Idealism flourished in Russia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The most significant thinker in this movement was Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), whose ideas influenced an entire generation of philosophers and inspired the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance of the early twentieth century. In the post-Soviet era, Soloviev’s thought is again much discussed, as religious philosophy returns to prominence in Russia.

At first sight, Soloviev’s contribution seems remote from most nineteenth-century Russian philosophy, written by men of letters and political activists preoccupied with the social issues raised by the backwardness and brutality of Russian life. Yet although Soloviev was a scholar, he was equally concerned with practical matters of human wellbeing. His work shares the predominant theme of all Russian philosophy: the search for a conception of regenerated humanity, where human beings live harmoniously as parts of an integral whole and the forces that alienate and divide us are overcome. Soloviev is admired for his critique of positivism (Soloviev 1874 [1996]), but it would be misleading to portray the Russian scene as dominated by a confrontation between positivism and idealism. At issue was a broader conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism, between secular and religious visions of humanity’s destiny. To appreciate the significance of Soloviev’s thought, and the tradition it created, it must be seen in historical context.

INTRODUCTION

For the larger part of its history, those practising what they think of as a ‘sociology’ have not intended to be doing ‘science’, and have not been taken by others to be doing so. It is true that Auguste Comte, who coined the neologism in the 1830s, did so to distinguish a kind of social understanding that would be consonant with what he took to be the modern esprit, and called it ‘positive’. It is also true that nearly two hundred years later ‘sociology’ is commonly thought of as one of the ‘social sciences’. Comte’s programme for the reorganisation of all knowledge, however, had no direct intellectual descendants, and to think of ‘sociology’ in the twenty-first century as a ‘science’ is to accept a classification that is more institutional, or instrumental, than intellectual. It would nevertheless be wrong to suggest that there has never been any such aspiration. There has, and this was perhaps at its strongest at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even then, however, it was not pervasive. In Germany, the contemporary contrast was between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, and although sociology might in practice have descended to empirical enquiry, and ordered the facts it discovered in the manner of what might be described as the administrative sciences, those who considered it in principle put it fairly firmly in the second of these two classes. In England and the United States, where the empirical impulse was stronger, the idiom in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have been that of ‘evolution’, but this merely described the conviction, in the one, that there was some sort of progression from the simpler societies to the more complex, in the other, that what drove modernity was the pursuit of interest and the competition between interests, a conviction that soon found it convenient, in a culture that did not think of itself historically, to talk instead of ‘pragmatism’.

This volume begins in 1870, the year in which the Prussian army defeated the French at Sedan; it ends in 1945, the year of German defeat in the Second World War. During this period Germany became the most powerful state in Europe and, indeed, twice sought to achieve control of Europe. This is also a period during which the work of German philosophers, including those of the Austrian tradition, was widely regarded as making the most important contributions to the subject. After 1945 no one could sensibly continue to maintain such a claim; so there is also a sense in which this volume covers the period of the rise and fall of the influence of German philosophy.

The early chapters of this volume describe and discuss the main currents of philosophical debate in 1870 and the following decade, during which there was a remarkable flourishing of new philosophical activity – the German Neo-Kantian movement, the idealist movement in Britain, the start of pragmatism in the United States, the work of Brentano and his followers in Austria, and so on. I shall attempt to set the scene for these chapters by briefly sketching the political and cultural world of the 1870s.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the fall of Paris in 1871, precipitated several important developments. The Prussian victory finally persuaded the south German states to join with Prussia in establishing a new German empire, which was consummated when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser in Versailles in 1871 and Bismarck was appointed chancellor of the newly unified Germany that he had for so long sought to create.

The reaction to nineteenth-century idealism took many forms. On the epistemological front several species of realism reasserted themselves while on the metaphysical stage a variety of naturalistic tempers made their appearances. In addition, pragmatism, in a guise that purported to transcend the terms of the traditional polemic, came into the ascendancy. While there clearly were major European versions of these various reactions to idealism, and more specifically British versions (Moore, Russell, and F. C. S. Schiller), the concerted reaction to idealism in terms of realism, naturalism, and pragmatism was a decidedly American phenomenon.

