Introduction

The three characteristics of 19th Century Empiricism are true also of Bertrand Russell. And what comes out of Bertrand Russell are the works of early Wittgenstein and logic positivism and certain types of analytic philosophy after logic positivism.

Introduction

Let’s come back to the diagram about the intersection of modern empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the kind of synthesis affected by Immanuel Kant, out of which grew distinction between two methodologies that persistent through philosophy until this day. The rationalism of the Enlightenment is mainly on the European continent, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The outgrowth of that as we’ve seen in Hegel, the existential tradition to some extent people like Whitehead, and some kind of phenomenological kind of method that tries to look at reality through the lens of human self awareness. On the other hand, the empiricist tradition, Locke, Berkeley and Hume is mainly in Britain and continued in the 19th century with three people we’re going to be looking at Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Ernst Mach, and the greatest of these is John Stuart Mill. That continuing empiricist approach led to an emphasis on scientific method being universalized for all kinds of human knowledge. Whereas the way of seeing the world, the lens through which everything was seen for the European tradition is the human spirit with its creative freedom, on the other hands, the lens through which the 19th century empiricists are seeing everything is simply the lens of nature as viewed through the scientific method. To this day, throughout the 20th century, it’s fair to say that the philosophical dominance in the continent of Europe is phenomenological whereas philosophical dominance of English speaking philosophy is empiricist.

General Characteristics

There are similarities between pragmatism and process philosophy. With that in mind, some general characteristics of American pragmatism.

Influences on Whitehead’s Thought

Hegel’s Evolutionary Idealism

Let’s start with influences that shapes Whitehead’s thinking. The first is Hegel’s evolutionary idealism. They buy into the theory of evolution, but they are not metaphysical naturalists, they are idealists. Their point is while there are underlying realities of the nature of spirit, there are various degrees to which that an immaterial free creative spirit is been fully manifested in the phenomenon of nature and human existence and human history. So the evolutionary process, biological evolution, cultural evolution, is understood in terms the dialectical unfolding of the absolute, to a point where that freedom of spirit becomes self conscious rather than just implicit and unconscious. The self conscious expression of free creative spirit in culture is the zenith towards which the evolutionary process moves. That kind of the evolutionary thought was in an idealist context, so consciousness is the key. Obviously unfolding self consciousness is not substance, but process, so you have change in the basic notion of reality, from the changelessness of some basic stuff, to some dialectical process. Like Hegel, Whitehead does a phenomenology of the process, of consciousness. And process is not a mechanistic thing, but the model is more organic than mechanistic. The ingredients are not atomistic in the sense of no relationships with anything else, but they are rather relationships. All of this translates to Whitehead expect the idealism. He is going to be an evolutionary naturalist.

History

The phenomenological method is alluded in Hegel, but the 20th century phenomenology is much more developed and complex. Even if we want to simply talk about existentialism we want to talk about phenomenology. The history goes like this: you have Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first phase of existentialism in reaction to the Enlightenment, their work is description, and a kind of introspective psychology of self-discovery, there is no rigorous philosophical method involved, but as you move into the 20th century, you find that influence of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is combined with the more rigorous phenomenological method that is being developed out of the original Hegelian roots. A phenomenological method that we usually ascribe in its most rigorous form to the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, though it also operates in parallel in a variety of other philosophers in the European tradition. The sort of description of structures of inner consciousness. That combination becomes evident in Martin Heidegger who at one time works with Husserl. And by the same token people like Sartre, who represents this more philosophically rigorous phenomenological method in an existentialist. It’s proper to call Kierkegaard and Nietzsche existential thinkers and Heidegger and Sartre are often delineated from other as phenomenological existentialist, what they use is a method of existential phenomenology, the existential dimensions of human existence, but that’s not what Husserl’s phenomenology was developed to do, he was more interested in the phenomenology of the transcendental ego and his original work is spoken of as transcendental phenomenology to mark it off from existential phenomenology. There are other European writer who also are more influenced by earlier Husserl like French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the decisive figure of phenomenological hermeneutics.