DOCSLIB.ORG

Philosophy and Its History*

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Philosophy and Its History* Alasdair Mac!ntyre Philosophy and its History* '\ Abstract: Richard Rorty argues that the present state of analytic philo­ sophy is the result of the collapse of the logical empiricist program. But most of the characteristics of analytic philosophy which Rorty ascribes to that collapse predated logical empiricism. The historical explanation of the present state of philosophy must begin not later than with the schism between philosophy and the other disciplines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin then leads to a differ­ ent view of how philosophical problems are generated. Many recent philosophers, especially perhaps those educated in some of the analytic traditions, have treated the history of philosophy either as only having marginal relevance to con­ temporary philosophical enquiries or as interesting only inso­ far as historical figures can be presented as contributors to contemporary discussions. On this latter view Descartes for example is still interesting because he provides a position for G.E.M. Anscombe to criticise, Hurne because his views on causation are relevant to John Mackie's. It is therefore an occasion worthy of remark and even celebration when analytic philosophy itself is presented as drawing its significance from its place in the overall history of philosophy, as it is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979) and in a series of articles and papers which he has published before and since. The essay to which I shall be particularly addressing myself is 'Philosophy in America To­ Day' (Rorty 1981), a central thesis of which is that the present state of analytical philosophy is to be explained by the disintegration of the neopositivist program of the Vienna Circle and its allies. The consequence of th~s disintegration, a result of the way in which "all the positivist doctrines ... were deconstructed by Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Kuhn", (Rorty 1981, 4) has been that analytical philosophy has lost any serious intellectual unity. It no longer can identify it­ self by reference to "a finite number of distinct, specifiable philosophical problems to be resolved - problems which any serious analytic philosopher would agree to be the outstand­ ing problems." (7) Rorty's thesis about analytic philosophy extends and completes a central thesis of Philosophy and the Mirror of Natu.re. For in * Originally presented in a symposium on Philosophy in America To-Day at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Milwaukee, April 25, 1981. Analyse & Kritik 4 (1982), S. 102-113 (G) Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen Comments on Rorty that book he argued that philosophy as such had dissolved it­ self by attaining an understanding that the whole set of prob­ lems which concern the relationship of mind to realitites external to mind had been generated by a false Cartesian con­ ception of mind and the objects of knowledge. Philosophy has in so doing lost its traditional claim to provide a kind of understanding which was specific to its enquiries and which gave it a right to a certain hegemony among the disciplines. Rorty's paper spells out for analytic philosophy the implica­ tions of his general thesis about how philosophy as traditio­ nally understood has ended its history by delegitimating itself. Underlying both the book and the paper is an unargued thesis about the history of philosophy, namely that traditionally 'philosophy' was always the name of one and the same distinct and autonomous discipline which was believed to have a sub­ stantial rationale for its distinctiveness and its autonomy. Without that presupposition the kind of contrast that Rorty draws between philosophy and other disciplines would scarcely make sense. And yet it is just that presupposition which only needs to be examined in order to be rejected. 1. Three Possible Worlds, One of Them Actual Imagine a possible world in which there is no discipline named 'philosophy' within the academic curriculum. The history of this possible world is identical with that of the actual world up to the seventeenth century and therefore in its past as in our own 'philosophy' used to be the name for a very wide range of loosely unified intellectual enquiries and activities. But in that imaginary world when from the seventeenth to the nine­ teenth century a variety of disciplines seceded from philoso­ phy, and declared their independence as autonomous fields of enquiry, each entitled to its own self-sufficient place in the curriculum, each of these disciplines carried away with it that part of philosophy relevant to its own concerns. In that imaginary world when in the transition from Adam Smith to Ricardo political economy detached itself from moral philoso­ phy, it did not leave moral philosophy behind just as it was, but carried away with it a whole range of enquiries into the moral presuppositions and moral characteristics of economic activity. And when physics in the age after Newton detached itself from natural philosophy, it defined itself so that debate about the status of theoretical entities and the nature of laws was as much a part of physics as thermodynamics or the study of electricity and magnetism. Even those academic dis­ ciplines, such as history, which had not been part of philoso­ phy in the older sense, annexed the relevant parts of the philosophy of action, explanation and narrative. And the out­ come was that, apart from logic, which became an independent discipline, the whole of philosophy was absorbed into, was divided up between the other subjects, without any part being left over. Hence there were no professional philosophers, no departments of philosophy, no philosophical journals, no American Philosophical Association or Aristotelian Society, and those who