Massimo Ferrari

The systematic confrontation between neo-Kantianism and phenomenology was strongly influenced by the dialogue between Natorp and Husserl, which largely dealt with the question of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between the “bottom up” description promoted by the phenomenological method and the “top down” construction that characterizes instead the transcendental method. At the root of this passionate philosophical dispute, however, there is also another issue that is not always adequately considered: the nature of pure logic in the context of the rejection of psychologism. My paper focuses on this aspect and, in particular, examines Natorp’s anti-psychologistic conception of knowledge and his extensive discussion of Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic.

The history of science is a highly promising field of inquiry for contemporary scholarship. Alexandre Koyré and Ernst Cassirer are among the major protagonists of the twentieth century and offer an interesting perspective in understanding the development of the history of science in relation to the history of philosophical ideas. The aim of this paper is to show several crucial aspects of both Koyré’s and Cassirer’s work, particularly concerning the role of Platonism in the rise of modern science and the concept of “scientific revolution” underlying their historical analysis. According to the author, it is nonetheless impossible to distinguish Koyré’s and Cassirer’s own reconstructions of modern science from their respective philosophical backgrounds, which belong to very different philosophical traditions such as Husserlian phenomenology and Marburg neo-Kantianism.

William James was welcomed in Vienna with much more interest and sympathy than in Germany. Ernst Mach knew James’s work fairly well and they corresponded for many years. Thanks to the German translation of is book on Pragmatism provided by Wilhelm Jerusalem, within the “First Vienna Circle” James’ work was read and appreciated during the first decade of the twentieth century. Philipp Frank, Otto Neurath, and Hans Hahn established a pragmatist tendency that would emerge more and more during the further development of Logical Empiricism, and that would eventually result in a convergence with James’s conception of truth, method of knowledge, and more generally of philosophy of science.

As recent scholarship has repeatedly shown, the history of Vienna Circle is to some extent rooted in the tradition of Austrian Philosophy which Neurath considered as not involved in the “Kantian interlude”. Nevertheless, it seems that the heritage of Leibniz and, in particular, of his “reform of logic” has been hitherto neglected. Indeed, Leibnizianism (along with Herbartianism) represents a main feature of this tradition stretching from Bolzano to quite forgotten figures as Exner and Zimmermann, and still influent on the Brentano circle. This paper attempt to highlight the role played by Leibniz in framing of the “scientific world conception”, focusing in particular both on Carnap’s and Neurath’s stance towards the characteristica universalis underlying the project of the encyclopedia Leibniz aimed to realize.

This paper aims at focusing on Cassirer's relationship with Hegel during the crucial period when Cassirer is outlining and completing the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in the early 1920s. The main thesis is that Cassirer has never abandoned his original Neo-Kantian approach, despite the fact that it has been enriched within the perspective of a philosophy of culture indebted to some extent also to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Cassirer maintains that Kant's critical idealism must be contrasted with Hegel's absolute idealism, keeping thereby open the process of the spirit that cannot close itself in a definitive logical structure. This critical stance is shared by some contemporaries of Cassirer such as Dilthey, Windelband, and above all Natorp. We have thus to read Cassirer's project against the historical backdrop of the ‘Hegel-Renaissance’ in Germany, a circumstance that, according to the author, can contribute to a more adequate understanding of Cassirer's opus magnum.

Schopenhauer und Nietzsche haben eine bedeutende Rolle in Schlicks philosophischem Werdegang gespielt. Es geht um einen bis dato wenig berücksichtigten Umstand, dem freilich nicht bloß eine biographische Bedeutung zukommt. Denn Schopenhauer und Nietzsche sind zwei Hauptfiguren, die nicht nur die Bildungszeit Schlicks prägten, sondern auch seine spätere philosophische Tätigkeit, und zwar bis auf die Wiener Zeit, verschiedenartig beeinflusst haben. Dieser Einfluss lässt sich besser verstehen, wenn das übliche Bild von Schlick als subtilem Ausleger der Relativitätstheorie und als Vater der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung erheblich modifiziert bzw. ergänzt wird. Wie Edgar Zilsel anlässlich der brutalen Ermordung Schlicks bemerkte, war neben der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit auch „eine zweite Linie“ deutlich, die „ganz ebenso zu seinem Werk gehört“. Nach Zilsel.

