Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

The pursuit of a definitive explanation of how scientists produce knowledge and what kinds of knowledge they produce became more urgent in the early twentieth century as science became increasingly important to society in the form of society-transforming technologies. As the century proceeded, philosophy of science emerged as a subdiscipline within philosophy, coordinate with the elusiveness of the goal of explaining science. By mid-century, philosophers, many trained in the physical sciences, had displaced scientists as the dominant figures in this effort. Henri Poincaré proposed a Mach-like relationalist theory of science, Bertrand Russell defended a logical atomism theory indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Percy Bridgman defended a theory he called operationalism. Concurrently, William James and John Dewey developed the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce into an action- and belief-based explanation of science. But the dominant philosophy of science from the 1920s through the 1950s was logical positivism/empiricism.

scholarly journals Person of the Issue: William James (1842-1910)

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Patel
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
School Of Medicine ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Thinker

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.

scholarly journals DEMOCRACY AND EXPERTISE IN THE LIPPMANN–TERMAN CONTROVERSY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Lippmann ◽  
And Control

Historians often interpret American political thought in the early twentieth century through an opposition between the technocratic power of expertise and the deliberative promise of democracy, respectively represented by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. This article explores Lippmann's concurrent controversy with Lewis Terman about intelligence testing, in which Dewey also intervened. It argues that the Lippmann–Terman controversy dramatized and developed a range of ideas about the politics of expertise in a democracy, which centered on explaining how democratic citizens might engage with and control the authority of experts. It concludes by examining the controversy's influence on democratic theory.

Reading Dewey: Reflections on the Study of Routine

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 773-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual Difficulties

Early twentieth-century American pragmatists such as John Dewey placed a strong emphasis on the human faculties of habit and emotion. That contrasts with the emphasis in recent decades on cognitive processes. In contemporary organizational research there has been an increasing interest in recurring action patterns, such as routines and practices. The conceptual difficulties this work has encountered are usefully illuminated by Dewey's view of the primacy of habit and its interplay with emotion and cognition.

scholarly journals VIRTUAL REPATRIATION: THE PITTSBURGH–KONSTANZ ARCHIVAL PARTNERSHIP

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-43
Author(s):  
W. Gerald Heverly
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Hans Reichenbach ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
Carl Hempel ◽  
Late Nineteenth

During the 1920s and 1930s, a group of German and Austrian thinkers pioneered an approach to philosophy that shaped much of the discipline's subsequent development. These thinkers were “inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics” and “aimed to create a similarly revolutionary scientific philosophy purged of the endless controversies”1 that had traditionally occupied philosophers. The result was a style of doing philosophy known as logical positivism. Berlin and Vienna were its main centers. The proponents of logical positivism included, among others, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Carl Carl Hempel, and Hans Reichenbach. The logical . . .

Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 31-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Correspondence Theory ◽  
Coherence Theory ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Proper Analysis

Every student of English-speaking analytical metaphysics is taught that the early twentieth century philosophical debate about truth confronted the correspondence theory, supported by Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein and, later, J.L. Austin, with the coherence theory advocated by the British Idealists. Sometimes the pragmatist conception of truth deriving from Dewey, William James, and C.S. Peirce is regarded as a third player. And as befits a debate at the dawn of analytical philosophy, the matter in dispute is normally taken to have been the proper analysis of the concept.No doubt this conception nicely explains some of the characteristic turns taken in the debate. Analysis, as traditionally conceived, has to consist in the provision of illuminating conceptual equivalences; and illumination will depend, according to the standard rules of play, on the analysans’ utilizing only concepts which, in the best case, are in some way prior to and independent of the notion being analyzed — or, if that's too much to ask, then concepts which at least permit of some form of explication which does not in turn take one straight back to that notion.

A Sane Gospel: Radical Evangelicals, Psychology, and Pentecostal Revival in the Early Twentieth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-226
Author(s):  
Heather D. Curtis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Christian And Missionary Alliance ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
New Science ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Pentecostal Movement ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Observation

