The renaissance of epistemology between the two world wars forms a bridge between early modern and contemporary philosophy of knowledge. At the turn of the century there had been a resurgence of interest in epistemology through an anti-metaphysical, naturalist, reaction against the nineteenth-century development of Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealism. Within German-speaking philosophy, this reaction had its roots in Helmholtz’s scientific reinterpretation of Kant, in Brentano’s phenomenology, and in Mach’s neutral monism. In British philosophy, it had acquired the specific nature of a rebuttal of Hegelianism by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. And in America, the new pragmatist epistemology of William James and C. S. Peirce had directed attention away from the traditional a priori to the natural sciences. The interwar renaissance of epistemology, however, was not just a continuation of this emancipation from idealism. It was also prompted by major advances in mathematics, logic, and physics which engendered new methodological concerns (as in the influential tradition of French philosophers of science: Duhem, Poincaré, Bachelard). Hence among the traits that became prominent as a result of this renaissance, one may list an interest in mathematical, natural, and social sciences; criticism of the possibility of synthetic a priori truth; logical and semantic investigations which transformed epistemology from a theory of ideas and judgement into a theory of propositional attitudes, sentences, and meanings; a realist and naturalist orientation that tended to accommodate, if not to privilege, commonsensical and empiricist demands; a reconsideration of the role of philosophy as a critical exercise of analysis rather than as an autonomous and superior form of knowledge; and, finally, a disregard for the philosophy of history and the temporal dialectic of conceptual developments.

The philosophy of religion in the period from 1914 to 1945 is considered in terms of five major factors, that inform each section of this chapter. First, as regards context, in an era of progressive secularisation and cultural crisis the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology are seen to have held relatively marginal positions as interlinked sub-disciplines within the institutional academy. Second, mainstream philosophy of religion and philosophical theology were practised under the declining influence of philosophical idealism and in reaction to the challenge of positivism. Third, as dialectical theology and the theology of encounter moved from Europe to Britain and North America, they indirectly mediated a more innovative response within theology and philosophy of religion (and the socio-scientific study of religion) to the Zeitgeist of societal crisis, one which drew upon phenomenology and existential thought. Fourth, Roman Catholic philosophy of religion was largely conducted within the framework of Scholasticism which was maintained as a bulwark against philosophical modernity, but new developments were also present that presage the renewal associated with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). Fifth, in conclusion, towards the end of the period from 1910 to 1945, there is the appearance, alongside other options, of the post-war development of an Anglo-American philosophy of religion strongly connected with the central concerns of analytical and linguistic philosophy.

INTRODUCTION

In Britain, the period from 1870 to 1914 was one of a general movement, both in politics and in philosophical reflection on it, from individualism to collectivism (Collini 1979: ch. 1; Gaus 1983: ch. 1; Greenleaf 1983; Bellamy 1992: ch. 1). These are loose and disputed terms (M. Taylor 1996). Roughly, individualism meant leaving the individual as free as possible to pursue his own interests as he saw fit, society being simply a collection of individuals and a means to their ends. Collectivism was more or less the opposite, holding that individuals are not isolated atoms but social beings with shared interests, and that society may act through the state to promote them. Collectivism ranged in degree from occasional government action to effect particular social reforms, to state socialism’s control of the means of production and restructuring of society.

The dominant political theory, Liberalism, adapted itself to the new political conditions. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Liberalism had sought to maximise individual freedom and assumed that this entailed minimising state action. It restricted state action to what was unavoidable because all state action was by its very nature an interference with individual liberty and therefore intrinsically bad, and also bad in its effects, especially by reducing individuals' self-reliance. But later many Liberals accepted state action. They realised that for most individuals freedom from interference was worthless because they lacked the means to utilise it. State action could secure those means, and thus was not necessarily opposed to individual liberty.

