1941: Philosophy

Effects of War.

The deepening shadows of World War II all but blotted out evidence of philosophic activity in all countries excepting England and America. There has not been an important original philosophical work out of Germany in several years. The occasional monographs on scattered topics which still appear, though with diminishing frequency, fall roughly into two classes: (1) Dissertations on subjects which are safely removed from the issues of the present conflict and scrupulously avoid any dangerous entanglements: (2) Monographs on social, moral or political questions, the authors of which take occasion to seek philosophical justification for the Nazi ideology in some of the great systems of the past. Italy's situation, which is not much better, declined sharply during 1941. The outstanding philosophical journal in Italy, Rivista di Filosofia, suspended publication by order of the Minister of Popular Culture, 'in view of the present exceptional conditions in the life of the nation.' The appearance of the English translation of Croce's latest book under the title History as the Story of Liberty, published in Italy in 1938, was a reminder of freer days of Italian philosophy and a tribute to the courage of Italy's foremost philosopher, who has not made terms with the Fascist régime. The History is not, however, a forthright criticism of the present plight of liberty, but takes the long view, Hegelian-fashion, and reaffirms faith in the ultimate triumph of liberty.

The war seems, for the time being, to have all but eclipsed philosophy in France. One hopeful note was the renewed publication of Etudes Philosophiques. It is symbolic that in 1941 the event of outstanding importance in French philosophy was the death of her most distinguished philosopher, Henri Bergson, at the age of 81 years. Bergson exemplified all powers for which French thought is famous: deftness and brilliance of style, versatility, clarity, subtlety and penetration. During his influential career he fertilized ideas in literature, art, science, philosophy and religion. Bergson's thought was a subtle blending of old and new; he was not wholly uncongenial to Catholic philosophy, while at the same time he was the reluctant intellectual rallying point for several ultra-modern tendencies in the arts. Bergson was a professor at the College de France, a member of the French Academy, head of the International Commission for Intellectual Collaboration founded after World War I, and a Nobel Prize winner in literature. Among his best known works are, Essai sur le données immédiates de la conscience, 1889 (in English, Time and Free Will); Matière et Mémoire, 1896; L'Evolution Créatrice, 1907; and Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, 1932. In his last days Bergson, who was partly Jewish, refused a proffered honorary exemption from the onerous racial decrees which the Vichy government of France instituted in 1940.

English and American philosophy continued with vigor and freedom, greatly enriched by refugee scholars and enlivened by discussions of the moral and spiritual issues raised by the war. English learned journals and books continued to appear with but slight interruptions. None of the important philosophical journals suspended publication in 1941. Thus far there is no tendency visible to make German philosophy the scape-goat for the present world conflict. On the contrary, there seems to be a conscious effort to avoid those patriotically motivated denunciations of German philosophy which were so common during World War I. Instead, some academic and literary philosophers in America composed books setting forth the moral and spiritual basis of democracy and the underlying issues of the present conflict. Such, for example, was R. B. Perry's Shall not Perish from the Earth.

Positivism.

There was no distinctively new trend apparent in American and English philosophy. Positivism, in one form or another, remained the most vigorous and commanding school of thought. But there was growing evidence that it is passing from the initial phase of dogmatic, presumptive assertion into more moderate, circumspect forms. Not only are there several factions within positivism, but also many cross-currents and combinations of doctrine. It is no longer possible to give a simple or precise definition of what contemporary positivism is. Absorption in problems of method is common to all factions. Most systems of 'logical positivism' are compounded in various proportions of doctrines derived from the empiricism of Hume and Berkeley; Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Carnap's writings, especially Der logische Aufbau der Welt; other recent developments in symbolic logic and epistemology, stemming in the main from Bertrand Russell; the type of analysis best exemplified by Prof. G. E. Moore; the sciences of semantics and semiotics; theories of verification with a pragmatic moment; and in the more developed and systematic forms, a theory of perception is also included. Positivism is motivated by the desire to make of philosophy an exact science. This is accomplished in some instances by banishing the speculative element altogether and by dismissing many basic, traditional systems, either politely as a kind of intellectualized poetry, or rudely as sheer nonsense.

