Guide to Philosophy and History of Science

Notes	Supporters	Critics	Critical notes and types of philosophy
What is Philosophy? Definition: Kuhn, “The Essential Tension” (?) History is the truth about what happened at a particular time and place-- it is presented in a narrative form; Philosophy is the truth at all times and places-- it is presented in the form of arguments Abraham Kaplan (?) The word philosophy means the love of wisdom (from Greek “philosophia”. And the love of wisdom, I suppose, is like any other sort of love -- the professionals are the ones who know the least about it Bryan Magee (1998) The Story of Philosophy. A philosophical argument is one that carries its own credentials with it, in the form of reasons: it asks you for your rational assent, not for faith or obedience. Philosophy tries to see how far reason alone will take us. Because philosophy is a quest for rational understanding of the most fundamental kind it raises important questions about the nature of understanding and hence of enquiry and knowledge. Don Ihde (1993) Philosophy of Technology The term “academic” comes from the “Groves of Academe” which was the location of Plato’s philosophic “university” founded in 385 B.C. Pre-Socratic philosophers had begun developing the critical and reflective style of questioning and reasoning. These early philosophers, beginning with Thales (585 B.C.) and running through Parmenides and Heraclitus (~500 B.C.) and up to the “atomism” of Democritus (~400 B.C.) began to make the first secular and scientific queries about the nature of the universe. These speculations were called “metaphysics” by Aristotle. Philosophy and science were inseparable then. The early studies of the humanities (the Good, the True, and the Beautiful) were part of the Classical Period of Ancient Greek thought. After the decline of the Greeks, philosophy moved into new cultural contexts, Hellenic and Roman (the post-Classical period). The Hellenic period was a period of great technological and experimental development centered in Alexandria. This was the time of Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), and Strato ( d. 269 BC) who wrote the first treatise on “mechanics” and engineering, and Ptolemy (90-168 AD). Measurement devices were invented – the sundial, water clock, gnomon, etc. By post-Renaissance, “natural philosophy” was recognized as a distinct area of philosophy. As the various sciences matured, they broke away from philosophy. By the 18^th century, philosophy began to elevate its concerns to higher or more “transcendental” concerns, the time of Kant and Hegel. Science or actually physics had progressed as a study of motion and matter. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was to become a metaphysics of science. Philosophy had begun to differentiate itself from science. Kantian philosophy saw its role as a critical interpretation of “what makes science possible”. Here, Aristotle’s metaphysics as “after the physics” was elevated to metaphysics as “above the physics”. Here was when the “philosophies of…” were invented. Hegel elevated philosophy to the meta-realm, to the whole of history itself. Hegel used the terms Geschitesphilosophie or “philosophy of history” and “philosophy of religion”. Following this characterization, a “philosophy of …” looks at the subject matter and thematically, critically interprets it. In 1877, a neo-Hegelian, Ernst Kapp, wrote Tecknikphilosophie. It was 100 years later that in 1979, Mario Bunge wrote “Technophilosophy” is still immature and uncertain of its very object.
Methods Thomism: Synthesizing philosophy to the “natural light of reason” in so far as they reconcile with the Church. Philosophy is the highest of sciences, the discipline that explores the ultimate “ground” or explanation of everything. Each special science inquires about each of their sphere, but makes assumptions that it cannot justify. The task of philosophy is to explore how the world must be, if those assumptions are to be valid, hence, it cannot base its results on experience, but by reason alone, everything falls under it, since every subsidiary of science depends on it (“first causes”)
Medieval Philosophy
Earliest of the philosophers and contributed to astronomy, geometry, and cosmology	Thales of Miletus (6th cent. BC)
Extended Thales' ideas and proposed that the universe is composed of four basic elements, i.e., earth, air, fire, and water	Anaximander
Everything is composed of tiny, indivisible atoms	Leucippus and Democritus (both 5th cent. BC)
The Pythagoreans tried to explain the workings of the universe in terms of whole numbers and their ratios; in addition to contributions to mathematics and philosophy, they also made notable studies in the area of biology and anatomy	Pythagoras of Samos (6th cent. BC) Alcmaeon of Croton (fl. c.500 BC).

Formulated the science of diagnosis based on accurate descriptions of the symptoms of various diseases	Hippocrates of Cos (4th cent. BC), known as the Father of Medicine

Dialectic Examining statements by pursuing their implications, on the assumption that if a statement were true it could not lead to false consequences. Introduced teleological view of the world that all the forms participate in and lead to the highest form, the form of the good. Plato’s Theory of Forms and Knowledge Knowledge is attainable. Knowledge must be certain and infallible. Knowledge must have as its object that which is real (real knowledge) as opposed to an appearance only (opinions). Plato rejects empiricism because knowledge from sense has only a degree of probability. Reason, properly used, can result in certainty. True Forms can only be grasps using reason, because true forms cannot exist in the physical world.	Socrates ( -399BC) Plato (428-347BC)
Worked on logic (Organon, First Philosophy), and Natural Sciences (Metaphysics). Introduced notion of causality as 4 causes, material cause (made up of), efficient cause (motion), formal cause (category) and final cause (goal). His physics include the spherical universe with earth at the center made up of earth, air, fire and water, each with its place of rest (specific gravity). Developed rules of logic (syllogism). Established the Lyceum Tycho developed a system that combined the best of both worlds. He kept the Earth in the center of the universe, so that he could retain Aristotelian physics (the only physics available). The Moon and Sun revolved about the Earth, and the shell of the fixed stars was centered on the Earth. But Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn revolved about the Sun. He put the (circular) path of the comet of 1577 between Venus and Mars. This Tychonic world system became popular early in the seventeenth century among those who felt forced to reject the Ptolemaic arrangementof the planets (in which the Earth was the center of all motions) but who, for various reasons, could not accept the Copernican alternative.	Aristotle (384-322 BC)	Bacon (see below) Tycho Brahe Kepler Copernicus (see below)	Tycho's observations of the new star of 1572 and comet of 1577, and his publications on these phenomena, were instrumental in establishing the fact that these bodies were above the Moon and that therefore the heavens were not immutable as Aristotle had argued and philosophers still believed. The heavens were changeable and therefore the Aristotelian division between the heavenly and earthly regions came under attack (see, for instance, Galileo's Dialogue) and was eventually dropped. Further, if comets were in the heavens, they moved through the heavens. Up to now it had been believed that planets were carried on material spheres (spherical shells) that fit tightly around each other. Tycho's observations showed that this arrangement was impossible because comets moved through these spheres. Celestial spheres faded out of existence between 1575 and 1625.
Organized the axiomatic system of geometry that has served as the model for many other scientific presentations since then;	Alexandrian school founded in 332 BC by Alexander the Great. The so-called first Alexandrian school included Euclid (fl. c.300 BC)
Made a remarkably accurate estimate of the size of the earth;	Eratosthenes (3d cent. BC),
Showed that the sun is larger than the earth and suggested a heliocentric model for the solar system	Aristarchus (3d cent. BC)
Worked at Syracuse, Sicily, and made contributions to mathematics and mechanics that were surprisingly modern in spirit.	Archimedes (287-212 BC)
Presented the geocentric system of the universe that was to dominate astronomical thought for 1400 years, and his contemporary Heron, who contributed to geometry and pneumatics.	Ptolemy (2d cent AD)		The development of two devices spelled doom for the accuracy of the Ptolemaic system: the astrolabe and the clock. The astrolabe is a device perfected by the Arabs for the purpose of determining the accurate positions of objects in the sky.
Paper was invented in the 2d cent. AD; block printing was known in the 7th cent. AD, with movable clay type by the 11th cent. and cast-metal type in Korea by the beginning of the 15th cent.; gunpowder was invented in the 3d cent. AD and firearms were in use by the 13th cent.; and the magnetic compass came into use during the 11th and 12th cent.	Chinese
Studied at Pergamum and Alexandria and later practiced medicine and made important anatomical studies at Rome	Galen (2d cent. AD)	Indians	Alphabetic script was developed, as well as a numeral system based on place value and including a zero; this latter Hindu contribution was adopted by the Arabs and combined with their numeral system.
Certain technical innovations during the Dark Ages, e.g., development of the heavy plow, the windmill, and the magnetic compass, as well as improvements in ship design, had increased agricultural productivity and navigation and contributed to the rise of cities, with their craft guilds and universities. These changes were more pronounced in N Europe than in the south. The introduction of papermaking (12th cent.) and printing (1436-50) made possible the recording of craft traditions that had been handed down orally in previous centuries. This served to reduce the gap between the artisan classes and the scholar classes and contributed to the development of certain individuals who combined elements of both traditions, the artist-engineers such as Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of flight and other technological problems were far beyond their time, and the artist-mathematicians, such as Albrecht Dürer, who examined the laws of perspective and wrote a textbook on geometry. Many artists came to study anatomy in detail. Beginning in the 12th cent. the Arabic versions of Greek works were translated into Latin, an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest being translated at Toledo, and one of Aristotle's biological works in Sicily. Leonardo da Pisa (Fibonacci) presented some of the new Hindu-Arabic mathematics in the early 13th cent., and the medical and alchemical works were also translated. Also in the 13th cent., a trend toward empiricism was promoted by Roger Bacon and others, but this was short-lived. The dominant philosophy of science and other fields was the Christianized version of Aristotelian philosophy created by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cent. This view tended to treat scientific theories as extensions of philosophy and, for example, postulated the existence of angelic agents to account for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Even so, the craft traditions continued to develop in an independent manner, particularly medieval alchemy, and certain schools grew up that were not dominated by the main scholastic philosophy. The rebirth, or Renaissance , of learning spread throughout the West from the 14th to the 16th cent. and was further enhanced by the great voyages of discovery that began in the 15th cent.		Al-Razi Ibn-Sina Ibn-Rushd Jabir Al-Hazen Maimonides	In medicine important contributions were made by Al-Razi (Rhazes, 865-925) and Ibn-Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), and in alchemy and pharmacology by Jabir (Geber, 9th cent.), whose work was expanded in the 10th cent. by a mystical sect aligned with the Sufi tradition. At Cairo, Al-Hazen (965-1038) studied optics, particularly the properties of lenses, and Maimonides (1135-1204), the Jewish philosopher, came there from Spain to practice medicine as physician to Saladin, the Sultan.
Aquinas insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary. Some truths, such as that of the mystery of the incarnation, can be known only through revelation, and others, such as that of the composition of material things, only through experience; still others, such as that of the existence of God, are known through both equally. All knowledge, Aquinas held, originates in sensation, but sense data can be made intelligible only by the action of the intellect, which elevates thought toward the apprehension of such immaterial realities as the human soul, the angels, and God. To reach understanding of the highest truths, those with which religion is concerned, the aid of revelation is needed.	St Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274)
Arrival of Positivism (Enlightenment) A trend in bourgeois philosophy which declares natural (empirical) sciences to be the sole source of true knowledge and rejects the cognitive value of philosophical study. Positivism emerged in response to the inability of speculative philosophy (e.g. Classical German Idealism) to solve philosophical problems which had arisen as a result of scientific development. Positivists went to an opposite extreme and rejected theoretical speculation as a means of obtaining knowledge. Positivism declared false and senseless all problems, concepts and propositions of traditional philosophy on being, substances, causes., etc., that could not be solved or verified by experience due to a high degree of abstract nature. Positivism claims to be a fundamentally new, non-metaphysical ("positive") philosophy, modelled on empirical sciences and providing them with a methodology. Positivism is essentially empiricism brought to extreme logical consequences in certain respects: inasmuch as any knowledge is empirical knowledge in one form or another, no speculation can be knowledge. Positivism has not escaped the lot of traditional philosophy, since its own propositions (rejection of speculation, phenomenalism, etc.) turned out to be unverifiable by experience and, consequently, metaphysical. Positivism was founded by Auguste Comte, who introduced the term "positivism", although similar approaches are credited to Bacon, Hegel and other philosophers. Historically, there are three stages in the development of positivism. The exponents of the first were Comte, E. Littré and P. Laffitte in France, J S Mill and Herbert Spencer in England. Alongside the problems of the theory of knowledge (Comte) and logic (Mill), the main place in the first Positivism was assigned to sociology (Comte's idea of transforming society on the basis of science, Spencer's organic theory of society). The rise of the second stage in Positivism - empirio-criticism - dates back to the 1870s - 1890s and is associated with Ernst Mach and Avenarius, who renounced even formal recognition of objective real objects, which was a feature of early Positivism. In Machism, the problems of cognition were interpreted from the viewpoint of extreme psychologism, which was merging with subjectivism. The rise and formation of the latest Positivism, or neo-positivism, is linked up with the activity of the Vienna Circle (O. Neurath, Carnap, Schlick, Frank and others) and of the Berlin Society for Scientific Philosophy (Reichenbach and others), which combined a number of trends: logical atomism, logical positivism, semantics (close to these trends are Percy Bridgman's operationalism and the pragmatism of William James et al). The main place in the third positivism is taken by the philosophical problems of language, symbolic logic, the structure of scientific investigations, and others. Having renounced psychologism, the exponents of the third positivism took the course of reconciling the logic of science with mathematics, the course of formalisation of epistemological problems.
Wrote De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs"), which was published in Nuremberg in 1543, the year of his death. Copernicus stated that the Sun was the center of the universe and that the Earth had a triple motion around this center.	Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)		Both Copernicus and Galileo (1564-1642) suffered from that same flaw in logic that Ptolemy had: motions in the sky must adhere to the perfect shape, the circle.
Built many new astronomical instruments to accurately measure planetary orbits. Hired Kepler as assistant (read Aristotle for Tycho’s theories)	Tycho Brahe (Danish) (1546-1601)
Invented the telescope, discovered the four bright satellites of Jupiter, observed the moon's valleys and mountains, and Saturn has a unique form and he detected the phases of Venus. The Church forced him to retract his theories and state that the Earth was the center of the universe (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican). At the age of 20, he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing a great lamp swing hanging from the ceiling of a cathedral in Pisa. He timed the motions of the lamp with his pulse beat and noticed that each took the same amount of time. Galileo dropped two objects of unequal weights from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see which one would hit the ground the fastest and they both landed at around the same time. This is known as the Law of Falling Bodies.	Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Pisa 1564 - Arcetri, Florence 1642
Kepler took the discovery of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits one step further--he discovered that the properties of elliptical orbits allowed him to explain other properties of the solar system not explained by the Ptolemaic model. He expressed these properties, now known to be valid for any system of orbiting objects, in the form of three laws of motion. Kepler's discoveries is that they not only contradict the theory that objects in the sky move in perfect circles, but that they lead to the radical idea that mathematics can describe events in the sky.	Johannes Kepler (German) (1571-1630)		Kepler published these discoveries between 1609 and 1618, just about the time Galileo was confronting the Church with his ideas. Galileo knew of Kepler's discoveries, but rejected them because he could not bring himself to accept the possibility that the orbits of the planets did not conform to the perfect circle ideal of the Greeks.
