Russell’s Critique Of Bergson And The Divide Between ‘Analytic’ And ‘Continental’ Philosophy

Vrahimis, Andreas

doi:10.5840/bjp20113123

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Heidegger) are like failed poets or 38 In his draft for the article, Schlick (2013a, p. 141) explicitly cites Hegel's account of the stars as abstract points of light, and also names Hegel's theory of heat (which he does not further explore, but only cites the relevant passage). 39 Bertrand Russell had weighed similar accusations against Bergson in 1912; see Vrahimis (2011Vrahimis ( , 2019Vrahimis ( , 2020c.…”

Section: Xy7 'Beautiful Nonsense': Schlick On German Idealismmentioning

confidence: 96%

Philosophy (and Wissenschaft) Without Politics? Schlick on Nietzsche, German Idealism, and Militarism

Vrahimis

2022

Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook

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With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there emerged two controversies related to the responsibility of philosophical ideas for the rise of German militarism. The first, mainly journalistic, controversy concerned the influence that Nietzsche's ideas may have had on what British propagandists portrayed as the ruthlessly amoral German foreign policy. This soon gave way to a second controversy, waged primarily among academics, concerning the purportedly vicious political outcomes of German Idealism, from Kant through to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. During the autumn of 1914, and at the cusp between the two controversies, Moritz Schlick was to deliver a lecture series on Nietzsche's life and work at the University of Rostock. Responding to both debates, Schlick penned an introduction in which he sought to defend philosophy against all those who would embroil it in warfare. Schlick offers a series of arguments defending Nietzsche against his accusers. He also argues that, though their contributions to the History of Philosophy often amounted to no more than 'beautiful nonsense', the German Idealists' philosophical views cannot be held responsible for the rise of German nationalism. Finally, Schlick mounts a general defense of the search for truth, both in philosophy and in Wissenschaft, as a type of activity which presupposes peace. Though Schlick's metaphilosophical views change, as this paper shows, he remains constant both in his favourable appraisal of Nietzsche, as well as his separation between politics on the one hand, and both philosophy and Wissenschaft on the other hand.

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Section: Xy7 'Beautiful Nonsense': Schlick On German Idealismmentioning

confidence: 96%

Philosophy (and Wissenschaft) Without Politics? Schlick on Nietzsche, German Idealism, and Militarism

Vrahimis

2022

Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook

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“…In 1911 Bertrand Russell attended a lecture by Bergson at University College London on the 28th of October, and on the 30th of October Bergson attended one of Russell's lectures Bergson (Vrahimis 2011). Russell regarded Bergson's convictions concerning the nature of numbers as naive (Russel 1912;Petrov 2013;Čapek 1971).…”

Section: Immediate Concretenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Attempt to an Applied Metaphysics

Landeweerd

2020

Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy

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Cluny 1906 [twelfth century]). In this work he criticised a church in Rome that has sunk to become Rome in name only. It is also the last sentence of Umberto Eco's well-known novel The Name of the Rose (1980). The rose in Bernard of Cluny's adage was a core metaphor in the problem of the universals. Dealing with the problem of the relation between universal forms and particular things, its main issue was that although we might have concepts, they do not necessarily refer to reality in its pluralistic nature. Bernard's adage is one of the most elegant summaries of the 'problem of words and things', which in metaphysics has never been truly solved. Looking at the nature of things, philosophers assumed two positions for generations: either it was assumed that forms, in the Platonic sense, were decisive for the emergence of individual things, or it was assumed, from an Aristotelian perspective, that our knowledge is based on individual specific properties or relations (Brougham 1993).The struggle over concepts was a clash between realists, prioritising concepts and forms as attributable to reality, and nominalists, prioritising the unknowable existence of individual things, and regarding concepts as arbitrary and relative to us. Aristotle rejected the idea that names are derived from things: "'Man', and indeed every general predicate, signifies not an individual, but some quality, or quantity or relation, or something of that sort". (Aristotle 1984). Nominalists agreed with Aristotle that Plato's forms do not have an independent existence. Thus names are nothing but our categorisation of individual things in their actualised existence. Nominalism is another term for conceptual formalism: concepts are merely a form of understanding the world, they do not relate to something real in nature. They are part of our way of referring to the world, they do not require being part of that world.The example of the rose is often taken to explain the issue: what's in a name? A rose will smell as sweet, regardless of our labels. The most famous reference to the rose, a covert pun on the dilemma, can be found in Romeo and Juliet. To cite Shakespeare's Juliet in an allusion to the debate, the question is: "Would a rose smell as sweet if called by another name". For the conceptual realist, the rose, the real thing, can be captured by its form, its name, at least, if correctly phrased. For the nominalist, any individual rose would smell sweet apart from the names we attribute to it. In the words of Romeo's later response: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet are obviously well versed in nominalism. But for the realist, it is the form that decides whether the rose smells as sweet as it does. So, if it had been up to those of a Platonic, conceptual realist, persuasion, Romeo and Juliet would have had to remain enemies, since Montegues and Capulets remain defined by their universal form -their belonging to the categories of their respective families.But, speaking from a r...

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“…Bergsonian Answers to Contemporary Persistence Questions Bergsoniana, 1 | 2021philosophy clearly is an important factor in this regard (Chase and Reynolds 2010, ch. 2) and especially Bertrand Russell might have played a significant part(Vrahimis 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%