The English version of the Cambridge Philosophical History 1870-1945

The phenomenological movement 487 Gerhart was seriously wounded. In the same year Husserl’s friend and pupil Adolf Reinach was killed and his mother, with whom he had a close relationship, died. During the First World War, like many converted Jews, he was a loyal German patriot, but he was never affected by the kind of pro-war frenzy exemplified by Max Scheler, who extolled ‘the genius of war’. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, Husserl’s works were increasingly inspired by a humane and rationalist ethos that he held to be the hidden motive of the development of philosophy from Plato to transcendental phenomenology. In 1916 Husserl had been appointed to a chair at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He gradually acquired an international reputation and lectured in London (1922), Amsterdam (1928), Paris (1929), Berlin (1932), Vienna, and Prague (1935). When he discovered in 1928 that Heidegger, who succeeded him at the Freiburg chair in that year, rejected phenomenology as Husserl understood it, his life took a tragic turn. He felt more and more isolated from his pupils. After the Nazis seized power in February 1933 and Heidegger had become an ardent supporter of this movement, Husserl retired into the intellectual bastion of his philosophy. Feeling too old for emigration, he died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938. 2.THE GERMAN PHASE OF THE MOVEMENT Having been Privatdozent in Halle from 1887 onwards, Husserl was appointed as an extraordinary professor at the University of G¨ ottingen in 1901.There he started to attract students who, inspired by his Logische Untersuchungen, wanted to practise phenomenology for themselves, such as Adolf Reinach, Johannes Daubert, Moritz Geiger, Theodor Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Alexander Koyr´ e, Roman Ingarden, Fritz Kaufmann, and Edith Stein. About 1907 a special circle was formed which met once a week for philosophical discussions and became a philosophical society in 1910, when Max Scheler also became a member. In 1913, Husserl started the Jahrbuch f¨ ur Philosophie und ph¨ anomenologische Forschung,inwhich the first volume of his Ideas appeared in 1913 and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in 1927. Apart from Husserl, the editorial committee consisted of Geiger, Alexander Pf¨ ander, Reinach, and Scheler. None of these pupils could follow the master on his way towards transcen- dental idealism. What attracted them in phenomenology was rather the method of eidetic reduction. Husserl had defended the existence of essences or ‘ideal species’ in his second Logical Investigation, because he held that one cannot avoid scepticism regarding logic, mathematics, and knowledge in general except by assuming that logic is about essences which exist beyond space and time, and which are the ideal types of meaning-bestowing mental acts. The laws of logic Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

488 Herman Philipse and mathematics could be verified by intuition of essences, Husserl thought. Husserl’s pupils were not primarily interested in mathematics, however, except Geiger and Becker. Taking for granted that there are essences which can be ‘intuited’, they set out to explore a great many phenomena by means of ‘eidetic reduction’ or Wesensschau,phenomena such as the will, human personality, and religious belief (Pf¨ ander), civil law (Reinach), empathy and the psychologi- cal function of art (Geiger), the nation and one’s homeland (Kurt Stavenhagen), time, space, colours, and sounds (Conrad-Martius), or values and value-blindness (Dietrich von Hildebrand). After 1933,Nazism scattered the phenomenologi- cal movement. Some members fled to the United States (Geiger, Hildebrand, Schutz), others became Nazis (Heidegger, Becker), whereas Edith Stein and Paul-Ludwig Landsberg opposed Nazism and were murdered in concentration camps. Apart from Pf¨ ander and Reinach, and before Heidegger appeared on the scene, the most important phenomenological associate of Husserl was Max Scheler (1874–1928). Scheler was certainly more than a phenomenologist: he was a dazzling star whose brilliant ideas and boundless energy impressed his contemporaries. Whereas Husserl claimed to be the founder of a new scientific philosophy, Scheler was preoccupied with the moral crisis he perceived in his epoch, in which the values of a calculating and egotistic bourgeois capitalism replaced those of Christianity. Being of Jewish descent but converted to Catholicism, he wanted to reconstruct Christian ethics after Nietzsche’s attacks as an ethics free of the ressentiment which Nietzsche had discovered at the heart of Christian morality. Phenomenology was a means for doing so, and Scheler published aphenomenological study of sympathy, love, and hate in 1913, the second edition of which was called Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923, The Nature of Sympathy). Scheler’s ethics was not formal, like Kant’s. It aimed at a phenomenol- ogyof‘material’ values, as Scheler explained in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913, 1916, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values). These values are neither individuals nor universals. Like Moore in Principia Ethica, Scheler held that they may be intuited or ‘felt’ in moral ex- perience, being the ‘pure whatness’ of valuable goods or aims. Scheler made a complicated classification of values and seemed to have special liking for values such as nobility and holiness. Anticipating Maslow, he sketched a hierarchical ordering of values and discussed the different criteria for doing so. Scheler’s ethics was narrowly connected to his philosophical anthropology. He thought that the problem of the external world can be solved by pointing out that the world is what resists to our will, hence the reality of the external world is experienced in our pragmatic involvement in it. Science is part and parcel with this pragmatic involvement, Scheler claimed, echoing American Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The phenomenological movement 489 pragmatism, but the human individual is able to say ‘no’ to the involvement in the world. The possibility of such a spiritual act of negation is what charac- terises man in his essence, and relates him to the personal Deity. The crowning achievement of Scheler’s philosophy was a phenomenology of the essence of religion, in which he described both the essential attributes of the Deity and the receptive acts in which the human being intuits the Divine. The essen- tial attributes of the Divine are absoluteness, superiority, holiness, spirituality, and personality, whereas the individual experiences the Deity in an experience of his own nullity and of being God’s creature. As Scheler apparently thought that Christian monotheism is closer to the essence of religion than polythe- ism, one might conclude that his subjective opinions were masquerading as specimens of phenomenological Wesensschau.Indeed, there are convincing ar- guments for the view that the idea of intuitable essences is an illusion. But this does not imply that all phenomenological writings are worthless. Many of them contain valuable insights and may be re-interpreted as essays in conceptual analysis. 3.MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889–1976) Heidegger was Husserl’s most promising pupil and after the end of the twentieth century Heidegger’s popularity is greater than ever. Next to Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, Heidegger inspires the largest output of secondary literature con- cerned with an individual thinker; indeed many philosophers on the European continent and elsewhere regard him as the greatest philosopher of the twen- tieth century. No contemporary philosopher except Wittgenstein managed to change the philosophical agenda so drastically and to impress so deep a mark on posterity. However, reception of Heidegger’s philosophy is complicated by several factors: his political engagement as a Nazi in 1933, the uncritical nature and size of the edition of his collected works (Gesamtausgabe), and Heidegger’s language, which is often obscure and idiosyncratic. Like Scheler, Heidegger held that there is a type of knowledge or thought (Denken)more profound than science, and although Heidegger emancipated himself gradually from his Catholic upbringing, his works retain a distinct re- ligious flavour without being overtly religious. Born as a son of the sexton to the Catholic church in Messkirch, Baden, Heidegger was initially heading for a career as a priest. Disappointments with the church, studies of Luther, and a mixed marriage drove him away from Catholicism, and he became Husserl’s assistant for the phenomenology of religion at the University of Freiburg in 1918. After an intermezzo in Marburg, he succeeded Husserl to the chair at Freiburg in 1928, where he lectured until the senate of the university forbade Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

490 Herman Philipse him to teach in 1946 by wayofdenazification, partly because of a report written by his former friend Karl Jaspers. The ban lasted until 1950, when Heidegger resumed lecturing until retirement. In Sein und Zeit (1927), the first major publication after his Habilitation, Heidegger wanted to raise anew ‘the question of Being’, which had inspired the philosophical investigations of Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics. However, only one third of the book was published, and in the published part Heidegger argued that the question of Being cannot be raised properly without a prepara- tory analysis of the human being that we are (Dasein). Sein und Zeit isarevo- lutionary book. According to Heidegger, the concepts with which traditional philosophers and scientists analysed the human mode of being are inadequate, because they were originally derived from other ontological domains, such as that of artefacts. The primary task of philosophy is to develop new ontological concepts which are more adequate for interpreting daily human life, the so- called existentialia.Inaseries of brilliant but often unclear analyses, Heidegger developed the themes that Dasein is essentially being-in-the-world, that the world in which Dasein lives is a meaningful world of tools, roads, farmland, and work, and that each Dasein projects freely its future life and is concerned with itself, others, and the world. Dasein faces a fundamental choice between attaining ‘authenticity’ (Eigentlicheit)byfinding itself or losing itself in inauthen- ticity by doing what ‘one’ (das Man) normally does. The only way to become authentic, Heidegger said, is to face our own death in Angst,andtograsp the time of our life as a finite whole. The ‘existential’ analysis of Sein und Zeit drew its inspiration from St Paul, St Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and Dilthey, and it inspired in its turn Karl Jaspers, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and many others, including theologians such as Tillich and Bultmann. It is the seminal book of the later existentialist movement, although Heidegger emphat- ically denied in 1946 that he had ever been an existentialist. Apart from being the seminal text of existentialism, Sein und Zeit is both atreatise in transcendental philosophy and the starting point of the post-war hermeneutic movement. Radically transforming Husserl’s transcendental doc- trine, Heidegger argued that the ultimate source of meaning or being is not an eternal transcendental ego but rather a finite ecstatic time structure or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung)inhuman beings in-the-world (Dasein). The objects of natural science are constituted on the basis of an a priori framework, which, Heidegger claimed, is projected by Dasein.The real world an sich is the meaningful world of daily life, and not a meaningless multiplicity of particles and other theoretical entities of physics. Although Heidegger rejected transcendental idealism, the outcome of his transcendental turn was similar to that of Kant and Husserl: the world Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The phenomenological movement 491 of physics is thought to be secondary and superficial, whereas the meaningful world of daily life and morality is fundamental. Like Carnap, Heidegger held that the traditional problem of the external world is a pseudo-problem. In opposition to Carnap, however, he thought that the problem is caused by the assumption that the scientific view of the world is fundamental: it would disappear as soon as one realises that Dasein exists primarily in the daily meaningful world. Yet one wonders whether Heidegger’s transcendental philosophy is not a solution to the problem of the external world, and hence whether the various strands in Sein und Zeit are mutually compatible. The latter question also arises with regard to Heidegger’s conviction that Dasein is fundamentally interpretative. Our human identity allegedly depends on how we understand ourselves, and because understanding is historically situated, human beings are historical. As the ontology of Dasein is an auto-interpretation of Dasein,this ontology is hermeneutic. But if our view of the world is the product of an interpretation, as Heidegger asserts, how can the meaningful world of daily life be a world an sich? While Sein und Zeit wasaphenomenological interpretation of human ex- istence, Heidegger’s later writings from the lecture course Einf¨ uhrung in die Metaphysik (1953; based on lectures delivered in 1935) onwards had a very dif- ferent nature. Heidegger now developed a grandiose historical narrative, ac- cording to which Being had shown itself to man in the writings of pre-Socratics such as Anaximander or Parmenides, but had withdrawn since then in the his- tory of Western metaphysics. Heidegger interpreted major philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche as thinkers who did not succeed in asking the question of Being in Heidegger’s sense, even though Being sent hints to man in their writings. The task of the post- metaphysical philosopher was to ‘think’, that is, to prepare a future advent of Being by diagnosing the fundamental nature of our epoch, the epoch of tech- nology, as a result of the history of metaphysics and as a ‘fate’ (Geschick)sent (geschickt)byBeing. Heidegger’s later thought resembles Hegel’s philosophical history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte) and it should not be seen primarily as a con- tribution to historical scholarship in philosophy. In contrast to Hegel, however, Heidegger interpreted his own epoch not as the culmination point of history, butasadeep fall or crisis, which his thought (Denken)purported to overcome, taking H¨ olderlin’s poetry as a lead. From the Brief ¨ uber den ‘Humanismus’ (1947, Letter on Humanism)onwards, Heidegger claimed that his later thought was connected to Sein und Zeit by a Kehre (turn). What is the nature of this connection, which allegedly uni- fies Heidegger’s oeuvre? Pupils such as Karl L¨ owith and J¨ urgen Habermas have Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