Rejected the older alchemical and medical theories and founded iatrochemistry, the forerunner of modern medical chemistry.	Paracelsus
Turned away from the medical teachings of Galen and other early authorities and through his anatomical studies helped to found modern medicine and biology.	Andreas Vesalius
Introduced the experimental method (the inductive method of modern science), re-introduced the concept of Natures and Forms. Natures are the natural phenomena of heat, sound, light, or of any other actual object of the investigations of physical science; Forms are the immanent laws of these natures (laws of nature). For the new science, a new way is necessary -- a new organ ("novum organum") -- through which discoveries will not be the work of chance, as in the past, but the result of systematic experiments. Thus an "instauratio ab imis fundamentis" of all human knowledge is necessary -- a restoration of human knowledge beginning at the root of things, as a means of discovering the hidden possibilities of nature. Of this writing only De degnitate et augmentis scientiarum (Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning 1605), and Novum Organum scientiarum (New Organ of Learning 1620) was finished. This is written in response to Aristotle’s Organon, because Bacon says that knowledge is power, not theoretical or speculative, and man's capacity to act is in proportion to his knowledge. It was to lead man to the discovery of the realm of nature, and to allow him to establish over it the "regnum hominis," the dominion of man over nature.	Francis Bacon (1561–1626)		Considered the classical empiricist. Hobbes developed his mechanistic viewpoint and proclaimed materialism; Locke, Berkeley and Hume, concentrating on the formal aspect, turned to phenomenalism (see below)
Descartes applied rational inductive methods particularly of mathematics, to philosophy. Before his time, philosophy had been dominated by the method of Scholasticism, which was entirely based on comparing and contrasting the views of recognized authorities. Rejecting this method, Descartes stated, "In our search for the direct road to truth, we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry." He therefore determined to hold nothing true until he had established grounds for believing it true. The single sure fact from which his investigations began was expressed by him in the famous words Cogito, ergo sum,"I think, therefore I am." His goal was [see book]. His first work, Philosophical Essays was published in 1637. The work contained four parts: an essay on geometry, another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), which described his philosophical speculations. This was followed by other philosophical works, among them Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641; revised 1642) and Principia Philosophiae (The Principles of Philosophy, 1644 His philosophy is called the Cartesian philosophy. He is also considered the classical rationalist for relying on the mind and reason and using proper methods to arrive at the truth. Descartes changed the whole course of modern philosophical enquiry by placing at the center of philosophy the epistemological question "how do I know," replacing the earlier emphasis on what the world was like with how one could know what the world was like. His philosophy contained the seeds of idealism that began with Berkeley and continued with Schelling and Hegel through the 19th century.	Descartes, René (1596-1650) Father of modern philosophy	The empiricists Locke and Hume Leibniz commented on Descartes’ An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by writing New Essays on Human Understanding John Locke critics the illusion argument using “representative realism” and the use of primary and secondary qualities Kant (see below)	Hobbes denies the existence of spiritual or non-material substance or "soul". For Hobbes, to be is to be a body (see Epicurus). All that happens is the result of particles of matter "bumping into one another," pushing one another. Even human perception, imagination, reasoning, desiring, and acting is but a chain reaction of material causes and effects. God, if he exists, must be in some sense "body." Thus, Hobbes' thinking is not dualistic, but consistently materialistic (as Epicurus). Descartes initiated a dualism of inner and outer, mind and body, knowledge and practice. Kant overcomes this dualism with a new dualism -- the dualism of reality and appearance. According to Kant, there is a difference between the way things are in themselves (reality) and the way things appear to us. We cannot know things as they really are in themselves (noumena); we only know them as appearances (phenomena). Knowledge is not the transparent viewing of "bare facts." The mind is not a window, through which objects pass unaltered. Rather, knowledge is the making of a product. The mind converts the raw material of beings as they are into the finished product of objects, or beings as they are for us in perception and knowledge. To know is to reconstruct, to interpret reality. Knowledge is objective interpretation of reality, but it is not reality itself. According to Kant, human knowledge is a process that includes both sensibility (perception) and understanding (conception).
Worked on three treatises, dealing respectively with matter or body, with human nature, and with society. Discussed with Galileo and Descartes. Hobbes does not share Descartes' mistrust of the senses. According to Hobbes, all knowledge comes through and by means of the senses. Even geometry, according to Hobbes, is constructed from images gained through the senses. There are no "innate ideas." Mathematics, like everything else that we know, is learned from experiencing the physical world about us. Whereas Descartes is a rationalist (believing that knowledge is arrived at by reason using the proper method), Hobbes is an empiricist (of a "constructionist" variety). Nevertheless, Hobbes, unlike Descartes, does not place much value in conducting experiments. According to Hobbes, the "state of nature" or the state of men without civil society is a state of continual warfare. By nature, human beings are not social, as ancient philosophers believed. By nature, human beings have an inclination to hurt one another. By nature, human beings are reservoirs of unlimited desires seeking unlimited satisfaction. So human beings are necessarily continually at war with one another. For Hobbes, freedom means the absence of external restraint -- being able to do whatever one wants without being stopped (without meeting with external resistance); freedom is the ability to seek endless satisfaction of limitless desires, without interference from outside force. One sees here the inversion of Greek values.	Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)	Kant disagrees that there is no spiritual substance	Kant maintains that the soul and freedom do exist, but that their existence can be neither proved nor disproved. The standard fare of metaphysics is beyond the scope of human experience and is therefore beyond the bounds of knowledge. For proof and disproof apply only to what can be sensibly experienced, and we cannot see the soul. Yet it is presumptuous to assume, because we cannot see something, that it does not exist. According to Kant, there are things that cannot be known. In fact all things, as they are in themselves and not as we reconstruct them in experience, are unknowable. We can only know things as they appear to us and are constituted in our consciousness. In this way, Kant corrects the error of both dogmatic rational metaphysics (such as in Descartes) and dogmatic scientific determinism (such as Hobbes). Kant confines knowledge to appearances and places things as they really are outside of appearances. Science is not reality; it is simply the best interpretation of reality. Beyond this interpretation is the thing in itself, an inscrutable and unknowable mystery or "X" or "?".
Wrote Ethics, where he proceeds to prove its conclusions by a method modeled on geometry, through rigorous definitions, axioms, propositions and corollaries. Spinoza hoped to build his philosophy on the solidest rock, but the methods, as well as some of the arguments and definitions, are often unconvincing. He derived an ethic by deduction from fundamental principles. The highest good, he asserted, was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from tyranny by the passions, freedom from fear, resignation to destiny, and true blessedness.	Spinoza (1632-1674)
“Rejecting substantial forms and occult quantities, have endeavored to subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics. Wrote the Principia, which was accused of having “occult” qualities. Defined “hypothesis” as whatever that is not deduced from the phenomena. Also wrote that in geometry, the word hypothesis is not understood to include Axioms and Postulates such as the laws of motion, which are deduced (inferred) from phenomena and made general by induction, so hypotheses are just propositions not deduced from phenomena (Here the words “induction” and “deduction” is still used confusingly). In Newton’s Third Rule, he writes, “The qualities of bodies, which admit neither of intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.” Newton’s Laws Objects change motion in response to action from external objects. Mass is the amount of opposition to changes in motion an object possesses Force is equal to mass X acceleration, since acceleration is the measure of change in motion, the action required to exert that change is proportional to mass as is consistent with the first law To every action there is an opposed equal reaction Differential calculus was used to solve mechanical and hydrodynamic problems Newton also published Optics (1704) to theorize that light is composed of tiny particles or corpuscles, emitted by luminous bodies.	Isaac Newton (1632-1727) Built the first reflecting telescope. Developed differential calculus (“Theory of Fluxions) - 1704 President of the Royal Society Published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687 where he explained the laws of motion. At 23 he explained the laws of gravitation (directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them)	Einstein proved that gravitation is explained geometrically, as matter in its immediate neighborhood causes the curvature of the four dimensional space-time continuum Leibniz was also claimed to have invented differential and integral calculus. Newton used calculus to calculate the mass of the earth, sun and planets. Earth’s mass was 5-6 times that of water (it is actually 5.5)	Newton concluded that “in this philosophy, particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and themselves rendered general by induction. Thus it was that impenetrability, the mobility and the impulsive force of bodies, and of the laws of motion and of gravitation were discovered. Here the proposition “all bodies are impenetrable” is arrived at in two steps, (1) by abstracted a property which is seen to be true of all observed cases, it is established by “sensation” that all the bodies are impenetrable (this is deduction from phenomena), (2) it is further inferred that bodies not known to us by experiments (e.g. atoms) are impenetrable. This is the “transdiction” mode of inference, which is considered legitimate by Newton. Newton’s “empiricism” was not Humean because he considered transdiction a legitimate mode of inference.
The Empiricists Empiricists believe that all knowledge begins with and is based on experience. For empiricist epistemology, sense experience is emphasized over reason or the understanding in the acquisition of knowledge. Accordingly, the emphasis for empiricism is a posteriori knowledge. For most empiricists, experience includes inner experience—reflection upon the mind and its operations—as well as sense perception. This position is opposed to rationalism in that it denies the existence of innate ideas. According to the empiricist, all ideas are derived from experience; therefore, knowledge of the physical world can be nothing more than a generalization from particular instances and can never reach more than a high degree of probability. Most empiricists recognize the existence of at least some a priori truths, e.g., those of mathematics and logic. John Stuart Mill was the first to treat even these as generalizations from experience. Empiricism has been the dominant but not the only tradition in British philosophy. Among its other leading advocates were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. See also logical positivism.
Founder of British empiricism. Locke summed up the Enlightenment in his belief in the middle class and its right to freedom of conscience and right to property, in his faith in science, and in his confidence in the goodness of humanity. His influence upon philosophy and political theory has been incalculable. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is one of the classical documents of British empirical philosophy. His official concern is with epistemology. It thus tells us in some detail what one can legitimately claim to know and what one cannot. Locke sees the universe as made up of material bodies, which in turn are made of "insensible particles," which interact mechanically. Immaterial bodies have sense organs, which when stimulated produce "ideas of sensation." These ideas are operated on by our minds to produce "ideas of reflection." These two types of ideas are the material of our thoughts, perception, and consciousness, which are all derived from experience; we can have no knowledge beyond our ideas. In perception, according to this view, we are not directly aware of physical objects; we are directly aware of the ideas that objects "cause" in us and that "represent" the objects in our consciousness. Our ideas of primary qualities of objects, or the mathematically determinable qualities of an object, such as shape, motion, weight, and number, actually exist in the world. Secondary qualities, those which arise from the senses, do not exist in objects as they exist in ideas. According to Locke, secondary qualities, such as taste, "are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce ideas in use by their primary qualities." One conclusion of Locke’s theory is that genuine knowledge cannot be found in natural science, because the real essences of physical objects that science studies cannot be known Locke describes “representative realism”. The term ‘realism’ here refers to the view that objects are real or exist apart from perception. And ‘representative’ means that some of our perceptions accurately represent an object as the thing which it is in itself apart from perception. But Locke thought that only some of our ideas or perceptions are accurate representations of the object itself, and that others are partially due to properties of the object and partially due to us as perceivers. The perceptions which accurately represent the object as the thing which it is in itself apart from awareness Locke called ‘primary qualities,’ and those qualities of an object which appear when we perceive it, such as its color, which are not taken to be intrinsic or mind-independent properties of the object are called ‘secondary.’`	John Locke (1632 – 1704)	Berkeley says Locke’s ideas was incoherent Hobbes Leibniz Kant (see below)	Unlike Hobbes he believed that principles of conduct were rational and humans could be trusted to follow those principles. Leibniz says Locke’s theory of knowledge does not explain how we know of certain propositions that they are not only true but necessarily true, propositions that do not depend on experience (a priori knowledge) – what is innate to the mind. In Book I Locke argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term ‘idea,’ Locke tells us "...stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks." Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these -- sensation -- tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other -- reflection -- tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both. Bishop Berkeley objected to Locke’s representative realism on two counts. First he pointed out, and as we have seen with Russell, that an object’s primary qualities are just as observer dependent and relative to perception as are its secondary qualities. Thus the size of an object depends on the distance from which it is seen, its shape depends on the angle from which it is viewed, and how heavy it is sensed to be will depend on the strength of the person who attempts to lift it. An even greater problem, Berkeley said, is that, if all we are ever aware of is the sense data of our sensations, if all we ever know is the effects of an external object on our minds or nervous systems and not the object itself, then we can never tell whether our perceptions accurately represent the object or not. This is because there is no way in which we can compare our perceptions with the object as it is in itself apart from perception. That is, our knowledge of an object is confined to our perceptions of the object, and we can never get out of the sphere of our perceptions to perceive what the object is like in itself.
Berkeley declared “esse ess percipi”, to exist is to perceive. Whenever I blink, whatever is in front of me does not exist, provided, no one else is perceiving these things at the time. His philosophy is referred to as “idealism”. He opened A Treatise concerning the Principles of Knowledge (1710) rather technically, with an extended attack on Locke's theory of abstract ideas. The book continues with arguments designed to show that sensible qualities—both secondary and primary—can exist only when perceived, as ideas in our minds. Since physical objects are, on Berkeley's view, nothing more than collections of such qualities, these sensible objects, too, are merely ideas. In what he believed to be his most devastating point, Berkeley argued that it is literally inconceivable that anything like a material substance could exist independently of the spirits or active thinking substances that perceive it. Berkeley’s point is that it is God that create outr sense experience, not physical objects. Since God perceive every object all the time, so the world continues to exist when it is unperceived by humans.	Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753)	Jean Paul Satre (Being and Nothingness) – in almost every action we all of us suggest that there are minds other than our own Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone hard and saying “I refute it thus”.	What about dreams and hallucinations? An idealist explains them by saying that actual physical objects are repeated patterns of sensory information. By touching a guitar, my visual experience concur with my tactile experience and so forth, and therefore I can distinguish between dreams and reality. Idealism leads to solipsism, the view that all exists only in the mind. This leads to the view that there is no physical objects, but also that there are no other people. Jean Paul Satre – we cannot as a solipsist. For example, shame and embarrassment is nonsensical for a solipsist.