The evolution of positivistic doctrine is most clearly revealed by comparing Alfred J. Ayres latest book. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (late 1940) with his earlier Language, Truth and Logic (1936), the dogmatism of which created a furor in philosophical circles. The latest book is at once more modest and more solid than its predecessor. Metaphysical problems which the earlier work dismissed as nonsense are now probed and answered; and critical problems, such as causality and perception are analyzed more searchingly. While the writings of Ayer have precipitated a good deal of controversy, he is not so much an originator as a synthesizer of ideas. The work of Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, upon which Ayer leans, is a mainstay of contemporary positivism. Russell's most recent work, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, the William James Lectures at Harvard University, aims to specify the meaning of 'empirical evidence' and the connection of such evidence with materially true propositions. The general character of the book and the form in which the problems are stated indicates that epistemology is not nearly as dead as the frequent obsequies of recent times would have one believe.

The interest which positivists have always evinced in the relations of philosophy and the natural sciences was the chief subject of ten papers by Philipp Frank, collected under the title, Between Physics and Philosophy. He argues the now familiar theses that recent advances in physics do not support any special metaphysic and that science stands in no need of metaphysical justification. At the sixth International Congress for the Unity of Science, held at Chicago, many central and frontier problems in the present stage of the unification of knowledge were discussed, including the problems of the mental, social and moral sciences, which have hitherto been accorded less attention.

Epistemology.

Further evidence of the continued interest in epistemology was Ledger Wood's The Analysis of Knowledge, which exhibits an affinity for recent phenomenalistic and positivistic trends. While it does not develop any radically new hypotheses, it brings together much recent research on the problem of knowledge. A more independent work was C. J. Ducasse's Philosophy as a Science, Its Matter and Method. After criticizing various hypotheses of the nature and method proper to philosophy, he concludes that philosophy is a science of norms. The latter are described as 'spontaneous appraisals,' whether of ontological, epistemological, moral or aesthetic sorts. Another book, appearing at the end of the year, which treats the problems of epistemology in a broad and traditional compass was A. C. Ewing's Reason and Intuition. Evidence of the growing recognition and study of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, dating from the publication of his Collected Works, was to be found in the large number of articles devoted to the interpretation and evaluation of various aspects of his thought.

Logic.

Of significant contributions to pure logic there were very few. Georg Henrik von Wright's The Logical Problem of Induction, published by the Philosophical Society of Finland was of special interest. The author contends that Hume's critique of induction is unanswerable because of the way in which the problem was formulated. Among special topics in logic was R. Jackson's An Examination of the Deductive Logic of J. S. Mill. Ushenko's The Problems of Logic was a general treatment.

Recent Publications.

The year 1941 saw the growing interest in the history of philosophy continue undiminished. There were able studies covering special authors or subjects of every period, ancient, medieval and modern, written by secular and Catholic philosophers. Besides Lane Cooper's new translations of several of Plato's Socratic dialogues, W. A. Heidel's Hippocratic Medicine, Its Spirit and Method threw new light on Greek thought, especially on the connection between Greek philosophy, science and medicine. For those interested in the medieval period there was E. Crewdson Thomas's large History of the Schoolmen; and a symposium of Essays on Maimonides, which testified to the vitality of his Guide for the Perplexed. In the modern period H. F. Stewart's The Secret of Pascal, testified to the ever-present interest in that genius. New source material on Leibniz was made available by the publication of Leibniz's Unknown Correspondence with English Scholars and Men of Letters, published by the Warburg Institute.

The most important commentary of the year was Norman Kemp Smith's The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines. It is the most searching book on Hume which has yet appeared. Prof. Smith establishes the general thesis that Hume's preoccupation with 'the experimental method of reasoning' was motivated predominantly by his interest in ethical problems. The book traces out the conflicting influences on Hume of Newton's natural philosophy and Francis Hutcheson's defense of 'feeling' and 'belief,' which conflict Hume settled, excepting only mathematical reasoning, at the expense of reason.