pursued philosophical questions always did so in the context of some other academic discipline. Naturally 104 Alasdair Macintyre enough the point and purpose of conceptual enquiries was under­ stood in terms of their place within each specific discipline. Imagine now a second possible world the history of which once again is identical with that of the actual world up to the seventeenth century, but in which 'philosophy' remains the name of intellectual enquiry. Not only are there 1no acts of secession by such subjects as physics and political economy, but subjects such as history, which had not been part of philosophy, are absorbed into philosophy. In the first of the imaginary worlds nobody was a professional philosopher, in the second imaginary world everyone engaged in the academic intell­ ectual and educational enterprise is by profession a philosoph­ er. There are indeed many different lines of specialized en­ quiry in this second world, but these lines are as likely to cross what we in our world take to be disciplinary boundaries as to remain within them. What this second imaginary world shares with the first is that in it there is no separate discipline of philosophy. What would be the advantage and disadvantages of each of these three modes of intellectual and academic organization, that provided by these two imaginary worlds and that provided by the actual world? The first would suffer from one large dis­ advantage, as compared bo'th with the second and with the actual world. Not only would what are substantially the same philo­ sophical questions be posed separately in a number of distinct and different disciplinary contexts, but no discipline would have any specific responsibility for those problems which arise precisely at the boundaries of the autonomous disciplines, which arise, for example, when the beliefs about human respons­ ibility which inform the moral and legal practices studied in such disciplines as ethics and the sociology of law are con­ fronted with the beliefs about the causal determination of human action which inform a good deal of psychology, biochem­ istry and neurophysiology. But both the first and more par­ ticularly the second imaginary world would enjoy one .outstand­ ing advantage over actuality: the conceptual, philosophical parts of complex intellectual enquiries would not be detached from their context in these enquiries and grouped together contextlessly as 'philosophy', a set of fragments lacking any fundamental unity. Any such characterisation of philosophy in the actual world is of course bound to encounter immediate and strong resistance. For one central preoccupation of philoso­ phical enquiry ever since Kant in Germany and ever since Reid in Scotland has been to identify the unity of philosophical enquiry in some non-trivial way; and we are all of us to some large degree the heirs of both Kant and Reid. Nonetheless one underlying thesis of this paper is that all attempts to iden­ tify such a unity have in fact failed. Why I believe this will emerge in part at least later in the argument. For the moment I want to consider a second disadvantage of actuality. The professionalised separation of philosophy from the other disciplines has not only left philosophy without any real unity; it has also systematically concealed from the profess­ ional practioners of the other disciplines the extent to which their own enquiries necessarily involve philosophy. Nurtured in the belief that their disciplines long ago achieved independence from philosophy, their responses to the recurrent 106 Alasdair Macintyre one discipline among others. Professionalisation with all its drawing of boundary lines and its invocation of sanctions against those who cross them, its conceptions of what is cen­ tral to 'the' discipline and what is marginal, is the inevi­ table accompaniment of bureaucratisation. Hence there is at le~st a tension between the professionalisation of philosophy and its flourishing, except of course as technique and idiom. For professionalisation is always favorable to the flourish­ ing of technique and to making narrowly technical proficien­ cies the badge of the fully licensed professional; and it is equally favorable to the development of idiosyncratic idiom, an idiom by which professionals recognize one another and for the lack of which they stigmatise outsiders.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Geuss-On-Rorty.Pdf
    Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections RAYMOND GEUSS When i arrived in Princeton during the 1970s my addiction to tea was already long-standing and very well entrenched, but I was so concerned about the quality of the water in town that I used to buy large containers of allegedly “pure” water at Davidson’s—the local supermarket, which seems now to have gone out of business. I didn’t, of course, have a car, and given the amount of tea I consumed, the trans- port of adequate supplies of water was a highly labor-inten- sive and inconvenient matter. Dick and Mary Rorty must have noticed me lugging canisters of water home, because, with characteristic generosity, they developed the habit of call- ing around at my rooms in 120 Prospect, often on Sunday mornings, offering to take me by car to fill my water bottles at a hugely primitive and highly suspicious-looking outdoor water tap on the side of a pumphouse which was operated by the Elizabethtown Water Company on a piece of waste land near the Institute Woods. This pumphouse with its copiously dripping tap was like something out of Tarkhovski’s film about Russia after a nuclear accident, Stalker, and the sur- rounding area was a place so sinister one half expected to be attacked by packs of dogs in the final stages of radiation sick- ness or by troops of feral children who had been left by their parents to fend for themselves while the parents went off to the library to finish their dissertations.
