Andreas Vrahimis

Dieser Aufsatz versucht darzulegen, dass die Geschichte der sogenannten Teilung der Wege innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Philosophie, angefangen bei der von Friedman dargestellten Konfrontation von Carnap, Cassirer und Heidegger, in viele Richtungen verfolgt werden kann. Unser Rückblick zeigt zum Beispiel, wie die deutschsprachige Rezeption Bergsons die von Scheler initiierten Anfänge eines Dialogs zwischen Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie begünstigte. Eine Rezeption, die auch die frühe Kritik an der intuitiven Metaphysik entscheidend prägte, aus der sich schließlich ein vollwertiger Angriff des Logischen Empirismus auf die Metaphysik entwickelt hatte. Schauen wir mit Friedman schließlich nach vorn, wird die Trennung zweier Traditionen voneinander deutlich. Dabei hatten Frankfurter Schule und Logischer Empirismus in den 1930er Jahren beide noch gegen metaphysische Tendenzen gekämpft, die sie als Verfechter einer autoritären Politik beurteilten. In gewisser Weise besiegelte Horkheimers Kommentar von 1937 den Abschied, indem er ein vereinfachtes Bild der zeitgenössischen Philosophie entwarf und sie in drei Lager – Metaphysik, Positivismus und Kritische Theorie – spaltete. Dieser Artikel zeigt nun allerdings, dass sein von polemischen Schmähungen geprägtes Bild korrekturbedürftig ist. Horkheimer verwechselt frühere und spätere Ausprägungen des Positivismus und versäumt es dabei, deren jeweilige Irrtümer voneinander zu unterscheiden. Dass die Kritik weniger auf Vertreter des «linken Flügels» zutrifft als auf jemanden wie Schlick, der die begriffliche Erkenntnis von Tatsachen streng von einem bloß wertenden Kennen trennte, war hingehen innerhalb des Wiener Kreises eindeutiger. Unser Blick auf dessen frühe Entwicklung einer Intuitionskritik hat wiederum gezeigt, dass Horkheimers Charakterisierung nicht mit dem Angriff der Logischen Empiristen auf Bergsons Metaphysik der Intuition übereinstimmt.

Within the history of analytic philosophy, L.S. Stebbing was among the few figures who explicitly saw something important and worth defending in the early Whitehead’s philosophy of nature, even if she was unwilling to go along with the later Whitehead’s change of direction. This chapter examines Stebbing’s responses to Whitehead primarily during the period, around the 1920s, before her focus turned to her better-known discussions of what she called ‘directional analysis’. Stebbing produced a series of detailed responses to Whitehead, endeavouring to render his theses and concepts as precise and clear as possible, so as to salvage those worth defending. During this time, some of Stebbing’s original views are presented as solutions to problems found in Whitehead. This chapter demonstrates that, within this Whiteheadian framework, Stebbing developed an original conception of abstraction and its significance for the methodology of science. Apart from reconstructing Stebbing’s theory of abstraction, this chapter highlights its relevance to contemporary debates in the philosophy of science, especially concerning the conception of abstraction as selective attention.

In ‘Brentano’s Methodology as a Path through the Divide’, Röck makes two related claims. (A) Röck argues that there exists a philosophical dilemma between description and logical analysis, and that the current divide between continental phenomenology and analytic philosophy may be seen as a consequence of the dilemma. (B) Röck further argues that Brentano’s work integrates description and logical analysis in a way which ‘can provide a suitable starting point for an equally successful integration of these methods in contemporary philosophy’ (Axiomathes 27:475–489, 2017). Without disputing Röck’s claim (B) about the suitability of Brentano’s work for such an integration, this paper questions (A) by examining the influence of Brentano and his school on early analytic philosophy. As recent scholarship in the history of analytic philosophy demonstrates, contrary to Röck’s contention, many prominent analytic philosophers conversed with Brentano and his school’s conceptions of phenomenological description.