The aim of this chapter is to chart the emergence and early development, particularly in the works of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, of a revolutionary approach to the solution of philosophical problems concerning the nature of human understanding, thought, and judgement. That approach has been hugely influential and, perhaps more than any other single factor, has determined the subsequent course of twentieth-century Anglophone, ‘analytic’ philosophy, as a result of the developments and modifications it subsequently underwent in the hands of Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Tarski, Ryle, Davidson, Kripke, Dummett, and those whom they, in their turn, have influenced. Amongst the elements of this new approach to have emerged during the period from 1879 to 1914, emphasis will here be placed on those involving new conceptions of logic, logical analysis, linguistic analysis, meaning, and thought, in the context of an overall anti-psychologism, and a commitment to taking what came to be called ‘the linguistic turn’.

BACKGROUND

The nature of our conceptual, discursive, rational abilities – the nature, that is, of human concepts, ideas, representations, understanding, reason, thought, and judgement – has been a perennial and central focus of philosophical concern since at least the time of Plato. And for over two thousand years, from the appearance of the works comprising Aristotle’s Organon to the publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Grundlagen (Frege 1879, 1884), that concern typically relied upon an intuitively attractive, indeed apparently inescapable set of general assumptions concerning the nature of the phenomena (for a detailed account of this tradition, see Prior 1976).

THE COMBINATION THEORY OF JUDGEMENT

Introduction

The theory of judgement most commonly embraced by philosophers around 1870 was what we might call the ‘combination theory’. This was, more precisely, a theory of the activity of judging, conceived as a process of combining or separating certain mental units called ‘concepts’, ‘presentations’, or ‘ideas’. Positive judging is the activity of putting together a complex of concepts; negative judging is the activity of separating concepts, usually a pair consisting of subject and predicate, related to each other by means of a copula.

The combination theory goes hand in hand with an acceptance of traditional syllogistic as an adequate account of the logic of judging. In other respects, too, the theory has its roots in Aristotelian ideas. It draws on Aristotle’s intuition at Categories (14b) and Metaphysics (1051b) to the effect that a conceptual complex may reflect a parallel combination of objects in the world. It had long been assumed by the followers of Aristotle that the phenomenon of judgement could be properly understood only within a framework within which this wider background of ontology is taken into account. The earliest forms of the combination theory were accordingly what we might call ‘transcendent’ theories, in that they assumed transcendent correlates of the act of judgement on the side of objects in the world. Such views were developed by Scholastics such as Abelard (e.g. in his Logica Ingrediendibus) and Aquinas (De Veritate 1, 2), and they remain visible in the seventeenth century in Locke (Essay IV, V) as well as in Leibniz’s experiments in the direction of a combinatorial logic, for example at Nouveaux Essais, IV.5.

EXISTENCE

Existence, like tea, can be taken strong or weak. Speculative philosophy characteristically defends a strong theory of existence, while other kinds of philosophy strenuously defend a weak theory. So fundamental is the difference between strong and weak theories of existence to any account we give of the nature of things that the debate between them lies at the very heart of philosophy.

Admittedly, weak theorists would regard such a claim as contentious, for weak theorists characteristically understand existence in terms of the analysis which Frege developed in the 1880s: statements of the type ‘horses exist’ are interpreted as quantificational statements to the effect that ‘for some x, x is a horse’. On this view, existence amounts to no more than the satisfaction or instantiation of a predicate, such as ‘ … is a horse’. To exist is to answer a description. Whether one is talking about prime numbers, stones, or people, existence statements are defined in the same way, as saying that something satisfies a description. The weak theory of existence is thus not properly a theory of existence at all. Existence is simply removed from the realm of reflection and replaced by an account of the logical structure of language. Yet such claims do not impress strong theorists, the speculative philosophers, for speculative philosophy holds that existence is more than the silent, featureless pendant of the ‘existential’ quantifier (‘for some x’). The ‘is’ of existence is not to be reduced to the ‘is’ of instantiation.