    [Show full text]
  • Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty's Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism
    Ash Center Occasional Papers Tony Saich, Series Editor Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism Joshua Forstenzer University of Sheffield (UK) July 2018 Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center Occasional Papers Series Series Editor Tony Saich Deputy Editor Jessica Engelman The Roy and Lila Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation advances excellence and innovation in governance and public policy through research, education, and public discussion. By training the very best leaders, developing powerful new ideas, and disseminating innovative solutions and institutional reforms, the Center’s goal is to meet the profound challenges facing the world’s citizens. The Ford Foundation is a founding donor of the Center. Additional information about the Ash Center is available at ash.harvard.edu. This research paper is one in a series funded by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed in the Ash Center Occasional Papers Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or of Harvard University. The papers in this series are intended to elicit feedback and to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. This paper is copyrighted by the author(s). It cannot be reproduced or reused without permission. Ash Center Occasional Papers Tony Saich, Series Editor Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism Joshua Forstenzer University of Sheffield (UK) July 2018 Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Harvard Kennedy School Letter from the Editor The Roy and Lila Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation advances excellence and innovation in governance and public policy through research, education, and public discussion.
    [Show full text]
  • Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey Author(S): Richard Rorty Source: the Review of Metaphysics , Dec., 1976, Vol
    Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey Author(s): Richard Rorty Source: The Review of Metaphysics , Dec., 1976, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1976), pp. 280-305 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20126921 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Metaphysics This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 27 Jun 2020 15:25:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms OVERCOMING THE TRADITION: HEIDEGGER AND DEWEY RICHARD RORTY I X HILOSOPHERS who envy scientists think that philosophy should deal only with problems formulated in neutral terms?terms satis factory to all those who argue for competing solutions. Without common problems and without argument, it would seem, we have no professional discipline, nor even a method for disciplining our own thoughts. Without discipline, we presumably have mysticism, or poetry, or inspiration?at any rate, something which permits an escape from our intellectual responsibilities. Heidegger is frequently
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction to Ethics
    p.1 Introduction to Ethics Place: TBD Time: TBD Instructor: Eric de Araujo Office: TBD Email: [email protected] Office Hours: TBD Texts & Materials An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (2018) by Jonathan Wolff. Readings in Moral Philosophy (2018) by Jonathan Wolff. Readings will come from the above text and anthology. Additional readings might be posted on Carmen. Bring either your textbook or appropriate readings to class. Course Description In this introduction to ethics will think about ethical issues like philosophers. First, we will learn how to reason morally and consider challenges to moral theorizing. Ten we will examine some major ethical theories along with some objections to them.Syllabus Once we understand these, we will discuss some ethical debates on particular topics. Course Goals & Objectives A. You will be able to articulate and evaluate major ethical theoriesAraujo by: Articulating main positions within ethical debates, identifying differences between ethical theories, presenting objections to ethical theories, applying ethical theories to cases, and communicating philosophical views to others. B. You will be able to comprehend and critique others' views by: Identifying the main conclusion ofde others' arguments, identifying the support given for a conclusion, evaluating the arguments of others, representing the logical structure of arguments, and determining what evidence is relevant to a conclusion. CourseC. You will be able to contribute to ethical debates by: Articulating main positions within ethical debates, applying ethical theories to cases, constructing an original argument, identifying the main conclusion of others' arguments,Eric identifying the support given for a conclusion, evaluating the arguments of p.2 others, distinguishing moral and non-moral questions, communicating philosophical views to others, and anticipating and defending views from objections.
    [Show full text]
  • György Pápay: Pragmatism and the Ordinary: the Rorty-Putnam Debate
    PRAGMATISM AND THE ORDINARY: The Rorty-Putnam Debate from a Different Angle 1 György Pápay E-mail: [email protected] In his essay „Philosophy and Ordinary Experience” Stanley Rosen claims that when philosophers become increasingly interested in the question of the Ordinary— ordinary language or ordinary experience—it always indicates a crisis of philosophy. Both the phenomenological and the analytical school of modern philosophy included important thinkers who supposed that philosophical activity as such had reached a theoretical dead end, and therefore urged a return to the Ordinary. This enterprise itself can be carried out in a more or less theoretical way. The more theoretical approach is represented by Husserl or Heidegger. The less or sometimes even antitheoretical way of returning to the Ordinary is exemplified by Oxonian philosophers such as Ryle and Austin, and the later Wittgenstein. As Rosen adds, „Perhaps it would be fair to classify pragmatist like James and Dewey in this camp.” 2 Although the latter suggestion is not indisputable, I think Rosen has a point. If we put the scientistic vein aside that is common in some works of Peirce, Dewey and Sidney Hook, classical pragmatism with its firm critique of metaphysical dualisms and its emphasis on the practical character of human concerns could be seen as a philosophical movement that takes side with everyday life rather than pure theory. However, my aim is not to consider whether this classification of James and Dewey proves to be useful. I would rather focus on two influental contemporary pragmatists, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, and especially on their relation to the question of the Ordinary.
