Incididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Dermot MORAN"On the other hand, although philosophy can never be completely disengaged and isolated from other scientific, cultural, and indeed social and political developments, the chapters in this volume focus primarily on the intrinsic philosophical issues, and external social and political developments are in general left to one side. One might say, then, that the chapters here offer an internalist vision of the development of twentieth-century philosophy. "(xiv)
[Maar het vervelende is dat dat altijd gebeurt, een geschiedenis van de filosofie die zich blind staart op zichzelf. Precht is de enige die ik tot nu las die de geschiedenis van de filosofie wat meer in een bredere samenhang probeert te trekken. ]
"As always, the human world is extremely complex and escapes the exact lawfulness found in the natural sciences, and there is no clearly identifiable progress in moral concepts. As the German Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno once put it, “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb.”"(4)
"So, despite their inaugural moments at the turn of the century, perhaps Nietzsche and Freud are not in fact the most representative or archetypal philosophical figures for the twentieth century, certainly if one considers the nature of their respective influences on philosophy. In fact, the pair of names most often advanced (in the work of Richard Rorty among many others) as best representing twentieth-century philosophy are: Heidegger and Wittgenstein, especially after both had made the “linguistic turn” subsequent to their own early publications. The influence of these two philosophers probably outweighs all other philosophers in the twentieth century." [mijn nadruk] (10)
[Het lijkt me nogal zinloos om toptienlijstjes te willen maken voor "de meest invloedrijke filosoof". Wat voor invloed en waarop? Hoe meet je die invloed dan? En was het wel een goede invloed? Moran ontsnapt hier trouwens niet aan zijn eigen voorkeuren: Husserl en de fenomenologie.]
"As we know, Husserl himself was isolated and humiliated by the rising Nazi movement, a movement in which his successor Heidegger enthusiastically participated. Any history of twentieth-century philosophy must face that great betrayal of Husserl and of the academy by Heidegger – a betrayal which might be interpreted as being a kind of Nietzschean philosophizing with a hammer. Heidegger hated the ensconced academic practice in the university and saw in Nazism a chance for university renewal and at the same time a vehicle for cultural renewal, or Erneuerung, the very term of Husserl’s project in the Kaizo lectures of the 1920s. Husserl had claimed that the First World War had exposed the “internal untruthfulness and senselessness” of contemporary culture. In response he sought intellectual renewal through radically self-critical reflection. Heidegger, on the other hand, in his Rectoral Address of 1933, demanded that the university dedicate itself to following the will of the Führer. It would later fall to other German philosophers, notably Jaspers, Habermas, and Adorno, to seek to break Heidegger’s spell and to show up his feet of clay. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that Heidegger continues to have enormous influence today, especially in the discussion concerning the meaning of art, poetry, and technology. " [mijn nadruk] (11-12)
[Die invloed van Heidegger zou ons zorgen moeten baren. ]
Ook Gottlob Frege is belangrijker en invloedrijker geweest dan veel mensen denken.
";... he had little interest in epistemology or ethics, for instance.(...) Like Heidegger, Frege had a dark side. Frege’s political beliefs were somewhat naive, to say the least. He allied himself with Bruno Bauch’s right-wing Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft (German Philosophical Society), a group that supported Hitler’s rise to power. Furthermore, Frege’s diary contains anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiments, including the view that Jews should be expelled from Germany." [mijn nadruk] (12-13)
[Ik vermoed dat het een - geen belangstelling voor ethiek - met het ander -politiek naïef - samenhangt.]
"It is generally recognized that one of the most notable features of twentieth-century philosophy is that there developed two dominant intellectual traditions, traditions that in that century began to be named as the “analytic” or “Anglo-American” or “Anglo-Saxon” on the one hand, and “Continental” or “European” on the other. These traditions are widely held to have developed separately, with opposing aspirations and methodologies, and, indeed, to be fundamentally hostile to one another."(13)
[Ik heb dat nooit zo'n zinvolle tegenoverstelling gevonden. Moran blijkt het met me eens te zijn.]
"Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore must also be given enormous credit for establishing the manner of analytic writing in philosophy that soon became current: writing crisply, identifying a thesis, addressing its merits, entirely independently of its historical context or location in the scheme of a philosopher’s thinking." [mijn nadruk] (17)
[En waarschijnlijk ook van andere context. De vraag is of we daar zo blij mee moeten zijn. Ook dat is een vorm van reductionisme. ]
" The human and cultural sciences were often passed over by the analytic tradition, a move that the Continental tradition regarded as disastrous for the very conception of what science is. " [mijn nadruk] (18)
[Precies, dat is de eenzijdigheid, het reductionisme in de analytische filosofie.]
