Austrian Philosophy

Brentano’s position in the history of philosophy is often illustrated by the long list of important philosophers who have studied with him. Yet, the relations between Brentano and his students were not always without friction. In the present article I argue that Brentano’s students were most attracted by his conception of a scientific philosophy, which promised to leave the received tradition (German Idealism) behind and to mark the beginning of a new period in the history of philosophy – a project (...) they were happy to be part of. Brentano’s work remained in an important sense fragmentary, however, and could, thus, not provide the inner unity that would have been essential for forming a compact school or a unified philosophical movement. (shrink)

In this paper, I re-examine Barry Smith’s list of features of Austrian Philosophy in his Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. Open Court, Chicago, 1994). I claim that the list properly applies only in a somewhat abbreviated form to all significant representatives of Austrian Philosophy. Moreover, Smith’s crucial thesis that the features of Austrian Philosophy are not shared by any German philosopher only holds if we compare Austrian Philosophy to a canonical list of German Philosophy II. This list, however, (...) was established in twentieth century as a result of historical misrepresentations. If we correct these misrepresentations, we obtain another list of hidden representatives called German Philosophy I. German Philosophy I is fundamentally identical to Austrian Philosophy, whereas German Philosophy II is entirely different from both Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I. Therefore, a slightly modified version of Smith’s Austrian Philosophy account still makes sense as a tool to position the proscientific and rational currents of Austrian Philosophy and German Philosophy I against the tendentially anti-scientific and irrational current of German Philosophy II. (shrink)

Autobiographical survey of interactions between the author and Barry Smith, especially as concerns the background and influence of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy and work on the relevance of Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden and other Central-European thinkers to contemporary analytic philosophy.

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński.

Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought.

The majority of the papers in the present volume were presented at, or prepared in conjunction with, meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy, a group of philosophers interested in the work of Brentano and Husserl and of the ...

Die Philosophiegeschichte hat festen Bestand als philosophische Disziplin. Sie wird hier als eine "Nachlese" der authentischen Texte der Philosophen eingeführt. Der heutige wissenschaftstheoretische Reflexionsstand im allgemeinen legt auch eine Reflexion auf die Prinzipien dieses "zweiten Diskurses" nahe. Dazu sind Vorbedingung die effektive Kenntnis der "Geschichte der Philosophiegeschichte" selber wie auch der Prinzipien, die diese Historiographie steuern. Eine Reihe sich für eine solche "Philosophie der Philosophiegeschichte" stellender Fragen und Problem-Topoi wird genannt, deren Existenz die heute allgemein spürbare "Prinzipienkrise" der Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung ausmacht. (...) Das führt zu der Frage, inwieweit die Prinzipienreflexion und das Problembewußtsein selber den Verfall einer magistralen Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung mitbedingt, der durch Kollektivarbeiten allenfalls verdeckt, nicht aber kompensiert wird. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two related threats to the idea that our beliefs compose a genuine worldview the global skeptic challenge to the clam that our beliefs are somehow grounded and the suspicion that our beliefs have no relation to the world whatsoever I consider these two threats from the point of view of our activity of doubting m order to establish what follows from our capacity to doubt any claim although not at once I argue that the two (...) threats can be dispelled if we attend to a careful consideration of what is involved in doubting Once these threats are dismissed we find ourselves in a Position that enables us to critique both a naturalist conception of our worldviews and the conception of reasons that has been recommended by Brandom. (shrink)

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects (...) and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (English translation is appended to the French text.). (shrink)

The article examines some of the main theses about self-awareness developed in recent analytic philosophy of mind (especially the work of Bermúdez), and points to a number of striking overlaps between these accounts and the ones to be found in phenomenology. Given the real risk of unintended repetitions, it is argued that it would be counterproductive for philosophy of mind to ignore already existing resources, and that both analytical philosophy and phenomenology would profit from a more open exchange.

Philosophers unacquainted with the workings of actual scientific practice are prone to imagine that our best scientific theories deliver univocal representations of the physical world that we can use to calibrate our metaphysics and epistemology. Those few philosophers who are also scientists, like Heinrich Hertz, tend to contest this assumption. As Jesper Lützen relates in his scholarly and engaging book, Hertz's Principles of Mechanics contributed to a lively debate about the content of classical mechanics and what, if anything, this highly (...) successful scientific theory told us about the physical world. Lützen provides an in-depth reconstruction of how Hertz reacted to the foundational problems within the physics of his day and then used these problems to motivate his influential philosophical reflections on the nature of science and scientific theorizing. While giving a thorough portrait of how Hertz brought together science and philosophy, Lützen himself offers an excellent example of the benefits of combining philosophy, the history of science, and the history of mathematics. Lützen convincingly argues that Hertz's most influential innovation was in bringing geometrical concepts to bear on mechanics in a novel and productive fashion. In his preface he motivates his book by noting that most of the work on Hertz's philosophy of science fails to engage with what Hertz does after the Introduction of his Principles. The bulk of Lützen's book, then, concerns the physical and mathematical content of Hertz's image of mechanics. This places certain demands on the reader who is otherwise unacquainted with analytic mechanics, but is sure to repay those who are willing to work carefully through the more technical details of Lützen's reconstruction.1Hertz is well known for his conception of scientific theories as images [Bilder] and for the fact that his preferred image of mechanics takes only space, …. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to consider the suggestion, made in an unpublished paper by Peter Hobson, a psychoanalytic colleague, that psychoanalysis is a form of life. Hobson is impressed by the peculiarity of psychoanalytic thinking, by its specialness, by the fact that its concepts are embedded in a system of practices and beliefs such that an outsider to all this may be unable to understand what the analyst says, whether to his patient or to another analyst. Hobson uses (...) Wittgenstein's notion of a form of life to refer to this system of practices and beliefs, but he does not criticize or examine the notion itself. (shrink)

