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212-400: The Tractatus is written in an austere and succinct literary style, containing almost no arguments as such, but consists of 525 declarative statements altogether, which are hierarchically numbered. The Tractatus is recognized by philosophers as one of the most significant philosophical works of the twentieth century and was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of

424-477: A correspondence theory of truth (versus a coherence theory of truth ). Wittgenstein's influence also shows in some versions of the verifiability principle . In tractarian doctrine, truths of logic are tautologies , a view widely accepted by logical positivists who were also influenced by Wittgenstein's interpretation of probability although, according to Neurath, some logical positivists found Tractatus to contain too much metaphysics. Gottlob Frege began

636-615: A logical syntax . A scientific theory would be stated with its method of verification, whereby a logical calculus or empirical operation could verify its falsity or truth . In the late 1930s, logical positivists fled Germany and Austria for Britain and the United States. By then, many had replaced Mach's phenomenalism with Otto Neurath 's physicalism , whereby science's content is not actual or potential sensations, but instead consists of entities that are publicly observable. Rudolf Carnap , who had sparked logical positivism in

848-743: A 'calculus'. These passages are rather crucial to Wittgenstein's view of 'meaning as use', though they have been widely neglected in scholarly literature. The centrality and importance of these passages are corroborated and augmented by renewed examination of Wittgenstein's Nachlaß , as is done in "From Tractatus to Later Writings and Back – New Implications from the Nachlass" (de Queiroz 2023). The Tractatus employs an austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such, but rather consists of declarative statements, or passages, that are meant to be self-evident. The statements are hierarchically numbered, with seven basic propositions at

1060-428: A claim of "necessity". Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge—most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation. Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have

1272-483: A connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes. The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the Critique . The analogies are three in number: The fourth section of this chapter, which

1484-417: A content of any sort. Similarly, Michael Kremer suggested that Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing could be compared with Gilbert Ryle 's famous distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". Just as practical knowledge or skill (such as riding a bike) is not reducible to propositional knowledge according to Ryle, Wittgenstein also thought that the mastery of the logic of our language

1696-468: A debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era. Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising

1908-418: A form that can be analyzed. Garve and Feder also faulted the Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann , a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded

2120-587: A merely true regularity—for instance, George always carries only $ 1 bills in his wallet —a law suggests what must be true, and is consequent of a scientific theory 's axiomatic structure. ) By the Humean empiricist view that humans observe sequences of events, (not cause and effect, as causality and causal mechanisms are unobservable), the DN model neglects causality beyond mere constant conjunction , first event A and then always event B . Hempel's explication of

2332-704: A notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime ; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg 's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer . In 1770, Kant

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2544-432: A pillar of scientism , Carl Hempel was key in establishing the subdiscipline of the philosophy of science, where Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper brought in the era of postpositivism . John Passmore found logical positivism to be "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". Logical positivism's fall reopened the debate over the metaphysical merit of scientific theory, whether it can offer knowledge of

2756-400: A priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the Critique both to prove and to explain the possibility of this knowledge. Kant says "There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through

2968-448: A priori knowledge. Logical positivists rejected Kant's synthetic a priori , and adopted Hume's fork , whereby a statement is either analytic and a priori (thus necessary and verifiable logically) or synthetic and a posteriori (thus contingent and verifiable empirically). Early, most logical positivists proposed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. In

3180-417: A priori possible?" To understand this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction between two sources of knowledge: Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the form of knowledge: An analytic judgement is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic judgements are a priori since basing an analytic judgement on experience would be absurd. By contrast,

3392-418: A priori – there are no apriori truths (TLP 3.05), and that there is only logical necessity (TLP 6.37). Since all propositions, by virtue of being pictures, have sense independently of anything being the case in reality, we cannot see from the proposition alone whether it is true (as would be the case if it could be known apriori), but we must compare it to reality in order to know that it is true (TLP 4.031 "In

3604-401: A priori ), whereas truths by states of actualities (concrete) always align on the other side (synthetic, contingent, a posteriori ). Of any treatises containing neither, Hume orders, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion". Thus awakened from "dogmatic slumber", Immanuel Kant quested to answer Hume's challenge—but by explaining how metaphysics

3816-434: A priori . This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics. The second half of the Critique is the explicitly critical part. In this "transcendental dialectic", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establish in

4028-425: A proposition to represent something in the world, Wittgenstein was largely concerned with the way propositions function as representations. According to the theory, propositions can "picture" the world as being a certain way, and thus accurately represent it either truly or falsely. If someone thinks the proposition, "There is a tree in the yard", then that proposition accurately pictures the world if and only if there

4240-426: A report for every piece's position. The logical form of our reports must be the same logical form of the chess pieces and their arrangement on the board in order to be meaningful. Our communication about the chess game must have as many possibilities for constituents and their arrangement as the game itself. Kenny points out that such logical form need not strictly resemble the chess game. The logical form can be had by

4452-453: A response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy . Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism . Such a charge, tantamount to an accusation of atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn , leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into

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4664-541: A rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works. Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum , from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg , where he would later remain for

4876-423: A sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge." One interpretation, known as the "two-world" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, meaning that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, and therefore cannot access the " thing-in-itself ". On this particular view,

5088-427: A separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the "two-aspect" view. On this alternative view, the same objects to which we attribute empirical properties like color, size, and shape are also, when considered as they are in themselves, the things-in-themselves, otherwise inaccessible to human knowledge. Following the "Transcendental Analytic"

5300-518: A series of NOR operations on the totality of atomic propositions. Wittgenstein drew from Henry M. Sheffer 's logical theorem making that statement in the context of the propositional calculus . Wittgenstein's N-operator is a broader infinitary analogue of the Sheffer stroke , which applied to a set of propositions produces a proposition that is equivalent to the denial of every member of that set. Wittgenstein shows that this operator can cope with

5512-418: A sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god." When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull

5724-470: A state of affairs which is satisfied by any possible arrangement of objects (since it is true for any possible state of affairs), but this means that the would-be necessary proposition would not depict anything as being so but will be true no matter what the world is actually like; but if that's the case, then the proposition cannot say anything about the world or describe any fact in it – it would not be correlated with any particular state of affairs, just like

5936-474: A static unchanging Form and its identity with Substance represents the metaphysical view that has come to be held as an assumption by the vast majority of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato and Aristotle , as it was something they agreed on. "[W]hat is called a form or a substance is not generated." (Z.8 1033b13) The opposing view states that unalterable Form does not exist, or at least if there