REALISMS

The most powerful American spokesperson for the philosophical perspective of idealism was Josiah Royce. From his position at Harvard his version of absolute idealism exerted considerable influence on American thought. The initial realist reaction to this idealist hegemony took a cooperative form when six philosophers (Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin) published in 1910 ‘A Program and First Platform of Six Realists’ followed in 1912 by a cooperative volume entitled The New Realism (Holt et al. 1912) for which each provided an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘The New Realists’ for this group of six.

Although these six differed on many particulars, they did concur on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance that characterized their reaction to absolute idealism. Procedurally, they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively, they were in agreement on several epistemological stances that constituted the centrepieces of their ‘refutation of idealism’.

At times of transition in the history of thought, we find thinkers who open and close doors, often in exploratory or surprising ways, and others who map out whole new programmes of enquiry. The sketch of Bergson’s work in this chapter will set it in context, and show it as opening and closing doors, rather than as providing a manifesto for a new philosophical programme.

ANALYSIS IN PHILOSOPHY

Nineteenth-century debates over positivism and idealism were displaced in time by other themes, in which a renewed interest in analysis had a major part. The analytic method had played a central role in European thought since Descartes. His invention of analytic geometry, and the later invention by Leibniz and Newton of the calculus, had been inseparable from major advances in natural science, as well as leaving their imprint upon philosophical work more generally.

But analysis, while not indifferent to the temporal dimension, treats it on the model of spatial dimensions (indeed, Descartes had described his physics, which was, after all, destined to give an account of physical change over time, as nothing but pure geometry). Now the nineteenth century had seen a new concern with diachronic explanation, whether as an idealist project in the wake of Hegel, or as a disciplinary project in linguistics (historical linguistics), in economics (Marx), in biology (Darwin, Mendel), in textual criticism, and so forth. This had, for the time, displaced the analytic method from its central (though contested) position as the key to our understanding of the phenomena of our world.

‘ART FOR ART’s SAKE’

The popular conception of the development of the arts at the turn of the twentieth century is dominated by the transition from naturalism to abstraction in painting and from realism to modernism in literature. The popular conception of art theory and aesthetics in this period is likewise dominated by formalism and the ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. The painter James MacNeill Whistler (1834–1903) gave expression to both of these themes. In 1878, in his libel suit against John Ruskin, who had described him as ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’, Whistler stated that he had meant to divest the offending picture ‘from any outside sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first’ (Harrison, Wood, and Geiger 1998: 834–5). Such an emphasis on the sensible properties of artworks and on the formal relations among them, coupled with de-emphasis on the content of such works and their moral, political, and religious associations, is the doctrine of formalism in its most general sense.

The ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’ is the view that a special pleasure afforded by art is a necessary and sufficient condition of its value, and that art is to be neither valued nor criticised for moral, political, or religious reasons. The view is often said to have been introduced by Théophile Gautier (1811–72) in the preface to his 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, where he asserted that a novel should have no moral, political, or economic use at all, other than that of perhaps putting a few thousand francs into its author’s pocket, and that instead ‘the useless alone is truly beautiful’ (Harrison, Wood, and Geiger 1998: 98–9).

The term ‘solipsism’ derives from the Latin solus ipse, meaning oneself alone. Broadly speaking a method, or doctrine, or point of view is solipsistic to the extent that it assigns a fundamental, irreducible, and asymmetrical role to subjective phenomena of the kind that are normally indicated by use of the singular form of the first person pronoun. Solipsistic theories, that is, stress what is both unique and irreducible about, say, the ‘I’, me, myself, my ego, my subjectivity, or my experience.

Explanatory reliance on such essentially first-personal phenomena is a necessary condition of adoption of a form of solipsism, but it is not sufficient. The use made by Descartes of the principle ‘Cogito, ergo sum’, for example, requires that the principle be formulated in the first person singular. The Cartesian cogito is not, however, intrinsically or inescapably solipsistic, if only because it fails to imply the necessary asymmetry between what is the case for me, as against what is the case for others. On the contrary, as indeed Descartes himself explicitly points out, the cogito is a principle that anyone at all can apply to himself or herself. Solipsism, I shall take it, requires commitment to a stronger view, namely that there are basic metaphysical and epistemological truths of the form ‘I alone–’, or ‘Only I—’. Ontologically, for example, a solipsist might claim ‘I alone exist’, ‘Only I am conscious’, or, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Mine is the first and only world’. Epistemologically, on the other hand, solipsism might take the form of a theory committed to the conclusion that ‘For all it is possible to know, only I exist’, or ‘There can be no justification for denying that I alone am conscious’.

