Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition

Nikolay Milkov

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350086456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

This book investigates the emergence and development of early analytic philosophy and explicates the topics and concepts that were of interest to German and British philosophers. Taking into consideration a range of authors including Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Fries, Lotze, Husserl, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, Nikolay Milkov shows that the same puzzles and problems were of interest within both traditions. Showing that the particular problems and concepts that exercised the early analytic philosophers logically connect with, and in many cases hinge upon, the thinking of German philosophers, Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition introduces the Anglophone world to key concepts and thinkers within German philosophical tradition and provides a much-needed revisionist historiography of early analytic philosophy. In doing so, this book shows that the issues that preoccupied the early analytic philosophy were familiar to the most renowned figures in the German philosophical tradition, and addressed by them in profoundly original and enduringly significant ways.

Part One

Introductory Chapters

1

What Is Early Analytic Philosophy, and How to Write Its History?

1 Early Analytic Philosophy as Continuation of Mainstream German Philosophy

Nineteenth-century German philosophy and logic played a significant, yet still-insufficiently appreciated, role in the genesis of early analytic philosophy.¹ Hence any historically sound and adequately nuanced comprehension of the origins and character of analytic philosophy needs to be informed by detailed knowledge and fine-grained philosophical understanding of this influence.

Regrettably, until the mid-1960s there was little interest in tracing the relation between early analytic philosophy and the German philosophical tradition. Historians of philosophy regarded analytic philosophy simply as an outgrowth of British empiricism and Common Sense doctrine (Ayer 1936: 41). Reflective of this widely held view is Robert Ammerman’s influential anthology of analytic philosophy (1965). Ammerman selected for inclusion mostly Anglophone philosophers. The two German figures he chose to include in the text, Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel, were represented only by the work they published in English while they taught in the United States. A most glaring (and telling) omission in the Ammerman collection is the absence of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This situation was to change as a result of a series of developments in Anglophone philosophy, six of which are of particular significance: (i) Largely due to the persuasive powers of Michael Dummett, Anglophone scholars came to appreciate the substantial influence that Gottlob Frege exerted on the beginnings of analytic philosophy. This newly established historical factor had an increasing impact in the field, most notably in the wake of Dummett’s monograph Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973). (ii) At the same time, studies appeared highlighting the formative influence that the thought of several leading Austrian philosophers had on analytic philosophy. Chief among these Austrian thinkers were Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano and his school. (iii) Recent decades have witnessed a marked increase in scholarship that reassesses twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Among the most influential examples are monographs by Alberto Coffa (1991) and Michael Friedman (2000) that have pointed to the Marburg neo-Kantian, Ernst Cassirer as having exercised considerable influence over early logical empiricists. (iv) Another salient development is the growing debate over Edmund Husserl’s impact on Rudolf Carnap’s Aufbau program. This was initially traced in a paper by Verena Mayer (1991, 2016), then subsequently taken up in published essays by Jean-Michel Roy (2004) and T. A. Ryckman (2007), and ultimately in a volume by Guillermo Rosado Haddock (2008). (v) Along with these Husserl-related studies, other recent work on Carnap’s Aufbau finds evidence of influence of the Germanophone philosophy on the early analytic philosophy both in the form of the Southwest neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert’s value theory (Mormann 2006a, 2006b) and in the empirical facet of Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy (Damböck, 2012, 2016). (vi) Finally, the last few decades have seen scholarship disclosing evidence, hitherto largely neglected, of Hermann Lotze’s legacy in early analytic philosophy (Gabriel 2002).

This book aims to transformatively advance these largely disparate efforts by developing a comprehensively unified account of early analytic philosophy as a movement that both inherited and transformed an entire spectrum of themes dealt with in mainstream German philosophy. This project challenges the widely held view that it was above all various schools of the so-called “continental philosophy” that genuinely reflected the legacy of mainstream German philosophy of the earlier period.