AbstractThis article examines how radical evangelicals employed psychological concepts such as sanity, temperament, and especially the subconscious as they struggled to understand and respond to the rapidly expanding pentecostal movement within their midst. By tracing the growing tensions over ecstatic spiritual experiences that emerged among Holiness and Higher Life believers during the 1880s and 1890s, this article demonstrates that differing assumptions about the importance of consciousness for the religious life presaged reactions to the pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century. Although their proclivity for rational judgment predisposed Higher Life evangelicals to question the sanity of involuntary phenomena such as speaking in tongues, some prominent leaders within this community appealed to “mental science” in an effort to revise conventional understandings of the spiritual self and its capacities. For participants in the Christian and Missionary Alliance— an organization in which disputes over the propriety of pentecostalism were particularly contentious—notions of temperament and the subconscious articulated in the works of “new psychologists” like William James offered resources for reassessing Higher Life views of authentic spirituality in light of pentecostal revivalism. By analyzing how a particular faction within the radical evangelical movement made use of psychological theories to contend with the challenge of the revivals at Azusa and elsewhere, this article exposes some of the social divisions that exacerbated debates over the validity of pentecostal religious experiences. Exploring the complicated interactions and creative tensions that arose as Higher Life evangelicals appropriated constructs such as the subconscious in the wake of Azusa Street also shows that this influential contingent of conservative Protestants engaged with aspects of the field of psychology in dynamic and inventive ways that involved both selective borrowing and critical resistance. While there is truth in the common observation that radical evangelicals were deeply suspicious of the “new science of Psychology,” this article uncovers a more complex history that expands our understanding of the interplay among scientific discourse, the varieties of evangelical spiritual experience, and the emergence of pentecostalism in the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals Origins of marketing thought in Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (7/8) ◽  
pp. 1016-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Jones ◽  
Mark Tadajewski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Business Economics ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Study And Teaching ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document contributions to the early study and teaching of marketing at one of the first universities in Britain to do so and, in that way, to contribute to the literature about the history of marketing thought. Given that the first university business program in Britain was started in 1902, at about the same time as the earliest business programs in America, the more specific purpose of this paper was to explore whether or not the same influences were shared by pioneer marketing educators on both sides of the Atlantic. Design/methodology/approach – An historical method is used including a biographical approach. Primary source materials included unpublished correspondence (letterbooks), lecture notes, seminar minute-books, course syllabi and exams, minutes of senate and faculty meetings, university calendars and other unpublished documents in the William James Ashley Papers at the University of Birmingham. Findings – The contributions of William James Ashley and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham to the early twentieth-century study and teaching of marketing are documented. Drawing from influences similar to those on pioneer American marketing scholars, Ashley used an historical, inductive, descriptive approach to study and teach marketing as part of what he called “business economics”. Beginning in 1902, Ashley taught his students about a relatively wide range of marketing strategy decisions focusing mostly on channels of distribution and the functions performed by channel intermediaries. His teaching and the research of his students share much with the early twentieth-century commodity, institutional and functional approaches that dominated American marketing thought. Research limitations/implications – William James Ashley was only one scholar and the Commerce Program at the University of Birmingham was only one, although widely acknowledged as the first, of a few early twentieth-century British university programs in business. This justifies future research into the possible contributions to marketing knowledge made by other programs such as those at the University of Manchester (1903), University of Liverpool (1910) and University of London (1919). Originality/value – This paper adds an important chapter to the history of marketing thought which has been dominated by American pioneer scholars, courses, literature and ideas.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Modern Logic ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
Extended Reflection

Whitehead made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be the revolutionary consequences for philosophy of the new discoveries in mathematics, logic and physics, developing these consequences first in logic and then in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. His work constantly returns to the question: what is the place of the constructions of mathematics, science and philosophy in the nature of things? Whitehead collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which argues that all pure mathematics is derivable from a small number of logical principles. He went on in his philosophy of science to describe nature in terms of overlapping series of events and to argue that scientific explanations are constructed on that basis. He finally expanded and redefined his work by developing a new kind of speculative metaphysics. Stated chiefly in Process and Reality (1929), his metaphysics is both an extended reflection on the character of philosophical inquiry and an account of the nature of all things as a self-constructing ‘process’. On this view, reality is incomplete, a matter of the becoming of ‘occasions’ which are centres of activity in a multiplicity of serial processes whereby the antecedent occasions are taken up in the activities of successor occasions.

James and Pragmatism: The Road Not Taken

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Kitcher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Cognitive Significance ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pragmatic Maxim ◽  
Original Point

William James envisaged pragmatism as a reform of philosophy. Like his fellow pragmatist John Dewey, he held that the history of philosophy often shows how questions, once relevant and exciting, inspire a sequence of derivative and ever-narrower inquiries, in which the original point becomes lost. To read James’s pragmatism in this way distinguishes it from the reforming efforts of the logical positivists, whose concerns with “cognitive significance” and “meaningful language” neither he nor Dewey shared. Viewed in this light, James’s version of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, his theory of truth, and his interest in reconciling the claims of science and religion take on new significance. His discussions point toward a road less traveled, one that twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy did not take.

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