6148-419: A synthetic judgement is one the content of which includes something new in the sense that it is includes something not already contained in the subject concept. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic judgement is a simple empirical observation. Philosophers such as David Hume believed that these were

6360-466: A tautology (TLP 6.37). Although Wittgenstein did not use the term himself, his metaphysical view throughout the Tractatus is commonly referred to as logical atomism . While his logical atomism resembles that of Bertrand Russell , the two views are not strictly the same. Russell's theory of descriptions is a way of logically analyzing sentences containing definite descriptions without presupposing

6572-433: A term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense". An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things ... [with] features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon

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6784-531: A universal language that could reconstruct mathematics and thereby encode physics. Yet Kurt Gödel 's incompleteness theorem showed this impossible except in trivial cases, and Alfred Tarski 's undefinability theorem shattered all hopes of reducing mathematics to logic. Thus, a universal language failed to stem from Carnap's 1934 work Logische Syntax der Sprache ( Logical Syntax of Language ). Still, some logical positivists, including Carl Hempel, continued support of logicism. In Germany, Hegelian metaphysics

6996-442: A useful analogy for understanding Wittgenstein's logical atomism : a slightly modified game of chess . Just like objects in states of affairs, the chess pieces alone do not constitute the game—their arrangements, together with the pieces (objects) themselves, determine the state of affairs. Through Kenny's chess analogy, we can see the relationship between Wittgenstein's logical atomism and his picture theory of representation . For

7208-499: Is corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Popper thus acknowledged the value of the positivist movement's emphasis on science but claimed that he had "killed positivism". Although an empiricist, American logician Willard Van Orman Quine published the 1951 paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", which challenged conventional empiricist presumptions. Quine attacked

7420-418: Is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of meaning). This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers , scientists , and mathematicians formed

7632-482: Is a representation of a real car, a toy truck is a representation of a real truck, and dolls are representations of people. In order to convey to a judge what happened in an automobile accident, someone in the courtroom might place the toy cars in a position like the position the real cars were in, and move them in the ways that the real cars moved. In this way, the elements of the picture (the toy cars) are in spatial relation to one another, and this relation itself pictures

7844-419: Is a tree in the yard. One aspect of pictures which Wittgenstein finds particularly illuminating in comparison with language is the fact that we can directly see in the picture what situation it depicts without knowing if the situation actually obtains. This allows Wittgenstein to explain how false propositions can have meaning (a problem which Russell struggled with for many years): just as we can see directly from

8056-532: Is a unique practical skill that does not involve any sort of propositional "knowing that", but rather is reflected in our ability to operate with senseful sentences and grasping their internal logical relations. At the time of its publication in 1921, Wittgenstein concluded that the Tractatus had resolved all philosophical problems, leaving one free to focus on what really matters – ethics, faith, music and so on. He would later recant this view, beginning in 1945, leading him to begin work on what would ultimately become

8268-495: Is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility: Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy. The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the "Ideal of Pure Reason". (Whereas an idea is a pure concept generated by reason, an ideal is the concept of an idea as an individual thing . ) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for

8480-409: Is also, apparently, held by Wittgenstein: Here ends what Wittgenstein deems to be the relevant points of his metaphysical view and he begins in 2.1 to use said view to support his Picture Theory of Language. "The Tractatus's notion of substance is the modal analogue of Immanuel Kant 's temporal notion. Whereas for Kant, substance is that which 'persists' (i.e., exists at all times), for Wittgenstein it

8692-468: Is an a priori conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience. This is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents. Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both that they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and how it

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8904-704: Is an exaggeration. Rather, most neopositivists viewed talk of unobservables as metaphorical or elliptical: direct observations phrased abstractly or indirectly. So theoretical terms would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules , and thereby theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws . Via Bertrand Russell 's logicism , reducing mathematics to logic, physics ' mathematical formulas would be converted to symbolic logic . Via Russell's logical atomism , ordinary language would break into discrete units of meaning. Rational reconstruction , then, would convert ordinary statements into standardized equivalents, all networked and united by

9116-411: Is analogous to the spatial relations between toy cars discussed above. The structure of states of affairs comes from the arrangement of their constituent objects (TLP 2.032), and such arrangement is essential to their intelligibility, just as the toy cars must be arranged in a certain way in order to picture the automobile accident. A fact might be thought of as the obtaining state of affairs that Madison

9328-537: Is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with

9540-447: Is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in empirical judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections. The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for

9752-660: Is further developed in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason . The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally,

9964-513: Is in Wisconsin, and a possible (but not obtaining) state of affairs might be Madison's being in Utah. These states of affairs are made up of certain arrangements of objects (TLP 2.023). However, Wittgenstein does not specify what objects are. Madison, Wisconsin, and Utah cannot be atomic objects: they are themselves composed of numerous facts. Instead, Wittgenstein believed objects to be the things in

10176-485: Is indicated only in Schlick 1936a.) A second element that began to do so soon was the recognition of the problem of the irreducibility of disposition terms to observation terms ... A third element was that disagreement arose as to whether the in-principle verifiability or support turned on what was merely logically possible or on what was nomologically possible, as a matter of physical law etc. A fourth element, finally,

10388-501: Is interpreted, he wished to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of Berkeley . Paul Guyer , although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, writes of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that it "not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires

10600-565: Is itself not an arrangement of anything ; rather logical form is a feature of an arrangement of objects and thus it can be properly expressed (that is depicted) in language by an analogous arrangement of the relevant signs in sentences (which contain the same possibilities of combination as prescribed by logical syntax), hence logical form can only be shown by presenting the logical relations between different sentences. Wittgenstein's conception of representation as picturing also allows him to derive two striking claims: that no proposition can be known

10812-587: Is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the Critique . The B edition includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations. The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes phenomena , of which we can have genuine knowledge, from noumena ,

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11024-425: Is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) regulative value. Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics "ideas". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to

11236-542: Is possible. Eventually, in his 1781 work , Kant crossed the tines of Hume's fork to identify another range of truths by necessity— synthetic a priori , statements claiming states of facts but known true before experience—by arriving at transcendental idealism , attributing the mind a constructive role in phenomena by arranging sense data into the very experience of space , time , and substance . Thus, Kant saved Newton's law of universal gravitation from Hume's problem of induction by finding uniformity of nature to be

11448-464: Is remarkably large and decidedly retreating." Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad , Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining

11660-485: Is restricted to Basissätze / Beobachtungssätze / Protokollsätze ( basic statements or observation statements or protocol statements ). Hempel elucidated the paradox of confirmation . The second edition of A. J. Ayer 's book arrived in 1946, and discerned strong versus weak forms of verification. Ayer concluded, "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience", but

