In early major works, Cassirer and Schlick differently recast traditional doctrines of the concept and of the relation of concept to intuitive content along the lines of recent epistemological discussions within the exact sciences. In this, they attempted to refashion epistemology by incorporating as its basic principle the notion of functional coordination, the theoretical sciences' own methodological tool for dispensing with the imprecise and unreliable guide of intuitive evidence. Examining their respective reconstructions of the theory of knowledge provides an axis (...) of comparison along which to locate Cassirer's Neo-Kantianism and Schlick's pre-positivist empiricism, and an immediate background of contrast to the subsequent rise of logical empiricism. For in the absence of intuition all our knowledge is without objects and therefore remains entirely empty. (Kant A62/B87) And how awkward is the human mind in diving the nature of things when forsaken by the analogy of what we see and touch directly? (Boltzmann 1895). (shrink)

It is often claimed that epistemological thought divides around the issue of the place of experience in knowledge: While empiricists argue that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge, rationalists find other such sources. The trouble with such accounts is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. On occasion, epistemological differences run deeper, raising the very notion of experience as an issue for epistemology. This paper looks at two epistemological debates which concerned not simply the place (...) of experience in knowledge but also the appropriate account of experience itself. The first episode is the rise of Marburg Neo-Kantianism in the 1870s – in particular the seminal work of Hermann Cohen in his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871). Cohen's principal point was that Kant's significance as an epistemologist was in providing a new theory of experience, one that tied experience to exact science and led to a new stress on the formal conditions of exact knowledge. The second episode is Carnap's rejection of epistemology in the 1930s in favour of a program of the logic of science. My focus in each case will be the interplay between an epistemology focused on exact science as the locus of knowledge and a concomitant call for logical methods in epistemology. (shrink)

This article aims to give an overview of Carnap's 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2 , I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3 . Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and (...) Richardson which focuses on issues of objectivity. In Section 5 , I turn to two more recent interpretations that can be thought of as emphasizing Carnap's concern with rational reconstruction. Finally, the article concludes by noting some current work by Leitgeb that aims to develop and update some aspects of the Aufbau project for contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

This article aims to give an overview of Carnap’s 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2, I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3. Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and Richardson which (...) focuses on issues of objectivity. In Section 5, I turn to two more recent interpretations that can be thought of as emphasizing Carnap’s concern with rational reconstruction. Finally, the article concludes by noting some current work by Leitgeb that aims to develop and update some aspects of the Aufbau project for contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that a main theme of Neurath’s philosophical work was the formulation of a radically empiricist theory of science. His approach, dubbed "encyclopedism", can be characterized by the following five theses: scientific knowledge is (1) fallible, (2) pluralistic, (3) holistic, (4) can be systematized only locally, and (5) does not give us a faithful description of the real world. (4) is to be considered as the most original thesis of encyclopedism and is discussed in (...) detail. (shrink)

Idealist Heresies in Philosophy of Science: Cassirer, Carnap, and Kuhn. As common wisdom has it, philosophy of science in the analytic tradition and idealist philosophy are incompatible. Usually, not much effort is spent for explaining what is to be understood by idealism. Rather, it is taken for granted that idealism is an obsolete and unscientific philosophical account. In this paper it is argued that this thesis needs some qualification. Taking Carnap and Kuhn as paradigmatic examples of positivist and postpositivist philosophies (...) of science it is shown that these accounts share important features with Cassirer's idealist philosophy of science developed in the first half of this century. As it turns out, often Cassirer is more modern than those classical philosophers of (post)posivitist philosophy of science. For instance, Quine's criticism against Carnap's empiricist philosophy of science launched in Two Dogmas of Empiricism is anticipated by Cassirer for several decades. (shrink)

(2000). CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND ‘STRUCTURAL’ REALISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE EXACT SCIENCES IN THE BACKGROUND TO EARLY LOGICAL EMPIRICISM. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 71-106.