He discussed with Benedict Spinoza and supported the founding of the Brandenburg Society (Berlin Academy of Science) in 1700. He met Peter the Great to recommend educational reforms in Russia and proposed what became the St. Petersburg Academy of Science. His contribution in mathematics was to discover, in 1675, the fundamental principles of infinitesimal calculus. This discovery was arrived at independently of Sir Isaac Newton, whose system of calculus was invented in 1666. Leibniz's system was published in 1684, Newton's in 1687, and the method of notation devised by Leibniz was universally adopted. In 1672 he also invented a calculating machine capable of multiplying, dividing, and extracting square roots. Leibniz was dissatisfied with the "new philosophy" since Descartes and with the concepts of absolute space, time and matter of Newtonian mechanics. He showed that Descartes' formulation of the laws of motion was scientifically unsound, and that his view of motion as miraculously imparted to essentially inert matter was metaphysically unsatisfactory. The laws of motion he thought demanded that the elements involved should be bearers of energy. The only possible element must be a "simple substance, without parts." In his Monadology, this simple substance he called a "monad," a non-extended, indestructible and immaterial entity. Every "body" is a colony of monads with various degrees of activity, and the human being is therefore no longer a Cartesian miracle of mind and body but part of the natural order of the universal mirroring. In the Discourse on Metaphysics Leibniz presents arguments for the doctrine of monads drawn from the nature of propositions.	Leibniz (1646 – 1716)		Leibniz was an essentially religious personality, and in transplanting the spirit of the Enlightenment into Germany he gave it that distinctively ethical and religious flavor which became characteristic of German Idealism. It was he who was chiefly instrumental in substituting the mechanical view of nature with a teleological one. He transformed the atoms of the materialists into monads, or psychical entities, and substituted for natural law his theory of preestablished harmony. He asserted the absolute worth of the individual against the destructive monistic pantheism of Spinoza, and saw in the progress of history a movement of the monads towards some divine end. On the one hand, he made the development of materialism and skepticism impossible in Germany, and, on the other hand, he brought about the teleological explanation of the history of the universe as a whole. The teleological and idealistic tendencies of Leibniz were strengthened through Pietism; Klopstock, Herder, Jacobi, Goethe, and Jean Paul, all betray in their works the Pietistic influence. Leibniz argued that some concepts are innate to the mind (e.g. the concept of substance and causation)
Skepticism can mean: Philosophical skepticism - a philosophical position in which people choose to critically examine whether the knowledge and perceptions that they have are actually true, and whether or not on can ever be said to have true knowledge; or Scientific skepticism - a scientific, or practical, position in which one does not accept the veracity of claims until solid evidence is produced in accordance with the scientific method. Scientific skepticism is related to, but not identical to, philosophical skepticism. Many scientists and doctors who are skeptical of claims of the paranormal are nonetheless not adherents of classical philosophical skepticism. When critics of controversial scientific or paranormal claims are said to be skeptical, this only refers to their taking a position of scientific skepticism. The term skeptic is now usually used to mean a person who is taking a critical position in a given situation, usually by employing the principles of critical thinking and the scientific method (that is, scientific skepticism) to evaluate the validity of claims and practices. Skeptics are often confused with, or even denounced as, cynics. The truth, however, is that valid skeptical criticism (as opposed to arbitrary or subjective misgivings for an idea) strictly originates from an objective and methodological examination that is often agreed between skeptics themselves. A debunker is a skeptic who pursues the disproof of false claims.
Scottish philosopher and historian, Hume carried the empiricism of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. Hume believed that all knowledge came from experience. He also believed that a person's experience's existed only in the person's mind (he was a skeptical phenomenalist). Hume believed that there was a world outside of human conscience, but he did not think this could be proved. Hume grouped perceptions and experiences into one of two categories: impressions and ideas. Ideas are memories of sensations claimed Hume, but impressions are the cause of the sensation. In other words, an impression is part of a temporary feeling, but an idea is the permanent impact of this feeling. Hume believed that ideas were just dull imitations of impressions. Hume also attacked the idea of casualty. This idea states that for all effects there is a cause. Hume said that even though the cause preceded the effect, there is no proof that the cause is responsible for the effect's occurrence and that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. The Problem of Causation When one event causes another, most people think that we are aware of a connection between the two that makes the second event follow from the first. Hume challenged this belief, noting that whereas we do perceive the two events, we don't perceive any necessary connection between the two. And how else but perception could we gain knowledge of this mysterious connection? Hume denied that we could have any idea of causation other than the following: when we see that two events always occur together, we tend to form an expectation that when the first occurs, the second is soon to follow. This constant conjunction and the expectation thereof is all that we can know of causation, and all that our idea of causation can amount to. Such a lean conception robs causation of all its force and some later Humeans like Bertrand Russell have dismissed the notion of causation altogether as something akin to superstition. But this violates common sense, thereby creating the problem of causation -- what justifies our belief in a causal connection and what kind of connection could we have knowledge of? -- a problem which has no accepted solution. For relevant contemporary work, see Wesley Salmon's Hume and the Problem of Causation and Causality and Explanation. The Problem of Induction We all think that the past is a reliable guide to the future. For example, physicists' laws of planetary orbit work for describing past planetary behavior, so we presume that they'll work for describing future planetary behavior as well. But how can we justify this presumption -- the principle of induction? Hume suggested two possible justifications and rejected them both. The first justification is that, as a matter of logical necessity, the future must resemble the past. But, Hume pointed out, we can conceive of a chaotic, erratic world where the future has nothing to do with the past -- or, more tamely, a world just like ours right up until the present, at which point things change completely. So there is nothing logically necessary about the principle of induction. The second justification, more modestly, appeals only to the past reliability of induction -- it's always worked before, so it will probably continue to work. But, Hume pointed out, this justification is using circular reasoning -- justifying induction by an appeal that requires induction to gain any force. Hume concluded that induction cannot be intellectually justified, but that since we are hard-wired by nature to believe it, there's no point in fighting it. This also violates common sense, and the problem of justifying induction is still with us. For relevant contemporary work, see Richard Swinburne's compilation The Justification of Induction. The Bundle Theory of the Self We tend to think that we are the same person we are 5 years ago. Though we've changed in many respects, the same person is present as was present then. We might start thinking about which features can be changed without changing the underlying self. But Hume denies the distinction between the various features of a person and the mysterious self that bears those features. After all, Hume pointed out, when you start introspecting, you notice a bunch of thoughts and feelings and perceptions and such, but you never perceive any substance you could call the self. So as far as we can tell, Hume concluded, there's nothing to the self over and above a big, fleeting bundle of perceptions. Note in particular that, on Hume's view, there is nothing that these perceptions belong to. Hume further compares the soul to a commonwealth, which retains its identity not by virtue of some enduring core substance, but by being composed of many different related and constantly changing elements. Questions of personal identity then become a matter for arbitrary stipulation. (Note that in the Appendix to the Treatise Hume said mysteriously that he was dissastified with his account of the self and never returned to it!) For relevant contemporary work, see Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. Practical Reason: Instrumentalism (A pragmatic theory that ideas are instruments that function as guides of action, their validity being determined by the success of the action, or The view that the sanction of truth is its utility, or that truth is genuine only in so far as it is a valuable instrument) and Nihilism (An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief. The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement. Also a diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.) Most of us think that some behavior is more reasonable than others. There seems to be something unreasonable about, say, eating aluminum foil. But Hume denied that reason has any important role in motivating or discouraging behavior. After all, reason is just a sort of calculator of concepts and experience. What ultimately matters, Hume said, is how we feel about the behavior. His work begot the doctrine of instrumentalism, which states that an action is reasonable if and only if it serves the agent's goals and desires, whatever they be. Reason can enter the picture only as a lackey, informing the agent of useful facts concerning which actions will serve his goals and desires, but never deigning to tell the agent which goals and desires he should have. So, if you want to eat aluminum foil, reason will tell you where to find the stuff, and there's nothing unreasonable about eating it or even wanting to do so. Instrumentalism went on to become the orthodox view of practical reason in economics, rational choice theory, and some other social sciences. But, some commentators argue, Hume actually went a step further to nihilism and said there's nothing unreasonable about deliberately frustrating your own goals and desires ("I want to eat aluminum foil, so let me wire my mouth shut"). Such behavior would surely be highly irregular, granting reason no role at all, but it would not be contrary to reason, which is impotent to make judgments in this domain. For relevant contemporary work, see Jean Hampton's The Authority of Reason and David Schmidtz's Rational Choice and Moral Agency.	Hume, David, (1711-1776)	Kant rejected skepticism.	Besides his chief work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he wrote Political Discourses (1752), The Natural History of Religion (1755), and a History of England (1754-62). "to be a Humean, precisely, is to take no system as final, nothing as ultimate except the spirit of enquiry" Moral Anti-Realism and Motivation Drawing on his attack on reason's role in judging behavior, Hume argued that immoral behavior is not immoral by being against reason. He first claims that moral beliefs are intrinsically motivating -- if you believe killing is wrong, you will be ipso facto motivated not to kill and to criticize killing and so on (moral internalism). He then reminds us that reason alone can motivate nothing -- reason discovers matters of fact and logic, and it depends on our desires and preferences whether apprehension of those truths will motivate us. Consequently, reason alone cannot yield moral beliefs. Hume proposed that morality ultimately rests upon sentiment, with reason only paving the way for our sensitive judgments by analysis of the moral matter in question. This argument against founding morality on reason is now one in the stable of moral anti-realist arguments; Humean philosopher John Mackie argued that, for moral facts to be real facts about the world and, at the same time, instrinsically motivating, they would have to be very weird facts. So we have every reason to disbelieve in them. For relevant contemporary work, see J. L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Mackie's Hume's Moral Theory, David Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics, and Michael Smith's The Moral Problem. Free Will vs. Indeterminism Just about everyone has noticed the apparent conflict between free will and determinism -- if your actions were determined to happen billions of years ago, then how can they be up to you? But Hume noted another conflict, one that turned the problem of free will into a full-fledged dilemma: free will is incompatible with indeterminism. Imagine that your actions are not determined by what events came before. Then your actions are, it seems, completely random. Moreover, and most importantly for Hume, they are not determined by your character -- your desires, your preferences, your values, etc. How can we hold someone responsible for an action that did not result from his character? How can we hold someone responsible for an action that randomly occurred? Free will seems to require determinism, because otherwise, the agent and the action wouldn't be connected in the way required of freely chosen actions. So now, nearly everyone believes in free will, free will seems inconsistent with determinism, and free will seems to require determinism. (See also Compatibilism.) How can we resolve this dilemma? The Is-Ought Problem Hume noted that many writers talk about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is. But there seems to be a big difference between descriptive statements (what is) and prescriptive statements (what ought to be). Hume calls for writers to be on their guard against changing the subject like that, not without giving an explanation of how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can you derive an 'ought' from an 'is'? That question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. A similar thesis was argued by G. E. Moore's 'open question argument', intended to refute any identification of moral properties with natural properties -- the so-called 'naturalistic fallacy'. Now any ethical theorist who wishes to give morality an objective grounding in more down-to-earth features of the world is fighting an uphill battle. Utilitarianism Hume, along his fellow members of the Scottish Enlightenment, first advanced the idea that moral rules are justified by promoting the utility of the persons involved. Hume's role is not to be overstated, of course; it was his countryman Francis Hutcheson who coined the utilitarian slogan "greatest good for the greatest number". But it was from reading Hume's Treatise that Bentham first felt the force of a utilitarian system: he "felt as if scales had fallen from [his] eyes". But Hume's proto-utilitarianism is a peculiar one from our perspective. He doesn't think that the aggregation of cardinal units of utility provides a formula for arriving at moral truth. On the contrary, Hume thinks that moral principles aren't intellectually justifiable -- some rules appeal to us and others don't. But, he thinks, the reason that good moral principles appeal to us is that they promote our interests and those of our fellows, with whom we sympathize. Humans are hard-wired to approve of things that help society -- public utility. Hume used this insight to morally appraise things from social institutions and government policies to character traits and talents. The legacy of utilitarianism is too well-known to go into -- the theory is a mainstay of ethics and economics. The Problem of Miracles One way to support a religion is by appeal to miracles. But Hume argued that, at minimum, miracles could never give religion much support. There are several arguments suggested by Hume's essay, all of which turn on his conception of a miracle: namely, a violation of the laws of nature by God. One argument claims that it's impossible to violate the laws of nature. Another claims that human testimony could never be reliable enough to countermand the evidence we have for the laws of nature. The weakest and most defensible claims that, due to the strong evidence we have for the laws of nature, any miracle claim is in trouble from the get-go, and needs strong supporting evidence to defeat our initial presumptions. In a slogan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This point has been most applied to the question of the resurrection of Jesus, where Hume would no doubt ask, "Which is more likely -- that a man rose from the dead or that this testimony is mistaken in some way?" Or, more blandly, "Which is more likely -- that Uri Geller can really bend spoons with his mind or that there is some trick going on?" This argument is the backbone of the skeptic's movement and a live issue for historians of religion. For a critical and technical (Bayesian) analysis of Hume, see John Earman's Hume's Abject Failure -- the title of which gives you an idea of his assessment! The Design Argument One of the oldest and most popular arguments for God's existence is the design argument -- that all the order and 'purpose' in the world bespeaks a divine origin. Hume gave the classic criticism of the design argument, and though the issue is far from dead, many are convinced that Hume killed the argument for good. All a century before Darwin! Here are some of his points. (1) For the design argument to work, it needs to be true that about the only time we see order and perceived purpose is when it results from design. But we see the stuff all the time, resulting from presumably mindless processes like generation and vegetation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and 'purpose'. (2) The design argument, even if it worked, could not support a robust theism; all you can hope for is the conclusion that the universe's configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears some remote similarity to human design. (3) By the design argument's own principles, God's mental order and functionality needs explanation. Otherwise, we could leave the universe's order, etc. unexplained. (4) Often, what appears to be purpose, where it looks like object X has feature F in order to secure some outcome O, is better explained by a filtering process: that is, object X wouldn't be around did it not possess feature F, and outcome O is only interesting to us, a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated natural selection. For relevant contemporary work, see J. C. A. Gaskin's Hume's Philosophy of Religion, and Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God; for a view from a philosopher of biology, see Elliott Sober's Philosophy of Biology, ch. 2.
Transcendental idealism, a form of German Idealism Kant demolished the rationalistic arguments of Anselm, Descartes, and others, for the existence of God. Science is valid, but it has to do only with phenomena. This phenomenal world, however, is produced a priori by the activity of consciousness, reacting on that external reality whose eternal nature cannot be known. The constancy of experience is accounted for by the very fact that the world as we know it is only the sum total of phenomena. This becomes the basis of the universal validity of certain principles of explanation. Space and time, and the categories of the understanding are subjective and thus ideal. Taken together they form a mold in which we shape the impressions coming from the unknowable, transcendent reality. Thus, the principles of science and the laws of nature are universally valid because they are in the subject, not in the object. Knowledge of ultimate reality comes through the practical reason, particularly through the a priori moral law in us. Kant's idea of inner freedom became the inspiration of the creative genius. The phase of German Idealism manifested in the art and poetry of the period has been called aesthetic-ethical idealism.
