From 1870 to 1945 Spanish philosophy lived moments of splendour which, in contrast with the spiritual stagnation of the two preceding centuries, have earned it the epithet ‘The Silver Age’ of Spanish culture and thought. The great thinkers Unamuno and Ortega can be seen as its culmination. But it would be oversimplifying matters to reduce that splendour to only these two figures. In this chapter I shall consider five major moments: (1) Krausism; (2) Unamuno and the ‘Generation of'98’; (3) Ortega and the ‘Generation of'14’; (4) the Catalan philosopher Eugeni d'Ors; and (5) Zubiri and the ‘Generation of'27’.

KRAUSISM

For political and religious reasons Spanish culture has long kept itself apart from the rest of Europe. This explains why, especially since the Enlightenment, Spanish intellectual circles have raised again and again, with angry protest by traditionalists, the question of the europeización of Spain. Initially, people understood by this an opening up to French influence. But in the middle of the nineteenth century this term acquired a new meaning. The young Spaniard Julián Sanz del Río, who was interested in reforming the thought of his country, travelled to Germany in 1843, contacted there the philosophical circle of the Kantian/Schellingian Christian Krause, and returned home a converted apostle of Krausism, which spread like wildfire along university circles.

The Spanish Krausists embraced enthusiastically the Kantian moral idealism which was so characteristic of Krause himself. In time, nevertheless, this idealism entered into an alliance with the positivist materialism which was also in fashion: the common denominator of the idealist Krausists and materialist positivists was their passion for liberalism and progress.

INTRODUCTION

The great French philosopher-historian of science Emile Meyerson (1859–1933) began his 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica article ‘Explanation’ with the following words:

Meyerson’s conclusion would be difficult to overstate: the structure of any given science — indeed, of science itself — is developed around the ideal of explanation peculiar to it. Explanations in physics differ formally and materially from those in biology; and both differ from explanations provided by geologists and sociologists; even more generally, explanations in science differ widely from those given in, say, law or religion.

MEYERSON ON THE TWO MODES OF EXPLANATION

From the publication of the 1908 first edition (of three) of his monumental Identité et Realité (Identity and Reality) until his death in 1933, Emile Meyerson was not only France’s dominant philosopher of science, he was one of the most important philosophers of science throughout the Western world. In the opening chapter of Identity and Reality, Meyerson speaks of two sharply opposed modes of explanation: the ‘mode of law’, and the ‘mode of cause’. Each mode has ancient philosophical roots. Law-explanations may with some justice be traced to Heraclitus’s dictum that everything changes except the law of change itself. Cause–explanations, according to Meyerson, trace back through atomic theory all the way to Parmenides’s notion of the unchanging self-identity of being.

NEW BEGINNINGS

The 1870s was a decade of new beginnings in British moral philosophy. This was partly in reaction to the work of J. S. Mill, who had dominated the previous decade and whose Utilitarianism had appeared in book form in 1863. First, in 1870, John Grote’s Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy was posthumously published (Grote had been professor at Cambridge when Mill’s work appeared). Then in 1874, also from Cambridge, came what has justly been called the first work of modern professional moral philosophy, Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics. Meanwhile an idealist response to Mill (and to empiricist thinking more generally) had been brewing in Oxford, particularly in the lectures of T. H. Green. Its first significant ethical work was F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, published two years after Sidgwick’s in 1876 (whereupon Bradley and Sidgwick promptly fell on each other in critical reviews and pamphlets). At the end of this decade, in 1879, came Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics. Although Spencer was more favourable to empirical methods than Sidgwick, Green, or Bradley, and although like Mill and unlike them he worked outside the established universities, he was nevertheless another critic of Mill.

Mill stood for empirical, observational, methods and held that the central ethical issue was between results based on observation of actual human behaviour (which he thought led to his own utilitarianism) and results based upon supposed direct intuitions of moral truths (as believed in by his Cambridge opponent, Whewell). In 1870 the conflict between empiricist utilitarianism and intuitionism seemed to be the central issue, or problem, in ethics. For example W. Lecky’s History of European Morals of 1869 frames its study round the ‘great controversy, springing from the rival claims of intuition and utility’ (Lecky 1869: 1).

The allies portrayed their defeat of Germany in 1918 as the triumph of liberal democracy over authoritarianism, a victory marked by the establishment of the League of Nations and the creation of the Weimar Republic. However, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism and the economic depression of the 1930s almost immediately placed liberal democrats on the defensive. Critics argued that mass democracy and the spread of bureaucracy within both the private and public sectors had rendered the liberal ethic of the autonomous individual an anachronism. The corporate manager had replaced the entrepreneur within the economy, and the manipulation of popular opinion by the media and party machines had supplanted rational debate between disinterested individuals in politics. Individual identity and will were shaped by functional, ethnic and cultural group membership rather than innate preferences and capabilities, the exercise of reason, or effort. New social and economic conditions required novel forms of political and industrial organisation that combined decisive and expert leadership with efficient administration, thereby harnessing popular support and energy to the collective good in a manner supposedly unavailable to liberals. The economic crisis was taken as confirming this diagnosis of liberal democracy’s malaise.