11872-402: Is shown is not that something is the case, as if we could somehow think it (and thus understand what Wittgenstein tries to show us) but for some reason we just could not say it. As Diamond and Conant explain: Speaking and thinking are different from activities the practical mastery of which has no logical side; and they differ from activities like physics the practical mastery of which involves

12084-479: Is shown to be held by Wittgenstein in what follows: Although Wittgenstein largely disregarded Aristotle (Ray Monk's biography suggests that he never read Aristotle at all) it seems that they shared some anti-Platonist views on the universal/particular issue regarding primary substances. He attacks universals explicitly in his Blue Book. "The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of

12296-421: Is such a thing, it contains an ever changing, relative substance in a constant state of flux. Although this view was held by Greeks like Heraclitus , it has existed only on the fringe of the Western tradition since then. It is commonly known now only in "Eastern" metaphysical views where the primary concept of substance is Qi , or something similar, which persists through and beyond any given Form. The former view

12508-408: Is that "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me." The necessary possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time,

12720-594: Is that which, figuratively speaking, 'persists' through a 'space' of possible worlds." Whether the Aristotelian notions of substance came to Wittgenstein via Kant, or via Bertrand Russell , or even whether Wittgenstein arrived at his notions intuitively, one cannot but see them. The further thesis of 2. and 3. and their subsidiary propositions is Wittgenstein's picture theory of language. This can be summed up as follows: The 4s are significant as they contain some of Wittgenstein's most explicit statements concerning

12932-461: Is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of reason as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic"). The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts",

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13144-495: Is the source of morality , and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation . His cosmopolitan reputation is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on

13356-494: Is their capacity to combine with other objects. When combined, objects form "states of affairs". A state of affairs that obtains is a "fact". Facts make up the entirety of the world; they are logically independent of one another, as are states of affairs. That is, the existence of one state of affairs (or fact) does not allow us to infer whether another state of affairs (or fact) exists or does not exist. Within states of affairs, objects are in particular relations to one another. This

13568-410: Is they do so. In the first book of this section on the " schematism ", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds

13780-401: Is to act according to rational moral principles. Kant's 1781 (revised 1787) Critique of Pure Reason has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. In the first Critique , and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the "general" and "real problem of pure reason" in terms of the following question: "How are synthetic judgments

13992-445: Is to be credited with the popularization of truth tables (4.31) and truth conditions (4.431) which now constitute the standard semantic analysis of first-order sentential logic. The philosophical significance of such a method for Wittgenstein was that it alleviated a confusion, namely the idea that logical inferences are justified by rules. If an argument form is valid, the conjunction of the premises will be logically equivalent to

14204-488: Is true via terms' arrangement and meanings , thus a tautology —true by logical necessity but uninformative about the world—whereas the synthetic adds reference to a state of facts, a contingency . In 1739, David Hume cast a fork aggressively dividing "relations of ideas" from "matters of fact and real existence", such that all truths are of one type or the other. By Hume's fork, truths by relations among ideas (abstract) all align on one side (analytic, necessary,

14416-458: Is verifiable in the weak sense "if it is possible for experience to render it probable". And yet, "no proposition, other than a tautology , can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis ". Thus, all are open to weak verification. Upon the global defeat of Nazism, and the removal from philosophy of rivals for radical reform— Marburg neo-Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology, Heidegger 's "existential hermeneutics"—and while hosted in

14628-612: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican Revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding, so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms. Kant believed that reason

14840-673: The Philosophical Investigations . The book was translated into English in 1922 by C. K. Ogden with help from the teenaged Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey . Ramsey later visited Wittgenstein in Austria. Translation issues make the concepts hard to pinpoint, especially given Wittgenstein's usage of terms and difficulty in translating ideas into words. Logical positivism Logical positivism , later called logical empiricism , and both of which together are also known as neopositivism ,

15052-410: The pseudoscientific , which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving

15264-708: The Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle , which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism. Flourishing in several European centres through the 1930s, the movement sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims by converting philosophy into "scientific philosophy", which, according to the logical positivists, ought to share the bases and structures of empirical sciences ' best examples, such as Albert Einstein 's general theory of relativity . Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by studying and mimicking

15476-499: The Coriolis force . In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake . Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography

15688-560: The Critique entitled "The transcendental aesthetic" introduces Kant's famous metaphysics of transcendental idealism . Something is "transcendental" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and "idealism" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial. The metaphysical thesis then states that human beings only experience and know phenomenal appearances, not independent things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but

15900-605: The Königsberg City Museum ; however, the museum was destroyed during World War II . A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds. After the expulsion of Königsberg 's German population at the end of World War II , the University of Königsberg where Kant taught

16112-540: The Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason , in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott 's English translation of

16324-651: The Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula . Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars , which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on

16536-460: The Vienna Circle , such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann and Bertrand Russell 's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism". Wittgenstein's later works, notably the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations , criticised many of his ideas in the Tractatus . There are, however, elements to see a common thread in Wittgenstein's thinking, in spite of those criticisms of

16748-535: The Vienna Circle , such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann . Bertrand Russell 's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" is presented as a working out of ideas that he had learned from Wittgenstein. There are seven main propositions in the text. These are: The first chapter is very brief: This, along with the beginning of two, can be taken to be the relevant parts of Wittgenstein's metaphysical view that he will use to support his picture theory of language. These sections concern Wittgenstein's view that

16960-485: The analytic/synthetic division , which the verificationist program had been hinged upon in order to entail, by consequence of Hume's fork , both necessity and aprioricity . Quine's ontological relativity explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world. Quine later proposed naturalized epistemology . In 1958, Norwood Hanson 's Patterns of Discovery undermined

17172-633: The covering law model of scientific explanation . And ultimately, by supplying boundary conditions and supplying bridge laws within the covering law model, all the special sciences' laws would reduce to fundamental physics , the fundamental science . After World War II, key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability principle, and the fact/value gap , drew escalated criticism. The verifiability criterion made universal statements 'cognitively' meaningless, and even made statements beyond empiricism for technological but not conceptual reasons meaningless, which

17384-460: The explanans . Explanans must be true or highly confirmed, contain at least one law, and entail the explanandum. Thus, given initial conditions C 1 , C 2 , ..., C n plus general laws L 1 , L 2 , ..., L n , event E is a deductive consequence and scientifically explained. In the DN model, a law is an unrestricted generalization by conditional proposition— If A, then B —and has empirical content testable. (Differing from