In some of her earliest writings, Susan Stebbing developed a hitherto overlooked response to the scientific realism debate. This paper reconstructs Stebbing’s objections against different forms of scientific anti-realism defended by Pragmatism, Bergson, and his ‘New Positivist’ followers. Within the broader context of her critique of ‘anti-intellectualism’, Stebbing argues that the different forms of epistemic instrumentalism upheld by each side lead to widely divergent views of scientific theory choice. F.C.S. Schiller’s Pragmatism maintains that scientific hypotheses are arbitrary postulates, partly confirmed by their ‘workings’. By contrast, drawing on Bergson’s method of intuition, the New Positivists radically divorce the practical utility of scientific hypotheses from their truth-value. While both sides rely on Poincaré’s conventionalism, Stebbing argues that he not only rejected their brands of instrumentalism, but also defended a version of structural realism. Stebbing demonstrates the opposition between these purported allies by applying their views to the question of theory choice between Euclidean and non-Euclidean axioms in geometry. In doing so, she expresses her own preference for a realist alternative, thus paving the path to her better-known later defences of realism.

Bergson enjoyed immense popular acclaim at around the time Schlick criticised his metaphysical method of intuition. Schlick’s published writings focus primarily on Bergson’s thesis that intuition constitutes knowledge, which he rejects as a contradictio in adjecto. A clearer view of Schlick’s familiarity with Bergson’s work emerges from his Nachlass, which this paper examines. Schlick understood Bergson’s views as a dangerous revival of medieval doctrines threatening the development of a wissenschaftliche Philosophie, even if a radical empiricism comparable to Bergson’s was upheld by the Machians. His 1912-1924 lecture notes elucidate Schlick’s positioning of Bergson within the historical context of philosophical responses to evolutionary biology. While Schlick rejects Bergson’s metaphysics, he appreciates parts of his philosophy of biology. I argue that Schlick agrees with Bergson in viewing the content of our immediate acquaintance as an incommunicable Heraclitean flux, and show that their disagreement about intuition’s epistemic status stems from this shared premise.

According to the standard account, early analytic philosophy clashed with Pragmatism when Moore and Russell attacked the James-Schiller theory of truth from 1908 onwards. While recent scholarship has focussed on revising this account of the relation between the two traditions, one significant piece of the puzzle has remained overlooked: Stebbing’s debate with Schiller. The debate commences with Schiller’s attempt to answer Moore’s critique of the Pragmatist theory of truth. Stebbing enters the debate in 1912 by demonstrating Schiller’s answer to be inadequate, which Schiller addresses in two sets of replies. Contesting the received view of Stebbing’s later conversion to analytic philosophy, this paper will demonstrate that she defends a variant of Moore’s position, even as – far from being Moore’s ‘disciple’ – she advances beyond it. In the course of the debate, Stebbing raises a number of hitherto underestimated objections against any Pragmatist theory of truth that eschews the attempt to define truth. Stebbing centrally argues that, without espousing a definition of truth, any effort to set up criteria for truth, or to distinguish truths from truth-claims that work without being true, must inevitably falter. While Stebbing’s challenges push Schiller towards articulating a fallibilist form of confirmationism, this paper shows that he fails to adequately answer Stebbing’s main objection.

Textor's The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn Against Metaphysics examines the voluntarist background of Schlick's epistemology, including his conception of knowledge as essentially involving judgements that relate at least two terms, and his connected objection against according intuition epistemic status. Textor interprets Schlick's conception of intuition in light of Schopenhauer's distinction between ordinary and extraordinary cognition. Thus Textor argues that Schlick takes intuition to be a form of “steady contemplation” (Disappearance, 348) of an object that is “either a universal or a particular” (332). I suggest an alternative interpretation, according to which Schlick takes intuition to be an immersion into the contents of the stream of consciousness, which he claims to be a formless “Heraclitian flux” (General Theory, 31, 156). This interpretation allows for a defence, against Textor's objections, of Schlick's thesis that the aim of knowledge is prediction. If the kind of flux given in pure intuition is genuinely ‘Heraclitian’ – that is to say, if the stream of consciousness is ever-changing and unrepeatable – then it is simply impossible for “the devotee of intuition” (General Theory, 150) to predict its course. By contrast, the process of re-cognition that constitutes knowledge is intimately tied to prediction.

