Austrian philosophy : the legacy of Franz Brentano

373 Pages·1994·2.002 MB·English

by  Barry Smith

Preface

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in
its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. But I hope that the
volume will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right B as an
attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf
Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much to demonstrate
the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our
own day.
My work on the volume has been made possible by grants from the Austrian
Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, the Alexander von Humboldt-
Stiftung and the British Academy. It has been influenced at various points by
Mitchell Ash, Wilhelm Baumgartner, Johannes Brandl, Axel Bühler, Hans
Burkhardt, Roberto Casati, Wolfgang Degen, Reinhard Fabian, Kit Fine, Barry
Gower, Wolfgang Grassl, Marjorie Grene, Audoenius LeBlanc, Czes»aw Lejewski,
Johannes Marek, Edgar Morscher, Dieter Münch, Robin Rollinger, Heiner Rutte,
Werner Sauer, John Searle, Jeremy Shearmur, Paolo Spinicci, Graham White, Dallas
Willard, Jan Wole½ski and Wojciech òe»aniec. To all of these I should like to
express my thanks. Special thanks go to J. C. Nyíri and Karl Schuhmann, whose
inspiration and example will, I hope, be evident throughout.
I am grateful also to the publishers of the following papers, portions of which
have been included in this volume: ``The Substitution Theory of Art'', Grazer
Philosophische Studien, 25/26 (1986); ``The Theory of Value of Christian von
Ehrenfels'', in R. Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels, Amsterdam: Rodopi (1986);
``Austrian Origins of Logical Positivism'', in B. Gower (ed.), Logical Positivism in
Perspective, London: Croom Helm (1987); ``The Substance of Brentano's Onto-
logy'', Topoi, 6 (1987); ``Gestalt Theory: An Essay in Philosophy'' in B. Smith (ed.),
Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Munich: Philosophia (1988); ``The Soul and Its
Parts'', Brentano-Studien, 1 (1989); ``Kasimir Twardowski'', in K. Szaniawski (ed.),
The Vienna Circle and the Philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Dor-
drecht/Boston/Lancaster: Kluwer (1989); ``Brentano and Marty'', in K. Mulligan
(ed.), Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Kluwer (1990);
``On the Phases of Reism'', in J. Wole½ski (ed.), Kotarbi½ski: Logic, Semantics and
Ontology, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer (1990); ``On the Austrianness of
Austrian Economics'', Critical Review, 4 (1990); ``Aristotle, Menger, Mises'', in B.
Caldwell (ed.), Carl Menger and His Economic Legacy, Durham and London: Duke
University Press (1990).
2 INTRODUCTION

Introduction

For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to
terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world
ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to
as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first
consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and
Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the
second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano,
Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper.
As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to
the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon
world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial
contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers
were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical
culture, and in fact a number of them, as we shall see, found their philosophical
home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the
Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to
the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As
Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly
fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as ‘Anglo-American’ is in
this light a ‘grave historical distortion’. If, he says, we take into account the
historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy
‘could at least as well be called “Anglo-Austrian”’ (1988, p. 7).
Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl
and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian
philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by
the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on
Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests
upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken
out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is
devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian
philosophers in general were exercised B in spite of the fact that many of these
same problems have once more become important as a result of the

