Chiara Russo Krauss

Friedrich Albert Lange was a neo-Kantian and a socialist. Scholars have questioned whether there is a connection between these two aspects of Lange’s work. The paper argues that such a connection is apparent once Lange’s philosophy is understood in light of Schiller’s Kantianism. According to Lange, Schiller’s aesthetic redemption consists of two tasks: to create the beautiful image of an ideal reality; and to realize this ideal model in the actual world. Accordingly, I show that Lange’s political analysis points to three different types of social evolution: 1) one corresponding to the natural state of humanity, based on Darwin’s and Malthus’s concept of the struggle for survival; 2) one corresponding to ideal evolution, in which all human beings achieve full development of their talents (first task of the esthetic redemption); 3) one corresponding to the actual realization of this ideal, in which human beings advance step by step thanks to social experimentation and the resulting progress in knowledge (second task of esthetic redemption).

The paper aims to shed light on Heymann Steinthal’s ambiguous relationship to Humboldt. Examining the development of Steinthal’s interpretations and judgments of Humboldt’s work, the paper distinguishes three phases of this relationship. In the first, from the 1840s, Steinthal read Humboldt through the lens of Hegel’s philosophy and criticised the residual Kantianism in his work. In the second phase, from the 1850s to the 1870s, Steinthal’s growing interest in psychology gradually led him to develop a more positive evaluation of Kant’s work and to distance himself from Humboldt and Hegel, accusing them of dualism and the creation of hypostases. In the final phase, in the 1880s, work on the edition of Humboldt’s writings and a personal crisis led him to shift the focus of his inquiries to ethical themes and Kant’s practical philosophy. As a result, Steinthal reconsidered the significance of Humboldt’s philosophy, now highlighting its Kantian basis.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, several members of the Neo-Kantian movement became interested in Schiller. For the first time, he was regarded not only as a poet and dramatist, but also as a philosopher – and, above all, as a Kantian philosopher. The authors of the contributions collected in this book reconstruct how various Neo-Kantian thinkers engaged with Schiller. Thus, the book illuminates the pivotal role that neo-Kantianism played in the discovery of Schiller’s philosophy as well as the pivotal role that Schiller’s philosophy played in the shaping of neo-Kantianism.

Russo Krauss outlines Wilhelm Wundt’s twofold strategy to respond to the new trend in experimental-physiological psychology. On the one side, he developed a theory about the purely psychological principles that characterize mental life (actuality, creative synthesis, relational analysis, and contrast amplification). On the other hand, he wrote a series of articles that attacked the “materialism” of the position maintained by his former pupils and allies, Hugo Münsterberg, Oswald Külpe, and Richard Avenarius. Regarding the latter, Wundt’s insisting on Avenarius being a philosopher, rather than a scientist, demonstrates the key role played by Avenarius in the debate on the philosophical foundation of scientific psychology.

Russo Krauss exposes Wilhelm Wundt’s position on some fundamental issues of the philosophical and psychological debate at the turn of the century, such as: the antinomy between idealism and realism; the apparent contradiction between physiological explanation and psychical causality; the difference between natural and spiritual sciences. Russo Krauss highlights Wundt’s inclination to seek compromises, in opposition to Richard Avenarius’ tendency to adopt radical positions (especially regarding the cerebral explanation of mental life). Russo Krauss reconstructs how the growing distance between the two thinkers ultimately resulted in the end of their decade-long collaboration.

Russo Krauss reconstructs Richard Avenarius’ intellectual career, from the early relationship with Wilhelm Wundt to the development of his philosophical system: Empiriocriticism. At first, Avenarius and Wundt collaborated to spread experimental psychology in the philosophical faculties. Later, Avenarius designed a philosophical foundation for a radically physiological experimental psychology. By distinguishing the first-person perspective from the third-person perspective, Avenarius tried to reconcile the apparently contradictory assumptions that all knowledge begins with consciousness (phenomenalism) and that consciousness depends on the brain. Psychology is thus defined not as the science of inner experience (an error that Avenarius called “introjection”), rather as the science that studies experience from the perspective of its dependency upon the nervous system.

