Matthias Neuber

Phänomenologie, Neukantianismus und logischer Empirismus waren die dominanten Strömungen in der deutschsprachigen theoretischen Philosophie des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Die Beziehungen dieser drei philosophischen Positionen untereinander wurden in der philosophiehistorischen Forschung bisher allenfalls in Teilkonstellationen untersucht. Der Band liefert erstmals eine Zusammenschau dieser drei Positionen. Die Autoren gehen in ihren Aufsätzen der Frage auf den Grund, wie die Beziehungen zueinander zu bestimmen sind und zwar unter dem Gesichtspunkt der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie, dem Projekt, das alle drei Protagonisten – Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer und Moritz Schlick – verfolgten und dabei jeweils eine eigene Version entwickelten. Die Aufsätze sind in drei Blöcken zusammengefasst. Der erste Block widmet sich Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie, der zweite Ernst Cassirers Neukantianismus und der dritte dem logischem Empirismus von Moritz Schlick. In ihren Beiträgen stellen die Autoren immer wieder Bezüge zu den jeweils anderen Protagonisten und ihren für die Fragestellung maßgeblichen Schriften her. Der Band richtet sich an Forscher und Studierende, die sich mit der Geschichte der Wissenschaftsphilosophie befassen und die Struktur des Diskurses in der ‚kontinentalen‘ Philosophie des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts nachvollziehen möchten.

Hans Vaihinger and the Stiftung Nietzsche-Archiv. The Letters to Richard Oehler. Hans Vaihinger’s letters to Richard Oehler document the ideological constellation in the context of the First World War. Unconcealed enthusiasm for the war, associated national-chauvinist resentment, and pronounced anti-communism immediately after the war clearly emerge. At first sight, this may be surprising, since Vaihinger is generally regarded as a progressive liberal pacifist. As this article attempts to make clear, however, it is also evident in Vaihinger’s case that the First World War and its immediate aftermath led – at least temporarily – to quite questionable intellectual attitudes even among declared pacifists. In this respect, Vaihinger’s letters to Nietzsche’s cousin, librarian at the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar and later convinced National Socialist Richard Oehler are evaluated as revealing documents of contemporary history.

This paper shows that Cassirer’s philosophy of mathematics underwent a significant transformation by the end of the 1920s. This transformation was due to Cassirer’s reception of the ‘foundational crisis’ within mathematics itself. David Hilbert’s conception of the ‘ideal elements’ of mathematics attracted Cassirer’s particular attention. Indeed, he sought a ‘transcendental deduction’ of these elements. Reflection on this issue is therefore essential to providing an adequate interpretation of the later Cassirer’s enterprise in the philosophy of mathematics.

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate over ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations is well explored, as far as its course in Britain is concerned. F. H. Bradley’s idealistic internalism, on the one hand, and Bertrand Russell’s realistic externalism, on the other, were at the center of this debate. Less well known, however, is that there was also a discussion about relations in the United States at the time. The central figures in this discussion were Edward Gleason Spaulding and John Dewey. Like Russell, Spaulding advocated a realist-inspired externalism, while Dewey criticized this viewpoint from a pragmatist perspective. The aim of the present paper is to reconstruct the exchange between Spaulding and Dewey and to elaborate the specifics of this exchange. In doing so it will emerge, among other things, that, in contrast to Bradley’s idealist rejection of externalism, Dewey’s pragmatist attempt at a refutation was more in line with common sense and science and that Spaulding’s version of externalism differed markedly from Russell’s in its strong empirical orientation. Overall, an undeservedly forgotten chapter in the history of early twentieth-century American philosophy is revisited and reassessed.

Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) is often reduced to his role as father of Wilfrid Sellars. This is unfair because during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Roy Wood was one of the leading figures of the then prevailing American realist movement. In the present paper, I will focus on one particular facet of R. W. Sellars’ philosophical approach: his continual examination of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. I shall primarily reconstruct his discussion of Einstein’s theory, as it can be found in his seminal The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932). In contrast to authors such as Bertrand Russell or Émile Meyerson, Sellars refused to interpret special relativity in a realist vein. In his view, it should be seen as an “ars mensurandi” and thus being interpreted purely operationally. As with Einstein himself, the concept of simultaneity was his paradigm case in point. However, Sellars opined that besides the physical (mensurational) concepts of time and simultaneity there also exists an ontological understanding of these notions. “Real” time and “absolute” simultaneity are, according to Sellars, the indispensable non-relativistic counterparts to Einstein’s respective relativistic conceptions. They are to be interpreted realistically since they prove, Sellars maintains, to be explanatory regarding events in Einstein-Minkowski’s world. In the course of the paper, I shall compare this view with the one defended by Henri Bergson. Furthermore, Sellars’ later approach from the 1940s and ‘50s will be briefly considered and critically discussed by confronting it with more recent attempts at ontologically ‘grounding’ special relativistic kinematics.