The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cohen, H., Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd Edition (Berlin: Dümmler, 1885).
Cohen, H., Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte (Berlin: Dümmler, 1883).
Collins, A., Possible Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Fichte, J. G., Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre, in J. G. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1962ff.), vol. I, 4.
Fichte, J. G., Wissenschaftslehre “nova methodo,” in J. G. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IV, 2.
Forster, M. N., Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Franks, P., All or Nothing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Fries, J. F.‚ “Über das Verhältnis der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik,” in C.C.E. Schmid (ed.), Psychologisches Magazin (1798), vol. 3, 156ff.
Fries, J. F., Sämtliche Schriften (Aalen: Scientia, 1982), vol. 2, 251ff.
Fulda, H. F. and R. P. Horstmann (eds.), Skeptizismus und spekulatives Denken in der Philosophie Hegels (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1996).
Hanna, R., Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Hatfield, G., “The Prolegomena and the Critiques of Pure Reason”, in V. Gerhardt, R. Schumacher, and R. P. Horstmann (eds.), Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), vol.1, 185–209.
Hegel, G. W. F., Phänomenologie des Geistes, in G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968ff.), vol. 9.
Hegel, G. W. F.‚ “Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968 ff.), vol. 4, 19 ff.
Heidelberger, M., Nature from Within (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Helmholtz, H., Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1879).
Husserl, E., Logische Untersuchungen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1900).
Kant, I., Critik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: Hartknoch, 1781/1787).
Kant, I., Jäsche-Logik, in: I. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer/de Gruyter, 1900ff.), vol. 9.
Köhnke, K., Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986).
Natorp, P., “Über objective und subjective Begründung der Erkenntnis,” Philosophische Monatshefte xxiii (1887), 257–86 (English translation by L. Philips and D. Kolp, Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 12, 3, 1981, 245–66).
Natorp, P., Descartes’ Erkenntnistheorie (Marburg: Elwert, 1882).
Post, K., Johannes Müllers philosophische Weltanschauung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1905).
Schelling, F. W. J., System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: Cotta, 1800) and Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1976ff.), vol. 1, 9.
Stern, R., Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Trendelenburg, A., Logische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Bethge, 1840).
* * *
1 I. Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: Hartknoch, 1781/1787). Further references to this text will be quoted with the page numbers of the A and B editions.
2 See also Jäsche-Logik, in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer/de Gruyter, 1900ff.), vol. 9, 49ff.
3 See G. Hatfield, “The Prolegomena and the Critiques of Pure Reason,” in V. Gerhardt, R. P. Horstmann, and R. Schumacher, Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), vol. 1, 185–209.
4 See, for example, A. Collins, Possible Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 31–60 and 153ff. and P. Franks, All or Nothing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 154ff.
5 See R. Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 142–64.
6 J. G. Fichte, Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre, in Fichte, Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1962ff.), vol. I, 4; Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre “nova methodo,” in Fichte, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IV, 2.
7 See Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre “nova methodo,” 43.
8 Fichte, “Die Wissenschaftslehre, 2. Vortrag 1804,” in Fichte, Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1962 ff), vol. II, 8, 104ff.
9 F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: Cotta, 1800) and Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1976ff.), vol. 1, 9.
10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968 ff.), vol. 9, 11. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as PG, followed by page number.
11 Hegel’s relation to skepticism has been extensively discussed in the literature—see, for example, H. F. Fulda and R. P. Horstmann (eds.), Skeptizismus und spekulatives Denken in der Philosophie Hegels (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1996) and M. N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
12 Hegel, “Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie,” in Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968ff.), vol. 4, 208. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as S, followed by page number.
13 A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Bethge, 1840).
14 K. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 37.
15 M. Heidelberger, Nature from Within (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 41.
16 On Müller, see K. Post, Johannes Müllers philosophische Weltanschauung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1905).
17 Fries, “Über das Verhältnis der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik,” in C. C. E. Schmid (ed.), Psychologisches Magazin (1798), vol. 3, 156ff. and Fries, Sämtliche Schriften (Aalen: Scientia, 1982), vol. 2, 251ff.
18 Helmholtz, Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1879), 14ff. Further references to this text will be abbreviated as H.
19 On this topic, see K. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 183.
20 H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd edition (Berlin: Dümmler, 1885). Further references to this text will be abbreviated as C.
21 Cohen uses the term Erkenntniskritik instead of the more common Erkenntnistheorie, since he is concerned that the latter has psychological connotations. See Cohen, Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte (Berlin: Dümmler, 1883), 4ff.
22 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1900), vol.1, 110–54.
