DESCRIPTION:
Today's Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy grows out of the tradition of Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism as it evolved in the circles around Wittgenstein in England after the Second World War, and it positions itself over and against Continental Philosophy. That positioning, however, obscures how Wittgenstein and the group that Viktor Kraft, the first historian of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism, took over a much broader cultural project that is echoed in the work of twentieth-century theorists and philosophers from Walter Benjamin through Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Just as significant, the Vienna Circle's work parallels today's philosophy of science as practiced by figures like Bruno Latour.
This class will combine perspectives from philosophy and the history of philosophy to undertake a project in "historical epistemology": it will trace how Logical Empiricism actually came into being out of a set of methodological arguments about the philosophy of science and hermeneutics that were widespread in the late nineteenth century (and which find their echoes in figures as diverse as Nietzsche and Heidegger). The new genesis narrative we will trace reverberates with problems of forced migration and emigration, as a generation of theorists and philosophers were forced out of continental Europe and to the US and Great Britain by the Nazis. And in order to find their feet, these émigrés took up new projects and redefined their work for new audiences, offering a set of cases of culture transfer -- cases where philosophical logics responded directly, if tacitly, to politics and culture.
No background in philosophy is required for this course, and all readings will be available in English on the class blackboard site. Background reading on the history of science will ground our readings of primary texts, and each student will be responsible for evolving a semester project in writing a specific philosopher or project into a new kind of intercultural history of ideas.
CLASS READINGS WILL INCLUDE (all in excerpts):
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books
Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
Essays by Windelband and Rickert on the "science debate" of the nineteenth century.
Wilhelm Dilthey, On the Crisis of the European Sciences
Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Benjamin,
Viktor Kraft, The Vienna Circle
Janik/Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna
Friedrich Stadler, The Vienna Circle
Wittgenstein, Waisman, The Voices of Wittgenstein
Lakatos/Feyerabend, For and Against Method
Essays by Carnap, Neurath, Latour
ASSIGNMENTS:
Daily readings
Three one-page précis (analysis of individual texts) = 3 x 5% of grade =15% of grade
Midterm writing assignment = 10 % of grade
One comprehensive final essay test = 25% of grade
One semester project, done in stages (history/biography section [5% of grade], bibliography/research plan [5% of grade], close reading of a text [15% of grade], plus 10-page paper presenting one issue from the texts read in class together with individual work [25% of grade]).