Elisabeth Nemeth

The Selected Works of Arne Naess, ed. by Harold Glasser and Alan Drengson in cooperation with the author, Dordrecht: Springer 2005. 10 volumes. On January 12, 2009 Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess passed away at the age of 96. He was still actively involved in putting together the edition of the Selected Writings of Arne Naess . He worte an introduction to the writings which is printed at the beginning of each volume together with the extensive introduction by the editor Harold Glasser. At first sight this seems strangely repetitive and superfluous but on closer scrutiny it certainly makes sense. In view of the large breadth of philosophical themes that are presented in the volumes it is quite likely that the readers interested in the writings will come from different areas. A number of these writings make high demands on the reader who is expected to be relatively versed in logical analysis and in the work and thought of Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Gandhi, Husserl, Carnap or even Sextus Empiricus. The reader who is interested in one of these heterogenous fields is encouraged by both introductory texts to reflect on a specific theme against the backdrop of the philosophers’s entire oeuvre – and that’s a good thing

In this paper I would like to discuss some normative aspects of Otto Neurath’s concept of scientific knowledge. I will take some reflections of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist known for his harsh criticism of “philosophers” as a point of reference. I have decided to employ his “non-philosophical” perspective because of its convergence with the very tradition to which the Institute Vienna Circle has aligned itself. That tradition derived the form and power of its beginnings from the unbiased attitude, the impartiality of its intellectual and scientific standpoint. This impartial attitude was all but naive I wish to claim; it was the result of a conscious effort to liberate the philosophical vision from the sediments of a history of perception and thought that had reached its end in the 19th century.1 Of course, that that history had come to its end was felt by many scientists, philosophers and artists at the beginning of this century. What distinguished the Vienna Circle was that its members reacted with new insights into the nature of knowledge, indeed with the attempt to develop the impartiality of the scientific point of view. What had been in the foreground up to that time receded into the background for those versed in modern formal logic and empirical science. The disciplinary boundaries, most notably those between the natural sciences and the humanities became blurred. What we know became so complex and rich that traditional forms of classification were revealed as inadequate. For Neurath “Unified Science” was the name for future forms of classification and “encyclopedia” the name for the “orchestration” of the individual sciences. What remained of “philosophy” focussed on the logical analysis of language and — long neglected — the historical and practical aspects of science. Taking these general developments as my background here I want to defend the thesis that working on the “impartiality” of the scientist’s point of view can be seen as a contribution to and work on the normative dimensions of knowledge. In the case of the Vienna Circle and Otto Neurath such a contribution has nothing to do with developing a scientific conception of ethics or rationality.2 Rather it represents an attempt to analyze the scientific approach to reality and to reinforce the social effects of this approach by making it more precise. Viewed in this context Neurath’s project of a “scientific world conception” coincides with some perspectives whose topicality cannot be overestimated, Pierre Bourdieu’s epistemological reflections on sociology among them