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning… [O]ne of the games to which it most attached is called… ‘Cheat the Prophet’. [The prophets] took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and than sait it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. … The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what (...) is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until att the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. (shrink)

A idéia de que o psíquico não se limita ao consciente é essencial à psicanálise, mas nem a ampliação do campo do psíquico em relação ao dos estados de consciência, nem a colocação em primeiro plano da noção de psíquico inconsciente, levaram Freud a deixar de lado a questão da consciência. Ao contrário, o estabelecimento das condições de possibilidade da consciência de um processo psíquico ou representacional tornou-se um dos problemas centrais da metapsicologia, ao qual Freud dedicou parte considerável de (...) suas reflexões teóricas desde o “Projeto de uma psicologia” . O objetivo deste artigo é analisar de que maneira a possibilidade de uma representação se tornar consciente é concebida na primeira teoria freudiana do aparelho psíquico, como contribuição ao exame do problema da consciência em Freud. Em primeiro lugar, serão discutidas as hipóteses elaboradas por Freud no “Projeto de uma psicologia” e, em seguida, as que são apresentadas no capítulo 7 de “A interpretação dos sonhos” .The idea that the mind is not restricted to consciousness is essential to psychoanalysis, but neither the enlargement of the mental field in relation to that of conscious states, nor the bringing of the concept of a psychic unconscious to the foreground did lead Freud to put the question of consciousness aside. On the contrary, the establishment of the conditions of possibility of the awareness of a psychic or representational process became a central problem of metapsychology, to which Freud dedicated a considerable part of his theoretical reflections since the “Project for a psychology” . The objective of this paper is to analyze how the possibility of a representation becoming conscious is conceived in the first Freudian theory of the psychic apparatus, as a contribution to the study of the problem of consciousness in Freud’s work. The hypotheses elaborated by Freud in the “Project for a psychology” shall be discussed in first place and, afterward, those presented in the chapter 7 of “The interpretation of dreams”. (shrink)

This book covers a period of Austrian history stretching from 1848 to 1933, a period of amazing intellectual activity, on a scale comparable perhaps only with renaissance Italy. Johnston includes chapters on Emperor Franz Joseph, the Beidermeir culture, legal and economic theorists, Austro-marxists, and Viennese aestheticism. Perhaps most interesting for philosophers are sections on positivism and impressionism and the author’s discussions of men such as Mach, Boltzman, Schlick, Mauthner, the ever-present Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein, Buber, and Freud. There is another notable (...) section on Bohemian Reform Catholicism which includes discussions of Bolzano, Herbart, Brentano, and Husserl. The author’s scholarship is excellent. A large amount of significant information is exceedingly well-organized. (shrink)

Analytical philosophy begins with the first mathematical and philosophical works of Bolzano published between 1804 and 1817. There, Bolzano set out a project for the global reform of mathematics by means of the axiomatic method. Having completed the Wissenschaftslehre, Bolzano wrote a summary of his logic for the Größenlehre, which he sent to Exner in 1833. The correspondence between Bolzano and Exner covered some of the main subjects treated by analytical philosophy: the status of abstract objects, intuitions, objectless ideas, the (...) concept of object and many others. While Bolzano argued in favor of abstract entities independent of mind and of language, Exner considered them as abstractions obtained from the subjective judgments and representations. During the XlXth century, Bolzano's philosophy spread over Bohemia and Austria through manuscripts and through the first edition of Zimmermann's textbook of philosophy. The most important Brentanians, Kerry, Twardowski, Meinong and Husserl, discussed his doctrines which may also have influenced Wittgenstein and the Polish school. (shrink)

Bolzano's theory of collections has usually been taken as a rudimentary set theory. More recently, Frank Krickel has claimed it is a mereology. I find both interpretations wanting. Bolzano's theory is, as I show, extremely broad in scope; it is in fact a general theory of collective entities, including the concrete wholes of mereology, classes-as-many, and many empirical collections. By extending Bolzano's ideas to embrace the three factors of kind, components and mode of combination, one may develop a coherent general (...) account of collections. But it is most difficult to take Bolzano's view to fit modern set theory. So while Krickel's positive thesis is rejected, his negative thesis is confirmed. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers have until recently been reluctant to pursue historical investigations into the Central European roots of their own philosophical tradition. The most recent book by Michael Dummett, however, entitled Origins of Analytic Philosophy, shows how fruitful such investigations can be, not only as a means of coming to see familiar philosophical problems in a new light, but also as a means of clarifying what, precisely, ‘analytic philosophy’ might mean. As Dummett points out, the newly fashionable habit of referring to (...) analytic philosophy as ‘Anglo-American’ leads to a ‘grave historical distortion’. If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy ‘could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian"’ (p. 7). We here show the implications of this assertion for a more adequate understanding of the relations between analytic and Continental philosophy. (shrink)

Some problems concerning transcendental epistemic arguments are raised on the basis of Jan Srzednicki’s epistemological conception presented in the bookEpistemology after Wittgenstein. Jan Srzednicki’s New Epistemological Perspective by Grażyna Żurkowska. The problem of the cognition immediacy is briefly discussed. The great philosophical importance of many other relevant topics is indicated, i.e. the internal similarity of Jan Srzednicki’s philosophical challenge to the project of Heideggerian hermeneutics or the problem of mutual relations between language and cognition.

O presente artigo visa abordar, a partir da obra Fenomenologia do espírito, de Hegel, o movimento dialético de superação e conservação da consciência em suas sucessivas etapas; bem como sua relação com a formação do espírito em direção ao absoluto.