Logical Empiricism: The Vienna Circle

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the map of Europe went through radical changes. By the end of the First World War, the three great empires of Austria-Hungary of the Habsburgs, tsarist Russia, and the Ottoman dynasty had disappeared. They were replaced by a large number of new states, most of which were based on the nationalist idea of ‘one people, one state’. Because the borders between these new states were often drawn rather arbitrarily, and because almost all of them had a heterogeneous population, the seeds were sown for various new conflicts. The old societal order was in the process of disappearing, as the power of the older nobility and the church had been eroded or damaged beyond repair, and various radical reformist and revolutionary movements arose.

In later chapters, we will return to this new nationalism and its importance for the humanities. But the natural sciences experienced equally radical changes at the turn of the twentieth century. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, people believed that man's knowledge of theoretical physics was virtually complete, just as the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed stable if not eternal. As a prospective physics student, Max Planck (1858-1947), the future pioneer of quantum mechanics, was advised to choose another discipline, for his teachers told him that nothing new was to be expected in physics anymore. This belief, however, soon turned out to be quite mistaken. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, both of which heralded a totally novel and unexpected kind of physical science. Also in other disciplines such as mathematics and logic, major progress was booked during this period. In logic what were arguably the most important new discoveries since Aristotle were made, especially with the development of so-called *predicate logic by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and others.

These radical innovations in the exact sciences constituted a major problem for the epistemological justification of scientific knowledge that Kant had provided more than a century earlier.

This chapter argues for both a broad similarity and a crucial distinction between the ways in which Lucretius (De rerum natura) and Seneca (Naturales quaestiones) employ the category of the sublime in their natural scientific (including cosmological) writings. Both authors, as previous scholars such as Gian Biago Conte and Gareth Williams have observed, use the sublime as part and parcel of their didactic and consolatory projects. Moreover, in both authors the sublime first causes the pupil-reader to "take fright" in the face of nature and then builds him up to conquer nature with his own knowledge. Yet in Lucretius and Seneca the knowledge that allows such conquest is quite distinct: for the Epicurean, scientific knowledge is limited, while for the Stoic, it approaches omniscience.

This chapter argues that Plato effectively pre-empts the Stoics in defining virtuous action as conformity with cosmic order. Scholarship has been beguiled by Alcibiades’ striking analysis of Socrates in the Symposium as someone ugly to look at but beautiful within, and misled into thinking that Plato defines virtue as ‘inner beauty’, something private which only accidentally manifests itself in public benefit. In fact, as a closer examination of Diotima’s account of the lover’s ascent towards beauty in the same dialogue shows that the distinction that actually interests Plato is that between the body and its activity – not the body and the soul as such. And by referencing this activity to cosmic order (as he does most clearly in Gorgias 507e-508), Plato guarantees essentially that virtue is not only publicly manifest but of essential benefit to others as well as self.

This chapter synopsises and synthesises the contributions of the preceding chapters. Approaching cosmos as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (in Jacques Rancière’s phrase), it traces the way kosmos operates to organize reality on the level of aesthetics, politics, ethics and epistemology and to integrate these various domains into a holistic vision. The chapter also stresses, however, the provisionality and partiality of that cosmic whole and considers the alternative visions of reality it precludes, the disorderly order that Heraclitus characterised as ‘the sweeping of random things scattered’ and that James Joyce terms ‘chaosmos’.

The 'Introduction' contextualizes the ancient notion of kosmos (which implies arrangement through forces of opposition, equilibrium or measure) with the twentieth-century notion of 'system' as understood by Van Bertalanffy and Lazlo and the nineteenth-century concept of 'cosmos' as configured by Alexander von Humboldt. It also traces the biref history of 'cosmos' from its first appearance in the English language, in the twelfth-century poetic commentary on the Bible, Ormulum. Finally, it summarizes the contributions that are to follow in the volume.

