THOMAS MORMANN A VIRTUAL DEBATE IN EXILE: CASSIRER AND THE VIENNA CIRCLE AFTER 1933 Ernst Cassirer, 2011, Symbolische Prägnanz, Ausdrucksphänomen und „Wiener Kreis", Nach ge las sene Ma nu skripte und Texte, vol. 4, ed. Christian Möckel, 478pp., Ham burg, Felix Meiner Verlag.1 1. CASSIRER AND OTHER PHILOSOPHERS Cassirer was one of the leading philosophers and public intellectuals in Germany in the last years of the Weimar Republic. In philosophy of science one might recall his discussion with Schlick on the philosophical interpretation of Einstein's relativity theory in the early 1920s. The famous Davos Disputation of Cassirer and Heidegger in 1929 was considered a major philo so phi cal event by his contemporaries. The parti ci pants included Carnap who on this occasion got to know Cassirer personally. Later, Cassirer, Schlick, and Carnap met several times in Vienna. Carnap had received essential ideas for the Aufbau from Cassirer and other neo-Kantians, and he referred to Cassirer's works already in his fi rst philosophical pub lication Der Raum (Carnap 1922). Cassirer's contacts were not restricted to the members of the Vienna Circle – he was on friendly terms from 1915 till the end of his life with his former student Reichenbach.2 Not all members of the Vienna Circle held Cassirer in high esteem, however. Neurath dismissively characterized him as a "Kantian, who sometimes stood more closely to the basic conception of modern science than other Kantians ..." (Neurath, 1936, 694). In a similar vein, Philipp Frank used to characterize Cassirer as a repre sen ta tive of "school philosophy". Only later, in a review of Cassirer's Determ i nismus und In de ter minismus in der modernen Physik (Cas sirer 1937), did he reluctantly extend a poisoned accolade to Cassirer by describing the book "as a highly successful attempt to continue the adjustment of the tradi ti o nal idealist philosophy to the progress of science", 1 In this paper, the following abbreviations for Cassirer's works are used: ECW = Ernst Cassirer Werke, ECN = Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, ECB = Ernst Cassirer Briefe, SF = Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, PSF = Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen. All Cassirer citations are translated from the German into English by the reviewer. 2 The last but one letter that Cassirer wrote before his unexpected death on April 13 of 1945 was to Reichenbach, who had invited him as a visiting scholar to California (ECB, pp. 238-239, April 10, 1945). 2 Thomas Mormann which, in his opinion, could end "only with the complete disintegration of the traditional philosophy" (Frank 1938 (1955), 184/185). Pace Frank's contribution. The award for the most curious dispute with Cassirer should probably go to Kurt Grelling who thirty years earlier, in the youthful pole mical paper Das gute, klare Recht der Freunde der anthropologischen Vernunftkritik, ver teidigt gegen Ernst Cassirer (Grelling 1908), had taken issue with Cassirer defending Leonard Nelson in the latter's dispute with Hermann Cohen, Cassirer's mentor and the head of Mar burg neo-Kantianism.3 In sum, in the 1920s Cassirer and the members of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin group were involved in quite a few, sometimes polemical discussions with each other that dealt with a broad spectrum of themes from science and philosophy. After the National so ci alists seized power in Germany and the Clerical Fascists in Austria most members of these groups and many other philosophers and scientists were forced to emigrate. Most went to the US, but some also to other countries, such as Great Britain (Cassirer, Neurath), Sweden (Cassirer), or even Turkey (Reichen bach), at least temporarily. The intellectual connections that had existed since the fi rst decades of the last century were thus inter rupted or at least seriously damaged due to the often diffi cult circumstances under which the emigrants had to live. One might assume that the vivid intellectual exchanges that had taken place during the Weimar years would have considerably diminished. Cassirer and the logical empiricists defy this conjecture – at least in one direction: Cassirer's interest in the philosophy of the Vienna Circle reached its peak after the Circle had ceased to exist in Vienna (cf. Krois 2000, 136). This is amply evidenced by Cassirer's posthumous writings ECN (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte) whose publication is now well under way in a lavish critical edition under the general edi torship of John Michael Krois (†), Klaus Christian Köhnke, and Os kar Schwemmer. Twenty volumes are projected from which about twelve have been already published. ECN drags its material from the holdings of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, and of other libraries and privately owned manuscripts. According to the publisher, the volumes of ECN are arranged thematically. This must be understood in a broad sense: on the one hand, the volume under review (ECN4) brings together many texts that do not have much to do with Cassirer's relation to the Vienna Circle, on the other hand many other volumes of ECN do contain a wealth of papers that deal extensively with precisely this topic. Thus, a reader who wishes to gain a broad understanding of Cassirer's later thought on a specifi c topic is well advised to read across the dif ferent volumes of ECN. The present review will follow this strategy, i.e., focus only those texts of ECN4 that are relevant to the topic of this essay, but at the same time consider pertinent texts from other volumes of ECN. Nonetheless, it seems expedient to give 3 Twenty years later, Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn considered Grelling's paper as important enough to be included in the bibliography of The Scientifi c Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Man ifesto). Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 3 the reader a short description of the topics that are treated in ECN4. The volume has two main parts: (I) Symbolische Prägnanz, Ausdrucksphänomen und "Wiener Kreis", and (II) Beilagen that provide among other texts some lecture notes of Cassirer's from the early 1920s. The volume is rounded off with an extensive appendix (Anhang) of approximately 160 pages containing critical editorial comments and further elucidations regarding the published material. While Cassirer's continuing interest in logical empiricism in general and in the Vienna Circle in particular is evidenced by a wealth of texts now available in ECN, the interest of members of the Vienna Circle in Cassirer after 1933 is more diffi cult to substantiate. Carnap, for instance, hardly ever mentioned Cassirer in his later writings. This should not be interpreted as meaning that he was not interested in Cassirer's later philosophy. As I would like to show in the following, a kind of virtual debate took place: Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms may be considered as an implicit target of Carnap in the early thirties. More precisely, the aim of this essay is to discuss some aspects of the virtual