    [Show full text]
  • Law and the Metaethics of Discord
    Katja Maria Vogt, katjavogt.com, Columbia University 1 Law and the Metaethics of Discord, NYU Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy, Draft 08-2020 For: Special issue on the Normativity of Law, Ancient Philosophy Today: Dialogoi Law and the Metaethics of Discord Plato’s Euthyphro, I argue, lays out a metaethics that responds to persistent and unresolved value disagreement, and that is a genuine contender for us today. With this proposal, I reject centuries of scholarship, not to speak of countless anthologies and syllabi in ethics and the philosophy of law.1 The Euthyphro begins with three cases of unresolved value disagreement. These cases are to be adjudicated by the law, which turns out to be difficult. Today if an author starts with three examples, we expect that the subsequent text is going to address them. This, I submit, is the structure of the Euthyphro. Against my reading, discussions of the Euthyphro tend to focus almost exclusively on a brief section in which Plato discusses what is now known as the Euthyphro Problem. Socrates asks whether the gods love the pious because it is pious, or whether the pious is pious because it is loved by the gods. In the idiom of contemporary metaethics, the puzzle may seem to be this: is value attitude-independent or is value conferred by attitudes?2 Alternatively, in the idiom of traditional Divine Command Theory, do the gods —or, does God, since Divine Command Theory tends to be monotheistic—recognize value, or is value conferred by divine approval?3 1 Much of the literature on the Euthyphro focuses on two out of fifteen pages of the dialogue, where the so- called Euthyphro Problem is discussed.
    [Show full text]
  • The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and the Classical Model of Science: Kant, Bolzano and Frege
    Synthese (2010) 174:237–261 DOI 10.1007/s11229-008-9420-9 The analytic-synthetic distinction and the classical model of science: Kant, Bolzano and Frege Willem R. de Jong Received: 10 April 2007 / Revised: 24 July 2007 / Accepted: 1 April 2008 / Published online: 8 November 2008 © The Author(s) 2008. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract This paper concentrates on some aspects of the history of the analytic- synthetic distinction from Kant to Bolzano and Frege. This history evinces con- siderable continuity but also some important discontinuities. The analytic-synthetic distinction has to be seen in the first place in relation to a science, i.e. an ordered system of cognition. Looking especially to the place and role of logic it will be argued that Kant, Bolzano and Frege each developed the analytic-synthetic distinction within the same conception of scientific rationality, that is, within the Classical Model of Science: scientific knowledge as cognitio ex principiis. But as we will see, the way the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or propositions functions within this model turns out to differ considerably between them. Keywords Analytic-synthetic · Science · Logic · Kant · Bolzano · Frege 1 Introduction As is well known, the critical Kant is the first to apply the analytic-synthetic distinction to such things as judgments, sentences or propositions. For Kant this distinction is not only important in his repudiation of traditional, so-called dogmatic, metaphysics, but it is also crucial in his inquiry into (the possibility of) metaphysics as a rational science. Namely, this distinction should be “indispensable with regard to the critique of human understanding, and therefore deserves to be classical in it” (Kant 1783, p.
    [Show full text]
  • John P. Burgess Department of Philosophy Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1006, USA [email protected]
    John P. Burgess Department of Philosophy Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1006, USA [email protected] LOGIC & PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY Introduction For present purposes “logic” will be understood to mean the subject whose development is described in Kneale & Kneale [1961] and of which a concise history is given in Scholz [1961]. As the terminological discussion at the beginning of the latter reference makes clear, this subject has at different times been known by different names, “analytics” and “organon” and “dialectic”, while inversely the name “logic” has at different times been applied much more broadly and loosely than it will be here. At certain times and in certain places — perhaps especially in Germany from the days of Kant through the days of Hegel — the label has come to be used so very broadly and loosely as to threaten to take in nearly the whole of metaphysics and epistemology. Logic in our sense has often been distinguished from “logic” in other, sometimes unmanageably broad and loose, senses by adding the adjectives “formal” or “deductive”. The scope of the art and science of logic, once one gets beyond elementary logic of the kind covered in introductory textbooks, is indicated by two other standard references, the Handbooks of mathematical and philosophical logic, Barwise [1977] and Gabbay & Guenthner [1983-89], though the latter includes also parts that are identified as applications of logic rather than logic proper. The term “philosophical logic” as currently used, for instance, in the Journal of Philosophical Logic, is a near-synonym for “nonclassical logic”. There is an older use of the term as a near-synonym for “philosophy of language”.