23 P. Natorp, “Über objective und subjective Begründung der Erkenntnis, ” Philosophische Monatshefte xxiii (1887), 257–86. I quote from the English translation by L. Philips and D. Kolp, Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 12, 3, 1981, 245–66. References to this edition will be abbreviated as N.
24 Natorp, Descartes’ Erkenntnistheorie (Marburg: Elwert, 1882), in the following abbreviated as D.
25 R. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4.
CHAPTER 29
METAPHYSICS AND CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICS
PIRMIN STEKELER-WEITHOFER
29.1 INTRODUCTION
TWENTIETH-CENTURY philosophy is proud to have overcome metaphysics by logical analysis of language (Rudolf Carnap).1 To say something like this, however, presupposes that we already know what metaphysics is. The answers to this question do not only fill books, they fill whole libraries.
In order to structure the nineteenth-century preconditions of the ongoing debate about the need of metaphysics and of getting rid of it, I first give a sketch of the central notions and problems of ‘metaphysics’ (in sections 29.2 and 29.3), like the words ‘transcendent’ and transcendental’, ‘an sich’ and ‘für sich’, of the need of overcoming empiricism, naturalism, and materialism, and of the antinomy of freedom and causal determinism (also in section 29.6). In the debate about the ambivalence of a critique of metaphysics, on the one side, and critical metaphysics as logical analysis of the very constitution of our world-related knowledge, on the other, Hegel is the central figure. The re
constructions of his main ideas (in sections 29.4, 29.5, and 29.6) show this in opposition to widespread abusive polemics against his alleged spiritualist ‘absolute idealism’. The hearsay about the collapse of ‘Hegel’s System’ turns out to be a shift of interest from ontological and meta-theoretical questions to existential questions (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) or to social and political questions (on the Hegelian Left, including Engels and Marx), as the last section shows: the critique of ‘metaphysics’ is turned here into a general critique of all kinds of ‘ideologies’. A central logical issue concerns the role of generic standing sentences as articulations of conceptual default rules of inference (sections 29.4 and 29.7) in a two level distinction between a conceptually formed reality (Wirklichkeit) and the apparent phenomena (sections 29.5 and 29.7) that hopefully are ‘explained’ in a reasonable way by the theories in which we represent this ‘efficacious reality’.
29.2 WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?
The title ‘metaphysics’ goes back to Andronikos of Rhodes who is said to have used it as a label for the books of Aristotle on ‘first philosophy’ (in Greek: protē philosophia, in Latin: prima philosophia) just because they stood behind (meta) the books on physics (ta physika). The leading questions of these books are at the same time ontological and logical in a wider sense: ontology asks what there is. But Aristotle already knows that there are, in a sense, different readings (pollachōs legetai) of being (einai), such that we need logical reflections on what it means in different domains to say that something (possibly) exists or is true. Such a general ontology takes the very notion of being as its topic and talks not only about the physical things (meta ta physika) but also about physical knowledge and the notions of the physical which also can stand under the label ‘ta physika’. In order to understand the relation between physics, metaphysics, and general logics, we must remember furthermore that the Greek word ‘physis’ for nature comes from the same morphematic roots as the English verb ‘to be’ and the Latin ‘fui’ (‘I was’). This explains why practically all ‘books’ of pre-Socratic philosophy are brought under the title ‘peri physeos’: they talk both about being and about nature, about what it logically means to be real and what it epistemologically means to know it.
Philosophy in the narrow sense of a self-conscious reflection on the very concepts of being and knowledge begins with Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Socrates, who arguably were the first to distinguish meta-level reflection from object-related claims. As Aristotle says, Socrates began to separate questions about the form of human life (our ethos) and the forms of reason (nous) from questions of ‘physics’, for example, in contrast to Anaxagoras. Under the heavy influence of Plato’s dialectics, Aristotle continued the separation of natural philosophy (ta physika), in the modern sense of the natural sciences, from meta-physics: physics and biology turn into the institutions of developing our knowledge about nature. Metaphysics reflects on the ‘principles’ or ‘starting points’, that is, on the ‘forms’ and ‘reasons’ in our knowledge about what there is in nature or the real world.
The central problem of philosophy as a critical discipline ever since the times of Heraclitus and Parmenides can now be identified as the difficult distinction between reliable general knowledge and merely subjective, perhaps arbitrary, belief (doxa), or, what amounts to the same, between what there really is and what only seems to exist. Since then, the role of the phenomena or appearances is heavily disputed. Is what is apparent only a prejudice? In which sense, and how, must our theoretical explanations of what really exists save the phenomena, as Plato is famously reported to have said? Moreover, since we do not know everything, and all our knowledge claims are fallible and defeasible, there certainly are matters in the world which we (still) do not know (yet) and perhaps never will. Therefore, it often sounds reasonable to assume things as possible even though we do not know (for sure) if (or that) they really exist. But what is a reasonable belief in possibilities? The crucial question of Kant’s old-new concept of philosophy can now be condensed in the ‘metaphysical’ question what we can know and what we may believe to be possible—in contrast to what we cannot know and what is not reasonable to assume to be possible.