As the social sciences began to come into their own in the early part of the twentieth century, the utility of the Neo-Kantian dualism between the human (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) once again became controversial. Previously philosophers who were in favour of this distinction saw it as the only way to save the human sciences from the encroachment of the natural sciences, especially from positivism’s denial of the status of ‘science’ to enquiries that did not issue in prediction and control. Such dualism demanded strict separation, marked by ontological differences involving distinctive features of the objects of study, such as their particularity rather than generality, or epistemological differences between understanding and empirical observation. After 1915 the participants in the debate changed as it shifted away from a conception of human sciences modelled on history or textual interpretation towards a debate about the social sciences themselves, specifically sociology and its theories of social action. Even those philosophers who maintained weakened versions of dualism did so for a different purpose. Distinctions were now formulated in methodological terms and the issue became how to understand distinct explanatory and interpretive tasks within the social sciences themselves.

Once formulated in methodological rather than ontological or transcendental terms, the divide between the sciences no longer seemed to be an unbridgeable gap. The issue now became not whether or not there are different legitimate methodologies, but whether they can be brought together in some methodological unity or should be left as a heterogeneous plurality of unrelated approaches. Once the discussion of the social sciences included well-developed disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology, and history, the task of distinguishing the human from the natural sciences became less important than that of figuring out how such disciplines and the diverse approaches within each of them might be brought ‘under one roof ’, as Max Weber demanded for sociology.

From the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, logic languished in stagnation and neglect. At the end of the eighteenth century Kant declared it incapable of further improvement. Yet within a hundred years of the first stirrings in the early nineteenth century it had undergone the most fundamental transformation and substantial advance in its history. Between 1826 and 1914 logic was irreversibly changed, leading in the 1930s to the metalogical limitation results of Gödel, Church, and Turing which rocked mathematics, while laying the foundations for the coming computer revolution. The story of this transformation is one of the most astonishing in the history of ideas.

NEW INTEREST, NEW FORMS

Ironically, the revival of logic began as a retrospective movement. Dismayed by the deadening influence of Locke on Oxford, in 1826 Richard Whately (1787–1863), assisted editorially by John Henry Newman, published his Elements of Logic. It was not an innovative work, being based in good part on Henry Aldrich’s (1647–1710) Artis Logicae Compendium (1691), an Aristotelian Latin crammer for Oxford students, but the mere fact of its publication was significant. Whately also restricted logic deliberately to the study of deduction, in contradistinction to the emphasis on induction among empiricists. Whately’s work went through many editions and became an established textbook in England. Thus logic, albeit in a form much impoverished by comparison with the Middle Ages, re-entered the syllabus. John Stuart Mill, in his System of Logic of 1843, defended the empiricist preoccupation with inductive methods, and his careful linguistic preliminaries to logic, including the influential though by no means novel distinction between the denotation and connotation of terms, were to be widely copied, but his rather negative attitude to deduction was to have little influence on the development of logic.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the subsequent formation of the communist International encouraged a philosophical recasting of Marxism. This involved crucially the rejection of the naturalistic interpretation of historical materialism which had prevailed in the Second International. Thus Antonio Gramsci hailed the October Revolution as a ‘revolution against Capital’, that is, against the conception elaborated by Kautsky and Plekhanov of history as an evolutionary process governed by natural laws which operated by ‘irresistible’ necessity. The thought was that the Bolsheviks' attempt to carry through a socialist revolution in an economically backward country and their stress on the indispensable role of a vanguard party in the class struggle required a version of Marxism in which the driving force of change was, not the development of the productive forces, but the constitution of classes as revolutionary subjects.

GEORG LUKÁCS

Various theorists – for example, Karl Korsch and Gramsci himself — participated in this projected philosophical revolution. But its key work was undoubtedly Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923). Lukács brought to Marxism an already formed and sophisticated philosophical sensibility shaped by Neo-Kantianism. A pupil of Simmel and Weber, he took from them chiefly a sense of the extreme fragmentation of modern society. Whatever formal coherence might arise from the use of instrumental rationality to discover the most efficacious means to attain arbitrarily chosen goals, capitalism was unable to integrate its different aspects into a self-equilibrating whole. Individual actors confronted a social world which together they had created, but whose overall workings they were unable either to understand or to control.