Kant is most famous for his view—called transcendental idealism—that we bring innate forms and concepts to the raw experience of the world, which otherwise would be completely unknowable. Kant's philosophy of nature and human nature is one of the most important historical sources of the modern conceptual relativism that dominated the intellectual life of the 20th century—though it is likely that Kant would reject relativism in most of its more radical modern forms. Kant is also well-known and very influential for his moral philosophy. Kant also proposed the first modern theory of solar system formation, known as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis . Around 1770, when he was forty-six, Kant read the work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume's was fiercely empirical, and scorned all metaphysics (as well as systematically debunking great quantities of it). His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify our assuming that there are "causal powers" inhering in things—that, for example, when one billiard ball strikes another the second one in any sense "must" move. Of course, things always have happened this way, and we tend through "custom and habit" to assume they will; but we have no rational grounds for doing so. Kant was profoundly bothered. He simultaneously found Hume's argument irrefutable and his conclusions unacceptable. The old rational dogmatism had, he now considered, laid too much emphasis on the a priori elements of knowledge; on the other hand, as he now for the first time realized, the empirical philosophy of Hume had gone too far when it reduced all truth to empirical or a posteriori elements. Kant, therefore, proposes to pass all knowledge in review in order to determine how much of it is to be assigned to the a priori, and how much to the a posteriori factors, if we may so designate them, of knowledge. As he himself says, his purpose is to "deduce" the a priori or transcendental, forms of thought. Hence, his philosophy is essentially a "criticism", because it is an examination of knowledge, and "transcendental", because its purpose in examining knowledge is to determine the a priori, or transcendental, forms. Kant himself was wont to say that the business of philosophy is to answer three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? He considered, however, that the answer to the second and third depends on the answer to the first; our duty and our destiny can be determined only after a thorough study of human knowledge. For ten years he published nothing, and then in 1781 released the massive "Critique of Pure Reason," arguably the most significant single book in modern philosophy. In this he developed his notion of a transcendental argument to show that, in short, although we cannot know necessary truths about the world "as it is in itself," we are nonetheless constrained to perceiving and thinking about the world in certain ways: we can know with certainty a great number of things about "the world as it appears to us": for example, that every event will be causally connected with others, that appearances in space and time will obey the laws of geometry and arithmetic, and so forth. Kant's most widely read and most influential book is Critique of Pure Reason [1] (1781), which proceeds from a remarkably simple thought experiment. He said, try to imagine something that exists in no time and has no extent in space. The human mind cannot produce such an idea—time and space are fundamental forms of perception that exist as innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be perceived except through these forms, and the limits of physics are the limits of the fundamental structure of the mind. On Kant's view, therefore, there are something like innate ideas—a priori knowledge of some things (space and time)—since the mind must possess these categories in order to be able to understand the buzzing mass of raw, uninterpreted sensory experience which presents itself to our consciousness. Secondly, it removes the actual world (which Kant called the noumenal world, or noumena) from the arena of human perception—since everything we perceive is filtered through the forms of space and time we can never really "know" the real world. The first thing that Kant does in his study of knowledge is to distinguish between the material, or content, and the form, of sensation. The material of our sense-knowledge comes from experience. The form, however, is not derived through the senses, but is imposed on the material, or content, by the mind, in order to render the material, or content, universal and necessary. The form is, therefore, a priori; it is independent of experience. The most important forms of sense-knowledge, the conditions, in fact, of all sensation, are space and time (we experience hotness when we approach a fire, that is synthetically built through sense experience, however, a priori we have to approach, get closer through space and time to the fire). Not only, then, are space and time mental entities in the sense that they are elaborated by the mind out of the data of experience; they are strictly subjective, purely mental, and have no objective entity, except in so far as they are applied to the external world by the mind. Because of what is to follow, it is important to ask at this point: Do the a priori forms of sensation, since they admittedly enhance the value of sense-knowledge by rendering it universal and necessary, extend the domain of sense-knowledge, and carry us outside the narrow confines of the material, or data, of the senses? Kant holds that they do not. They affect knowledge, so to speak, qualitatively, not quantitatively. Now, the data of sensation represent only the appearances (Erscheinungen) of things; therefore all sensation is confined to a knowledge of appearances (fire appears to be hot) Sense-knowledge cannot penetrate to the noumenon, the reality of the thing (Ding-an-sich) – the hotness does not tell me anything about the real substance of fire) B. Judgment (b) Taking up now the knowledge which we acquire by means of the understanding (Verstand), Kant finds that thought in the strict sense begins with judgment. As in the case of sense-knowledge, he distinguishes here the content and the form. The content of judgment, or in other words, that which the understanding joins together in the act of judgment, can be nothing but the sense-intuitions, which take place, as has been said, by the imposition of the forms of space and time on the data of sensation. Sometimes the sense-intuitions (subject and predicate) are joined together in a manner that evidently implies contingency and particularity. An example would be the judgment, "This table is square." With judgments of this kind the philosopher is not much concerned. He is interested rather in judgments such as "All the sides of a square are equal", in which the relation affirmed to exist between the subject and the predicate is necessary and universal. With regard to these, Kant's first remark is that their necessity and universality must be a priori. That nothing which is universal and necessary can come from experience is axiomatic with him. There must, then, be forms of judgment, as there are forms of sensation, which are imposed by the understanding, which do not come from experience at all, but are a priori. These forms of judgment are the categories. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the contrast between the Kantian categories and the Aristotelean. The difference is fundamental, a difference in nature, purpose, function, and effect. The important point for the student of Kant is to determine the function of the categories. They serve to confer universality and necessity on our judgments. They serve, moreover, to bring diverse sense-intuitions under some degree of unity. But they do not extend our knowledge. For while representations (or intuitions) without the categories would be blind, the categories without representative, or intuitional, content, would be empty. We are still within the narrow circle of knowledge covered by our sense-experience. Space and time do not widen that circle; neither do the categories. The knowledge, therefore, which we acquire by the understanding is confined to the appearances of things, and does not extend to the noumenal reality, the Ding-an-Sich. It is necessary at this point to explain what Kant means by the "synthetic a priori" judgments. The Aristotelean philosophers distinguished two kinds of judgments, namely, synthetic judgments, which are the result of a "putting-together" (synthesis) of the facts, or data, of experience, and analytic judgments, which are the result of a "taking-apart" (analysis) of the subject and predicate, without immediate reference to experience. Thus, "This table is round" is a synthetic judgment; "All the radii of a circle are equal" is an analytic judgment. Now, according to the Aristoteleans, all synthetic judgments are a posteriori, because they are dependent on experience, and all analytic judgments are a priori, because the bond, or nexus, in them is perceived without appeal to experience. This classification does not satisfy Kant. He contends that analytic judgments of the kind referred to do not advance knowledge at all, since they always "remain within the concepts [subject and predicate] and make no advance beyond the data of the concepts". At the same time he contends that the synthetic judgments of the Aristoteleans have no scientific value, since, coming as they do from experience, they must be contingent and particular. Therefore he proposes to introduce a third class, namely, synthetic a priori judgments, which are synthetic because the content of them is supplied by a synthesis of the facts of experience, and a priori, because the form of universality and necessity is imposed on them by the understanding independently of experience. An example would be, according to Kant, "Every effect must have a cause." Our concepts of "effect" and "cause" are supplied by experience; but the universality and necessity of principle are derived from the a priori endowment of the mind. The Aristoteleans answer, and rightly, that the so-called synthetic a priori judgments are all analytic. C. Reasoning In the third place, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is occupied with the reasoning faculty (Vernunft). Here "ideas" play a role similar to that played in sensation and judgment by space and time and the categories, respectively. Examining the reasoning faculty, Kant finds that it has three distinct operations, namely, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive reasoning. To these, he says, correspond the three "ideas", the idea of the soul as thinking subject (psychological idea), the idea of matter as the totality of phenomena (cosmological idea), and the idea of God as the supreme condition of all reality (theological idea). He first takes up the idea of the soul, and, examining the course of reasoning of the psychologist who teaches the substantiality, immateriality, and immortality of the human soul, he pronounces that line of philosophical thought to be fallacious, because it starts with the false supposition that we can have an intuitive knowledge of the soul as the substantial subject of conscious states. This, he claims, is an erroneous supposition, for, while we can and do know our conscious states, we cannot know the subject of them. Rational psychology, then, makes a wrong start; its way is full of contradictions; it does not conclusively establish the immortality of the soul. Next, Kant subjects the cosmological idea to a similar analysis. He finds that as soon as we begin to predicate anything concerning the ultimate nature of matter we fall into a whole series of contradictions, which he calls "antinomies". Thus, the propositions, "Matter has a beginning", "The world was created", are apparently no more true than their contradictories, "Matter is eternal", "The world is uncreated." To every thesis regarding the ultimate nature of the material universe an equally plausible antithesis may be opposed. The conclusion is that by pure reason alone we cannot attain a knowledge of the nature of the material universe. Finally, Kant takes up the theological idea, the idea of God, and criticizes the methods and arguments of rational theology. The speculative basis of our belief in the existence of God is unsound he says, because the proofs brought forward to support it are not conclusive. St. Anselm's ontological argument tries to establish an existential proposition without reference to experience; it confounds the order of things with the order of ideas. The cosmological argument carries the principle of causality beyond the world of sense-experience, where alone it is valid. And the physico-theological argument from design, while it may prove the existence of an intelligent designer, cannot establish the existence of a Supreme Being. Kant, of course, does not deny the existence of God, neither does he deny the immortality of the soul or the ultimate reality of matter. His aim is to show that the three ideas, or, in other words, speculative reasoning concerning the soul, the universe, and God, do not add to our knowledge. But, although the ideas do not extend our experience, they regulate it. The best way to think about our conscious states is to represent them as inhering in a substantial subject, about which, however, we can know nothing. The best way to think of the external world is to represent it as a multiplicity of appearances, the ground of which is an unknowable material something; and the best way to organize and systematize all our knowledge of reality is to represent everything as springing from one source, governed by one law, and tending towards one end, the law, the source, and the end being an unknown and (speculatively) unknowable God. It is very easy to see how this negative phase of Kant's philosophy affected the subsequent course of philosophic thought in Europe. The conclusions of the first "Critique" are the premises of contemporary Agnosticism. We can know nothing except the appearances of things; the senses reach only phenomena; judgment does not go any deeper than the senses, so far as the external world is concerned; science and philosophy fail utterly in the effort to reach a knowledge of substance (noumenon), or essence, and the attempts of metaphysics to teach us what the soul is, what matter is, what God is, have failed and are doomed to inevitable failure. These are the conclusions which Kant reaches in the "Critique of Pure Reason"; they are the assumptions of the Agnostic and of the Neo-Kantian opponent of Scholasticism. Kant had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy, particularly as developed by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built; the dialectical method, used by both Hegel and Karl Marx, was an outgrowth of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used. Knowledge is always tied to perception; it combines both understanding and sensibility. An object of knowledge is always at the same time an object that can be tied to a sensible intuition -- a percept (what is sensed).	Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher	Fichte (1762-1814) German philosopher Johann Fichte, Kant's pupil, rejected his teacher's division of the world into objective and subjective parts and developed an idealistic philosophy that also had great influence on 19th-century socialists. Herder	In Kant's view, Descartes and other "rationalists" overestimated the power of reason, assuming an almost "divine point of view." The mere presence in the mind of clear and distinct "ideas" of God and the soul is, according to Descartes, "evidence" of the existence of real things corresponding to such ideas. For Kant, it is presumptuous to believe that "thinking something" makes it exist. For Kant, human reason cannot "see" supersensible entities; it does not in fact see anything. It merely "thinks" or plays with ideas and then falsely concludes that these "speculations" must correspond to real things. On the other hand, in Kant's view, empiricists, who believed the human mind to be a "blank tablet" (such as John Locke), underestimated the role of reason in the "building" of knowledge. According to Kant, the human mind is not passively formed by objects of perception; it actively "forms" the raw material of objects given in perception. It adds something of its own to knowledge. Kant endeavored to make clear once and for all the precise role the human knower plays in determining the "production" of knowledge. For Fichte, on the contrary, the ego is creative activity and the root of all reality. Nothing is presupposed to the ego. In the very act by which the ego affirms that it is thinking there are contained, implicitly, all the causes of the phenomena, and nature in its totality. Fichte thus abolishes Kant's dualism of subject and object, of form and matter, of thought and being. Herder’s Metacritique: For Herder space and time are not absolutes but derivations from experience, the "calendar of nature," and the conventions and tenses of language. There is no "a priori knowledge," and self-knowledge is empty without awareness, a posteriori and from concrete experience, of the Other--that is, of the historically remote as well as the culturally different. For grasping this sort of alterity was also part of the Enlightenment project; and this was what led to Herder’s own turn to what he called the philosophy of history and then “cultural history” (Kulturgeschichte), which was the path he chose to understand reason not just in its allegedly pure form but in its human development. Nobody reads Herder’s Metakritik these days, and this is not a connection I’ve see made, but I believe that what he offers, in his rejection of late 18th-century philosophical fashion, is not only an epistemological metacritique of the empty abstractions of critical philosophy but also a justification of cultural history as the more comprehensive and human way to a critique of reason--for human reason is indeed all we can know. To suggest the folly of philosophical schemes Herder quoted at length from Swift's Tale of a Tub, which situated philosophers in the "academy of modern bedlam." "For what man, in the natural state or course of thinking, did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own?" asked Swift. "Yet [answering his own question] this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason." Swift meant Descartes, but Herder turned the ridicule on Kant and his followers. Herder's arguments, however, were ruled out of court by academic philosophers both then and in the philosophical canon ever since. In the two centuries since Kant professional philosophy, especially in Germany, has continued mainly along the yellow brick road of internal reflection to the Emerald City of "pure reason" and pure apriorism, as in the early Husserl’s vision of philosophy as a “rigorous.” At most there are distant echoes of Herder from philosophers on the margins of their profession, such as Gadamer, who remarked that "In phenomenology, then, the same abysmal forgetfulness of language, so characteristic of transcendental idealism, was repeated, thus appearing to confirm, albeit belatedly, Herder's ill-fated criticism of the Kantian transcendental turn" –and further away Derrida, who asked in his commentary on Husserl, "Did not Herder [in Metacritique of Pure Reason] already reproach Kant for not taking into consideration the intrinsic necessity of language and its immanence in the most a priori act of thought?"–suggesting also that Derrida goes on to add that this "unhistorical naiveté may be the basis of Husserl's supposed methodological revolution." But of course Husserl himself came to appreciate the subversions which history could work on the Enlightenment project in his later work on the crisis of the cultural sciences.