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INTRODUCTION 3

contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in
the field of cognitive science.
It is possible to define the concept of ‘Austrian philosophy’ in purely
geographical terms, drawing up a list of those philosophers of importance who
were born or settled within the borders of the Habsburg Empire from out of
which modern Austria evolved. Such a list B which would embrace the
philosophers of Prague, Cracow and Lvov/Lemberg as much as those of
Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck B would include at the very least Bolzano, Mach,
Brentano, Twardowski, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Husserl, Mally, Wittgenstein,
Neurath, Carnap, Schlick, Waismann, Gustav Bergmann, Gödel and Popper.
On the other hand, however, and more ambitiously, one might seek to lay down
the marks or features of a certain way of doing philosophy that could be held to
be characteristic of the thinkers on this list, and much of the relevant
historiographical literature has pursued a line of this sort. Austrian philosophy,
it is held, is marked by:
(i) The attempt to do philosophy in a way that is inspired by or is closely
connected to empirical science (including psychology): this attempt is
associated also with a concern for the unity of science. In the work of some of
the Vienna positivists it is manifested in the extreme form of a physicalistic or
phenomenalistic reductionism. In the work of Brentano and his followers it
relates rather to a unity of method as between philosophy and other disciplines.
(ii) A sympathy towards and in many cases a rootedness in British
empiricist philosophy, a concern to develop a philosophy ‘from below’, on the
basis of the detailed examination of particular examples.
(iii) A concern with the language of philosophy. This sometimes amounts
to a conception of the critique of language as a tool or method; sometimes it
leads to attempts at the construction of a logical ideal language. In many cases it
manifests itself in the deliberate employment of a clear and concise language
for the purposes of philosophical expression and in a sensitivity to the special
properties of those uses and abuses of language which are characteristic of
certain sorts of philosophy.
(iv) A rejection of the Kantian revolution and of the various sorts of
relativism and historicism which came in its wake. Instead we find different
forms of realism and of ‘objectivism’ (in logic, value theory, and elsewhere B

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4 INTRODUCTION

illustrated in Bolzano’s concept of the proposition in itself and in Popper’s
doctrine of the ‘third world’).
(v) A special relation to the a priori, conceived not however in Kantian
terms but in terms of a willingness to accept disciplines such as phenomenology
and Gestalt theory which are, as Wittgenstein expressed it, ‘midway between
logic and physics’. (The question as to how such apriorism can be consistent
with a respect for empirical science will be one of the issues to be addressed
below.)
(vi) A concern with ontological structure, and more especially with the
issue as to how the parts of things fit together to form structured wholes. In
some cases this involves the recognition of differences of ontological level
among the entities revealed to us by the various sciences and a consequent
readiness to accept a certain stratification of reality.
(vii) An overriding interest in the relation of macro-phenomena (for
example in social science or ethics) to the mental experiences or other micro-
phenomena which underlie or are associated with them. This need not imply
any reduction of complex wholes to their constituent parts or moments.
Certainly a reductionism of this sort is present in Mach and in some of the
Vienna positivists, but it is explicitly rejected by almost all the other thinkers
mentioned.
There is much that is of value in this brief conspectus. Unfortunately,
however, it is far from being the case that all the given features are shared in
common by all the thinkers mentioned. Some philosophers on the list are
marked precisely by the ways in which they reacted against one or other of the
features mentioned, and some (for example Wittgenstein and Husserl) changed
their relationship to these features over time. Moreover, many of the purported
marks of ‘Austrian philosophy’ are exemplified also by thinkers who have
nothing whatsoever to do with Austria in any recognizable (geographical)
sense.
In what sense, then, can it be philosophically useful and historically
legitimate to talk of ‘Austrian philosophy’ (defined, broadly, in terms of the
features listed) as a single and coherent movement of thought? To answer this
question it is necessary to refer once more to the German philosophy which
served for Austrian philosophy as a never completely forgotten sparring-partner
throughout the period of its development. What then springs to mind is the

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INTRODUCTION 5

degree to which the features mentioned have in German philosophy played
almost no role at all B a fact which is all the more remarkable given the extent to
which successive generations of German philosophers have differed so widely
amongst themselves. Simplifying tremendously, we might say that German
philosophy is determined primarily by its orientation around epistemology:
attention is directed not to the world, but to our knowledge of the world.
Moreover, even the latter is conceived largely in abstraction from knowledge
actually gained and from the practices of scientists, in a way which can be seen
to have thwarted the development of a native German tradition in the
philosophy of science. This is sometimes connected further with what we might
call the romantic element in German philosophy, a mode of thought which, in
stressing the ultimate unintelligibility of the world, is often inimical to scientific
theory.
The relation of philosophy to matters of scientifically established fact is in
post-Kantian German philosophy therefore not normally a subject for
investigation: the philosopher’s world is in effect split apart from the empirical
world of what happens and is the case. Certainly there are exceptions: for
example Bauch, Natorp or Cassirer, but the exceptions, again, are
overwhelmingly thinkers outside the mainstream of German philosophy, and in
this light it is especially significant that the contributions of philosophically
minded mathematicians such as Frege and Hilbert were not by German
philosophers but by philosophers in England or Poland.
The main currents of German philosophy have moreover shown little
sensitivity to the role of language in philosophy. They have tended to strive for
philosophical depth, often at the expense of clarity, which they have associated
with shallowness of thinking. Even Kant can be charged with some of the
responsibility for certain stylistic excesses of his successors in this respect, and
Neo-Kantians such as Rickert or Cohen, who attempted to develop a scientific-
ally oriented philosophy in the spirit of Kant, never achieved in their writings
the sort of clarity of language and precision of argument which we associate
with Bolzano or Brentano.
German philosophy in the nineteenth century was to no small part a
philosophy of idealism, more specifically a philosophy of idealism in its im-
manentistic variants B a doctrine according to which meaning, truth, value, and
sometimes even the world as a whole, are seen as being immanent to (as real

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6 INTRODUCTION

constituent parts or ‘contents’ of) the mind or ego. Around the turn of our
present century this immanentistic mode of philosophizing was subjected to
attack from two quarters: in the Anglo-Saxon world, above all in the Cambridge
of Russell and Moore; and in Austria by philosophers in Brentano school. It is
in this connection that we shall justify our claim that it is Brentano and his
followers who constitute the central axis of Austrian philosophy. This claim
rests not merely on the personal dominance of Brentano and his pupils in
universities throughout the Habsburg Empire and on the fact that it is Brentano
and his pupils who came closest to instantiating those marks which have been
picked out in the literature as characteristic of Austrian philosophy as a whole.
It rests also, and most importantly, on the role Brentanian philosophers played
in breaking through the restrictions of immanentism in philosophy (restrictions
which affected also Brentano’s own thinking).
The Brentanian philosophers showed how to deal in rigorous, scientific
fashion with mental reference to transcendent objects in a way which proved
extraordinarily fruitful for the early development of exact or analytic
philosophy on the continent of Europe, as it proved fruitful also in giving rise to
movements of thought such as phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. For in
working out their ‘theories of objects’, the Brentanian philosophers B in contrast
to Frege and his successors B did not abandon psychological concerns. Rather,
their work in ontology proceeded always in tandem with work on the cognitive
processes in which the corresponding objects are experienced, and it is in thus
spanning the gulf between ontology and psychology in non-reductionistic
fashion that the members of the Brentano school can be seen to have anticipated
certain crucial aspects of contemporary cognitive science.