Textor's The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn Against Metaphysics examines the voluntarist background of Schlick's epistemology, including his conception of knowledge as essentially involving judgements that relate at least two terms, and his connected objection against according intuition epistemic status. Textor interprets Schlick's conception of intuition in light of Schopenhauer's distinction between ordinary and extraordinary cognition. Thus Textor argues that Schlick takes intuition to be a form of “steady contemplation” (Disappearance, 348) of an object that is “either a universal or a particular” (332). I suggest an alternative interpretation, according to which Schlick takes intuition to be an immersion into the contents of the stream of consciousness, which he claims to be a formless “Heraclitian flux” (General Theory, 31, 156). This interpretation allows for a defence, against Textor's objections, of Schlick's thesis that the aim of knowledge is prediction. If the kind of flux given in pure intuition is genuinely ‘Heraclitian’ – that is to say, if the stream of consciousness is ever-changing and unrepeatable – then it is simply impossible for “the devotee of intuition” (General Theory, 150) to predict its course. By contrast, the process of re-cognition that constitutes knowledge is intimately tied to prediction.

The controversy between Edmund Husserl and Moritz Schlick played a significant role in forging divisions between the phenomenological tradition and analytic philosophy. While Schlick systematically criticised multiple facets of Husserl’s outlook from 1910 onwards, Husserl’s brief response in the 1921 foreword to his Logische Untersuchungen was highly polemical. Given that he does not address Schlick’s criticisms in detail, scholarship has hitherto focussed primarily on defending Husserl’s position. In many such cases, Schlick’s position has been misconstrued, primarily because his earliest and most detailed response to Husserl has not been taken into account. This paper reconstructs Schlick’s overall argumentative strategy from his entry into the Psychologismusstreit in 1910, up to his response to Husserl in the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre in 1925. Schlick’s critique of Husserl begins with his early onslaught against the ‘independence theory’ of truth, which is then gradually connected to his overall critique of intuition. Any defence of Husserl from Schlick’s objections is best undertaken in light of this overall argumentative strategy.

After the attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle failed in the late 1930s, Adorno stood at the forefront of critical theory’s polemics against ‘positivism’. Given these later polemical exchanges, some of the tendencies common to both movements have remained overlooked. Among these is their opposition to the phenomenological tradition. This paper focusses on certain features common to Schlick’s and Adorno’s critical responses to Husserl. The Machians, including Adorno’s supervisor Hans Cornelius, were targeted by Husserl’s onslaught against psychologism in 1900. The young Schlick’s Machian background had motivated his contribution to the Psychologismusstreit, in the context of which he launched a series of objections against Husserl’s ‘independence theory of truth’. Adorno’s later doctoral dissertation under Cornelius was also motivated by the effort to defend his master against Husserl’s objections. Schlick’s criticisms intensified in later works, where Husserl’s epistemology of intuition is seen as yet another instance of the widespread confusion between knowledge and acquaintance. Schlick’s warnings against Husserl’s turn towards the irrationalist fashions of his day find their echo in Adorno’s ‘Metakritik’. Apart from their broad agreement in how they understand Husserl’s positioning within his context, Schlick and Adorno also develop a similar criticism of Husserl’s account of intuition as failing in its aspiration to discover unmediated givenness, which it confuses with mediated conceptual knowledge. Unfortunately, while Adorno explicitly acknowledges Schlick’s critique of Husserl, he also misconstrues it as a scientistic rejection of metaphysical nonsense, thus failing to acknowledge the proximity to his approach.