As we have seen, the statement that everything which really exists is ‘physical’—in Latin: ‘natural’—is, in a certain reading, just a tautology, since the old word ‘physis’ refers to everything there is, was, and will be, that is, to the whole world. But there is a new reading of nature with a much narrower scope. It goes back to the semantics of Latin ‘nasci’, meaning that something comes into being or develops without interference by human culture or human action. Knowledge about nature in this sense refers only to processes that happen by themselves, that is, without planned human intervention. Think, for example, of the course of events that happens after we have started an experiment (in a certain generic way) and let it run: we then have to wait and see for the (hopefully regular, repeatable) result. Every occurrence of nature in this sense lies outside the domain of ‘ethics’, so to speak. But the experiment as a whole belongs to culture and technique, not to nature; and experimental science is not totally descriptive in the sense of just saying what happens in nature taken in the narrow sense of the word, but what we can technically know how to do and what we can predict from certain premises. If we remain aware of the two main readings of ‘nature’, we may also realize that the topics of ‘science proper’, namely nature, do not comprise everything there is in the world. This already explains the logical dualism and methodological contrast between the (natural) sciences and the so-called humanities.
The term ‘scientia’ traditionally stands in contrasts to ‘empiria’ just as ‘theoria’ to ‘historia’. This contrast is preserved in the German label ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ which traditionally included not only historical and philological knowledge but also the social and political sciences and the systematic development of all knowledge about human practices and techniques, especially linguistic techniques, for example, those of our mathematical theories and of the observational, experimental and theoretical methodologies of the natural sciences. Unfortunately, in Neo-Kantianism of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert declared that the humanities allegedly use an idiographic method of telling narratives about mere histories whereas the natural sciences are declared to be nomothetic in their construction of explanatory theories. This is as misleading as Wilhelm Dilthey’s merely hermeneutical, that is, philological, reading of the humanities.
In any case, there is an important difference between German Wissenschaft and the usual reading of the English word ‘science’: the latter restricts its scope almost automatically to nature in the narrow sense of Latin natura as it stands in contrast to Latin cultura. As a result, the very connotation of the word ‘science’ supports the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism, which more or less coincides with scientism. All these labels stand over the conviction that the true scientific method is that of the natural sciences and that this science (as a whole) is the measure of all things, that they are and that they are not, as Wilfrid Sellars’ scientia mensura formula nicely says. We do not go deeper here into finer distinctions, for example, between biologism and some more radical form of physicalism—claiming that every thing and process in the world, including the biological and psychological, could in principle be described and explained in some ideal physics, even though we do not know at all what an ideal future physics is. It cannot be too similar to our physics today, which stands in some clear contrast not only to chemistry, biology, and physiology, but to all the cultural sciences or Geisteswissenschaften as well.
The notion of an ideal is obviously difficult, as the divine properties attributed to an all-knowing or almighty god also show: we cannot understand them in the sense that they are similar to some human properties but totally different. Therefore, not only any form of theology but also physicalism and naturalism must be understood as ‘metaphysical’ doctrines for which it is not
merely unclear how to find a justification: the sweeping impacts of their claims go far beyond what we can reasonably argue for. They are transcendent in precisely this sense, which includes the fact that their very meaning and function is unclear.
This leads us to the crucial connection of ‘metaphysics’ with ‘transcendence’: the word ‘transcendent’ expresses some sort of step beyond limits. In this connection, metaphysical claims are often seen as independent of empirical experience, referring, perhaps, in an a priori way to some ‘world beyond all appearances’, as a prayer of Gregor Nazianzenos begins. ‘Metaphysics’ thus deals with God, Freedom, and Immortality, as a formula of Kant’s famously says. But we cannot know anything about a world behind the only real world there is, namely the one we actually live in (of course taken as a whole). Metaphysical investigations thus concern, at first, the very meaning of words like ‘exist’, ‘real’, ‘actual’, ‘world’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘belief’, and then the question whether there are any ‘transcendent’ things beyond the objects and events in the world about which we can know something on empirical grounds or at least believe that they possibly have some properties that somehow can show up in the real empirical world (or, as some believe, in some possible after-world).