previous Masters dissertation that Carnap had written for the philosophy department in 1920. In the revisited version Carnap substitutes his previous conception of ‘pure geometry’ with ‘intuitive space’ and this very change marks a shift from a neo-Kantian notion of ‘condition for the possibility of experience’ to a Husserlian reinterpretation thereof. I do not mean that Carnap adheres completely to Husserl’s perspective, but his major interest in phenomenology relies exactly on the Husserlian reformulation of Kant’s synthetic a priori propositions in terms of regional axioms that belong to a certain regional ontology. It is precisely this notion of regional ontology that shapes Carnap’s notion of intuitive topological space, and more generally it is precisely the Husserlian distinction between regional ontology and formal ontology that shapes the overall Carnapian distinction between intuitive and formal space. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a philosophical account that – by the introduction of the notion of categorial intuition (that later develops into the notion Wesenserschauung) – enables Husserl to speak in terms of essential structures intuitively given in a phenomenal domain and playing the role of regional axioms, i.e. conditions for the possibility of experience of this very domain. These regional axioms, moreover, are connected to their correlated abstract structures – free from any intuitive elements and belonging to the domain of formal ontology – by means of relations of formalization and de-formalization (categorical intuitions come into play again). These abstract structures, moreover, share the status of experience-constituting validity since they represent the categorical form of the essential structures governing the given phenomenal domain. Carnap’s intuitive topological space – shaping Husserl’s notion of regional ontology – does not share ‘confusingly’ the status of conditions for the possibility of experience with formal topological space, rather they both have this experience-constituting validity – even though in a different way – in agreement with Husserl’s perspective. Further remarks can be found in the editorial notes that do not seem to capture adequately the nature of the Husserlian framework underlying Der Raum. The editors rightly point out that Husserl’s phenomenology is essentially a descriptive science based on essential insight (Wesenserschauung), but they do not seem to ascribe the role of essences – grasped by Wesenserschauung – directly to the axioms of intuitive space. They designate these axioms as ‘describing the Wesenserschauung’ of our perceptual experience of objects in space, or as ‘codifying certain attributes of intuition’. These remarks seem to underlie that firstly, they keep distinct essences grasped by Wesenserschauung and the axioms describing them, and secondly, they do not ascribe to the axioms any intuitiveness by essential insight. Although the relation between a phenomenological description of a given phenomenal domain and the regional ontology characterizing the domain itself is a complex, multi-faced, and problematic field of phenomenological research, Husserl clearly states that they both have to investigated by Wesenserschauung. Therefore, the axioms themselves are intuitively given and they do not ‘describe’ or ‘codify’ an intuitive knowledge but, at most, we could say that in-depth phenomenological analysis can clarify their meaning-constitution.

It seems to me that this misconception of Husserl’s philosophy undermines their evaluation of Husserl’s contribution to Der Raum in several instances. However, the editors are right not to over-estimate Husserl’s influence on Der Raum over Carnap’s adherence to Kant’s philosophy or neo-Kantian thinkers. Der Raum is arguably a personal re-elaboration of several philosophical perspectives rather than a complete adherence to one specific account. It is not clearto what extent Carnap is fully accepting Husserl’s phenomenology in Der Raum, especially, with respect to the possibility to explore exhaustively a given phenomenal domain by Wesenserschauung in all its essential and stratified connections. Instead he seems interested in Husserl’s perspective only so far as it represents a philosophical account (with a Kantian flavor) within which it is possible – starting from the domain of empirical reality – to avoid the restrictions imposed by a neo-Kantian approach. This would enable him  to freely explore the ‘characteristic structures’ belonging to this domain as without it implies a contingent knowledge and laying the foundations for a structural objective analysis of experience.

Über die Aufgabe der Physik addresses the question of what should be regarded as a criterion for maximal simplicity within a physical theory. Two different possibilities are examined with the aim of clarifying the relevant aspects that should rule the choice between them, even though no decision between these two possibilities is suggested in the paper. This text is an important resource to better understand Carnap’s view on simplicity and stipulations within a physical theory and how they both are related to Carnap’s conception of scientific rationality.