    [Show full text]
  • Taking Rorty's Irony Seriously
    Humanities 2013, 2, 292–312; doi:10.3390/h2020292 OPEN ACCESS humanities ISSN 2076-0787 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Article Taking Rorty’s Irony Seriously Andrew Inkpin School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia; E-Mail: [email protected] Received: 4 May 2013; in revised form: 26 May 2013 / Accepted: 6 June 2013 / Published: 12 June 2013 Abstract: Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (CIS) is an ambitious and provocative, but for many readers a deeply flawed work. This paper argues that many of its apparent flaws can be understood as integral to Rorty’s attempt to write a work of private, post-theoretical irony. The paper’s first section outlines the substantive theoretical claims about language, selfhood and community which Rorty proposes as an antiessentialist alternative to ‘metaphysics’. The second identifies three difficulties—residual dualism, conceptual problems with the public-private distinction, and the work’s self-referential consistency—which constitute serious, but obvious problems for those substantive claims. The third section argues that Rorty’s metaphilosophical discussion of ‘ironist theory’ suggests CIS should be read as a personal work of irony which eschews theoretical ambitions, showing how this is consistent with and provides a motive for accepting the presence of conspicuous difficulties. The final section considers how the work’s metaphilosophical views interact with its substantive theoretical claims. The work’s irony is interpreted as resulting from the tension between these, so as to coexist rather than conflict with Rorty’s enduring commitments to liberalism and pragmatism. Keywords: Rorty; irony; metaphilosophy; pragmatism; continental philosophy 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Rorty
    Richard Rorty Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin Books, 1999) If there is anything to the idea that the best in- tellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulle- tin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symp- toms of moral weakness, denounces my 'cynical and nihilistic view' and says 'it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them posi- tively mobilized for mindlessness'. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the 'ironist vocabulary' I advocate 'can neither pro- vide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation'. My criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield - recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities - to say that I have 'given up on America' and that I 'manage to diminish even Dewey'. (Mansfield recently de- scribed Dewey as a 'medium-sized malefactor'.) His colleague on the council, my fellow phi- losopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.
    [Show full text]
  • An Introduction to Philosophy
    An Introduction to Philosophy W. Russ Payne Bellevue College Copyright (cc by nc 4.0) 2015 W. Russ Payne Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5 Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11 Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23 Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38 Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58 Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72 Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79 Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94 Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108 Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120 2 Introduction The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so.
    [Show full text]
  • Immanuel Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics in Terms of His Theory
    Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics in Terms 2012/18 45 Hülya YALDIR*- Necdet GUNER** Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics in Terms of His Theory of Space and Time Abstract At the beginning of the modern age, mathematics had a great importance for the study of Nature. Galileo claimed that ‘the book of nature was written in a kind of mathematical code, and that if we could only crack that code, we could uncover her ultimate secrets’. But, how can mathematics, consisting of necessary tautological truths that are infallible and non-informative, be regarded as the language of natural sciences, while the knowledge of natural sciences is informative, empirical and fallible? Or, is there another alternative: as Hume claimed, modern sciences only depend on empirical data deriving from our perceptions, rather than having the necessity of mathematics. Many philosophers have tried to find an adequate answer for the problem of the relationship between mathematical necessity and contingent perceptions, but the difficulty remained unsolved until Kant’s construction of his original philosophy of the nature as well as the limits of human reason. The main purpose of this study is to show how Kant overcomes this difficulty by making use of the examples of Euclidean geometry and of arithmetic: there are synthetic a priori (a priori, universal, necessary, but at the same time informative) judgments, and indeed mathematical propositions are of this kind. Key Terms a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, synthetic a priori, mathematics, geometry, arithmetic, space, time and imagination. Uzay ve Zaman Teorisi Açısından Immanuel Kant’ın Matematik Felsefesi ÖZET Modern çağın başlangıcında, matematik doğa çalışması için büyük bir öneme sahip olmuştur.
    [Show full text]