For Immanuel Kant the death of speculative metaphysics and the birth of the rights of man were not independent events. Together they constitute the resolution of the Enlightenment debate about the scope and power of reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant shows that theoretical reason is unable to answer the questions of speculative metaphysics: whether God exists, the soul is immortal, and the will is free. But this conclusion prepares the way for an extension in the power of practical reason. Practical reason directs that every human being as a free and autonomous being must be regarded as unconditionally valuable. In his ethical writings Kant shows how this directive provides a rational foundation for morality, politics, and a religion of moral faith. Bringing reason to the world becomes the enterprise of morality rather than metaphysics, and the work as well as the hope of humanity.

A CHILD OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, Prussia, on 22 April 1724, into a devout Pietist family.

Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative, the Formula of Universal Law, runs:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (G 421)

A few lines later, Kant says that this is equivalent to acting as though your maxim were by your will to become a law of nature, and he uses this latter formulation in his examples of how the imperative is to be applied. Elsewhere, Kant specifies that the test is whether you could will the universalization for a system of nature “of which you yourself were a part” (C2 69); and in one place he characterizes the moral agent as asking “what sort of world he would create under the guidance of practical reason, … a world into which, moreover, he would place himself as a member” (R 5). But how do you determine whether or not you can will a given maxim as a law of nature? Since the will is practical reason, and since everyone must arrive at the same conclusions in matters of duty, it cannot be the case that what you are able to will is a matter of personal taste, or relative to your individual desires. Rather, the question of what you can will is a question of what you can will without contradiction.

TWO STORIES WITH A COMMON THEME

Neurath founded the Unity of Science movement in 1934. For Neurath – a social scientist – the drive for unity was rooted in the great debates between Carl Menger and his thesis examiner, Gustav Schmoller, about the nature of political economy and in Max Weber's insistence that the social sciences are indeed sciences, although sciences of a different type from physics. In this setting, unity of science necessarily meant unity of the social and the natural sciences. For Neurath it meant both more and less: he did not look for a sweeping philosophical union of two great domains of human thought, but rather for the practical unification of the rich variety of special disciplines in all their detail. Unity for him was not a matter of a single metaphysics for natural and social law as Menger advocated nor of one epistemology to mend the rift that Weber imposed; and it was not a unification once and forever. Instead Neurath laboured for different combinations of concrete lessons from different sciences at each and every occasion of rational action. Car nap had proposed an Aufbau, one gigantic structure into which every valid science could in principle be fitted. Unity for Neurath was not a matter of abstract philosophical principle nor a programme for constructing a complete world picture. It was a tool for changing the world; in his own vocabulary ‘an auxiliary motive’. We aim, he argued ‘to create a unified science that can successfully serve all transforming activity.’

Among economists, Otto Neurath is most well known for his views about moneyless economies; among historians, for his work on full socialisation during the short-lived Bavarian revolution of 1919; among educators, for his work on social museums. Among philosophers, he is surely most widely known for his metaphor of sailors rebuilding their ships at sea, which he used to attack foundational accounts of knowledge. This book is about Neurath's philosophy and it is about his political life. And it is about the connection between the two, which left neither of them unchanged.

As a young man near the beginning of his career, fifteen years before the official founding of the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath wrote his first extended attack on the hunt for certainty in science and in life. There he urged: ‘The thinking of a man during his whole life forms a psychological unity, and only in a very limited sense can one speak of trains of thought per se’ This description perfectly fits Neurath himself. Otto Neurath was a philosopher, a publicist, an activist, a bureaucrat, a scholar, a social scientist and a Marxist. His philosophy will be our central topic. But philosophy for Neurath was not a discipline. His philosophical thought did not evolve within a closed system, new philosophical views emerging from older ones adjusted by new philosophical insights and arguments. Indeed, as Neurath saw it, the disciplines themselves crystallised into separate self-contained systems as a result of useful but false abstraction.

THE BOAT! NEURATH'S IMAGE OF KNOWLEDGE

Otto Neurath's philosophy – or better: his ‘anti-philosophy’ – found its characteristic expression in the simile named after him, ‘Neurath's Boat’:

In this part we will trace the history of Neurath's Boat. The formulation just quoted is the one most commonly referred to and dates from the heights of the Vienna Circle's protocol sentence debate. With it Neurath cast into dramatic form his insight that knowledge has no secure foundations, that it all depends on how we ‘make it up’. This was not the first time that Neurath employed the simile to this end; it was, in fact, the third of five. The Boat represents a recurring motif in Neurath's work. The ‘first Boat’ dates to 1913.

Neurath's Boat is a simile, a literary figure. Indications are that it is original with Neurath, even though he fashioned it from rhetorical driftwood of his time. The image of the gradual replacement of a ship's components figures in Plutarch's Ship of Theseus, long employed as an example of the problems of identity. It is clear, however, that Theseus' Ship is not at sea, but that its repair took place in the harbour of Athens.