Lambert Discussed with Kant on phenomenology. Coined the term “phenomenology”.	Lambert (1728-
Herder studied with Kant. Herder wrote the seminal Treatise on the Origin of Language (published 1772). Herder established fundamental ideas about an intimate dependence of thought on language which underpin modern philosophy of language. He inspired W. von Humboldt to found modern linguistics. It was Herder who developed modern hermeneutics, or interpretation-theory, in a form that would subsequently be taken over by Schleiermacher and made vital contributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship. 1. Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language -- i.e. one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. One major consequence of this thesis for interpretation is that an interpreted subject's language is a reliable indicator of the scope of his thought. 2. Meanings or concepts consist in usages of words not their literal form. Consequently, interpretation will essentially involve pinning down word-usages. (see Fragments.) 3. Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts according to which sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, though we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of a sort of metaphorical extension from the empirical ones -- so that all of our concepts ultimately depend in one way or another on sensation. This position carries the important consequence for interpretation that any understanding of a concept must somehow capture its basis in sensation. (For this position, see e.g. On the Cognition.) Herder also has two further basic principles in interpretation-theory: (4) A principle of secularism in interpretation: the interpretation of texts must never rely on religious assumptions or means, even when the texts are sacred ones. (This principle is already prominent in works from the 1760's.) (5) A principle of methodological empiricism in interpretation: interpretation must always be based on, and kept strictly faithful to, exact observations of linguistic (and other relevant) evidence. (This principle is again already prominent in the 1760's, e.g. in the Fragments and On Thomas Abbt's Writings (1768).) Beyond this, Herder also advances a further set of interpretive principles which can easily sound much more "touchy-feely" at first hearing (the first of them rather literally so!), but which are in fact on the contrary quite "hard-nosed": (6) Herder proposes (prominently in This Too) that the way to bridge radical difference when interpreting is through Einfühlung, "feeling one's way in." , not to mean that the interpreter should perform some sort of psychological self-projection onto texts but an arduous process of historical-philological inquiry. What, though, more specifically, is the cash value of the metaphor of Einfühlung? It has at least five components: (a) Note, first, that the metaphor implies (once again) that there typically exists radical difference, a gulf, between an interpreter's mentality and that of the interpreted subject, making interpretation a difficult, laborious task (it implies that there is an "in" there which one must carefully and laboriously "feel one's way into"). (b) It also implies (This Too shows) that the "feeling one's way in" should include thorough research not only into a text's use of language but also into its historical, geographical, and social context. (c) It also implies a claim - based on Herder's quasi-empiricist theory of concepts -- that in order to interpret a subject's language one must achieve an imaginative reproduction of his (perceptual and affective) sensations. (d) It also implies that hostility in an interpreter towards the people he interprets will generally distort his interpretation, and must therefore be avoided (e) Finally, it also implies that the interpreter should strive to develop his grasp of linguistic usage, contextual facts, and relevant sensations to the point where this achieves something like the same immediacy and automaticness that it had for a text's original audience when they understood the text in light of such things (so that it acquires for him, as it had for them, the phenomenology more of a feeling than a cognition). (7) In addition, Herder insists (e.g. in the Critical Forests) on a principle of holism in interpretation. This principle rests on several motives, including: (a) Pieces of text taken in isolation are typically ambiguous in various ways (in relation to background linguistic possibilities). In order to resolve such ambiguities, one needs the guidance provided by surrounding text, in short: holism. Authors must interpret the work as a whole or will miss essential aspects of its meaning -- not only the ideas in question themselves but also meanings of the particular parts on which they shed important light. 8. Interpretation must supplement its focus on word-usage with attention to authorial psychology to establish the author's illocutionary intentions. For example, a stranger tells me, "The ice is thin over there"; I understand his linguistic meaning perfectly; but is he simply informing me?, warning me?, threatening me?, joking? . . . (c) Skinner implies that one can determine linguistic meanings prior to establishing authorial intentions. That may sometimes be so (e.g. in the example just given). But is it generally? Herder implies not. And this seems right, because commonly the linguistic meaning of a formula is ambiguous (in terms of background linguistic possibilities), and in order to identify the relevant meaning one must turn, not only (as previously mentioned) to larger bodies of text, but also to hypotheses, largely derived therefrom, about the author's intentions (e.g. about the subject-matter he intends to treat). This is a further reason why interpreters must invoke psychology. Herder also refers to the second limb of his doctrine of radical difference -- individual variations in mode of thought even within a single culture and period -- as a source of the need for psychological interpretation. 9. Interpretation requires the use of divination, a process of hypothesis, based on meager empirical evidence, but also going well beyond it, and therefore vulnerable to subsequent falsification, and abandonment or revision if falsified. After Herder, the question arose whether interpretation was a science or an art. Herder does not really address this question. But his inclination would clearly be to say that it is like rather than unlike natural science (a) He assumes (as did virtually everyone at this period) that the meaning of an author's text is as much an objective matter as the subjects addressed by the natural scientist. (b) The difficulty of interpretation that results from radical difference, and the consequent need for a methodologically subtle and laborious approach to it in many cases, make for another point of similarity between interpretation and natural science. (c) The essential role of "divination" qua hypothesis in interpretation constitutes a further point of similarity between it and natural science. Moreover, (d) even the subject-matter of interpretation is not, in Herder's view, sharply different from that dealt with by natural science: the latter investigates physical processes in nature in order to determine the forces that underly them, but similarly interpretation investigates human verbal (and non-verbal) physical behavior in order to determine the forces that underly it (Herder explicitly identifying mental conditions, including conceptual understanding, as "forces"). Herder in On the Cognition and elsewhere also develops an extremely interesting and influential position in the philosophy of mind. The following are some of its central features. Herder's position is uncompromisingly naturalistic and anti-dualistic in intent. In On the Cognition he tries to erase the division between the mental and the physical in two specific ways: First, he advances a theory that minds consist in forces [Kräfte] which manifest themselves in people's bodily behavior -- just as physical nature contains forces which manifest themselves in the behavior of bodies. (Note that the general notion of mental "forces" can already be found before Herder in Rationalists such as Wolff and Süßmilch.) He is officially agnostic on the question of what force is, except for conceiving it as something apt to produce a type of bodily behavior, and as a real source thereof (not something reducible thereto). This, strictly speaking, frees the theory from some common characterizations and objections (e.g. vitalism). But it also leaves the theory with enough content to have great virtues over rival theories: (1) The theory ties mental states conceptually to corresponding types of bodily behavior -- which seems correct, and therefore marks a point of superiority over dualistic theories, and indeed over mind-brain identity theories as well. (2) On the other hand, it also avoids reducing mental states to bodily behavior -- which again seems correct, in view of such obvious facts as that we can be, and indeed often are, in mental states which happen to receive no behavioral manifestation, and hence marks a point of superiority over outright behaviorist theories.	Herder (1744-1803) Philosophy should become relevant and useful for the people as a whole -- this is a basic ideal of Herder's philosophy.		He wrote “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People” (1765) – influenced by Kant; published his first major work, on the philosophy of language and literature, the “Fragments on Recent German Literature” (1767-8); In 1771 Herder won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language (published 1772). He also wrote This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774). In 1776, partly through Goethe's influence, he was appointed General Superintendant of the Lutheran clergy in Weimar, a post he kept for the rest of his life. During this period he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); a seminal work concerning the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782-3); his well-known longer work on the philosophy of history, the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784-91); an influential essay in the philosophy of religion, God. Some Conversations (1787); a work largely on political philosophy, written in response to the French Revolution, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793-7); and two works opposing Kant's critical philosophy, the Metacritique (1799) (against the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason) and the Calligone (1800) (against the aesthetics of the Critique of Judgment) Herder’s rejection of Metaphysics Largely in the service of this ideal, Herder's essay argues for two sharp turns in philosophy, turns which would again remain fundamental throughout the rest of his career. The first involves a rejection of traditional metaphysics, and closely follows an argument of Kant's in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Herder's case is roughly this: (1) Traditional metaphysics, by undertaking to transcend experience (or strictly, and a little more broadly, "healthy understanding," which includes, in addition to empirical knowledge, also ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics), succumbs to unresolvable contradictions between claims, and hence to the Pyrrhonian skeptical problem of an equal plausibility on both sides requiring a suspension of judgment. Moreover (Herder adds in the Fragments), given the truth of a broadly empiricist theory of concepts, much of the terminology of traditional metaphysics turns out to lack the basis in experience that is required in order even to be meaningful, and hence is meaningless (the illusion of meaningfulness arising through the role of language, which spins on, creating illusions of meaning, even after the empirical conditions of meaning have been left behind). (2) Traditional metaphysics is not only, for these reasons, useless; it is also harmful, because it distracts its participants from the matters which should be their focus: empirical nature and human society. (3) By contrast, empirical knowledge (or strictly, and a bit more broadly, "healthy understanding") is free of these problems. Philosophy should therefore be based on and continuous with this.
Schleiermacher's theories of interpretation and translation rest squarely on three of the Herder-inspired doctrines in the philosophy of language which were described earlier: (4) thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by, or even identical with, language; (5) meaning is word usage; and (7) there are deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual differences between people. Doctrine (7) poses a severe challenge to both interpretation and translation, and it is the main task of Schleiermacher's theories to cope with this challenge. Schleiermacher's most original doctrine in the philosophy of language, (8) (semantic holism), is also highly relevant in this connection, for, as Schleiermacher perceives, semantic holism greatly exacerbates the challenge to interpretation and translation posed by (7). Schleiermacher lectured on hermeneutics frequently between 1805 and 1833. The following are his main principles: (a) Hermeneutics is strictly the art of understanding verbal communication -- as contrasted, not equated, with explicating, applying, or translating it. (b) Hermeneutics should be a universal discipline -- i.e. one which applies equally to all subjects-areas (e.g. the bible, law, and literature), to oral as well as to written language, to modern texts as well as to ancient, to works in one's own language as well as to works in foreign languages, and so forth. (c) In particular, the interpretation of sacred texts such as the bible is included within it -- this may not rely on special principles, such as divine inspiration (of either the author or the interpreter). (d) Interpretation is a much more difficult task than is generally realized: contrary to a common misconception that “understanding occurs as a matter of course,” “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.” (This position derives from Schleiermacher's version of principle (7): deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual diversity.) How, then, is interpretation to be accomplished? (e) Before the interpretation proper of a text can even begin, the interpreter must acquire a good knowledge of the text's historical context. (The suggestion found in some of the secondary literature that Schleiermacher thinks historical context irrelevant to interpretation is absurd.) (f) Interpretation proper always has two sides: one linguistic, the other psychological. Linguistic interpretation's task (which rests on principle (5)) consists in inferring from the evidence consisting in particular actual uses of words to the rules that are governing them, i.e. to their usages and thus to their meanings; psychological interpretation instead focuses on an author's psychology. Linguistic interpretation is mainly concerned with what is common or shared in a language; psychological interpretation mainly with what is distinctive to a particular author. (g) Schleiermacher implies several reasons why an interpreter needs to complement linguistic interpretation with psychological in this way. First, he sees this need as arising from the deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual distinctiveness of individuals. Such distinctiveness at the individual level leads to the problem for linguistic interpretation that the actual uses of words which are available to serve as evidence from which to infer an author's exact usage or meaning will usually be relatively few in number and poor in contextual variety -- a problem which an appeal to authorial psychology is supposed to help solve by providing additional clues. Second, an appeal to authorial psychology is also required in order to resolve ambiguities at the level of linguistic meaning which occur in particular contexts (i.e. even after the range of meanings available to the author for the word(s) in question is known). Third, in order fully to understand a linguistic act one needs to know not only its linguistic meaning but also what some more recent philosophers have called its “illocutionary” force or intention. For example, if I encounter a stranger by a frozen lake who says to me, “The ice is thin over there,” in order fully to understand this utterance I need to know not only its linguistic meaning (which in this case is clear) but also whether it is being made merely as a factual statement, as a threat, as a joke … (Schleiermacher emphasizes the first of these three considerations most. However, if, as he does, one wants to argue that interpretation needs to invoke psychology generally, and if, as I hinted earlier, linguistic and conceptual-intellectual distinctiveness is not the pervasive phenomenon that he normally takes it to be, then it is arguably the latter two considerations that one should consider the more fundamental ones.) (h) Interpretation also requires two different methods: a “comparative” method (i.e. roughly, a method of plain induction), which Schleiermacher sees as predominating on the linguistic side of interpretation (where it takes the interpreter from the particular uses of a word to the rule for use governing them all), and a “divinatory” method (i.e. roughly, a method of tentative and fallible hypothesis based on but also going well beyond available empirical evidence -- the etymology to keep in mind here is not Latin divinus but French deviner, to guess or conjecture), which he sees as predominating on the psychological side of interpretation. (The widespread idea in the secondary literature that “divination” is for Schleiermacher a process of psychological self-projection into texts contains a small grain of truth -- in that it is his view that interpretation requires some measure of psychological commonality between interpreter and interpreted -- but is basically mistaken.) (i) Ideal interpretation is of its nature a holistic activity. (This principle in part rests on but also goes well beyond Schleiermacher's semantic holism.) In particular, any given piece of text needs to be interpreted in light of the whole text to which it belongs, and both need to be interpreted in light of the broader language in which they are written, their larger historical context, a broader preexisting genre, the author's whole corpus, and the author's overall psychology. Such holism introduces a pervasive circularity into interpretation, for, ultimately, interpreting these broader items in its turn depends on interpreting such pieces of text. Schleiermacher does not see this circle as vicious, however. Why not? His solution is not that all of these tasks can and should be accomplished simultaneously -- something which would be beyond human capacities. Rather, it lies in the (very plausible) thought that understanding is not an all-or-nothing matter but something that comes in degrees, so that it is possible to make progress towards full understanding in a piecemeal way. For example, concerning the relation between a piece of text and its whole text, Schleiermacher recommends that we first read through and interpret as best we can each of the parts of the text in turn in order thereby to arrive at an approximate overall interpretation of the text, and that we then apply this approximate overall interpretation in order to refine our initial interpretations of the particular parts (which in turn gives us an improved overall interpretation, which can then be re-applied towards further refinement of the interpretation of the parts, and so on indefinitely).	Schleiermacher (1768-1834)		During the periods just mentioned he was heavily occupied with the study and criticism of Kant's philosophy. This work culminated in several unpublished essays -- On the Highest Good (1789), On What Gives Value to Life (1792-3), and On Freedom (1790-3) -- which rejected Kant's conception of the “summum bonum [highest good]” as requiring an apportioning of happiness to moral desert, rejected Kant's connected doctrine of the “postulates” of an afterlife of the soul and God, and developed an anti-Kantian theory of the thoroughgoing causal determination of human action but of the compatibility of this with moral responsibility. Schleiermacher, importantly, develops a much more holistic conception of meaning than was yet found in his predecessors (goes beyond Herder's). At least three aspects of his semantic holism can be distinguished: (a) (As can be seen from a passage quoted above,) he espouses a doctrine of “the unity of the word-sphere.” This doctrine in effect says that the various specific senses which a single word will typically bear and which will normally be distinguished by any good dictionary entry (e.g. the different senses of “impression” in “He made an impression in the clay,” “My impression is that he is reluctant,” and ”He made a big impression at the party”) always form a larger semantic unity to which they each essentially belong (so that any loss, addition, or alteration among them entails an alteration in each of them, albeit possibly a subtle one). (b) He holds that the nature of any particular concept is partly defined by its relations to a ”system of concepts.” In this connection, the dialectics lectures emphasize a concept's relations as a species-concept to superordinate genus-concepts, relations as a genus-concept to subordinate species-concepts, and relations of contrast to coordinate concepts falling under the same genus-concepts. However, other types of conceptual relationships would be included here as well (e.g. those between “to work,” “worker,” and “a work”). (c) He holds that the distinctive nature of a language's grammatical system (e.g. its system of declensions) is also partly constitutive of the character of the concepts expressed within it. (This last position was also developed at about the same time by Friedrich Schlegel, who has a strong claim to be considered the real founder of modern linguistics, and for whom it constituted one of the main rationales for a new discipline of “comparative grammar” (see his On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808)). It was shortly afterwards taken over and used to similar effect by another of the founders of modern linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt.)
