Nikolay Milkov

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand.

For years, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was interpreted as a work on metaphysics (by Peter Hacker, David Pears and others). Recent studies demonstrated, however, that the Tractarian objects were only introduced in order to make the logic of depiction understandable. Similarly to Wittgenstein, Hegel only discussed the categories in order to lay down the hypothetical structure of what is thinkable (intelligible). Following this argument, Hegel and Wittgenstein maintained that philosophy explores thinking/language. However, thinking/language it is already there; it is not synthetic, must not be first discovered. This makes philosophy analytical in principle.

The chapters in this volume try to reveal the depth and coherence of Lotze’s philosophy. Lotze emerges as a systematic philosopher whose work addresses enduring philosophical problems: the relation between science and metaphysics, the nature of meaning, the structure of subjectivity, the foundations of logic, and the ethical demands of human life. His dialectical approach—balancing empirical rigor with metaphysical insight and logic with teleology—positions him as a key figure in the transition from classical German philosophy to contemporary thought. Lotze’s influence on a wide array of philosophical movements—from British idealism and American pragmatism to Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and early analytic philosophy—testifies the enduring relevance of his ideas. By revisiting Lotze’s work through both historical and systematic lenses, this volume aims not only to restore his rightful place in the philosophical canon but also to stimulate new conversations about the intersection of science, metaphysics, and human values.

Wittgenstein’s philosophical work has often been judged as constituting a decisive break with the philosophical tradition. Georg Henrik von Wright once wrote that it “is unlike anything I know in Western thought and in many ways opposed to aims and methods in traditional philosophy”. In this chapter we argue against this claim. We are going to show, first, that Wittgenstein was indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze through his philosophy teachers Frege and Russell. Secondly, there are two other closely related points of Lotze’s philosophy and that of Wittgenstein which are even more important. Significantly, while the traces of the above mentioned influence are clearly visible, the relatedness between Lotze’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy we have in mind is not easy to discern. The analysis of the latter will be the main subject of the present chapter. We shall also show that its examination can help to better understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817‒1881) was a leading figure of late 19th-century German philosophy. This volume provides a comprehensive reassessment of Lotze's thought and analyzes the many different aspects of his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. Lotze reconsidered the philosophy of German Idealism and initiated an objectivist turn that was instrumental in the development of leading philosophical movements of the 20th century, including analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and pragmatism. This volume seeks to demonstrate the importance of Lotze's thought to the history of philosophy. Part I addresses Lotze's influence on and relatedness to the thought of Franz Brentano, Thomas Hill Green, Francis Herbert Bradley, James Ward, Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones, William James, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to two philosophers who brought Lotze to his turn in philosophy, Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart. Part II focuses on the connection between metaphysics and epistemology in the early Lotze, on the problem of value in Lotze's “greater” Logik, on his explorations on the foundations of mathematics, on the relationship between thought and language, on human sentience, on the method of hypotheses in science, and on Lotze's logic of existence and existence-entailing concepts. The Philosophy of Rudolph Hermann Lotze will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in the history of philosophy, particularly 19th-century German philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

The paper discusses problems I struggled with when translating Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into Bulgarian. Publishing a 20th century philosopher ‘of the West’ was a serious challenge in the mid-1980s. In fact, this was the first attempt of this kind in Bulgaria. On the theoretical side, the main problem was that the literature on logical-philosophical themes in Bulgarian was scant and the terminology used in it was anything but clear and consistent. One of my objectives was to revise it and to introduce some new logical-philosophical terms. There were also specific problems with which colleagues translating the Tractatus into other languages have also struggled, for example, the question of how to translate such key terms as Satz, Sachverhalt and Sachlage. My approach was to translate these terms in a way that coheres both with ordinary language and the ideas of the Tractatus.

Shortly before G. E. Moore wrote down the formative for the early analytic philosophy lectures on Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1910–1911), he had become acquainted with two books which influenced his thought: (1) a book by Husserl's pupil August Messer and (2) a book by the Greifswald objectivist Dimitri Michaltschew. Central to Michaltschew's book was the concept of the “given”. In Part I, I argue that Moore elaborated his concept of sense-data in the wake of the Greifswald concept. Carnap did the same when he wrote his Aufbau, the only difference being that he spoke not of sense-data but of Erlebnisse. This means, I argue, that both Moore's sense-data and Carnap'sErlebnisse have little to do with either British empiricists or the neo-Kantians. In Part II, I try to ascertain what made early analytic philosophy different from all those philosophical groups and movements that either exercised influence on it, or were closely related to it: phenomenologists, Greifswald objectivists, Brentanists. For this purpose, I identify the sine qua non practices of the early analytic philosophers: exactness; acceptance of the propositional turn; descriptivism; objectivism. If one of these practices was not explored by a given philosophical school or group, in all probability, it was not truly analytic.

Logical empiricists claimed that following modern mathematical logic and math-ematical physics, they resolutely abandoned the Kantian synthetic a priori. Recently, this claim was challenged by Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson who have argued that Kant’s scientific legacy in the twentieth century philosophy was much more complex and subtle. Even before them, Quine insisted that the logical empiricists still followed Kant, above all, in preserving the sharp distinction between the underlying a priori framework of logic, on the one hand, and the empirical laws formulated within this framework, on the other hand. In this paper we are going to demonstrate, with the example of Hans Reichenbach, that this was only the tip of the iceberg of latent Kant-ianism in the works of the logical empiricists. Indeed, despite his anti-Kantian rhetoric, Reichenbach failed to purify his philosophy from the ghost of Kant at least in three respects: (i) He never became what he claimed to be: a “radical empiricist”. In fact, he often relied on a priori principles, or “definitions”. (ii) Reichenbach continued to think in Kantian terms. In particular, he took over from Kant the strong distinction between analytic and synthetic knowledge, and between propositions of ethics and propositions of logic. (iii) A third point that Reichenbach took over from Kant was the practice of criticism: he transformed it in critical investigation of our knowledge, in particular, of science. (cf. Reichenbach 1938: 7) In this paper we shall concentrate on (i) and shall not discuss (ii) and (iii). In other words, we shall criticize Reichenbach’s claim that he was a radical empiricist. Furthermore, we shall see that Reichenbach employed two conceptions of empiricism, both embedded in Kant’s theoretical heritage.

This book offers a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and connects it with the early development of analytic philosophy in Cambridge and Jena. In this book, Wittgenstein's method is presented as an epitome of analytic philosophy. It considers how Wittgenstein adopted and deepened the method of Moore and Russell and how he fused it with that of Frege. The book also explores the attempts to adopt Wittgenstein's method by the Vienna Circle, the Cambridge school of therapeutic analysis, and the Oxford school of ordinary language philosophy, as well as how it relates to some leading figures in the history of philosophy including Kant and Spinoza. The Tractatus, Wittgenstein's Method and Analytic Philosophy is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and of the history of analytic philosophy.

Die Geschichte der Philosophie wird oft einseitig verfasst. Philosophische Schulen sind entgegengesetzt präsentiert, und das aus gutem Grund. Man ist bestrebt, sie klar und deutlich zu umreißen, um ihre Identität zu vermitteln. Gleichzeitig birgt diese Herangehensweise die Gefahr, wichtige Zusammenhänge verschiedener Richtungen und Bewegungen der Philosophie aus den Augen zu verlieren. Die herkömmliche Geschichte des logischen Empirismus und der philosophischen Anthropologie der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts weist genau auf diese Gefahr hin. Sie wurde so gut wie immer in strenger Isolation von Strömungen dargestellt, die sich in eine andere Richtung orientierten. Die Aufgabe dieses Kapitels ist, eine Alternative zu dieser Herangehensweise anzubieten. Es untersucht Ähnlichkeiten und Zusammenhänge zwischen der Berliner Gruppe der logischen Empiristen um Hans Reichenbach und der „anthropologischen Wende“ in der deutschen Philosophie Ende der 1920er Jahre, vor allem, wie sie Helmuth Plessner dargestellt hat.

In 1921, John Wisdom (1904–1993) became a member of Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, where he read philosophy and attended lectures by G. E. Moore, C. D. Broad, and J. E. McTaggart. He received his BA in 1924, after which he worked for five years at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. From 1929 to 1934, Wisdom was a Lecturer in the department of logic and metaphysics at the University of St Andrews and a colleague of G. F. Stout. After the publication of his book Interpretation and Analysis (1931) and five articles on “Logical Constructions” in Mind (1931–3), Wisdom became a Lecturer in Moral Sciences in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. This gave him the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Since nothing by Wittgenstein but Tractatus appeared in print for decades, Wisdom’s publications of these years were—mistakenly—read as portents of the new ideas of Wittgenstein himself. The publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 1953 brought with it, among other things, the fall of Wisdom’s popularity.

Susan Stebbing wrote only once on Wittgenstein, in her paper ‘Logical Positivism and Analysis’ (1933). The paper was unusually critical of Wittgenstein. It put the Cambridge analytic philosophy of Moore and Russell in a sharp opposition to the positivist philosophy of the Vienna Circle, in which Stebbing included Wittgenstein. Whereas the positivists were interested in analysing language, the Cambridge realists were analysing facts. To be more explicit, the analytic philosophers were engaged in directional analysis, which seeks to illuminate (to elucidate) the multiplicity of the analysed facts. In contrast, positivists aimed at a final analysis that proves that there are simples. Stebbing’s sympathies were clearly on the side of the Cambridge realists. The important implication of Stebbing’s paper was that it urged Wittgenstein to change the style of his philosophy, abandoning those points which allegedly connected him with the Vienna Circle.

The Chapter discusses Susan Stebbing’s conception of analytic philosophy as a discipline that can help to achieve clear thinking not only in fields of academic interest but also in public matters. We first explore Stebbing’s long road to analytic philosophy, her mature position as an analytic philosopher and her work on developing and in defense of clear thinking. Then we show that this work of Stebbing’s is the clearest expression of a side of the early analytic philosophy that is generally neglected. Analytic philosophy, as seen by its founding fathers G. W. Moore and Russell, can help us to improve our thinking. As a matter of fact, many of its contemporaries saw it this way. Especially close to Stebbing’s understanding of the practical significance of analytic philosophy was Russell. This side of analytic philosophy was not forgotten in the UK in the first years after the Second World War—but in the 1960s and later by what is now called late analytic philosophy.

Die Berliner Gruppe um Hans Reichenbach, Kurt Lewin, Walter Dubislav, Alexander Herzberg, Kurt Grelling und Carl Gustav Hempel, die die »Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Philosophie« in Berlin leitete, verstand sich als gleichberechtigter Partner der Wiener Kollegen und schlug durchaus einen eigenständigen Weg zu »einer an der exakten Wissenschaft geschulten Philosophie« (Reichenbach) ein. Im öffentlichen und geistigen Leben der deutschen Hauptstadt spielte sie eine bedeutende Rolle, bevor ihre Mitglieder durch den Nationalsozialismus ins Exil gezwungen wurden. Nach ihrer Emigration haben Reichenbach, Hempel und andere für die Entwicklung der analytischen Philosophie und der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie im angelsächsischen Sprachraum eine bedeutende Rolle gespielt. Der Band fasst erstmals in einer repräsentativen Auswahl die Texte der Berliner Gruppe in einer Anthologie zusammen und zeigt die Bedeutung und die Einheitlichkeit der Gruppe als – neben dem Wiener Kreis – zweitem Entstehungsort exakter Philosophie.

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36).

The present paper has two objectives. First, it explicates the story, initially portrayed by Eckart Förster (2012), that allegedly philosophy started with publishing of Kant’s CPR and ended a quarter century later when Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind appeared. We address the questions in what sense this happened and how is this development to be interpreted? Secondly, we demonstrate that similar radical transition from new, “true” beginning of philosophy to its apparent finishing took place in two other, high profile occasions in the history of Western philosophy, in two key points of its development: in the years 390–365 BC, between the early and the late Plato, and between 1898 and 1922, between Russell and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. These three short-lived, spectacular transitions from philosophy’s alleged start to its alleged ultimate accomplishment give us good reason to speak about a specific 25-years principle in philosophy. In a peculiar way, this principle reveals philosophy’s true nature.

Aristotle first investigated different modes, or ways of being. Unfortunately, in the modern literature the discussion of this concept has been largely neglected. Only recently, the interest towards the concept of ways increased. Usually, it is explored in connection with the existence of universals and particulars. The approach we are going to follow in this chapter is different. It discusses Wittgenstein’s conception of higher ontological levels as ways of arranging elements of lower ontological levels. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein developed his ontology of ways in six steps: Constructing states of affairs out of objects; Constructing propositions out of states of affairs; Constructing propositional signs; Constructing thoughts with the help of propositional signs; Constructing truth / falsity; Constructing works of art. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein added further five ways of producing new ontological levels: the meaning of a proposition is the way in which it is verified; the child gets command on language/calculus by way of replicating demonstrations of the teacher; the products of mind are ways of doing something; an action is a way of carrying out the instructions for acting.

Karl Popper has often been cast as one of the most solitary figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The received image is of a thinker who developed his scientific philosophy virtually alone and in opposition to a crowd of brilliant members of the Vienna Circle. This paper challenges the received view and undertakes to correctly situate on the map of the history of philosophy Popper’s contribution, in particular, his renowned fallibilist theory of knowledge. The motive for doing so is the conviction that the mainstream perspective on Popper’s philosophy makes him more difficult to understand than might otherwise be the case. The thinker who figures most significantly in the account of Popper developed in these pages is Leonard Nelson. Both a neo-Friesian and neo-Kantian, this philosopher deeply influenced Popper through his student Julius Kraft, who met with Popper on numerous occasions in the mid 1920s. It is in the light of this influence that we understand Popper’s recollection that when he criticized the Vienna Circle in the early 1930s, he looked upon himself “as an unorthodox Kantian”.

Shortly before G. E. Moore wrote down the formative for the early analytic philosophy lectures on Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1910–1911), he had become acquainted with two books which influenced his thought: (1) a book by Husserl's pupil August Messer and (2) a book by the Greifswald objectivist Dimitri Michaltschew. Central to Michaltschew's book was the concept of the given. In Part I, I argue that Moore elaborated his concept of sense-data in the wake of the Greifswald concept. Carnap did the same when he wrote his Aufbau, the only difference being that he spoke not of sense-data but of Erlebnisse. This means, I argue, that both Moore's sense-data and Carnap'sErlebnisse have little to do with either British empiricists or the neo-Kantians. In Part II, I try to ascertain what made early analytic philosophy different from all those philosophical groups and movements that either exercised influence on it, or were closely related to it: phenomenologists, Greifswald objectivists, Brentanists. For this purpose, I identify the sine qua non practices of the early analytic philosophers: exactness; acceptance of the propositional turn; descriptivism; objectivism. If one of these practices was not explored by a given philosophical school or group, in all probability, it was not truly analytic

Historians of philosophy commonly regard as antipodal Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. This paper, however, establishes that during a formative phase in both of their careers Russell and Husserl shared a range of seminal ideas. In particular, the essay adduces clear cases of family resemblance between Husserl’s and Russell’s philosophy during their middle period, which spanned the years 1905 through 1918. The paper thus challenges the received view of Husserl’s relation to early analytic philosophy and this by pursuing two strategies of exposition. One involves comparing Husserl with Russell, and not, as has been the usual practice, with Frege. The other, which follows the first, foregrounds Husserl’s thinking vis-à-vis Russell’s from 1905 onward, a move that constitutes a break with what has become the standard approach of emphasising the relatedness of Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900/1) to analytic philosophy. Moreover, this approach discloses two chief grounds of relatedness between the middle Husserl and the middle Russell. One is their shared interest in exploring philosophical “fundamentals”. The second consists of common elements shared by their epistemologies and philosophies of mind.