This is how Ernst Niekisch described Otto Neurath in his diary in March 1919. But it was not only Neurath's outer appearance, his gigantic figure, his behaviour – considered rude by some – that impressed his contemporaries. Over and over again he was characterised as charming, friendly, witty; often as energetic, ambitious and full of purpose, a man of action. William M. Johnston wrote:

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) is one of the most neglected geniuses of the twentieth century. He made innovations in so many fields that even his admirers lost count of his accomplishments.

Over the course of his life Neurath was a business-school teacher, a military officer, a junior university professor, a commissioner for socialisation, a secretary of a housing movement, a museum director – to name but a few of his professions. Neurath's manifold activities correspond to the many stereotypes applied to him. One Austrian minister of education considered him a Communist; an old Social Democratic librarian reported that Neurath was considered an eccentric in the Social Democratic movement of the first Austrian republic. Another contemporary viewed Neurath as a Marxist who had hardly read Marx. Older citizens of Vienna still remember his permanent exhibitions in the town hall. By philosophers he is classed as a radical empiricist, while amongst economists he counts as a daring innovator, if not a misguided visionary.

This book is made up of three parts. Part 1, Neurath's intellectual biography, is primarily from Lola Fleck's Graz dissertation, with additions by the other authors to fill in missing links with the account of parts 2 and 3. The translation from the German of Fleck's original work is by Martin Anduschuss with revisions by Nancy Cartwright and Thomas Uebel. Part 2 of the book was written by Thomas Uebel and part 3 by Nancy Cartwright and Jordi Cat. Although the book has four different authors, listed alphabetically on the title page, there is a common point of view among them. The work on the book has been a close collaborative effort among Cartwright, Cat and Uebel, and these three authors would like especially to thank Lola Fleck for her generosity in allowing additions and revisions to integrate her dissertation more fully with the remainder of the text. Existing translations have been used where available; translations of previously untranslated materials are by the present authors. Timothy Childers has served as editorial assistant throughout. Figure 1.1 was recreated by George Zouros. Original drawings are by Rachel Hacking. The index was contributed by Mauricio Suárez.

Neurath's own distinctive idea of Ballungen – congested concepts with fuzzy edges – plays a special role in our philosophic discussions. It enters the work of parts 2 and 3 by independent routes. In 1990 Nancy Cartwright went to talk to C.G. Hempel about Neurath. Hempel reported that there were two themes that he felt were really dear to Neurath and central to his thought: the moneyless economy and Ballungen.

‘There is no scientific method. There are only scientific methods. And each of these is fragile; replaceable, indeed destined for replacement; contested from decade to decade, from discipline to discipline, even from lab to lab.’ We are apt to take these as special insights of our own postmodern period, the final rejection of the foundationalist myth of a clean, clear and certain scientific edifice which was spawned by the Positivists and nurtured by the Vienna Circle. In this book we have shown how Otto Neurath, working from the heart of Logical Positivism in the first and second Vienna Circles, launched an all-out attack on foundationalism and the myth of the mechanical method. There are, he declared, no unrevisable, incorrigible or undeniable givens. Neither are there guaranteed means of epistemic ascent, nor methods that can get us from what we already accept to new truths or to new falsifications without the need for on-the-spot judgements. Neurath made a radical break with what since has been called the ‘spectator view of knowledge’, the view that knowledge is the reflection of independent reality and that truth consists in some correspondence relation between signifier and the object signified.

To understand Neurath's distinctive alternative it is important to note again the peculiar nature of his self-confessed 'scientism‘. It excelled in the scientific attitude.

Here is a simple example of a conceptual ontological argument:

1. I conceive of an existent God. (Premise)

2. (Hence) God exists. (From 1)

This argument can, it seems, be paralleled to its discredit:

1. I conceive of an existent God. (Premise)

2. (Hence) God does not exists. (From 1)

However, it might be object that the two arguments are not really parallel. In order to decide whether they are, we need to decide on the sense that we are to give to the expression ‘conceive of’.

There are a number of different sense that can be given to the expression ‘conceive of’. Suppose that I am asked to conceive of - think about, form an idea of - the current president of the United States. There seem to be at least four different ways in which I can respond to this request: (i) I can consider the description ‘the current president of the United States’, but without making any commitment to the existence of anyone who conforms to that description; (ii) I can consider the description ‘the current president of the United States’, while being committed to the view that there is no one who conforms to that description; (iii) I can consider the description ‘the current president of the United States’ and take it that the description provides a correct characterization of a unique person who conforms to it, even if there is no independent characterization that I could give of that person; and (iv) I can consider the description ‘the current president of the United States’ and take it that the description provides a correct characterization of a person whom I can also characterize independently.