Language became a major concern during this period. Moreover, theories of language suggested methodologies for the study of philosophy itself, so that the two topics often became intertwined. A number of main tendencies can be distinguished: whereas at the beginning of the period models suggested by logic and other formal disciplines predominated, by the end there was a growing interest in psychological and sociological approaches, and increasing scepticism about the value of formal models.

LOGICAL ATOMISM

Russell coined this term in a series of lectures given in 1918 (Russell 1918 [1956: 177]). Non-logical expressions are, he argued, either complex or simple. To understand the former one has to understand the simple expressions contained in their analyses. Since complex expressions can be analysed only in the context of analyses of sentences in which they occur, the apparent formof such sentences may be a poor guide to the logical form revealed by analysis (for Russell an important example of this situation arises from his theory of descriptions). Analysis terminates when all the complex non-logical items have been eliminated, and only simple ones remain. To understand these it is necessary to be cognitively acquainted with the items they stand for, which are literally their meanings. So, to understand (S1) ‘This is blue’ one has to be acquainted both with the sense-datum identified by ‘this’, and with the universal blue. A sentence such as (S1) that cannot be further analysed corresponds to what Russell called an atomic fact. The fact to which it corresponds, if true, is of the simplest kind and consists in the possession by a particular of a property.

In the period 1870 to 1914 there emerged new philosophical defences of religious experience and belief and new philosophies of faith. These programmes undertake a critique of the then dominant scientific positivism and its materialist and behaviourist doctrines. They can best be set out in the work of representative thinkers in four different contexts: in France, in Britain and the United States, and in Germany.

THE DEFENCE OF RELIGIOUS FAITH IN FRANCE

In France these new spiritualist philosophies trace their beginnings to a number of influential philosophers earlier in the century, such as François-Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824). He had argued that the study of human consciousness must begin with the distinctive experience of the human will and its efforts, without which perception, memory, habit, and judgement remain inexplicable. A true philosophy insists on free will and deliberative action, and points to an exigency or need for faith and religion. These interests are later pursued in the work of Emile Boutroux (1845–1921) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941). In his De la contingence des lois de la nature (1874), Boutroux attacks all forms of monistic materialism and determinism. He argues that natural laws alone are, finally, inadequate explanations, as is shown when one moves from the laws of one science to another, for example, from physics to biology to sociology and history. In Ideé de la loi naturelle (1895), Boutroux further argues that the activity of the human mind is holistic, necessarily engaging the entire person, and this activity portends certain spiritual needs that issue in such creative activities as art, morality, and religion.

INTRODUCTION

Although discourses on the subject of wealth and money reach back to antiquity, extensive theorising about economic phenomena only emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) launched the classical theory of political economy which was developed in the nineteenth century, most notably by Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Despite numerous differences, they were of one mind on the significance of labour in determining value and prices, on the perpetual strife between landowners, capitalists, and labourers, and on the inevitable onset of the ‘stationary state’ due to a tendency of the profit-rate to decline. Notwithstanding the fact that the British economy had grown at an unprecedented rate since the mid-eighteenth century, nineteenth-century economists were preoccupied with the problems of scarcity of land and capital, coupled with an overabundant population.

By the 1820s, it was commonplace in learned circles to refer to political economy as a science. It had an extensive list of laws and, in the hands of Ricardo, had gained a deductive rigour that was often compared to Euclidean geometry. Nevertheless, political economy was almost entirely a literary pursuit. Ricardo used hypothetical numerical examples to illustrate his principles, but he did not posit algebraic functions or undertake quantitative verifications of his derivations. The basic assumptions about human behaviour were also left rather vague, though it could be argued that, with the immediate ancestry of Hume and Smith, classical political economy was actually founded upon a rich set of insights into human nature.

The decades around 1900 witnessed a lively debate in German philosophy about the nature of knowledge and methodology in the social and cultural sciences, and about the appropriate demarcation criterion distinguishing these Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) from the more established natural sciences. This debate engaged philosophers (W. Dilthey, W.Wundt, G. Simmel, W.Windelband, H. Rickert) and leaders from the empirical Geisteswissenschaften (K. Lamprecht, M. Weber).

The problem of humanistic knowledge assumed philosophical importance for many reasons, but the most important was a serious tension within a widely held constellation of views about the human sciences. On the one hand, humanistic learning was prominent in the German intellectual landscape, both because of nineteenth-century scholarly achievements, and because of the central place of classical languages and literatures in gymnasium education. Work in the Geisteswissenschaften thus served as an example of intellectual rigour for students and scholars alike, and it was standard to see humanistic learning as exemplary science. On the other hand, the older and more established natural sciences were still paradigms of mature science, and the progress of the natural and human sciences had carried them far apart, both in their methods, and in the nature of their results. Natural sciences subjected phenomena to relatively simple quantitative laws, which permitted improvements in precision and confirmation of theory by controlled experiment. Because the nineteenth century saw repeated extensions of this broad approach to new areas in physics, chemistry, and fields like physiology and psychology, it could claim to be the model for mature scientific knowledge. By contrast, the Geisteswissenschaften in Germany were dominated by the ‘Historical School’, whose highest accomplishments rested on sensitive historical interpretations of unique and valuable cultural achievements.

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.