Mach, Ernst (1838–1916)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Atomic Theory ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Neutral Monism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Scientific Laws ◽  
Limiting Case

Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Though not one of the great philosophers, he was tremendously influential in the development of ‘scientific philosophy’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A vigorous opponent of ‘metaphysics’, he was celebrated as a progenitor of logical positivism. His work is regarded as a limiting case of pure empiricism; he stands between the empiricism of Hume and J.S. Mill, and that of the Vienna Circle. Mach’s positivist conception of science saw its aims as descriptive and predictive; explanation is downgraded. Scientific laws and theories are economical means of describing phenomena. Theories that refer to unobservable entities – including atomic theory – may impede inquiry. They should be eliminated where possible in favour of theories involving ‘direct descriptions’ of phenomena. Mach claimed to be a scientist, not a philosopher, but the ‘Machian philosophy’ was ‘neutral monism’. Close to phenomenalism, it saw the world as functionally related complexes of sensations, and aspired to anti-metaphysical neutrality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Alexander L. Nikiforov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Analysis ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Main Task ◽  
Language Of Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Laws ◽  
Empirical Foundation

The article examines the question of whether L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had any influence on the formation and development of logical positivism. It is shown that the members of the Vienna Circle were familiar with the Tractatus, but practically did not accept anything from its content. Wittgenstein's reasoning about the world, about facts, about the structure of fact were rejected by them as a bad metaphysics, with which they fought. The denial of causality and the deprivation of the meaning of scientific laws could not be accepted by representatives of logical positivism, whose main task was the logical analysis of the language of science in order to cleanse it of metaphysical concepts and build a unified science on a solid empirical foundation. If the members of the Vienna Circle were even familiar with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, then representatives of the Berlin Group, the Lvov-Warsaw School, the Uppsala School and supporters of logical positivism in other countries hardly heard of it. This leads to the conclusion that Wittgenstein's Tractatus did not have any impact on the logical positivism.

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 . . .

Logical positivism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Mathematical Techniques ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Logical positivism (logical empiricism, neo-positivism) originated in Austria and Germany in the 1920s. Inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics, it aimed to create a similarly revolutionary scientific philosophy purged of the endless controversies of traditional metaphysics. Its most important representatives were members of the Vienna Circle who gathered around Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna (including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann) and those of the Society for Empirical Philosophy who gathered around Hans Reichenbach at the University of Berlin (including Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling and Carl Hempel). Although not officially members of either group, the Austrian philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper were, at least for a time, closely associated with logical positivism. The logical positivist movement reached its apogee in Europe in the years 1928–34, but the rise of National Socialism in 1933 marked the effective end of this phase. Thereafter, however, many of its most important representatives emigrated to the USA. Here logical positivism found a receptive audience among such pragmatically, empirically and logically minded American philosophers as Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel and W.V. Quine. Thus transplanted to the English-speaking world of ‘analytic’ philosophy it exerted a tremendous influence – particularly in philosophy of science and the application of logical and mathematical techniques to philosophical problems more generally. This influence began to wane around 1960, with the rise of a pragmatic form of naturalism due to Quine and a historical-sociological approach to the philosophy of science due mainly to Thomas Kuhn. Both of these later trends, however, developed in explicit reaction to the philosophy of logical positivism and thereby attest to its enduring significance.

The Vienna Circle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Murray
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Rudolf Carnap ◽  
Ernst Mach ◽  
Kurt Gödel ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Scientific Worldview

In 1922 Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) transformed the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society), a weekly reading group concerned with logical positivism, into an international assembly of academics known as der Weiner Kreis, or the Vienna Circle, which responded to recent developments within analytic philosophy by leading thinkers Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Early members included Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). In 1929, Neurath published Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle), a pamphlet delineating the group’s rejection of metaphysics in favour of a scientific worldview predicated upon empirical phenomena.

The Paradox of “A High Standard of Public Honesty”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kennedy ◽  
Ronald Kroeze
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Patronage Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter takes as its starting point the contemporary idea that the Netherlands is one of the least corrupt countries in the world; an idea that it dates back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this chapter, the authors explain how corruption was controlled in the Netherlands against the background of the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic, modern statebuilding and liberal politics. However, the Dutch case also presents some complexities: first, the decrease in some forms of corruption was due not to early democratization or bureaucratization, but was rather a side-effect of elite patronage-politics; second, although some early modern forms of corruption disappeared around this period, new forms have emerged in more recent times.

Cities and News

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lila Caimari
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
New World ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
South American ◽  
International News ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Shape Representations ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

The Steel Heard ‘Round the World: Exposing the Global Reach of Indigenous Musical Journeys with the Hawaiian Steel Guitar

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
John W. Troutman
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Native Hawaiians ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A New Technique

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiianmele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disease Models ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Morbid Anatomy ◽  
Models Of Disease

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.

scholarly journals Antonio Cabrera. Una vida dedicada a las letras, los libros y la edición (1847-1925) / Antonio Cabrera. A life devoted to literature, books and publishing (1847-1925)

2017 ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
José Pablo Zamora Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
History Of The Book ◽  
San Luis ◽  
San Luis Potosi ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
San Luis Potosí

Resumen. Este trabajo ofrece una aproximación a una de las figuras más importantes en el mundo de la edición y las letras del San Luis Potosí de finales del siglo xix e inicios del xx: Antonio Cabrera. De esta forma, es por medio de Cabrera que se realiza un acercamiento al mundo del libro, las publicaciones periódicas, la edición y las letras de su tiempo y contexto, en particular el local y el regional; esto no sólo nos permitirá conocer algunas facetas de su quehacer, sino comprender y sopesar el impacto que tuvo su labor. Abstract. This paper provides a biographical summary of Antonio Cabrera, one of the leading booksellers, publishers, and men of letters of San Luis Potosí in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.At the same time, these biographical notes provide some hints about the history of the book at the local and regional levels, which help us explain the work of Cabrera in the immediate context of the world of books and the printed word.

scholarly journals Identity considerations for a psychology based on a complex epistemology

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.

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