VOCATION IN THE WESTERN WORLD.”
“The Rectorate,” 1933/34, Review of Metaphysics (1985), p.483
HEIDEGGER 329
Heidegger’s major work, Being and Time, declares that the Western philosophical tradition since the Greeks has forgotten the “question of being,” and has been interested only in the present, thereby ignoring the temporal dimensions of past and future.
EXISTENTIALISM
The goal of Being and Time was to reopen the question of what being is, by exploring how we confront the fact of our own existence and the manner in which the world appears to us. Heidegger returned
to Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” (see pp.276–9) to produce his own version of the Cartesian cogito: “Dasein”—literally,
“being there”—is the term he used for this original mode of human consciousness.
Dasein differs from the Cartesian cogito in that it is “always already” in the world, rather than separated from it. Where Descartes treats his knowing mind as the source of certainty and contrasts the world of material things with it, Heidegger emphasizes the lived reality of our being in a world not of our own choosing. Thus Dasein involves a material
embodied existence located in time and in a socio-historical setting with other people, all dimensions ignored by the Cartesian “I.” The being of Dasein is an open-ended project of “becoming:” we create ourselves through our actions and choices. Heidegger describes the affective dimensions of being: the experiences of boredom, anxiety, guilt, and dread. In dealing with the most general problems of the human condition, he is often regarded as the father of existentialism.
Heidegger was a critic of mass culture and modern technological society for distancing man from nature, leading to a loss of the original oneness with being possessed by primitive humanity. This may explain his attraction to those elements in Nazism that appeared to signal a return to the old culture and the land, contrasted with the technocratic modernism he perceived in the US and USSR.
SEE ALSO 왘 Husserl (p.319) • Sartre (p.336)
• Derrida (p.344) • Gadamer (p.330)
KEY IDEAS
During his early career, Carnap taught at Jena and Prague universities, then, during the Nazi era, in the US. His papers
“Pseudo-problems in philosophy” (1928) and “Elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language” (1932) elucidated his version of the verifi cationist theory of meaning, according to which a statement is only meaningful if it can be established by experience.
One of the fi rst to recognize the importance of the advances in logic made by Gottlob Frege (see p.318) and Bertrand Russell (see pp.322–3), Carnap linked these to empiricism in developing his account of how knowledge of the
Gadamer studied under Heidegger (see pp.328–9), held positions at Marburg and Leipzig, and became Professor at Heidelberg. In his major work Truth and Method (1960) he argues that we cannot escape the conditioning of our own historical situation, and thus the process of understanding a text necessarily involves two perspectives: those of the author and the interpreter. This means that interpretation is a two-way process in which these perspectives merge in a “fusion of horizons.” Furthermore, because any text remains open to the possibility of new interpretations, continually revealing new aspects of itself, this process cannot be pinned down to a set method.
Gadamer’s commitment to the idea of dialog was refl ected in his engagement in public debates with fellow-philosophers Habermas and Derrida.
Rudolf Carnap
b 1891–1970 n Germany
A key defender of “logical positivism,” a philosophical position that owes much to Wittgenstein (see pp.326–7), Carnap held that claims that cannot be verifi ed by experience are empirically empty and so lack meaning. Into this category falls all traditional metaphysics, which is the product of linguistic confusions.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
b 1900–2002 n Germany
Known for his theory of interpretation or “philosophical hermeneutics,” Gadamer opposed the idea that the interpretation of texts requires an objective understanding of the authors’ intentions.
world is constructed out of the elemental data of experience. The Logical Structure of the World (1928) elaborates this view, but Carnap later came to regard individual experience as too subjective a basis for scientifi c knowledge. He later wrote that many apparent metaphysical questions do not hinge on any substantive issue, but boil down to a practical choice over how we describe the matter. Thus the choice between phenomenalism and realism is really one between linguistic frameworks. His later works include The Logical Syntax of Language (1934), Meaning and Necessity (1947), and Logical Foundations of Probability (1950).
WHO’S WHO IN PHILOSOPHY 331
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO 왘 The consciousness puzzle (pp.124–7) • Wittgenstein (pp.326–7) •
Category mistakes (p.225)
ESSENTIAL TEXTS The Concept of Mind; Categories.
Ryle studied and taught at Oxford University. He was fi rst infl uenced by phenomenology during the 1920s and later espoused a form of the “ordinary language” philosophy that dominated Oxford in the ’40s and ’50s. His paper
“Systematically Misleading Expressions”
introduced the idea that philosophy was about clarifying the logic of expressions:
an approach developed in his 1938 paper
“Categories.” He was recruited to do intelligence work during the war, and became Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford while also editing the prestigious journal Mind from 1948 to 1971. Aside from The Concept of Mind (1949), he published Collected Papers (1971), Dilemmas (1954), and Plato’s Progress (1966).
Ryle noted philosophers’ tendency to suppose that expressions that function in a superfi cially similar way grammatically are members of the same logical category.
Such “category mistakes” cause much philosophical confusion, so careful attention to the underlying function of ordinary discourse becomes the means to overcome philosophical problems.