492 Herman Philipse argued that the link between the book of 1927 and the publications that appeared after the Second World War is more or less contingent. The radical change in Heidegger’s thought had to be explained by external factors, such as the advent of Nazism, and when Heidegger reintroduced the existentialia of Sein und Zeit into his later writings, they acquired meanings opposite to those in the earlier book. However, there is a more charitable interpretation of the Kehre and Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the existentialia, which is based on his Lutheran conception of faith in Sein und Zeit.According to Luther and Heidegger, faith is a gift from God, and theology cannot be anything but an analysis of human existence as it is radically transformed by the grace of faith. In a lecture on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ of 1927, Heidegger explained the relation between the fun- damental ontology of Dasein in Sein und Zeit and theology as follows. Sein und Zeit had to be a purely secular ontology of Dasein, whereas theology, as an ontology of Dasein as transformed by faith, would have to re-interpret the existentialia. Could it be that the ontological interpretation of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was written as a preparation of man for the grace of faith, and that Heidegger was convinced that he had received faith when he later re-interpreted the existen- tialia? This would explain the gloomy view of human existence-in-the-world which Heidegger sketched in the book of 1927: such a view might prepare man for the leap to faith. And it would also explain the overtly mystical nature of Heidegger’s inaugural lecture Was ist Metaphysik? (What is Metaphysics?)of1929. In any case, Heidegger’s later faith was not Christian faith any more, for in 1933 Heidegger agreed with Nietzsche that the Christian God is dead. It remains an urgent task for historical scholarship to determine the precise meaning of Heidegger’s later works and, indeed, of his oeuvre as a whole. Was Heidegger’s later philosophy an attempt to rescue religion after the death of God? Or did Heidegger rather want to replace actively the Christian religion with a post- Christian and more German creed, in accord with the urges of many Nazis? These questions are rarely raised by modern Anglo-American Heidegger schol- arship, which tends to play down the religious aspect of Heidegger’s thought and to concentrate on its allegedly pragmatist or Wittgensteinian side. However this may be, Heidegger held the opinion that Being sends hints to mankind. The thinker or the poet pays heed to these hints, and the natural language for thought is German. Heidegger has been a source of inspiration for, but also a rival of, contem- poraries such as Helmuth Pleßner, Nicolai Hartmann, and Karl Jaspers. Unfor- tunately, there is no space to discuss their works here, which were important at the time, but none of them deeply influenced later thought nor clearly belong to phenomenology. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The phenomenological movement 493 4.THE FRENCH PHASE OF THE MOVEMENT Whereas in Germany an existentialist such as Karl Jaspers was not considered to be a phenomenologist, because he held that the philosopher should elu- cidate the meaning of individual human life (Existenzerhellung) instead of in- tuiting essences, in France existentialism and phenomenology became nearly equivalent. The reason is that instead of Husserl’s phenomenology Heidegger’s analysis of human existence was a main source of inspiration. However, since Heidegger’s phenomenology of Sein und Zeit was seen as a logical continuation of Husserl’s works, French phenomenologists underestimated the revolutionary import of Heidegger’s book. In 1927, Heidegger had rejected the tradition of Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl, but Jean-Paul Sartre formulated his phenomeno- logical ontology of the human subject in Cartesian and Hegelian terms. Most French phenomenologists and existentialists were also influenced by Hegel, who became popular in France after the lectures on his Ph¨ anomenologie des Geistes by Jean Hyppolite and the Russian Marxist Alexandre Koj` eve at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.AsKoj ` eve had argued that Hegel’s phenomenology was not very different from Husserl’s, French phenomenologists often did not bother to dis- tinguish between these two conceptions. The existentialist analyses of human life were suitable for illustrations by literature, and major French existential- ists such as Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)wrote novels, poetry, or plays. Many of them were also engaged in left-wing politics, and Sartre argued that existentialism should replace dialectical materialism as a philosophical basis of Marxism. Sartre had spent the winter semester of 1933–4 in Berlin, studying Husserl’s works. His early phenomenological writings include two studies of the imagina- tion, L’imagination (1936a) and L’imaginaire (1940), a study of emotion (Esquisse d’une th´ eorie des ´ emotions, 1939), and a criticism of Husserl in which Sartre argued that the human ego is a construct of consciousness instead of being an indepen- dent ‘transcendental’ substance (‘La Transcendance de l’ego’, 1936b). Indeed, in his phenomenological masterpiece L’Etre et le n´ eant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), Sartre held that the human subject is nothing at all, a contingent ‘gap’ in the causal structure of being, that is, absolute freedom. Consciousness, whose being is being-for-itself (pour soi)isradically distinct from matter, whose being is being-in-itself (en soi), for consciousness is negation, the negation of being-in- itself. Because the human subject or consciousness is nothing, it has no essence and it has to choose its course in life and its values in total freedom. Our exis- tence precedes our essence, that is, what we do with our lives. Sartre thought that freedom inspires angoisse, because it implies universal responsibility, and that Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

494 Herman Philipse people therefore deny their freedom, pretending that they are determined by external factors, and holding that values are pre-existent instead of being the product of free choice. With uncompromising zeal, Sartre combated this ‘bad faith’ in his philosoph- ical and political opponents, especially Catholics. He held that the Christian concept of God is an inner contradiction, because it is the concept of a being- for-itself that is also in-itself. Furthermore, Sartre thought that human love is impossible, for human subjects cannot really communicate. As soon as they try to reach each other’s being-for-itself, this being will appear as something whose being is being-in-itself, a being-for-the-other. In a psychological adaptation of Hegel’s dialectics of master and slave, Sartre argued that whenever we look at each other, we reify the other person and thereby deny his or her freedom. Since we do not want to be reified by someone else, the others are ‘hell’ for me and the death of the others is my final victory over them. There is an intimate relation between Sartre’s existentialist philosophy of freedom and his political commitment. Indeed, the only thing necessitated by freedom is commitment (engagement), and Sartre argued, unconvincingly, that the individual choice of a particular commitment such as communism implies the view that everyone should have made this same choice. Hence individual choices imply universal responsibility for everyone, the very responsibility people of bad faith try to escape from. After 1945, Sartre became the best-known intellectual in France. He started the periodical Les Temps modernes, which would dominate French literary and leftist political culture until the 1960s. He also wrote at length about Marxism and other topics; but these writings fall outside the scope of this volume. Sartre’s fame at this time is best illustrated by an anecdote according to which a minister proposed to De Gaulle that he imprison him because he was inciting young people to protest during the Algerian war. Allegedly, De Gaulle replied: ‘One does not incarcerate Voltaire.’ But whereas De Gaulle did not want to imprison Sartre, his existentialism was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in the Encyclical ‘Humani generis’. Next to Sartre, the greatest French phenomenologist has been Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Like Sartre, he was educated at the Ecole Normale Sup´ erieure in Paris. They became friends and edited Les Temps Modernes to- gether until Merleau-Ponty published an undisguised critique of Sartre’s phi- losophy – the chapter on ‘Sartre’s Ultra-bolshevism’ in his book Aventures de la dialectique (1955, Adventures of Dialectics). Simone de Beauvoir replied in Les Temps Modernes byapaper called ‘Merleau-Ponty et le Pseudo-Sartrisme’, after which Merleau-Ponty’s name disappeared from the list of editors. In contrast to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty pursued an academic career. Having been professor of Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The phenomenological movement 495 child psychology and education at the Sorbonne, he was appointed to a chair at the Coll` ege de France in 1952.Inhis first book, La structure du comportement (1942, The Structure of Behaviour), he argued that neither perception nor be- haviour can be understood in terms of linear causality ` alaWatson and Pavlov. From Wolfgang K¨ ohler and others he borrowed the notion of Gestalt, and held that both behaviour and perception have to be seen as Gestalten.However, the notion of Gestalt had not been defined adequately by Gestalt psychology, be- cause it never overcame traditional philosophical dilemmas such as physicalism versus mentalism. For this reason, a new foundational study of perception was needed, in which the intentional correlation between the perceiving organism and the perceived world was described from within, as it is experienced by the perceiving subject. This conclusion of La structure du comportement contained the philosophi- cal programme for Merleau-Ponty’s next book, Ph´ enom´ enologie de la perception (1945). Whereas Sartre’s existentialism was closer to conceptual speculation in the manner of Hegel than to Husserl’s careful phenomenological descriptions, Merleau-Ponty started from Husserl’s later analysis of the life world (Lebenswelt) and from Heidegger’s analysis of human existence as being-in-the-world. In Ph´ enom´ enologie de la perception, Merleau-Ponty tried to describe the perceived world and our bodily commitment in it as it is really experienced and not as it is analysed by psycho-physics and other sciences. The phenomenological field, the object of this description, allegedly is the basic stratum of all knowledge, which is overlooked by the scientific view of the world. Merleau-Ponty rejected Sartre’s Cartesian conception of the subject, according to which consciousness and the material world are opposites that exclude each other, because in reality our body is the vehicle of our being-in-the-world. Perception is not a passive reception of sensations or sense-data which are interpreted by consciousness, but an active bodily exploration of the human environment. Likewise, human behaviour is not a series of meaningless physical movements of the body, caused by mental processes in the brain, but an intrinsically meaningful dynamic structure, which is inseparable from the meaningful world in which the human being is situated. Indeed, the world is full of ‘meaning’ (sens), a word which Merleau-Ponty uses for everything that refers to something else. The phenomenon of language is butone meaningful phenomenon among others, and when we hear or read a language which we know, the perception of meaning is indistinguishable from the perception of the physical aspect of the words. With a literary talent rare among philosophers, Merleau-Ponty provided de- scriptions of phenomena such as our own body, the experience of space and bodily movement, the sexual nature of the human body, language, and ges- tures. The phenomenon of bodily exploration of the world is correlative with Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

496 Herman Philipse the phenomenon of the world-as-perceived, as Merleau-Ponty showed, taking space, perceived things, and our experience of other persons as examples. His phenomenological descriptions were meant to refute traditional philosophical dichotomies such as intellectualism versus sensationalism and realism versus ide- alism. In the third part of the book, Merleau-Ponty sketched a philosophy of the human subject, of time, freedom, and history, which stresses the many- sided nature of these phenomena and resists any attempt at an absolute and final knowledge. If the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty was a refusal of the sci- entific view of the world (d´ esaveu de la science), as he wrote in the preface, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty neglected the sciences. On the contrary, his descriptions were interlarded with results of the sciences of man, which functioned as pointers to concrete phenomena. What he meant is that the phe- nomenological description of the intentional correlation between the perceiving subject and the world-as-perceived is more fundamental than the sciences: it is the transcendental discipline upon which the sciences are ultimately founded. Moreover, the world-as-perceived is the fundamental phenomenon, which is overlooked by the scientific view of the world. In 1945, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were at the beginning of their in- tellectual career. Other French phenomenologists and existentialists, such as Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), Paul Ricoeur (1913–), or Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95)wrote their main works well after the Second World War. Indeed, it was only after the war that existentialism became a popular movement, which inspired many generations of students and intellectuals, drawing its inspiration from the dilemmas that citizens of countries involved in war had to face. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

38 HEIDEGGER raymond geuss The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)isbyawide 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 aproject 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’. 497 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

