Austrian and Hungarian Philosophy: on the Logic of Wittgenstein and Pauler
Chapter 26 Austrian and Hungarian Philosophy: On the Logic of Wittgenstein and Pauler Barry Smith Abstract As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism or transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Ger- many, on the one hand; and of realism or objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South, on the other. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos von Pauler, and especially on Pauler’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Keywords Austrian philosophy · Wittgenstein · Lukács · Picture theory of meaning 26.1 Austrian Philosophy In a series of extraordinarily fertile essays (cf. Mulligan 1981, 1986, 1989, 1993, 2001, 2006a, 2006b, 2011a, 2011b, 2012), Kevin Mulligan has demonstrated not merely that there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between the transcendentalism of the North and the realism of the South (comprising, roughly, Bavaria and the Habsburg lands) but also that paying atten- tion to this distinction can yield fruitful consequences for our understanding of twentieth-century philosophy in general and of the rise of analytic philosophy in particular. It would of course be going too far to suggest that there is any one system of thought properly to be called “Austrian philosophy” which would unite all of those thinkers, from Bolzano and Wittgenstein to Gödel and Popper, born within the frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is however clear that there are certain tendencies which these philosophers exhibit to varying degrees, tendencies which set them in contrast to their Northern contemporaries in something like the way in which (for example) those who read Musil (or Kafka) are set apart from, say, admir- ers of Thomas Mann.
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