"In any event, to write a history of twentieth-century philosophy is not, as Hegel correctly recognizes, merely to assemble a list of all the philosophical works and tendencies. It is also an attempt to seize the rationale at work in the processes. "(25)
"The very notion of “Europe” itself has not remained static in the period in question, but has been the subject of intense analysis from Husserl and Jan Patočka to Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. Edmund Husserl in his Crisis of the European Sciences (1936) sought to overcome the dangerous slide of European culture into irrationalism by tracing the roots of modernity in the mathematicization of nature successfully begun by Galileo. Modern science had literally split the world in two (into objective measurable properties and “subjective-relative” properties) and had separated fact from value to a degree that twentieth-century scientifically informed culture was left without means to analyze the incipient loss of meaning and value that threatened its very existence. " [mijn nadruk] (26)
"analytic philosophy or, perhaps more appropriately, as the analytic method in philosophy. What this brief summary masks, however, is that it is far from easy to say what the analytic method in philosophy amounts to. By tracing the outlines of the moment when it was born we shall here try to identify some of its distinctive features." [mijn nadruk] (43)
Eerst komt Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) aan de orde. Uiteindelijk zijn zijn oplossingen niet erg bevredigend, vindt Potter.
"There is nothing deep, of course, in the distinction between a sign and the thing it signifies, nor in the distinction between both of these and the ideas I attach to a sign when I use it. What goes deeper is the claim that if we are to have a satisfying account of language’s ability to communicate thoughts from speaker to listener we must appeal to yet a fourth element – what Frege calls sense. "(48)
Vervolgens worden Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) en George Edward Moore (1873–1958) besproken. Over Russels logicisme:
"What was significant about this method of translation was that it showed how the grammatical form of a sentence might differ from the logical form of the proposition the sentence expresses."(53)
"Because of these difficulties over the axioms of reducibility and infinity, therefore, Whitehead and Russell’s attempted reduction of mathematics to logic is generally regarded as a failure. Far more influential in philosophy, however, was the method of logical analysis of which it was an instance. The aim of this method, in application to any sphere of discourse, is to find the true logical form of the propositions expressed in the discourse." [mijn nadruk] (55)
[Ik vind dat Russell zich te veel bezig houdt met zinloze exercities, die weinig zeggen over hoe we in de praktijk taal begrijpen en toepassen. Het zijn simplistische reducerende theorietjes gericht op logische structuur, op zekerheden (logisch atomisme, sense-data) met weinig oog voor de complexiteit van hoe we taal gebruiken om over de werkelijkheid te praten. We snappen de betekenis van een zin als 'De koning van Frankrijk is kaal' omdat we weten wat een koning is, wat Frankrijk is, wat kaal is, de zin maakt deel uit van een complex aan kennis. Die kennis maakt ook dat we tegelijkertijd snappen dat de zin een bewering uitdrukt die niet op waarheid getoetst kan worden omdat een koning van Frankrijk niet bestaat, laat staan een kale koning van Frankrijk. Veel interessanter is het wat er gebeurt als iemand die kennis niet heeft en geen weet heeft van koningen, landen en kale koppen.]
"Frege, we have seen, made explaining communication one of the central tasks of his theory of meaning; that is why he had to insist that the sense of an expression is not simply an idea in my mind but a distinct, intersubjectively available entity. For Russell, on the other hand, it was not really part of the task he was engaged in to explain communication; on his view the fact that we communicate at all emerges as a strange kind of miracle." [mijn nadruk] (57)
[Wat een achteruitgang ... Wittgenstein I doet het dan toch wat beter. met zijn afbeeldingstheorie.]
"Lying behind the picture theory, however, there is what seems to me to be a genuine insight, of which there are glimmerings in Frege, but which Wittgenstein was the first to bring fully to light: it is an essential component of what enables a sentence to express something about the world that the complexity of the proposition the sentence expresses should track the complexity of the possibilities of arrangement of the world which it represents. "(59)
"If this is right, then the consequences for philosophy are far-reaching indeed. All the “big” questions of philosophy are, according to the Tractatus, not really questions at all and cannot be answered by the application of logical reasoning in anything like the manner that Russell and others were attempting. For logical reasoning applies only to propositions, and the sentences which occur in “big” philosophy do not express propositions."(65)
Potters conclusie:
"The idea which gave the tradition its name, that an analysis of sentences could reveal the true structure of the propositions they express and hence the true nature of the world, has re-emerged in various forms, and is not yet quite dead, but it certainly is not universally accepted."(69)
[Dit hoofdstuk van Potter is zo'n typische interne analyse van een filosofische stroming. Ik wil juist die externe factoren kennen waarover hij het heeft, externe factoren die duidelijk maken waarom een bepaalde manier van denken en schrijven ineens zo populair wordt onder filosofen.]