Hans Kelsen’s fundamental contributions to legal philosophy are accompanied by seminal work in political theory and on problems of constitutional law and public international law. There are also forays into anthropological speculation, important studies of classical philosophers, most notably Plato, and much more of interest along the way. It is in legal philosophy, however, that Kelsen made his mark. As early as 1934, the erudite Roscoe Pound wrote that Kelsen was ‘unquestionably the leading jurist of the time’ (Pound 1933–4: 532), and to this day many in jurisprudential circles endorse Pound’s assessment.

Three phases of development in Kelsen’s theory can be distinguished: an early phase, ‘critical constructivism’ (1911–21); then the long, ‘classical’ or ‘Neo-Kantian’ phase (1921–60), including in the 1920s the formation, around Kelsen, of the Vienna School of Legal Theory; and, finally, the late, ‘sceptical’ phase (1960–73). The early phase is seen most clearly in Kelsen’s first major treatise, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre (Kelsen 1911). One of Kelsen’s central aims in the early phase – but not just there – is to establish legal science as a ‘normative’ discipline, by which he understands a discipline that is addressed to normative material and whose statements are formulated in normative language. Toward this end, he attempts to ‘construct’ the fundamental concepts of the law, for, as he argues, to understand these concepts correctly is to understand them as peculiarly normative – and not, then, as amenable to expression in factual terms.

INTRODUCTION

The positivist impulse, to accept only what is certain and to reject anything in any degree speculative, from its earliest intimations in classical Greece to its most recent revival in contemporary anti-realist philosophy of science, expresses itself in two main ways. It appears as a doctrine about the limits of what human beings can legitimately claim to know, displayed as an austere epistemological attitude. This leads to a foundationalism according to which only what is immediately given by the senses can be known for certain. It also appears as a doctrine about what can legitimately be taken to exist, displayed as an austere ontological attitude. This leads to a scepticism about the existence of unobservables of all sorts, from God to the material substance thought by many philosophers and scientists to account for common experience. Positivism is at root driven by an impulse, attitude, or frame of mind, which expresses itself in a variety of philosophical theses and arguments. That positivistic arguments and analyses are found convincing has perhaps more to do with an attitude of austerity and scepticism, than with their intrinsic worth. Always ready to wield Ockham’s Razor against the proliferation of kinds of entities which people are tempted to believe in, positivists could be said to hold that it is better to accept less than one perhaps could, for fear of believing more than perhaps one should.

The topic of this chapter, the rise of positivism in the nineteenth century, picks out just one of the high points of a repeated cycle of waxing and waning enthusiasm for positivist austerity. Harsher and more relaxed attitudes to what one should reasonably believe have come and gone since antiquity. In the sixteenth century the debates about astronomy turned on an opposition between positivism and realism in science. Should one believe in the reality of the heliocentric theory or was it just a convenient calculating device for predicting the comings and goings of ‘lights in the sky’?

INTRODUCTION: A SCIENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY?

Social anthropology studies the construction and mechanisms of social systems, as well as the interactions among these systems, their members, and the larger environment. Social anthropology embraces a spectrum of theoretical approaches, including but not limited to evolutionism, diffusionism, and functionalism. The evolutionary approach of early social anthropologists differs from the evolutionary theory that today’s biologists espouse. Contemporary biologists reject the view that evolution is progressive, whereas nineteenth-century evolutionists believed that human societies evolve from ‘primitive’ forms to those represented in their own ‘advanced’ European civilisations. Diffusionists, in contrast to evolutionists, see new social forms arising, either spontaneously or in response to internal or external pressure, in the context of a particular social and environmental setting. Once a new form takes hold, it may spread to other groups. The diffusionist research programme emphasises locating the original source of an idea and tracing its spread. Functionalism eschews the historical (or pseudohistorical) character of the other two approaches, and focuses on the functions served by various social institutions or the functional interrelationships among the constituent parts of a larger social system.

Social anthropology as understood in this chapter is one of the four main fields of anthropology, and includes what is often called ‘cultural anthropology’. The other fields are physical anthropology, which studies how modern humans came to assume their present physical form and how their biological characteristics determine their relationships to the rest of their environment; archaeology, which studies humans by examining the remains of their material culture; and linguistic anthropology, which studies human development and diversity by investigating the history and structure of languages.

The years between 1870 and 1914 saw the emergence of international socialism as a force in European and, to a lesser extent, North American politics. Most notably in Germany, socialist parties began to attract significant blocs of votes. Their broader aspiration to become the agency of a global social transformation was reflected in the formation of the Second International in 1889. Plainly such aspirations required theoretical articulation, and thanks to the influence in particular of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Marxism became the most important socialist ideology (though its position never went unchallenged). Indeed, Marxism’s transformation from the doctrine of a handful of German exiles in London into the ideology of a mass movement was largely the work of the SPD. Engels’s key work of popularisation, Anti-Dühring (Marx and Engels 1975–98: XXV), was originally serialised in the SPD paper Vorwärts in 1877–8. The task of simplifying the complexities of Marx’s concepts was later taken on by Kautsky as editor of the Social Democratic weekly Neue Zeit. His voluminous writings provided the way into Marxism for a generation of socialist militants, not merely in Germany but elsewhere in Europe.

MARX VS. BAKUNIN

The Marxism that was thus popularised itself gained sharper definition thanks to the emerging contrast between it and a rival radical ideology, anarchism. The contest between the followers of Marx and Bakunin helped to destroy the First International in the early 1870s. The respective movements which arose from this dispute – social democracy (as, following the example of the SPD, Marxists tended to call their parties) and anarchism – competed for influence in many countries, with Bakunin’s followers often gaining the upper hand in Southern Europe.

Adorno, Theodor (1903–69). Born in Frankfurt, Adorno was precocious intellectually and musically, writing a dissertation on Edmund Husserl at twenty-one and then studying with the Arnold Schoenberg circle in Vienna. Returning to Frankfurt in 1927, he began his lifelong collaboration with Max Horkheimer’s Institute and, in 1931, began teaching at the university. After the Nazi seizure of power, he first lived in London, then joined Horkheimer in New York in 1938. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he did important studies in social psychology and in the sociology of music and culture. With Horkheimer, he wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and then, after returning to Frankfurt in 1949, composed his own major works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970). Important studies of him include Buck-Morss, S. (1977), The Origin of Negative Dialecties: Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press); Jay, M. (1984), Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); and Rose, G. (1978). The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of W. Adorno (New York: Columbia Press).

Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz (1890–1963). Ajdukiewicz studied in Lvov with Twardowski, gaining his PhD in 1913 and his Habilitation in 1920. He was an associate professor in Lvov from 1921 to 1926, a professor in Warsaw from 1926 to 1928, in Lvov from 1928 to 1939, in Poznan from 1945 to 1952, and finally once more in Warsaw from 1952 to 1963. His main writings (available in English) are Pragmatic Logic (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers and Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974) and The Scientific World-Perspective and Other Essays, 1931–1963, ed. J. Giedymin (Dordrecht: Reidel).

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is by a wide margin the single most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. His original motivation for doing philosophy arose out of religious concerns (he was raised as a Roman Catholic and studied for the priesthood, before converting to a radical form of Lutheranism just after the First World War), and one of the easiest ways to try to make sense of much of his philosophy is to trace in it the shadow of various traditional religious beliefs and doctrines. Thus philosophically in parallel to Heidegger’s own conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, his early interest in scholastic metaphysics was increasingly placed in the service of a project that had its origins in a certain radical Protestant tradition of ‘negative theology’. The negative theologian holds that God is so different from anything else, so ‘transcendent’, that it is utterly impossible to grasp him in conceptual terms; he is accessible only through faith. Since human reason cannot know him, any form of theology (of rational, conceptually articulated doctrine) can be no more than a perverting distortion of the vital reality of religious belief. The only task left for philosophy in this construction is to destroy theology totally, to undermine from within the pretensions of human reason. Heidegger’s philosophy, like the National Socialism he espoused in the 1930s, was intended to initiate a conservative revolution, which would consign the whole of traditional philosophy, especially Neo-Kantianism, to the rubbish-bin, and also in some not easily definable way transform human life. His religious commitments after the National Socialist period seem to have remained strong until the very end of his life, although they became difficult to categorise in any conventional terms. Thus in an interview given in old age and published by his own request only after his death, he famously remarked that the modern world was so debased that ‘only a God could save us’.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, philosophical critics on both left and right posed their challenges to liberal-democratic politics in terms of a crisis of civilisation. The First World War had ushered out the last vestiges of Europe’s old regime; no one imagined a new Metternich-legitimist restoration. But what might be the ‘new regime’ of modernity that could resolve the crisis? The answer depended in part upon one’s national vantage-point. The focus here will be on the central and southern European contexts where communist revolutions were launched in 1919–20 only to be supplanted by fascist reactions thereafter. In France, the political outcomes were different but the intellectual environment, similar. Only in Britain and the United States did bourgeois institutions appear largely unchallenged.

While even partisans of liberal democracy understood that ‘rescuing bourgeois Europe meant recasting bourgeois Europe’ (Maier 1975: 594), its critics sought to sweep it aside in a bold revolutionary stroke. For them, fin-de-siècle fears that a looming mass society would become a quantitative, materialist nightmare had been borne out, necessitating a turn to radical solutions. A radical conservatism demanding new institutions to restore old values came into full flower, particularly in Germany, where the fears had run deepest, while Marxists, emboldened by the Bolshevik triumph in 1917, sought to theorise the nature of, and preconditions for, a new basis of Western civilisation. Both extremes appreciated the raw power of ‘Americanism’ as a principle of social organisation, but despite occasional admirers (like Gramsci), most detested it as an alien invasion.

INTRODUCTION

In the most narrow sense, the Polish school of logic may be understood, as the Warsaw school of mathematical logic with Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski, and Alfred Tarski as the leading figures. However, valuable contributions to mathematical logic were also made outside Warsaw, in particular by Leon Chwistek. Thus, the Polish school of logic sensu largo also comprises logicians not belonging to the Warsaw school of logic. The third interpretation is still broader. If logic is not restricted only to mathematical logic, several Polish philosophers who were strongly influenced by formal logical results, for example Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbiński, can be included in the Polish school of logic sensu largissimo. Polish work on logic can therefore encompass a variety of topics, from the ‘hard’ foundations of mathematics (e.g. inaccessible cardinals, the structure of the real line, or equivalents of the axiom of choice) through formal logic, semantics, and philosophy of science to ideas in ontology and epistemology motivated by logic or analysed by its tools. Since the development of logic in Poland is a remarkable historical phenomenon, I shall first discuss its social history, especially the rise of the Warsaw school. Then I shall describe the philosophical views in question, the most important and characteristic formal results of Polish logicians, their research in the history of logic, and applications of logic to philosophy. My discussion will be selective: in particular I will omit most results in the ‘hard’ foundations of mathematics.

The initial empirical corroboration of the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) was announced to the world at a packed joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society on 6 November 1919. Lengthy data analysis of solar eclipse observations, made the previous May by a joint British expedition to Brazil and to an island off the coast of West Africa, confirmed that the GTR-predicted amount of ‘bending’ of light rays in the solar gravitational field had indeed been found. Under a portrait of Isaac Newton, J. J. Thompson, president of the Royal Society, pronounced this ‘the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day, and … one of the highest achievements of human thought’ (quoted from Pais 1982: 305). There followed the ‘relativity-rumpus’ (Sommerfeld 1949: 101), a public clamour that, regarding a purely scientific theory without apparent military or technological application, was completely unprecedented, and is, as yet, unmatched. Almost overnight, Albert Einstein, hitherto largely unknown outside the rarefied (and by present standards, miniscule) circle of theoretical physicists, became world famous and a favoured target of anti-Semitism.

A plausible explanation of this astonishing spectacle points to the exhausted state of European culture, eager for diversion after the ravages of four years of world war, political revolution, and an influenza pandemic in which millions perished. Diversion the theory certainly provided, with the novelty of claims made on its behalf and its aura of incomprehensibility. But even among the scientifically literate, there was considerable controversy and misunderstanding concerning the theory’s physical content as well as its philosophical implications.