In the Concept of Mind Ryle set out to map the “logical geography” of our ordinary concepts of mind
and body in order to end the diffi culties that had plagued this branch of philosophy. The principal source of confusion has been, he claims, the Cartesian tendency to treat the mind as a non-physical machine within the body, from where it produces human behavior.
Ryle coined the phrase “the ghost in the machine” in caricature of this category mistake, and his analysis attempts to show that talk of the mind
is simply talk about behavior.
The bowler bowls, the batsman bats—but to ask which player is responsible for the “team spirit” is a category mistake.
Gilbert Ryle
b 1900–1976 n England
Infl uenced by Wittgenstein, Ryle believed that many of the problems of philosophy were simply confusions arising from the abuse of language, and that its purpose should be to dissolve these confusions through linguistic analysis. His work paved the way for late-20th-century theories of mind.
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO 왘 The problem of induction (pp.180–5)
• Bacon (p.274) • Carnap (p.330) • Quine (p.337)
Popper completed his PhD in Vienna in 1929. His fi rst work, The Logic of Scientifi c Discovery, outlined his views on scientifi c method, later developed in Conjectures and Refutations. In 1937, as a Jew facing the imminent annexing of Austria by Nazi Germany, Popper emigrated to New Zealand. During the war years, he wrote Open Society and Its Enemies, a defense of liberal democracy through a critique of
the political philosophy of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. After the war he taught at the London School of Economics, becoming Professor in 1949. In The Self and Its Brain, written with John Eccles, he defends a form of mind-body interactionism.
Like Carnap and the logical positivists, Popper saw science as the paradigm of rational inquiry. But he was concerned by Hume’s “problem of induction.” Hume argues that no matter how many instances of a generalization we might happen to observe, they fail to confi rm a hypothesis
—it remains as rational to reject the hypothesis as to accept it. Rejecting
Bacon’s “inductivist” view of scientifi c method, Popper argues that theories are refuted, not confi rmed, by empirical evidence, therefore scientifi c advance becomes a matter of putting forward hypotheses in order to try to falsify them.
To be genuinely scientifi c, a theory must lay itself open to being refuted, since a theory that cannot be refuted does not make a claim about the world.
Popper argued that science progresses by eliminating theories that prove to be untrue: for example, when the sight of a black swan disproves the theory that all swans are white.
Karl Raimund Popper
b 1902–1994 n Austria
Popper is best known as a philosopher of science and for his critiques of utopian political philosophies. He argues that science does not progress by generalizing from observations, but through making bold conjectures which must then be tested. A scientifi c theory gains power from its testability.
ESSENTIAL TEXTS The Logic of Scientifi c Discovery;
Open Society and Its Enemies; The Poverty of Historicism; Conjectures and Refutations; Objective Knowledge; The Self and Its Brain.
WHO’S WHO IN PHILOSOPHY 333
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO 왘Marx (pp.311–2) • Popper (facing page)
• Habermas (p.343)
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Dialectic of Enlightenment; Philosophy of Modern Music; The Authoritarian
Personality; Minima Moralia;
Negative Dialectics.
A brilliant scholar with an intense interest in music, Adorno studied musicology, sociology, and philosophy at Frankfurt University. In 1925 he moved to Vienna to study under the composer Alban Berg. He returned to Frankfurt to teach and became involved in the Frankfurt Institute of
Social Research under his friend Max Horkheimer. In 1933 the Nazis revoked his teaching license and he
emigrated to England, then to the US. After the war he returned to Frankfurt and
became head of the Institute and prominent in the Frankfurt School with
Horkheimer and Marcuse.
By the 1930s the age of mass-production and mass culture had arrived and it became clear to leftist thinkers such as Adorno that the point at which capitalism would succumb to the proletarian revolution predicted by Marx had passed. Capitalism had discovered the means to perpetuate itself and Adorno’s interdisciplinary approach—with investigations into popular culture and aesthetics, often deploying the tools of psychoanalysis
—was concerned to explore the mechanisms with which
contemporary society defused the forces of revolutionary
change. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in collaboration with
Horkheimer, examines the problems with
modernity and, in
particular, the uncritical embrace of
“reason” which, rather than being a force for liberation, has today become another mechanism of social control through technology. Meanwhile the culture industry and mass media, particularly in the US, producing artifi cial needs for readily digestible products and entertainments designed to pacify the new consumer, involve a similar process of domination. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno describes the personality of those attracted to fascism as one which submits readily to authority yet exults in exerting power over others.
In the 1960s Adorno engaged in a famous dispute over positivism, opposing Popper’s “critical rationalism.”
Theodor Adorno
b 1903–1969 n Germany
Musicologist, literary critic, sociologist, and philosopher, Adorno was a key fi gure in the Frankfurt School, which aimed to give a new direction for Marxist thought in the wake of Communism’s failure in Western Europe and its degeneration into Stalinism in the east.
Adorno admired the atonal music of Schoenberg and detested jazz, seeing it as a sop to the masses.