No doubt a decisive historical factor behind the decades-long failure to credit the role of German thought in the rise of analytic philosophy was the critical stance toward it prevalent in the English-speaking academy roughly from 1914 to 1970. This was to a great extent a function of bitter political and cultural conflicts that so largely infected the Zeitgeist of the epoch. The period was marked by sharply divided ideological parties and blocs—cosmopolitans against nationalists, liberals against conservatives, Germans against Britons and French. The split between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy emerged in this environment of sociocultural animosity and clashing ideologies. A major historical impetus of this development was the anti-German sentiments inflamed by the Great War (Akerhurst 2010). Anglophone scholars came to repudiate German philosophy as not only mistaken in principle but also imbued with dubious ideological undertones.²

It is long past time, however, to adopt a philosophically disinterested stance and to set the intellectual-historical record straight by articulating a theoretically balanced and comprehensive, ideologically unbiased account of this seminal current of twentieth-century Western philosophy. As a contribution to that end, the present book shows how the emergence of this philosophical movement represents the beginning of a transformation of mainstream German academic philosophy on British soil and, later, in America. We shall see how G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and later also Ludwig Wittgenstein, the pioneering figures of analytic philosophy, inherited problems and doctrines that originated in German philosophical thought, and how they explored them along original lines in the language and theoretical idiom of a far different cultural and intellectual environment.

2 Competing Conceptions

As previously indicated, the present work is not the first to consider the history of analytic philosophy in the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy. But it expressly challenges the leading accounts by substantively revising the influential historical picture that they have retailed. This study opposes, in particular, five ways in which historians of philosophy have explained the relation of nineteenth-century German thought to analytic philosophy:

1) It rejects the assumptions of those studies that direct attention to Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy as something that early analytic philosophers putatively made central to their projects (Soames 2003, 2014/17). Many American authors in particular have made this the point of departure for their historical accounts (Hanna 2001) (see Chapter 15).

2) It opposes the recent trend, initiated by Robert Brandom and Paul Redding, to relate analytic philosophy to Hegel’s grand philosophical theories (Redding 2007).³ By contrast, the present investigation directs attention, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, to selected elements of Hegel’s method in order to show that they are related to early analytic philosophy in an important way.

3) Also challenged here is the thesis that Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith have promulgated, one also championed by Dale Jacquette and Thomas Uebel, namely that the philosophy of Kant and that of the neo-Kantians have in principle nothing to do with analytic philosophy. Rejecting this supposition, the present study argues that Kant’s philosophy introduced a universe of ideas, some of which led to the flowering of modern forms of continental philosophy, and some to the emergence of formally rigorous, scientific philosophy, including analytic philosophy (Milkov 2013b).

4) The present work contests the view propounded by Alberto Coffa, Allan Richardson, and Michael Friedman that analytic philosophy was profoundly influenced by neo-Kantian thinking, particularly in its Marburg form (Friedman 1999; Richardson 1998). The chief objection to positing the mainstream neo-Kantians as historical antecedents of analytic philosophy is that the lead figures in both the Southwest and the Marburg schools were largely preoccupied with the philosophy of culture. As E. W. Orth has observed, neo-Kantianism “was closely connected with the emergence and spread of the concept of culture and had a typical culture-consciousness” (1994: 16; Flach 2007: 9−24; Damböck 2016: v). In this sense, it is a “philosophy of culture as a human product” (ibid.), a line of thought that early analytic philosophy at least dismissed as philosophically irrelevant.

That said, however, it is beyond doubt that neo-Kantianism significantly contributed to the birth of analytic philosophy, above all, with the ways it perpetuated the logicalization of philosophy initiated by Kant (Milkov 2013b: § 5.1). Chapter 13 details this with reference to Leonard Nelson, a neo-Kantian and a neo-Friesian who defended a more realistic and objectivist view than his colleagues, and whose work had marked affinities with early analytic philosophy.