The challenge to liberal democracy was threefold, therefore, involving an attack on the contemporary relevance of the market, representative democracy, and the values underlying them. In their various defences against such criticisms, the divisions amongst liberals were often as sharp as (and frequently mirrored) those between them and their opponents. Like the pre-war debates, disagreement centred on the role and nature of the state, the legitimacy and efficacy of its interventions in social life, and the parts played by democracy and leadership within its operations.

PROBABILITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE

Variation was considered, well into the second half of the nineteenth century, to be deviation from an ideal value. This is clear in the ‘social physics’ of Adolphe Quetelet, where the ideal was represented by the notion of ‘average man’. In astronomical observation, the model behind this line of thought, there is supposed to be a true value in an observation, from which the actual value deviates through the presence of small erratic causes. In mathematical error theory, one could show that numerous small and mutually independent errors produce the familiar bell-shaped normal curve around a true value. But if observations contain a systematic error, this can be identified and its effect eliminated. All sorts of data regarding society were collected into public state records (whence comes the term statistics), showing remarkable statistical stability from year to year. Such stability, as in criminal records, was explained as the very nearly deterministic result of the sum of a great number of free individual acts (see Krüger et al. 1987 for studies of these developments).

Around 1860, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell theoretically determined a normal Gaussian distribution law for the velocities of gas molecules. This discovery later led to statistical mechanics in the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Here there was no true unknown value, but genuine variation not reducible to effects of external errors. The world view of classical physics held that all motions of matter follow the deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics. It was therefore argued, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, that there is an inherent contradiction in the foundations of statistical physics.

‘CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY’?

The words ‘Catholic’ and ‘philosophy’ form an uneasy combination which arguably should not exist at all, since it seems to carry the misleading implication that all the authors to whom it refers had an allegiance to Rome, and reduces to a questionable common denominator a number of thinkers whose views were sometimes conflicting. It is therefore preferable to speak of ‘Catholic philosophers’ in the plural, or, if we still insist on using the expression, to put the epithet between cautious quotation marks: ‘Catholic philosophy’.

One thinker to whom the term ‘Catholic philosophy’ could, in a sense, be applied was Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), despite the fact that, in his anxiety to avoid the accusation that his philosophy was an apologetics, he was careful to point out in a revealingly entitled book Le problème de la Philosophie Catholique (1932) that he had not used this problematical expression ‘one single time’ in his earlier classic work L'Action (1893). Even so he wanted to restore it to its original, etymological, meaning of universality, the full significance of which was indissociable from the ecclesiastical dimension. Thus, in the third part of the work, he endeavoured in twenty pages to demonstrate ‘in what sense, with what reservations, and at what price “Catholic” … philosophy is conceivable and achievable’. This was logically in keeping with his Pan-Christianism, which was stated with supreme self-assurance in La philosophie et l'Esprit chrétien (1944), the fourth part of a ‘tetralogy’ of works written with a common purpose, the other parts being La Pensée (1934), L'Etre et les Etres (1935), and a new volume again entitled L'Action (1936–7).

OVERVIEW

Modern symbolic logic, including axiomatic set theory, developed out of the works of Boole, Peirce, Cantor, and Frege in the nineteenth century. The contours of the subject as it is known today, however, were largely established in the decade between 1928 and 1938. During those years the scope of the discipline was expanded, both through clarification of the distinction between syntax and semantics and through recognition of different logical systems, in contrast to the conception of logic as a universal system within which all reasoning must be carried out. At the same time the primary focus of logical investigation was narrowed to the study of first-order logic (then called the ‘restricted functional calculus’), in which quantification is allowed only over the elements of an underlying structure, not over subsets thereof. The former development made possible the formulation and resolution of metasystematic questions, such as the consistency or completeness of axiomatic theories, while the latte, by isolating a more tractable logical framework, facilitated the derivation of theorems. Both developments led to the study of model-theoretic issues, such as the compactness of logical systems and the existence of non-isomorphic models of arithmetic and set theory.

In addition, questions concerning definability and decidability by axiomatic or algorithmic means were given precise mathematical formulations through the definition of the class of recursive functions and the enunciation of Church’s Thesis (that the recursive functions are exactly those intuitively characterised as being effectively computable). Formal proofs of indefinability and undecidability theorems thereby became possible, with profound implications for Hilbert’s proof theory and for the subsequent development of computer science.