Despite its formative influence on the subsequent emergence of a supposed ‘divide’ between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy, the clash between the phenomenological tradition and early analytic philosophy is only a small part of a much broader, complex, and multi-faceted ‘parting of the ways’ between various strands of interwar Germanophone philosophy. It was certainly more than two parties that parted their ways. As Friedman (2000) rightly saw, this ‘parting’ was indeed largely an outcome of the post-war context of Neo-Kantianism’s ‘decline’. The ensuing power vacuum generated clashes between multiple philosophical tendencies vying for the institutionally dominant position previously occupied by the Neo-Kantian schools. This power-struggle included, apart from Cassirer’s last stance in defence of Neo-Kantianism, not only the Logical Empiricists and the various offshoots of the Phenomenological tradition, but also Lebensphilosophie, Philosophical Anthropology, and the Frankfurt School. This paper will trace a path through some of the tendencies involved in the abovementioned ‘parting of the ways’, in an effort to bring some of them back into dialogue. I will focus on exploring one specific facet of Horkheimer’s account of the ‘parting of the ways’, namely his critique of the notion of givenness. The overall goal of the paper will be to set up a dialogue between three parting ways towards givenness: Horkheimer’s polemic against the Logical Empiricist myth of the given, Schlick’s polemic against the Bergsonian myth of the given, and the Bergsonian methodology of intuition.

Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell’s 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own ‘logical atomism’ in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to ‘evolutionism’. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing’s criticisms of Russell’s overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley’s and C.H. Waddington’s application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism’s relation to the philosophy of biology.

Maria Rosa Antognazza's work has issued a historical challenge to the thesis that the analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) attacked by epistemologists from Gettier onwards was indeed the standard view traditionally upheld from Plato onwards. This challenge led to an ongoing reappraisal of the historical significance of intuitive knowledge, in which the knower is intimately connected to what is known. Such traditional accounts of intuition, and their accompanying claims to epistemological primacy, constituted the precise target of Moritz Schlick's critique. Schlick engages with this topic throughout his oeuvre, from some of his early epistemological writings, to his anti-metaphysical stance as a leading Logical Empiricist. Schlick crucially distinguishes knowledge from mere acquaintance, denying that the latter has epistemic status. He therefore argues that the very notion of ‘intuitive knowledge’ is a contradictio in adjecto.

The early Schlick developed an evolutionary biological account of play. He contrasted play with work. Where work encompasses all activity that is undertaken for the sake of some practical outcome, play renders what was previously a mere means into an end enjoyable in itself. Schlick thus distinguished between aesthetic, religious, scientific, and ethical game types. This paper shows that this typology underlies his later attempts to naturalize these fields, and allows us to clarify the relation between object-games and their description within the scientific game. Schlick's demarcation between aesthetic and scientific games arguably prefigures the Vienna Circle's anti-metaphysical stance.

It is commonly assumed that while Nietzsche’s intellectual influence significantly marked 20th century ‘continental’ philosophy, his sway over analytic philosophy was conspicuously minimal. To challenge this received view, this essay demonstrates that the reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy formed a space of dialogue among three founding figures of analytic philosophy: Schlick, Wittgenstein, and Waismann. A significant Nietzschean influence guided Schlick’s project of naturalising ethics. Schlick nonetheless maintained a critical attitude towards various aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as his assertion of the will to power. Despite their proximity, Wittgenstein’s understanding of several of Nietzsche’s views (under the influence of Spengler) deviated from Schlick’s more elaborate interpretation. Wittgenstein concurred with Schlick’s criticism of an absolute ‘ought’, despite his overall rejection of Schlick’s naturalisation of ethics. In Waismann’s articulation of his own view of the relation between ethics and science, we find an emphasis on an element that is common in Schlick and Wittgenstein, namely their rejection of the possibility of scientifically justifying moral claims. Waismann’s criticisms of Nietzsche’s ethics can thus be brought into dialogue with Schlick’s and Wittgenstein’s responses, especially in the case of the notion of eternal recurrence.

In a move characteristic of appropriationist approaches to the history of philosophy, Katzav (Asian Journal of Philosophy 2(47):1–26, Katzav, 2023a) argues that Grace Andrus de Laguna had, already in 1909, developed what is effectively a critique of analytic philosophy (as a form of epistemically conservative philosophy). In response to Katzav’s claim, this symposium paper attempts to pay closer attention to the context of de Laguna’s paper. As Katzav also acknowledges, de Laguna was dialogically engaged with two non-analytic tendencies in her contemporary philosophy, namely pragmatism and absolute idealism. More specifically, her target is Dewey’s, 1905 defence of ‘immediatism’ (and, by extension, James’ ‘radical empiricism’), which was put forward in opposition to absolute idealism. In 1909, de Laguna separates ‘immediatism’ from ‘instrumentalism’ as two distinct tendencies within pragmatism, rejecting the former and embracing the latter. By thus situating her critique, I argue that, while successful against Deweyan non-analytic ‘immediatism’ (and possibly also James’s Bergsonist variant of this view), it cannot, without further ado, be charitably interpreted as applicable against Russell’s analytic theory of sense-data.