498 Raymond Geuss 1.HEIDEGGER’S BASIC PROJECT The central portion of Heidegger’s philosophy is a certain view about history and metaphysics. The biblical story of the Fall from Grace and original sin provides a convenient image for Heidegger’s basic view of Western history. Adam and Eve had a relatively direct unproblematic relation to God in Eden, which was a state of such innocence and happiness that post-lapsarian humanity cannot recapture it even in thought and imagination. Similarly, for Heidegger, the Greeks of the pre-Socratic period had a primordial experience of Being that was direct, meaningful, and satisfactory in a way that modern humans can hardly conceive. This raises the first question that confronts any serious study of Heidegger. ‘Being’ is the central object of his philosphical reflection, but what exactly does he mean by ‘Being’? Since it is obviously some kind of successor concept to God, it should come as no surprise that ‘Being’ for Heidegger, given his background as a negative theologian, was of tremendous, indeed overwhelming importance, but also was not amenable to clear, direct conceptual definition, analysis, or even description. ‘Being’ designates a numinous primordial experience in which subject and object are not yet distinguished, nor are particular and universal, experience and thing-experienced, etc. Being is around us all the time; it is everywhere and nowhere; we understand it, as Augustine says of ‘time’, without being able to say what it is. It is that through which alone we are human and are able to encounter anything in our world. Humans, in fact, are defined, according to Heidegger, by their need to ask the question of Being – the question what Being is. This is his analogue of the traditional Christian view that all humans are defined by their ineluctable seeking to know the true God. In both cases – that of traditional Christianity and that of Heidegger’s thought – the ‘asking’ and ‘answering’ need not take an explicitly verbal or conceptual form. I can seek God without knowing exactly that that is what I am doing, just as I can ‘question authority’ simply by living in a certain way without saying anything. Similarly, ‘finding an answer’ is not a question of having a verbal formula or a correct theory, but of having found an appropriate way of living. To return to the biblical story, just as Adam and Eve became estranged from God and lost paradise through their sin, so Western humanity destroyed this blessed, unitary pre-Socratic form of experience by inventing conceptual thought. This destruction occurs because conceptual thought splits Being, driv- ing a wedge between subject and object, and by this means gives rise to the possibility of, and indeed the need for, metaphysics, as the attempt to think conceptually about the relation between subject and object, word and thing, thought and world. Metaphysical thinking, however, distorts the original ques- tion about Being and reconstrues it in one of two ways, both of which are Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Heidegger 499 pernicious. Either the metaphysician asks about the nature of the highest entity there is (God), or about the properties possessed by everything that is. In the first case metaphysics becomes theology and in the second it becomes ontol- ogy (which in Heidegger’s view is the matrix from which all Western science emerged and on which it remains dependent). Heidegger thinks that all traditional metaphysics is essentially a form of either theology or ontology. In either case metaphysics overlooks and tacitly denies what he calls the ‘ontological difference’, the radical difference between Being and beings, reducing, in one way or another, the former to the latter. Theology construes ‘Being’ as something like an individual entity (God); ontology as an abstract property common to all that which is, in the way in which traditionally ‘cathood’ designates the property all cats have in common. To respect the ‘onto- logical difference’ and find a way of speaking about Being without reducing it to the status of a being or a common property of beings is the central philosophical task Heidegger set himself. Western metaphysics as a whole, then, is the story of a downward spiral, an increasing falling away from primordial Being. The more conceptual thought develops, the more estranged we become from Being, and the more desperate, then, our attempts become to get back into contact. In our frantic despair we are then tempted to use the major resource we have, metaphysical thinking (and its off-shoots, theology and science), but further elaboration of metaphysics merely means creating a further layer of distorting conceptual structures that move us yetfurther from the immediate relation to Being to which we aspire. Thus we end in a modern world in which our basic relation to Being is through a form of technology in which all that is is reduced to a set of mere objects to be controlled by humans for our own accidental purposes. Our situation, then, is one in which in one sense we cannot stop asking the question of Being (because this is what constitutes us as human), but in another sense we have now fallen so far away from the primordial experience of Being that even the question is to some extent lost from our explicit sight and covered over. The conclusion Heidegger draws from this is that we need to try to ask the question of Being again, while breaking completely with the whole metaphysi- cal tradition, in particular with its whole conceptual apparatus and its language, because by asking the question through the conceptual vocabulary of the tradi- tion, one is distanced from a correct relation to Being. Since, however, he also holds the view that we are to some extent constituted by our history, we seem to be trapped. It is difficult to see what possible position we might occupy from which we could strip off our history and ‘begin again’, get back into contact with Being. Indeed I have told the story of Western metaphysics above as if it were one concerning human agents and their doings, but if Heidegger’s own Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

500 Raymond Geuss view is right this is not the full or correct story. If he is right, to be sure, it should also be virtually impossible for me as a descendant of over two thousand years of metaphysics to tell the story in any other way. I have spoken as if ‘human sub- jects’ stood over on one side, spontaneously initiating various actions directed at a ‘Being’ which stood over on the other side and was the detached, inert object of their concerns, ministrations, and manipulations. This is precisely to accept the standpoint of metaphysics, to treat Being as if it were a mere thing, like an ashtray, that could be used and abused in this way. To be able to tell the story in any other way would be to have broken exactly the spell of metaphysics which it is part of the point of Heidegger’s philosophy to analyse, and from which he thinks we cannot extract ourselves except (at best) by dint of the most rigorous existential-philosophical exertions. Although, then, for reasons Heidegger thinks he can specify, one cannot really tell the story except by invoking the whole metaphysical apparatus of subjective human agents and their actions, which is radically inappropriate for describing what is going on, it is at least possible to gesture at what is left out. The other side of the story, then, is that the initial philosophical fall from grace is not just something individual philosophers do by inventing conceptual thought, but it is also something Being does, or solicits, or invites, or calls us forth to do. Particularly in his later writings, Heidegger emphasised the need to get away from all forms of anthropocentrism and construe our relation with Being as acooperative dialogue. The later works propound a paradoxical view that has some similarities with Buddhism: disciplined ontological questioning is to lead to an attitude of letting-be (Gelassenheit), a giving up of the active attempt to control the world. Heidegger’s views on how one can try to break out of and ‘overcome’ the tradition of metaphysics underwent a change during his long career. In the early period (roughly pre-1936), he envisaged the possibility that by analysis of certain existential phenomena of human life (such as angst)wecould find a starting point that would allow us to ‘work our way back’ through the historical tradition, and by doing so we could undermine it from the roots, thereby freeing ourselves from the fixed and frozen conceptual distinctions which constitute it and which it has imposed on us. The second half of his first major published work Being and Time (1927), as originally conceived, was to carry through this ‘destruction of the tradition’ (as he calls it). This second half was never completed in publishable form. Heidegger’s own later interpretation of this fact was that the original project was a failure because it was not radical enough. It underestimated the hold which traditional metaphysics and its conceptual language has on us. Because it retained the form of an academic treatise and the method of conceptual thinking, Being and Time had been unable to break out of metaphysics. In the later period Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Heidegger 501 Heidegger attempted to to approach Being by giving a series of philosophical interpretations of poetry (by Trakl, M¨ orike, Rilke, George, Benn, C. F. Meyer, and, most notably, the early German Romantic poet H¨ olderlin), hoping to find in this a way of non-conceptual ‘saying’ that would put the metaphysical tradition and its conceptual vocabulary out of action. 2. BEING AND TIME Although Being and Time wasconsidered by Heidegger to be a failure and was never completed, at the same time he thought it a necessary failure and one which presented a certain path of thought that needed to be followed through to the end by anyone who wished to go beyond it. Part I of Being and Time was supposed to reopen in a preliminary way the question of Being. To ask about the meaning of Being, Heidegger argues, one needs first a theory of how this meaning could be understood, that is, a theory of human understanding as the mode of access to Being. A theory of human understanding, though, is possible only in the context of a general theory of what it is to be human. Given Heidegger’s view about the way in which traditional language and concepts distort the question of Being, he believed he needed to invent a whole new vocabulary for describing human life and our forms of understanding. He uses the term Dasein (‘being-there’) to designate what we humans are. Dasein is thus to replace such previous terms as ‘rational animal’, ‘thinking thing’, ‘conscious- ness’, and ‘spirit’. The analysis of human life and of our forms of understanding is, therefore, for Heidegger ‘analysis of Dasein’. In Being and Time Heidegger discusses six features of Dasein, each of which refers to a way in which a human being is different from the ways in which something (e.g. a chair, an animal, a stone) which is not a human being is. First, the essential features of Dasein are answers to the question ‘who?’ rather than (as is the case with non-human things) ‘what?’ Second, Dasein is a kind of being for whom Being is at issue, or is a concern. This means both that Dasein is defined by its concern for Being (part of this being its concern with asking and answering the question ‘What is Being?’), and that Dasein is essentially concerned with its own Being, that is, with who (or what kind of person) it is. Third, Dasein is in each case irreducibly individual, is ‘in each case my own’. Fourth, Dasein is its possibilities. Whereas a stone has certain real properties, and these are what it is important for us to know about if we want to know what the stone is, what it is important for us to know about a human being is that human being’s possible ways of being or acting. Just as it is central to this stone, let us say, that it weighs one kilo, it is central to being John Jones that he can speak French, can control himself in certain ways, can be generous, etc. Fifth, Dasein is always Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

502 Raymond Geuss characterised by a complex kind of ‘understanding’ of Being, of itself, its own possibilities, the world it lives in, things in its world, other people, etc. The ‘understanding’ in question is not a matter of having the correct set of beliefs, butofbeing able to deal with the thing in question, whatever it is (myself, the world, other things), in a certain way. To be a person of a certain kind is to be an entity with certain possible ways of existing, and correspondingly certain waysofunderstanding. Finally, Dasein is always being-in-a-world: this means that a human always exists as a person who is thrust into a set of already existing objects, projects, and arrangements and one who is always already engaged in complicated dealings with the entities in such a world. To be a human, Heidegger claims, is to be a ‘thrown project’, by which he means what is important in specifying who Dasein is is the set of projects it has. To have projects means always to be running ahead of oneself to a future in which the next step of the project exists. It means understanding oneself and one’s world in acertain way and having (or rather being) certain possibilities. To be me means to have the project of eating lunch soon, finishing this chapter, going to the cinema this evening. What I am now cannot be understood except by reference to these ways in which I am oriented towards an inherently uncompleted future. On the other hand these projects are not the free creation of Dasein,butare taken over from the world into which it is thrown. I can only have the project of writing a book if the institution ‘book’ exists, and it is not an institution I brought into existence. The central portion of the published version of Being and Time is devoted to the contrast between two specific ways in which Dasein can exist, which Heidegger calls ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) and ‘inauthentic’ (uneigentlich) forms of existence. To exist ‘inauthentically’ is to understand oneself in categories drawn from (non-human) things we encounter in the world, to understand oneself therefore as one thing among others, that is, to fail in some sense to register the fundamental difference that exists between the way in which human beings are and the way in which other things are. To the extent to which in inauthentic existence I am ‘absorbed’ in my everyday concerns, I give the present a kind of priority in my existence, and see the future as a potentially orderly uni- form sequence of moments in time, each of which will in due course become present. The comfortable life of absorption in everyday tasks, however, cannot be the whole truth about human life. It is, Heidegger believes, an essential truth about human life that angst can break in at any time and destroy all our cosy constructions. The experience of angst has, Heidegger thinks, overwhelming metaphysical significance, because in angst Iamtaken out of my absorption in the world and confronted with my own death as my ‘ownmost possibility’. This Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Heidegger 503 means that I am in some sense forced to ask the question of Being, both my own and that of the world, given that with me my world will end. Furthermore angst reveals to me the possibility of an ‘authentic’ mode of existence and an authentic temporality. Because of the way in which as a human I am essentially always ahead of myself, for me to be brought vividly to confront my death is to be confronted with a loss of present which is also equally loss of future. If I can grasp this truth and live with it – that my present is always a possible loss of the very possibility of my having a future – I am existing authentically, and, Heidegger claims, in such authentic existence the future has a priority over the present which is in some sense the reverse of the priority of the present over the future which he finds in inauthentic existence. Despite the unfinished state of Being and Time,the text that was actually published, plus fragments and drafts of the remaining unpublished portion which have since come to light, make it possible to tell fairly reliably how the work wastohave continued. The basic theme is that historically metaphysics has used time, and in particular a certain conception and experience of time, as the criterion for defining being. What is real has been construed as that which is forever present, present at all times. This means that time has had a kind of priority over being, although characteristically Heidegger also claims that traditional philosophy has been unaware of this priority or has even in some sense suppressed awareness of it. If this is right, one might go on to ask what kind of (experience of) time it is that gives rise to the concept of time which is used as the criterion for Being in traditional metaphysics. Heidegger’s answer to this is that it is the ‘inauthentic’ time of everyday experience – time as a single linear succession of present instants – which has traditionally functioned as a criterion. This leaves open the possibility that a different form of life, an authentic mode of existence, might have associated with it or even be constituted by a different form of temporality, and that asking the question of Being through the lens of this authentic temporality would give one a completely different kind of metaphysics. If traditional metaphysics was ‘a metaphysics of presence’ – what really existed was what was present – the new Heideggerian metaphysics will be different, because in it that which pre-eminently is, namely our death (because to live authentically is to live with death as our most real possibility and hence our fundamental reality), is something which by its very nature is not present (as long as we are). From the novel point of view provided by the experience of authentic temporality, the second part of Being and Time wastohave completed the destruction of the history of metaphysics, and the reopening of the question of Being in its full richness. In principle this philosophy could have not just an existential, but also an eschatological dimension. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