disputes that Cassirer had in ECN with the leading fi gures of the Vienna Circle, in particular with Car nap.4 This may give us an idea of how a debate between two competing currents of German en lighten ment-oriented philo sophy could have looked like under more fortu nate historical cir cum stances. This may not be only of historico-philosophical interest: It does not seem unreasonable to contend that such a debate has remained a matter still to be resolved for German philosophy to this today.5 The pub li ca tion of Cassirer's posthumous writings in ECN is, of course, not only important for elucidating his relations with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, it also sheds new light on his philosophy in general. The writings of ECN show that his thought after the completion of his opus magnum The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923 – 1929) (PSF) underwent a further evolution that brought many new aspects to the fore. This is evidenced in particular by the so-called "fourth volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" (ECN1) in which Cassirer sought to address philosophical currents that had not yet found their place 4 Although Cassirer was well aware of the fact (cf. ECN4, 186) that the Vienna Circle was not a monolithic philosophical movement, after 1933 he mainly dealt with Carnap's version of logical empiricism. To some extent, he later tended to identify the Vienna Circle's logical empiricism with Carnap's. Before 1933, his main addressee had been Schlick, as is exemplifi ed, for instance, by Cassirer (1927). Schlick had started the debate with Cassirer already in 1921 with the highly infl uential paper Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik? Bemerkungen zu Ernst Cassirers Buch „Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie" (Schlick 1921). 5 As is well known, after the end of the Second World War, in Germany and Austria antienlighten ment and reactionary philosophies continued to dominate the philosophical scene for decades. Many intellectual fi gures, who had been prominent already in the Weimar Republic, kept on being infl uential in West Germany. Cassirer was not one of them. 4 Thomas Mormann in his philoso phical universe. The most prominent ones were perhaps Husserlian pheno me no logy, Lebensphilosophie, and the rising star of Heidegger. These new ingredients had a considerable infl uence on his stance toward the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Or, seen from the opposite per spective, Cassirer's numerous references to logical empiricism in the texts of ECN show that he was at pains to defend his own account of philosophy (dubbed "criticial idealism" or "philosophy of symbolic forms") against the rivaling one of the logical empirists that had been put forward most vigorously by Carnap. While Cassirer was in the process of developing an all-encompassing philosophy of culture, at the same time Carnap's style of philo sophizing evolved in a quite different direction. In the Aufbau he had still opted for a "comprehensive scientifi c philosophy" that dealt not only with empirical and formal sciences, but also sought to include a theory of Geistes wissenschaften dealing with cultural objects, in particular values (cf. Mormann (2006)). Around 1930, however, he began to favor a "restrictive scientifi c philosophy" according to which values and other cultural objects ceased to be respectable objects of study for scientifi c philosophy. In his post-Aufbau works Carnap con cen trated more and more on formal and logical aspects of philosophy of science, and hardly ever mentioned the work of traditional philosophers as is evidenced in Logische Syntax der Sprache (Carnap 1934) and the programmatic article On the Character of Philosophical Problems (Carnap 1934a) written for the newly founded journal Philosophy of Science. Thus, after 1930 Cassirer and Carnap headed in quite different directions. While Cassirer sought to reach an all-embracing panoramic under standing of the sciences, the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften or Kultur wis sen schaften) and other symbolic forms, Carnap concentrated on the logic of science as the very essence of a (post) philosophical understanding of science and human reason. This does not mean that Carnap ignored traditional philosophy altogether. On the contrary, it remained an important concern for him. The Elimination of Metaphysics by through Logical Analysis of Language (Carnap 1932), The Unity of Science (Carnap 1932a) and Philosophy and Logical Syntax (Carnap 1935) may be read as relentless, although anonymous, attacks on then contemporary non-empiricist philosophical currents. While Overcoming targeted Heidegger and, on a different level, Rickert's Wertwissenschaft, The Unity of Science (Carnap 1932a) and Philosophy and Logical Syntax (Carnap 1935) targeted central theses of Cassirer's philosophy of the symbolic forms, namely, the meaningfulness of the expressive function. In these papers neither Rickert nor Cassirer nor any other "traditional" philosopher is mentioned by name. Not even Heidegger was considered as an individual philosopher but just as a typical metaphysician, as Carnap dismissively asserted in a footnote. This peculiar style was probably due to the fact that these articles were not meant as contributions to an open-ended discussion with philosophical adversaries but as "offi cial announcements" of the doctrines of the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 5 Thus, one may speak of a virtual debate between Cassirer and Carnap (whom Cassirer seemed to have considered as a sort of representative of the Vienna Circle) that took place after 1933 when most of members of the Vienna Circle and Cassirer had been exiled from their home countries. Following the Second World War, the fates of Cassirer's and Carnap's philosophies were quite different: Carnap's version of logical empiricism became part of mainstream analytic philosophy in the US, while Cassirer's philosophy rapidly fell into oblivion.6 In Germany and the rest of Europe the twelve years of the Third Reich had suffi ced to wipe out his memory almost completely.7 This dark age for Cassirer scholarship defi nitively belongs to the past. Since the mid-eighties of the last century a Cassirer-renaissance is well under way. Meanwhile the immense project of a critical edition of his collected works ECW and his posthumous writings ECN has been realized to a large extent. A wealth of secondary literature is constantly being produced, and Cassirer may safely be considered a recognized classical author of 20th century phi losophy. Cassirer's critique of logical empiricism concentrated on the issue of physicalism. Independently of this topic, however, he considered the Viennese way of philosophizing as resulting in a serious impoverishment of philosophy, and he vigorously argued against the allegedly reductionist conception of knowledge, science, and philosophy favored by the Viennese philosophers. For this endeavor, he drew on a variety of arguments from his Philosophy of sym bolic forms, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie. The outline of this paper is as follows. In section 2 the project of physicalist logical empiricism is contrasted with Cassirer's philosophy of sym bo lic forms: Physicalism is characterized by its tho rough-going monism. According to it there is only one kind of science to be formulated in one language, to wit, the lan guage of physics. In contrast, the philosophy of symbolic forms insists on an irreducible 6 Evidence for this is the fact that for more than thirty years after Cassirer's death (until the 1980s) no serious efforts were made to make accessible Cassirer's philosophical Nachlass. 