17596-463: The pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible . The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had

17808-933: The problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible, and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction , whose inference form is denying the consequent , Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions. Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific —a label not in itself unfavorable. Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values. Popper disparages

18020-424: The "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute. This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of

18232-447: The 1930s, Otto Neurath had argued for nonfoundationalism via coherentism by likening science to a boat ( Neurath's boat ) that scientists must rebuild at sea. ) Although Kuhn's thesis itself was attacked even by opponents of neopositivism, in the 1970 postscript to Structure , Kuhn asserted, at least, that there was no algorithm to science—and, on that, even most of Kuhn's critics agreed. Powerful and persuasive, Kuhn's book, unlike

18444-424: The 1936 and 1937 papers "Testability and meaning", individual terms replace sentences as the units of meaning. Further, theoretical terms no longer need to acquire meaning by explicit definition from observational terms: the connection may be indirect, through a system of implicit definitions. Carnap also provided an important, pioneering discussion of disposition predicates. The logical positivists' initial stance

18656-506: The 1960s. Yet the movement failed to resolve its central problems, and its doctrines were increasingly criticized, most trenchantly by Willard Van Orman Quine , Norwood Hanson , Karl Popper , Thomas Kuhn , and Carl Hempel . Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , by the young Ludwig Wittgenstein , introduced the view of philosophy as "critique of language", offering the possibility of a theoretically principled distinction of intelligible versus nonsensical discourse. Tractatus adhered to

18868-563: The Circle was Karl Popper , whom Neurath nicknamed the "Official Opposition". Carnap and other Vienna Circle members, including Hahn and Neurath, saw need for a weaker criterion of meaningfulness than verifiability. A radical "left" wing—led by Neurath and Carnap—began the program of "liberalization of empiricism", and they also emphasized fallibilism and pragmatics , which latter Carnap even suggested as empiricism's basis. A conservative "right" wing—led by Schlick and Waismann —rejected both

19080-578: The DN model held natural laws —empirically confirmed regularities—as satisfactory and, if formulated realistically, approximating causal explanation. In later articles, Hempel defended the DN model and proposed a probabilistic explanation, inductive-statistical model (IS model). the DN and IS models together form the covering law model , as named by a critic, William Dray . Derivation of statistical laws from other statistical laws goes to deductive-statistical model (DS model). Georg Henrik von Wright , another critic, named it subsumption theory , fitting

19292-607: The Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens . In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into

19504-586: The English-speaking world and reintroducing empiricism in Britain. Its influence extended beyond philosophy, particularly in psychology and social sciences. What Carnap later called the 'liberalization of empiricism' was underway and different camps became discernible within the Circle ;... In the first place, this liberalization meant the accommodation of universally quantified statements and

19716-400: The English-speaking world. Concerning reality , the necessary is a state true in all possible worlds —mere logical validity —whereas the contingent hinges on the way the particular world is. Concerning knowledge , the a priori is knowable before or without, whereas the a posteriori is knowable only after or through, relevant experience. Concerning statements , the analytic

19928-576: The Faculties . He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold , Beck , and Fichte ) transformed

20140-584: The Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism . In what was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions, Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik , which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared

20352-584: The Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the Critique . Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor. Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition. The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to

20564-639: The Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason , in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift , met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution . Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid

20776-458: The Tractatus are withheld from self-application, they are not themselves nonsense, but point out the nonsensical nature of the Tractatus. This view often appeals to the so-called 'frame' of the Tractatus, comprising the preface and propositions 6.54. The No-Truths-At-All View states that Wittgenstein held the propositions of the Tractatus to be ambiguously both true and nonsensical, at once. While

20988-459: The Tractatus give rise to a paradox: for the Tractatus to be true, it will necessarily have to be nonsense by self-application; but for this self-application to render the propositions of the Tractatus nonsense (in the Tractarian sense), then the Tractatus must be true. There are three primarily dialectical approaches to solving this paradox 1) the traditionalist, or Ineffable-Truths View; 2)

21200-459: The Tractatus in later writings. Indeed, the legendary contrast between 'early' and 'late' Wittgenstein has been countered by such scholars as Pears (1987) and Hilmy (1987). For example, a relevant, yet neglected aspect of continuity in Wittgenstein's central issues concerns 'meaning' as 'use'. Connecting his early and later writings on 'meaning as use' is his appeal to direct consequences of a term or phrase, reflected e.g. in his speaking of language as

21412-561: The Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about logic and language led him to believe that some features of language and reality cannot be expressed in senseful language but only "shown" by the form of certain expressions. Thus for example, according to the picture theory, when a proposition is thought or expressed, the proposition represents reality (truly or falsely) by virtue of sharing some features with that reality in common. However, those features themselves are something Wittgenstein claimed we could not say anything about, because we cannot describe

21624-702: The Vienna Circle, had sought to replace verification with simply confirmation . With World War II's close in 1945, logical positivism became milder, logical empiricism , led largely by Carl Hempel , in America, who expounded the covering law model of scientific explanation. Logical positivism became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy , and dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world , including philosophy of science , while influencing sciences, but especially social sciences , into

21836-472: The affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding. Thus the statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure—that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic

22048-476: The ambition of theory reduction. Logical positivists were generally committed to " Unified Science ", and sought a common language or, in Neurath's phrase, a "universal slang" whereby all scientific propositions could be expressed. The adequacy of proposals or fragments of proposals for such a language was often asserted on the basis of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one special science to

22260-413: The basic observational evidence statements of science. While Carnap's focus on the reduction of descriptive terms allows for the conclusive verification of some statements, his criterion also allowed universally quantified statements to be meaningful, provided they were syntactically and terminologically correct (1932a, §2). It was not until one of his Paris addresses, however, that Carnap officially declared

22472-410: The basis of all synthetic a priori cognition. According to Guyer and Wood , "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects." Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as

22684-431: The bouncing of a ball (for example, twenty bounces might communicate a white rook's being on the king's rook 1 square). One can bounce a ball as many times as one wishes, which means that the ball's bouncing has "logical multiplicity", and can therefore share the logical form of the game. A motionless ball cannot communicate this same information, as it does not have logical multiplicity. According to traditional reading of

22896-408: The climate of American pragmatism and commonsense empiricism, the neopositivists shed much of their earlier, revolutionary zeal. No longer crusading to revise traditional philosophy into a new scientific philosophy , they became respectable members of a new philosophy subdiscipline, philosophy of science . Receiving support from Ernest Nagel , logical empiricists were especially influential in