This chapter argues that Plato’s Laws are more than a legislative code, more than a work of political philosophy, for they call for the realisation of a project toward which Plato's work converges: to account for the whole of reality, i.e. individual, city and world. This discourse (logos) in which the law (nomos) consists derives its origin from the intellect (nous), which represents what is most akin in the soul to the divine (theos), because it is the principle of order (kosmos). This order (kosmos) which is manifested in celestial bodies must be present in man's soul, in which the intellect has to rule over pleasures and pains. Thus, an order will be assured by means of the law within the city, an order based on the contemplation of the regularity and permanence of the movements of the celestial bodies, which the citizens shall imitate, even in their movements around the territory. In the Laws, Plato brings the project of the Presocratics to its natural conclusion. The city, which is to bring about the birth of the whole of virtue in all the human beings who constitute it, is organised by means of a legislation that takes the functioning of the world as its model. The opposition between nomos and physis therefore disappears, because the law (nomos) becomes the expression of physis.

Deployment of the notion of kosmos has been much discussed in the scholarship on Presocratic philosophy. But diakosmos and diakosmêsis have been almost entirely neglected. This chapter argues that in describing the business of articulating ‘mortal belief’ as diakosmos, Parmenides bequeathed to his successors among the Presocratics a question – intended as deflationary – about the main agenda for physics and physical explanation: how the universe is arranged. He coined a concept designed to articulate it. Diakosmos was a concept his successors were determined to reinflate, but only at the price of contestation between believers in a single world produced by design and proponents of infinite undesigned worlds. And in Aristotle, diakosmêsis is re-invested with a hint of the deflationary.

The concept of kosmos did not play the leading role in Aristotle’s physics that it did in Pythagorean, Atomistic, Platonic, or Stoic physics. Although Aristotle greatly influenced the history of cosmology, he does not himself recognize a science of cosmology, a science taking the kosmos itself as the object of study with its own phenomena to be explained and its own principles that explain them. The term kosmos played an important role in two aspects of his predecessor’s accounts that Aristotle rejected: first, cosmogony and kosmopoiia, generation or creation of the kosmos; second, diakosmêsis, arranging of a plurality of kosmoi. Aristotle was extremely critical of accounts involving kosmopoiia and diakosmêsis and developed general dialectical strategies against them. In emphatically distinguishing his view from all his predecessors' (including Plato), he uses the terms ho ouranos (the heaven), to holon (the whole) and to pan (the totality) in preference to ho kosmos (the kosmos or world). There is usually no harm in speaking loosely of ‘Aristotle’s cosmology’ when referring to his concept of the order of nature and the ouranos. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy offers something very different from those of his predecessors, for whom kosmos was a keyword.

In Neoplatonism, kosmos is the first ideal entity that human beings can emulate in their search for god-likeness. Kosmos displays perfection, harmony and completeness, all regulative of ideal selfhood. The chapter discusses cosmic activity as a human telos. It aims to contextualise human action within this ideal and to show the limits as such an ideal. First, human bodies are not totalities like the body of the universe or kosmos, nor perfect like the bodies of stars. Second, since human encounters are between parts, not totalities, human action is essentially different from the perfect and self-sufficient activities of cosmic entities. It involves either affecting or being affected in an encounter with something external to oneself. At 3.3.5.40-6, Plotinus offers a brief but telling glimpse at the challenges of human moral life. By using the example of the Trojan War, he outlines different kinds of encounters between virtuous and vicious people. Through situating the Homeric example in the Platonic framework of affecting and being affected, the text yields an opening for a theory of practical action and morality. Action emerges as ontologically relational, cosmologically situational and morally interpersonal. This human predicament is the inescapable framework of ethics for embodied human beings.

The analogy between the divine order of the kosmos and the human order of the polis was well established in Greek thought and the basis of a persistent but evolving political cosmology that attempted to link human and divine. The analogy is well attested in both literary evidence and the use of kosmos-derived terms in archaic political structures from several Greek cities. But this analogy was unstable, as philosophical ideas of nature and the divine challenged one side of it and the development of the civic microcosm of the polis, and particularly radical Athenian democracy, challenged the other. The traditional form of the analogy represented by Homeric epic was inherently conservative, in placing Zeus and kings (basileis) in the same position in each side of the analogy, controlling the ordering of cosmic and civic elements respectively, and the office of kosmos, seen particularly in the cities of Crete, replicated that. This chapter explores the use of analogies between macrocosm and microcosm in the political language of the polis, evidenced by epigraphy, and in a range of literary genres from Homeric epic to old comedy, historiography and philosophy.

This chapter traces a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology, covering the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE, the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE, the Jews writing in Alexandria in the first century BCE and the Christians of the first century CE. Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1-3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’.