504 Raymond Geuss 3.HEIDEGGER’S POLITICS AND HIS INFLUENCE In 1933,just after Hitler came to power, Heidegger, who was at the height of his philosophical reputation, joined the Nazi Party and became Rector of the University of Freiburg, the much-celebrated first National Socialist Rector of any German university. During an initial period he was a very visible and outspoken partisan of the regime, issuing public appeals to support Hitler (for instance, in the plebiscite to legitimise withdrawal from the League of Nations), organising forms of espionage and denunciations of politically suspect colleagues, etc. He seems to have been motivated by the belief that he could ‘lead the F¨ uhrer’ (den F¨ uhrer zu f¨ uhren), and he threw himself into academic politics with a will. After about a year, however, he lost a struggle within the Party for control over the universities and resigned the Rectorship. During the war he became increasingly disaffected with the Party leadership and criticised some aspects of the official ideology in his lectures, retreating into what one Party source called a ‘private National Socialism’. Although he lived on until 1976,heseems never to have seriously questioned or revised this private National Socialism. After the war he was banned (until 1951)fromteaching or publishing, but continued to dominate the German academic world until well into the mid- 1960s. In this connection it is important to recall that Germany in the immediate post-war period was an intellectual and cultural vacuum. Virtually all intellectual figures of any standing had been exiled, killed, or forced to spend years in military service and/or captivity. Despite the ban, Heidegger, along with one or two extremely aged Neo-Kantians, was the only game in town. Already in the 1930s Heidegger had had a profound effect on some younger French philosophers, and after the war he was also able to maintain and even extend excellent relations with a number of leading French intellectuals. Eventually, however, the Heideggerian intellectual hegemony in Germany was undermined by two developments. First, in the early 1950stwo of the members of the so- called Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno) returned from exile in the United States and began gradually to try to build up a progressivist intellectual culture in the German Federal Republic, and this eventually provided a kind of counterweight to Heidegger’s philosophy (which they interpreted as being of a piece with his politics). Adorno’s first public attack on Heidegger, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, appeared in 1964, and in 1966 he published a philosophically more substantive criticism of Heidegger in his Negative Dialektik. In parallel to these rather mandarin forms of rejection, the German student movement, which was committed to effecting a break with the academic-rightist past, was gaining momentum in the 1960s, making it difficult for Heideggerian forms of thought to retain their hold on university students. The second development was the Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Heidegger 505 rise of ‘analytic’ philosophy, which began in the mid-1960sunder the auspices of G¨ unther Patzig at G¨ ottingen and Ernst Tugendhat at Heidelberg. Tugendhat wasaformer Heideggerian who described himself as having been ‘converted’ (bekehrt) during a sabbatical he spent at the University of Michigan. Heidegger turned out eventually to have put down deeper roots in France than in Germany, perhaps precisely because it was possible for French thinkers, given their greater distance, to read Heidegger in abstraction from his immediate political context. In the 1930sHeidegger had also had some students from China and Japan, most notably perhaps Shuzo Kuki of Kyoto University. Several of his works were translated into Chinese, and his philosophical views have continued to be extremely influential throughout East Asia ever since. Heidegger’s combination of high, if idiosyncratic, philosophical gifts, sub- stantial historical erudition, a wilfully rebarbative and cryptic style, and extreme right-wing politics has made it extremely difficult to get him into focus, and even more difficult to assimilate his philosophy into any of the usual philo- sophic categories – which, of course, was precisely part of his intention. His influence on the philosophy of the second two-thirds of the twentieth century can hardly be overestimated, and was by no means confined to figures on the political Right. No other philosopher has had anything approaching his impact on the philosophical life of continental Europe, Asia, or South America. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and Levinas are only some of the philosophers who have been deeply influenced by his work. His influence on the general cultural life of Europe in the latter part of the century was equally profound, most notably on certain forms of psychology, anthropology, environ- mental studies, and theology, on the academic study of literature, architecture, and the visual arts, and on individual creative artists like Beckett, Blanchot, Celan, Godard, and Kundera, to name but a few of the more distinguished. In contrast Heidegger has had relatively little effect on the philosophy of the English-speaking world. Despite the existence of a community of Heidegger scholars in North America, his philosophy is still not part of the common universe of discourse in that part of the world. The radical right-wing political philosopher Leo Strauss kept the memory of Heidegger alive in the United States among his coterie of followers, and Hannah Arendt, who made a name for herself in the 1960sasapolitical journalist, had written her doctoral dissertation under Heidegger, and publicised some of his views, but much of the interest in Heidegger which this generated was biographical and prurient – Arendt, who wasJewish, had been Heidegger’s mistress during the late 1920s. None of this contributed to any philosophical appropriation of Heidegger’s thought. Perhaps not surprisingly, the part of the US academy that has been most hospitable to Heidegger is the large community of Roman Catholic philosophers and Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

506 Raymond Geuss their institutions. The reason for Heidegger’s neglect in the world of analytic philosophy derives from his complete lack of interest in natural science or logic as models for human knowledge and in everyday ethics, and his basic orientation towards religious and historical questions. This reason has combined with a reaction to his obscure, pretentious style and repellent politics to produce a very powerful exclusionary effect. In the context of the world as a whole, however, this Anglo-American reaction is a local phenomenon, and must be viewed as such by anyone interested in trying to come to a judicious assessment of the significance of Heidegger’s philosophy and its place in history. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

39 LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY eduardo rabossi 1.TWO SENSES OF ‘LATIN AMERICA’ ‘Latin America’ is used as a collective noun to denote a number of states (nine- teen in 1945)inNorth, Central, and South America. Each has idiosyncratic geographic, ethnic, cultural, social, political, and economic features. But in spite of their differences, Latin American countries share a common political origin (Spanish/Portuguese conquest), a similar linguistic heritage (Spanish/ Portuguese), a dominant religion (Catholicism), and comparable predicaments vis-` a-vis local, regional, and international affairs. It is no surprise, then, that Latin American countries show, by and large, similar patterns of development and evolution, and that the term ‘Latin America’ is also used to signify these shared traditions and relationships. Philosophical thinking is no exception to the rule. It has evolved in analogous periods, with similar influences and traditions, and produced comparable outputs. In referring to Latin American philosophy, therefore, I am presupposing this intensional sense of ‘Latin America’ and in what follows, I will ignore the national peculiarities associated with its exten- sional sense. 2. POSITIVISM VS. ANTIPOSITIVISM AND THE RISE OF ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY Positivism ruled the Latin American philosophical scene from 1870 to 1910. But from 1910 to 1920 onwards a wave of antipositivistic philosophies wiped out positivism and took over the stage. The antipositivist turn was influenced by a parallel and overlapping change in the institutional setting of philosophy. It was a turn from a non-academic to an academic practice, from a non- professional to a professional conception of the role of philosophy and philoso- phers. Philosophy departments and faculties, flourishing ‘athenea’ and ‘colleges’, became the proper places to learn and to do philosophy. The transition from 507 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

508 Eduardo Rabossi positivism to antipositivism was mostly envisaged, promoted, and accomplished in them. The philosophical arguments advanced by the antipositivists against the dog- matic strictures, presuppositions, and generalisations of the positivists were gen- erally cogent but were mixed up with ad hominem stratagems. Typically, the antipositivists identified their views with ‘serious’ philosophy and criticised positivism as an amateurish, second-rate, philosophy. In 1940, the Argentine philosopher Francisco Romero famously heralded the entrance of Latin Amer- ican philosophical thinking into ‘normality’. By this he meant the widespread adoption of European professional standards. But he also implied that there are ‘normal’ philosophical problems, methodologies, and outcomes – precisely those which antipositivist philosophies were disclosing and elaborating. This identification of normal professional standards with normal philosophical con- tents and methods (provided, mostly, by German philosophers and philosophies) is still operative in many Latin American philosophical quarters. Thus from 1910 to 1920 onwards philosophical thinking in Latin America was transformed into an activity undertaken in university cloisters. This was not an unprecedented phenomenon. What was going on in Latin America at that time could be equated to what had happened in British universities forty years earlier when the professionalisation of philosophy came together with an upsurge of admiration for German philosophy and sustained criticism of positivism. 3.POSITIVISM There was no such thing as a standard version of Latin American positivism. The number of Latin American positivist thinkers was large, and their extraction and importance were diverse; but it is agreed that the Venezuelan-Chilean Andr´ es Bello (1781–1865), the Argentinian Jos´ e Ingenieros (1877–1925) and the Cuban Jos´ eVarona (1849–1933)were among the most original and influential. ‘Positivism’ was a philosophical stance comprising antimetaphysical, scientific, empiricist, deterministic, psychological, evolutionary, biological, and sociolog- ical topics. Positivists admired Charles Darwin and prized Comte and Spencer as their philosophical heroes. Preference for one or the other gave rise to so- cial or evolutionary positivist accounts. In essence, positivism was a naturalistic philosophical endeavour. Positivists rejected a priori and intuitive methodolo- gies, execrated abstract metaphysical speculations, praised science as providing the most reliable knowledge about man and the universe, and tried to produce syntheses of scientific findings in which they elucidated the nature of physical, biological, psychological, and social phenomena. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Latin American philosophy 509 But positivists did not conceive of themselves as playing a mere intellec- tual game: most of them were personally concerned with the institutional, moral, educational, and social problems of their countries and were influential in the design and implementation of governmental policies (some held relevant political positions). They were truly engaged intellectuals and positivist tenets were incorporated in the working ideology of the leading classes, progressive or conservative alike. Some outcomes were eccentric. For instance, in Mexico, there was for a time, a positivist political party, the ‘Cient´ ıficos’ (the ‘Scientists’); the Brazilian flag reproduces the positivist motto ‘Ordem e Progresso’ (‘Orden and Progress’); as late as 1925–35,a‘Comit´ ePositivista Argentino’ (Argentine Positivist Commitee) was very active and published a periodical named El posi- tivismo (positivism). This list could be extended. 4.ANTIPOSITIVISM The antipositivist reaction was based on a sharp criticism of positivist tenets. Antipositivists stressed the autonomy of philosophy, argued for the legitimacy of metaphysical speculation and the reliability of intuition, expressed contempt for logical strictures, thought of themselves as opening philosophical paths ar- bitrarily precluded or ignored by positivists, and were unimpressed by scientific achievements. The French philosophers Emile Boutroux, Emile Meyerson and Henri Bergson were important allies. But German philosophy was the domi- nant tradition: Karl Krause, Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, among others, were influential at different times and in different degrees. A host of local figures took up an active role under the canopy provided by the new heroes. Most of them had been trained in positivist strictures and shared a strong reaction against positivism. They have been described as the ‘Founding Fathers’: the standard list includes: Argentinians Alejandro Korn (1860–1936) and Francisco Romero (1891–1962), Brazilian Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862– 1917), Chilean Enrique Molina (1871–1964), Mexicans Jos´ eVasconcelos (1882– 1959), Samuel Ramos (1897–1959) and Antonio Caso (1883–1946), Peruvian Alejandro Octavio Deust´ ua (1849–1945), and Uruguayan Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958). Marxism also made its entrance at this time. For instance, in Argentina, Juan B. Justo (1865–1928), one of the founders of the Socialist Party, translated Das Kapital into Spanish. He was influenced by Eduard Bernstein, and also wrote on the philosophy of history. In Per´ u, Jos´ e Carlos Mari´ ategui (1895–1930), the most original Latin American Marxist thinker, ‘read’ Peruvian reality through a fresh interpretation of Marxist tenets. Thomist and Neo-Thomist philosophers Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