7 For German-speaking philosophy, this is witnessed by Steg müller's Hauptströmungen der Gegen warts philosophie (1952 (19897)). Stegmüller mentioned Cassirer only in a footnote as „one of the most im portant and know ledgeable Kant scholars." On the other hand, he saw no problem ranking Scheler, Hartmann, Jaspers, Haeberlin, and Reininger among the protagonists of the most important contem porary currents of philosophy – still in the latest edition of 1989. For several decades, Hauptströmungen was a very popular reference work, but no body complained, as far as I know, about the author's strange selection of the "main currents of contemporary phi losophy". Stegmüller not only didn't take notice of Cassirer, he also preferred to ignore marxism and pragmatism (cf. Mormann 2010). Even in Schnädelbach's Ph ilo so phy in Germany 1831–1933 (Schnä delbach 1984) Cassirer is men tioned in passing only once as the author of "his classic work of Sub stanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff" (ibid., 87) In contrast, Schnädelbach dedicates detailed dis cus sions to the works of Cassirer's Weimar contem po raries Rickert, Scheler, and Spengler. 6 Thomas Mormann plurality of symbolic forms and their languages, all of which philosophy has to recognize without dog ma tically singling out the physical one as the only one that has cognitive con tent. As Cassirer had argued in PSF an important source for the irreducible plurality of symbolic forms was the so called "expressive function" of sym bo lization (cf. (PSF III, Part I)). While in PSF the expressive function was primarily discussed in its relation to the symbolic form of myth, in many writings of ECN this concept became also im por tant for the constitution of psychology and Kulturwissenschaften. As will be shown in section 3, Cassirer's account of the expressive function directly clashes with that of Carnap, for whom expressive propositions had no cognitive content at all. Section 4 deals with Cas sirer's attempt to fi nd a middle way between Lebensphilosophie and logical empiricism (cf. also Ikonen 2011). He considered both to be one-sided philosophical currents suffering from com ple men tary shortcomings, namely, a dogmatic acceptance of the contentions of the expressive function from the side of Lebensphilosophie, and an equally dogmatic skepticism with respect to the expressive function from the side of logical empiricism. The aim of section 5 is to assess the affi nities and the differences between Cassirer and logical empiricism. On the one hand, Cas si rer clearly recognized that both accounts shared a philosophical legacy that may be roughly characterized as enlightenmentoriented, scientifi c philosophy. On the other hand, the two accounts conceived of the task of philosophy in quite different, perhaps even opposite ways: for Carnap philosophy and science were theoretical, while Cassirer saw science and philosophy as activities of a collective subject that aimed to constitute a complex network of symbolic meanings. 2. PHYSICALIST MONISM AND SYMBOLIC PLURALISM For Cassirer, the core of the Vienna Circle's lo gical empiricism was physicalism. According to him, the physicalist doctrine most clearly marked the dif fe rences between his "philosophy of sym bolic forms" and Viennese empiricism. In the following I will mainly deal with the manuscript Symbolische Prägnanz, Ausdruck s phä no men und "Wiener Kreis" from ECN4. Symbolic pregnance and expression phe no menon being key concepts of the philosophy of the symbolic forms, already the title of this text indicates what was at stake here for Cassirer, namely, the defense of his philo so phical position against the Vienna logical empiricism. (ECN4) was, however, in no way the only text in which Cassirer was struggling with Vienna. Disputes about logico-empiricist theses are to be found in many volumes of (ECN), see for instance, ECN 1 (118 – 120), ECN2 (7, 135ff), ECN4 (153ff, 205, 209f), or ECN5 (72 – 74).8 8 Symbolische Prägnanz, Ausdrucksphänomen und „Wiener Kreis" was written Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 7 Cassirer's main references for his discussion of physicalism were the Aufbau (Carnap 1928), Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Carnap 1928a), and The Unity of Science (Carnap 1932a). In this booklet Carnap formulated physicalism as the thesis about the global archi tec to nics of science. According to it, the traditional separation between the natural sciences, the humanities, and psy cho logy was obsolete. They were all are parts of the same unifi ed science. The language of unifi ed science was to be a physical language, i.e., a language of an ideal physics, in which all scientifi c statements are statements about spatio-temporal events and processes. Moreover, philosophy was not to be conceived of as an extra science having its own domain; rather, the task of philosophy was the clarifi cation of the concepts and propositions of science (cf. Carnap (1932, 433)). Cassirer vigorously rejected these monopolist claims. According to him, the language of physics was not a universal language, but just a special language. Moreover, philosophy had to take into account all languages since they all were cultural products in their own right. Thereby it had to become a pluralist philosophy of symbolic forms (cf. ECN 4, 205). Philosophy was not primarily engaged in determining a priori which were admissible and which were not. As Carnap had already expected, physicalism met the fi ercest resistence in the case of psychology (cf. Carnap (1932, 36f)). Complementarily, the partisans of physicalism believed that a physicalist translation of psy cho logy was of strategic signifi cance for their program: If only psy cho logy fell prey to physicalism, the physicalist translations of all other sciences, dealing with historical, cultural, and economic issues, would easily follow (ibid. 72). But, as Carnap pointed out, this would be the case only for the really scientifi c propo si tions in this the area – the many pseudo-concepts, which cluttered the Geistes wis sen schaften or Kultur wissen schaften, would, of course, not be translatable into properly scientifi c, genuine physicalist terms. In other words, for Carnap, translatability into physicalist language served as a criterion for scien ti fi city. Cassirer agreed with Carnap in that psychology and Kulturwissenschaften were crucial for physicalism. Consequently, he concentrated his attacks against physicalism exactly on this point, namely, the physicalist contention that psychology could be reformulated in physicalist, i.e., behaviorist terms. For Cassirer, the basic fl aw of all physicalist attempts to explain the psy chical was located in the implicit positivist assumption that "originally" only the physical was given. Taking the physical as starting point, the task for physicalism was to explain how from this base the psychical could be constituted in some way or other. According to Cas sirer this project was doomed to fail from the outset, since an analysis of the transcendental presuppositions revealed that the physical was not originally given 1935/1936 probably as material for an article that Reichenbach had commissioned for Erkenntnis. Cassirer had planned to take Schlick as the target of his con tri bution (cf. ECN4, 340). After Schlick's assassination Cassirer no longer pursued this project, although, as he wrote to Reichenbach, "the thing is pretty well fi nished inside of my head" (ECB, September 1, 1936, p. 151). 