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Austrian philosophy: the legacy of Franz Brentano

1995; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 32; Issue: 07 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.32-3835

1943-5975

Barry Smith,

Philosophy, Science, and History

could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" ' (1988, p. 7).Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle.The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood.Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context.Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised B in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the B in contrast to Frege and his successors B did not abandon psychological concerns.Rather, their work in ontology proceeded always in tandem with work on the cognitive processes in which the corresponding objects are experienced, and it is in thus spanning the gulf between ontology and psychology in non-reductionistic fashion that the members of the Brentano school can be seen to have anticipated certain crucial aspects of contemporary cognitive science.'new Viennese school' of composition around Arnold Schönberg, the school of linguists and psychologists around Karl Bühler, the school of Austrian economics founded by Carl Menger in 1871 and evolving, by degrees, into the Ludwig von Mises circle in the 1920s.Or consider the 'Prager Kreis' of novelists and critics around Max Brod and Franz Kafka, the Prague linguistic circle of Roman Jakobson, Jan MukaÍovský and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, or, in more recent times, the philosophical discussion group which met regularly in the apartment of Václav Havel and which later formed the nucleus of the Czech Civic Forum.Schlick, too, had his regular Thursday evening discussion circle.This comprised above all a group of mathematicians around Hans Hahn, himself a former student of Mach and Boltzmann, and included Kurt Gödel, Gustav Bergmann, Karl Menger (son of the economist Carl), and Schlick's own assistant Friedrich Waismann.The Schlick circle could count among its members also Philipp Frank, Herbert Feigl, Viktor Kraft, Rudolf Carnap, and a3. There are of course exceptions to the thesis expressed in the text, above all Frege (though even here we can point to Wittgenstein's role in disseminating Fregean ideas).Other exceptions include Helmholtz, Ostwald, Hilbert, Nelson (the latter exerting an important influence on Grelling and on Dubislav), and also Oswald Külpe (who exerted an influence on Bühler, Popper and the Berlin Gestaltists and who was himself influenced by Mach).All of these were, however, on the fringes of German philosophy, even if -as in the case of Weyl or Hilbert -they distinguished themselves in other fields.The thinking in the area of the philosophy of science of German philosophers truly belonging to the mainstream German tradition -for example that of Natorp and the lesser Neo-Kantians -has, in contrast, been almost entirely forgotten, or it has been resurrected precisely in investigations of the thiking of philosophers, such as Carnap, who were allied to the Austrian tradition (see for example Runggaldier 1984, Friedman 1987, Sauer 1989, Coffa 1991).9Reichenbach, Carl Hempel and Kurt Grelling -it can often be asserted that the true flowering of their thought and influence occurred precisely through formal or informal collaboration with their teachers or contemporaries in Austria. 3Of quite specific interest for our own purposes is the fact that almost all such philosophers were based in Berlin, where the 'Society for Empirical Philosophy' was established in 1928 as a counterpart to the Schlick circle in Vienna.Why, then, was the new scientific, logically empiricist philosophy, insofar as it found a home in Germany at all, concentrated so heavily in the single city of Berlin?And why, of all the cities in Europe, should this philosophy have taken root so firmly in Vienna, Prague and Lemberg? Philosophy and PoliticsWhen A. J. Ayer arrived in Vienna in late November of 1932, spending a protracted honeymoon of just over three months in Austria before returning to Oxford to write Language, Truth and Logic, the Schlick circle was at the very height of its activity.It had already organized its first two international conferences, and at the first of these, held in Prague in 1929, it had distributed copies of its manifesto, the "Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung" or "Scientific Conception of theWorld".This was written, effectively, by Neurath, in collaboration with Carnap and Hahn (and to a lesser extent other members of the circle), who served to temper some of Neurath's wilder flights of fancy.The patrician Schlick, to whom the manifesto was dedicated, was less than satisfied with the result.This was first of all because he was not taken by the conception of the circle as a 'movement' of any sort, favouring a more modest and more narrowly scientific approach:Schlick hated everything that smacked of agitation, was against it all: 'It is not necessary for us to agitate: that we can leave to the political parties: in science we say what we have found, we hope to say the truth; and if it is the truth, then it will win out.' (Haller and Rutte 1977, p. 31) But it was also because he was distressed by the political tone of the piece, and more specifically by those portions which suggested some sort of alignment of the dominant political current in Vienna.Its world of ideas stems from the enlightenment, from empiricism, utilitarianism and the free trade movement of England.In Vienna's liberal movement, scholars of world renown occupied leading positions.Here an anti-metaphysical spirit was cultivated, for instance, by men like Theodor Gomperz (who translated the works of J. S. Mill), and by Suess, Jodl and others.(Neurath 1929, p. 301 of translation, amended slightly) This liberal atmosphere fostered also, Neurath tells us, the development in Austria of scientifically oriented popular education -leading eventually to the school reform movement of the 1920s, in which Wittgenstein, perhaps inadvertently, participated during his time as a school teacher in Lower Austria.Secondly, Neurath points out that Mach, too, was a product of this Viennese liberal enlightenment, which was as it were compressed, in Austria, into the short span of a few decades.His formative years as student and Privatdozent were spent in Vienna, where his political attitudes -subsequently to reveal themselves in his activities as Rector of the still unified University in p. 303.A comprehensive discussion of this aspect of the development of positivism in Austria is provided by Stadler 1982.15 were shaped.These same attitudes then manifested themselves also, Neurath suggests, in Mach's philosophy of science, and specifically in his attempt to 'purify' empirical science of metaphysical notions:We recall his critique of absolute space which made him a forerunner of Einstein, his struggle against the metaphysics of the thing-in-itself and of the concept of substance, and his investigations of the construction of the concepts of science from ultimate elements, namely sense data.(Op.cit., p. 302)The influence of Mach and of his successor Boltzmann, Neurath now argues, 'makes it understandable' why there was in Vienna 'a lively dominant interest in the epistemological and logical problems that are linked with the foundations of physics'.This influence was, certainly, of lasting importance, despite the fact that, after only six years as professor in Vienna, Mach was forced by ill-health to retire.Thus Hayek, for example, reports that he and his contemporaries upon arriving in Vienna to take up their studies in the immediate post-war years 'found in Mach almost the only arguments against a metaphysical and mystificatory attitude' such as was manifested by the dominant philosophers in the University at the time:from Mach one was then led on to Helmholtz, to Poincaré and to similar thinkers, and of course, for those who went into the matter systematically such as my friend Karl Popper, to all the natural scientists and philosophers of the period (Hayek 1966, pp.42f.).