Summary This survey deals with five books: Ethical Questions, by Moritz Schlick; Significance, Genuineness, and Love, by Paul Feldkeller; Neo-Kantian Tasks, by Kurt Sternberg; Kant's Ethics, by Arthur Liebert; and Contemporary Philosophy of the History of Art, by Walter Passarge.

No trait is more characteristic of contemporary philosophy in France than its continued fecundation by the physical and biological sciences. The divorce between philosophy and science that existed in the first half of last century is now regarded, by almost common consent, as an error of the great pre-war Unenlightenment. The ménage is rémonté ; the vieilles traditions of Descartes and Pascal live again, though very transfigured. How long the alliance may endure, how and how much it may benefit both (...) parties, it would be idle to prophesy. But it is significant that Boutroux and Bergson were compelled to devote much energy to acquiring a scientific competence, the one in mechanics, the other in biology. It is still more significant that a number of professional scientists should, with the passing of years, have contributed less to their sciences and increasingly to philosophy. This mutual invasion of territories has, indeed, become so considerable and enduring that philosophy in France is at present, for good or ill, almost wholly ‘philosophy of the sciences.’ It is now within this ‘internationalized’ neutral zone that the distinction between the epistemological and the ontological has to be drawn. Thus, Meyerson fairly represents the former emphasis, Bergson and Le Roy the latter. And if it is rare for one man to hold successively a chair in mathematics and a chair in philosophy, like Milhaud and Whitehead, rarer still is it for one man to hold both concurrently. But M. Edouard Le Roy has for many years lectured on mathematics and mechanics at the Faculte des Sciences in Paris; he has extended and modified Bergsonism from Bergson's former chair at the College de France. (shrink)

Karl Popper's aim in Logik der Forschung is to consider the method of investigation used by the empirical sciences. Many people would say that their procedure is marked by the use of induction, and accordingly that the logic of scientific investigation is the logical analysis of induction. But Popper disagrees. Scientific procedure consists of two steps, an hypothesis is formed, and then it is tested. Logic is only concerned with questions of validity, and thus is only concerned with the second (...) of these steps. But every method of testing validity is deductive, and thus the logic of scientific investigation is the study of deduction as used by the empirical sciences. (shrink)

SummaryThis survey first deals with German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century and Forms of Thought, both by Hans Leisegang. It then summarizes Theodor Ziehen's Foundations of the Philosophy of Religion. Next it refers to a revised edition of Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason, and to two small books by Louis Anderson. Finally some shorter announcements of other new books, including Hans Reichenbach's Philosophy of the Space-Time Theory, which Einstein has praised, Nicolai Hartmann's Hegel, and a new edition of Bolzano's Theory (...) of Science. (shrink)

SummaryThis survey deals with Contemporary [German] Philosophy, vol. vii, by several contributors; The Machine-Theory of Life, by Julius Schultz; Bernard Bolzano, by Heinrich Fels; The Theory of Classes, by Adolf Fraenkel; Anof Logistic, by Rudolf Carnap.

SummaryThis survey deals with Contemporary [German] Philosophy, vol. vii, by several contributors; The Machine-Theory of Life, by Julius Schultz; Bernard Bolzano, by Heinrich Fels; The Theory of Classes, by Adolf Fraenkel; Anof Logistic, by Rudolf Carnap.

In his introduction to the logic of morals Karl Menger maintains that only two kinds of ethical inquiry are fruitful—the psychology or biology of morals and the logic of morals. The first of these is an empirical science which discovers what value judgments have actually been made and correlates them with various other factors. In this way it provides material for the logic of morals, which neither discovers empirical facts nor analyses them, but simply points out logical relations. In this (...) book Menger discusses the nature of ethical judgments and carries out some investigations of the logical type. (shrink)

In the Critique of So-called Practical Knowledge Alf Ross wishes to show that ethical judgments are nonsensical. He begins by asserting that when people speak about practical knowledge they mean knowledge which contains an unconditional command to the will, and this, he points out, involves a confusion between knowledge and volition. Thus, since all ethical theories are forms of practical knowledge, they are doomed to failure. All ethical theories can be classified into two types: they all belong to the ethics (...) of value or the ethics of duty. These differ very radically, since the one takes value and the other duty as its fundamental concept; but they are inadequate for the same reasons. Both value and duty are self-contradictory concepts, and both awareness of value and awareness of duty are quite different from what ethical theories suppose. (shrink)