5) Lastly, this study questions Michael Dummett’s claim that Frege alone introduced analytic philosophy as a kind of philosophy of language. After all, it is Russell who best lays claim to being the founder of modern analytic philosophy (Chapter 16: § 7), and he was not primarily a philosopher of language but a realist philosopher of the “external world” (Monk 1996a). Moreover, as will become clear in Chapter 5, there are elements in Frege that are not “analytic” in any sense consistent with Moore’s and especially with Russell’s concept of analytic philosophy. Among other things, such differences were to put Russell sharply at odds not only with Frege but also with Wittgenstein (Chapter 15; see also Milkov 2013, 2017).

3 A Brief Overview of the Proto-Analytic Philosophy

To help set the stage for the account of early analytic philosophy introduced in the chapters ahead, it will be well to profile the prehistory of analytic philosophy as it bears upon the historical lines of influence we shall identify and trace in the discussions to follow.

A defining moment of the prehistory of the early analytic philosophy was Kant’s recalibration of Western philosophy by way of synthesizing logic with the rest of the field (Milkov 2013b). This recasting of different lines of philosophical study into one formal discipline, in order to achieve theoretical rigor (or “solid results”⁴ ) in philosophy, proved to be the source of an epochal enhancement of its heuristic power. A first result of this Kantian “formal turn” was that philosophers of widely different intellectual temperaments and theoretical interests became convinced that they could “improve on” Kant’s system by developing it in their own way. The Kantian revolution inspired the projects of a diverse group of philosophers. They range from humanistic-oriented thinkers like Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer to those such as Fries, Herbart, and Fechner, whose leading concerns were keyed to exact natural science and mathematics.

Further post-Kantian developments in the German academy proved to be antecedents of analytic philosophy. Less than a decade after Hegel’s death Germanophone philosophical thinking took an objectivist turn, as it became obvious that many of Hegel’s speculative claims and analyses were otiose or patently wrong or radically misconceived. First, in 1837, Bernard Bolzano published his Wissenschaftslehre, then in 1840, Adolf Trendelenburg saw into print his Logical Investigations, followed in 1841 and 1843 by the young Hermann Lotze who brought out his first (“lesser”) Logic and first (“lesser”) Metaphysics (see the next para.). In the following years (i.e., long before the birth of the neo-Kantianism) these and other Germanophone philosophers preoccupied themselves with ideas and themes which decades later would be identified as signature concerns of Cambridge analytic philosophy. The topics ranged from the proposition, objective content—both perceptual and conceptual—of knowledge, and intentionality, to the theory of logical forms, the objective nature of values and logical validity.

Without any doubt, the towering figure of the objectivist turn in German philosophy was Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). Lotze successfully synthesized components of exact, scientifically oriented philosophy with elements of classical German idealism. This explains why, like Kant, Lotze proved a major, if often unrecognized, influence on a plethora of fin de siècle philosophers and philosophical movements (Chapter 7: § 2). These ranged from phenomenology and Dilthey’s life philo sophy, to American pragmatism (Josiah Royce studied with Lotze in Göttingen), the so-called British “neo-Hegelians” (several of whom headed by Bernhard Bosanquet, translated Lotze’s “greater” Logik (1874) and “greater” Metaphysik (1879) (Chapter 6: § 2)), and also early analytic philosophy.

One last point: today it is widely accepted that various schools of thought played a role in the genesis of analytic philosophy. However, few current students of the history of analytic philosophy are aware that German academic philosophy also produced a home-grown version of a proto-analytic philosophy: the Greifswald objectivism, associated with Johannes Rehmke, and the Göttingen neo-Friesian critical philosophy, whose chief exponent was Leonard Nelson. W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Introductory Chapters
• Part Two Leibniz and Hegel
• Part Three Hermann Lotze
• Part Four Edmund Husserl
• Part Five Two Neglected German Proto-analytic Philosophers
• Part Six Different Conceptions of Analytic Philosophy
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright