teorema Vol. XXX/1, 2011, pp. 103-113 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2011) 30:1; pp. 103-113] Grumbles and Quibbles from Mitteleuropa Kevin Mulligan Hanjo Glock’s judicious, lively, reliable and extraordinarily wide- ranging account of analytic philosophy contains many good things. Several of his numerous, interesting and well-argued criticisms of available accounts of the history of analytic philosophy are spot on – for example, his objections to Michael Friedman’s influential Parting of the Ways [Friedman (2000)]. I was also pleased to find that he (henceforth “HG”) endorses a conception of analytic philosophy (henceforth “AP”) which is in part “genetic”.1 In accor- dance with the Editor’s instructions, my quibbles focus on only two frag- ments of HG’s rich analysis. I. AUSTRO-ANGLO ? HG sketches a view of the origins of AP according to which the latter is at bottom “Anglo-Austrian” and Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) philosophy is to be sharply distinguished from German philosophy. Versions of this view have been set forth, as he notes, by Neurath, Haller, Dummett, Barry Smith and Peter Simons. (I, too, have defended a similar view). HG accepts that many of the claims put forward by proponents of the Neurath-Haller thesis are correct and important. But he disagrees with what he calls three of their suggestions: “first, that there is a single, unified and unique current of ‘scien- tific`, proto-analytic philosophy which dominated Austrian philosophy; sec- ondly, that the proto-analytic/analytic movement was entirely alien to Germany; and thirdly, that this movement was universally characterised by realism and hostility to Kant” [p. 75]. HG says that “the idea that there was a single Austrian tradition going back to Bolzano is a propagandistic invention of Neurath’s” and refers, as does Haller, to the realist strand from Bolzano, Brentano and his heirs to Pol- ish philosophy and the empiricist strand from Mach and Boltzmann to the Vienna Circle [p. 75]. The claim about Neurath is unfair; although he was in- deed capable of propaganda he takes great pains in his remarkable 1935 “Le développement du Cercle de Vienne et l’avenir de l’empirisme logique” to 103 104 Kevin Mulligan distinguish the many complicated ways in which very different conceptions within Austrian philosophy of empiricism and the empirical, of logic, analy- sis, metaphysics and realism fed into the complex traditions which led to logical empiricism [cf. Neurath (1935) pp. 8, 12, 34, 38-39, 58]. HG goes on to stress the undeniable, large differences between the two strands but does not mention the complex interactions and similarities be- tween the strands: Brentano, who was in many respects Boltzmann’s phi- losophical mentor, wrote a critical book about Mach’s Erkenntnis und Irrtum, Mach is the object of extensive critical discussions by Höfler, Meinong, Musil and others; Husserl’s phenomenology was, as he himself points out, profoundly influenced by Mach. HG says: “there could not be a greater con- trast than that between the patently metaphysical ideas of Bolzano and Mei- nong, on the one hand, and the anti-metaphysical zeal of Carnap and Neurath, on the other” [p. 75]. It is true that Carnap and Neurath thought that what they called “Metaphysik” was profoundly misguided and did not, like Bol- zano and Brentano, go in for proofs of the existence of God. But it is also true that it is important to distinguish the analyses and theories of a philosopher from his interpretation or account of their status. The Aufbau’s of the world we find in Meinong, Husserl and Carnap (like those of Russell, Whitehead and Nicod) form a common enterprise and manifest a variety of agreements and disagreements peculiar to the enterprise. Carnap is quite explicit about the similarities and differences between the types of struc- ture appealed to by his Austrian predecessors (“formal ontology”, “the theory of objects”) in their “constitutions” and “constructions” of the world and his own preferred tools such as equivalence relations. The fact that Husserl’s later Aufbau is (sometimes) interpreted by him in idealist fashion, Meinong’s in a realist fashion and Carnap’s in a metaphysically neutral fashion should not lead us to overlook the existence of a shared, novel – Austro-Anglo – philosophical project. HG says “there could not be a greater contrast...between Brentano’s long list of synthetic a priori truths and the blanket repudiation of the syn- thetic a priori by Wittgenstein and the logical positivists” [pp. 75-76]. I as- sume “Brentano” here is a slip and should be replaced by “Husserl”. Then, while of course accepting that the contrast between those who accept and those who reject synthetic a priori truths is undeniable and great I add the ob- servation that the range of sentences which Husserl and other phenomenolo- gists took to express synthetic a priori truths (and to be made true by “essential connexions”) overlaps to a remarkable extent with the range of sentences which, according to