23108-634: The conclusion and this can be clearly seen in a truth table; it is displayed . The concept of tautology is thus central to Wittgenstein's Tractarian account of logical consequence , which is strictly deductive . At the beginning of Proposition 6, Wittgenstein postulates the essential form of all sentences. He uses the notation [ p ¯ , ξ ¯ , N ( ξ ¯ ) ] {\displaystyle [{\bar {p}},{\bar {\xi }},N({\bar {\xi }})]} , where Proposition 6 says that any logical sentence can be derived from

23320-459: The conditions of possible experience and its objects. "Transcendental illusion" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas. Although reason has a "logical use" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant is concerned with its purportedly "real use" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination. The three categories of relation , pursued without regard to

23532-456: The division of observation versus theory , as one can predict, collect, prioritize, and assess data only via some horizon of expectation set by a theory. Thus, any dataset —the direct observations, the scientific facts—is laden with theory . With his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn critically destabilized the verificationist program, which was presumed to call for foundationalism . (But already in

23744-566: The efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions. Like "the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels", reason "could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space". Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant's critique

23956-401: The error of subreption , and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish. It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate

24168-580: The existence of an object satisfying the description. According to the theory, a statement like "There is a man to my left" should be analyzed into: "There is some x such that x is a man and x is to my left, and for any y , if y is a man and y is to my left, y is identical to x ". If the statement is true, x refers to the man to my left. Whereas Russell believed the names (like x ) in his theory should refer to things we can know directly by virtue of acquaintance, Wittgenstein did not believe that there are any epistemic constraints on logical analyses:

24380-566: The extant conduct of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as a movement to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it. After World War II , the movement shifted to a milder variant, logical empiricism. It was led mainly by Carl Hempel , who, during the rise of Nazism , had emigrated to the United States. In the ensuing years, the movement's central premises, still unresolved, were heavily criticised by leading philosophers, particularly Willard van Orman Quine and Karl Popper , and even, within

24592-548: The first Critique . Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . Kant's reputation gradually rose through

24804-426: The first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique ), and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals . The 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment (the third Critique ) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology . In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish

25016-417: The first, "constructive" part of his book. As Kant observes, however, "human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason". It is the project of "the critique of pure reason" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed. The section of

25228-416: The following three questions: The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must— think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Our rational faith in morality

25440-540: The hope that all theoretical terms of science could be related to an observational base by such reduction chains. This admission raised a serious problem for the formulation of a meaning criterion: how was one to rule out unwanted metaphysical claims while admitting as significant highly abstract scientific claims? Articles by logical positivists Articles on logical positivism Articles on related philosophical topics Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804)

25652-465: The introduction to Logik , that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik , "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason , the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic , but in its position within

25864-563: The latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, " Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? "; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science from 1786. Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as

26076-403: The lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism , the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented

26288-481: The left of the model for car B, it depicts that the cars in the world stand in the same way relative to each other. This picturing relation, Wittgenstein believed, was our key to understanding the relationship a proposition holds to the world. Although language differs from pictures in lacking direct pictorial mode of representation (e.g., it does not use colors and shapes to represent colors and shapes), still Wittgenstein believed that propositions are logical pictures of

26500-427: The liberalization of empiricism and the epistemological nonfoundationalism of a move from phenomenalism to physicalism . As Neurath and somewhat Carnap posed science toward social reform, the split in Vienna Circle also reflected political views. The Berlin Circle was led principally by Hans Reichenbach . Both Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap had been influenced by and sought to define logical positivism versus

26712-413: The limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics: Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole. Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with

26924-456: The line and drift away from the concepts of universal Forms held by his teacher Plato. The concept of Essence, taken alone is a potentiality, and its combination with matter is its actuality. "First, the substance of a thing is peculiar to it and does not belong to any other thing" (Z.13 1038b10), i.e. not universal and we know this is essence. This concept of form/substance/essence, which we have now collapsed into one, being presented as potential

27136-547: The local Masonic lodge . His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747). Kant

27348-537: The logical empiricist program was untenable, and it became viewed as self-contradictory: the verifiability criterion of meaning was itself unverified. Notable critics included Popper , Quine , Hanson , Kuhn , Putnam , Austin , Strawson , Goodman , and Rorty . An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung , arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery , directly answered verificationism. Popper considered

27560-420: The mastery of content specific to the activity. On Wittgenstein's view ... linguistic mastery does not, as such, depend on even an inexplicit mastery of some sort of content. ... The logical articulation of the activity itself can be brought more clearly into view, without that involving our coming to awareness that anything. When we speak about the activity of philosophical clarification, grammar may impose on us

27772-573: The meaning criterion to be mere confirmability. Carnap's new criterion required neither verification nor falsification but only partial testability so as now to include not only universal statements but also the disposition statements of science ... Though plausible initially, the device of introducing non-observational terms in this way gave rise to a number of difficulties which impugned the supposedly clear distinctions between logical and empirical matters and analytic and synthetic statements (Hempel 1951). Independently, Carnap himself (1939) soon gave up

27984-583: The mere thought of "I" in the proposition "I think" as the proper cognition of "I" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul. The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the antinomies of pure reason—that is, the contradictions of reason with itself—in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms. He presents four cases in which he claims reason

28196-438: The metaphysical subject's world. In turn, a logically "ideal" language cannot supply meaning , it can only reflect the world, and so, sentences in a logical language cannot remain meaningful if they are not merely reflections of the facts. From Propositions 6.4–6.54, the Tractatus shifts its focus from primarily logical considerations to what may be considered more traditionally philosophical foci (God, ethics, meta-ethics, death,

28408-398: The mind knows only actual or potential sensory experience, verificationists took all sciences' basic content to be only sensory experience. And some influence came from Percy Bridgman 's musings that others proclaimed as operationalism , whereby a physical theory is understood by what laboratory procedures scientists perform to test its predictions. In verificationism , only the verifiable

28620-481: The mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality , morality , and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781,

28832-443: The modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility. The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science. In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in

29044-464: The most direct contested matter was Hume's argument against any necessary connection between causal events, which Hume characterized as the "cement of the universe." In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant argues for what he takes to be the a priori justification of such necessary connection. Although now recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, the Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book

29256-559: The movement itself, by Hempel. The 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn 's landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dramatically shifted academic philosophy's focus. In 1967 philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". Logical positivists picked from Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language the verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness. As in Ernst Mach 's phenomenalism , whereby