The 1870s were the high noon of nineteenth-century scientific rationalism in Europe. In the succeeding years to 1914 several important critiques of religion were advanced by philosophers and influential men of letters in France, England, and Germany.

THE CRITIQUE OF RELIGION IN FRANCE

In France, August Comte (1798–1857) was the leading proponent of mid- and late nineteenth-century scientific positivism. He also proved a formative critic of the European religious tradition. He declared it no longer credible and sought to replace Christianity with a religion that he baptised the Religion of Humanity. His writings on religion continued to have influence in Europe and North America in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

While Comte disavowed Christianity, he undertook to establish a religion on the scientific principles enunciated in the six volumes of his Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42) (The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, 1853). In later writings, such as the four-volume Systéme de politique positive (1851–4) (The System of Positive Polity, 1875–7) and the Catéchisme positiviste, 1852 (The Catechism of Positive Religion, 1858), Comte brings together his positive philosophy (see chs. I and 18) and his vision of the Religion of Humanity. Some of his disciples repudiated the latter as a wholly foreign and superfluous addition to Comte’s positivism. It is clear from his earliest writings, however, that the creation of a new humanistic religion was integral to Comte’s positive programme. He was impressed by Catholicism’s proven social efficacy, and the Religion of Humanity can be viewed as an effort to simulate but secularise Catholic cult and organisation.

In the period from 1870 to 1914 there was a shift within moral philosophy towards meta-ethical concerns. Metaethics and its guiding idea that the first task in moral philosophy is an enquiry into the semantics of moral discourse and into its ontological foundations, though by no means an invention of twentieth-century philosophy, has become its most characteristic feature.

The history of twentieth-century ethics starts in Cambridge, where in 1903 G. E. Moore published Principia Ethica. It rarely happens, as it did with Principia Ethica, that one book accounts for so many of the later developments in a field. It was Moore’s declared intention to break sharply with the philosophical tradition. According to him, even the most prominent figures in the history of moral philosophy, for example, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill, have misunderstood the foundations of ethics. Too late to be of any influence on Principia Ethica, Moore thinks he has discovered a soul-mate. In the Preface to the first edition of Principia Ethica Moore writes: ‘When this book had been completed, I found, in Brentano’s Origins of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong opinions far more resembling my own, than those of any other ethical writer with whom I am acquainted’ (Moore 1903 [1993a: 36]).

In the thirty years after 1914, idealist philosophers found themselves divided and uncertain. Many left boxes of unpublished material which record their struggles. Much that remains will prove to be of interest as philosophers return to some of the traditional questions, but much of it is as yet unexplored.

Despite the fact that a concern with language was prominent in the British idealist movement, by the end of this period the movement, along with its realist rival, was eclipsed by a ‘linguistic philosophy’ which was stridently anti-metaphysical in tone. In France the near-idealist philosophie de l'esprit was similarly eased out by existentialism, though Jean Guitton (1939) thought a logical idealist development of Malebranche remained one of the two great philosophical possibilities. In Austria and Germany the idealist tradition continued in the work of the phenomenological movement which flourished alongside the brief flowering of logical positivism; by the end of the period, however, phenomenology itself gave way to Heidegger’s philosophy of being which rejects idealism by affirming the priority of being over thought. Only in Italy did idealism remain the dominant mode of thought, and the conflicting idealist philosophies of Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce were the dominant strands, fascist and liberal, of Italian political thought (idealism also held its own in Canada; see Armour and Trott (1981)).