In conversations with Schlick and Waismann from June and December 1930, Wittgenstein began to turn his attention to the topic of games. This topic also centrally concerned Schlick. In his earliest philosophical output, Schlick had relied on the results of evolutionary biology in setting out an account of the emergence of the human species’ ability to play [Spiel] as a prerequisite for the genesis of scientific knowledge. Throughout his subsequent works one finds fragmentary appeals to this early view, e.g. in his oft misunderstood claim that play constitutes the meaning of life. Wittgenstein’s turn to the topic of games in 1930 not only happened while Professor Schlick was in the room, but was also coupled with an explicit response to Schlick’s 1930 book Fragen der Ethik. Schlick here employs the example of chess to distinguish between rules and their application – a distinction which underlies his whole attempt to naturalise ethics as a descriptive psycho-sociological discipline. This paper investigates the relation between Wittgenstein’s and Schlick’s accounts of games in light of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Schlick’s ethics. Wittgenstein’s objections can be answered by taking Schlick’s theory of play into consideration.

At the heart of Mizrahi’s project lies a sociological narrative concerning the recent history of philosophers’ negative attitudes towards scientism. Critics (e.g. de Ridder (2019), Wilson (2019) and Bryant (2020)), have detected various empirical inadequacies in Mizrahi’s methodology for discussing these attitudes. Bryant (2020) points out one of the main pertinent methodological deficiencies here, namely that the mere appearance of the word ‘scientism’ in a text does not suffice in determining whether the author feels threatened by it. Not all philosophers use the term in ‘inherently negative’ (29) or pejorative ways. In this paper, I not only corroborate Bryant’s critical claim, but argue that Mizrahi’s response to this part of Bryant’s objection is inadequate.

The concepts of work, labour, leisure, and play have been widely debated by the social sciences. By contrast, most canonical figures in the history of analytic philosophy have written very little, if anything, on the topic. One of the few exceptional discussions of the concept of labour and its history can be found in Bertrand Russell’s popular work from the 1930s, and more specifically his well-known essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’. In the essay, Russell attempts a spirited defence of a specific, qualified proposal for eventual reform: the universal limitation of the working day to four hours. Looming in the background of this proposal is a bolder thesis, namely the view that social progress involves the eventual minimisation (if not the complete elimination) of labour in the sphere of human activity. It is this bolder view that, as I shall show in what follows, Russell at least partly shares with another philosopher whose work shaped the history of analytic philosophy, Moritz Schlick. While Russell's work on the future of leisure and labour was written for a popular audience and widely read, Schlick’s early writings on work and play have not received adequate scholarly attention. Aside from some differences in their scope and details, there are some striking parallels between Russell’s and Schlick’s overall views on the future of work and play.

Is there a substantial difference between a portrait depicting the sitter’s face made by an artist and an image captured by a machine able to simulate the neuro-physiology of facial perception? Drawing on the later Wittgenstein, this paper answers this question by reference to the relation between seeing a visual pattern as (i) a series of shapes and colours, and (ii) a face with expressions. In the case of the artist, and not of the machine, the portrait’s creative process involves the ability to see both aspects. From the perspective of the image’s viewer, the distinction is more difficult to draw. I address this difficulty by further distinguishing between two attributes of portraits: their representational accuracy, and their ability to convey the artist’s reflection on her experience of seeing the sitter face-to-face. While artificial intelligence can mimic this latter reflective ability, it cannot exactly reproduce it.

In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity, profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing, Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched different critical attacks against some of Bergson’s views. This book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an ‘anti-intellectualist’ ally of American Pragmatism, and Max Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later influenced the Vienna Circle’s critique of metaphysics. It eventually contributed to the formation of the view that ‘analytic’ philosophy is divided from its ‘continental’ counterpart.