29468-570: The nature of philosophy and the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. It is here, for instance, that he first distinguishes between material and grammatical propositions, noting: A philosophical treatise attempts to say something where nothing can properly be said. It is predicated upon the idea that philosophy should be pursued in a way analogous to the natural sciences ; that philosophers are looking to construct true theories. This sense of philosophy does not coincide with Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein

29680-409: The necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge. The second of the two Divisions of "The Transcendental Logic", "The Transcendental Dialectic", contains the "negative" portion of Kant's Critique , which builds upon the "positive" arguments of the preceding "Transcendental Analytic" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious

29892-414: The need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of The Conflict of

30104-668: The neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer —the then leading figure of Marburg school , so called—and against Edmund Husserl 's phenomenology . Logical positivists especially opposed Martin Heidegger 's obscure metaphysics, the epitome of what logical positivism rejected. In the early 1930s, Carnap debated Heidegger over "metaphysical pseudosentences". As the movement's first emissary to the New World , Moritz Schlick visited Stanford University in 1929, yet otherwise remained in Vienna and

30316-501: The northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city. Into the 21st century, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana , were included in

30528-431: The objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories." Kant's principle of apperception

30740-458: The only interpretation given to the theoretical terms is their explicit definition provided by the correspondence rules". According to Hilary Putnam , a former student of Reichenbach and of Carnap , the dichotomy of observational terms versus theoretical terms introduced a problem within scientific discussion that was nonexistent until this dichotomy was stated by logical positivists. Putnam's four objections: Putnam also alleged that positivism

30952-441: The only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which Hume called "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact". Establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike a posteriori cognition, a priori cognition has "true or strict ... universality" and includes

31164-466: The organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason , Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question. These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge , that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously

31376-450: The penultimate proposition of the Tractatus, proposition 6.54, states that once one understands the propositions of the Tractatus, he will recognize that they are senseless, and that they must be thrown away. Proposition 6.54, then, presents a difficult interpretative problem. If the so-called 'picture theory' of meaning is correct, and it is impossible to represent logical form, then the theory, by trying to say something about how language and

31588-485: The picture the situation which it depicts without knowing if it in fact obtains, analogously, when we understand a proposition we grasp its truth conditions or its sense, that is, we know what the world must be like if it is true, without knowing if it is in fact true (TLP 4.024, 4.431). It is believed that Wittgenstein was inspired for this theory by the way that traffic courts in Paris reenact automobile accidents. A toy car

31800-450: The positive results of the first part of the Critique . He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality. In the second of the two Books of "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of

32012-453: The positivism but other instrumentalism —whereby scientific theory is but a human tool to predict human observations—filling the void left by positivism's decline. By the late 1960s, logical positivism had become exhausted. In 1976, A. J. Ayer quipped that "the most important" defect of logical positivism "was that nearly all of it was false," though he maintained "it was true in spirit." Although logical positivism tends to be recalled as

32224-406: The primary level (numbered 1–7), with each sub-level being a comment on or elaboration of the statement at the next higher level (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13). In all, the Tractatus comprises 525 numbered statements. The Tractatus is recognized by philosophers as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century and was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of

32436-649: The principle that is statements cannot justify ought statements, but are separated by an unbridgeable gap. A. J. Ayer 's 1936 book asserted an extreme variant—the boo/hooray doctrine —whereby all evaluative judgments are but emotional reactions. In an important pair of papers in 1936 and 1937, "Testability and meaning", Carnap replaced verification with confirmation , on the view that although universal laws cannot be verified they can be confirmed. Later, Carnap employed abundant logical and mathematical methods in researching inductive logic while seeking to provide an account of probability as "degree of confirmation", but

32648-399: The problems. Indeed, the philosophy of the Tractatus is for Wittgenstein, on this view, problematic only when applied to itself. At the end of the text Wittgenstein uses an analogy from Arthur Schopenhauer and compares the book to a ladder that must be thrown away after it has been climbed. As the last line in the book, proposition 7 has no supplementary propositions. It ends the book with

32860-415: The program of reducing mathematics to logic. He continued it with Bertrand Russell , but lost interest in this logicism . Russell then continued it with Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica , inspiring some of the more mathematical logical positivists, such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap . Carnap's early anti-metaphysical works employed Russell's theory of types . Carnap envisioned

33072-405: The proposition "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" ( German : Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen ). A prominent view set out in the Tractatus is the picture theory, sometimes called the picture theory of language . The picture theory is a proposed explanation of the capacity of language and thought to represent the world. Although something need not be

33284-400: The proposition a state of affairs is, as it were, put together for the sake of experiment"). And for similar reasons, no proposition is necessarily true except in the limiting case of tautologies, which Wittgenstein say lack sense (TLP 4.461). If a proposition pictures a state of affairs in virtue of being a picture in logical space, then a non-logical or metaphysical "necessary truth" would be

33496-409: The propositions could not be, by self-application of the attendant philosophy of the Tractatus, true (or even sensical), it was only the philosophy of the Tractatus itself that could render them so. This is presumably what made Wittgenstein compelled to accept the philosophy of the Tractatus as specially having solved the problems of philosophy. It is the philosophy of the Tractatus, alone, that can solve

33708-503: The realm of historical and social assessment, rather than fitting it to the model of physics. Kuhn's ideas were rapidly adopted by scholars in disciplines well outside natural sciences, and, as logical empiricists were extremely influential in the social sciences, ushered academia into postpositivism or postempiricism. The " received view " operates on the correspondence rule that states, "The observational terms are taken as referring to specified phenomena or phenomenal properties, and

33920-506: The relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy . Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature , had argued that we only know

34132-409: The relationship that pictures bear to what they depict, but only show it via fact-stating propositions (TLP 4.121). Thus we cannot say that there is a correspondence between language and reality; the correspondence itself can only be shown , since our language is not capable of describing its own logical structure. However, on the more recent "resolute" interpretation of the Tractatus (see below),

34344-428: The remarks on "showing" were not in fact an attempt by Wittgenstein to gesture at the existence of some ineffable features of language or reality, but rather, as Cora Diamond and James Conant have argued, the distinction was meant to draw a sharp contrast between logic and descriptive discourse. On their reading, Wittgenstein indeed meant that some things are shown when we reflect on the logic of our language, but what

34556-489: The resolute, 'new Wittgenstein', or Not-All-Nonsense View; 3) the No-Truths-At-All View. The traditionalist approach to resolving this paradox is to hold that Wittgenstein accepted that philosophical statements could not be made, but that nevertheless, by appealing to the distinction between saying and showing, that these truths can be communicated by showing. On the resolute reading, some of the propositions of