[Glock schrijft beter dan Potter. Potter vervalt in logische analyses, terwijl Glock simpelweg dingen op een rij zet en uitlegt. Daarin zie je het verschil tussen iemand die dicht zit bij de taalanalytische filosofie en dat irritante taalgebruik heeft overgenomen (Potter) en iemand die in staat is met gewone taal ingewikkelde samenhangen te laten zien, problemen uit te leggen en zo verder (Glock). Het enige probleem hier bij Glock is dat hij wel erg veel filosofen bespreekt: alle variaties en afleidingen komen aan de orde. Dat voelt niet goed: zijn al die mensen allemaal even belangrijk dan? En waarom maken filosofische auteurs zo zelden overzichten en schema's zodat je de samenhangen tussen filosofen en stromingen beter gaat begrijpen? ]
"My aim is to chart and critically assess the development of analytic philosophy from roughly the 1930s onwards. The most striking feature is the transformation of the self-assured (if distinct) programs of logical atomism and logical positivism into highly diverse strands which come to question and undermine the very idea of analysis and finally of analytic philosophy itself. "(76)
"Many philosophers of the past have disparaged the theories of their predecessors as false, unfounded, or pointless. But according to Wittgenstein metaphysical theories suffer from a more basic defect, namely that of being “nonsensical” in the sense of being meaningless or unintelligible. It is not just that they provide wrong answers, but that the questions they address are misguided questions to begin with (what the logical positivists later called “pseudo-questions”). They are based on a misunderstanding or distortion of the rules of logical syntax, and must hence be rejected. Legitimate philosophy is not a doctrine but an activity, namely a “critique of language” to be pursued through logical analysis. Without propounding any propositions of its own, it brings to light the logical form of meaningful propositions which, according to the Tractatus, are confined to the propositions of empirical science. This positive task is complemented by the negative task of demonstrating that the statements of metaphysics are nonsensical, since they violate the rules of logical syntax. " [mijn nadruk] (78)
"Nowadays the logical positivists are best known for verificationism, the view that the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification (the “principle of verification”), and that only those propositions are meaningful which are capable of being verified or falsified (the verificationist “criterion of meaningfulness”). On the basis of this criterion, they condemned metaphysics as meaningless, because it is neither a posteriori – by contrast to empirical science – nor analytic – by contrast to logic and mathematics. " [mijn nadruk] (79)
[Dat vat de benadering van na de 'linguistic turn' goed samen. Maar je ziet meteen ook het zwakke van die positie: als filosofie alleen nog maar taalanalyse is en zelf niets beweert over de werkelijkheid, dan vervreemdt filosofie van die werkelijkheid en wordt ze tamelijk onbelangrijk. Bovendien zou dat taalanalytische programma nog nuttig kunnen zijn als bijvoorbeeld die taalanalyse en verificatie toegepast werden op alles wat er buiten de metafysica beweerd wordt - laten we zeggen in de politiek of zo - maar daar zie ik maar bitter weinig van en ook dat illustreert hoe wereldvreemd taalanalytische filosofie vaak is. Maar het bezwaar tegen het verificatie-idee is ook principieel:]
"The trouble is that plenty of sentences which competent speakers count as perfectly meaningful do not allow of conclusive verification."(80)
"vMeanwhile in Cambridge there emerged a new generation of logical analysts, Ramsey pre-eminent among them. The Cambridge analysts shared neither the anti-metaphysical fervor of the logical positivists nor their verificationism. They did, however, share with them Wittgenstein’s “thesis of extensionality” (simple propositions occur in complex ones only in such a way that the truth-value of the latter depends solely on those of the former) and Russell’s empiricist aspiration of analyzing propositions and concepts into constructions referring exclusively to the contents of experience. Alas, their attempts to reduce all meaningful propositions to truth-functional constructions out of elementary propositions referring to sense-data were no more successful than Russell’s fledgling attempts and Carnap’s heroic effort in Der logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928 (The Logical Structure of the World). " [mijn nadruk] (80-81)
"It is tempting to blame the failure of reductive analysis on the vagaries of ordinary language: the proposed analysis fails to say precisely the same thing as the analysandum simply because the analysandum does not say anything precise to begin with. This was the attitude of a strand within analytic philosophy that is known as “ideal language philosophy” and comprises Frege, Russell, Tarski, the logical positivists, and Quine. It holds that owing to their logical shortcomings (ambiguity, vagueness, referential failure, category-confusions), natural languages need to be replaced by an ideal language – an interpreted logical calculus – at least for the purposes of science and “scientific philosophy.”" [mijn nadruk] (81-82)