Among other special studies in the history of thought was L. C. Rosenfield's From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine, a study of the two-fold theme of the animal soul and the mechanistic conception of life in French literature from Descartes to LaMettrie. A new addition of Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, edited with a critical introduction by Bernard Cohen, will help to accord Franklin the place that is rightfully his in the history of science. R. B. Brandt's The Philosophy of Schleirmacher expounds the whole system of one who has been recognized hitherto only in the philosophy of religion. A new study of Ludwig Feuerbach under the title, Heaven Wasn't His Destination, by William B. Chamberlain, characterizes Feuerbach as the son of Hegel, father of Marx and half-brother of Comte: he might have added that he was at least the first cousin of Kierkegaard. Karl Löwith's Von Hegel bis Nietzsche deals in an illuminating way with the left-wing Hegelians and the nihilism resulting from their critique of the bourgeois-Christian-capitalistic conception of man and society. The nihilism, he claims, was finally overcome by Nietzsche's concept of the 'eternal recurrence.'

Studies of Nietzsche.

Interest in the intellectual backgrounds of the war greatly stimulated the study of Nietzsche. No less than four books about this controversial figure appeared in 1941. Crane Brinton's Nietzsche aimed to fill a popular need for scrutinizing Nietzsche's alleged connection with totalitarian ideology. Nietzsche and das Recht, by Kurt Kassler, sought to convince Nazi lawyers of Nietzsche's insight into specific legal questions. An illuminating comparison was presented in Alfred von Martin's Nietzsche and Burkhardt. George Morgan's What Nietzsche Means, the most thorough of the list, was a sympathetic study and appreciation of the challenge of Nietzsche. Not in the Nietzschean tradition was the pessimism of Ortega y Gasset's Towards a Philosophy of History — in which the author characterizes modern man as having successively lost faith in God and in reason, so that he now has nothing to cling to but the history of man.

Religion.

The philosophy of religion was greatly enriched by the long deferred appearance in English of most of the works of Sren Kierkegaard, Danish theologian and philosopher of the nineteenth century. In the past two years there have appeared in English, besides the two basic works Stages on Life's Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, several lesser works, among them The Sickness Unto Death: Repetition; Fear and Trembling; Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life; and The Present Age. These are certain to provoke no little controversy in philosophical and theological circles, partly because of the Nietzsche-like quality of Kierkegaard's style, his love of mystification and the esoteric. The translations have been done for the most part by three ardent disciples: Walter Lowrie, the late Professor David Swenson and Alexander Dru. Professor Swenson's brief introduction, Something About Kierkegaard contains some illuminating chapters on his life and thought. Out of Germany, where Kierkegaard has been diligently assimilated for some time, came Willi Perpeet's Kierkegaard and die Frage nach einer Aesthetik der Gegenwart.

Another important contribution to the philosophy of religion, but in quite another tradition, was Etienne Gilson's God and Philosophy, the Powell Lectures at Indiana University. Professor Gilson contends that in Greek thought, Aristotle excepted, God remains outside the system of philosophical principles. It was Aristotle who established rational theology by making God the first principle of his system. Gilson then contrasts Augustine and Aquinas, showing that the former neglects the 'existential' element in God's nature, while in the convergence of the Aristotelian and Christian traditions in Aquinas, both the 'essential' and 'existential' aspects are clearly recognized. After a brief examination of God in modern philosophers, Gilson observes that neither philosophy nor science ultimately can dispense with the concept of God. In addition to this work, John Laird's Mind and Deity, the second series of Gifford Lectures, also appeared.

In the fields of metaphysics, aesthetics and political philosophy there was a dearth of new books. A new Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism came into being. Prof. DeWitt H. Parker's systematic work, Experience and Substance was the only metaphysical essay to appear during the year. Three works on political questions deserving of notice were, English Political Pluralism by H. M. Magid; Gerhart Niemeyer's Law Without Force; and Studies in Legal Terminology by Erwin Hexner.

The journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research continued vigorously into its second year. It is now apparent that Husserlian phenomenology has lost much of its belabored and over-refined methodology in being transplanted to America. This journal also published some of Husserl's hitherto unpublished manuscripts. Devotees of Husserl's philosophy together produced a volume, Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, intended to facilitate the understanding of his thought in America. Other events of special interest were the organization of a Philosophy of Education Society in Philadelphia, and the honoring of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of William James at a plenary session of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Philosophers in America were reminded once again of the need for vigilance in the defense of academic freedom. The Bertrand Russell Case, edited by John Dewey and Horace Kallen, presented a record and indictment of the bigotry and chauvinism which characterized the argument and conduct of those who restrained the Board of Education of New York City from honoring their contract with Mr. Russell. This case bids fair to take its place beside the Scopes trial as a cause célèbre in American education.