34768-586: The rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton . Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony , which he regarded as "the pillow for

34980-467: The result was the Critique of Pure Reason , printed by Johann Friedrich Hartknoch . Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori , and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality . Perhaps

35192-464: The return, as it were, to salient aspects of Carnap's 1928 conception. Everybody had noted that the Wittgensteinian verificationist criterion rendered universally quantified statements meaningless. Schlick (1931) thus followed Wittgenstein's own suggestion to treat them instead as representing rules for the formation of verifiable singular statements. (His abandonment of conclusive verifiability

35404-465: The sake of this analogy, the chess pieces are objects, they and their positions constitute states of affairs and therefore facts, and the totality of facts is the entire particular game of chess. We can communicate such a game of chess in the exact way that Wittgenstein says a proposition represents the world. We might say "WR/KR1" to communicate a white rook's being on the square commonly labeled as king's rook 1. Or, to be more thorough, we might make such

35616-683: The sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures , a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God . By 1764, Kant had become

35828-426: The second of which they are thought ." Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a particular object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a general type of object. The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is,

36040-463: The sensible, changing world we perceive does not consist of substance but of facts. Proposition two begins with a discussion of objects, form and substance. This epistemic notion is further clarified by a discussion of objects or things as metaphysical substances. His use of the word "composite" in 2.021 can be taken to mean a combination of form and matter, in the Platonic sense . The notion of

36252-399: The simple objects are whatever is contained in the elementary propositions which cannot be logically analyzed any further. By objects , Wittgenstein did not mean physical objects in the world, but the absolute base of logical analysis, that can be combined but not divided (TLP 2.02–2.0201). According to Wittgenstein's logico-atomistic metaphysical system, objects each have a "nature", which

36464-504: The social sciences. Comtean positivism had viewed science as description , whereas the logical positivists posed science as explanation , perhaps to better realize the envisioned unity of science by covering not only fundamental science —that is, fundamental physics —but the special sciences , too, for instance biology , anthropology , psychology , sociology , and economics . The most widely accepted concept of scientific explanation, held even by neopositivist critic Karl Popper,

36676-414: The spatial relation between the real cars in the automobile accident. Pictures have what Wittgenstein calls Form der Abbildung or pictorial form, which they share with what they depict. This means that all the logically possible arrangements of the pictorial elements in the picture correspond to the possibilities of arranging the things which they depict in reality. Thus if the model for car A stands to

36888-446: The structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful." And Aristotle agrees: "The universal cannot be a substance in the manner in which an essence is", (Z.13 1038b17) as he begins to draw

37100-528: The subject in the last decade of his life. Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran faith in Königsberg , East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg . Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from Memel , at

37312-509: The subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience. Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are "transcendentally ideal"—the pure forms of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are "empirically real", by which he means "that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time". However Kant's doctrine

37524-736: The terms of another, putatively more fundamental. Sometimes these reductions consisted of set-theoretic manipulations of a few logically primitive concepts (as in Carnap's Logical Structure of the World , 1928). Sometimes, these reductions consisted of allegedly analytic or a priori deductive relationships (as in Carnap's "Testability and meaning"). A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept. As in Comtean positivism 's envisioned unity of science , neopositivists aimed to network all special sciences through

37736-433: The theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory. Explicitly denying the positivist view of meaning and verification, Popper developed the epistemology of critical rationalism , which considers that human knowledge evolves by conjectures and refutations, and that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. For Popper, science's aim

37948-400: The thing-in-itself is not numerically identical to the phenomenal empirical object. Kant also spoke, however, of the thing-in-itself or transcendent object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, a different interpretation argues that the thing-in-itself does not represent

38160-447: The three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are in fact pseudosciences. This section of the Critique is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion. The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the paralogisms —i.e., false inferences—that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take

38372-495: The time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda , Lithuania ). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: Kantwaggen – today part of Priekulė ) and were of Kursenieki origin. Kant was baptized as Emanuel and later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew . He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood). The Kant household stressed

38584-411: The title of "father of modern philosophy ". In his doctrine of transcendental idealism , Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism , he wrote

38796-409: The universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, for instance, the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a thing in general —that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the a priori forms of intuition, are

39008-430: The university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism . In 2010, the university was again renamed to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University . Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular,

39220-411: The use of 'that'-clauses and 'what'-constructions in the descriptions we give of the results of the activity. But, one could say, the final 'throwing away of the ladder' involves the recognition that that grammar of 'what'-ness has been pervasively misleading us, even as we read through the Tractatus. To achieve the relevant sort of increasingly refined awareness of the logic of our language is not to grasp

39432-444: The value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work. At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz , Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for

39644-413: The vocabulary and symbols of logic's formal language , was written in natural language open to the layperson. Kuhn's book was first published in a volume of International Encyclopedia of Unified Science —a project begun by logical positivists but co-edited by Neurath whose view of science was already nonfoundationalist as mentioned above—and some sense unified science, indeed, but by bringing it into

39856-466: The whole of Kant's work." Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering Es ist gut ("It is good") before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum . Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. Heinrich Heine observed the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him

40068-425: The whole of predicate logic with identity, defining the quantifiers at 5.52, and showing how identity would then be handled at 5.53–5.532. The subsidiaries of 6. contain more philosophical reflections on logic, connecting to ideas of knowledge, thought, and the a priori and transcendental . The final passages argue that logic and mathematics express only tautologies and are transcendental, i.e. they lie outside of

40280-491: The will) and, less traditionally along with these, the mystical. The philosophy of language presented in the Tractatus attempts to demonstrate just what the limits of language are – to delineate precisely what can and cannot be sensically said. Among the sensibly sayable for Wittgenstein are the propositions of natural science, and to the nonsensical, or unsayable, those subjects associated with philosophy traditionally – ethics and metaphysics, for instance. Curiously, on this score,

40492-424: The world beyond human experience (scientific realism) versus whether it is but a human tool to predict human experience (instrumentalism). Philosophers increasingly critiqued logical positivism, often misrepresenting it without thorough examination. It was generally reduced to oversimplifications and stereotypes, particularly associating it with foundationalism . The movement helped anchor analytic philosophy in