Schlick’s relationship with the Tractatus has been mainly investigated in what concerns the conception both of language and world, the insight of logic, the criteria of verifiability, the proper role of philosophy as mental activity. However, some other features of Schlick’s reading of the Tractatus require a closer consideration. In the 1920s, Schlick was dealing with the questions of ethics (and, to some extent, of religion), that represent from the early days the core issue of his philosophy of culture. Schlick’s intellectual relationship with Wittgenstein ought to be explored also in this broader context, namely after his first encounter with the Tractatus. As it emerges from their private conversations in 1929, Schlick did not agree with Wittgenstein’s account of ethics as a domain going beyond the limits of language. Whereas Wittgenstein maintains that “that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same [Tractatus 6.421]”, Schlick considers ethics as a factual science. As he says in the Problems of ethics (1930), “if there are ethical questions that have meaning, and are therefore able to be answered, then ethics is a science”. Wittgenstein’s position is patently in contrast with Schlick’s. According to Wittgenstein, ethics, no differently from religion, cannot be tested as is usual for meaningful propositions, namely by recurring to hypotheses, high probability or knowing. My paper aims at highlighting this contrast, that is rooted both in the Tractatus and in Schlick’s conception of ethics as science already endorsed in his work before the arriving in Vienna. How Schlick would have appreciated Wittgenstein’s late thoughts on ethics remains, at any rate, an open question.

The paper is devoted to an overview of Cassirer’s work both as historian of philosophy and historian of science. Indeed, the “intelletcual cooperation” between history of philosophy and history of science represents an essential feature of Cassirer’s style of philosophizing: while the roots of a wide exploration stretching from Renaissance thought to modern physics go back to the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the results of a similar cross-fertilization of research fields have deeply contributed to shaping new standards of inquiry. Cassirer’s relationship with the Warburg milieu in Hamburg and late in his life with the American intellectual scenario (for instance, with the “Journal of History of Ideas”) are surely worthy of closer investigation. Distinguished scholars such as Meyerson, Brunschvicg, Burtt, Koyré, Metzger, Lovejoy, Kristeller, have disussed, appreciated, critizised Cassirer’s still today fascinating studies devoted to Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to mention but a few. To explore some of these aspects focusing both on affinities and differences within a cosmpolitian intellectual community can provide a better understanding of philosophy and history of science in the first half of 20th century. Cassirer’s legacy requires, therefore, a new assessment.

Alois Riehl was a major figure in German Neo-Kantianism at the end of the 19th century. Though his contribution to the Neo-Kantian movement has been long underestimated, Riehl’s historical and systematic reconstruction of Kant’s “criticism” has in a fruitful way paved the way to “scientific philosophy” as well. As Riehl affirmed in 1883 on the occasion of an academic lecture, he was convinced that the scientific philosophy arising both from the history of modern science and the reshaping of Kantian epistemology could represent the new horizon of contemporary philosophy. This paper focuses on Riehl’s outlines of scientific philosophy, investigating at once the role played therein by the history of science from Galileo to Helmholtz. Finally, Riehl’s correlated concept of “not-scientific” philosophy is explored in order to give an account of his philosophy of culture in comparison with current philosophy of values in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.

The aim of this paper is to point out some interesting features of Moritz Schlick’s thought regarding both his refusal of Metaphysics and his view of the relationship between Realism and Positivism. In particular, the author stresses the importance of Schlick’s early attempts to define the concept of truth as well as to formulate a kind of pre-linguistic verificationism. Unpublished letters and manuscripts have been considered in order to give a more precise picture of Schlick’s intellectual development, from the beginning of his academic career up to the unknown letters documenting his discussion with Max Planck about Realism in the early Thirties.

Hermann Cohen, der Begründer der Marburger Schule des Neukantianismus, hat einen bis dato unterirdischen Einfluss auf den Logischen Empirismus ausgeübt. Seine Konzeption der transzendentalen Methode sowie seine scharfe Polemik gegen den Psychologismus wurden insbesondere von Rudolf Carnap und Hans Reichenbach zum Teil angenommen, aber zugleich auch umgewandelt. Reichenbach’s Analyse der Wissenschaft und Carnaps logische Analyse wissenschaftlicher Sätze sind mit Cohens Ansatz in dem Sinne noch verbunden, dass die Kritik der Vernunft Kantischer Prägung durch die Eruierung der begrifflichen Struktur wissenschaftlicher Theorien ersetzt wird. Trotz offensichtlicher Differenzen handelt es sich doch um einen Zusammenhang, auf den die Forschung weiter einzugehen hat.

This paper explores the philosophical relationship between Clarence Irving Lewis and Moritz Schlick, questioning their understanding of verificationism. At stake is not only the crucial point of the possibility of verifying statements regarding, for instance, the other side of the moon, but also the proper status of ethical values in opposition to, or in connection with, scientific propositions grounded in experience. This latter aspect can better explain how both Lewis and Schlick understand the notion of experience in general, posing the conceptual framework within which Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism established a dialogue in the 1930s but still worthy of closer inquiry.