Wittgenstein, (can) express or function as so called grammatical propositions. (“Orange lies between red and yellow”, “Meaning something is not a process” etc.). Here there is a – great ? – con- trast between Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, on the one hand, and Kant, on the other hand. The handful of synthetic a priori judgments allowed Grumbles and Quibbles from Mitteleuropa 105 for by Kant and his followers contrasts with the great variety of grammatical propositions à la Wittgenstein and of the synthetic or material a priori à la Husserl & Co. The variety of the synthetic a priori à la Husserl is a conse- quence of his account of the nature of synthetic a priori propositions, which is, as he points out, distinctly unkantian. He had, after all, the advantage of having read Bolzano on analyticity. The thesis that there was an “Anglo-Austrian axis of light” [p. 74] is said to ignore “the intimate cultural, political and academic connexions be- tween Germany and the Habsburg Empire....There was no cultural or aca- demic chasm between the German states and Imperial Germany (after 1871) on the one hand, and the German speaking parts and constituencies of the Habsburg empire and its successor states on the other” [p. 76]. HG may be right about academic mobility (further evidence in favour of this claim is given by the Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz (1936); Scheler – see below – disagrees). Whether or not there was a “cultural chasm” between the two parts of the German-speaking world, is there not at least a “great con- trast” between, on the one hand, the culture in which flourished Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Trakl, Schnitzler, Kafka, Kraus, Musil, Svevo, Kraus, Mahler, Schönberg, Webern, Roth, Berg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Loos, Doderer, Broch, Canetti, Billy Wilder, Zimmermann, Brentano, Kerry, Ehrenfels, Gomperz, Meinong, Twar- dowski, Marty, Witasek, Husserl, Weininger, Mauthner, Wittgenstein, Neurath, Schütz, Kaufmann, Waismann, Bergmann, Popper, Hering, Mach, Carl Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Boltzmann, Freud, Les- niewski, Lukasiewicz, Ludwig von Mises, Richard von Mises, Fleck, Malinowski, Heider, Karl Menger, Schumpeter, Bühler, von Neumann, Hayek, Wertheimer, Gödel, Tarski and, on the other hand, the contemporaneous culture of Germany? Writing in 1915/16, Max Scheler, one of the first philosophers to talk of “Austrian philosophy” (hence my preference for the label “the Scheler- Neurath-Haller thesis”; cf. Smith (2001)) says that before the war intellectual contacts (Berührungen des höheren Geisteslebens) between Germany and Aus- tria were rare and almost completely absent in philosophy, economics and the humanities. The situation began to change, he asserts, quite rapidly in philoso- phy and literature just before the outbreak of war [Scheler (1982), p. 463]. Whatever the truth of the matter about mobility, chasms, contrasts and contacts, there is a compromise between the Anglo-Austro analytic axis claim and HG’s view that the proto-analytic/analytic movement was not en- 106 Kevin Mulligan tirely alien to Germany. On this third view [cf. Mulligan (1997), p. 86; (2001), p. 23] proto-analytic/analytic philosophy is associated above all with Austria- Hungary and southern Germany. It is in Würzburg that Brentano, Stumpf, Marty and, later, Bühler and the members of the Würzburg School of psychol- ogy first flourished. It is in Munich that Lipps, Scheler and Pfänder, under the influence of the Brentanians and then of Husserl, brought into existence the group of “realist phenomenologists” (Pfänder, Scheler, Reinach, Geiger, von Hildebrand), a group joined later in Göttingen by Stein and Ingarden. Just how much weight should be given to this suggestion will depend in part on the philosophical importance of the least familiar of these figures. I suggest that if Grice’s account of meaning and its developments are philoso- phically important, then so, too, is Marty’s carefully argued anticipation of this account. If the standard evaluation of the analyses of speech acts associ- ated with the names of Austin and Searle is correct, then Reinach’s anatomy of “social acts” such as promises, questions and orders deserves an important place in histories of twentieth century philosophy (even in those written in Oxford). If Wittgenstein’s account of the differences between causes and rea- sons is philosophically valuable, so too is the much more careful account given by Pfänder and other phenomenologists. If the descriptions of different language-games at the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investiga- tions are as valuable as they are often said to be, then it is time to salute the penetrating taxonomy and analysis of the very same uses of language to be found in Bühler’s 1934 Sprachtheorie. Finally, I predict that many friends of contemporary analytic metaphysics would find much to admire in the (largely untranslated from German and Polish) ontological investigations of Roman Ingarden.