In Dreidimensionalität des Raumes und Kausalität Carnap explores how we construct reality starting from a world of sense impressions. Carnap draws an important distinction between experience that exhibits only necessary formation – or first-order experience – and experience that is processed further – or second-order experience. This distinction echoes the previous one in Der Raum between the necessary topological form and the various metrical conventions that could be imposed on it. In the paper Carnap explores this specific issue in a wider perspective where his conventional view is elaborated in the light of Vaihinger’s pragmatic view. It is no coincidence that the paper was published in Annalen der Philosophie, regarded as the house journal of Vaihinger and his followers. Vaihinger argues that we are able to access only the ‘chaos’ of our world of sense impressions whereas the reality we construct is not genuine knowledge but is rather based on useful fictions that allow us to get things done and live in the world. Carnap agrees with Vaihinger as far as it concerns the role of fictions in constructing the reality, but he argues that such a construction is not completely arbitrary. Firstly, we face a first-order experience that exhibits a basic form of ordering, and secondly, certain kinds of logical connections can be established among fictions shaping second-order experience. The paper aims to show that the fiction of three-dimensionality of space and the fiction of physical causality ‘stand in a relation of logical dependence with each other’, and the former is conditioned by the latter. This text is especially important because it helps us to shed light on the development of Aufbau. The first draft of Aufbau dates back to early 1922 and it was completed in 1925. During these years we can observe an important shift: in the early phase (1922-24) Carnap distinguishes a fixed ‘primary world’ of immediate experience – in accordance with the text we are discussing – from a ‘secondary world’ (or ‘realities’) that could be constructed by quasi-analysis on this intuitive basis. However, sometime during 1924 the distinction between primary and secondary world was dropped. Further investigation of Carnap’s intellectual encounters during these years is required , but the present text is clearly an important resource to better understand the development of his thought from Der Raum to Aufbau, especially with respect to his changing perspective on the epistemic value of intuitive knowledge.

In Über die Abhängigkeit der Eigenschaften des Raumes von denen der Zeit Carnap argues that statements about the topological structure of physical space can be reduced to statements about temporal or causal order. The paper needs a proper mathematical and physical background to be properly understood and Malament’s appendix satisfies this requirement. Malament gives a detailed reconstruction of Carnap’s account and he further discusses a number of mathematical problems suggesting how they could be fixed. This text is clearly an important resource for understanding Carnap’s efforts during these years not only in logic and philosophy of science, but also in physical and mathematical research of the time.

The last paper, entitled Physikalische Begriffsbildung, is an important paper written shortly before Carnap moved to Vienna in 1926. In the Introduction Carnap outlines what is science: an activity of collecting and organizing items of knowledge with the aim of subjecting the reality ‘to an ever higher degree of control’”. According to this pragmatic view of science, the task of physics is ‘to order perceptions systematically and to draw inferences from perceptions at hand to perceptions to be expected’. Carnap then explores thoroughly the hierarchical structure of physical concept formation, subdividing its formation into three main stages: qualitative stage, quantitative stage, and abstract stage. The present paper gives us an interesting overall picture of Carnap’s conception of rational reconstruction at the very moment when Carnap was on his way to the final version of the Aufbau. The editorial work (edited by Creath and Richardson) is again very accurate and detailed, although a few remarks on the comparison between Carnap’s Begriffsbildung and Weyl’s Begriffsbildung (as well as Weyl’s Konstitution) might have been useful, especially with respect to Carnap’s later conception of Konstitution.

But aside from these last considerations, the editors have done an excellent job firstly, in making all these texts available to English readers for the first time, and secondly, in making them more understandable thanks to their very rich in-depth analysis. This volume enhances the increasing English literature on the early young Carnap, which in turn provides a clearer picture of the development of logical empiricism and early analytic philosophy. The essays provide a fundamental resource to explore the multi-faceted cultural framework of the time where different philosophical movements were used to profitably interact with each other in a way that has become increasingly difficult in the later years. For all these reasons, the present volume is of considerable merit and should be of interest to Carnap scholars, historians of analytic philosophy and to Husserl scholars and researchers working at the intersection between the philosophy of science, logic and phenomenology.

Radek Schuster (Ed.): The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia, Springer, 2020

The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia Book Cover The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia
Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 23
Radek Schuster (Ed.)
Springer
2020
Hardback 88,39 €
VII, 206

Rudolf Carnap: The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings, Oxford University Press, 2019

The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings Book Cover The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1, Early Writings
Rudolf Carnap. Edited by A.W. Carus, Michael Friedman, Wolfgang Kienzler, Alan Richardson, and Sven Schlotter
Oxford University Press
2019
Hardback £65.00
528

[:en]Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (Ed.): Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, 2017[:]

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Routledge Research in Phenomenology
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (Ed.)
Routledge
2017
Hardback £105.00
178

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