Romanticism The Nineteenth Century: José de Espronceda The many attempts to define Romanticism confirm, the difficulty of doing so. Sáinz de Robles defines it as an artistic revolution against what be termed the rigidity, the coldness, the regulations, the antinationalism, the cerebralism, the pagan estheticism, the religious incredulity, the preponderance of the objective over the subjective, the declamatory emphasis, and the artistic impersonality of Neo-Classicism. He lists Romanticism's characteristics as contemplation of nature, intimacies of natural life, revival of the Middle Ages, the cult of the individual, rejection of the rules of the nation against the foreign, subjective lyricism against objective epic form, anarchy of inventiveness and procedure, the intimate connection between art and life, and absolute emancipation of the YO.
Phenomenology as a term was first coined in 1764 by the Swiss-German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert from two Greek terms whose combined meaning was "the setting forth or articulation of what shows itself." He used the term to refer to the illusory nature of human experience in an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge that distinguished truth from error. Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Lambert, used the term only twice, but built the philosophical foundations for the ongoing development of it when he distinguished things as they appear to us (which he called phenomena) from things as they really are (which he called noumena). He proposed that a true and genuine knowledge of the transcendent (or noumena) was not possible as a science, but that a true and genuine knowledge of the immanent (or phenomena) as a description of the structures of human experience was possible, and proposed it as an appropriate field of philosophical and scientific inquiry. Georg W. F. Hegel, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), reacted against Kant's splitting of phenomena and noumena. He proposed that phenomena were actual stages of knowledge progressing in evolutionary fashion from raw consciousness to absolute knowledge. For Hegel, phenomenology was the science by means of which we come to absolute knowledge through studying the ways our minds appear to us. The term was picked up by other philosophers but generally used of a specific study of phenomena. By the mid 1800s, it had become synonymous with "fact," and had acquired the meaning of a purely descriptive study of any subject. In the early 1900s, a German group published a series of studies on phenomenology. The most influential thinker among the group was the Austrian-born philosopher Edmund Husserl. He sought to give philosophical foundations to a generally intuitive, non-empirical approach of phenomenological methodology. Husserl and the other like phenomenologists were generally reacting against a scientific methodology which demanded that life experiences be discarded for objective empiricism. They called for recognition that such experiences, rather than being a hindrance, could be used as a means through which reality could be explored. As a result of Husserl's influence, the term now refers not only to a descriptive methodology but also to the movement of phenomenological philosophy. Philosophers who applied phenomenological methods to diverse disciplines include Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sarte, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Jasper, Marvin Faber, and Paul Ricoeur. Though certainly not uniform in their thinking, they have generally stressed nonempirical intuitive investigation as the appropriate tool for understanding the fundamental realities of existence. Some philosophical phenomenologists (e.g., Max Scheler, Otto Grundler; Joachim Wach, Gerardus van der Leeuw) have devoted themselves to the study of religion. This is yet another sense in which the term "phenomenology of religion" may be used. Britannica’s Explanation a 20th-century philosophical movement, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. The word itself is much older, however, going back at least to the 18th century, when the Swiss-German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert applied it to that part of his theory of knowledge that distinguishes truth from illusion and error. In the 19th century the word became associated chiefly with the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., 1931), by G.W.F. Hegel , who traced the development of the human spirit from mere sense experience to “absolute knowledge.” The so-called Phenomenological movement did not get under way, however, until early in the 20th century. But even this new Phenomenology includes so many varieties that a comprehensive characterization of the subject requires their consideration.
Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a “logical” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. For most of the twentieth century, the “logical” side of Hegel's thought had been largely forgotten, but his political and social philosophy continued to find interest and support. 'Phenomenon' is a word which refers to appearances. It's a Greek word used by Plato to distinguish mere temporal appearances from the eternal Noumena of the Ideal Realm. The student of philosophy should recall Plato's parable of the shadows in the cave, where appearances were taken for realities. Phenomena are appearances. Where is the reality? In Hegel's view, probably unique in Western Philosophy, we can only know reality when we have completely mastered the appearances, since the appearances (phenomena) partially hide and partially reveal Reality (noumena, Geist) in a peculiar manner. There are degrees of reality within various phenomena. This is the origin of Hegel's idea that there can be degrees of truth in propositions. There are material phenomena and there are mental phenomena. Phenomena of mind also partially hide and partially reveal the truth. The study of phenomena is called, phenomenology, and Hegel focuses on mental phenomena, hence the title, PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, which is a study of appearances, images and illusions throughout the history of human consciousness. The term “phenomenology” had been coined by the German scientist and mathematician (and Kant correspondent) J. H. Lambert (1728 -- 1777), and in a letter to Lambert, sent to accompany a copy of his “Inaugural Dissertation” (1770), Kant had proposed a “general phenomenology” as a necessary “propaedeutic” presupposed by the science of metaphysics. More specifically, Hegel presents the evolution of consciousness, as starting with Sensory (infant’s) to Perceptual (as per Aristotle, categorization, cause & effect), to Understanding (as per Kant, unifying principle), to Self-Consciousness, and even Spiritual consciousness and beyond. Like Kant, Hegel thinks that one's capacity to be “conscious” of some external object as something distinct from oneself requires the reflexivity of “self-consciousness,” that is, it requires one's awareness of oneself as a subject for whom something distinct, the object, is presented as known. Hegel goes beyond Kant, however, in making this requirement dependent on one's recognition (or acknowledgment -- Anerkennung) as a subject by other self-consciousnesses whom one recognises in turn. In short, one's self-consciousness is in no sense direct, as it was for Descartes, for example. It comes about only indirectly via one's recognising other conscious subjects' recognition of oneself! It is in this way that the Phenomenology can change course, the earlier tracking of “shapes of consciousness” being effectively replaced by the tracking of distinct patterns of “mutual recognition” between subjects. It is thus that Hegel has effected the transition from a phenomenology of “subjective mind,” as it were, to one of “objective spirit,” thought of as culturally distinct patterns of social interaction analysed in terms of the patterns of reciprocal recognition they embody, since social life is ordered by customs we can approach the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those customs or conventions themselves -- the conventional practices, as it were, constituting specific forms of life. It is not surprising then that his account of spirit here starts with a discussion of religious and civic law. This is his standpoint of science. As for his standpoint on philosophy,	Hegel (1770-1831)	Husserl rejects the thesis that …	He was an idealist philosopher whose ideas of evolution of man from bondage to freedom had strongly influenced Karl Marx. By late 1806 Hegel had completed his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (published 1807), from 1808-1815, wrote and published his Science of Logic. In 1816 he managed to return to his university career by being appointed to a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Then in 1818, he was offered and took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German philosophical world. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work in which an abbreviated version of the earlier Science of Logic (the “Encyclopaedia Logic” or “Lesser Logic”) was followed by the application of its principles to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg but ultimately grounded in the section of the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit dealing with “objective spirit.” During the following ten years up to his death in 1831 Hegel enjoyed celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the Encyclopaedia. After his death versions of his lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were published.
In his own words: 1. (Everything follows a natural law) As we have seen, the first characteristic of the positive philosophy is that it regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws. 2. (Goal of science is to discover the natural laws) Our business is--seeing how vain is any research into what are called causes, whether first or final--to pursue an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number. 3. (Research cause and effect) Our real business is to analyze accurately the circumstances of phenomena, and to connect them by the natural relations of succession and resemblance 4. (Empirical observation is the source of knowledge) "All the good minds repeat, since Bacon, that there is no real understanding other than that based on observed facts." 5. (Ignore metaphysical discussions) As to what weight and attraction are, we have nothing to do with that, for it is not a matter of knowledge at all. Theologians and metaphysicians may imagine and refine about such questions, but positive philosophy rejects them. When any attempt has been made to explain them, it has ended only in saying that attraction is universal weight, and that weight is terrestrial attraction--that is, that the two orders of phenomena are identical, which is the point from which the question set out. 6. (Positive revolution started Descartes and Bacon?) But, if we must fix upon some marked period, to serve as a rallying point, it must be that--about two centuries ago --when the human mind was astir under the precepts of Bacon, the conceptions of Descartes, and the discoveries of Galileo. Then it was that the spirit of the positive philosophy rose up in opposition to that of the superstitious and scholastic systems that had hitherto obscured the true character of all science…. every branch of knowledge being sooner or later brought within the operation of positive philosophy. This is not yet the case. Some are still lying outside 7. (Social physics completes the classification of the sciences, it being the most complex and the most dependent on the others) social phenomena demand a distinct classification, on account of both their importance and their difficulty. They are the most individual, the most complicated, the most dependent on all others; and therefore they must be the latest--even if they had no special obstacle to encounter. This branch of science has not hitherto entered into the domain of positive philosophy. …This is the great, while it is evidently the only, gap that has to be filled to constitute, solid and entire, the positive philosophy. Now that the human mind has grasped celestial and terrestrial physics--mechanical and chemical; organic physics, both vegetable and animal--there remains one science, to fill up the series of sciences of observation: social physics. This is what men have now most need of, and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish…there can be no positive philosophy without a basis of social science, without which it could not be all- comprehensive; and, on the other hand, we could not pursue social science without having been prepared by the study of phenomena less complicated than those of society, and furnished with a knowledge of laws and anterior facts that have a bearing upon social science. 8. (Summarize the laws that covers all disciplines – unity of science) that we need what we can not obtain under the present isolation of the sciences—a combination of several special points of view; and for want of this, very important problems wait for their solution much longer than they otherwise need do -- the elucidation of the respective sciences by their combination.	Auguste Comte 1798-1857	Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte (1864)	1. (The “positivist” title has been abused) It has become the habit of the theological party to think of the antagonist scientific party, under the title of "positivists." And thus, from the habit of calling them "positivists," there has grown up the assumption that they call themselves "positivists," and that they are the disciples of M. Comte. On the other hand, those who have accepted M. Comte's system, and believe it to be the philosophy of the future, have naturally been prone to see everywhere the signs of its progress; and wherever they have found opinions in harmony with it, have ascribed these Opinions to the influence of its originator. M. Comte himself by no means claims that which some of his adherents are apt, by implication, to claim for him. He says:- "There is, doubtless, a strong analogy between my positive philosophy and what the English scientists, especially since Newton, mean by natural philosophy;" the general mode of thought and way of interpreting phenomena, which M. Comte calls "Positive Philosophy," he recognises as having been growing for two centuries; as having reached, when he wrote, a marked development; and as being the heritage of all men of science. 2. (Comte like Bacon, wanted to organize the sciences) That which M. Comte proposed to do, was to give scientific thought and method a more definite embodiment and organisation; and to apply it to the interpretation of classes of phenomena not previously dealt with in a scientific manner. He (Bacon), too, held that "Physics is the mother of all the sciences;" he, too, held that the sciences can be advanced only by combining them, and saw the nature of the required combination; he, too, held that moral and civil philosophy could not flourish when separated from their roots in natural philosophy; and thus he, too, had some idea of a social science growing out of physical science. Spencer agrees with Comte on the following: 1. All knowledge is from experience 2. All knowledge is phenomenal or relative (directly only from sense experience). Sir William Hamilton, in his "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," first published in 1829, has given a scientific demonstration of this belief. 3. Condemns the interpretation of different classes of phenomena by assigning metaphysical entities as their causes 4. Believes in invariable natural laws absolute uniformities of relation among phenomena – although Comte has not demonstrated them Spencer disagrees with Comte on: 1. The progress of our conceptions, and of each branch of knowledge, is from beginning to end intrinsically alike, not through three different philosophies, but at first, and to the last, the conceived causal agencies of phenomena, have a degree of generality corresponding to the width of the generalisations which experiences have determined; and they change just as gradually as experiences accumulate. 2. There are not three possible terminal conceptions; but only a single terminal conception. When the theological idea of the providential action of one being, is developed to its ultimate form, by the absorption of all independent secondary agencies, it becomes the conception of a being immanent in all phenomena 3. The sciences as arranged in this succession specified by M. Comte, do not logically conform to the natural and invariable hierarchy of phenomena; and there is no serial order whatever in which they can be placed, which represents either their logical dependence or the dependence of phenomena. 4. Ideas do not govern and overthrow the world: the world is governed or overthrown by feelings, to which ideas serve only as guides. The social mechanism does not rest finally upon opinions, but almost wholly upon character. Not intellectual anarchy, but moral antagonism, is the cause of political crises. All social phenomena are produced by the totality of human emotions and beliefs of which the emotions are mainly pre-determined, while the beliefs are mainly post-determined. Men's desires are chiefly inherited but their beliefs are chiefly acquired, and depend on surrounding conditions; and the most important surrounding conditions depend on the social state which the prevalent desires have produced. 5. M. Comte contends that of what is commonly known as mental science, all that most important part which consists of the subjective analysis of our ideas, is an impossibility I have very emphatically expressed my belief in a subjective science of the mind, by writing a Principles of Psychology, one half of which is subjective.
Naturalism A position that attempts to explain all phenomena and account for all values by means of strictly natural (as opposed to supernatural) categories. The particular meaning of naturalism varies with what is opposed to it. It is usually considered the opposite of idealism and is sometimes equated with empiricism or materialism; it is not easily distinguished from positivism. Naturalism limits itself to a search for causes and takes little account of reasons. Naturalism in the broad sense has been maintained in diverse forms by Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. However, these philosophers differ widely on specific questions. Some, like Comte and Nietzsche, were professed atheists, while others accepted a god in pantheistic terms. Aristotle, James, and Dewey all attempted to explain phenomena in terms of biological processes of perception; Spinoza and the idealists tended instead to emphasize metaphysics; later thinkers of all schools have placed emphasis on unifying the scientific viewpoint with an all-encompassing reality. This amalgamation of science and an over-all explanation of the universe in naturalistic terms is the source of much of contemporary philosophic thought.
Phenomenalism (Often confused with Phenomenology) The monistic view that all empirical statements (such as the laws of physics) can be placed in a one to one correspondence with statements about only the phenomenal (i.e. mental appearances) (Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind). Unlike the idealist, who believes that things cease to exist when they are not perceived, the phenomenalist thinks that these objects continue to exist as possible experiences even though they are not perceived. Everything that appears, or might appear can be described in the language of sense experience without any reference to physical objects (Warbuton) Britannica’s Explanation An epistemological theory of perception and the external world. Its essential tenet is that propositions about material objects are reducible to propositions about actual and possible sensations, or sense data, or appearances. According to the phenomenalists, a material object is not a mysterious something “behind” the appearances that people experience in sensation. If it were, the material world would be unknowable; indeed, the term matter itself would be unintelligible unless it somehow could be defined by reference to sense experiences. In speaking about a material object, then, reference must be made to a very large group or system of many different possibilities of sensation. Whether actualized or not, these possibilities continue during a certain period of time. When the object is observed, some of these possibilities are actualized, though not all of them. So long as the material object is unobserved, none of them is actualized. In this way, the phenomenalist claims, an “empirical cash value” can be given to the concept of matter by analyzing it in terms of sensations.			Some philosophers have raised the objection against phenomenalism that, if these hypothetical propositions play such an important role in the phenomenalist analysis—analyzing all material-object expressions in terms of actual and possible sense experiences—it nonetheless remains difficult to avoid using material-object expressions in “if . . . then” clauses, which would render any analysis circular. A second and even more important objection is that it is very difficult to believe that categorical propositions about material objects (e.g., “There is a fire in the next room”) can be analyzed without remainder into sets of hypotheticals or “if . . . then” clauses; i.e., that a statement about what there actually is can be reduced to a set of statements about what there would be if certain (nonexistent) conditions were to be fulfilled. 1. Leads to solipsism also, like idealism. The Private Language argument also denies phenomenalism. PLA says that a private naming and re-identification of sensations could not possibly occur and undermines phenomenalism. All language depends on rules, and rules depend on there being ways of checking that they have been correctly applied. If a phenomenalist senses red, how can he check that this sensation is the same color as the others he has labeled “red”? This is like trying to remember the time of a train and having to check this memory against itself rather than a schedule. It is a private check, not a public check and cannot be used to make sure that our public use of the word “red” is correct.