8 Thomas Mormann (cf. ECN4, 153). To back this claim, he relied on argu ments from phenomenology according to which the phenomena of the "I" and the "Thou" are basic phe nomena not reducible to any other phenomena such as the physical "It"– neither by analogy, empathy, or by any other method.9 Rather, for positing an objective physical world, a com mu ni ty of subjects that already share a common world was necessary. Taking the physical as an ultimate basis was a positivist prejudice. Carnap's confessed adherence to physicalism did not entail that the Auf bau pro ject did not share important features with his "Critical philosophy" and Husserl's phe no me no logy (cf. ECN4, 153), namely, that the concept of constitution played a central role in all three of them. Indeed, in constituting the realm of Kulturwissenschaften, Cassirer may be seen as continuing – on a much broader and more detailed scale than Carnap – a project that the latter had already sketched in the Aufbau, to wit, the con stitution of "cultural objects" (cf. Aufbau (§§ 150ff) and Mormann 2006). Cassirer virtually rehearsed Carnap's con stitution of cultural objects as witnesses of an "objective spirit" that the latter had developed in the Aufbau (§55ff, §150-152). This is evidenced by the fact that both Cassirer (cf. ECN5, 7, 131) and Carnap (cf. Aufbau §12, §56) referred to Hans Freyer's Neohegelian Theorie des objektiven Geistes (Freyer 1923).10 A naive physicalism conceived of the physical as something given. In contrast, neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy understood the physical not as "given" ("gegeben") but as "aufgegeben", i.e.. as something to be constituted in an ongoing process of investigation. Cassirer conceded that Car nap was not a naive physicalist, since in the Aufbau he did not take the physical as given, but rather as constituted by the method of quasi-analysis. Nevertheless, Carnap unfortunately clung to a positivist bias when he sought to re con struct the psychical in terms of the physical. This fl aw bereft his constitution theory of the con ceptual means to deal adequately with questions concerning psychical and related concepts. As a result, many traditional problems of philosophy were disqualifi ed as pseudoproblems (cf. ECN4, 210, Footnote 11). In particular, physicalism was mistaken in contending that the expressive function was devoid of cognitive meaning. In fact, logical empiricism had only shown that the expressive phe no mena and utterances had no meaning within the realm of physicalist discourse, i.e., from the standpoint of physics. It was, however, erroneous to conclude from this that they would be altogether without meaning. 9 For Husserl's phenomenological constitution of the psychical, see Cartesian Medi tations §42 – §62 (Husserl 1931). 10 Not for long, however, Freyer's "objective spirit" enjoyed a good reputation in Carnap's idearium. Only a few years later, it had be come a typical example of a pseudoconcept that could not be trans lated into ho nest physicalist terms (cf. Car nap (1932, 73)). Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 9 There was cognitive meaning beyond physicalism. Or, as Cassirer put it, "metaphysi ca lism" does not coincide with "metaphysics" (cf. ECN4, 210).11 For Cassirer philosophy was more than a critique of knowledge. It was essential for a philosophy in its proper sense that it deals with the universe of human symbolization in all its dimensions. Against the Vienna Circle's thesis that only decidable problems were meaningful problems, Cassirer argued that, although the problem of the psychical may not be decidable on theoretical grounds, it nevertheless was meaningful since it made a practical difference. Carnap admitted such a practical difference (cf. Aufbau §11), but insisted, as always, that practical differences were scientifi cally irrelevant. For him, the practice of science was not an issue which could be discussed in philosophy of science proper, since science as such was concerned only with theoretical knowledge (cf. Carnap (1935, 32)). Consequently, the only task of philo so phy of science proper was the purely theoretical analysis of the formal structure of the language of science (ibd., 99). Although Cassirer rejected physicalism he did not regard it as completely useless. Physicalism had made an important contribution to philo so phy of science by clarifying how to distinguish the natural sciences from Kultur wissenschaften by pointing out that the expressive function was an indispensable ingredient of the latter, since they necessarily went beyond the physical. For Cassirer a phenomenological analysis revealed that also the expressive function had to play an essential role for an objective human world (cf. ECN 4, 207f). In other words, Cassirer and Carnap are involved in a vigorous virtual debate on the meta physical character of the expression function. 3. EXPRESSION PERCEPTION In PSF "expression perception" was mainly related to the symbolic forms of art, language, and myth. In particular, the mythical world conception was characterized by the primacy of expression perception over object perception. For it, there still does not exist a world of things. Everything is perceived as expressing, so to speak, a personal meaning. Only later does science replace expression qualities by sense qualities. It should be noted, however, that the expression function placed an important role for Cassirer's approach that had not much to do with myth. For instance, it enables us to perceive the three basic phenomena of "I", "Thou", and "It" that are needed to get a comprehensive understanding of the world. These basic phenomena do not have much to do with myth but a lot with the Lebens welt in the sense of Husserlian pheno me nology. Their irreducibility to phenomena that can be un der stood in purely physicalist terms was the basis for Cassirer's rejec11 In German, this can be expressed elegantly by distinguishing between "meta phy sisch" and "me ta phy si ka lisch": "Was den 'Wiener Kreis' betrifft, so entstehen hier viele Schwierigkeiten daraus, dass viele Probleme als meta-physisch bezeichnet und als solche denunziert werden, die nur meta-physikalisch sind." (ECN 4, 210). 