40704-758: The world by virtue of sharing logical form with the reality which they represent (TLP 2.18–2.2). And that, he thought, explains how we can understand a proposition without its meaning having been explained to us (TLP 4.02); we can directly see in the proposition what it represents as we see in the picture the situation which it depicts just by virtue of knowing its method of depiction: propositions show their sense (TLP 4.022). However, Wittgenstein claimed that pictures cannot represent their own logical form, they cannot say what they have in common with reality but can only show it (TLP 4.12–4.121). If representation consist in depicting an arrangement of elements in logical space, then logical space itself cannot be depicted since it

40916-404: The world must be for there to be meaning, is self-undermining. This is to say that the 'picture theory' of meaning itself requires that something be said about the logical form sentences must share with reality for meaning to be possible. This requires doing precisely what the 'picture theory' of meaning precludes. It would appear, then, that the metaphysics and the philosophy of language endorsed by

41128-463: The world that would correlate to the smallest parts of a logically analyzed language, such as names like x . Our language is not sufficiently (i.e., not completely) analyzed for such a correlation, so one cannot say what an object is. We can, however, talk about them as "indestructible" and "common to all possible worlds". Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher's job is to discover the structure of language through analysis. Anthony Kenny provides

41340-455: Was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg , Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology , metaphysics , ethics , and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy . He has been called the "father of modern ethics", the "father of modern aesthetics", and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism, he has earned

41552-444: Was a dominant movement, and Hegelian successors such as F H Bradley explained reality by postulating metaphysical entities lacking empirical basis, drawing reaction in the form of positivism . Starting in the late 19th century, there was a "back to Kant " movement( Neo-Kantianism ). Ernst Mach 's positivism and phenomenalism were a major influence. The Vienna Circle , gathering around University of Vienna and Café Central ,

41764-409: Was actually a form of metaphysical idealism by its rejecting scientific theory's ability to garner knowledge about nature's unobservable aspects. With his "no miracles" argument, posed in 1974, Putnam asserted scientific realism , the stance that science achieves true—or approximately true—knowledge of the world as it exists independently of humans' sensory experience. In this, Putnam opposed not only

41976-632: Was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit

42188-444: Was led principally by Moritz Schlick . Schlick had held a neo-Kantian position, but later converted, via Carnap's 1928 book Der logische Aufbau der Welt , that is, The Logical Structure of the World . A 1929 pamphlet written by Otto Neurath , Hans Hahn , and Rudolf Carnap summarized the Vienna Circle's positions. Another member of Vienna Circle to later prove very influential was Carl Hempel. A friendly but tenacious critic of

42400-559: Was logically possible to conceive of a procedure of verification; concerned with constructed languages only, Carnap (1936–37) deemed meaningful only statements for whom it was nomologically possible to conceive of a procedure of confirmation or disconfirmation. Many of these issues were openly discussed at the Paris congress in 1935. Already in 1932 Carnap had sought to sharpen his previous criterion by stipulating that those statements were meaningful that were syntactically well-formed and whose non-logical terms were reducible to terms occurring in

42612-487: Was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similarly to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder , he rejected Kant's position that space and time possess

42824-469: Was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead

43036-1019: Was murdered in 1936 at the University by a former student, Johann Nelböck , who was reportedly deranged. That year, a British attendee at some Vienna Circle meetings since 1933, A. J. Ayer saw his Language, Truth and Logic , written in English, import logical positivism to the English-speaking world . By then, the Nazi Party 's 1933 rise to power in Germany had triggered flight of intellectuals. In exile in England, Otto Neurath died in 1945. Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel—Carnap's protégé who had studied in Berlin with Reichenbach—settled permanently in America. Upon Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, remaining logical positivists, many of whom were also Jewish , were targeted and continued flight. Logical positivism thus became dominant in

43248-437: Was never able to formulate a model. In Carnap's inductive logic, every universal law's degree of confirmation is always zero. In any event, the precise formulation of what came to be called the "criterion of cognitive significance" took three decades (Hempel 1950, Carnap 1956, Carnap 1961). Carl Hempel became a major critic within the logical positivism movement. Hempel criticized the positivist thesis that empirical knowledge

43460-511: Was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography , was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics. In the Universal Natural History , Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis , in which he deduced that

43672-562: Was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change, which was considered a politically-charged issue due to the residents having mixed feelings about its German past, was announced at a ceremony attended by Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder , and

43884-529: Was scientific, and thus meaningful (or cognitively meaningful ), whereas the unverifiable, being unscientific, were meaningless "pseudostatements" (just emotively meaningful ). Unscientific discourse, as in ethics and metaphysics , would be unfit for discourse by philosophers, newly tasked to organize knowledge , not develop new knowledge. Logical positivism is sometimes stereotyped as forbidding talk of unobservables , such as microscopic entities or such notions as causality and general principles, but that

44096-469: Was taken to pose significant problems for the philosophy of science. These problems were recognized within the movement, which hosted attempted solutions—Carnap's move to confirmation , Ayer's acceptance of weak verification —but the program drew sustained criticism from a number of directions by the 1950s. Even philosophers disagreeing among themselves on which direction general epistemology ought to take, as well as on philosophy of science , agreed that

44308-575: Was that a statement is "cognitively meaningful" in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content only if some finite procedure conclusively determines its truth. By this verifiability principle , only statements verifiable either by their analyticity or by empiricism were cognitively meaningful . Metaphysics , ontology , as well as much of ethics failed this criterion, and so were found cognitively meaningless . Moritz Schlick, however, did not view ethical or aesthetic statements as cognitively meaningless . Cognitive meaningfulness

44520-472: Was that differences emerged as to whether the criterion of significance was to apply to all languages or whether it was to apply primarily to constructed, formal languages. Schlick retained the focus on logical possibility and natural languages throughout, but Carnap had firmly settled his focus on nomological possibility and constructed languages by the mid-thirties. Concerned with natural language, Schlick (1932, 1936a) deemed all statements meaningful for which it

44732-448: Was the deductive-nomological model (DN model). Yet DN model received its greatest explication by Carl Hempel, first in his 1942 article "The function of general laws in history", and more explicitly with Paul Oppenheim in their 1948 article "Studies in the logic of explanation". In the DN model, the stated phenomenon to be explained is the explanandum —which can be an event, law , or theory —whereas premises stated to explain it are

44944-551: Was variously defined: having a truth value ; corresponding to a possible state of affairs; intelligible or understandable as are scientific statements. Ethics and aesthetics were subjective preferences, while theology and other metaphysics contained "pseudostatements", neither true nor false. This meaningfulness was cognitive, although other types of meaningfulness—for instance, emotive, expressive, or figurative—occurred in metaphysical discourse, dismissed from further review. Thus, logical positivism indirectly asserted Hume's law ,

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