May Sinclair said (1917: v) that, if you were an idealist philosopher, ‘you [could] not be quite sure whether you [were] putting in an appearance too late or much too early’. Widely circulated arguments had been raised by Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and the American realists against idealism. The idealism they criticised affirmed that mind and its objects form a very close unity, such that the material world cannot be the ultimate reality because its parts are separable and therefore lack the requisite unity. Moore’s counter argument (Moore 1903) was that thinking and perceiving must be separate from their objects.

INTRODUCTION

Pragmatism entered public debate in 1898, when William James (1842–1910) lectured on ‘Philosophical conceptions and practical results’ to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley. His book Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking appeared in 1907, a record of lectures delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a year or two earlier (James 1907). Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1913) delivered a series of lectures entitled Pragmatism in Harvard in 1903 (Peirce 1934), and spent much of the following decade attempting to distinguish his version of pragmatism from James’s and trying to establish its truth. However, although James’s lecture may have been the first public statement of pragmatism, the philosophical outlook which he presented was already two or three decades old, dating to philosophical discussions in Cambridge in the early 1870s. The roots of James’s pragmatism can be seen in writings from that decade which culminated in his Principles of Psychology (1890); an early classic statement of Peirce’s pragmatism is found in a series of papers entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877–78, and James’s readers were further prepared for his pragmatism by works such as The Will to Believe (1897).

Although pragmatism is a distinctively American contribution to philosophy, we should not lose sight of the degree to which both Peirce and James were engaged in debates growing out of European philosophy. Indeed this European connection continued: both Peirce and James identified F. C. S. Schiller in Oxford and Italian thinkers such as Giovanni Papini and Giovanni Vailati as important fellow pragmatists.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of the unconscious is now associated so firmly with Sigmund Freud that an alternative conception of the unconscious, one which is not in some way dependent on or derived from that of psychoanalysis, is hard to imagine. Yet, as studies of the prehistory of psychoanalysis emphasise, by no means did Freud introduce the concept from scratch: already by 1900, when Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) appeared, the unconscious was a well-established intellectual topic (the classic studies of psychoanalysis’s ancestry are Ellenberger 1970 and Whyte 1979; see also Brandell 1979: ch. 8, Decker 1977: ch. 9, and Ellenberger 1993: chs. 1–2; Freud’s debts are acknowledged in Jones 1953: I, 435–6). Throughout the period 1870 to 1914 the concept of the unconscious was, however, in comparison with its psychoanalytic version, indeterminate in several respects. This reflects its deep involvement with two broader issues in later nineteenth-century philosophy, namely the disentangling of psychology as an autonomous discipline from philosophy, and the opposition between ascendant materialistic naturalism and the contrary impulse to preserve something of the metaphysical systems which had dominated the first three decades of the century (for a different suggestion as to why the unconscious appeared in Western thought, see Foucault 1966 [1974: 326–7]).

The problems of perception feature centrally in work within what we now think of as different traditions of philosophy in the early part of the twentieth century, most notably in the sense-datum theories of early analytic philosophy together with the vigorous responses to them over the next forty years, but equally in the discussions of pre-reflective consciousness of the world characteristic of German and French phenomenologists. In the English-speaking world one might mark the beginning of the period with Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (Russell 1912) and its nemesis in Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (Austin 1962 – published posthumously, but given originally as lectures at the end of our period in 1947). On the continent, a corresponding route takes us from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl 1900/1) to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945).

While the structure of the problems is recognisably the same in both traditions, over this chapter I elaborate and comment on some of the differences in these treatments. It is easy to feel at home with the alleged attachment to common sense and obvious truths that the analytic tradition from the outset avows. But when one looks at the topic of perception, a concern as central to the development of early analytic philosophy as is the study of logic and analysis of meanings, early analytic theories look strange and idiosyncratic. Much of what the phenomenologists have to say, on the other hand, strikes more of a chord with contemporary English-speaking philosophers than their analytic forebears. But the development of early-twentieth-century discussions shows that the parallels and differences among these thinkers, and the echoes with the way that we now conceive of these problems, are somewhat more elusive than one might expect.