Human Knowledge: A Classic Statement of Logical Empiricism - Brossura

Kaila, Eino

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0812698487 ISBN 13: 9780812698480

Casa editrice: Open Court Pub Co, 2014

Riassunto

Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila wrote a classic statement of logical empiricism. Having experienced the foundational debates of the Vienna Circle in 1929, Kaila was a keen follower of the further developments of the Circle. His synoptic presentation and analysis of the basic themes, or ?theses,” of the movement was based on his lectures as professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. The work appeared as a book in Finnish in 1939 and a Swedish translation by Georg Henrik von Wright followed immediately. Earlier, a translation of his philosophical essays from the original German, entitled Reality and Experience, appeared in 1979. However, this is the first translation of Kaila's major epistemological work, which remains a source for re-evaluations of Logical Empiricism.

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L'autore:

Finnish philosopher, critic, and teacher Eino Kaila (1890?1958) worked in numerous fields, including psychology, physics, and theater, and attempted to find unifying principles behind various branches of human and natural sciences. George A. Reisch is the author of How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. He lives in Chicago.Anssi Korhonen is the author of Logic as Universal Science: Russell's Early Logicism and its Philosophical Context. Juha Manninen is the editor of The Vienna Circle in the Nordic Countries: Networks and Transformations of Logical Empiricism. Ilkka Niiniluoto is the author of Truthlikeness. Korhonen, Manninen, and Niiniluoto live in Helsinki, Finland.

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Preface

This book is meant as a guide for anyone who takes pleasure in a pursuit of philosophical problems as well as an academic textbook in scientific philosophy; furthermore, it is intended as a systematic introduction to logical empiricism’ for professional philosophers. It may be in order to address a few words to each of these circles of potential readers.

A reader in the first group, before he gets down to a detailed study of the present work, is entitled to learn about the requirements the book will impose upon him. To this we reply: Understanding this book presupposes no special knowledge over and above what is included in standard secondary school education, but it will require sustained work and independent thinking on the part of the reader. Here secondary school education’ is to be understood as including introductions to the elements of philosophy, history of philosophy as well as the basics of school logic. If the reader lacks any of these, he may do well to gather the relevant information before picking up this book. Here even a concise textbook in the history of philosophy or an introduction to philosophy’ will suffice, in particular, if it addresses developments in the history of scientific ideas.

Secondly, this book is intended as a textbook in scientific philosophy. As such, it is meant to provide a systematic description of what is involved in the concept of knowledge, to clarify, in light of the history of scientific ideas, the developments this concept has undergone and, finally, to provide a justification for the important results that contemporary logical analysis has achieved with respect to the question of what human knowledge is and what it is not.

Finally, the present work has been written with the needs of professional philosophers in mind. The intention has been to fill a gap in existing philosophical literature, as there has been no systematic introduction to logical empiricism’, that is, an introduction that, while admitting no compromises in scientific accuracy on any important point, could nevertheless be understood even by a reader with no experience in exact logic or logistic’. For this reason, the book includes a summary of the elements of logistic’, mainly as presented by Hilbert, though concentrating upon points that are significant in epistemological applications.

Some of the basic principles of logical empiricism are already to be found in the Galileian’ concept of knowledge, which is part and parcel of modern science. It was first developed by Galileo
and Newton, who not only founded their research on this conception but even endeavoured to give explicit formulations of it. In the late 19th century and at the turn of the century, a number of distinguished mathematicians, among them Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré, developed it further in important respects. Nevertheless, the type of philosophical research that is best known as logical empiricism’ received its contemporary form only after philosophers began to realize, mainly after the Great War, how important exact logic was for their work, this reform in logical thought that is in the last instance to be traced back to some ideas by Leibniz and has been taking place step-by-step during the last century.

This book attempts to synthesize’ the most important results of logical empiricism’ into a systematic whole, the core of which is to be found in the four basic theses of logical empiricism’; these will be worked out and given a justification gradually in the course of the following investigations. Apart from a few details, the present author’s own contribution is confined to this systematisation and a number of insights and observations relating to it; these have to do, mainly, with a number of questions belonging in the psychology and history of knowledge and constituting the background for logical empiricism’. In light of these insights, the logical empiricist’ conception of knowledge presents itself as a consequent result of a development in human ideas that has continued for two and a half millennia.

In the references’ found at the end of the book I have mentioned the most important advocates of logical empiricism’ together with their most significant works. The list is by no means exhaustive; the intention has been to mention sources from which the author has benefited the most, on the one hand, and those, on the other hand, that the reader will be likely to find useful, insofar as he wishes to deepen his understanding of issues to which he has been here introduced. This work was prompted by my experiences as academic teacher; in this capacity I have on a few occasions addressed issues examined on the following pages and they have led me to numerous exchanges of thoughts with my students, where I have not always been on the giving end. Part of the gratitude that I feel now that this book, which means a great deal to me, is due to be brought before the public eye, belongs therefore to some of my pupils. As a teacher I have occasionally felt as if the light from the logical height that I have seen moving upon the face of the deep was visible to my audience, too. If this book could give the reader a similar glimpse of clarity, its purpose would have been served.

In Christmas 1938
The Author

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Open Court Pub Co
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0812698487
• ISBN 13: 9780812698480
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 217
• Redattore: Manninen Juha, Niiniluoto Ilkka, Reisch Georges A.