The leading element in Mill's thought is his lifelong effort to weave together the insights of enlightenment and romanticism. He subscribed unwaveringly to what he called the 'school of experience and association'. He denied that there is knowledge independent of experience and held that attitudes and beliefs are the products of psychological laws of association. His view of human beings is naturalistic and his ethics is utilitarian. But he redesigned the liberal edifice built on these foundations to the romantic patterns of the nineteenth century. Kant and Mill do in fact agree on a vital aspect of this question. They agree that if the mind is only a part of nature, no knowledge of the natural world can be a priori. Either all knowledge is a posteriori, grounded in experience, or there is no knowledge. Any grounds for asserting a proposition that has real content must be empirical grounds. However, much more important is the difference between them: whereas Kant thought knowledge could not be grounded on such a basis, and thus rejected naturalism, Mill thought it could. This radically empiricist doctrine is the thesis of the System of Logic. There Mill draws a distinction between 'verbal' and 'real' propositions, and between 'merely apparent' and 'real' inferences. The distinction corresponds, as Mill himself notes, to that which Kant makes between analytic and synthetic judgements. But Mill applies it with greater strictness than anyone had done before, insisting with greater resolution that merely apparent inferences have no genuine cognitive content. He points out that pure mathematics, and logic itself, contain real propositions and inferences with genuine cognitive content. This clear assertion is central to the System of Logic, and the basis of its continuing importance in the empiricist tradition. For if Mill is also right in holding that naturalism entails that no real proposition is a priori, he has shown the implications of naturalism to be radical indeed. Not only mathematics but logic itself will be empirical. All reasoning is empirical. What then is the basis of reasoning? Epistemologically, historically, and psychologically, Mill holds, it is enumerative induction, simple generalization from experience. We spontaneously agree in reasoning that way, and in holding that way of reasoning to be sound. The proposition 'Enumerative induction is a valid mode of reasoning' is not a verbal proposition. But nor is it grounded in an a priori intuition. All that Mill will say for it is that people in general, and the reader in particular, in fact agree on reflection in accepting it. It is on that basis alone that he rests its claim. His first great intellectual work was his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, which appeared in 1843. This was followed, in due course by many political writings including in 1863 came his Utilitarianism. Richard Whately had written a text-book, Elements of Logic (1826), which gave considerable impetus to the study, and Hamilton's more comprehensive researches had begun. Mill first worked out his theory of terms, propositions, and the syllogism; He provided the empirical sciences with a set of formula and criteria which might serve the same purpose for them as the time-worn formulae of the syllogism had served for arguments that proceeded from general principles. Mill's work is not merely logic but also a theory of knowledge such as what Locke and Hume provide. Mill's account is made more precise by its reference to the question of proof or evidence. Mill formulates five guiding methods of induction; the method of agreement, that of difference, the joint or double method of agreement and difference, the method of residues, and that of concomitant variations. The common feature of these methods, the one real method of scientific inquiry, is that of elimination. All the other methods are thus subordinate to the method of difference. Here we have a case of the occurrence of the phenomenon under investigation and a case of its nonoccurrence, these cases having every circumstance in common, save one, that one occurring only in the former; and we are warranted in concluding that this circumstance, in which alone the two cases differ, is either the cause or a necessary part of the cause of the phenomenon. It is only in the simpler cases of casual connection, however, that we can apply these direct methods of observation and experiment. In the more complex cases, we have to employ the inductive method, which consists of three operations: induction, ratiocination or deduction, and verification. Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Following his predecessors, such as Hume and Bentham, he refers to this as the principle of utility (Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness)	John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)	Wittgenstein	Causation Some causal conditions are necessary conditions: the presence of oxygen is a necessary condition for combustion; in the absence of oxygen there is no combustion. "Cause" is often used in this sense when the elimination of the cause is sought to eliminate the effect (what's causing the pain?) Some causal conditions are sufficient conditions: the presence of a sufficient condition the effect must occur (being in temperature range R in the presence of oxygen is sufficient for combustion of many substances. "Cause" is often used in this sense when we seek to produce the effect (What causes this metal to be so strong?) Looking for special circumstances: what was the cause of the fire? Oxygen? or an arsonist's match? Causes are sometimes said to be INUS conditions in that they are Insufficient but Necessary parts of an Unnecessary but Sufficient set of conditions for the effect. Striking a match may be said to be a cause of its lighting. Suppose there is some set of conditions that is sufficient for a match's lighting. This might include the presence of oxygen, the appropriate chemicals in the matchhead and the striking. The striking can be said to be a necessary part of this set (though insufficient by itself) because without the striking among those other conditions the match would not have lit. But the set itself, though sufficient, is not necessary because other sets of conditions could have produced the lighting of the match. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, (1843) A is a sufficient condition for B if every time A occurs, B must occur A is not a sufficient condition for B if A occurs without B. A is a necessary condition for B if B occurs and A must be present A is not a necessary condition for B if B occurs without A. The Direct Method of Agreement Find a causal connection between an effect and a necessary condition Which factor is always present when the effect is present? If among the residents of a dormitory there is a rash of stomach upsets, we would likely look for one food item that all the patients ate as the cause. 1. The conclusion applies only to the occurrences considered. 2. Only probable: other important conditions might have been overlooked; it might have been a combination of factors The Inverse Method of Agreement Find a causal connection between an effect and a sufficient condition Which factor is always absent when the occurrences of the effect are absent? Five factory workers are found to be inefficient relative to others who are doing the same work. The efficient workers and the inefficient workers were found to be similar in all relevant ways except one: the inefficient were not part of a profit sharing plan. Conclusion: profit sharing causes efficiency. 1. The conclusion applies only to the occurrences considered. 2. Only probable: other important conditions might have been overlooked; it might have been a combination of factors The Double Method of Agreement Find a cause that is both a necessary and a sufficient condition Which factor is always present when the effect is present? Which factor is always absent when the occurrences of the effect are absent? Eight patients have a disease and each was given some remedy or other. Four patients who are given serum S are cured. Of those who are cured no other single remedy was given to all. Of the four who were not cured, every patient was given at least one of the remedies (but none the serum S). Serum S judged to be the cure. 1. The conclusion applies only to the occurrences considered. 2. Only probable: other important conditions might have been overlooked; it might have been a combination of factors The Method of Difference Identify a sufficient condition among possible candidates in a specific occurrence The factor is the only one that is present when phenomenon is present and absent when the phenomenon is absent. Two identical white mice in a controlled experiment were given identical amounts of four different foods. In addition, one of the mice was fed a certain drug. A short time later the mouse that was fed the drug became nervous and agitated. The researchers concluded that the drug caused the nervousness. 1. Less general conclusion than the inverse method of difference, which applies to all occurrences listed The Joint Method of Agreement and Difference Identify a necessary and sufficient condition that is present is a specific occurrence. Use the direct method of agreement to isolate necessary conditions (if no factor, no effect) and the method of difference to isolate those that are also sufficient. 1. Less general conclusion than the double method of agreement, which applies to all occurrence listed; George, who exercised regularly, took vitamins, and got plenty of rest, contracted a rare disease. Doctors administered an antibiotic and the disease cleared up. convinced that the cure was caused by either the exercise, the rest, or the antibiotic, the doctors searched for analogous cases. Of the two that were found, one got no exercise, took no vitamins, and got little rest. He was given the same antibiotic and was cured. The other person, who did the same things George did, was given no antibiotic and was not cured. The doctors concluded that George was cured by the antibiotic. Method of Residues "Separate from a group of causally connected conditions and phenomena those strands of causal connection that are already known, leaving the required causal connection as the 'residue'." Method of Concomitant Variation Match variations in one condition with variations in another.
Founder of positivism. “On studying the development of human intelligence, it is found that it passes through three stages: (1) The theological, (2) the metaphysical, (3) the scientific or positive. In the theological stage it seeks to account for the world by super-natural beings. In the metaphysical stage it seeks an explanation in abstract forces. In the scientific, or positive, stage it applies itself to the study of the relation of phenomena to each other. The first step to be taken in forming a positive philosophy is to classify the sciences. The first great division we notice in natural phenomena is the division into inorganic and organic phenomena. Under the inorganic we may include the sciences astronomy, physics, chemistry; and under the organic we include the sciences physiology and sociology. These five sciences, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and sociology, we may consider the five fundamental sciences. This classification follows the order of the development of the sciences, and indicates their social relation and relative perfection. In order to reach effective knowledge, the sciences must be studied in the order named; sociology cannot be understood without knowledge of the anterior sciences. Behind and before all these sciences, however, lies the great science of mathematics--the most powerful instrument the mind can employ in the investigation of natural law--and the science of mathematics must be divided into abstract mathematics or the calculus, and concrete mathematics embracing general geometry and rational mechanics. We have thus really six great sciences, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and social physics, which Comte feels is perverted by theological and metaphysical doctrines. Comte's idea of transforming society on the basis of science, Spencer's organic theory of society). The rise of the second stage in Positivism - empirio-criticism - dates back to the 1870s - 1890s and is associated with Ernst Mach and Avenarius, who renounced even formal recognition of objective real objects, which was a feature of early Positivism. In Machism, the problems of cognition were interpreted from the viewpoint of extreme psychologism, which was merging with subjectivism.	Comte (1798-1857)	Herbert Spencer	"There is, doubtless, a strong analogy between my positive philosophy and what the English scientists, especially since Newton, mean by natural philosophy;" (see Avertissement) and further on he indicates the "great movement impressed on the human mind, two centuries ago, by the combined action of the precepts of Bacon, the conceptions of Descartes, and the discoveries of Galileo, as the moment when the spirit of positive philosophy began to be expressed in the world." That is to say, the general mode of thought and way of interpreting phenomena, which M. Comte calls "Positive Philosophy," he recognises as having been growing for two centuries; as having reached, when he wrote, a marked development; and as being the heritage of all men of science. Spencer agrees with Comte that: (1) all knowledge is from experience (like Bacon), (2) all knowledge is phenomenal (e.g. as William Hamilton, in his "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," first published in 1829), (3) rejects all metaphysical causes, (4) invariable natural laws absolute uniformities of relation among phenomena. Spencer disagrees with: (1) the three stages and says that our thinking, the progress of our conceptions, and of each branch of knowledge, is from beginning to end intrinsically alike, but may change as experience changes, (2) the beginning stage has an infinite Being as the cause, whereas the end stage concludes with “nature” (e.g to see all the observable diverse phenomena as particular cases of a single general fact, such as that of gravitation). Spencer says these two are exactly the same because it is one being, manifested in all phenomena, (3) M. Comte contends that of what is commonly known as mental science, all that most important part which consists of the subjective analysis of our ideas, is an impossibility I have very emphatically expressed my belief in a subjective science of the mind, by writing a Principles of Psychology, one half of which is subjective.
Metaphysics At the University of London, Whitehead turned his attention to issues in the philosophy of science. Of particular note was his rejection of the idea that each object has a simple spatial or temporal location. Instead, Whitehead advocated the view that all objects should be understood as fields having both temporal and spatial extensions. For example, just as we cannot perceive a Euclidean point that has position but no magnitude, or a line that has length but no breadth, it is impossible, says Whitehead, to conceive of a simple spatial or temporal location. To think that we can do so involves what he called "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness," the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.[2] As Whitehead explains, it is his view "that among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. … [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme."[3] Whitehead's basic idea was that we obtain the abstract idea of a spatial point by considering the limit of a real-life series of volumes extending over each other, for example, a nested series of Russian dolls or a nested series of pots and pans. However, it would be a mistake to think of a spatial point as being anything more than an abstraction; instead, real positions involve the entire series of extended volumes. As Whitehead himself puts it, "In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world."[4] Further, according to Whitehead, every real-life object may be understood as a similarly constructed series of events and processes. It is this latter idea that Whitehead later systematically elaborates in his imposing Process and Reality (1929), going so far as to suggest that process, rather than substance, should be taken as the fundamental metaphysical constituent of the world. Underlying this work was also the basic idea that, if philosophy is to be successful, it must explain the connection between objective, scientific and logical descriptions of the world and the more everyday world of subjective experience. In Process and Reality, rather than assuming substance as the basic metaphysical category, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. On Whitehead's view, an actual occasion is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Donald Sherburne points out, "It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is 'all window.' It is as though one were to take Aristotle's system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its preeminence by the category of relation …."[5] As Whitehead himself explains, his "philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world."[6] Significantly, this view runs counter to more traditional views associated with material substance: "There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived."[7] The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, integrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, "Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events."[8] The end result is that Whitehead concludes that "nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process."[9] Whitehead's ultimate attempt to develop a metaphysical unification of space, time, matter, events and teleology has proved to be controversial. In part, this may be because of the connections Whitehead saw between his metaphysics and traditional theism. According to Whitehead, religion is concerned with permanence amid change, and can be found in the ordering we find within nature, something he sometimes called the "primordial nature of God." Thus although not especially influential among contemporary Anglo-American secular philosophers, his metaphysical ideas have had significant influence among many theologians and philosophers of religion.	Alfred Whitehead 1861-1947
Logical positivism Also known as logical or scientific empiricism. It is a modern school of philosophy that attempted to introduce the methodology and precision of mathematics and the natural sciences into the field of philosophy. The movement, which began in the early 20th cent., was the fountainhead of the modern trend that considers philosophy an analytical, rather than a speculative, inquiry. It began in the group called the Vienna Circle, which formed around Moritz Schlick when he occupied (1920s) a chair of philosophy at the Univ. of Vienna. Among its members were the philosophers Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Victor Kraft, and the mathematicians Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, and Kurt Gödel. The movement soon had a widespread following in Europe and the United States. Among those philosophers whose work was influenced by the Vienna Circle are A. J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle. The position of the original logical positivists was a blend of the positivism of Ernst Mach with the logical concepts of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, but their inspiration was derived from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived for a time near Vienna, and G. E. Moore. The Vienna Circle in general subscribed to Wittgenstein's dictum in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that the object of philosophy was the logical clarification of thought; philosophy was not a theory but an activity. The logical positivists made a concerted effort to clarify the language of science by showing that the content of scientific theories could be reduced to truths of logic and mathematics coupled with propositions referring to sense experience. They held that metaphysical speculation was nonsensical, propositions of logic and mathematics tautological, and moral or value statements merely emotive. They championed the highly influential verification principle, from which it follows that a proposition has meaning only if some sense experience would suffice to determine its truth. The Vienna Circle disintegrated after the Nazis took control of Austria in the late 1930s. The influence of the movement, as a movement, ended c.1940. However, the concepts of the movement, particularly in its emphasis on the function of philosophy as the analysis of language, has been carried on throughout the West. See A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (1959, repr. 1966); Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (rev. ed. 1968, repr. 1979).