[Hier gaat het dus om de logische constructie van kunstmatige talen. Maar precies dát is onmogelijk gebleken. Wittgenstein II vond dan ook:]
" Ordinary language is not “a calculus according to definite rules” (1953: §81), as the Tractatus had assumed. Its rules are more diverse, diffuse, and subject to change than those of artificial calculi."(82)
"Moreover, the possibility of linguistic representation does not presuppose a one-to-one correlation between words and things. Fundamentally, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein all shared a referential conception of meaning, according to which the meaning of an expression is an object for which it stands. This conception is doubly wrong. Not all meaningful words are names that refer to objects. The referential conception is modeled solely on proper names, mass nouns, and sortal nouns. It ignores verbs, adjectives, adverbs, connectives, prepositions, indexicals, and exclamations (Wittgenstein 1958: 77; 1953: §§1–27). Moreover, even in the case of referring expressions, their meaning is not the object they stand for. “The word ‘meaning’ is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word.” " [mijn nadruk] (83)
"Both the picture theory and verificationism restrict meaningful propositions to statements of fact. Wittgenstein now rejects the idea, epitomized in the Tractatus notion of the general propositional form, that the sole function of language is to describe reality. In addition to statements of fact there are not just questions and commands but “countless” other “language-games,” linguistic activities such as telling jokes, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying, etc. Furthermore, the logical and semantic rules that constitute a language – Wittgenstein calls them “grammatical rules” – do not have to mirror the structure of reality but are “autonomous.” They are not responsible either to physical reality or to a Platonic realm of “meanings.” Language is not the self-sufficient abstract system which it appears in Frege, Russell and the Tractatus. Rather, it is a human practice which in turn is embedded in a social “form of life” (1953: §23). Wittgenstein still held that philosophical problems are rooted in misunderstandings of language. But he rejected both logical analysis and logical construction as means of resolving these confusions. (...) Finally, the idea that analysis can make unexpected discoveries about what ordinary expressions really mean is misguided. The rules of language cannot be “hidden” beneath the surface and await discovery by logicians and linguists. Rather, competent speakers must be capable of recognizing them, since they are the normative standards which guide their utterances. To fight the “bewitchment of our under- standing through the means of our language” we need neither the construction of artificial languages nor the uncovering of logical forms beneath the surface of ordinary language. Instead, we need a description of our public linguistic practices which constitute a motley of language-games (1953: §§65–88, 108, 23). " [mijn nadruk] (83-84)
[Goed gezien door Wittgenstein II en geweldig samengevat door Glock. Dit is de kern van de zaak.]
Een en ander werd op die manier aangepakt binnen de 'gewone taal - filosofie' of 'Oxford filosofie' van Ryle, Austin en Strawson. De voorstanders van het 'logisch positivisme' verhuisden door WO II naar de VS waar ze grote invloed kregen. Quine wordt uitvoeriger besproken. Een en ander liep uit op de wetenschapsfilosofie van Popper (falsifieerbaarheid als demarkatiecriterium), Kuhn en Feyerabend.
"Although few analytic philosophers have swallowed their relativistic conclusions, Kuhn and Feyerabend turned philosophy of science from ahistorical methodological questions to the history and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of science."(88)
Daarnaast komen bepaalde vormen van metafysica terug.
"The rise of philosophy of language thus understood reveals that the received contrast between ideal and ordinary language philosophy actually comprises two distinct conflicts. The first is between two different aims: while logical construction seeks to replace natural languages by artificial alternatives, both conceptual analysis and the new philosophies of language explore the workings of actual languages. The second is between two different techniques (which in turn are connected to different perspectives on language, see below): while formal approaches define terms and paraphrase sentences by translating them into an interpreted logical calculus, non-formal approaches explain words and paraphrase sentences by describing their role and their connections with other expressions from the vernacular. "(92)
Ook leidt taalfilosofie uiteindelijk tot de 'philosophy of mind'.