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Chapter One
Austrian Philosophy and the Brentano School
1. The Rise of Scientific Philosophy
It was in 1922 that Moritz Schlick – a German physicist-cum-philosopher of
aristocratic manners and conservative opinions – arrived in Vienna. Schlick had
been invited to take up the chair of philosophy ‘with special reference to the
history and theory of the inductive sciences’ that had been created for another
physicist-cum-philosopher, Ernst Mach, in 1895. Mach himself had previously
served for almost thirty years as professor of experimental physics in Prague, at
that time a centre of intellectual activity almost no less important than Vienna
herself. The lines of communication between the two cities were still strong, and
the same figures were often, at different times, prominent in each.
The two cities shared also the characteristically Austrian predilection for
forming clubs, societies, and discussion groups. The cultural and intellectual life
of the Habsburg Empire was indeed to a striking extent a matter of ‘schools’ and
‘movements’, and one might pause to reflect on the degree to which such
schools and movements have determined the artistic, intellectual, and political
world we inhabit today. Thus consider, in no particular order, the Vienna
psychoanalytic movement, the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl, the
‘new Viennese school’ of composition around Arnold Schönberg, the school of
linguists and psychologists around Karl Bühler, the school of Austrian
economics founded by Carl Menger in 1871 and evolving, by degrees, into the
Ludwig von Mises circle in the 1920s. Or consider the ‘Prager Kreis’ of
novelists and critics around Max Brod and Franz Kafka, the Prague linguistic
circle of Roman Jakobson, Jan MukaÍovský and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, or, in more
recent times, the philosophical discussion group which met regularly in the
apartment of Václav Havel and which later formed the nucleus of the Czech
Civic Forum.
Schlick, too, had his regular Thursday evening discussion circle. This
comprised above all a group of mathematicians around Hans Hahn, himself a
former student of Mach and Boltzmann, and included Kurt Gödel, Gustav
Bergmann, Karl Menger (son of the economist Carl), and Schlick’s own
assistant Friedrich Waismann. The Schlick circle could count among its
members also Philipp Frank, Herbert Feigl, Viktor Kraft, Rudolf Carnap, and a
certain sociologist-cum-philosopher, proletarian in manner and socialist in
opinions, by the name of Otto Neurath.
Carnap is, apart from Schlick himself, the single native German on this list,
and it is remarkable to consider the extent to which not merely logical positivism
but also the exact or scientific philosophy of which it formed a part were and are
characteristically Austrian phenomena. One thinks in this connection not only
of Mach, but also of another Prague figure of an earlier generation, Bernard
Bolzano. Bolzano was on the one hand a priest and social reformer; but he was
also a notable mathematical logician and philosopher of science, though his
contributions in these fields were largely ignored until after his death. One
thinks of Ludwig Boltzmann, hero of Wittgenstein and contemporary of Mach
in Vienna; one thinks of Wittgenstein himself, of Ludwik Fleck, Karl Popper,
Michael Polanyi, Paul Feyerabend, Wolfgang Stegmüller and Imre Lakatos – all
of them Austrians (or Austro-Hungarians) who have, for better or worse, done
much to determine the shape of the philosophy of science as we know it today.1
Consider, as an example, the case of Ludwik Fleck. Fleck was born in 1896
in Lvov (Lemberg, Lwów or Lwiw), capital of Galicia on the Eastern fringes of
the Habsburg Empire. He was the author of some 200 scientific papers in the
areas of medicine and microbiology.2 But he was also the author of a longer,
philosophical work, published in 1935, entitled Genesis and Development of a
Scientific Fact. Introduction to the Doctrine of Cognitive Style and of the
Thought-Collective, a work that is of interest first of all because, as a
contribution to the nascent discipline of ‘sociology of science’, it anticipates and
perhaps even served to inspire some of the now so influential ideas of Thomas
Kuhn. (Kuhn in fact contributed a preface to the English translation of the
work.) But it is of interest also because Fleck was one of a number of Lemberg-
based philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists and mathematicians
who were associated, in different ways, with those developments in scientific
philosophy in Central Europe which will here concern us – and it will turn out
that Lemberg, like Vienna and Prague, will have a quite special role to play in
the story that follows.
The native German philosophers who have made serious contributions to
exact philosophy or to the philosophy of science in the modern sense are, in
contrast, remarkably few, and of these – one thinks particularly of Hans
1. Another native Austrian who deserves mention in this connection is the economist Friedrich von
Hayek, a distant cousin of Wittgenstein, who was the author of a Mach-inspired treatise on the
foundations of psychology (1952: the initial draft dates from around 1920), as also of a work in the
history and philosophy of the social sciences (1952a). One might mention also the Hungarian
philosopher and social theorist Karl Mannheim, one of the principal initiators of the so-called
‘sociology of knowledge’.
2. For a complete bibliography of Fleck’s writings see Schnelle 1982.
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Reichenbach, Carl Hempel and Kurt Grelling – it can often be asserted that the
true flowering of their thought and influence occurred precisely through formal
or informal collaboration with their teachers or contemporaries in Austria.3 Of
quite specific interest for our own purposes is the fact that almost all such
philosophers were based in Berlin, where the ‘Society for Empirical Philosophy’