10 Thomas Mormann tion of phy si ca lism: "Experiences of pure expression are not of mediated but of an original character" and "Understanding of expression is prior to knowledge of things" (PSF III, 65). Carnap's attempts in the Aufbau to constitute the hetero psy cho lo gi cal and the physical from an autopsychological base were doomed to fail from the outset for Cassirer since they sought to reduce two of the three basic phenomena, namely "Thou" and "It" to the third ("I").12 In sum, the opposed assessments of the expressive function were the point where Cassirer and Carnap parted ways. I thus propose to read Carnap's thesis, put forward in (Car nap 1935) that expressive phenomena are sheer metaphysics, as a direct, although anony mous, attack against Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms: Metaphysical propositions express some thing, ... but nevertheless they have no sense, no theoretical content. ... Metaphysical propositions – like lyrical verses – have only an expressive function. ... they lie completely outside the fi eld of knowledge. (Carnap (1935, § 5, Meta physics as Expression, 27, 29)) Cassirer was not alone in contending that the phenomena of "I", "Thou", and "It" were ir re ducible to each other and to anything else. The later Husserl argued for similar theses (cf. ECN 4, 154; Husserl (1931, §49)). According to Husserl, the fi rst "non-I" was an other "I" (the "Thou"), not an "It". Only later, the subject came to differentiate between va rious aspects of its world and the objective thingworld appeared. For Cassirer, exp res sion perception was a genuine source of cognition, it was crucial for the foundation for Ku ltur wis sen schaften: The "expression" must be added as a second dimension – as the key for the world of "life", "soul", and "mind". Without it these three worlds would remain closed for ever. From the mere perception of things no path leads to them. (ECN1, Über Basis phä nomene, 118) In contrast, Car nap sought to fi nd access to these allegedly non-physicalist worlds through a radically behaviorist reduction that Cassirer rejected as implausible. Instead, he turned the physicalist argument upside-down. The expression perception constituted for every subject the original phenomenon of being in a common world that it shared with other subjects (koinos kosmos). Drawing on results from 12 It may seem doubtful whether Carnap's "autopsychological" can be identifi ed with the "I" in Cassirer's or Husserl's sense (cf. Aufbau §65). If this is denied, in Cassirer's eyes, the expec ta tions for Carnap's reductionist constitution project looked even bleaker, since then the Aufbauer was forced to constitute all three basic phenomena from something more basic than all of them, which, according to Cassirer, was quite impossible. Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 11 gestalt psychology Cassirer pointed out that this phe no menon manifested itself already in new-born infants who very early distinguished between faces as friendly and unfriendly, respectively, but did not distinguish between different color spots as a reductionist psychology contended (cf. ECN 4, 153). According to the neo-Kantian "transcendental method" of philosophy to which Cassirer subscribed throughout his entire philosophical career, an unprejudiced scientifi c philosophy had to acknowledge this kind of facts instead of getting engaged in futile reductionist endeavors. 4. LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE If there was a philosophical current characteristic of phi losophy in Germany in the later years of the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar republic, it certainly was Lebens ph ilosophie (philosophy of life) (cf. Kusch 1995, Ringer 1969). On the surface, the relation of the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle to Lebensphilosophie was simple. They dismissed Lebensphilosophie as unmitigated me ta phy sical nonsense. Actually, as will be seen, matters were not thus simple. Before coming to this issue let us briefl y re call Cassirer's differentiated attitude to Lebensphilosophie. Although neo-Kantian philosophy in general was critical with respect to Lebensphilosophie it did not dismiss it out of hand. Cassirer cast his criticism of Lebens phi lo sophie in the same framework as his criticism of me taphysics in general. Already in Su b stance and Function, he had put forward the thesis that a metaphysical philo so phical stance usually was cha rac te rized by certain abso lu tized du a listic schemes (cf. SF, 271). Twenty years later, in the so-called fourth volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he criticised Lebens philosophie as the then reig ning version of metaphysics, as an example of such a dualistic thinking: The opposition of "life" and "spirit" is in the centre of the metaphysics of the 19th and the beginning 20th century. It turns out to be thus determining and de cisive that it swallows more and more all the other metaphysical dualisms that have been coined in the history of metaphysics, thereby making them dis ap pear. The oppositions of "being" and "becoming", "unity" and "plurality", "mat ter" and "form", "soul" and "body" all appear to be dissolved in that one ba sic antithesis. (ECN1, 7-8). Cassirer traced back Lebensphilosophie to 19th century's romanticism and took it as evi dence of the profound infl uence that ro man ticism still had on the "modern and most mo dern currents of philosophy" in Germany (cf. Cassirer (1993, 33ff.)). The dualistic ten dency of lebens philo so phi cal metaphysics stood in stark con trast to the philosophy of symbolic forms that aimed to over come fruitless oppositions, in particular that between Geist and Leben. For Carnap the opposition between Geist and Leben was not an issue that could be discussed in a rational discourse. Leben was a realm determined by one's 12 Thomas Mormann Lebensgefühl, not something belonging the ken of rational deliberations and decisions. Leben for him was a matter of living one's life and expressing one's feelings and emotions in terms of literature, music, and other arts. There was no point in arguing about one's Lebensgefühl.13 Nevertheless, "Le ben" played an important subliminal role in the Vienna Circle's philo so phical Welt an schauung. For instance, the Mani festo closes with the cryptic remark that "Science serves life, and life receives it" (Manifesto 1929, 318). Certainly a resounding fi nal phrase, but its meaning is far from clear, even in its original German. Similarly, in the preface to the fi rst edition of the Aufbau one fi nds the wooly remark: [W]e feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philo so phical work is founded and artistic movements ... and in movements which strive for mea ningful forms of personal and collective life. ... It is an orientation which de mands clarity everywhere, but which realizes that the fabric of life can never quite be apprehended. (Aufbau, xviii) At the end of the day, Carnap subscribed to an unbridgeable gap between science and life, when, at the very end of the Aufbau, he approvingly quoted the Tractatus: ... We feel that even if all possible scientifi c questions are answered, the pro blems of life have not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. (Aufbau, § 163) For Carnap, the dualism between Geist and Leben was something that could not be dealt with in a rational, scientifi c manner, it just had to be accepted as such. Nevertheless, although Carnap and the other members of the Vienna Circle hardly ever discussed explicitly philo so phers such as Scheler, Klages, or Spengler14, who counted as protagonists of Lebensphilosophie, there is a curious episode in Carnap's most radical physicalist period in which he sought to employ some of Klages's "results" in graphology to foster his project of the phy si calization of psychology. In (Carnap 1932/33) Carnap seriously put forward the claim that the physicalization of psychology had already made enormous progress in the area of gra pho logy, mainly due to the achievements of Klages's Hand schrift und Charakter (Klages 1920) (cf. Carnap 1932/1933, Physika l isierung in der Gr a pho logie 13 His radical noncognitivism may be considered as an enduring vestige of this strict separation be tween "Leben" and "Geist". Still in 1963 Carnap contended that there was no defi nitive argument in favor or against a democratic or an aristocratic organization of so ciety. Rather, he claimed that it was a matter of one's "character" which one is preferred (cf. Carnap (1963, 1009)). 14 An exception is Neurath's Anti-Spengler (Neurath 1921). In this booklet the author straight forwardly attacked Speng ler's irrationalism and sought to refute it by rational arguments pointing at its lacunae and non-sequiturs. To put it mildly, the success of Anti-Spengler was limited. In contrast, Cassirer in his later writings, e.g. in The Myth of the State (Cassirer 1946), showed a much deeper understanding of the role of quasimythical thinking in politics. Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 13 130 – 136).15 On the other hand, neo-Kantian philo so phers such as Cassirer (but also Rickert) were not prepared to hand over Leben and the affairs of social and political practice to ir rationalist Lebensphilosophie. They sought to come to terms with Lebens ph i losophie as a dis course that at least partially was susceptible to reasons. In particular, Cas sirer vigorously refused to leave the various expression phenomena entirely to the irra ti onal Leben (cf. ECN1, Geist und Leben). 5. AFFINITIES AND DIFFERENCES Compared with the often simplistic caricatures of logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle that dominated the opinions of the general philosophical public in later decades Cassirer's image of it was surprisingly modern and detailed – he did not have to wait for modern research of history of philosophy of science to know that the idea of a monolithic Vienna Circle was mistaken. He cleverly spotted the Circle's inner ten sions resulting from the different assessments of the roles that perception and logic played as criteria of reality. He set up the following "dialec ti cal" couples: Schlick (objectivistic, "re alistic", "rationalistic") vs. Mach (sensualistic, psy cho logistic), Carnap (formalistic, objec ti vistic, logicistic) vs. Neurath (empiristic, "anar chis tic") (cf. ECN4, 186). While the members of the Vienna Circle always were at pains to mark the allegedly abysmal difference between Vienna and "school philosophy" Cassirer emphasized that, in some respect, there was a close af fi nity between him and the Vien nese logical empiricists: With respect to the "world view" ("Weltanschauung"), i.e., what I consider to be the ethos of philosophy, there is no other "school" to which I feel closer than to the thin kers of the Vienna Circle – striving for determinateness, exact ness, elimination of the only subjec15 This was not Carnap's only reference to Klages's oeuvre. Klages's opus maximum (app. 1500 pages) is Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (Klages 1929 – 1933). Together with Spengler, Klages may be considered as one of the leading fi gures of the „politics of cultural despair" (Fritz Stern) that plagued Weimar Germany and eventually led to desaster. According to Klages "the essence of the historical process of mankind, often called 'progress', is the victorious battle of the spirit (Geist) against life (Leben) with the logical end of the latter." (Klages (1929 – 1933), 68). Klages made a great impression on Carnap. In some notes that he had jotted down for a talk in Dessau in October 1929 (RC-110-07-49--1) one reads: "Can science be a guide for life? The answer will be No. Or does the spirit kill life? Also No. ... Klages 'Leben' contra 'Geist'. If the powers of life are mighty enough, they need not fear the spirit (Goethe)." Traces of Klages's "charac te ro logy" may still be found in his later works when Carnap referred to the individual's "character" as the main source of his moral con victions (cf. Carnap 1963, 1009). Around the same time, Neurath pursued the abstruse (and eve n tually abandoned) physicalist project to translate Freud's psychoanalysis into a physicalist lan gu age. A mischievous observer might have come to the conclusion that in the 1930s phy si calism had a curious inclination toward pseudo-sciences. 14 Thomas Mormann tive and "feel-good philosophy", application of the analytical method, ri gorous conceptual analysis – these are all re qui re ments that I also recognize. (ECN4, 206) Nevertheless, Cassirer pointed out, there remained fundamental differences between him and the Vi en nese thinkers in what they considered as the task of philosophy. For the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle philosophy was philosophy of science. In Cassirer's terms, for them, philosophy was restricted to Er kennt niskritik. In contrast, his own conception of phi lo sophy was much more comprehensive. As the texts of ECN evidence Cassirer took into account virtually the entire range of phi lo so phi cal cur rents in German philosophy, from Klages to Carnap, Husserl, Scheler, Hei deg ger, so to speak, to say nothing about his literacy in linguistics, theory of art, psy chology, and ethnology. Com pared with this wide spectrum that of the Vienna Circle's was utterly narrow. From the 1930s onwards the Vienna Circle's attitude became more and more that of a philosophical movement that had largely lost interest in the theses and opinions of those who did not belong to the movement. Traditional philosophical currents were routinely disqualifi ed as "metaphysical" without further discussion. This did not exclude the possibility of forging strategic alliances when this appeared to be expedient, but, by and large, the members of the former Vienna Circle were sure they were standing on the right, anti-metaphysical side. The verdicts on metaphysical aberrations basically remained intact, even if they underwent some verbal cosmetics insofar as allegedly non-empirical and non-ana lytical assertions were no longer harshly dis missed as meaningless, but classifi ed as "cognitively meaning less". Even after the turn to "tolerance" none of the usual suspects was acquitted. A certain shortsightedness in Cassirer's per spec tive of the Vienna Circle may be seen in the fact that he considered physicalism as an essential trait of logical empiricism. Nevertheless, he had taken notice of Syntax (ECN 4, Footnote 539) and explicitly admitted that his critique of a dogmatically physicalist empiricism no longer was applicable to this version of the allegedly new "tolerant" empiricism. To me, it seems doubtful whether the new tolerance announced in Syntax had any measurable effect on the Carnap-Cassirer debate.16 Be this as it may, there remained other essential dif ferences between Carnap's logical empiricism and Cassirer's critical idealism that survived the abandonement of strict physicalism. According to Cas sirer, logical em pi ricism was deeply "un-Kantian"17 in that it put foundational "struc ture" at center stage, neg lec ting the role of "function". In contrast, 16 In contrast, Carus recently proposed to interpret the Carnap of Syntax as the founding father of a new kind of phi losophy based on the notion of tolerance and characterized by an irreducible plu rality of conceptual frame works, each of which being allowed to fl ourish in its own right (cf. Carus 2007). 17 Anti-Kantianism was especially virulent among the members of the "left wing" of the Vienna Circle, i.e., Neurath, Frank, and Hahn. But also for Schlick quite a lot of antiKantian statements can be found. Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 15 [w]e emphasize the functional side, not the foundational side, but of course we do not deny the necessity of a base. In this respect we are really empirists. All our activity never leads us beyond the basis in an absolute sense, it leads us to or i en tation, ar ti cu lation, "structuring", and systematization of the base. On the other hand, we point out that this structuring is not given as such, but con sti tu ted by certain "functions" – it has not only to be found, but con structed. (ECN4, 215) The principle of the primacy of function over structure is just another formulation of the basic principle of the "transcendental method" characteristic for Marburg neo-Kantianism in general. According to it, philosophy does not operate in empty space but had to rely on the historically established facts of science, language, ethics, art, religion, and myth that provided it with its proper content. The task of philosophy is to "justify" these symbolic productions of the human spirit by elucidating their basic assumptions and principles thereby understanding and making proper sense of them. Thereby, along with the function of cognition the philosopher had to strive to understand the functions of linguistic thinking, mythical and religious thinking, and the function of artistic perception, all of which disclosed to humanity not substantial different worlds but rather dif ferent ways of world making – to borrow a phrase from Nelson Goodman who may be considered as Cassirer's most kindred spirit among analytic philosophers. In Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms the critique of reason becomes a critique of enlightened culture, i.e., a culture for which science plays a pre-eminent role but which does not neglect the other symbolic forms. As Cassirer pointed out, the concept of culture, however, cannot be detached from the fundamental forms and directions of human activity: in the general framework of a philosophy of culture "being" can be apprehended only in terms of "doing". As has been observed by many authors, in the logical empiricist account practical and pragmatic aspects of science have re mained strangely underdeveloped. According to the Viennese con cep tion, philosophy and science were essentially theoretical. Arguably, in its most radical form, this claim was put forward by Carnap (cf. Carnap 1934, 1963), but in the fi nal analysis, practical reason in some classical Kantian sense did not exist for virtually all members of the Vienna Circle.18 Instead, practical problems were ultimately relegated to the realms of "character", Lebensgefühl, and merely instrumental rationality (cf. Carnap 1963). Cassirer had a more comprehensive idea of philosophy and its role in the ongoing struggle for a rational and enlightened society. 18 This contention needs some further arguments, in particular, for the case of Neurath, whom many con sider as the representative of a full-blown pragmatist philosophy of science. Evidence for the claim that Neurath's "pragmatism" was perhaps less pragmatist than often believed is the fact that he sided with Carnap against Morris when a reconciliation of logical empiricism and American prag ma tism was discussed on the International Congress for Unifi ed Science that took place 1935 in Paris (cf. Mormann 2012). 16 Thomas Mormann It may be tempting to somehow relate the virtual debate between the Vienna Circle's lo gical empiricism and Cassirer's critical idealism to contemporary philosophical debates dealing with the relation between analytical and continental philosophy in our time. I'm not sure whether this is really useful. In particular, it may be rash to interpret the Cassirer-Carnap debate as an early attempt to over come the allegedly obsolete gap between continental and analytic philosophy. Rather, taking notice of Cassirer's immensely rich philo so phical legacy, as is now possible in the excellently edited volumes of ECN, constitutes in itself a philosophical pleasure that no one should forego, who has more than a slight interest in the thought of one of the great fi gures of 20th Century German enlightenment philosophy. REFERENCES Carnap, R., 1922, Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre, Kant-Studien, Ergän zungs hefte 56. Carnap, R., 1928, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, Bernary, Berlin. Translated as part of The Logical Struc ture of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy by R.A. George, Chicago and LaSalle, Open Court, 1967. (Aufbau) Carnap, R., 1928a, Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie: Das Fremdpsychische und der Rea lis musstreit, Berlin-Schlachtensee, Weltkreisverlag. Translated as part of The Logical Struc ture of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy by R.A. George, Chicago and LaSalle, Open Court, 1967. Carnap, R., 1929, Wissenschaft und Leben (Unpublished Notes for a Lecture in Dessau, 15.10.1929, RC-110-07-49-1. Archives for Scientifi c Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Hill man Library. Carnap, R., 1932 (1996), Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache, Erkenntnis 2, 219 – 241. Translated as The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language, in S. Sarkar (ed.) Science and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Basic Works of Logical Empiricism, Vol. 2, Logical Empiricism at its Peak, Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 10 – 31. Carnap, R., 1932a (1934), Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissen schaft, Erkenntnis 2, 432 – 465. Translated as The Unity of Science by Max Black