G. H. Lewes and Karl Pearson

2020 ◽  
pp. 178-204
Author(s):  
W. J. Mander
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Willingness To Engage

Examining the cases of two further nineteenth-century empiricists, this chapter begins by considering how G. H. Lewes moved from an early position of neo-Comtean positivism which was avowedly anti-metaphysical to the advocacy of what he described as ‘empirical metaphysics’. An examination is made of five different ways in which Lewes moves beyond simple sensualism to a more sophisticated understanding of ‘the empirical’, before considering in detail three examples of his empirical metaphysics, respecting physical reality, mind, and causation. The discussion of Lewes concludes by reflecting upon the sense in which he remains hostile to what he describes as ‘metempirics’ including the notion of the unknowable thing-in-itself. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Karl Pearson’s philosophy which centre stages sense-impressions and champions both reductionism and scientism. But it is noted that even with Pearson we find willingness to engage in a degree of metaphysical speculation.

Schopenhauer, “Life,” and the Affects of the Noumenal

Anxiety ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 201-242
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Basic Characteristic ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Will To Live ◽  
The Will ◽  
Century Science

In his unique response to Kant, Schopenhauer worked to combine Spinoza’s monism with Kant’s transcendental investigations. Working at the crossroads between nineteenth-century science (physiology, natural history) and German metaphysics, he redefined the thing-in-itself as a generative principle called the “noumenal will.” The latter stood beyond all our possible representations but could be “known” thanks to an affect; namely, in the urging of anxiety in us. As the “sign” of the will to live, angst followed our brief pleasures and flowed into suffering. It was the basic characteristic of living beings. Nevertheless, drawing from the popular wave of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, he argued that the striving of the will in us might be quieted intellectually. Schopenhauer’s thought stands at one endpoint of European philosophy, arising when it runs out of metaphoric energy and looks abroad.

scholarly journals Psychicones: Visual Traces of the Soul in Late Nineteenth-Century Fluidic Photography

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-341
Author(s):  
Nicolas Pethes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Abstract Entity ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Abstract Shapes ◽  
French Physician

The article discusses attempts to visualise the soul on photographic plates at the end of the nineteenth century, as conducted by the French physician Hippolyte Baraduc in Paris. Although Baraduc refers to earlier experiments on fluidic photography in his book onThe Human Soul(1896) and is usually mentioned as a precursor to parapsychological thought photography of the twentieth century, his work is presented as a genuine attempt at photographic soul-catching. Rather than producing mimetic representations of thoughts and imaginations, Baraduc claims to present the vital radiation of the psyche itself and therefore calls the images he producespsychicones.The article first discusses the difference between this method of soul photography and other kinds of occult media technologies of the time, emphasising the significance of its non-mimetic, abstract character: since the soul itself was considered an abstract entity, abstract traces seemed all the more convincing to the contemporary audience. Secondly, the article shows how the technological agency of photography allowed Baraduc’spsychiconesto be tied into related discourses in medicine and psychology. Insofar as the photographic plates displayed actual visual traces, Baraduc and his followers no longer considered hallucinations illusionary and pathological but emphasised the physical reality and normality of imagination. Yet, the greatest influence of soul photography was not on science but on art. As the third part of the paper argues, the abstract shapes on Baraduc’s plates provided inspiration for contemporary avant-garde aesthetics, for example, Kandinsky’s abstract paintings and the random streams of consciousness in surrealistic literature.

scholarly journals The Magic Wand of the Wagnerians: Musik als Ausdruck

2013 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Stephen McClatchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Magic Wand ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Works

As is well-known, throughout most of the nineteenth century the defence of Wagner's music was not undertaken on the same grounds on which it was attacked. Critics such as Ludwig Bischoff and Eduard Hanslick attacked Wagner's music for its alleged "formlessness" and harmonic illogicalities, while Wagner's partisans countered with appeals to vaguer criteria of beauty and truthfulness, couched generally in leitmotivic terms, often focusing on the so-called "symphonic web" of Wagner's late works. One particular strategy is encapsulated by the phrase "Musik als Ausdruck," which forms the basis of a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century monographs and articles about Wagner's works. Musical gestures were held to encode a particular emotional state and to reawaken that state in the listener, who would intuit the "meaning" of the gesture instinctively; within such an aesthetic, music was held to represent the essence of phenomenon, the "thing-in-itself." This article attempts to provide an account of the dual foundations of this aesthetic paradigm in philosophy and science, as manifested by Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and by Friedrich von Hausegger's Die Musik als Ausdruck respectively, and suggests that the resulting position – as articulated by Hans von Wolzogen and Curt Mey – is not only incompatible with but also incomparable to that of the formalists. The reconciliation of these two positions would not take place until the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Alfred Lorenz.

Appearances and the Problem of Affection in Kant

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Hall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Hans Vaihinger, in the late nineteenth century, posed a now famous trilemma for Immanuel Kant's theory of affection: (1) If things-in-themselves are the affecting objects, then one must apply the categories beyond the conditions of their application (space and time). (2) If one holds that appearances are the affecting objects, then one must hold that these appearances which are the effects of affection are themselves the causes of affection. (3) If one holds that things-in-themselves affect the noumenal self in parallel with appearances affecting the empirical self, then that which is a representation for the noumenal self must serve as a causally efficacious thing-in-itself for the empirical self's production of an empirical representation of the very same object (so-called ‘double affection’).

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