Ayer on Logical Positivism: Section 1

in the world of the arts the remarkable fact has very often been noted that what we still think of as modern painting and modern music and modern poetry and the modern novel all developed roughly speaking simultaneously they all got going in the early years of this century and first became fashionable in about the 1920s and in all the arts modernism has had some strikingly similar consequences for instance in each of the arts there was a turning away from the unselfconscious depiction of the world sort of experience and a turning in on itself art actually became its own subject matter that's to say it became familiar for say the subject of the poem to be the process of writing a poem or the difficulties of being a poet deter with plays and novels and later even films music and painting - in their different ways exhibited the same concern with their own innards and very often turned them into their own subject matter and put them on display in all the arts - and perhaps this is related to the last point there was a dis integration of traditional forms a tendency to build new structures and to build them out of small carefully shaped fragments and emphasizing this because all this is true and with remarkable exactitude of philosophy as well a fact which illustrates how deeply embedded the development of philosophy is in the cultural matrix of its time modern philosophy can be said to have started in 1903 with the breakaway of GE Moore and Bertrand Russell from the idealism which had dominated the 19th century and then after the pioneering work of Russell followed by that Vidkun Stein who was a pupil of Russell there developed in the 1920s in Austria the first fully fledged school devoted to the new philosophy school which was known as the Vienna circle - the philosophy they developed they gave the name logical positivism and for a long time afterwards that label was attached to modern philosophy generally in the minds of very many laymen the person who introduced logical positivism into England was AJ heir and his is the name that has been chiefly associated with it ever since in this country he did so in a still very famous and widely read book called language truth and logic which he published in January 1936 when he was only 25 it's very much a young man's book explosively written and it's still the best short guide to the central doctrines of logical positivism the aggressiveness of that book was typical of the movement as a whole they self-consciously organized themselves like a political party with regular meetings and publications and international congresses and they propagated their doctrines with missionary zeal if we look at the question of what they were fighting against so passionately and why I think that will provide us with the clearest starting point for our consideration and logical positivism and then we'll be in a better position to go on and examine their own doctrines professor Ian what was it that the logical positivists were campaigning so passionately against well primarily they were against metaphysics of they covet physics and that was any suggestion that there might be a world going beyond the ordinary world of science and common sense the world revealed to us by our senses or already a can't at the end of the 18th century had said it was impossible to have any knowledge of anything bottled in the realm of possible Sense experience but these Viennese people went further they said at any statement that wasn't either a formal statement like a statement of logic or mathematics or one that was empirically testable was simply nonsensical and so they cut away therefore all metaphysics in that sense and this had some flooded implications it was for example obviously a condemnation of any theology in any a notion of there being a transcendent God and this although they were themselves not politically conscience conscious with one exception was one of them awarded only one man Colin Arad had political implications because there wasn't there at that time a rather bitter struggle between the Socialists and a right-wing caracal party headed by by Dolphus and the opposition of the Conservatives it was in part a political act even though they weren't themselves primarily concerned with politics now you mentioned one of them by name also Niraj yeah since we're going to be talking about this circle people I think it'll be helpful if we get clear who the main individuals were who were they well the chief person the leader of the circle the official leader Lisette was a man called Moritz Schlick who was originally a German and he came to Vienna at the age of about 40 in the early 1920s in easily in his early forties and he had like most of them or many of them had been trained originally as a physicist and was interested mainly in the philosophy of physics and in fact one of the leading traits of the circle is the extreme reverence for net flexural sciences and Schick was their chairman and he took up his chair leon middle 20s and started organizing the circulating commerce the moment he arrived there then the next most important person was another German called Rudolf Carnap and he had been a pupil of the great lemon German Edition Frager he'd been people of fragran Indiana and he you came to be on a few years after slick in the late 1920s and in fact left Vienna in the early thirties for Prague but most it was still a very powerful input in the movement he was the chief contributor to that journal because a journal called a kentley's the third person was a man I've already mentioned called Murat I think he was an Austrian Ameth but he was the most active of them politically and in fact did have some post in the revolutionary Spartacus government in Munich after the first world war and he was very nearly a Marxist he wants to combine combine postures and Marxism and it was he who was mainly conscious of it as a political movement you want to organize it politically I thought this from what you said that this was a radically revolutionary movement I mean they were destructive of established ideas and religion destructive and established ideas in politics and above all destructive advice established ideas in the German philosophical tradition and I suppose that the two main scalpels that they used to tear away what they regarded as all that diseased or dead intellectual tissue were logic and some sense the name logical positivism indeed it wasn't quite so novel as all that it was continuing an old of previous Viennese tradition was a scientist and philosopher of science called Ernst Mach he's the man against whom Lenin wrote his materialism in imperial criticism who flourished in Vienna at the end of the 19th century he was a professor in Prague from about 1860 Zama then came to Vienna and he was he who took the view of science that for example slick also took that it must deal in the last resort simply with human sensation since are all our knowledge of scientific facts comes through our senses in mark reason that indeed last resort science was said to be a description of sensation and this the Viennese people took over and of course they were following an old in pure assistant tradition although they didn't themselves don't know or care much about the history philosophy what they said was very like what was said by the English flosser a Scottish philosopher David Hume in the 18th century so that extent they weren't all that novel they weren't all that revolutionary what was revolution was in sense their their fervor and seeing this as putting philosophy on a new road they thought here at last we've now discovered what philosophy is going to be it's going to be the handmaiden of science it wasn't such as they used science in their philosophy as that they thought that the whole field of knowledge was taken up by science I mean science describes the world the only world there is this world the world of things around us and so on and this is what science describes and there isn't any other domain philosophy to occupy itself with then what can it do all it can do is analyze and criticize the theory is the concept of science is how science came in logic came in as supplying them with a tool largely could remain pretty much stagnant since there's Aristotle and then at the beginning of the 19th century it took a move forward there were some precursors there was bull and de Morgan but the real jump came the end of the 19th century with Frager in Germany and as you yourself said earlier Russell and Whitehead in in England and this generalized logic more widely than Midland and it didn't actually refute Aristotle he showed Aristotle versus little corner of logic where they had lived a much more wide reaching for ranging logic which regarded them with a very powerful tool of analysis it enabled them to express things much more precisely and since they were very interested in structures and say pop that science was largely concerned with structure with relations between things the development by originally by Schroeder and purse in the 19th century by Russell and Whitehead an illogical relations gave them a tool it gave them a tool a philosophical analysis

Channel: flame0430

Views: 114,905

Rating: 4.8473897 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan, Magee, A.J., Ayer, Philosophy, Logic, Logical, Positivism, Language, Vienna, Circle, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick

Id: DMlXmLbGKJY

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 17 2008