Adolf Loos is one of the few figures that Wittgenstein explicitly named as an influence on his thought. Loos’s influence has been debated in the context of determining Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism, as well as in attempts to come to terms with his work as an architect. This paper looks in a different direction, examining a remark in which Wittgenstein responded to Heidegger’s notorious pronouncement that ‘the Nothing noths’ by reference to Loos’s critique of ornamentation. Wittgenstein draws a parallel between the requirement to start philosophy with an inarticulate sound and the need, in certain cultural periods, to highlight the borders of tablecloths using lace. Paying heed to Wittgenstein’s remark sheds further light on a Loosian influence at work in his thinking about modern civilization, both in his well-known ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ and in the earlier notes from his 1930 lectures at Cambridge.

Carnap’s 1931 attack against metaphysics notoriously utilises Heidegger’s work to exemplify the meaninglessness of metaphysical pseudo‐statements. This paper interprets Carnap’s metametaphysics as concerned with delimiting theoretical dialogue in such a manner as to exclude unresolvable disagreements. It puts forth a revised version of Carnap’s argument against the viability of metaphysics, by setting aside his stronger claims that rely on verificationism and focusing instead on his account of metaphysical claims as mere expressions of what he calls “Lebensgefühl,” or a general attitude towards life. Such attitudes, Carnap argues, are unsuitable objects of theoretical dialogue, insofar as disagreements that concern them are unresolvable. Carnap thus recommends abandoning the attempt to resolve metaphysical disagreements as if they were theoretical. As long as it does not enter into unresolvable disagreements, art, rather than theory, is the appropriate medium for expressing Lebensgefühl.

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there emerged two controversies related to the responsibility of philosophical ideas for the rise of German militarism. The first, mainly journalistic, controversy concerned the influence that Nietzsche’s ideas may have had on what British propagandists portrayed as the ruthlessly amoral German foreign policy. This soon gave way to a second controversy, waged primarily among academics, concerning the purportedly vicious political outcomes of German Idealism, from Kant through to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. During the autumn of 1914, and at the cusp between the two controversies, Moritz Schlick was to deliver a lecture series on Nietzsche’s life and work at the University of Rostock. Responding to both debates, Schlick penned an introduction in which he sought to defend philosophy against all those who would embroil it in warfare. Schlick offers a series of arguments defending Nietzsche against his accusers. He also argues that, though their contributions to the History of Philosophy often amounted to no more than ‘beautiful nonsense’, the German Idealists’ philosophical views cannot be held responsible for the rise of German nationalism. Finally, Schlick mounts a general defense of the search for truth, both in philosophy and in Wissenschaft, as a type of activity which presupposes peace. Though Schlick’s metaphilosophical views change, as this paper shows, he remains constant both in his favourable appraisal of Nietzsche, as well as his separation between politics on the one hand, and both philosophy and Wissenschaft on the other hand.

During the late 1930s, the failed attempt at collaboration between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle culminated in Horkheimer’s 1937 paper ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics’. Horkheimer ([1937] 1972), relying on a caricature of positivism as espousing an uncritical myth of the given, drew far-reaching conclusions concerning positivism’s conservative prohibition of the radical questioning of appearances. Horkheimer (1940) later applied some of these criticisms to Dilthey’s conception of Verstehen, while presenting Logical Empiricism as dismissing Dilthey’s proposals nothing more than poetry. By examining Neurath’s unpublished reply to Horkheimer, and drawing on Uebel’s (2019) account of Logical Empiricism’s stance towards Verstehen, this chapter will attempt to dispel Horkheimer’s caricature. I will highlight a parallel between Neurath’s attitude towards (i) claims about Verstehen in social science and (ii) Horkheimer’s proposals for the use of Vernunft by a ‘supra-scientific’ Critical Theory. Neurath argues that once Horkheimer’s objections to ‘positivism’ are reformulated in non-metaphysical terms, they point towards a genuine problem concerning science’s relation to social praxis. For Neurath, the problem can be addressed from within (rather than, as Horkheimer would have it, from above) empirically-minded investigations in the history and sociology of science.