Background

Rene Descartes’ <Meditation on First Philosophy>, especially the first two meditations, where the famous quote I think therefore I am(Cogito, ergo sum)’ comes from, have had a huge impact in the history of philosophy, they are often considered as the mark for modernity and an unavoidable first step for any modern philosophical thinking. The proposition “I think therefore I am” became a fundamental element of western philosophy, since it tries to form the indubitable foundation of knowledge in the face of radical doubt. This book also brings the mind body problem into people’s attention, and proposed the thesis known as Cartesian Dualism or “mind-body dualism”.

Continental v.s. Analytical

For this last class, we’ll finish with some general remarks. The first general characteristic of philosophy today is the contrast between Continental European and English-speaking philosophy, or contrast between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The thing however is that just as empiricism has been broaden so that narrow sense of empiricism that you get from Mill and Russell no longer applies thanks to the broadening and loosening up that took place with ordinary language and other things. So the term analytic is now extremely loose. Analytic philosophy is now simply virtually any philosophy that tries to analyze concepts and analyze arguments and in that sense to think in more detail. The phenomenologist as you know is inclined to describe rather than to construct arguments. He takes it that when you see what is being described then you get the point whereas the English-speaking philosopher is more inclined to want to amass arguments and reasons for and against in trying to draw conclusions. These are differences of methodology and differences of intention. This divide which we’ve seen historically continues and I think you have to say with little mutual understanding and oftentimes little mutual respect. And despite the fact that there are some notable individuals who succeeded in keeping a foot in both camps one such is Richard Rorty whom we’ve mentioned before his very postmodern book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” draws on people ranging from Wittgenstein to Gadmar to Foucault, very much in both camps. And Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley likewise seems to succeed in keeping the foot in the two. But most philosophy departments in the United States are overwhelmingly analytic in some sense or another some broad sense. There are a few departments that are overwhelmingly phenomenological. There are some who try to hold up both ends, Northwestern University for instance though they have in effect two different graduate programs as a result. The general picture is that philosophy in America is of the broadly empirical broadly analytic sort. It’s in the light of that that I’m inclined to say to people wanting to go on in philosophy don’t unless you can stomach a certain amount of analytic stuff and if you can’t work in that sort of detail and don’t have a mind for it don’t go on in philosophy. If what infuses you in terms you on is the history of ideas rather than working with issues and arguments and concepts and so forth then maybe you should go on in the history of ideas rather than in philosophy.

A.J. Ayer — Language, Truth and Logic

1. The Elimination of Metaphysics

Without metaphysics the function of philosophy is changed. The nature of philosophical analysis is going to be such that it’s telling us about reality beyond experience. The a-priori does not tell us about reality, it’s simply tautological. And truth and probability can be taken as a phenomenalist rather than realist sense. Ethics does not tell us about objective moral order in reality, nor does theology tell us about the metaphysical entity known as God. So the elimination of metaphysics is the thesis run through the book.

Introduction

20th century logical positivism has its roots in people like Comte, Mill and Mach. There was a Vienna circle of the logical positivists which developed in the 1910s and 1920s which shaped the continental development of this movement. The English development was sort of a spinoff from the Vienna circle but then was then popularized by A.J Ayer in his “Language, Truth and Logic”. Within the Vienna circle you have people like Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap. And the main significance of the Vienna circle is their initial development of the movement from a rather naive kind of empiricism into one which recognized that if we distinguish between sense data and material objects, we tend towards a phenomenalist epistemology and one which recognized that we cannot always have direct empirical verification of an apparently empirical statement. Sometimes it has to be indirect and through the logical implications of that statement in conjunction with other assertions.

Introduction

Russell is in continuity with the 19th century empiricists, particularly John Stuart Mill, those empiricists and their attention to objective empirical scientific knowledge as expressed in the hypothetical deductive method. That is to say scientific explanations have the structure of a deductive system based on a broad general hypothesis, which in Russell comes through in his logical atomism. And the universal extension of the scientific method. This movement of 19th century to Russell into the early 20th century represents the kind of scientism as it’s called which counts the scientific method as the only acceptable method for giving us a reliable knowledge. And it is this which then comes through in early Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein of the “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus”, the later Wittgenstein represented by his book “Philosophical Investigations” is different. The early Wittgenstein follows Russell in this regard as does the logical positivism of the 1930s and 1940s, the sort of positions represented by A.J. Ayer, though he moderates the appeal to science and hypothetical deductive method in some ways.