INTRODUCTION

Among the most important events of twentieth-century physics, we must surely count the development of the special and the general theories of relativity by Einstein in 1905 and 1916, and that of quantum mechanics, which was worked out about ten years later by Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and de Broglie. Owing to these theories, the physicist’s conception of space-time underwent two major upheavals.

Although they apply on different scales, the general theory of relativity and the quantum field theory play a fundamental role in describing the natural world, so a complete description of nature must encompass both of them. The formal attempt to quantise general relativity, however, leads to nonsensical infinite formulas. In the sixties non-Abelian gauge theory emerged as a framework for describing all natural forces except gravity; however, at the same time, the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum field theory emerged clearly as the limitation of twentieth-century physics. The resulting problem is a theorists’ problem par excellence: experiments provide little help, and the inconsistency illustrates the intermingling of philosophical, mathematical, and physical thought.

It is a fact of great significance that every physical theory of some generality and scope, whether it is a classical or a quantum theory, a particle or a field theory, presupposes a space-time geometry for the formulation of its laws and for its interpretation, and the choice of this geometry predetermines to some extent the laws which are taken to govern the behaviour of matter. Thus Newton’s classical mechanics (and especially its law of gravitation) is based on the assumption of an absolute simultaneity relation between events and a Euclidean geometry; similarly, the physical principle of the universal proportionality of inertial and gravitational mass, as recognised by Einstein between 1907 and 1915, requires the assignment of a non-integrable, that is, path-dependent, linear connection with non-vanishing curvature to space-time (the law of parallel displacement).

A survey of the themes which preoccupied writers and philosophers in parallel between 1914 and 1945, some perennial, some of more recent urgency, would doubtless include the following: relativism; the subjectivity of perception; the paradoxes of temporality; the instability of the self; vitalism and the limits of reason; the validity of intuition as a basis for knowledge; the mind–body relationship; the inadequacy, in expression or representation, of conceptual language; the problem of meaning; the relation between art and life. In the rich creativity of the period three paradigm texts stand out in that they do not simply mirror but actively renew reflection on these issues: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) (1913–27), Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (1924), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea) (1938). Proust’s emphasis on discontinuity and contingency complicates his supposed affinity with Bergson; Mann’s dialogue with the ongoing legacy of Nietzsche evolves throughout his career; Sartre’s pre-war novel is a phenomenological and heuristic fiction which clears the ground for his future theory.

PROUST: A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Proust’s ‘search for lost time’ was also a search for truth – a search which would entail a portrayal of our errors. And, indeed, in the experience of his hero, Marcel, and in the often disabused voice of his narrator (Marcel’s older self), errors proliferate, whether they be perceptual errors, errors of self-knowledge, errors of recollection, or errors in Marcel'ment of others. Perception yields no sense of a stable world; vivid flights of imagination or expectation find no correspondence or fulfilment in an elusive reality.

In 1856 the leading Oxford philosopher of his generation, Henry Longueville Mansel, later Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Canon of Christ Church, and Dean of St Paul’s, gave a lecture on the philosophy of Kant in which he described the value of studying German philosophy, particularly that of Schelling and Hegel. ‘Presumptuous’, he said, ‘as [their] conceptions must appear to us, daringly profane as their language must sound to one who believes in a personal God, their study is not without its value in the reductio ad absurdum which it furnishes of the principles from which such conclusions spring’ (Mansel 1856 [1873: 181]). Despite this backhanded recommendation in one of the first serious discussions of German absolute idealism in English, within twenty years English-speaking philosophers were on their way to domesticating what they had learned from Kant and Hegel and using it to supplant the two previously dominant philosophies in Britain and North America, British empiricism and Scottish common-sense realism. The sudden rise of idealistic philosophy, with its wide influence through religion and politics, does not seem explicable except as a response to the nineteenth-century crisis of faith. English-speaking philosophers found in idealism a defence of religious emotions which they were able to enlist in the cause of social reform (Richter 1964: 134).

EARLY BRITISH IDEALISM

In Britain, the nineteenth-century crisis of faith was produced by a confrontation between evangelical Christianity and seemingly incompatible forms of knowledge, particularly higher criticism of scripture and Darwin’s biology. Evangelical Christianity was grounded in a belief in the literal truth of scripture. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, an evangelical revival had by the nineteenth century carried this belief into most aspects of Victorian society. When higher criticism showed that the Gospels were not the simple eyewitness stories they purported to be and when biologists rejected the literal truth of the creation story in Genesis, the fabric of Victorian life came under attack.

INTRODUCTION

In looking at Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind up to 1945 we are attempting to survey a period that covers virtually the whole of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development, from the Notebooks, 1914–1916 to the end of Part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations. One of the central interpretative questions raised by the large body of work that is produced in this period is whether we should see it as the more or less continuous development of a reasonably unified philosophical vision, or view it as containing one or more important discontinuities or radical breaks. It is a question on which interpreters of Wittgenstein fundamentally disagree. There can be no question of doing justice to this dispute in this brief introduction to Wittgenstein’s thought. I shall therefore limit myself to attempting to develop one clear line of interpretation, in which I side with those who see Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a development, rather than a rejection, of his early work.