was established in 1928 as a counterpart to the Schlick circle in Vienna. Why,
then, was the new scientific, logically empiricist philosophy, insofar as it found
a home in Germany at all, concentrated so heavily in the single city of Berlin?
And why, of all the cities in Europe, should this philosophy have taken root so
firmly in Vienna, Prague and Lemberg?
2. Philosophy and Politics
When A. J. Ayer arrived in Vienna in late November of 1932, spending a
protracted honeymoon of just over three months in Austria before returning to
Oxford to write Language, Truth and Logic, the Schlick circle was at the very
height of its activity. It had already organized its first two international
conferences, and at the first of these, held in Prague in 1929, it had distributed
copies of its manifesto, the “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung” or “Scientific
Conception of theWorld”. This was written, effectively, by Neurath, in
collaboration with Carnap and Hahn (and to a lesser extent other members of the
circle), who served to temper some of Neurath’s wilder flights of fancy. The
patrician Schlick, to whom the manifesto was dedicated, was less than satisfied
with the result. This was first of all because he was not taken by the conception
of the circle as a ‘movement’ of any sort, favouring a more modest and more
narrowly scientific approach:
Schlick hated everything that smacked of agitation, was against it all: ‘It is not necessary for
us to agitate: that we can leave to the political parties: in science we say what we have found,
we hope to say the truth; and if it is the truth, then it will win out.’ (Haller and Rutte 1977,
p. 31)
But it was also because he was distressed by the political tone of the piece, and
more specifically by those portions which suggested some sort of alignment of
3. There are of course exceptions to the thesis expressed in the text, above all Frege (though even
here we can point to Wittgenstein’s role in disseminating Fregean ideas). Other exceptions include
Helmholtz, Ostwald, Hilbert, Nelson (the latter exerting an important influence on Grelling and on
Dubislav), and also Oswald Külpe (who exerted an influence on Bühler, Popper and the Berlin
Gestaltists and who was himself influenced by Mach). All of these were, however, on the fringes
of German philosophy, even if — as in the case of Weyl or Hilbert — they distinguished themselves
in other fields. The thinking in the area of the philosophy of science of German philosophers truly
belonging to the mainstream German tradition — for example that of Natorp and the lesser Neo-
Kantians — has, in contrast, been almost entirely forgotten, or it has been resurrected precisely in
investigations of the thiking of philosophers, such as Carnap, who were allied to the Austrian
tradition (see for example Runggaldier 1984, Friedman 1987, Sauer 1989, Coffa 1991).
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logical positivism with socialism and with the movement for workers’ education
in Vienna at the time.
The circle had already by 1932 taken over – with the group around
Reichenbach in Berlin – the journal Annalen der Philosophie, renaming it
Erkenntnis. And it had published some six volumes of its series of Schriften zur
wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung, including works by Richard von Mises
(brother of the economist Ludwig), and by Carnap, Schlick, Neurath and Philipp
Frank, together with a peculiar work, entitled On the Biology of Ethics:
Psychopathological Investigations of Guilt-Feelings and the Formation of
Moral Ideals: A Contribution on the Essence of the Neurotic Human Being, by
a certain Otto Kant.4
While Ayer does not address the question as to why it should have been
Vienna, rather than Königsberg or Tübingen or Marburg, that was enjoying such
a peculiar flowering of scientific philosophy at the time, his autobiography does
contain one remark on what he saw as the political role of the group around
Schlick:
The members of the Vienna Circle, with the notable exception of Otto Neurath, were not
greatly interested in politics, but theirs was also a political movement. The war of ideas
which they were waging against the Catholic church had its part in the perennial Viennese
conflict between the socialists and the clerical reaction. (Ayer 1977, p. 129)
A thesis along these lines has been argued quite seriously by the Viennese
sociologist-historian Friedrich Stadler, who provides us with a great mass of
documentation to support his case. Stadler suggests that we see the University
of Vienna in the interwar period as split into ‘two camps’:
on the one side, in the realm of scientific philosophy, there dominated democratic
(enlightenment, liberal, socialist) tendencies; on the other side there was a spectrum of
almost all forms of anti-democratic feeling, from neo-romantic conservatism to fascist-
totalitarian outgrowths. Thus it is tempting to see the philosophical life as part of the fierce
party-political Kulturkampf of the time, between the bourgeois camp and the workers’
movement. (Stadler 1979, p. 42)
In regard to Austrian society in general, a ‘two camp’ thesis of this sort has
a certain plausibility. Yet the idea that the flowering of scientific philosophy in
Austria can be accounted for by regarding the Schlick circle as a manifestation
of Austrian socialism, or of anti-clericalism, seems to be at best the product of
a certain sort of over-tidy wishful thinking. Socialist anti-clericalism did not,
after all, lead to similar phenomena in France, or Spain, or Italy; but more
importantly the thesis in question is not able to cope with the fact that so few
important Austrian philosophers of science, and so few of the members of the
4. A complete list of the publications of the circle is given in Soulez (ed.), pp. 346f., which also
contains other useful supplementary material on the wider Austrian background of the Vienna circle.
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