510 Eduardo Rabossi were also active in confessional centres, universities, and schools; the French philosoher Jacques Maritain was most popular among them. The influence of ‘travellers’, like the Estonian Hermann Keysserling and the Spaniard Jos´ eOrtega y Gassett, was also important. Ortega’s criticisms of positivism and his attractive presentation of contemporary German philosophy were crucial in Mexico and Argentina for the success of the antiposivist turn. The activity and influence of emigr´ es fleeing from Spanish Francoism and Italian Fascism, were also relevant, such as the Spaniard Jos´ e Gaos (1900–69) and the Italian Rodolfo Mondolfo (1877–1976), who settled in Mexico and Argentina respectively. There were many others. Antipositivism set the mood of Latin American philosophical thinking for years to come. The lack of strong philosophical traditions and the recurrent attitude of ignoring or despising their own philosophical ancestors and con- temporaries favoured the systematic ‘importation’ of philosophies from some preferred country or tradition. The philosophical status quo thus created was a pluralistic co-existence of competing views. It was not a successful experience. Instead of inspiring fresh theoretical blendings and synthesis, it gave rise to an eclecticism that tended to reproduce the quarrels of its European counterparts. Consequently, the standard way of doing philosophy consisted mainly in mim- icking the styles, problems and arguments of the imported philosophers and philosophies. However, mimicry did not necessarily produce second-rate or plainly repet- itive outputs. Both during the positivist and the antipositivist periods, some Latin American philosophers produced interesting and, at times, original pieces. A tentative list, no doubt controversial, includes Andr´ es Bello’s (1781–1865) Filosof´ ıa del entendimiento (Philosophy of Understanding)(1880), Jos´ eIngenieros’s Principios de Psicolog´ ıa (Principles of Psychology)(1919), Juan Carlos Mari´ ategui’s Siete ensayos sobre la realidad peruana (Seven Essays on Peruvian Reality)(1928), Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s L´ ogica viva (Live Logic)(1910), Carlos Astrada’s (1894–1970) El juego existencial (The Existential Game)(1933), and Antonio Caso’s (1943) La existencia como econom´ ıa, como desinter´ es y como caridad (Existence as Economy, Unselfishness and Charity) (see bibliography pp. 886–7). 5.PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE Normally, there are boundaries, albeit vague, between philosophy and other disciplines or genres, but Latin American philosophical thinking does not respect any such boundaries. I have mentioned thinkers and works that fit a standard philosophical pattern. But this leaves out a number of Latin American essayists who gave a philosophical tone to their works and reached, at times, high levels of Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Latin American philosophy 511 philosophical reflection – such as Argentinian Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–88), Bolivian Alcides Arguedas (1879–1946), Cuban Jos´ e Mart´ ı(1853–95), Mexicans Justo Sierra (1848–1912) and Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Peruvian Manuel Gonzalez Prada (1848–1918), Uruguayan Jos´ e Enrique Rod´ o(1871–1917). There are also important literary works, since the strategy of relating stories with the intention of disclosing philosophical presuppositions and implications has permeated Latin American literature from its very beginning. Novels are great instruments to that effect and it is agreed that R´ omulo Gallegos’s (1884– 1969) Do˜ na B´ arbara (1929)isarepresentative example of that genre. 6.LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY By 1925–30 a most interesting controversy began to unfold. It involved some of the most renowned Latin American philosophers and lasted for almost four decades. The controversy was about the identity and aims of Latin American philosophising. A large number of issues were involved: the unrestricted uni- versality attributed to philosophical statements, problems, and theories versus a restricted, ‘located’, universality or, even, sheer particularism; the cosmopolitan airs of philosophy versus a regional or national ´ elan; the possibility of an orig- inal and authentic philosophical thinking versus a dependent, importative, or imitative one; the seemingly economic, political, and ideological neutrality of philosophy versus the assumption of its real, earthly, commitments; the impact of philosophy in everyday affairs versus its abstract and detatched condition. The controversy turned on the description and evaluation of the practice of philosophy in Latin America: how to assess the value of the professional practice of philosophy; what sort of diagnosis its shortcomings, deficiencies, and frailties merited; what a proper prognosis of its course of development would be; what philosophy ought to do and achieve in Latin America. These different topics, obviously related, were very often mixed up. Questions about the identity and proper aims of philosophising in Latin Amer- ica were not problematic for the positivists. They held that evolving countries needed a philosophical ideology to ground institutional, educational, and cul- tural policies. Therefore importing suitable philosophies and elaborating them domestically with an eye on local problems was a proper course for intellectual action. Things changed, however, when antipositivism, with its professional claims and abstract proposals, took over the stage; and the debates were accen- tuated in the aftermath of the First World War, in the light of new political movements from Europe such as fascism, nazism, and francoism, the economic crisis of the 1930s, and the paramount role that the United States started to play Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

512 Eduardo Rabossi in Latin American affairs. All these changes instituted a new context in which questions about the role of philosophy and the part that philosophers were supposed to play were obviously relevant. As one would expect, there were voices in favour of practising academic phi- losophy according to universal standards. They claimed that there was nothing peculiar about the practice of philosophy in Latin America. Like doing philoso- phy in France, Germany, or Britain, it had to be serious, technical, and original. Our shortcomings were due to contextual problems that could be overcome by creating adequate conditions. Other voices gave a very different answer. They ran from messianic appeals to the peculiar historical role of the Latin American ‘man’, to more balanced views that stressed the peculiarity of our history, the predicaments of our situation, and the necessity of elaborating a philosophy that might help to undersand and to deal with them. This way of setting the problem gave rise to the quest for a proper object of study and an adequate methodology. Was Latin America itself such an object? What of more specific entities, such as M´ exico or Mexicans, Per´ u or Peruvians? Were the regional or national cultures or problems possible objects of philo- sophical study? And what was the appropriate philosophical methodology? Was it acceptable to rely on imported ones? Did the whole quest mean leaving the universal claims of philosophy aside, or was it a way, perhaps the way, toredraw them in a refreshing way? Were these claims capable of producing an authen- tic Latin American philosophy? Those were the questions that worried Latin American philosophers for a while. (For a useful overview of the controversy and its protagonists, see Salazar Bondy (1968).) After 1945, the discussion went off along different paths. But the question concerning the identity and aims of Latin American philosophising is (and should be) still with us. Philosophical Euro/North American centrism is a fact. For self-conscious Latin American philosophers, the search for a point of equi- librium between professional practice and philosophical authenticity is still an unsolved riddle. Two final points. First, whatever the technical merits of the controversy, as early as the 1930sand1940s Latin American philosophers were discussing a set of basic questions concerning the universal and neutral claims of philosophy that only years afterward were raised by Feminist and African philosophies. Second, from 1870 until 1945 (indeed until the 1960s) English-language philosophy was almost completely ignored. Only Hebert Spencer, William James (mostly on religious experience), and John Dewey (on education) were taken into serious consideration. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

40 JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY thomas kasulis The year 1868 marks the formal beginning of Japan’s modern period and by the late nineteenth century we find distinctively modern modes of philosophising. In the Japanese context ‘modern philosophy’ suggests significant knowledge of, and response to, the Western philosophical tradition. In 1854 US gunboats ended two and a half centuries of self-imposed Japanese national isolation. Aware that they had fallen behind the West technologically, the Japanese overthrew the shogun in 1868 and reinstated imperial rule with hopes of rapid modernisation. Real power, however, lay in the hands of an elite class of intellectuals, many of whom at a formative age were sent to the West to study any number of subjects, including philosophy. Upon returning home they immediately applied their knowledge to restructuring Japanese society and to translating or analysing a wide variety of Western intellectual works. The Japanese philosophers’ reading of the Western situation was that it was mired in a series of apparently irresolvable polarities: Kant’s or Hegel’s idealism versus Comte’s positivism or Locke’s empiricism; deontological versus utilitarian ethics; the imperial system versus democracy; individualism versus collectivism; Marxism versus capitalism. Furthermore, there was the new Japanese conflict between Western and traditional Asian values. There were two common ap- proaches to this polarised situation: either to argue for one pole over the other or to seek for a dialectical reconciliation between the opposites. Increasingly, especially from around the second decade of the twentieth century, the recon- ciliationists tended to dominate. ¯ 1.NISHIDA KITARO Most scholars, both Japanese and Western, consider Nishida Kitar¯ o(1870–1945) to have made a breakthrough with his Zen no kenky¯ u (An Inquiry into the Good) in 1911, which is still one of the most widely read books in modern Japanese philosophy. What most excited readers was Nishida’s innovation of writing in aWestern philosophical style of argument while incorporating and developing 513 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

514 Thomas Kasulis ideas borrowed from the Asian as well as the Western tradition. The book’s central purpose was its attempt to overcome major bipolarities, especially that between positivism and idealism, fact and value. Nishida’s practice of Zen Buddhist meditation has a bearing here. Zen main- tains that through meditation one can have access to reality ‘as it is’, without the interference of human conceptualisation. In itself, that reality is completely meaningless (‘empty’): meaning requires concepts. Yet, that immediacy is the raw material out of which one may construct meaning conceptually and affec- tively, with either delusion or insight. In the book Nishida hardly referred to meditation at all, but instead built upon William James’s notion of ‘pure expe- rience’. With his Zen-nuanced sense of the term, Nishida argued that thought arises out of the immediacy of pure experience to address disunities and once thought has accomplished its task, there is a return to pure experience. In effect, Nishida had hoped to develop not a religious philosophy based on Zen, but instead to apply certain general Zen insights to a philosophical psychology or epistemology built on Western terms. There were problems with this approach. For example, how does one know when to shift from immediacy into thought? Does not that decision itself require thought? Enamoured of Western volun- tarism, Nishida thought of pure experience as having a will towards unity that connected the immediacy with thought. Later, he saw this position as overly ‘psychologistic’ and ‘mystical’. In time, Nishida abandoned his old philosophical formulations for new ones. A most striking innovation was his ‘logic of basho’, developed in 1920s and 1930s (see, for example, Nishida 1927, 1929,and1934). The Japanese word basho is an ordinary word for ‘place’, but it also had at the time some technical meanings as well, for example, as ‘field’ in physics or as a translation for the ancient Greek term ‘topos’. The important move in Nishida’s use of this term was that he wanted to shift his focus from a psychologistic voluntarism to something more ‘logical’, namely, an analysis of conceptualisation and judgement as formed within context or basho. For example, he believed empirical judgement operates in one basho and idealist judgement in another. Yet there is a hierarchy among such basho. For one to make an empirical judgement such as ‘the cup is on the table’, one must first be in the idealist basho of judging, for example, ‘I visually experience the cup on the table.’ Empirical judgement, therefore, cannot occur without a preceding idealist judgement as part of its larger context. Within its own basho empiricism ignores this dependency, dissolving its experientially idealist or subjectivist roots into an unarticulated ‘nothingness’ vis-` a-vis its own judgements. For idealism, on the other hand, empiricism’s basho is nothing more than the ‘being’ constructed by the self. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Japanese philosophy 515 That is not the end of Nishida’s analysis, however. Both empiricism and idealism operate within a self-world polarity, each emphasising one pole. There is a third even more foundational basho, sometimes referred to as the basho of ‘absolutely nothing’ (zettai mu). This basho, defying anything but the most crude articulation, is not a ‘place’ for philosophising but is the ground out of which philosophies (such as idealism and empiricism) arise. For Nishida, the acting of self on the world (the idealist moment) and the world’s being intuited by the self (the empiricist moment) are in fact inseparable parts of one event, the so-called ‘acting-intuiting’. A corollary is that what is fundamental is no longer the Aristotelian substance (found in the sentential subject) with its qualifying attributes (found in the sentential predicate). Instead, by making the acting- intuiting event the foundation for all judgements, Nishida argued for a ‘logic of the predicate’ in which the substance qualifies an event, just as the sentential subject modifies the predicate. Through this analysis, Nishida hoped to show that empiricism and idealism are distinct but logically interdependent and both depend on a ‘place’ of infinite, boundless scope. Throughout his career Nishida applied his current epistemology to ethics, philosophical psychology, logic, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and politics. Given both his prominence as one of Japan’s leading intellectuals and the ultrana- tionalism rampant in the 1930s through 1945, Nishida found himself called upon (in a way he could not easily refuse) to make public addresses on topics related to ‘the Japanese spirit’. Within the severe restrictions on freedom of thought and expression at the time, Nishida tried to rework some ideas of Japanese nation- alist ideology to fit into a less ethnocentric and jingoistic context more to his personal liking. Depending on one’s own perspective, this could be interpreted as either collaborating with, or undermining, the ultranationalist ideology and those two interpretations continue to be debated today (see Heisig and Maraldo, 1994). Even in Nishida’s own lifetime, some prominent members of the Kyoto School such as Tosaka Jun (1900–1945)and Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945)criticised their mentor’s philosophy for its possible application to right-wing ideology. Both died in prison for their own leftist philosophical leanings. 2.TANABE HAJIME When a name besides Nishida’s is associated with the early Kyoto School, it is usually that of Nishida’s younger colleague at Kyoto University, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Although sympathetic to the questions Nishida raised, Tanabe was dissatisfied with Nishida’s answers. With a strong background in logic, mathe- matics, philosophy of science, and epistemology, in 1922–3 Tanabe studied in Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

516 Thomas Kasulis Germany with Edmund Husserl and Alois Riehl. Not surprisingly, his criticism of Nishida focused on the logic of basho. Tanabe’s fundamental objection was that Nishida’s logic essentially moved directly from the level of the universal (for example, ‘all men are mortal’) to the particular (‘Socrates is mortal’), or as Tanabe often described it, from the genus to the individual. Tanabe maintained that in so doing Nishida had overlooked the critical middle component, the level of the ‘species’ where the specification of Socrates’ being a man serves to connect the major premise in the syllogism to the conclusion. Tanabe suggested this level of ‘species’ (shu) is not only logically necessary, but also in some ways experientially primary as well. We experience Socrates first as a man, then ab- stract out from that his membership in the genus of mortal human beings, and finally logically deduce his individual mortality. Tanabe dubbed this a ‘logic of species’ to contrast it with Nishida’s position. In his social thought, Tanabe saw species as the crucial domain of cultural, ethnic, social, and national identification: our experience is formulated in the language, concepts, and values of our social context. Of course, some ultra- nationalists happily embraced such a theory that people are first concretely and experientially Japanese, only by abstraction human beings, and only by deduc- tion individuals. Tanabe himself had generally accepted that interpretation, a position causing him anguish in the last years of the war, leading to his phi- losophy of ‘metanoia’ which maintained that every adequate philosophy must contain a basis for self-criticism to prevent its absolutising itself. ¯ 3.WATSUJI TETSURO Watsuji Tetsur¯ o(1889–1960)was a third major philosophical figure from this pe- riod. He is only loosely associated with the Kyoto School, spending most of his career teaching at Tokyo University. As a young man he was deeply interested in nineteenth-century European thought, focusing on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Following those interests, he studied philosophy in Germany from 1927–8 and was deeply impressed with Heidegger’s thought. Upon re- turning to Japan, however, Watsuji realised that the traditional thought and values of Japanese culture did not mesh well with Western, including Heideg- gerian, assumptions. So he immersed himself in analysing culture’s relationship to history, thought, and value. Appointed professor of ethics first at Kyoto and later Tokyo University, Watsuji worked on his magnum opus in ethical theory, his three-volume Rinrigaku (Ethics, 1937–49). Drawing on his general under- standing of culture, his previous studies of Japanese culture, and his insights into Western philosophical thinking, Watsuji provoked a new way of understanding the human situation and its relation to ethical values and behaviour. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Japanese philosophy 517 Watsuji claimed that being fully human and being fully ethical were both realised in what he called ‘betweenness’, the space between the social and the individual. We are born into that betweenness and then the social pole takes overbyeducating us in the basic values of human relatedness (a ‘Confucian’ paradigm). For ethics to flourish, one must eventually negate that pole to move towards the individuality wherein values arise from autonomy and personal free- dom (a ‘Western’ paradigm). To achieve fully one’s deepest humanity and ethical nature, however, one must also negate that pole as well and move again towards a betweenness that accepts socially instilled values, not this time as part of so- cialisation, but instead as a freely chosen option. Such a dialectical betweenness negates the poles of both the simply social and the simply individual. During the nationalistic period Watsuji emphasised Japan’s distinctive geographical and in- tellectual position between a Confucian East Asia and an individualist West. He believed Confucianism was ultimately unviable because it denied human free- dom and he believed Western (especially American) culture would eventually fail because of individualism’s denial of social connectedness. In examining those three major Japanese philosophers of the period, we find they all tried to establish a third position that would be the logical or experien- tial ground for the binary oppositions. Unlike Hegel, these Japanese dialectical thinkers did not see the third position as sublating the logically prior opposites. Instead they analysed the opposites as emerging out of the abstraction from the third position. Because of the politics of the time, however, those theoretical and logical analyses were sometimes given (by the philosophers themselves or by their interpreters) a politicised reading. Ironically, that situation only confirmed the thrust of their own philosophical systems, namely, that philosophers’ ideas cannot be excised from their experiential context in culture and history. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

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section ten KNOWLEDGE, LANGUAGE, AND THE END OF METAPHYSICS Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

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41 SENSIBLE APPEARANCES michael martin 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)toMerleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945). While the structure of the problems is recognisably the same in both tradi- tions, 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 anal- ysis of meanings, early analytic theories look strange and idiosyncratic. Much of what the phenomenologists have to say, on the other hand, strikes more of achord 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. 1.THE SENSE-DATUM THEORY The question of realism is intertwined with the discussion of sense perception in much early-twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy. Different varieties 521 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

522 Michael Martin of realist insist that we have cognition of a world independent of this cognition at the same time as worrying about how sense perception can put us, at least in part, in contact with this world. For example, some philosophers who dubbed themselves critical realists emphasise both the reality of a world apart from us, and also the problematic nature of our sensory contact with it (see Drake et al. 1920). In Oxford, at the turn of the century Harold Prichard follows his teacher John Cook Wilson in throwing off idealism (Prichard 1909). From then on, his work on the theory of knowledge is dominated by discussion of perception and the topic of perception remains a favourite one among Oxford philosophers of succeeding generations – H. H. Price, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, G. A. Paul and J. L. Austin. Nonetheless, the dominant strand within the English-speaking tradition is a peculiarly Cambridge development: sense-datum theories of appearance and perception. The term ‘sense-datum’ was coined for use in this discussion by G. E. Moore in 1909 (see Moore 1909)but put first into the public sphere by Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy (Russell 1912), though the term was in fact first used in relation to perception in the late nineteenth century in Royce and James. Along with Moore and Russell we can count two other figures as important in developing this tradition: C. D. Broad, one of Russell’s pupils (his preferred term, though, is ‘sensum’ – see Broad 1914) and H. H. Price (see Price 1932). Price was an Oxford philosopher who studied with Moore before returning to Oxford, where in due course he taught Wilfrid Sellars, son of the Critical Realist Roy Wood Sellars and a fierce and influential critic of the ‘myth’ of the given (i.e. the sense-datum) that Price had helped to promulgate. Sense-data are much discussed by many philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century, though few actually advocated the theory. Later in the cen- tury, in discussions of sense-datum theories, we find A. J. Ayer’s name added to the list. Ayer certainly uses the term ‘sense-datum’ in outlining his views (see Ayer 1940), and J. L. Austin (with an obvious Oxford bias) identifies Ayer along with Price as a representative of the sense-datum tradition. As we shall see below, though, Ayer has a rather different view of these matters and should not be included among the sense-datum theorists simply because he also employs the term they used. Sense-datum theorists claim that when someone senses, he or she is ‘given’ a sense-datum in their experience. Within these terms, the problem of perception then becomes that of determining what the relation is between the sense-datum and any material object of perception. Note that the term ‘sense-datum’ is introduced as standing for whatever is given to the mind in sense perception. As introduced, the term is not intended to be prejudicial between physical objects, parts of physical objects, or non-physical objects. Nonetheless, in using the term Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Sensible appearances 523 the sense-datum theorists implicitly make two further assumptions which are hardly commented on in their presentations, but which we should now view as highly controversial. First, Moore, Russell, Broad, and Price all assume that whenever one has a sensory experience – when one perceives an object or when at least it appears to one as if something is there – then there must actually be something which one stands in the relation of sensing to; indeed they assume there must be something which actually has the qualities which it seems to one the object sensed has. So if it now looks to me as if there is a brown expanse before me as I stare at the table, then an actual brown expanse must exist and be sensed by me. This is so even if we consider a case in which I am misperceiving a white object as brown, or even suffering an hallucination or delusion of the presence of brown tables when none are in the vicinity. If one made a similar proposal about the objects of psychological states such as belief or desire, few would find the idea compelling. If James wants Santa Claus to visit, we do not assume that there is an actual being, Saint Nicholas, of whom James has the desire that he should visit. We all accept that such psychological states can have merely ‘intentional’ objects, that they are seem- ingly relations to objects, but no such appropriate object need actually exist for us to be in such psychological states. One popular diagnosis of the key error made by sense-datum theorists is therefore that they have become confused about this point: they ignore the intentionality of perception and fail to note that the objects of sensing may be merely intentional objects, not actually ex- isting (see, for example, Anscombe 1965 and Searle 1983: ch. 2). This is also one aspect in which the early analytic tradition seems strikingly different from the phenomenological school, which precisely emphasises the intentionality of perception. However, as we shall see, the relation between sense-datum theo- ries and intentionality, and consequently the contrast between the sense-datum tradition and phenomenology, is more complex than this suggests. The second questionable assumption at play is that there is a theoretically interesting unity to the category of things which can be given to us in sensing. Only given this assumption would we suppose that there is any point in talking about sense-data and having a sense-datum theory. One could introduce the term ‘stomachum-datum’ for whatever is placed in one’s stomach, but it does not follow that stomacha-data constitute a theoretically useful kind of thing to debate about. That the sense-datum theorists suppose that we can debate in general about sense-data reflects the further assumption not only that things are giventous, but that an important species of thing is so given. This said, sense-datum theorists do not immediately assume that what is givenmust be something other than a physical object. Although they almost invariably believe that sense-data are non-physical, this is normally a conclusion Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

524 Michael Martin that they argue for. In Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, the argument is swift and its brevity unsatisfactory – he merely appeals to the fact that we can have conflicting appearances of one stable object, namely a table, as we view it from different perspectives (Russell 1912: ch. 1). Russell’s discussion is almost definitely intended to echo the (equally brief and unsatisfactory) argument to similar conclusions in Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.Moore, on the other hand, tends to agonise protractedly over the matter, repeatedly so in paper after paper (see Moore 1914, 1925). On the whole, he sets out to establish the conclusion through some variant of the argument from illusion (that is, appealing to the fact that an object can appear to be other than it really is) and the same is true in Broad and Price. Forthese authors, we first identify a case which we would agree is one of something looking brown to one, even if no physical candidate for perception is brown. Following the assumption highlighted above, the sense-datum theorist concludes that in this case one senses some non-physical brown object of sense. Then, they employ some generalising move to show that even in cases in which we thought there could be no illusion there must still be some such non- physical entity present to the senses. The grounds for this generalising move are not always made explicit, though in general it seems to be taken as offering us the best explanation of the data, even though the philosophical theories on offer are not intended to replace a psychological or neurophysiological study of perceiving. On the whole, these authors propose non-physical sense-data as the direct objects of sense without denying that we also sense physical objects. In Moore’s case, throughout his writings, the sense-datum theory is combined with a ro- bust and common-sense realism about the ordinary world (see especially Moore 1925). Russell at different times flirts with phenomenalism, according to which the physical world is a construction out of sensory elements and facts (see Russell 1914), and with neutral monism, according to which both the world, and then the mind, are constructions out of a common basis in sensory acts (see Russell 1921). While Price’s account of the perceptual act echoes Moore in many of its details, when it comes to metaphysics he is much more drawn to phenomenalism, though his eventual final position is not quite phenomenalistic in form. In both England and the United States, these original sense-datum theorists were greatly influential, but principally as a target of criticism. What is of interest in them is how the problems as they conceive them form a framework for discussion, rather than the ways in which others adopted their approach and elaborated on it. Before tracing out the various lines of criticism, though, I want Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Sensible appearances 525 first to contrast this theoretical framework with a seemingly radically different one from the same period within the German-speaking world. 2. PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERCEPTION In the late nineteenth century, Franz Brentano reintroduced into philosophical usage the term ‘intentionality’ from scholastic philosophy, in order to designate the problem of how the mind can be related to objects in thought (see Brentano 1874 [1973: 84]). Edmund Husserl, a student of Brentanian psychology, founded Phenomenology as a philosophical discipline which has the task of describing how the various phenomena of the world can be given to the mind and be the objects of psychological states. Husserl placed as much emphasis on the prob- lems of perception as on those surrounding the case of thought. In this he parallels the concerns of the sense-datum theorists. Much of the second part of Husserl’s Logical Investigations is given over to an account of perceptual conscious- ness. This focus is continued in later works as well, for example Ideas, his major treatise elaborated after the key turn in phenomenology where he introduced the idea of the ‘phenomenological reduction’ according to which the phenome- nologist needs to bracket his or her ontological presuppositions in theorising and simply focus on an exact description of consciousness and its objects (Husserl 1913). In the terms of Ideas,Husserl distinguishes the psychological act of perceiv- ing, the noesis,from its content, the noema, which directs itself onto an object as presented in the act of perceiving. An act with this content can occur in the ab- sence of its object. In this way Husserl affirms the intentionality of perception – the possibility that perceptual acts, no less than thoughts, can be seemingly directed on objects where no actual object exists to be perceived (Husserl 1913 [1982: 213–14]). At the same time, though, Husserl does not suppose that only intentional objects are involved in sense perception. He also affirms the pres- ence of sensational aspects, or in the terms of Ideas, hule,the matter of an act of sensing (Husserl 1913 [1982: 203ff.]). Husserl’s thought is developed and radically criticised in Heidegger (Heidegger 1927) and in the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; his views on perception are particularly addressed and elaborated by the latter two. Sartre’s most Husserlian text is The Psychology of Imagination (Sartre 1940) and here one finds an emphasis also present in Husserl’s lectures – the contrast within consciousness between sensing objects and imagining them. The thought that this introduces a difference within consciousness rather than a difference in the kinds of objects of consciousness contrasts strikingly with Moore’s and Price’s Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

526 Michael Martin affirmations that any variation in consciousness is just a variation in the objects of consciousness. In Sartre’s later Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1943), the focus is rather on the idea that pre-reflective consciousness is empty in itself, a vessel for the presentation of the world to the subject. Here Sartre joins Merleau-Ponty in being critical of Husserl’s commitment to a passive aspect of experience in the form of hule (Sartre 1943 [1956: xxxv]). One problematic question within both the phenomenological tradition and later interpretations is whether the phenomenologists can, or do, embrace realism about the perceived world. Raised as a question purely of phenomenol- ogy, the question of the reality of the object of sense is focused on how an object is given in sensation as real rather than imaginary. It is a matter of further and delicate debate whether these philosophers allow one to raise the external question whether the subject genuinely is related to an object independent of them in perception of the real. One line of interpretation sees Husserl, from Ideas on, as endorsing a transcendental idealism which avoids one rais- ing this external question. Sartre’s discussion of the objects of sensory con- sciousness in Being and Nothingness also has an idealistic flavour – as if the existence of a world for me is a matter of actual and potential course of sen- sory encounters. But for both authors there is a vocal line of interpretation which seeks to reconstruct a realist reading of their discussion of perceptual intentionality. Merleau-Ponty’s views indicate how delicate some of these questions are. First in The Structure of Behaviour (Merleau-Ponty 1942)Merleau-Ponty devel- ops a phenomenology of perception which both exploits and is critical of Gestalt psychology. In part IV of that work he emphasises the thought that there is a conflict between ‘na¨ ıve realism’ as reflected in the phenomenology of perception – that we are given objects whose nature extends beyond what is giveninperceptual consciousness – and the thought that our experiences are an upshot of causal processes in the natural world. This is a familiar theme within the analytic tradition as well. But it is notable that the early analytic tradition did not rely on this form of argument to any great extent. One reason for this is that much of the analytic discussion is done as a form of ‘first philosophy’, entirely prior to any empirical knowledge and hence scientific knowledge of the working of the senses. Merleau-Ponty’s attitude to empirical work on perception contrasts strikingly with this attitude. In his later Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945) Merleau-Ponty discusses the critical status of the body as phenomenally given in experience, partly appealing to neurological evidence in support of the claims he makes. Nonetheless, transcendental idealism is not rejected: experience is still a transcendental condition of empirical science. The key move here is rather Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Sensible appearances 527 that the transcendental ego is replaced as a precondition of experience by the phenomenal body acting as a condition of experience, so that nothing stands outside of consciousness as a condition of it. Within both the analytic tradition and the phenomenological school there is the recognition that the objects of sense can present different, and even conflict- ing, appearances. Both allow for a contrast between mere momentary appearance and reality. Both recognise that the causal underpinnings of perception are open to empirical study, and both contrast such empirical work with philosophical reflection on the status of experience. Still the resulting philosophical discus- sion of these common problems is markedly different. And, strikingly here, the sense-datum tradition seems much, much further from us than the detailed phenomenological observations of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, despite its claims to rest philosophical method on common-sense truths and analysis. Wherein lies the difference? 3.COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS Where Husserl emphasises the intentional object of perception and affirms that the ordinary world is given to us in sensory consciousness, Moore worries whether only the surfaces of objects or even something entirely distinct from the objects of the ordinary world can be present to us in vision. If Moore’s anxieties seem to be at odds with na¨ ıve reflection on our experience, it may be tempting to follow recent analytic critiques of sense-datum theories and to suppose that their key mistake is to deny or ignore the intentionality of perception. And it is tempting to see this as the fundamental contrast between the development of the two discussions. Ye t the contrast is more elusive than this, and echoes down the analytic tradi- tion beyond the limited and idiosyncratic commitments of the early sense-datum theorists. It is best to see them not as ignoring the phenomenon of intentionality, but rather questioning its centrality when one’s concern is perception. Moore and Russell discussed the nature of judgement as they did the nature of sensing. In developing theories of judgement they did not suppose that when one makes a mistaken judgement there must be an entity which appropriately corresponds to what one judges about. When they treat sensing differently from judging, as they go on to do, this is presumably because they suppose that there is some- thing distinctive about sensing which requires that an object be present to the mind. Even if Moore seems to deny any intentionality to sense perception, the same is not true of all sense-datum theorists. Broad employs a distinction between the ontological and epistemological objects of sense which may be interpreted Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

528 Michael Martin as admitting intentionality to sense perception (Broad 1937: 141–2). Price more clearly affirms this, and in doing so explicitly alludes to Husserl, in his account of perceptual acceptance; according to which, in being conscious of a non-physical sense-datum one is also under the impression of being presented by some aspect of a physical object (Price 1932: 151ff.). Even in the context in which sense-datum theories were initially proposed, alternative approaches were offered which insisted that objects can appear other than they are. Critical Realists insisted that we are sensorily related to the world itself, but to account for appearances we need to recognise that objects have properties of appearing bent, or appearing red, as well as the more familiar intrinsic properties of actual shape and colour (see, for example, Dawes Hicks 1917). It is sometimes suggested that sense-datum theorists fail to note that there is no logical route from a claim about how things appear to how anything actually is. But if one looks at Broad’s careful discussion of the critical realists, under the heading of the ‘multiple relation theory of appearing’, one can see that he is keenly aware of this alternative to his view, but thinks it explanatorily inadequate (Broad 1937: 178ff.). Sense-datum theorists do not assume that the truth of their view follows as a matter of logic. Nor do they need to insist that all aspects of how things appear to us need correspond to some property a sensed object actually has. The key assumption – undefended but constantly asserted – is that sensing involves the presentation of observable properties which must be instantiated for one to be appeared to as one is. This is consistent with supposing that there are other aspects of appearance which are to be explained differently. Again, this helps to underline that the sense-datum tradition could allow for intentional aspects to sense perception. So the explanation of why they emphasise what they do needs to look elsewhere. These theorists are not subject to a general confusion about the phenomenon of intentionality. Rather, they seem to think that there is something distinctive about the case of sensing. However they seem ill prepared to offer any argu- ment in support of this differential treatment. When Price comes to justify the assumption of the necessary existence of an object of sense, he claims it to be an indubitable principle that is just self-evident to us (Price 1932: 3ff.). On the whole, then, these various theorists suppose that there is an important difference between sensing proper and mere thinking, treating the two very differently. At the same time, as we noted above, Husserl does not deny a role for sensation in perceptual consciousness and he emphasises the role of sensory matter, hule, in consciousness as well as noema.Itcannot be said that the phenomenological tradition need insist that all that there is to sensory consciousness is the intentional object as given – although, Sartre did go on to affirm this, and Merleau-Ponty resisted any role for sensation in the phenomenology of perception. The contrast, Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Sensible appearances 529 therefore, seems to be more muted: the phenomenological tradition emphasises the intentionality of perception, while in some cases allowing for sensational aspects as well; with the sense-datum tradition the emphasis is on non-intentional aspects of sensing, and the contrast between it and thought, yet not all sense- datum theorists deny intentionality a role in perception. To get at the essence of the opposition here, we need really to look to the aspects of the sense-datum theory which contemporaries reacted against. The essential contrasts stand out once we look at two further criticisms of the sense- datum theories, objections focused on elements of the approach which we now tend to play down. Recall that Moore insists that despite being non-physical sense-data are also mind-independent (Moore 1914). Broad is more cautious, carefully considering the various arguments for and against supposing mind- dependence, before settling on the same conclusion: that all sensa are (probably) mind-independent (Broad 1923 ch: XIII). Now, in claiming that non-physical sense-data are mind-independent, these theorists make their positions much more problematic than if they conceived as sense-data as akin to something sensational, subjective, or mind-dependent as many now conceive of mental images. As Austin complains, in his scathing attack on the sense-datum tradition in Sense and Sensibilia, neither term of the sense-datum/material object dichotomy takes in the other’s washing. Public objects of perception are not without ex- ception material or physical: tables and trees may be composed of matter, but what of rainbows or shadows, sounds or smells? All of these belong among the shared objects of perception (Austin 1962: lect. VII). But if one can find no property in common among the material objects of sense, sense-datum theorists rule out finding an easy candidate for what sense-data are to have in common. For the only plausible such candidate would be that sense-data universally are dependent on our awareness of them in contrast to material objects; and this claim the sense-datum theorists denied. Of course, they still claimed that sense- data were ‘private’: a given sense-datum can be an object of awareness for one subject only. But this cannot operate as a definition of what a sense-datum is, since something’s being private in this sense needs an explanation and the simple explanation of this in terms of mind-dependency is ruled out. Instead it must be claimed that the laws of nature are such that when a subject is in a position to have a sense experience, there must be some suitably placed sense-datum available, and that such a sense-datum would not thereby be available to anyone else. One gets no account of the intrinsic nature of sense-data from being told that they have the function of acting as the immediate objects of awareness. So the sense-datum theorists appear to commit themselves to there being a science of sense-data, dedicated to both the manner in which sense-data are correlated Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

530 Michael Martin perfectly with our states of awareness and the underlying nature they have to allow for this. When one looks to the early reactions to sense-datum theories, it is this picture of the nature of sense-data, the idea that there really is a substantive matter of disagreement about them and the nature of sense perception which needs to be settled by investigation, albeit one beyond any natural science, which provokes the most disagreement. C. I. Lewis, for example, who otherwise defends a notion of the given, criticises sense-datum theories for supposing that something substantial and independent of the subject can be given in a simple, single act of sensing. His preferred account of sensing (in terms of the instantiation of qualia, qualities as sensed) gives a role to our conceptual powers in bundling up qualia in different ways: one way as substantial objects to be perceived, the other way as acts of a perceiver apprehending such objects (Lewis 1929: appendix D). Similarly, the core of the disagreement between Ducasse and Moore is that Ducasse denies that it is obvious to us that the objects of sense must be substantial mind-independent objects (Ducasse 1942; Moore 1942). Again, G. A. Paul’s puzzlement about the individuation and persistence conditions for sense-data is a matter of keen interest (in a way that the parallel question about mental acts would not be), precisely because it presses the question how substantial are we to suppose the realm of appearances to be (Paul 1936). In fact it is here that one should also locate Ayer’s theory of perception, which Austin lumps together with Price as an example of a sense-datum theory. Ayer takes over from Carnap and the logical positivists the thought that there can be no genuine metaphysical disputes – so what is at issue in debate about perception must surely be a disagreement about the choice of scheme to depict the facts which are agreed in common through empirical investigation. Sense-datum the- orists cannot be concerned with the existence of controversial entities. Instead, Ayer suggests that we should see talk of sense-data as just offering us an alter- native way of talking about facts that all parties already agree – that appearances can conflict and that illusions are possible (Ayer 1940: 55–7). Few philosophers at the time thought Ayer’s reconstruction adequate. W. H. Barnes, for example, dismisses Ayer’s suggestion as inaccurate to the debates he discusses, and his complaint seems to prefigure Wilfrid Sellars’s later objections in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ about Ayer’s proposal that we simply have a novel language of sense-data (Barnes 1945, Sellars 1956 [1963: 135–9]). Yet, if Ayer is not faithful to the debate and problems which preceded him, he does offer us a significant move in the development of this debate. For with the rejection of a substantive metaphysics of the non-physical objects of perception, the focus of the debate comes to both the argument from illusion and the need for an incorrigible basis for empirical knowledge. In turn, it is these elements Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Sensible appearances 531 that become the target for Austin’s critique, even though incorrigibility is not central to the early sense-datum theorists. Leaving these later developments aside for a moment, why should sense- datum theorists have insisted on the mind-independence of sense-data, given that this claim left them open to such attack? The answer is simple: they were concerned with realism. Moore’s earliest forays into the area take place in his would-be refutation of absolute idealism. In his ‘Refutation of idealism’ he claims that in sensing we are aware of something independent of the mind, and hence through sensing we have a clear example of the falsity of idealism (Moore 1903). From then on we have the assumption that sensing is a form of knowing – for Russell it is the prime, but not sole, example of knowledge by acquaintance (Russell 1912: 72ff.). With this, we have the endorsement of the doctrine that knowledge is only of things independent of the knowing of them. The thought is echoed in Price too. Nor is this central element of the tradition overlooked by critics. In an early reaction to Russell, Harold Prichard accuses him of a ‘sense-datum fallacy’ (Prichard 1950: 200ff.). This is not, as one might expect from later criticisms, a focus on the invalidity of the argument from illusion. Rather, Prichard complains that the sense-datum theorists suppose that we know the objects of sense but that this is patently not so, since these objects cannot be mind-independent, as revealed by the argument from illusion. And it is here that we get the hint of how the early analytic school developed so differently from the phenomenological tradition. When C. I. Lewis affirms the existence of an ineffable given, his target is in part the sense-datum approach (Lewis 1929: 53). He is critical of the idea that one can know anything without the mediation of concepts to bind together different instances into a common kind. That is to reject a key element of the sense-datum tradition: sensing as an example of a simple, primitive, or unanalysable state of knowing which relates the knower to something independent of the mind, where the subject’s grasp of what is known is pre-conceptual. This aspect of the sense-datum approach does contrast fundamentally with the phenomenological tradition. Although Husserl allows a role for the matter of episodes of perceiving, such aspects are not given to a subject as objects of awareness – they are not candidates for knowledge in the way that sense-data are supposed to be. In taking the most basic element of sensing to be knowledge of something preconceptual, the sense-datum tradition downplays any intentional aspect of experience, as if the intentionality of experience would result from the conceptual capacities of the thinker and so would not be a clear example of knowledge of a mind-independent realm. Given the dominance of Moore’s and Russell’s work, discussion of per- ception within the analytic tradition tended to treat sensible appearances as Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

532 Michael Martin predominantly a non-intentional phenomenon. But as Moore’s and Russell’s idiosyncratic preoccupations fell away, the motivation for such theories of per- ception shifted. As suggested above, Ayer is motivated more clearly by epis- temological concerns, an interest in finding a proper foundation for empirical knowledge. Later in the century, the sense-datum approach is presented as com- bining suspect epistemological preoccupations with a controversial response to the argument from illusion. In fact, the common element in both the analytic and phenomenological tradition is a respect for the argument from illusion and problems of conflicting appearances – sense-data and the intentionality of per- ception are appealed to in different ways to solve these concerns. The peculiar development of the analytic tradition led to critiques in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and J. L. Austin at the mid-point of the century in the former’s attack on the myth of the given and the latter’s mocking rejection of the terms of the debate, which question even the force of the argument from illusion. From the second half of the twentieth century, the analytic tradition is dom- inated by physicalism. Consequently the ontology of non-physical sense-data becomes increasingly unfashionable. Austin’s attacks, begun at just the end of the period which concerns us here, mark the high point of interest within the English speaking world with perception. By the time the subject is of general interest again, the concern with illusion makes the idea of the intentionality of perception more attractive. Yet before one takes this to show a common concern with the phenomenological tradition, one should reflect that that tradition has a strikingly different, and more circumspect, attitude towards the natural sciences than does contemporary analytic work. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

42 THE RENAISSANCE OF EPISTEMOLOGY luciano floridi 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 devel- opment 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 influen- tial tradition of French philosophers of science: Duhem, Poincar´ e, 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 knowl- edge; and, finally, a disregard for the philosophy of history and the temporal dialectic of conceptual developments. Of course, these perspectives never formed a unified programme of research. Philosophers between the wars took very different positions when developing their epistemological investigations, and the full reconstruction and analysis of these cannot be the task of this brief chapter. Its more limited aim will be 533 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

534 Luciano Floridi to outline the discussions, within different traditions, of one central theme – scepticism and the foundations of knowledge. THE TWO FACES OF SCEPTICISM Twoquestions set the issues for sceptical debates: (K) Is knowledge possible? (KK) Is epistemology possible? (i.e. is an epistemology that answers (K) possible?) (K) proceeds bottom-up whereas (KK) works top-down in dealing with issues concerning the legitimacy of epistemic claims. At the beginning of our period, Edmund Husserl and the Neo-Thomistic philosopher Desir´ e Mercier clarified further the normative character of these issues. According to Husserl (1950), the justificatory ground of a theory of knowl- edge cannot be provided by other instances of knowledge. Following a Cartesian strategy, we can analyse potential instances of knowledge by affixing to them an ‘index of questionability’. The sceptic questions the possibility of ever re- moving the index permanently, and Husserl argued that any supposed solution of the sceptical challenge simply by some extension of knowledge would be fallacious. The infringement of Husserl’s principle can be considered of a piece with the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in ethics: (K) is not a question of natural science; by positing it, one asks whether what is considered to be knowledge justifiably deserves to be so described. Husserl formulated his principle by reacting against his previous psychologism and this explains why it can easily be formulated as an anti-naturalist dilemma: if a naturalised epistemology differentiates itself from aphilosophical theory of knowledge by being empirically testable it raises the question of its own justification. Yet if it claims to be able to solve this founda- tional problem, it must provide a solution which cannot be in itself an instance of empirical knowledge, and with respect to which it must abandon its aspiration to gain the status of empirical science. The acceptance of this anti-naturalist stand was one of the reasons why Husserl argued for a purely conceptual approach to epistemology. Thus he held that the only correct way of dealing with (K) is by means of principled and convincing arguments, by ‘placing it in the logical space of reasons of justifying and being able to justify what one says’ as Sellars was later to say (Sellars 1963: 169). But one can never be in a position to establish an answer to (K) if no satisfactory reply to (KK) can be provided. Questioning the possibility of epistemology rests on the problem of the criterion (Sextus Empiricus 1976:II.2)which Mercier re- launched as ‘le cheval du bataille du scepticisme’ (Mercier 1923;forarecent Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The renaissance of epistemology 535 discussion, see Chisholm 1973, 1989). To know whether things really are as they seem to be, one needs a criterion for distinguishing between true and false appearances. But to know whether the criterion is reliable, one needs to know whether it succeeds in distinguishing between true and false appearances. And one cannot know this unless one already knows which appearances are true and which are false. So it seems that an epistemology cannot establish what, if anything, deserves to be called knowledge. ANTI-NATURALISM AND THE FOUNDATIONAL PROBLEM IN GERMAN-SPEAKING PHILOSOPHY Owing to his limited concern with scepticism, Kant had not considered (KK). The transcendental method of his first Critique was supposed to yield a justi- fication for scientific knowledge, but what type of knowledge is exemplified by the Critique itself ? How can it be justified without incurring a vicious cir- cle? In 1807, the Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries addressed this issue in his Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft.Fries summarised the (KK) problem in terms of a trilemma: the premises of an epistemology can be dog- matically assumed, or justified by an endless chain of statements, or anchored to a psychological basis which is justificatory but not in need of a justification. During the 1910s and the 1920sthere was a ‘Fries-Renaissance’, particularly in the work of Leonard Nelson (Haller 1974; Nelson 1971). Drawing on Fries’s analysis, Nelson came to object to the entire project of an epistemology in the Cartesian, anti-sceptical, and justificatory sense, and to favour a more descrip- tive and psychologistic approach (Nelson 1930, 1965). Despite his criticism of foundational debates, Nelson’s ‘naturalised epistemology’ contributed greatly to reawakening philosophers’ interest in the foundational issue in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One philosopher especially influenced by his work was Moritz Schlick. Schlick endorsed the Cartesian requirement that there be an absolutely certain foundation of knowledge. He also accepted that it was ‘self-evident that the problem of the foundation of all knowledge is nothing else but the question of the criterion of truth’ (Schlick 1979: II, 374) and supported a correspondence theory of truth. However, in his view ‘anyone who holds that the Cartesian thesis [i.e. the direct perception of a fact of consciousness] constitutes knowledge will inevitably be drawn into a similar circle [i.e. Fries’s trilemma]’ (Schlick 1925 [1974: 86]). So he came to defend a foundationalism according to which there are objective facts, external to the knower’s doxastic states, that are accessible by the knower and capable of justifying the knower’s beliefs in a way that is sufficient for knowledge. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

536 Luciano Floridi According to Schlick, protocol propositions, that is, basic statements, ‘in absolute simplicity, without any forming, change or addition, set forth the facts, whose elaboration constitutes the substance of all science’ (Schlick 1979:II,370,see also 400–13). But although they are logically prior to other factual propositions, they are themselves grounded on a prior layer of indubitable, empirically con- tentful, ‘affirmations’ (Konstatierungen). These affirmations, for example, ‘there is red here now’, are expressions of immediate, simple, existential experiences which provide a genuine acquaintance with reality even though they are wholly subjective, fleeting, and ineffable. They are indubitable because to understand their meaning is to understand their truth; hence they constitute the basic form of evidence for protocol propositions, which are constantly tested against them. These ‘affirmations’ are, therefore, the foundation of science, not in a fixed, static, sense, but only in the sense that they form the constantly renewed ground necessary and sufficient for its open-ended development. Schlick’s foundationalism requires a verificationist semantics, an ostensive the- ory of meaning of elementary propositions, and a conception of ineffable ex- perience of the world which is immediately ‘given’ to the subject. As a result it appeared to critics such as Otto Neurath similar to a philosophy of intuition; they argued that it was beset with solipsistic difficulties and contained unacceptable metaphysical theses. Neurath’s view was that only a nominalist and constructivist interpretation of the nature of protocol propositions – as actual statements, expressed in a physical- istic language, recording empirical observations – is metaphysically acceptable. Scientific theories could be grounded, empirically, on these basic protocol sen- tences, but no position ‘external’ to language is achievable. Sentences could be compared only with other sentences. Direct reference to external reality or inter- nal experience is to be avoided as empty metaphysics. Since protocol sentences are intrinsically fallible and hence always corrigible in principle, any Cartesian demand for absolute certainty is unrealistic and misleading. For Neurath, the epistemic justification of science was not to be achieved by means of an appeal to external facts or alleged intuitions, but internally, through logical coher- ence (which did not necessarily exclude some ordering relations), instrumental economy, pragmatic considerations of social and scientific ends, a rational use of conventions by the scientific community, and a constantly open and public debate. Following Duhem, Neurath argued that, given an apparently successful theory, rival explanations can be made to fit the same evidence that supports it, and that in replacing or revising a theory, hypotheses and observation statements come under scrutiny as whole networks, not individually. Practical expedience rather than absolute truth was determinant. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008