Russo Krauss summarizes the role played by Wilhelm Wundt in 19th-century scientific psychology, as well as the state of research on this subject. The centennial of the foundation of the laboratory for experimental psychology in Leipzig revitalized the research on Wundt. Edwin Boring and Kurt Danziger retraced the so-called “positivist repudiation of Wundt” by his former pupils—Hermann Ebbinghaus, Oswald Külpe, Edward B. Titchener—that were influenced by the empiriocriticists Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Russo Krauss aims at showing that, since Avenarius was and still is wrongly considered just a pale copy of Mach, his peculiar part in the “repudiation of Wundt” and in the debate on the foundation of psychology has not yet been investigated.

Russo Krauss outlines Wilhelm Wundt’s twofold strategy to respond to the new trend in experimental-physiological psychology. On the one side, he developed a theory about the purely psychological principles that characterize mental life (actuality, creative synthesis, relational analysis, and contrast amplification). On the other hand, he wrote a series of articles that attacked the “materialism” of the position maintained by his former pupils and allies, Hugo Münsterberg, Oswald Külpe, and Richard Avenarius. Regarding the latter, Wundt’s insisting on Avenarius being a philosopher, rather than a scientist, demonstrates the key role played by Avenarius in the debate on the philosophical foundation of scientific psychology.

Russo Krauss retraces the reception of Richard Avenarius’ ideas about the philosophical foundation of experimental-physiological psychology among former Wundt’s pupils and other leading psychologists of the late nineteenth century, such as Oswald Külpe, Hugo Münsterberg, Hermann Ebbinghaus, James Ward, and Edward B. Titchener (plus a digression on William James). Russo Krauss shows how these thinkers adapted to their own conceptions Avenarius’ definition of psychology by point of view of the dependency upon the individual and the brain.

Even though the relationship between Einstein and Mach is well studied, the literature on the topic often overlooks the fact that Mach never provided an interpretation for the theory of relativity. Rather, it was Mach’s pupil Joseph Petzoldt who published several works to prove that Machian philosophy provided the correct philosophical framework for the theory of relativity. The paper reconstructs Petzoldt’s philosophy and his interpretation of the theory of relativity, also showing how his conceptions sometimes differed from Mach's. Thus, the study also explains why Einstein expressed a favorable opinion of Petzoldt’s work. On the one hand, the overall Machian tone of Petzoldt’s philosophy resonated with Einstein’s own Machian perspective. On the other hand, Petzoldt had developed the notion of Eindeutigkeit, which tended towards a stronger determinism (in contrast to Mach’s Humean conception of causality), and Einstein appreciated this deterministic version of Mach’s thought.

This book offers an up-to-date insight into the early philosophical debate on Einsteinian relativity. The essays explore the reception and interpretation of Einstein’s ideas by some of the most important philosophical schools of the time, such as logical positivism (Reichenbach), neo-Kantianism (Cassirer, Natorp), critical realism (Sellars), and radical empiricism (Mach). The book is aimed at physicists and historians of science researching the epistemological implications of the theory of relativity, as well as to scholars in philosophy interested in understanding how leading philosophical figures of the early twentieth century reacted to the relativistic revolution.

This book reconstructs the rise and fall of Wilhelm Wundt’s fortunes, focusing for the first time on the role of Richard Avenarius as catalyst for the so-called “positivist repudiation of Wundt.” Krauss specifically looks at the progressive disavowal of Wundtian ideas in the world of scientific psychology, and especially by his former pupils. This book provides important historical context and a critical discussion of the current state of research, in addition to a detailed consideration of Wundt’s and Avenarius’ systems of thought, as well as on their personal relationship. The author outlines the reception of Avenarius’ conceptions among Wundt’s pupils, such as Külpe, Münsterberg and Titchener, and among other psychologists of the time, such as Ward, James and Ebbinghaus. Finally, this book presents Wundt’s two-fold attempt to respond to the new trend through a criticism of the “materialistic” psychology, and a reformulation of his own ideas.