Realism In medieval philosophy realism represented a position taken on the problem of universals. There were two schools of realism. Extreme realism, represented by William of Champeaux, held that universals exist independently of both the human mind and particular things—a theory closely associated with that of Plato. Some other philosophers rejected this view for what can be termed moderate realism, which held that universals exist only in the mind of God, as patterns by which he creates particular things. St. Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury were proponents of moderate realism. 2 In epistemology realism represents the theory that particular things exist independently of our perception. This position is in direct contrast to the theory of idealism, which holds that reality exists only in the mind. Most contemporary British and American philosophy tends toward realism. Prominent modern realists have included Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad. See J. D. Wild, Introduction to Realistic Philosophy (1948, repr. 1984); P. K. Feyerabend, Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method (Vol. 1, 1985); Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning, and Truth (1987); Robert L. Arrington, Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism (1989). Direct realism: The view that we perceive physical objects directly, without the mediation of inner representations. Common-sense realism: The version of direct realism that holds that the external objects that we perceive directly actually possess not only the qualities that Locke designated primary qualities but also the qualities that he designated secondary qualities. Representative (or causal) realism A. This is the view that we do not perceive material objects directly but rather perceive only inner representations of them. B. In this view, we are more like TV sets receiving and reconstructing signals than like perceivers directly perceiving material substances in a world beyond the mind. 1. The signals transmitted to the mind are the primary correlates of secondary qualities (depicted in the graphic below by the causal lines proceeding from the cake to the eyes and nose). The primary correlates, in coming into contact with the sense organs, cause us to construct images, sounds, sensations, etc. and to project these sense data outwardly, just as if we were perceiving an external object.			Criticisms of common-sense realism a. Secondary qualities differ for different perceivers. For example, a room feels hot to one person, cold to another; a fabric feels rough to a tender-skinned baby, smooth to a person with work-hardened skin; a food tastes hot to one person, mild to another. (1) Conclusion: The things in the above examples cannot possess both of the secondary qualities that they are perceived to have, and they likely possess neither. The secondary qualities perceived likely exist only subjectively rather than objectively, that is, only in the minds of the perceivers, only as differing ways of experiencing the same objects. (a) In this view, only the primary correlates of the secondary qualities, not the secondary qualities themselves, exist objectively, independently of the perceiver. b Secondary qualities vary under different conditions (e.g., distance, medium, health or disease of perceiver). For example, an object that appears green to the naked eye appears blue when seen under a microscope; something that smells or tastes good to a person when healthy may smell or taste bad to the same person when sick. (1) Conclusion: Again, it is probable that the secondary qualities do not exist in the objects, objectively, and exist only in the mind of the perceivers, subjectively. (1) This possibility--which we shall call qualified direct realism--is depicted in the graphic below. According to qualified direct realism, the primary qualities of an object exist in the object itself and are perceived directly, but the secondary qualities (represented by the color and aroma of the cake) exist only in the mind of the perceiver. The perceiver projects the secondary qualities outwardly, and so these qualities, although existing in the mind of the perceiver, seem to exist objectively, as qualities of the object itself.
School of philosophy risen in Austria and Germany during 1920s, primarily concerned with the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. Among its members were Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, the leading figure of logical positivism, Hans Reichenbach, founder of the Berlin Circle, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Grelling, Hans Hahn, Carl Gustav Hempel, Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann. Logical positivists denied the soundness of metaphysics and traditional philosophy; they asserted that many philosophical problems are indeed meaningless. During 1930s the most important representatives of logical positivism emigrated to the USA, where they influenced American philosophy. Until 1950s logical positivism was the leading philosophy of science; today its influence persists especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention given to the analysis of scientific thought and in the definitely acquired results of the technical research on formal logic and the theory of probability. (1) The fundamental thesis of modern empiricism consists in denying the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. (2) Logical knowledge includes mathematics, which is reducible to formal logic. Empirical knowledge includes physics, biology, psychology, etc. Experience is the only judge of scientific theories; however, logical positivists were aware that scientific knowledge does not exclusively rise from the experience: scientific theories are genuine hypotheses that go beyond the experience. (3) A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in principle, by means of the experience -- this assertion is called the verifiability principle. The meaning of a statement is its method of verification; that is we know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false. (4) Philosophy is the activity by means of which the meaning of statements is clarified and defined (metaphysics is meaningless) (5) A scientific theory is an axiomatic system that obtains an empirical interpretation through appropriate statements called rules of correspondence, which establish a correlation between real objects (or real processes) and the abstract concepts of the theory. The language of a theory includes two kinds of terms: observational and theoretical. The statements of a theory are divided in two groups: analytic and synthetic. Observational terms denote objects or properties that can be directly observed or measured, while theoretical terms denote objects or properties we cannot observe or measure but we can only infer from direct observations. Analytic statements are a priori and their truth is based on the rules of the language; on the contrary, synthetic statements depend on experience, and their truth can be acknowledged only by means of the experience. This conception about the structure of scientific theories is perhaps the most durable philosophical principle of the logical positivism. It was proposed by H. Reichenbach and R. Carnap (6) A statement is meaningful only if it is verifiable; but, in scientific theories, there are many statements which are not verifiable -- for example, assertions dealing with quantum particles or relativistic gravitational fields. These statements are too abstract for a direct test; strictly speaking, they are meaningless. To avoid such a consequence, two different approaches were proposed. According to Schlick, the principles of a scientific theory are not statements, but rules of inference; hence the problem of their meaning does not arise (7) The other solution was proposed by Neurath: the terms which belong to the abstract language of a scientific theory are explicitly definable in a restricted language whose terms describe directly observable objects ('Physikalismus' in Scientia, 50, 1931). So a distinction between observational and theoretical terms arose. But soon Carnap realized that theoretical terms are not definable by observational ones. In a first time, he proposed a partial reducibility of theoretical to observational terms ('Testability and meaning', in Philosophy of science, 3, 1936 and 4, 1937). Later, it was supposed that all theoretical terms were removable from a scientific theory. This hypothesis was supported by two outcomes of formal logic: Craig theorem and Ramsey statement. (8) Craig theorem is an unquestionable result of formal logic. Let A and B be two set of statements, so that B is a logical consequence of A. Craig proved that (i) there is a set C of statements whose terms are common to A and B, (ii) C is a logical consequence of A and (iii) B is a logical consequence of C. Therefore, if A is the set of axioms of a scientific theory and B is the set of observational statements implied by A, then there is a set C, whose terms are common to A and B and thus they are the observational terms which occur in the axioms, so that C entails B and is a consequence of A. According to Craig theorem, it is possible to translate a scientific theory in a purely observational language without any loss of deductive power. (9) Ramsey sentence, named after English philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903-1930), was used by Carnap for dividing the axioms of a theory in two sets, say A and R, so that R contains only observational terms and expresses the empirical portion of the theory, while A is analytic and defines the meaning of theoretical terms (see Carnap for a full explanation). (10) Given a theory T, it is thus possible to build a theory T* without theoretical terms so that T and T* are equivalent with respect to observational statements, that is every observational statement O is a logical consequence of T if and only if is a logical consequence of T*. (11)	Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism (Also known as logical empiricism, logical neopositivism, neopositivism).
1^st problem -- Science as a problem of epistemology 2^nd problem – justifying scientific theories 19^th century scientists were positivists because science was “empirical” as suggested by the empiricists and by Kant, whereas others – idealists showed on epistemological grounds how science is part of an inclusive “philosophy” which is metaphysical.			Need to differentiate metaphysics, scientific and epistemological
			What is the problem with science, if men like Galileo is a man of science and positivism is all about science as Comte writes.
Opposed to the trend in the historical and social sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study of the relations between personal experience, its realization in creative expression, and the reflective understanding of this experience; the interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally, the logical development from these to the understanding of social groups and historical processes. The subject matter of the historical and social sciences is the human mind, not as it is enjoyed in immediate experience nor as it is analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or “objectifies” itself in languages and literatures, actions, and institutions. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding, however, can never be final because history itself never is: “The prototype ‘man' disintegrates during the process of history.” For this reason, his philosophical works were closely connected to his historical studies. From these works later arose the encompassing scheme of his Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (“Studies Concerning the History of the German Mind”); the notes for this work make up a complete coherent manuscript, but only parts have been published. Dilthey held that historical consciousness—i.e., the consciousness of the historical relativity of all ideas, attitudes, and institutions—is the most characteristic and challenging fact in the intellectual life of the modern world. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy of life emerge.	Dilthey (1833-1911)
Falsifiability Introduced the concept of the “logic of knowledge” as opposed to the prevailing “psychology of knowledge” and see epistemology as the logic of science, not psychological. He defines “inductive logic” as an inference passing from “singular statements” (actual observations) to universal statements (hypothesis or theories). He considers like Reichenbach, that it is the “principle of induction” that needs to studied in order to justify inductive inferences. He considers inductive logic too problematic even if based on probability.	Karl Popper
Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida has had an enormous impact on intellectual life around the world. So much so that his work has been the subject, in whole or in part, of more than 400 books. In the areas of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14,000 times in journal articles over the past 17 years 1. He was recently featured in a story in The New York Times. More than 500 US, British and Canadian dissertations treat him and his writings as primary subjects. He came into prominence in America with his critical approach or methodology or philosophy of deconstruction, and it is this line of thought that continues to identify him. Derrida's deconstructionist works are integrally related to the more general phenomenon of postmodernism. Postmodernist theories and attitudes come in a variety of forms. In the realm of social and political theory, what unites them -- from Foucault to Baudrillard, from Lyotard to Derrida and others -- is a challenge to, and largely a rejection of, both the truth value and pragmatic capacity for achieving justice or peace of the modern system of political and economic institutions, as well as the very ways in which we know and act to explain and understand ourselves. Especially in the latter theoretical and explanatory domain, Derrida's deconstructionism is provocative, if not subversive, in questioning the self-evidence, logic and non-judgmental character of dichotomies we live by, such as legitimate/illegitimate, rational/irrational, fact/fiction, or observation/imagination. During the 1960s Derrida published several influential pieces in Tel Quel, France's forum of leftist avant-garde theory. Among this group were not only those mentioned above in relation to postmodernism, but also Bataille, Barthes, Kristeva, and several others. He later distanced himself from Tel Quel. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960-1964 and the École Normale Superieure from 1964-1984. He currently directs the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he has also been Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and continues to lecture in academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Derrida is "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher -- if not the only famous philosopher," in the words of Dinitia Smith, the talented and entertaining author of the aforementioned New York Times feature "Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas." Ms. Smith confided in the article, "A scholar ... warned against asking him [Derrida] to define 'deconstruction,' the notoriously difficult and widely influential method of inquiry he invented more than three decades ago. 'Make it your last question,' the scholar counseled, because it sends deconstructionists into "paroxysms of rage.'" If Derrida and deconstruction can not be discussed one without the other, what then is deconstruction? Definitions even vary, from a seven page-explanation to a four page entry or an eleven page reference. How does Professor Derrida himself define it? He says of course a very great deal in numerous writings as well as in published interviews such as Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida. What Ms. Smith reported of their conversation at the Polo Grill is the following: "It is impossible to respond," Mr. Derrida said. "I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied." But after some prodding, he gave it a try anyway. "I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text." Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed." The name Derrida brings up controversies that would normally be reserved for political figures. In 1992 at the ever proper Cambridge University, the granting of an honorary degree to Derrida provoked an impassioned debate among the dons. The end result was the unusual step of putting the issue to vote, the first rift of its kind in twenty-nine years. It was settled by a 336-204 vote in Derrida's favor (a veritable landslide victory in the context of normal politics).	Derrida (1930-)		When I think of Derrida, I always think of a story a philosophy professor once told about Heraclitus. Heraclitus was the Greek philosopher who argued that everything in the universe was in a constant state of flux. Therefore, as he said, "You cannot step in the same river twice." Makes sense, right? It's a little odd, but it makes sense. Anyway, after his death, one of his students began teaching, and the center of his teaching was that you couldn't even step in the same river once. The moral of the story is that, if you stretch the way people think, and you develop a following for it, then after you die, somebody is sure to come along and take what you said and stretch it out until it becomes almost total nonsense. Derrida takes a good look at semantics and finds that it really doesn't make any sense. The basic idea is that every word contains and evokes every other word by association, and beyond that, that the meaning of every word is always deferred by circumstances. Because of this, ambiguity is always present, and we can never tell exactly what someone else means. Most semanticists have had to acknowledge the ambiguity of language, but they maintained that, eventually, you could get at the meaning. However, according to Derrida, meaning is made dialectically, is always a tension between opposites, and there is no central meaning holding it all together. Therefore, any unit of language could, potentially, mean just about anything. Without meaning, then there can be no Truth and no Authority, and so power relations in our entire culture more or less fall apart. This is the beginning of Deconstruction. Just like it sounds, Deconstruction revolves around taking things apart. In that respect, however, it is no different from traditional analysis. Deconstruction, however, does more than take a thing apart to see how it works. Rather, it takes a thing apart in order to see how it was put together in the first place, why it was put together like that, and whether it makes any real difference. When Derrida was first writing, he was Deconstructing philosophy, showing how it failed as a system of thought because of its dependence on an inherently flawed tool: language. However, later Deconstructionists have turned on literature, which is, of course, a completely different situation. Where many people get fed up with Deconstructionism is when the Deconstructionists say that, given the ambiguity in our language, communication is impossible (you can't step in the same river once). Another frustrating aspect of Derrideans is that their writing tends to be obtuse at the best, nonsensical at the worst. Of course, if I were going to apply their own critical lens to their work, I would feel it necessary to point out that, if you are setting out to show that communication is impossible, it is not in your best interest to write in such a way as to be easily understood. Deconstruction: A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. [First paragraph of a seven-page explanation in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deconstruction: The term denotes a particular kind of practice in reading and, thereby, a method of criticism and mode of analytical inquiry. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term: "Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." [First paragraph of a four-page definition of the term deconstruction in J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, third ed. (London: Blackwell, 1991)]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deconstruction: School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgium/North American literary critic Paul De Man. Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within texts. [Start of a four-page definition of deconstruction in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Blackwell, 1996).]

Immanent – Existing or remaining within; inherent: believed in a God immanent in humans.

Restricted entirely to the mind; subjective. Remaining within; inherent; indwelling; abiding; intrinsic; internal or subjective; hence, limited in activity, agency, or effect, to the subject or associated acts

Solipsism -- The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.

The theory or view that the self is the only reality

Eidetic -- Of, relating to, or marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images