Black, London, Kegan, Trench, Trubner. Carnap, R., 1932/33, Psychologie in physikalischer Sprache, Erkenntnis 3, 107 – 142. Carnap, R., 1934 (1937), Logische Syntax der Sprache, Wien. Translated as The Logical Syntax of Language, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner. Carnap, R., 1934a, On the Character of Philosophical Problems, Philosophy of Science 1, 5 – 19. Cassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 17 Carnap, R., 1935 (1996), Philosophy and Logical Syntax, Bristol, Thoemmes Press. Carnap, R., 1963, Abraham Kaplan of Value Judgments, in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, The Lbrary of Living Philosophers XI, Open Court, Chicago and LaSalle, 999 – 1013. Carus, A., 2007, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought, Explication as Enlighten ment, Cam bridge, Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, E., 1910 (1953), Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (SF) Cassirer, E., 1923-1929 (1980), Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen I – III, Darmstadt, Wissen schaft liche Buchgesellschaft. (PSF) Cassirer, E., 1927, Erkenntnistheorie nebst den Grenzfragen der Logik und Denkpsy cho lo gie, Jahr bücher der Philosophie 3, 31 – 97. Wiederabgedruckt in E. Cassirer. Erkenntnis, Begriff, Kultur, Philosophische Bibliothek Bd. 456, Hamburg, Meiner Verlag. Cassirer, E., 1937, Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik, Cassirer, E., 1942 (1980), Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien, Darmstadt, Wis sen schaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Cassirer, C., 1946, The Myth of the State, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Cassirer, E., 1993, Geist und Leben. Schriften, Leipzig, Reclam. Cassirer, E., 1995, Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, Nach ge las sene Manuskripte und Texte, Band 1, herausgegeben von John Michael Krois unter Mitwirkung von Anne Appelbaum, Rainer A. Bast, Klaus Christian Köhnke, Oswald Schwemmer, 410pp., Ham burg, Felix Meiner Verlag. Cassirer, E., 2000, Ziele und Wege der Wirklichkeitserkenntnis, Nachgelassene Manus kripte und Texte, Band 2, herausgegeben von Klaus Christian Köhnke und John Michael Krois, 229pp., Ham burg, Felix Meiner Verlag. Cassirer, E., 2004, Kulturphilosophie, Vorlesungen und Vorträge 1929 – 1941, Nachge las sene Manuskripte und Texte Band 5, herausgegeben von Rüdiger Kramme (†) unter Mitarbeit von Jörg Fingerhut, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. Cassirer, E., 2009, Ausgewählter wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte Band 18, herausgegeben von John Michael Krois unter Mitarbeit von Marion Lauschke, Claus Rosenkranz und Marcel-Simon Gadhof, Hamburg, Meiner Verlag. (ECB) Frank, P., 1938 (1955), Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, in P. Frank , Modern Science and its Philosophy, New York, George Braziller, 172 – 185. Freyer, H., 1923: Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie. Leipzig-Berlin, Teubner. Friedman, M., 2000, A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Chicago and LaSalle, Open Court. 18 Thomas Mormann Gordon, P.E., 2010, Continental Divide. Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge Massa chu setts and London, England, Harvard University Press. Grelling, K., 1908, Das gute, klare Recht der Freunde der anthropologischen Vernunftkritik, ver teidigt gegen Ernst Cassirer, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule Band 2, 153 – 190. Husserl, E., 1931 (1977), Cartesische Meditationen, Hamburg, Meiner. Ikonen, S., 2011, Cassirer's Critique of Culture. Between the Scylla of Lebensphilosophie and the Charybdis of the Vienna Circle, Synthese 179, 187 – 202. Klages, L., 1929–1933 (19816), Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, Bonn, Bouvier Ver lag. Klages, L., 1920, Handschrift und Charakter, Leipzig, Ambrosius Barth. Krois, J. M., 2000, Ernst Cassirer und der Wiener Kreis, in F. Stadler (Hrg.) Elemente moderner Wis senschaftstheorie. Zur Interaktion von Philosophie, Geschichte und Theorie der Wissen schaf ten, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis Band 8, 105121. Kusch, M., 1995, Psychologism. A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, Oxon, Routledge. Mormann, T., 2006, Werte bei Carnap, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 60(2), 169 – 189. Mormann, T., 2007, Carnap's Empiricism, Values, and American Pragmatism, Journal of General Phi lo sophy of Science 38, 127 – 146. Mormann, T, 2010, Wien und München. Zwei Stationen der deutschsprachigen Wissenschafts philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert, in F. Stadler (Hrg.), Vertreibung, Transformation und Rückkehr der Wissenschaftstheorie. Am Beispiel von Rudolf Carnap und Wolfgang Stegmüller, Berlin und Wien, LIT Verlag, 341-370. Mormann, T., 2012, Morris' Pariser Programm einer wissenschaftlichen Philosophie, to ap pear in C. Bonnet, E. Nemeth (eds.), Wissenschaft und Praxis. Zur Wissen schafts phi lo so phie in Frankreich und Österreich in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Springer, Wien. Neurath, O., 1921(1981), Anti-Spengler, in Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften Band 1, heraus ge geben von H. Rutte und R. Haller, Wien, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 140 – 196. Neurath, O., Carnap, R., Hahn, H., 1929(1981), Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, in Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften Band 1, heraus ge geben von H. Rutte und R. Haller, Wien, HölderPichler-Tempsky, 299 – 343. Translated as The Scientifi c Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle, in S. Sarkar (ed.), Basic Works of Logical Empiricism, Six Volumes, Volume 1, The Emergence of Logical Empiricism, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1996, 321 – 318. (Manifesto) Neurath, O., 1936(1981), Die Entwicklung des Wiener Kreises und die Zukunft des Logischen Empiris mus, in Gesammelte philosophische und methodoloCassirer and the Vienna Circle after 1933 19 gische Schriften Band 2, heraus ge geben von H. Rutte und R. Haller, Wien, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 673 – 701. Ringer, F., 1969, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890-1933, Cambridge/Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Schlick, M., 1921, Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik? Bemerkungen zu Ernst Cassirers Buch "Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie", Kant-Studien 26, 96 – 111. Schlick, M., 1930, Die Wende in der Philosophie, Erkenntnis 1, 4 – 11. Translated as The Tur ning-Point in Philosophy, in S. Sarkar (ed.), Basic Works of Logical Empiricism, Six Volumes, Volume 2, Logical Empiricism at its Peak, Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1996, 2 – 8. Schnädelbach, H., 1984, Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Stegmüller, W., 1952(19897), Hauptströmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Stuttgart, Kröner. Univerity of the Basque Country UPV/EHU Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science 20080 Donostia-San Sebastián Spain ylxmomot@sf.ehu.es