From the very beginning, Wittgenstein characterises philosophy as a ‘critique of language’ (1921 [1922] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) 4.0031) and associates philosophical problems with ‘our failure to understand the logic of our language’ (TLP: 4.003). We should, therefore, expect his view of the mind to be grounded in his conception of language and how it functions. Similarly, we should expect any development in his view of the mind to be traceable ultimately to developments in his view of language and of how the task of achieving a clarified understanding of it is to be accomplished. Equally, the suggestion that we can trace a continuous development in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind from the early to the later work commits us to the claim that there is an important, underlying continuity between his early and his late philosophy of language.

Nietzsche went virtually unnoticed during his productive life, but after his mental collapse in early 1889 his influence increased dramatically although unevenly. He has been a major figure in Europe for virtually the whole of the twentieth century with philosophers and intellectuals such as Vaihinger, Spengler, Jaspers, Heidegger, and later Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida regarding him as one of the most important philosophers of modern times. His influence on artists and writers has been remarkable. But until the middle of the twentieth Century, philosophers in the English-speaking world tended to regard him with hostility or indifference (Bertrand Russell’s unsympathetic attitude is typical, see Russell 1946). Perceptions of Nietzsche as a thinker worth exploring have risen steadily in the English-speaking world since then, and he is increasingly seen as important in the formation of twentieth-century consciousness. But this is not the emergence of an unruffled consensus, and Nietzsche continues to produce ardent worshippers and vehement revilers in a way unimaginable for the other major philosophers in the Western tradition. Nietzsche passionately wants to influence our approach to life, and no other philosopher places such importance on the affirmation of this world. In part this is a reaction to his early pessimistic philosophical hero, Schopenhauer. The task Nietzsche undertook as his philosophy matured was the revaluation of all values (Nietzsche 1882: §269).

INTRODUCTION

The Greeks put forward atomism in response to a philosophical problem: that of reconciling the Parmenidean thesis of the immutability of Being with the undeniable existence of phenomenal change. Democritus postulated a void containing a plurality of indivisible and immutable particles called atoms. The flux of appearances was to be explained in terms of different configurations of the same particles within the same empty space. Thus the only change admitted by the atomists was that of spatial position with respect to time. Through the work of chemists like Boyle and Dalton, atomism was gradually transformed into a testable theory. It proved to be a remarkably successful explanatory conjecture.

In the nineteenth century, atomism faced a serious challenge posed by a rival programme: phenomenological thermodynamics. The latter was based on two principles: those [A] of the conservation and [B] of the degradation of energy. [A] was familiar; [B] novel and challenging. [B] enabled Clausius to define entropy as a function S of the state of a system Ω such that S never decreases over time; intuitively, S is a measure of the disorder within Ω In all real, as opposed to idealised processes, S actually increases and can therefore be used to explain the unidirectionality of time. The increase of S also entails that no quantity of heat can be converted into an equivalent amount of (useful) mechanical work.

BEHAVIOURISM AND NATURALISM

Behaviourism was a peculiarly American phenomenon. As a school of psychology it was founded by John B. Watson (1878–1958) in 1913, and grew into the neobehaviourisms of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Philosophers were involved from the start, prefiguring the movement and endeavouring to define or redefine its tenets. Behaviourism expressed the naturalistic bent in American thought, which came in response to the prevailing philosophical idealism and was inspired by developments in natural science itself.

There were several versions of naturalism in American philosophy, and also several behaviourisms (Williams 1931; O'Neil 1995). Most behaviourists paid homage to Darwinian functionalism; all forswore introspection and made learned changes in behaviour the primary subject matter and explanatory domain of psychology. Most behaviourists acknowledged that scientists begin from their own conscious experience, but denied that such experience could be an object of science or a source of evidence in psychology. They differed in their descriptions of behaviour, modes of explanation, and attitudes towards mentalistic concepts. Watson was a strict materialist who wanted to eliminate all mentalistic talk from psychology. Edward Chace Tolman (1886–1959) regarded mind as a biological function of the organism. He permitted mentalistic terms such as ‘purpose’ in behavioural description, and posited intervening processes that included ‘representations’ of the environment, while requiring such processes be studied only as expressed in behaviour. Clark L. Hull (1884–1952) developed a hypothetical-deductive version of behaviourism, akin to Tolman’s functionalism in positing intervening variables but without his cognitivist constructs. B. F. Skinner (1904–90) rejected intervening variables and developed his own account of the behaviour of the whole organism, based on the laws of operant conditioning.